Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein translation. New York: Zone Books, 1987. [Published in France in 1974].

Review originally published in the New York City Tribune, July 4, 1988.

 

Generally a tedious lot, anthropologists slog through rain forests trying to understand obscure tribes, returning to academia where they preach ‘cultural relativism’ and accuse one another of ‘ethnocentricity.’ As none but a few of their colleagues can actually observe the phenomena they purport to describe, humbug goes undetected for years—viz. the notorious case of Margaret Mead and her swinging Samoans, hostages to mod-lib ideology.

These efforts might make some sense if anthropologists worked to uncover human nature. Most prefer the intellectually safer but morally more dangerous course of denying that human nature exists at all, thus dismissing their only conceivably raison d’être. Why read anthropology at all?

Because, despite the self-imposed blinders, at time anthropologists do glimpse human nature, as in the research of Pierre Clastres, late Director of Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Clastres undertook the study of South American tribes, not out of some aimless ‘interest’ but to learn something about the relation of human society to politics. He denies that politics, conceived as the exercise of ‘power,’ exists “in man as a natural being.”  Nonetheless, as a political anthropologist, Clastres sought answers to such perennial questions as, ‘Who rules?’ and ‘What is the end of political life?’ Human beings are political, just not in the way ‘we moderns’ define politics. This insight took him well beyond the conventional relativism of his trade.

Modern political philosophers—beginning with Machiavelli, subtly, and continuing through Marx and Nietzsche, baldly—define politics as coercion, conquest, command, and obedience. Aside from the Incans, whose political regime somewhat resembled the modern authoritarian state, the South American tribes have yet no such experience in their daily lives. In war, yes—necessarily. In peace, no: “If there is something completely alien to an Indian, it is the idea of giving an order or having to obey.” For an Indian, “the political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond hierarchical subordination.” “It is not evident to me,” Clastres writes, “that coercion and subordination constitute the essence of political power in all times and all places.”

Each tribe has a chief, to be sure. He acts not as a commander; instead, he moderates disputes, distributes his own (not others’) goods, and orates. He remains entirely dependent upon the group, his public speech ritualistic, not dictatorial. He reaffirms traditional ways, issuing no commands. Political power stays within the society itself, whose members prevent tyranny by simply ignoring any chief so presumptuous as to command them. “Most Indian societies in America are distinguished by their sense of democracy and taste for equality.” They allow a chief to command only in times of war. Clastres pauses to tell the comic-poignant story of Geronimo, the North American chief who wasted much of his life vainly urging the Apache to wage war against Mexico. As a wiser chief told a Spanish explorer (in unknowing contradiction of Machiavelli), “I prefer to be loved and not feared.”

Indians care “to constantly keep power apart from the institutions of power, command apart from the chief.” Clastres admires this solution to the problem of rulership. He does not overlook its severity. “Primitive society… is a society from which nothing escapes, which lets nothing get outside itself, for all the exits are blocked.” The means of blockage are cruel. Tribes initiate young men not by schooling but by torture. Society literally “imprints its mark on the bodies of the young people,” symbolically “inscribing the text of the law on the surfacing of their bodies.” This ferocious egalitarianism teaches, “You are worth no more than anyone else; you worth no less than anyone else.” Coercion, then, does not disappear from these societies; they ‘front-load’ it, reserve it for childhood or youth, counting on the lessons learned then to carry over for a lifetime. If this “prohibition of inequality that each person will remember” prevents tyranny, it also prevents philosophy. It is a “pedagogy” without dialogue; the initiate silently consents. The Thirty Tyrants could not concur, but neither could Socrates. The public rule of coercive state force and the private rule of wisdom are equally impossible.

Clastres’ observations confound Marxist pseudo-explanations of ‘History,’ particularly those regarding ‘surplus value.’ Primitive societies were not and are not subsistence economies, awaiting much-needed evolution into more advanced types. They are sedentary, not nomadic, thanks to the richness of the landscapes they inhabit. Indeed, the first Europeans in Brazil fretted at the Indians’ conspicuous leisure: “Obviously, these people were deliberately ignorant of the fact that one must earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow. It would do, and it didn’t last: the Indians were soon put to work, and they died of it.” Pace, Marx: Work is the opiate of the masses. Or, as Clastres writes, “the economic derives from the political.”

Feminists will find no more comfort in Clastres’ research than Marxists. Men and women perform separate functions, the men hunting and gathering, the women consuming and tending the household. Men are the humans of the bow, women the humans of the basket—one sex the masters of the forest, the other mistresses of the encampment. Taboos match practice: “A hunter could not bear the shame of carrying a basket, whereas his wife would be afraid to touch his bow.” Women sing of pain, anguish; they give birth and mourn the dead. Men sing of their own glory, each one to himself alone, pouring their (highly elevated) sense of themselves into “the hymn of their freedom,” the one activity in which their individuality is not strictly limited by the social laws etched into their skin. ‘Song of Myself,’ indeed!

Clastres would explain the transition from statelessness to state rule not by some natural or even historical evolution but by the pressures of population density. Tribes in the tropical forests of America range from between forty and several hundred persons. With more people, a society survives only with recourse to the unifying power of a state. Here Clastres succumbs to his own inadequate conception of human nature, which cannot distinguish between animal and human biology. Because he only conceives of speech in terms of command, or solitary song, or prophetic oratory, but never as a means of rational deliberation, Clastres cannot identify the distinctively human characteristics. He cannot see how government develops out of the tribe, naturally—that is, by human nature’s exercise. For this insight one must still read that earlier and greater political anthropologist, Aristotle.

A sort of latter-day Rousseau, Clastre does not entirely overcome modern thought any more than Rousseau did. He does correct that thought in telling ways, as Rousseau did. Like Rousseau’s, his work stands as a thorough refutation of the utopian dream which combines this-worldly community with humanitarian tenderness.

Asher Horowitz: Rousseau: Nature and History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, June 24, 1987.

 

Serious study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau reveals much of what goes on beneath the surface of politics in the West. Listen to the speeches, read the op-ed pieces, watch the televised argument-circuses, then identify the common themes and assumptions. You will find almost every one of those assumptions in Rousseau—not as assumptions, however, but as questions, criticisms, and counsels. Asher Horowitz writes, “Rousseau’s problems are still our problems, perhaps more so than ever.” The “question of civilization” itself, particularly the increasing dichotomy between rationalism and passion-worship, “still looms as a potentially explosive issue on the political agenda.”

This is so, because the complex question of the relationship between nature and history, a question Rousseau understood better than almost anyone in the past two centuries, remains nothing if not controversial. Do “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” legitimately govern men and nations? Or do we write our own laws, consciously and unconsciously constructing our ‘values’ as we go along? Radical publicists, ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ exalt ‘History’ over God and nature, with results that range from the lamentable to the preposterous.

A serious and perceptive student of Rousseau, Horowitz can therefore help us see the roots of modern politics. Although he foolishly admires the late Herbert Marcuse, a neo-Marxist charlatan who played to, and into, the illusions of the ‘Sixties New Left, Horowitz wisely avails himself of nothing Marcusean in his scholarship: no fake-Freudian social psychology, no Marxist attempt at locating the philosopher within his ‘historical moment,’ and no polemical jive.

Unlike most ideologues, Horowitz reads Rousseau. He tries to find out what Rousseau himself wants to teach careful readers. In this Horowitz follows Marcuse less than Leo Strauss, another German-Jewish refugee scholar with whom Marcuse may be said to have had nothing else in common. Horowitz employs some Straussian means for Marcusean ends, thereby bringing a certain tension to his book: the tension between nature and historicism.

Horowitz praises Strauss for seeing the beginnings of historicism in Rousseau while deploring Strauss’s objections to historicism. Whereas the greatest classical philosophers regarded nature as fundamentally stable, providing standards by which changes may be judged, Rousseau contends that nature, including human nature, lacks stability and hierarchy. Nature has little nature to it; almost infinitely malleable, it can and should be shaped by human artifice. This shaping, this deliberate and undeliberate change, constitutes history. Humanity ‘creates’ itself.

Horowitz stresses the social character of the labor by which humanity develops itself into humanity. Even the human ego results from this social construction. This doctrine contradicts the individualism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—Rousseau is the prototypical anti-‘bourgeois’—while subtly attacking Christianity, as well. “The dictate of conscience is natural only in so far as man is an animal made (by himself) to become social. When Rousseau… exalts conscience as a ‘divine instinct’ and seems to link it to a transcendent nature, he is disguising in terms of providential-teleological thinking a challenge to transcendent moral systems.” Christian an other religious moralities are “ideological illusion[s] bound up with the legitimation of social domination”—a staple trope in Leftist polemics to this day.

Unlike many atheists, Rousseau understands that traditional religion, if abandoned, must be replaced with something that serves some of the same purposes, particularly moral elevation and political cohesiveness. He also understands that rationalism or ‘Enlightenment’ will not serve this purpose. Nor does he assert the existence of all-determining laws of historical development, as Hegel and Marx do, and commend to us a place in the vanguard of historical progress. Called a dreamer, Rousseau has more realism in him than subsequent self-touted ‘realists.’

Rousseau’s (relative) realism catches Horowitz in a net. Having emphasized Rousseau’s social, even socialistic, side, Horowitz balks at some of the tougher themes in the Social Contract—Rousseau’s insistence on the need for a civil religion and for a “Legislator” who alone can design sound institutions. He turns to Rousseau’s great book on education, the Emile. But rather like Marcuse now, he underestimates the authoritarian component of Rousseauan education, with its supremely manipulative “tutor” (the parallel to the “Legislator”) who pulls the strings of Emile’s developing soul, in ways unsuspected by his pupil. Horowitz believes Emile to be a product of natural development, now forgetting Rousseau’s teaching on the malleability of nature.

This is why Horowitz concentrates his attention on the Discourses, the Nouvelle Heloïse, the Social Contract, and the Emile, but omits serious consideration of the Confessions and the Reveries. He claims that in Rousseau reason avoids the “repression and domination” of Enlightenment rationalism, but fails to consider, perhaps because he prefers not to consider, the extent to which Rousseau regards philosophic independence as a conquest, indeed not of nature but of fortune, and of opinion or sociality—the clear lesson of the ‘autobiographical’ writings. Unlike contemporary ideologues, Rousseau insists on the permanent possibility of philosophy, conceived as the transcendence of social and political customs. He would resist being dragooned into the Marcusean army as much as he resisted the calls to Christian soldiery and ‘Enlightenment’ vanguardism.

In approaching Rousseau’s philosophy through Rousseau’s writings, Horowitz the core of his teaching. In failing to consider all those major writings and trying to make Rousseau into a neo-Marxist avant-la-lettre, he partially undermines his own good work.

Stanley Corngold: The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 15, Numbers 2 & 3, May and September, 1987.

 

German writers seldom efface themselves. Contemporary French literary critics assert ‘the death of the self.’ North American literary critics assert the apotheosis of the French critics.

How long can this go on? Pessimists say, ‘Indefinitely,’ but Stanley Corngold is no pessimist. A professor of comparative literature at Princeton, a former student of Paul de Man, and a native of Brooklyn, he comes well positioned and equipped to arraign ‘deconstructionism’ before the bar of common sense. His departure from or overcoming of Brooklyn did not include any foolish attempt to jettison every ounce of Brooklyn baggage. But he knows that Brooklynite common sense will not by itself convince academics, who remain genteel even while assaulting Western civilization and the bourgeoisie—that is to say, themselves. So he writes his critique in ‘Eighties-academic prose. (“My purpose is to institute the modern self as the copresence [‘structure’] of various narratives [‘effects’] of the self which earlier writers have produced.”) He also gives every sign of actually having read most of what the ‘deconstructionists’ and their academic publicists have written—an ascesis more to be admired than emulated.

Each reader will find his favorite example of this happy conjunction of style and substance, but your reviewer recommends footnote 35, page 244. There Corngold quotes an as-they-say dense passage by Professor Victor Lange on Heidegger (“Historical concretizations of life,” “methodological access,” “suprapersonal presence,” “hermeneutical phenomenology”); with that convincing poker face you prefect only in the old neighborhood, he comments, “It is hard to say this any better.” Truly, Corngold attacks ‘deconstructionism with its own heavy instruments. It is inconceivable that even his most insensible targets will not flinch.

The poet’s self is Corngold’s topic—”a paradoxical being that must ‘disown’ itself in order to exist.” “Disown” is Hölderlin’s word; he likens poetic self-assertion to the “feeling of the sacred” in ancient tragedies, a feeling that can no longer find immediate recognition, but to which modern readers can carry over their own “spirit” (Geist) and experience. This carrying-over works both ways; the poet’s self carries over into “foreign analogous material,” into what T. S. Eliot calls its “objective correlative,” and the reader’s self carries over, away from itself, to perceive the poet’s intention. Hölderlin is the first of seven German writers Corngold presents, all of whom insist that this carrying-over, though problematic, does occur. The ‘deconstructionists’ claim that the self loses its way (‘shattering’ and ‘diffraction’ are the usual metaphors) among outside ‘structures.’ Attacking the notion of the Cartesian subject, res cogitans, the ‘deconstructionists’ deny the existence of self-knowledge, reject the self as a “coercive authority” and as the basis of autonomous individuality. The self “as the agent of its own development” and the source of poetic making, amounts to little more than a myth.

Corngold agrees that “the self as particular, the self as self is precisely what cannot be represented in the concept”; the self “cannot at once stand inside itself and give a full description of itself.” The attempt to do so would yield an infinite regress (not knowing when you’ve reached the self’s foundation) or an infinite ‘progress’ (selves followed by super-selves). “Can a self be itself and know that the act by which it is known ‘disowns’ it?” Corngold affirms that it can, thanks to “history,” by which he means narrative. Narrative is an “effect” issuing from but not identical to the self, opposing but not obliterating other selves (including parts of the originative self that the dominant part of that self finds objectionable); the synthesis of these effects approximates “a third term, a project totality” that objectively confirms the existence of both self and other-than-self. “The integrity of the self is established by a style open to the history [here, “history” also means experience] it suffers and perceives—and makes in the stories it tells, with others’ collaboration.” Corngold would defend Rousseau by means of a literary Hegelianism. Rousseau “figures in the carpet of almost everyone of these essays…. He is my eighth ‘German writer.'” Corngold’s German-language writers are Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Mann, Kafka, Freud, and Heidegger, many of whom find themselves subpoenaed by ‘deconstructionists’ as witnesses to the self’s alleged decease.

Hölderlin teaches that the self’s consciousness of its own mortality, of the most radical otherness, impels it to Bildung, development. This “divided self” does not merely contradict itself, as ‘deconstructionists’ assume. Bildung “turns toward historical and sacred objects and finally toward Nature as that generality enabling, sustaining, and enveloping… particular contacts and negations.” Nature makes the self possible. It also makes self-knowledge possible by affording the self a perspective outside the self. Hölderlin’s “Nature” has nothing to do with stable, Platonic forms; it is as mutable as the self—hence its affinity with the self. At the same time, both self and “Nature” do sustain themselves. Poetic, artful language “assures the permanence [perhaps too strong a word] of relations arresting an eternal ‘slippage’ between signifier and signified.” Language mediates between self and other, thus imitating all-encompassing “Nature.” Corngold does not attempt to prove Hölderlin’s scheme to be rationally sustainable or coherent; a proof of this would require justifying the emphasis on the mutability of which death serves as the most striking example. But he does argue plausibly that Hölderlin makes more sense than the ‘deconstructionists’ do. Corngold shows that Lacan, Laplanche, and Foucault unwittingly imply the existence of the self even in the formulations they use to deny its existence.

In Dilthey, nature, even nature conceived as mutable, gives way to social and political history. “What must a poetics be in order to sustain the view that the subjectivity of a poet may be authentic and representative of social forces?” Dilthey contends that historical activity includes the study of history, that study makes history, is a praxis. The self ‘objectifies’ itself by political activity, art, and scholarship. “Literature is an institution because it institutes relations of force between acts of creation, reception, and understanding whose thrust is to enter the public order.” But the notion of “force” implies much more than mere history-as-narrative. Predictably, Dilthey brings nature in under the cover of history, saying that statesmen, poets, and philosophers share a “powerful life force of soul,” “energy of experiences of the heart and of the world,” the capacity to generalize those experiences, and “the power of inspiring conviction.” The notion of “historical psychology”—in Dilthey a form of vitalism likely derived from Nietzsche’s writings—implies not only history but technē. Neither Dilthey nor Corngold entirely appreciates this, but the former does write, and the latter repeats, that literature’s “highest function” is “to represent the dignity of the person in the midst of its determination” by ‘history.’

In the argument between Rousseau and Hegel, Nietzsche incites to war. He rejects the understanding of art as a means of Bildung. If art is Dionysian, the poet’s self becomes more unstable, a field susceptible to possession. For Nietzsche, questioning distinguishes the self from merely determined phenomena. “The self wants itself as a question,”; it “exists as the question of its being and to this extent is self-determined,” as no outside force causes it to question itself. Corngold finds Nietzsche’s conception of the self to be dubious, because Nietzsche appears nearly to identify the self with the body, whose many drives are merely asserted to have a rank. Disorder cannot be said to determine itself. But Corngold adds that Nietzsche’s will to power itself consists of contradictory forces; if the self produces language, an “enterprise of the will to power,” then language, logos, and therefore logic, are not oriented toward discovery but toward overcoming. The self’s self-questioning means not self-doubt but self-overcoming, questioning. “The question of the self must live as an openness, an unansweredness toward being, yet it must bend the world into virtual answers in order to preserve itself as a question.” Nietzsche’s will to power, one might observe, synthesizes part of Rousseauan nature with part of Hegelian history. Corngold dismisses the ‘deconstructionist’ contention that Nietzsche’s texts are “pan-ironic,” noting that “irony can take place only through punctual abrogations of irony.”

Of the two twentieth-century literary men Corngold discusses, Mann does not interest him whereas Kafka does. The latter’s novels contain “breaks” in perspective—as when Joseph K. is described in the third person, a violation of the novel’s otherwise non-“authorial” point-of-view. Such “breaks” appear to exemplify what ‘deconstructionists’ call the “undecidability” of a text, symptomatic of “the death of the Author.” One might of course suggest that these “breaks” instead reveal the incompetence of the author, but Corngold has a better suggestion. Even as an author, Kafka has a horror of construction, which is one more instance of the mastery or control satirized in The Trial. Kafka objects to perfection of technique, on principle. Therefore, Kafka’s narrator “is as much subject to inauthenticity and blindness as any character”; “like the loopholes in bureaucratic procedures which, as Adorno writes, are the institutional equivalent of mercy, random breaks in narrative consistency grant the hero a sort of merciful liberation from the schematism of ‘character,’ from the privations of an irremediably personal perspective.” Of course, this can only go so far. Kafka is the one who lets the “random” breaks stand. In being allowed to stand, they are no longer random. Corngold does not quite say it, but Kafka cannot avoid presenting us with a coherent self even in his attempts to show mercy to his suffering characters. He cannot really relinquish control, only imitate such relinquishment. He approaches relinquishment of control in fiction.

Corngold attacks the ‘deconstructionist’ misreading of Freud, describing the interpretive method involved as “the disfigured expression of a will to power bent on masking its own contradiction.” Freud’s texts are not literary. The psychoanalyst attempts to “insert” the reality of biological life into fiction invented by a patient or a writer. To Kafka, such a “cure” would itself cause injury; like Rousseau, who deplores self-interest, “Kafka’s self is defined not by particular interests but by its narrative attentiveness to the products of dream play,” by “indifference to the practical concerns of an aimed empirical consciousness.” ‘Deconstructionists’ call Freud’s texts literary because they do not know what literature is, or perhaps are hostile to it. Although they claim to ‘deconstruct’ in order to liberate readers from authors’ allegedly coercive grip, they in fact coerce texts into saying nothing, the better to fit them into the ‘deconstructionist’ construct.

Heidegger “joins a tradition subverting the western philosophy of language which normally founds meaning on, and subordinates rhetoric to, grammar and logic.” The “most primordial” character of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein is a resolute return to “one’s ownmost Self.” Whereas Nietzsche begins with self and sees his general principle, the will to power, in it, Heidegger begins with his general principle, Dasein, which “make[s] a resolute return to the Self.” Wherever the emphasis falls, this anti-traditional tradition attributes a cognitive significance to human “moods,” beyond mere “sensation-bound feeling.” From Rousseau to Heidegger, “mood stands for a disclosive power whose reach cognitive understanding cannot attain.” The disclosive power of moods evidently has waned. Corngold’s Germans increasingly perceive that moods are “fragile” and “strange” when one sees them in others, even if they appear strong and ‘authentic’ in oneself; one self/subject cannot often coincide with another if the means of coincidence is mood. Corngold sees that historicism arises from this increased subjectivism, although he does not elaborate on this fact as much as he might—having availed himself of a sort of historicism.

Corngold would halt this waning of Rousseau’s project before it slides into ‘deconstructionism,’ which he rightly considers an absurdity. “If a text were only a self-deconstructing motion, a play of ineffable differences, a representation of nothingness, it could not weigh heavily enough upon the reader to produce a mood.” For all the formidable doctrine historicists have produced, the basis of their enterprise remains embarrassingly natural—even if so inchoate a naturalness as that seen in human moods. Corngold may concede too much to historicism and also to Rousseau, who at times has been credited with inventing an early form of historicism. When historicism, following subjectivism, eschews dialectic based on the principle of non-contradiction and asserts a “mood”-based dialectic of synthesizing opposites, an effort that eventually ranks rhetoric over logic, it finds such projects as ‘deconstructionism’ hard to resist.

A scholar might examine this matter by examining Rousseau, Hegel, and Nietzsche with an eye toward the classical reason they attacked and the ‘deconstructionism’ they somehow fostered. Corngold’s “postscript” and “prospect” bring to mind a less elephantine approach. Identifying his own book as a confession of sorts, a confession of the distance traveled between Brooklyn and ‘Germany,’ Corngold indicates a readiness to disown or overcome ‘Germany,’ too. One way of doing this would be to measure the language of Brooklyn against the language of ‘Germany,’ and vice-versa, in order to determine what common sense lacks that ‘Germany’ offers, and what ‘Germany’ offers that common sense can bring down to earth, or even falsify. (Socrates, for example, begins with the language of the marketplace, transcending it only when it deserves to be transcended). Despite the egalitarianism of many aspects of post-Rousseauan thought, this thought betrays a contempt for common sense that yields convolution in theory and extremism in practice. One way to get beyond ‘Germany’ is to return to ‘Brooklyn.’