Re: AUT: The Politics of Nietzsche & Bergson

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter,

Thanks for this, because I think that it is really important.

I am not trying to take up consciousness in the sense that the TradRevs were
always concerned with consciousness ie as something which could be
manipulated into the 'correct consciousness'.  I am rather more concerned
with consciousness as the development of self-awareness of the class, of
sections of the class, etc.  We play a role in that since we are not
exempted from the consciousness of the class, but we have no privileged
place from which to 'generate' consciousness.  The consciousness I am
concerned with has always been fetishized, torn, schizoid and it includes me
(and all of us).  There is no outside to this and IMO that notion of an
outside is an import from the non-dialectical "orthodox" tradition that
dominates post-Marx Marxism.  In that sense, I disagree with neither D + G
nor Foucault in their critique of the Subject as 'whole', 'healthy',
'necessarily transcendant', etc. (which Spinoza, for example, also held to).
But they go in a direction which is, again IMO, politically a retreat, and
maybe worse; a position which finds a place within bourgeois thought.

The flight from consciousness, IMO, reflects the flight (in part) from the
TradRev notion of consciousness.  Its funny, but I find the whole
'rational'/'irrational' thing to be kind of passe since Hegel.  Since
rationality is negative, is ruptural, is contradiction and antagonism, the
irrational HAS to exist as a moment of the rational and vice versa.
Isolating one from the other, to treat either rationality or irrationality
as 'positive', results in both cases in the recreation of a positivist
notion, a basically bourgeois notion of "what is", in which "A is and is not
A" has no space, in which contradiction and negation must again be denied.
So the move towards 'desire' and the irrational (a la Nietzsche, Freud,
Bergson, et al) does not at al take us one step beyond traditional bourgeois
theory.

You can't separate that move from the political implications involved, as
Lowe and I have argued about.  IMO, a notion of self-emancipation cannot
reside with a philosophy rooted in a hatred of 'the masses', which puts
itself outside the mass of humanity, seeking a privileged position (whether
of consciousness or of action or of wealth or of purity of desire really is
irrelevent here.)

Also, I am not portraying history as 'a history of consciousness'.  That
would be silly and can hardly be based on the fact that I want to know the
realtionship between activity and consciousness at a specific moment, a
consciousness which for me is not Enlightenment 'Consciousness' with its
'Cogito ergo sum'.  To ask after consciousness, however, is to ask after in
part how people in struggle understood their own situation, their own
possibilities.  To focus on 'desire', on the irrational, puts us in the
therapist's seat, diagnosing the patient as if we had some way to sit
outside, as if we were not the schizoid patient ourselves.  The position
that the issue is not about workers' self-consciousness has always been a
pretty conservative one, enunciated by people who are professionals in
'consciousness'.  I find it hard to imagine revolution which does not
involves some distinctly different level of self-consciousness among us than
exists today.  It just isn't something which can be 'brought in' or
conditioned by 'the right ideas'.  It only happens through negation, through
struggle.  That the rational and irrational, than 'reason' and 'desire'
intermingle, conflict and coexist is nothing surprising.

So I cannot say I am interested in 'structures of consciousness' or anything
else of that nature.  Marx's dialectic for me is not about a positive theory
of knowledge or consciousness (epistemology) or of being (ontology), but a
negative theory, a theory against, a movement of negation, of critique.  If
I want to grapple with consciousness among movements in the past, it is only
to critique the ideological portrayal of those movements by 'history', by
'theory', etc. and thereby to sharpen our critique of 'what is'.

So for example, 'ontological' radical thought asks about 'being', 'bodies',
'desire', but not after workers as rational too, as reason.  Workers are
reduced to crude force (see Hardt and Negri's Empire, where the multitude is
naught but brute force seeking the creative ,elightened 'militant' brain).
Leninism asks after our incomplete consciousness, but does not want to
reckon with our irrationalities, our contradictions.  Neither is any better
than the other in its one-sidedness.  Neither really asks sincerely, as it
were, whether something else was possible, whether or not fascism had to
win.  Oh, Leninism does, but its answer is exactly the wrong one: no 'pure'
party with the right program and an influence among 'the masses'.  Fascism's
victory was, for all intents and purposes, assured.

Anyway, this is rough and there is a lot I am not able to say with much
confidence, so I'll shut up.  I'm prolly already in over my head (again).

Cheers,
Chris

"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the
false." - Debord

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter van Heusden" <pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2002 1:24 AM
Subject: Re: AUT: The Politics of Nietzsche & Bergson


> Hey Chris!
>
> On 30 Jun 2002 at 1:23, cwright wrote:
>
> >
> > But how could they do this?  Why didn't the mass working class
> > organizations find themselves not only losing influence, but surpassed
> > by something else? Why didn't revolution happen in response to fascism
> > in Germany and Italy? And why did it fail in Spain?  I want to know
> > about the consciousness that was associated with this failure.
>
> I've only got 5 minutes, but this 'consciousness' thing bugged me.
>
> If I may be crude, the notion of consciousness is maybe the defining one
for 'the Left'
> (seen here as a broad political project). The whole 'thing' of 'the Left'
is the study of
> consciousness and changes in consciousness, so as to be able to grasp how
> 'revolutionary consciousness' comes about and replicate it in our current
situations (in
> my own terms, this has meant a search for 'where do the radical activists
I know come
> from? and how do you replicate people like them so that there are more?').
>
> The people you're arguing against (D&G, the French post-Structs,
Nietsche-influenced
> Spinoza-heads - not sure exactly how to categorise this) talk about
'desire' precisely
> because the concept of 'consciousness' doesn't cut it for understanding
how things have
> played out in the 20th C. There's something that doesn't 'fit' when you
portray history as
> a history of consciousness.
>
> Thus the turn to the irrational, on the one hand To some notion of 'Being'
that precedes
> conciousness on the other hand (Heidegger). And, as I understand D&G, to
some notion
> of production of  the Real which includes both psychology and politics.
I.e. a history
> which includes how people feel, not just how people think. Something like
that, at least.
>
> (Is there any D&G online that those of us without access to a uni. library
can go and
> grab?)
>
> Anyway, a history which isn't just of thought necessary cannot operate on
the level of
> abstraction which only allows thought to remain. Thus the whole concern
that D&G have
> with 'the molecular', in distinction with 'the molar' (where as I
understand it, molar is
> about 'the violence of abstractions', about how structures of
consciousness bind and
> harness desire into 'the machine').
>
> Anyway, that's about 15 minutes, and I really have to leave it at that.
>
> Peter
>
>
>
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>
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