Date: Sun, 7 Apr 1996 13:21:05 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: MODERNISM?


Jukka, thanks for being more reasonable.

>....because I think Hegel didn't do much justice to earlier

>generations. I have in mind ancients at the moment,....

My views on "modernism" have no deliberate connection of any kind
with Hegel.  Because I have been writing a lot about Hegelianism
recently, you may think that my notions are derived from a reading
of Hegel.  But that's my point: one shouldn't assume such things.
My studies of certain topics are very recent affairs (though not
Blake), and I have derived my views from a combination of a very
general intellectual exposure in combination with my life
experience, and not primarily from reading the great books.

I believe I indicated there are problems with the notion of
self-consciousness.  I advocated self-consciousness but I also
ridiculed precious self-consciousness.  I have indicated that the
development of the human mind is a very modern phenomenon, but I
also suggested the opposite (hence my mention of Taoism, etc.)  I
don't mean to imply that nobody could become self-conscious of
anything before the modern era, but I do believe that
pre-industrial society places some limits on what can be thought,
and the bourgeois revolution as a social phenomenon was so
profound it shook up people's view of the world is a very
fundamental way.  The question of self-consciousness and how much
of it one can attain under any set of conditions remains a
profound question.   I am not suggesting everyone was a robot
before the industrial revolution (what an ironic statement), but
that the modern era unleashed new possibilities, if realized only
for a relatively few (but among them some people on the bottom as
well as the top).

I also put in a reminder that modernity had its victims too.  I
also suggested that not everyone reaped the benefits: millions
live lives of mind-numbing drudgery, etc.  So I was not engaging
in naive Whiggish boosterism.

My whole perspective is what happens when the masses are capable
of seizing on these new possibilities for human development --
>from below.  When workers, women, ethnic, religious and racial
(not mutually exclusive categories) minorities seize upon this
tradition and discover the power of the human mind, they use the
tradition for different ends.  A few months ago I met a woman
biologist from India who loved western science because it was good
for women in India: it could free them from reactionary social
institutions.  There is also a Rationalist Center in India as well
working for positive social goals.  So there is a perspective on
all this that does not confirm to the project of elites.  How
plain can I make this?

Now it is evident that we are discussing two different kinds of
coherence.  Naturally, in an unstable, incoherent, world, people
strive for coherence in the most reactionary of ways - religious
fundamentalism, racism, authoritarianism, and the rest.  I am not
advocating this kind of coherence, which, by the way, Leo, has an
awful lot to do with myth.

This brings me to part two of my rant on modernism which has not
yet been written.  Marshall Berman emphasizes the disorienting,
transitory, unstable nature of the modern world and attempts to
cope with it.  I have another take on modernism that emphasizes
another side to the instability, i.e. the possibility of people to
emerge from the specific social conjunctures in which they are
born and raised, gather inwards the expenditure of energy
dissipated in the ruts of the social and cultural institutions for
thousands of years, and gain a sense of who they are or might
become beyond their social roles.  Not many manage to do this, but
it is what we strive for.  Bow it's easy for intellectual
bureaucrats like Althusser or Jameson to scoff at this, but it
shows a frivolous attitude toward the benefits of the education
they have been fortunate to receive as well as to the mental
deadness to which the vast majority of humanity is subjected.
That's why I said that millions would give their eyeteeth for a
coherent "bourgeois" self.

>it's reasonable to look how he sees 'psychic process' where

>there are impulses of natural as well as of social origin

>but which are hard if not impossible to see in self-conscious,

>introspective subjective experience. I think Hegel was basically

>on the right track when it comes to subjectivity as such but was

>unable to grasp real individual as subject.

I agree, and this would seem to be what I was aiming at when I
satirized precious self-consciousness.  Self-consciousness was
Bruno Bauer's shtick as it is for the alleged colostomy bags on
the Hegel list.  Yet such people always manage to be unconscious
of so many crucial things.  Same thing with this "reflexivity"
trick bag today.  But what I am advocating is the development of
the concrete individual, which means developing a sense of self to
transcend merely reacting blindly to the environment in which one
has been acculturated.

Freud was never modest.

I am not a European.  The French are not a despised minority in
the USA.  There is not much danger here of anyone getting the
wrong idea.  I know only a handful of French working class people,
who don't seem to care much for the pretensions of their
intellectual elite, though  I can't speak to other possible
ingrained attitudes about French superiority.  My contempt for the
French is obviously directed at intellectuals.  If I saw them as
victims I would be more careful about what I would say.

And Leo, please take the trouble to read what _I_ write, not what
professor you are reading would write.  After all my Blake posts
how can you see me the advocate of some dry logical rationalism?
Your posting seems very frivolous to me.


     --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---