The humanities and the left today, with notes on class and Judaism

Some people have suggested that the humanities today are in a certain way almost a single field, and that what drives them is the close readings of texts, and artworks as artifacts read as texts, and that this entails a sense of tradition.

I think what unites and drives the humanities today is the use of aesthetic works as documents to understand the social world.

The project of educating young people in a cultural tradition was central to bourgeois nationalism, which foregrounded the national language as basis of this tradition, in contrast to the classical languages and literatures that remained central to a more aristocratic model. Where you hear 'tradition', read 'nation'. (In America, the notion is not dissolved but pluralized by our multicultural identity politics.).

The project of education in both aristocratic and republican nationalist modes was focused on training an elite through a process of ethical self-formation. This self-formation is at the individual level what the nationalist project is socially.

The classical understanding of the task of philosophy was focused on this ethical self-formation. It is at the heart of both Stoic and Epicurean tendencies in the philosophy of late antiquity. A 'philosopher' was a wise person who knows how to live a good life. Ethics, as the question of the good life (of which morality, the question of what is to be done and not done by way of obligation to a given set of laws and norms, is a part), was central to the reasons for study of philosophy.

This shifted in modernity. In philosophy, a shift that begins in Machiavelli culminates in Hegel, after whom, much of philosophy on the Continent (not England and America) becomes centered on social theory. At the same time, disciplinary societies of industrial labor are developing with a need for a large professional and managerial class, who are employed as civil servants, and in the context the social sciences as we know them are born. At one extreme, their objectivistic, empirical and quantitative, character essentially suits them for understanding "(the) people" and how they can best be managed.

The main alternatives were phenomenological and hermeneutic (how things appear and how they are interpreted), and the broad movement in this direction effectively assimilated the social sciences to the tasks of the humanities. A third tendency, involving various formalisms and 'structuralist' theorizing driven ultimately by linguistics, came largely out of French traditions in science and philosophy of science that are equally tied to bureaucracy and managerialism but are more egalitarian and republican in spirit. The republican citizen subject on the French model places the thinker implicitly as a citizen addressing other citizens and speaking of the social world as belonging to a 'we', not, as in still monarchical and aristocratic England, an 'us' who rule over a 'them'. (This is in fact true of Heidegger and Nietzsche as much as Hegel and Marx. Heidegger’s ‘they’ (das Man) is in the first place all of us; Nietzsche advocates a republican aristocratism of the artist as model along with a social criticism as sharp as Marx’s).

All of these alternatives are more less neo-Kantian. Kantianism is the philosophy of a bureaucratic republican society that speaks in the name of universality and derives it from a thinking about language. In the modern republican world, study and learning are normally part of a profession, and the purpose of work in that profession is not fundamentally different from any other, including military service.

"Humanists" who would resist or rebel against this typically fall back on old aristocratic models. An aristocratic model of education is training an elite (aristoi, the best or most excellent ones) that is ethical superior by virtue of its learned wisdom. Hence, the centrality of literature in the 'formation' of these ethical subjects, and also of philosophy, considered as 'love of wisdom'. (It is better called love of truth, which divides between knowledge and information useful for governance on the other hand, and something more illuminating and intrinsically important on the other, the latter of course usually relegated to religion.).

Religious philosophy, including in Judaism as well as Christianity, remains tied to ancient and medieval notions of ethics. There is no social theory to speak of in any of the major religious "Jewish philosophers" of even the last 100 years: Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, Baeck, Heschel, Soloveitchik, Fishbane, etc. The idea of God is still linked fundamentally to the question of how to live the good life and not at all to social criticism. That has been reserved for "secular" philosophy, whatever its relationship to Jewish, Christian, or other religious and cultural traditions"; Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and most philosophers, Jewish or not, who are part of the broad Marxist, psychoanalytic, and Heideggerian traditions, are, despite and maybe partly because of their greater scholarly rigor, since these people are usually professors and not rabbis, seems to the dominant faction in Judaism to not even count. In truth, if these guardians of more purely Hebraic traditions who lack a modern understanding of politics, at least outside the normative options of either capitalist democratic liberalism or romantic nationalism with the emotional appeal of its communitarian Gemeinschaftgefühl (a term unfortunately popular with the Nazis, who hated in Jews, among other things, the “rootless cosmopolitan” intellectual type, and reduced them first to a race and then to the systematic destruction of their humanity that was staged for them as a degradation into animality, with the permanent exile’s creative parasitism (or cultural hybridity) reduced to a pestilence that can only be removed or eliminated, as a doctor might a cancer) - if these traditionalists lost their hegemony over the Jewish world when it is represented and recognized as such, just what cultural creativity might result or continue but on a more solid and broadly-recognized foundation, if that happened, the official Jewish world would become not more but differently assimilated, and its numbers would probably mushroom, but the guardians of tradition would find the result seeming foreign to them, and only massive changes could likely lead to their wanting to assimilate to their ‘religious’ thinking much of what has developed in secular traditions. Of course, this too would imply an ideal of partisanship. The basis of that does not exist; the social and political commitment of most Jews in America today is just success in the professional class and a nostalgia-driven clinging towards a vague image of something that still matters from the shared past: that is, a tradition. The most left-wing factions with Judaism basically just talk about identity politics and seek greater openness in gender and sometimes sexuality. They are strongly rooted in the centrism of the Democratic Party. In this situation, clearly the real social divide, within the Jewish world and everywhere else, the only one that really matters, as even race really does not (its claims are not false but overstated, and the reason is that slavery and its sequelae were projects of capitalism, not of prejudice but greed, and not of one culture and people oppressing another but one class oppressing the set of others, and ultimately themselves as part of this), is between center/right and left. And the reason is not Palestine and Israel’s horrifying alliance with the world’s most oppressive police state capitalisms and its continuation in an after-life where it is no longer normal, of the European colonial project, and not only the nationalist one, which can take anti-colonial forms. The Jews and the Palestinians have a deeper common cause, as the modern world has been unjustly cruel to both of us. This may be the most important consequence, but it is less the cause and not the essence of what is wrong with (or if you prefer, inadequate about) the Jewish world today. It is conservative. And the reason is capitalism. Capitalism and its business enterprises and governments (which are increasingly assimilated to each other), with their great need for policing and war (also assimilated), is the framework under which the whole works. It sets the terms. Just as, in the most extreme case to date, the Nazis set the terms for Jewish self-government in communities all over central and eastern Europe. The question for all of us is whether to just accommodate ourselves to the way things are, or to want something else and be clear for ourselves first of all that we do, and seek to change things. Center-right and left. And there is a Judaism of the left. There is because there can be. The textual sources exist, the historical and traditional ones are real. So where is this quasi-messianic Machiavellian ‘prince’?

The Renaissance humanist ethical ideal, which draws on pagan Greek and Roman as well as Jewish and Christian sources, and which is the one I referenced at the beginning of this essay, is a secularized form of the ‘religious’ that philosophy since its origins in Greece has always laid claimed to, but it is ethical, not political; its focus is still individual wisdom, not social critique and revolution.

This is why I find Reform Judaism intellectual sterile, an argument I have made elsewhere. Unlike, for example, the Irish, the Jews are an historically oppressed people who have almost always in their mainstream tendencies sought to ally themselves with the prevailing forms and instances of social power rather than to struggle against them. This has given the religion a conservative character generally, and recent history has only seen a wide-scale departure from that on behalf of their own cause pursued in their own behalf, in the form it took of bourgeois nationalism on the nineteenth-century European model, the form also taken by more or less all national liberation movements in the developing world after the war. In Judaism, right and left can be defined according to whether one thinks it more important to live an exemplary life in a community with high ethical standards and levels of education, including a commitment to lifelong learning, or to change the world, and to do so partly by working in science or arts to develop better tools and forms of understanding, and partly by allying themselves with people struggling against oppression and injustice.

Do you want to change the world, or merely live in it? Is your thinking prophetic or merely priestly?

The division in the arts and sciences is between those who want to understand the world in order to help manage it from above and those who want to help change it. The division is political and is roughly between a republican and democratic way of thinking on the one hand and an effectively monarchist one on the other, which views knowledge as handmaiden of government, offering advice to princes. The central discipline remains philosophy, but in the humanities and in Continental philosophy (which Americans in the humanities call 'theory'), its political and ethical focus has migrated from management to aid governments to a social theory that is intended to aid activists and artists.

These are two different visions of the world of ideas and study. They correspond to a division in the dominant class, the professional and managerial class. This class has a large left 'wing' and it is formed by people who are dissatisfied with the social world as it exists. If there were a name for a desire that defines this loose faction (it is not organized politically as such and probably will not be, short of a much greater social crisis that no one can want), it could only be "revolution". As Gramsci saw, the forces that tend in the direction named by this concept not as project but desire can only be united by their own success in a partisan context that does not exist today. The Democratic Party in the United States exists and functions partly as an apparatus for mapping radical desires onto liberal solutions friendly to corporations and government agencies staffed by members of the professional and managerial class who tend to be driven partly by politicized ethical aspirations. This often works badly because it results in individualizing, psychologizing, and moralizing tendencies. Neoconservatives have relentlessly, and not without much truth in their accounts, critiqued 'progressive' and 'left-liberal' thinking as accomplishing little more than giving an ideology or 'liberal', even 'left-wing' face to the administrative state, which, whatever is said about race, gender, sexuality, and all the things American liberals get steamed up about, governs the society and its people, including those whose education does not give them the cultural capital to participate in the discussions among rulers and their accomplices (university-educated professional and managerial elites). The administrative capitalist state with a militant radical liberal face.

The left in its social composition was always an alliance between intellectuals and the poor.

Management or revolution? Those are the options. Today, we can think capitalism and the critique of it on behalf of something else. It is on behalf of 'a' something else, not any but the one to come, whose features, necessarily, cannot be drawn in advance. In other words, the academically trained left is an avant-garde motivated by a very strong critique of the present and its historical genealogy, and a necessarily (still, at this moment in history) vague sense of the world to come. And of course, the historical world to come is the only one that there can be.

The left is futural, anti-authoritarian, and democratic. That is, it opposes all forms of domination and social power, indeed all social forms, that seem from our point of view oppressive. The left is futural, because it looks to the future for its possibilities, and to the past mainly as object of critique, and sometimes also for fragments pointing to possibilities that might be useful tactically or as part of a vision-in-formation of the world to come.

In being anti-authoritarian, it is liberationist, and this motif drives its futurism. It is democratic in the sense that its addressee is potentially everyone, and it envisions a society whose forms of empowerment and liberty are arranged in egalitarian terms rather than hierarchical ones.

That we on the left should be able to participate in and fight for our visions of the work we do must continue to be part of the disciplines of education and research. This is true on simple republican and democratic terms. Amongst ourselves, we should resist and try to counter with better visions, tendencies in the direction of accommodation to the capitalist state.

If only everyone on the left would agree - not on the shape of the alternative to be pursued, nor on the strategy for doing so, but - on then name of what we oppose and want to transform. Names like socialism, the proletariat or even the working class (a sociological and not political category, the subject not of revolution but of managed labor), and other things, even feminism and queer liberation, broad movements that have taught so many of us so much, have fallen by the wayside or become problematic or just under-informing our thinking (feminism and queer liberation are this: they are becoming accepted as the norm among the left-leaning factions of the professional class, but what they tell us is not enough). One name remains, because it is already with us, like it or not, and everyone has to deal with it. It would be easy enough to see many millions of people signing up for any project to replace it with its alternative, if we knew, not the why, but the what and how of that alternative. That we do not is reason for much continued research. This name of course is:

Capitalism.

This name plays the same role today that monarch and church (as a governing institution based on an enforced official ideology) played before the French Revolution. Of course we don't know the exact form the republic to come will take, what it will like it, what it will feel like, and what will be its problems and our needs and desires then. So what.

In this way, intellectuals and artists who think of themselves on the left, we can know enough about what we are committed to to know who we are, if that question still matters, and what to do.

One must avoid or resist the university discourse, which is always a mask of power. Recognizing this is not the same as saying that culture is always and only a mask of power and so we only need cultural critique in the name of politics. Ethics did not die but became, as did religion, less central, and that is a good thing. We don't need necessarily to just unmask, or even 'deconstruct', the prevailing discourses. Unmask power of its cultured visage in favor of what? Critique itself, obviously. The lack of unity around a political project probably saves us, and not only because such a formation would surely elicit even more violent attacks on intellectual life and the citizen's rather than capital's notions of education. Left with a vague political project of opposition to things as they are, I suggest that adding this one name and making it central is the key.

In fact, there is something critical for any and all opposition to the (capitalist) system (with its immense investments in social control from an ‘us’ over ‘them’ perspective (even when this perspective winds up being distributed within and not just between group subjectivities: that is, we can all take the point of view of the managerial capitalist state on ourselves, with or without a doubling of the subject-object relationship in baroque representations that center on a fetishized reflexivity of self-recognition as residue or site of social criticism — there is something critical for such a left project that is almost always, and intuitively, recognized, by the poor and those who are dominated. Especially those who are not either part of the university-trained (it is increasingly a training more than an education) professional class, or managers and petty police officers (like social workers and psychiatrists) with conservative managerial ideologies, as many are (the left recognizes that the poor whose cause it champions are often badly informed and formed in terms of the knowledge and thinking that would best facilitate opposing their oppression and not just getting what they want in the terms offered them; left-liberals often do not recognize this and champion the poor ‘empirically’, in terms of recognized (by managerial governance projects) personal traits (identity as membership in a recognized social group as demographic category), and in terms of the ‘actuality’ of what they say they want here and now and of ‘what’ they say they are (which social identity, even considering all those that count as ‘oppressed’), and so they are satisfied to simply put members of minoritarian groups in positions of power, and as if by magic, instantly the revolution has happened through empowerment.

What is this almost universally-recognized figure of the oppressive other? It is the experience of being managed from a point of view that is not what one might develop naturally if living and working in the liberty and autonomy of, instead of serving a system of employers, profiteers, debt-collectors, and police officers of every kind, one were living for oneself, and the others in their community, or even, as in socialism, at the limit that is the national society and perhaps also some figure of the world as totality. Trying for formulate alternatives so easily flounders, as the previous sentence manifests, but we can recognize what is to be dominated. And most people don’t like it. Some will rationalize it, but most people hate it.

That hatred is intuitive and obvious. It can be mobilized, yielding the various fascisms. That is not the only possible outcome; it is just that the others require more thinking. Our liberal and libertarian traditions, so strong in America with all classes and most groups (often less so with professionals, or non-professional managers when they are at their jobs and so compelled to obey, while making others obey them), are not without utility in this regard, but they are not enough. What we really ought to do with our universities is not just continue to encourage and allow thinkers to think creatively in liberty and autonomy, and struggle for more intellectual autonomy for researchers employed as teachers in neoliberal environments that reduce learning to obedience.

We should also make the theories and forms and artifacts of culture available to everyone, in the process also putting tools of thought-driven social change into their hands.

Then more than now, the ethical project of learning to live a good life, will regain more of its centrality. Though modern subjectivity tends to be self-reflective, and our ethical understanding tends, as in the novel generally, to be inseparably intertwined with social criticism. Part of the difference is the lack to us moderns of the ‘Copernican’ standpoint of a self imagined as outside the world and relating to it. Today, we are all divided externally between center and left and internally between the ethical and the political. But the ethical subject is in process and is found not abstractly but in social contexts, formed by history and indeed (the conscious study of its forms that is) ‘tradition’. Today, ethics remains important but it is in itself not enough, and when it is more useful socially and not just in relationship to God or other members of some community specially devoted to him (this is one image the Jewish people have sometimes had of themselves; it is not false but inadequate), it is less pure. More prophetically than priestly, if you prefer. This difference correlates roughly between periods of social stability and ones of instability and change. Things are happening in the world and we must admit that while we may know, as the proverbial “Mr. Jones'“ does not, what it is, we still don’t yet know what any or some bodies like us can do with what we have got, here and now where we are. Happily for some academics, it can be seen that, indeed, the arts remain quite central, including to many of the world’s poor and dominated. Tomorrow we will have lifelong learning for everyone with the object of living a good life and maintaining as citizens a good world. Today people are still just going to schools to be trained for jobs. When they are no longer needed, perhaps because there is not enough labor to go around, then they can be eliminated or allowed to die. They might be allowed to die in their camps, and combatted with the full force of a military occupation, if and when they rebel. In this circumstance, “on a droit de se revolter” (it is right to rebel). Who can doubt it?