Date: Tue, 2 Apr 1996 00:17:39 -0800 (PST)
Subject: DUMAIN & SATAN / BLAKE & MARX / THEORY & PRACTICE


Tom Dillingham, I'm so flattered to be put in the company of
Satan, but shouldn't you have titled your post "R. Dumain and J.V.
Stalin"?  Or "From Urizen to Stalin to -- Dumain"?  Or "Opposition
is True Friendship -- NOT!"  You tremble over my soul day and
night.  Could there be a there a danger that in my self-righteous
militancy, I will crash the Blake session at the next MLA meeting
and mow everybody down with my AK-47?  Am I the Chairman Gonzalo
of amateur Blake Studies?  Are such fantasies the stuff your
dreams are made on?  How rich your imaginative life!

OK, let me tell you about my day, while you were biting your nails
over my Satanism/Stalinism.

Having been repeatedly annoyed by the butt-headed questions put to
me by Maoists, CP-types, and various free-lance Reds over the
years, like: why wasn't Blake a political activist, or he doesn't
seem to have a political program in his prophecies, (Jack Lindsay
whines about Blake's aloofness from political action in his bio as
well), I decided to sit down and do some thinking about the
relation between theory and practice (should one do this sitting
down?), rather than to dismiss this silliness as I usually do.  I
asked myself: how would Marx, as a man of action, have addressed
these questions?  This is not the forum to recapitulate my study
over the past two years of Marx's emergence from the Young
Hegelians, but I did learn to ask certain questions that I don't
think anyone has asked before, because I don't think anyone has
properly understood the implications of Marx's early work for the
future of cultural and intellectual work.  Once people read the
"Theses on Feuerbach", they think they have understood something,
when they have understood nothing.  What have they missed?  The
trail has faded away, and they don't know where to go.

This is what I mean: Marx breaks with people that have influenced
him up to a certain point, writes but does not publish in his own
lifetime key works of his transition period, and then spends the
rest of his life as a revolutionary and scientific investigator of
political economy and the capitalist social formation, with little
hobbies on the side involving mathematics, ethnography,
literature, etc.  People simply assume without thinking: well, if
Marx wrote (but never published) that the point is to change the
world (but he did not write: the point _of philosophy_ is to
change the world), and that he underwent a transition from
philosopher to revolutionary, then, by George, Marx would have
wanted all composers, writers, playwrights, poets, choreographers,
chess masters, stamp collectors, and what not, from here on in to
marshal their various skills as instruments in the service of the
Revolution and to join the cause; and, by gum, if they don't put
their bodies on the line, their works are good for nothing.
People assume this, because they are not using their brains.  In
fact, the implications of Marx's method for this issue have not
begun to be studied.  The only one I know who picked up the trail
is C.L.R. James.

Where I pick up the trail is with Marx's dealing with the Young
Hegelians, from the positive incorporation of Feuerbach in the
1844 mss to the disposal of Bauer in THE HOLY FAMILY and the whole
lot in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY.  And I note some very important
things.  That in every case, he does not merely criticize his
fellow intellectuals for their personal political inaction, but
for the sterility of their ideas.  In fact, Marx diagnoses the
sterility of their thinking in terms of the immobility and
sterility of German society.  This says something about theory and
practice that nobody has bothered to analyze.  It is so basic and
simple, it has been entirely overlooked.  Could it be otherwise?
The complex is easy; the simple is hard and nobody pays
attention.

So I says to myself, we can see where the stasis in society and in
society's intellectuals results in the stasis and eventual decay
of their thinking.  There are many examples among the German
ideologists.  So I asks myself: now how would this apply to the
English?  What does the political degeneration of Wordsworth and
Coleridge have to do with the deterioration or ideologization of
their imaginative vision later in life?   And what are the
consequences, if any, for Blake, who was a man of contemplation
rather than of engagement with society on any terms other than
doing commissioned artwork?

I don't know if Thompson ever did any bellyaching, but Lindsay
certainly did, showing once again the ruinous effects the
Communist Party has on the human mind.  But the proper way to
approach this issue of theory and practice is not at all the way
Lindsay approached it, but rather using the Hegelian method
(loosely speaking) that Marx himself used.  So far it seems to me
Blake comes out looking pretty good.  He does change later in life
to some degree -- loses his enthusiasm for Paine, makes some quip
to his younger acolytes that Jesus should never have got himself
mixed up in politics -- but Blake's vision continues to mature; it
does not deteriorate.  Blake does not become Poet Laureate; his
final station in life is not lichen tukhus of the State.  And that
is what a writer is supposed to provide -- no matter what else he
do -- vision; drop science, however you want to put it: give
people something with enough range and depth they can draw on for
centuries.

So I jotted down my notes on these ideas at my local, and then I
worked out an analysis of "I asked a thief to steal me a peach."
This evening I have been continuing my reading of a book that is
just blowing me away: THE ROMANTIC IDEOLOGY: A CRITICAL
INVESTIGATION by Jerome J. McGann (University of Chicago Press,
1983).  So far McGann has not had much to say about Blake -- how
could he? -- Blake is so far above the rest -- but he's kicking
the ideological stuffings out of Coleridge and Wordsworth and many
others, and making me want to rush out to get something by Heine.
I'm so overwhelmed by all this stimulation, I'm getting a little
verklempt.  Talk amongst yourselves.

PS: Yes, I've got a severe, chronic case of PMS, but irritation
motivates me to work.  I am hot to give error a definite form so
that it may be cast off.  Oy, be permanent, O State, so that I may
deliver individuals evermore, amen.


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