LENIN'S TOMB: The parliamentary state of mind

Friday, July 14, 2017

The parliamentary state of mind posted by Richard Seymour

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night. -- Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

There is a claim in Christopher Bollas’s essay on ‘The Fascist State of Mind’, that theCommunist Manifesto, dixit Leo Kuper, enacts a “thoroughgoing dehumanisation of the bourgeoisie”. This dehumanisation purportedly occurs in the lines on the bourgeoisie's tendency to drown everything in the icy water of egoistic calculation.

Neither author bothers to evaluate the truth value of the claim, and nor of course do they interest themselves in whether there has ever been an acceptable, consensual interpretation of marxism which says that the bourgeoisie should be physically exterminated. Rather, the dehumanisation is (presumably) alleged to be there in the unconscious of the text.

Such a reading has to be symptomatic, however, eliding as it does lengthy passages of exaltation, lionisation and heroisation. The ironic structure of the text, the literary and political dialectic, depends upon the disappointment of real possibilities created only by the existence of capitalism and of the capitalist class.

Kuper (and thus Bollas) fail as literary critics, political critics and psychoanalysts when they ignore the fundamental ambivalence of the Manifesto's attitude to the capitalist class. The passage from which the offending lines are extracted contains the following:

“The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. … The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. … The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. … The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. … The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate … The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. … The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. … The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

One can scarcely reconcile this with a thoroughgoing dehumanisation. I won't add more on the question of the text's ambivalence, since I have an essay covering this subject coming out soon.

To give the criticism its due, the lionisation makes the ensuing condemnation all the more compelling and forceful. And the creative and generative capacities of the bourgeoisie are framed within a context in which as a class it is held to be pitiless, calculating, without the ordinary human compassion.

Yet this is not an analysis of human beings, but of class formation, and of the systemic imperatives of its reproduction. Class properties are relational properties; they are what you do, how you reproduce yourself, and only then, on account of that, what you are. To treat this as an act of theoretical dehumanisation is extraordinarily summary, gliding over the kinds of complexities which psychoanalysis generally finds it helpful to explore.

At any rate, framing Marxism in this way leads back to Bollas’s argument that the mind is “rather like a parliamentary order with instincts, memories, needs, anxieties, and object responses finding representatives in the psyche for mental processing” — and order of checks and balances, a “democratic order”. The metaphor is strained here, because the balancing of various interests is not the same thing as a democratic order.

Fascism, Bollas argues, involves at a psychic level a “killing off” of parts of the self, in favour of destructive narcissism. But this, again, is treated as an outgrowth of revolutionary ideology. Bakunin’s call for “tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude, and even honour” to “be stifled in the revolutionary by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause” is the cited as first example of this tendency. The argument might be slightly more interesting if it started off with destructive altruism.

The idea of an order of checks and balances is, of course, not so much liberal as conservative. It implies that we already know how the different ‘interests’ should be represented and balanced. It implies we know in advance that certain ‘interests’ have an intrinsic right to exist. It is an oddly a priori way to defend a parliamentary system of mental representation. It implies a kind of omniscience about what a good mental politics must consist of.

We might ask what sort of psychoanalysis it is that seeks the prototype for a healthy mind in an idealised healthy politics? What sort of psychoanalysis suppresses not only the ambivalence of its subject, but its own? What sort of psychoanalysis necessitates the suppression of class and history? There is a tendency in all psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips suggests, to become "a sophisticated form of adaptation," and that is a tendency that goes with omniscience.

There is no reason to assume that minds, whatever else they may be, are supposed to be 'balanced', or even democratic. What should a mind forged in oedipal capitalism look like, other than a struggle half in darkness, a knife-fight between shadows, a battlezone in which it is never clear what the stake is, other than the living body?