The Intellectual as Stranger: Studies in Spokespersonship (Routledge Studies in Social and Politicalthought)

The Intellectual as Stranger

The Intellectual as Stranger explores the venerable conjunction between images of the intellectual and those of the stranger in the history of social and political thought. Dick Pels’ social epistemology of strangerhood critically builds upon the classical theories of Marx, Simmel and Mannheim, as well as registering the contribution of feminist and postcolonial critiques and of the postmodernist sociology of cultural ‘nomadism’. Pels uses detailed case studies to examine the ambiguous strangerhood of political intellectuals both on the left and the right such as Marx, Durkheim, Barrès, Sorel, Freyer and Hendrik de Man. From the chequered genealogy of standpoint thinking, he develops a reflexive and critical sociology of spokespersonship which goes beyond the traditional dualisms of truth versus power, might versus right and left versus right. In doing so, he explores a new conception of objectivity which is rooted not in the methodology but in the social distribution of doubt, and which throws new light on the old question of whether outsiders are privileged with a deeper or more comprehensive view and may speak for a larger social reality. This book provides a new approach to the social theory of intellectuals and their political role, and offers an intriguing new account of the link between marginality and innovation. It is challenging and thoughtprovoking reading for scholars of social, cultural and political theory. Dick Pels is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Human Sciences at Brunel University and Research Affiliate at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research. His previous publications include Property and Power in Social Theory: A Study in Intellectual Rivalry.

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14 Property and Power in Social Theory A study in intellectual rivalry Dick Pels

30 The Intellectual as Stranger Studies in spokespersonship Dick Pels

The Intellectual as Stranger Studies in spokespersonship

Dick Pels

London and New York

For Lolle Nauta and Zygmunt Bauman who both know something about the intellectual as stranger

First published 2000 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2000 Dick Pels All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pels, Dick, 1948– The intellectual as stranger: studies in spokespersonship/Dick Pels. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Intellectuals—History. 2. Intellectual life—History. I. Title. HM728. P45 2000 305.5'52'09–dc21 00–042467 ISBN 0-203-45928-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-76752-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-20584-0 (Print Edition)

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

ix

Strangers in the house of power ix The problem of spokespersonship xii The horseshoe model xiv Outsider knowledge xvii 1

Speaking the spokesperson

1

Representation: scientific and political Representation as substitution 4 The absent spokesperson 7 The duplicity of the moderns 10 The capacity for critique 15 Accusatory realism 18 The duality of representation 23 2

1

The proletarian as stranger

27

Three farewells to the proletariat 27 A philosophical double 31 The proletarian standpoint 34 The objective stranger 36 The feminist stranger 41 The social distribution of doubt 43 3

Speaking for social things: sociology and socialism in Durkheim, Sorel and Barrès The project as object 49 An artful science 52

v

49

vi Contents The stratified project 56 Socialism as object and project 60 Third way socialism 64 Anti-intellectuals of the left and the right The standpoint of the nation 74 4

69

Missionary sociology between left and right: Karl Mannheim and the right-wing challenge

81

Between totality and estrangement 81 The mission of the intellectuals and that of sociology 85 The sociology of knowledge as master science 89 Marxism, fascism, and the class nature of intellectuals 92 Zehrer and Die Tat 95 Freyer’s ‘ethical’ sociology 98 The people’s point of view 102 5

The dark side of socialism: Hendrik de Man and the fascist temptation

110

The rationality of fascism 110 Two revisionisms 114 Between the tips of the horseshoe 118 Intellectuals’ socialism 122 Pianist socialism from above 127 6

Treason of the intellectuals: Paul de Man and Hendrik de Man

131

What (t)reason? 131 A family affair 134 From neutrality to collaboration 137 The revolutionary temptation 140 The German genius versus the French 142 Cultural nationalism and the critique of rationalism 144 Anti-semitism as anti-intellectualism 147 Reification as intellectual treason 152 7

Strange standpoints The point of standpoint theory 156 Drifting towards the stranger 159 The metonymic fallacy of feminist intellectuals 163 Idealization and identification 167

156

Contents vii Whose science? Whose knowledge? 170 The reflexive spokesperson 173 8

Privileged nomads

176

Exercises in nomadology 176 The intellectual traveller 180 Nomadic narcissism 184 The feminist nomad 187 In the third space 189 9

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood

193

Agoraphobia 193 Socratic doubts 196 Cartesian doubts 201 The duplication of strangerhood 205 Methodological voluntarism 210 Third positions 214 Reflexive dialectics 218 In praise of marginality 222 Notes Bibliography Index

228 261 279

Acknowledgements

The Introduction and Chapter 1 are newly written for the present book. Chapter 2 is based upon a Dutch article in Kennis & Methode 8(2), 1984, as substantially revised and translated in History of the Human Sciences 11(1), February 1998. Chapter 3 incorporates fragments of a Dutch article (Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 10(1), 1983) and an English one (Acta Politica 19(3), 1984) and has been significantly revised and expanded. Chapter 4 is adapted and expanded from ‘Missionary Sociology between Left and Right: A Critical Introduction to Mannheim’, Theory, Culture, and Society 10(3), 1993. Earlier versions of Chapters 5, 6 and 7 have appeared in History of the Human Sciences 6(2), 1993; Theory, Culture, and Society 8(1), 1991; and Telos 108, summer 1997. Chapter 8 was published as ‘Privileged Nomads. On the Strangeness of Intellectuals and the Intellectuality of Strangers’ in Theory, Culture, and Society 11(1), 1999. The concluding chapter is newly written for this book. I am grateful to the various editors and publishers for permission to draw on this material. In addition, I wish to thank Zygmunt Bauman, Mike Featherstone, René Gabriëls, David Kettler, Johan Muller, Lolle Nauta, Baukje Prins, Frédéric Vandenberghe, and Irving Velody for various critical readings and forms of encouragement.

viii

Introduction

Il faut être en dehors pour bien voir. Georges Sorel Granted, all standpoints are partisan; and granted, no one escapes a partisan standpoint. But aren’t some forms of partisanship more liberating than others? Alvin Gouldner That is to say that the truth is a truth which can only be deployed from the starting point of the historian’s position in the combat, of the looked-for victory…It is the belonging to a camp—a decentered position—which permits the deciphering of truth and the denunciation of illusions. Michel Foucault Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. Salman Rushdie

Strangers in the house of power This book explores some aspects of the long-standing metaphoric conjunction between the images of the intellectual and that of the stranger in the history of social and political thought. It registers the cognitive force but also attempts to weigh the knowledge-political risks which are inscribed in the venerable connection between the condition of outsidership and the vocation of social criticism. Traditionally, intellectuals have often been identified, and have identified themselves, as ‘displaced persons’, distanced and dissident vis-à-vis the broader society and its centres of political and economic decision making. Such outsidership, while breeding resentment and anxiety, has also been a source of considerable epistemic pride, in so far as intellectuals have often presumed the existence of a structural relationship between their generic distanciation and their chances of attaining a broader, less distorted, more objective or just view of ix

x Introduction the social world. In the modern period, this social epistemology of strangerhood has been most influentially revived, although initially in oblique and almost subconscious form, in the Marxian ‘parable of the proletariat’. It is more explicitly hinted at in Simmel’s portrayal of the stranger as an ‘objective’ person and in Mannheim’s picture of the freischwebende Intelligenz as collectively estranged from class-divided society. More recently, it has been reaffirmed in feminist and postcolonial strands of standpoint epistemology, as well as in the closely related selfstylization of postmodern intellectuals as ‘exilic’ or ‘nomadic’ subjects. In so far as they have sought broader political commitments, however, intellectuals have also traditionally been seduced to dissimulate and escape this precarious condition of estrangement. Marginal intellectuals have often offered themselves as organic spokespersons for political causes of left, right, and centre, simultaneously magnifying and concealing their own existential condition and their will to intellectual power behind larger interests and constituencies such as those of History, Society, the Working Class, the Nation, Culture, Science, Reason, or Justice. All thinking about the dilemma of reason versus power therefore runs up against this problem of spokespersonship, in so far as intellectuals, in identifying with those larger interests, have often silenced other voices and appropriated their subjects’ (and objects’) interests and desires as their own. In this way they have succumbed to the universal danger that resides in the very logic of speaking for others: which is to disregard the inevitable hiatus between representers and represented, or the specific sociological ‘strangeness’ which separates spokespersons from the subjects or objects which they claim to speak for. This ‘metonymic fallacy of the intellectuals’, which already invalidated classical proletarian standpoint theory, is not peculiar to one wing of the political spectrum, but is equally distributed over the right and the left. In analysing the logic of speaking for the social, we need to draw a broader ideological inventory which faces up to some embarrassing proximities between left-wing and right-wing thought, and which more adequately traces the various intellectual pathways leading from the one to the other. It is crucially important to extend the comparative base of inquiry of traditional standpoint epistemologies both historically and politically, in order to accommodate the important contributions of sophisticated nationalist and völkische versions. This may enable a more serious appraisal of the unique triangular relationship which historically linked social science, socialism, and fascism, and of the intellectual arguments and sociohistorical contexts which offered possible switchboards for crossing over from one side of the political spectrum to the other. One such intellectual switchboard can be identified as ‘Intellectuals’ Socialism’ or ‘Cultural Socialism’, an important strand in revisionist thought which was pioneered by Hendrik de Man, although major elements of his project of a social-liberal ‘third way’ were anticipated and elaborated by sociologists

Introduction xi such as Michels, Durkheim and Mannheim. One important historical locale for actual crossovers can be identified as ‘political Bohemia’: the refuge of declassed and ‘free-floating’ intellectuals, artists, and militants, who felt sufficiently estranged from established political ideas and institutions in order to sustain a generic state of ‘anti-political’ revolt and to engage in unexpected swings of allegiance. In the following chapters, these thematic concerns will be elucidated by means of a limited number of historical and comparative case studies. These studies variously illustrate the ambiguous situation of politicizing intellectuals, who were in various degrees distant or estranged from the space of professional politics, but nevertheless nurtured the ambition to ground social science as master science for a scientific politics, and asserted the calling of intellectuals or social scientists as master personnel for societal rationalization. These ambiguities are first studied in Marxist ‘proletarian’ socialism and in Durkheimian ‘sociological’ or ‘solidarist’ socialism, which have provided two contrasting but equally influential matrices for the modern ambition to speak for the social. On the right wing, similar spokesperson problems arose for the new integral nationalism developing around the turn of the century in France and Italy (and somwhat later in Weimar Germany), when anti-Marxist and ‘antiintellectual’ intellectuals offered to speak for an alternative ‘national’ socialism. These dilemmas of spokespersonship are subsequently traced in more detail in Mannheim’s missionary project for sociology and for the intellectuals, and in Hendrik de Man’s original elaboration of a ‘cultural’ socialism. The parallel cases of Third Way thinkers such as Durkheim, Mannheim, and de Man also signal some uncanny resemblances and crossborrowings between the revisionist sociological left and radical right-wing thought, as exemplified by the néo-socialisme championed by Marcel Déat (who was influenced simultaneously by Durkheim, Barrès, and de Man), by German ‘conservative-revolutionary’ thinking as represented by Freyer, Schmitt, and the Tatkreis, and by the cultural nationalism of young Paul de Man, Hendrik’s nephew, who subsequently became a founder of deconstructivism in literary studies in the USA. The closing chapters of this study refocus the spokesperson problem thus inherited from classical standpoint theories (both of the proletarian left and the nationalist right) as it is encountered in mitigated but still recognizable form in recent feminist and postcolonial cultural studies—which revive the long-standing claim that a marginalized condition supports or engenders a less distorted, more objective view of the social whole. Once again, however, the specific sociological strangeness of the intellectuals is made to disappear behind the imputed strangeness of the larger classes or categories (such as women or blacks) which they intend to speak for. This is particularly the case in the more self-centred and self-complimentary image of the postmodern intellectual as an essential ‘nomad’, who feels called upon to transgress all boundaries and be forever ‘on the move’. If,

xii Introduction therefore, we are concerned to preserve the powerful epistemological claim with regard to a structural linkage between marginality and intellectual creativity, we need to take a reflexive turn which more clearly acknowledges the performative logic of spokespersonship and the secondorder marginality of the intellectuals themselves. The problem of spokespersonship In order to provide a theoretical framework for the individual studies, the first chapter provides a concise but programmatic discussion of such related (and, admittedly, big) issues of representation, reflexivity, performance and spokespersonship. This conceptual scaffolding will serve to outline some of the epistem/ontological resources which I shall deploy in the following pages, and hopefully clear away a few misunderstandings which are easily invoked by the ‘unmasking’, ‘debunking’ or ‘disqualifying’ tendency of the conventional repertoires of modernist ideology critique, the sociology of knowledge, and the classical social theory of intellectuals. Many exercises in this book are indeed exercises in a critical mode, which seemingly indulge in the ‘hidden interests’ and ‘will to power’ talk of a traditional hermeneutics of suspicion. However, by bringing the ‘old’ problem of the role of the intellectuals in politics under the ‘new’ heading of a critical and reflexive theory of representation and spokespersonship, my aim is at once to broaden it and to give it a radical epistemological twist. This refocusing will make it easier to run the ‘old’ social theory of intellectuals and the conventional grammar of ‘debunking’ ideology critique more closely together with new, anti-objectivist and anti-realist approaches in social epistemology, standpoint theory, and the ‘symmetrical’ sociology of science which have recommended a much greater sceptical caution about what representation, reflexivity, and critique may look like in an epistemologically disenchanted world. This book intends to articulate a critical and reflexive theory of spokespersonship for the social (which includes socialized things). Its most crucial aim is to argue that all things (social)—all invisible objects, tendencies, laws, patterns, causes, connections, collectivities, interests, motives—are in need of a spokesperson or an intermediary who renders them present, who lends them an existence which is made to ‘bear’, ‘weigh’, or ‘act’ upon other entitites in the world. Hence it is often a critical account of efforts towards reification, essentialism, and totalization which seek to erase the speaker from the speech, and invoke such patterns, positions, and contexts as existing in a state of ontological sovereignty, ‘out there’, in an autonomous world which precedes and predetermines all representation. The pertinent dilemma which then arises for the classical sociology of knowledge idea that all human thinking is situated, context-bound, and position-relevant, is that all these standpoints, situations or contexts have in turn to be spoken for, must be

Introduction xiii discursively represented and enacted in order to have a critical impact upon other arguments, other situations, other contexts. The fundamental axiom about the existential or positional determination of thought (or ‘situated knowledge’), i.e. the entire operation of relating human cognition and valuation to a determinate social-existential base (historical, economical, sociological, or psychological) appears to beg the question of (in this case, scientific) spokespersonship for these determinations, connections, and roots. Who indeed locates these locations, textualizes these contexts, positions these positions, points out these standpoints—and with what representative authority? The reflexive quandary which we shall repeatedly face in the following chapters is that the reduction to a situation or context, and the concomitant attribution of interests, motives, or other relevant explanatory properties, are already circularly presupposed by and enveloped in the theoretical descriptions which serve as the launching pad for the ‘unmasking’ critique. Differently put: the idea of sociological contextualization or positional explanation invariably runs up against the reflexive and constructivist difficulty of how to define the situation for ‘situated knowledges’. In order to go to the heart of such reflexive questions, Chapter 1 will review some recent approaches to the problem of spokespersonship which intriguingly juxtapose and analogize the logics of scientific and political representation. In both domains, my argument will support and develop a ‘differential’ theory which is critical of all ‘identitarian’ representations that seek to displace the speaker from the speech and to exile the performer from the performance. All realities come with their spokespersons. They do not stand alone and cannot speak for themselves. Re-inscribing the ‘place’ of the spokesperson therefore ties all realities back to the performative act without which they would not become real. Chapter 2 begins to illustrate this reflexive concern by arguing that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projected a romanticized self-description or ‘false shadow’ of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately expressed the missionary complex and Bohemian lifestyle of marginalized political intellectuals than referring to a ‘really existing’ working class. This mistaken identity play between spokespersons and their favourite sociological constituency, which was already alluded to in various historical left-wing and right-wing ‘farewells to the proletariat’, has been more systematically criticized in recent reassessments by e.g. Bahro, Gouldner, Gorz, and Bauman. Next to its psychological and sociological infrastructure, classical ‘proletarian’ standpoint theory has also attracted critical attention because of its suggestive but subterranean linkage between the condition of estrangement and claims for scientific objectivity—a connection which is reasserted in recent feminist and postcolonial standpoint epistemologies. The chapter concludes by offering some initial propositions about situated knowledge and the classical link

xiv Introduction between marginality and creativity which serve to introduce themes which will be more systematically revisited in the final chapter. The horseshoe model In a curious reversal of terms, the metonymic fallacy of Marxist intellectuals and their standpoint theory of knowledge and science was repeated and mirrored by intellectuals of the political right who offered to speak for the Nation. While the national community was perceived as being threatened by a ruling class of uprooted rationalists, who wielded abstract and absolute conceptions of truth and justice, true intelligence was taken to be solidly anchored in the concrete particularity of the national heritage. The Dreyfus Affair, which marked the birth hour of the universalistic intellectual as a selfconscious collective type, also witnessed the emergence of ‘anti-intellectual intellectuals’ such as Barrès and Maurras, who pleaded a new integral (and socialist) nationalism which was wedded to a perspectivistic conception of objectivity and morality. Another vocal group of ‘anti-intellectuals’, inspired by the anarcho-syndicalism of Sorel, Péguy and Valois, intriguingly vacillated between left and right, influencing Italian national syndicalist thinkers who contributed to the first fascism. In all such cases, marginal (anti-)intellectuals projected their own existential condition and missionary zeal upon the larger subject of the nation, advancing a standpoint logic which celebrated rootedness in a national tradition while fiercely resisting cross-national strangerhood, hybridity, and syncretism. Chapter 3 discusses these particularisms of the left and the right against the backdrop of an emphatically universalist theory of social representation: Durkheim’s positivist account of social facts as ‘things’. As a paradigm example of the original accumulation of scientific capital, Durkheimian sociology consistently dissimulated its knowledge-political and positioned character, presenting its project of imperial sociological conquest and reformist social reconstruction in terms of the neutral discovery of an autonomous object (society, the social realm). Durkheimian sociology was committed to a realist politics of definition which ignored the crucial performance of the definer, implying that somehow things ‘defined themselves’. The mechanism and problematics of this spokespersonship for social things was instructively exemplified by Durkheim’s principled but ambiguous demarcation between social science and socialism. This demarcation conveniently rationalized his strong ambivalence towards the socialist project, in simultaneously marking his distanciation from current socialist ideologies and channelling his ambition to appropriate and improve socialism on the strength of his own scientific sociology. His version of academic socialism, which stood historically close to the democratic revisionism of Jaurès and Bernstein, but was also continued in the neo-socialism of Marcel Déat and Hendrik de Man, revived the calling of the intellectual as social legislator by viewing him as

Introduction xv the privileged spokesperson for sociological laws, to which political legislation should of necessity be subordinate. Precariously balancing between intellectual detachment and political involvement, fellowtravellers such as Durkheim are ‘politicians without party’, whose will to intellectual power is continuous with their political will, even though their primary concern is to found a school rather than a state. If one were to draw a field map of the various intellectual-political positions in turn-of-the-century Republican France, its contours would hence be more nearly shaped like a horseshoe than like a traditional ‘winged’ continuum in which the democratic middle position is challenged by a radical left and a radical right. Durkheimian sociological reformism, and adjacent varieties of solidarism and revisionist social democracy, could then be positioned near the upper middle bend, while the Sorelian revolutionary left and the Barrèsian revolutionary right would occupy the extremes (which nearly touch each other) on the lower tips of the horseshoe. Remarkably, this intellectual-political spectrum is re-encountered in some of its main features in the post-war constellation of the Weimar Republic, where sociology occupied a comparable middling position. Being often closely identified with reformist and revisionist strands of socialism, it was similarly challenged on both flanks by more intransigent particularist theories which either adopted the standpoint of the revolutionary proletariat or that of the revolutionary nation. Once again, the extreme tips of the horseshoe closely counterposed a ‘progressive-revolutionary’ account of the missionary alienation of the proletariat to a ‘conservative-revolutionary’ account that derived a kindred mission from ideas about ‘proletarian’ nationhood and national culture in the grip of Uberfremdung.

Figure 1 The horseshoe model

xvi Introduction Chapter 4 will focus upon Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and of the intellectuals as offering a representative example of this intermediate reformist position, and hence as displaying remarkable positional affinities with Durkheimian thought. This discussion will also bring us closer to my central theme of alienation and its epistemological benefits and risks. Indeed, a core issue of Mannheim’s sociological legacy, as carried over from its Hegelian and Marxian inspiration, is defined by the intriguing relationship between alienation, or the epistemological promise of sociological strangerhood, and totalization, or the will to forge a dynamic cultural synthesis. It remains a key liability of Mannheim’s characterization of the intelligentsia that the two themes are hardly distinguished, even though some of the most poignant dilemmas in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge originate from their potential tension and contrariness. Chapter 4 follows the modulations of this double theme throughout Mannheim’s writings, focusing especially upon the crucial period between 1929, the year of publication of Ideologie und Utopie, and 1933, the beginning of Mannheim’s second period of exile. It specifically addresses some neglected connections and disputes with major representatives of the Weimar intellectual right (Freyer, the Tatkreis, and Schmitt) whose sociological theorizing came sufficiently close to Mannheim’s own propositions about the volitional basis and standpointrelatedness of thought to force him to modify his views, without giving up on the missionary calling of the intellectuals or abandoning the idea of a foundational, totalizing role for the sociology of knowledge. One of the most creative, systematic, and influential critics of Marxism and ideologues of ‘cultural’ socialism, Hendrik de Man (1885–1953) decisively ruined his reputation by entering upon collaboration with the Nazi occupants of his Belgian homeland in 1940. The inevitable question addressed in Chapter 5 is therefore: why did this high-ranking and imaginative socialist thinker (and others like him) verge so closely upon the grammar of intellectual fascism as to view political collaboration as a legitimate option? Part of my argument is that fascist ideology was capable of exercising such fascination not least on account of its genuine intellectual stature and content, and that it developed along a track which sufficiently paralleled that of socialist revisionism in order to open intellectual corridors leading from the one to the other. The chapter further elaborates the horseshoe model of the left-right spectrum, with the aim of distinguishing more clearly between rational-conceptual and intuitivesentimental levels of political affiliation and engagement, and in order to better accommodate the curious topology of political Bohemia, which acted as a historical switchboard for a strange merger of ideological opposites. This model facilitates a more differentiated description of the various trajectories taken by ‘crossover intellectuals’ such as Sorel, Michels, Mussolini, de Man, and Déat, who in different ways and circumstances bode farewell to the Proletariat in order to engage themselves as spokespersons for the (proletarian) Nation.

Introduction xvii The following chapter charts the relationship between Hendrik de Man and his young nephew Paul, subsequent founder of literary deconstructivism at Yale University, who maintained close ties with his uncle during the first years of the German occupation of Belgium, when writing his incriminating nationalist and anti-Jewish articles for the gleichgeschaltete press. It connects the comparative European silence about Hendrik de Man, the socialist ideologue who took socialism so seriously that he ended as a prophet of authoritarian statism, to the recent American noise about Paul de Man, the deconstructivist who never deconstructed his own past as a cultural nationalist. Through a thematic analysis of some of their wartime writings, I attempt to gauge the uncle’s influence upon the nephew, to locate their ideological differences, and to find explanations for their rapprochement to selected elements of national socialist ideology. One explanatory theme concerns the critique of Enlightenment rationalism which easily shaded into a sectoral form of anti-Semitism. But this critique also touches the heart of contemporary postmodernism which, in this respect, displays disturbing proximities to right-wing cultural criticism from the Interbellum. The chapter concludes by arguing that Benda’s classical reproach about the treason of the intellectuals has lost its transparency, and should be redefined in such a manner as to enable us to withdraw from reassuring conceptual dilemmas such as rationalism versus irrationalism, truth versus power, detachment versus involvement, or left versus right. Outsider knowledge Chapter 6 extends my discussion of standpoint logic by exploring aspects of the recent extrapolation and radicalization of positional epistemology in the work of feminist and postcolonial critics such as Hartsock, Harding, Haraway, Hill Collins, Hall, and Gilroy. As noted in Chapter 2, classical proletarian standpoint theory, and its Mannheimian extension to the freefloating intelligentsia, already manifested a strong drift towards a generalized metaphorics of strangerhood. Recent feminist and black cultural studies likewise converge upon this magnetic idea of outsidership and its promise of ‘double vision’, especially when it is a matter of accounting for multiple identities which are defined by the cross-cutting social markings of class, gender, and race. These (post)modern variants of standpoint theory, however, gravitate towards the same spokesperson problem which characterized their historical precursors, and which arises from the fact that standpoints or identities cannot simply be adopted as deep structures or natural kinds, but must be constructed, spoken for, or intellectually processed in order to count as credible standpoints in the first place. At the heart of all standpoint theorizing sits a persistent (but also fruitfully exploitable) ambiguity about ‘standpoint’ as a category of lived experience and of socially configured identity, or as an achieved, decisional category of identi-fication and position-taking. As a consequence, theories

xviii Introduction about situated knowledges are prone to suffer from a vicious circularity which results from their efforts to derive objectivity claims from ontological situations which must first be ‘defined as real’ before such claims can be contextually situated. The following chapter takes another critical look at the long-standing conjunction between intellectuality and strangerhood by focusing upon the recently popularized self-complimentary image of the intellectual as ‘exile’ or ‘nomad’, who is torn between identities and transgresses cultural and linguistic traditions. This new Deleuzian self-stylization is presently encountered across a broad spectrum of disciplines and schools, which include British-AmericanAustralian cultural studies, postcolonial criticism, postmodernist feminism, the new cultural geography, the ethnography of science and technology, and the new sociologies of mobility and strangerhood. The chapter offers a critical appraisal of the intellectualist presumptions lurking behind such selfidentifications, which often feed a form of ‘nomadic narcissism’, in so far as intellectuals are easily led to transmute Bohemian self-fascination and selfcomplaint into political apology and self-aggrandizement. This new ‘narcissism of the intellectuals’ is easily complicitous with new forms of political correctness, as soon as the metaphorics of movement facilitate identification with ‘real-life’ migrants or refugees, breeding vanguard illusions which are structurally comparable with those which are encountered in more traditional modernist standpoint arguments. In this way, the narrative of nomadism once again succumbs to the universal danger that resides in the very logic of speaking for others: which is to disregard the inevitable hiatus between representer and represented, or in other words, to de-emphasize the existential strangeness which separates the spokespersons from the subjects or objects they speak for. My concluding chapter collects the various threads which have been unrolled in the previous chapters in offering a more systematic appraisal of the promises and liabilities of positional thinking and the time-honoured linkage between estrangement and intellectual innovation. It attempts to weigh the Sorelian adage that ‘one must be outside in order to see properly’ against the epistemological scepticism which necessarily arises from the circular play of definition which is always involved in performances of identity—which includes the performance (or the pose) of marginality, outsidership, and nomadism. It argues that objectivity, or its presumed result—new thinking that breaks the rules—does not so much issue from methodical rule-following and value-freedom as from a social distribution of doubt and the specific mixture of involvement and detachment which is typically concentrated in the precarious condition of strangerhood. Revisiting the primal scene of differentiation of the intellectual life which is staged in the Socratic dialogues, will enable me to show that its still reluctant estrangement from political and public life defines pragmatic rather than transcendental conditions for intellectual autonomy and critical innovation—conditions which are more sharply articulated by the

Introduction xix ‘doubtful situation’ which is inhabited by the Cartesian cogito. I continue to unfold this phenomenology of distanciation in terms of further ‘orders of estrangement’, which include the ‘Bohemian’ duplication of the logic of distanciation by ‘anti-intellectual’ intellectuals who reverse the critical stranger’s attitude upon a professionalized and industrialized academic establishment. The tradition of Socratic truth-telling which links Zola to Sartre, Havel, and Said consistently connects the notion of intellectual outsidership to the high calling of ‘speaking the truth to power’. But a social epistemology of strangerhood will refuse to encapsulate the intellectual function in the traditional dualisms of truth versus power, might versus right, or knowledge versus interest. The intellectual interest represents a different power which adds its critical voice to all the others (political, economic, cultural) in a liberal balance of powers which remains intrinsically contested and unstable. Rather than speaking the truth to power, intellectuals mobilize the performative force of a specifically estranged, ‘undecided’ and ‘unhastened’ perspective in order to counterbalance other powers that speak a different (‘faster’) truth. Strangerhood can also be conceived as a sociological reprise of the intriguing notion of the dialectical ‘third’, which creatively escapes from the deadlock and double bind of a contextually entrenched binary or dualism, opening up a ‘third way’ or a ‘third space’ which is inhabited by a ‘laughing third’ who gets away with the spoils of the rivalling first and second positions. The third position of the ‘outsider within’ offers a special lucidity and may open up unexpected vistas through its double distanciation from established and outsiders in a particular historical locale. Its perennial seduction, of course, is to think of itself as overarching, all-encompassing, constitutive, out-of-space. Despite its ‘local’ transcendence, however, the third position (like the first and the second ones) embodies a material interest and a new spatial perspective which nurtures its own blind spot; which explains why its situationally-bounded objectivity is not convertible into a disinterested grasp of the whole. A credible defence of positional epistemology and of situated knowledge must therefore always include a self-reflexive account of intellectual spokespersonship and of the ambiguous privilege of the ‘laughing third’. On this caution, however, one might still venture a small praise of marginality and a modest politics of strangerhood. A democracy of differences may be able to routinize innovation, but it cannot legislate or domesticate the truly exceptional. Nevertheless, it is feasible to work for a greater tolerance of the strange by extending and complexifying the social distribution of doubt. If creative doubt cannot be methodologized, objectivity is not a matter of finding the zero point of disinterested contemplation but of ‘accumulating different eyes’ (Nietzsche 1996:98), that is, of multiplying various knowledge interests by extending the orders of estrangement.

1

Speaking the spokesperson

Representation: scientific and political Representation is ‘presenting’ that which is not immediately at hand, which is absent, and hence needs to be introduced into the present situation, to be made (con)textually visible and available. What is absent must be imagined, evoked, designated, signified, or performed; what is unable to speak for itself must be spoken for and given voice. Carl Schmitt has usefully defined representation as that activity through which an invisible being is supposed to be absent and yet is simultaneously made present; it is the making present of the absent by an authorized representer (1928:209– 10, 282ff).1 As such, representational work is a vitally constitutive element of all cultural life, since collectivities cannot subsist and expand other than by mobilizing absent realities, events or processes that cannot be immediately grasped, in networks of interaction that stretch into distant reaches of time and space. Representation, in Latour’s suggestive characterization, is ‘acting at a distance’; in-formation compromises between presence and absence by giving us the inscripted or symbolic form of something without having the thing itself (Latour 1987:219ff; 1988b: 159ff). Increasingly, the communication-dependent cultures of our reflexive modernity depend on such ‘time-space distanciation’, on networks that continually make available absent structures and relations in local contexts of face-to-face interaction (Giddens 1990). Everything must be represented and imported in the actual microworld which falls outside the horizon of vision and immediate control. This includes knowledge of people and things, of facts, causes, and relations, of values and ideas, of ancestors and distant places, of social structures and institutions, which may be spoken for by (other) people, but may also be captured or symbolized by (other) things: monuments and shrines, photographs and videos, flags and other insignia, texts and other inscriptions. Representation hence always requires an intermediary: a spokesperson, an act or performance, an image, a gesture, a description. Spokespersons are everywhere, and potentially speak in the name of 1

2 The Intellectual as Stranger everything: the people, the working masses, the Ministry of Finance, Shell Cie., the hole in the ozone layer, or the seals in the Wadden Sea. A striking characteristic of the concept is therefore the sheer expanse and fuzziness of its semantic field. At first sight, it appears as if everything can be represented by everything else. Three chairs in a row ‘makes’ a train. The hobby-horse ‘stands for’ the real animal. A sample or case study refers to a larger whole. A portrait or photograph ‘captures’ the sitter or subject. The attorney speaks for his client, the sales manager for his firm and its products, the ambassador for his queen and country, the party for its electorate (and the leader for his party), the scientist for his university, his discipline, and his discoveries. A story ‘is about’ something. A healthy seal ‘is equal to’ an ecologically improved environment. A circle may stand for the sun, a coin, a city on the map. Such is the basic indeterminacy of representation: ‘a represents b’ (a=b) does not imply any definite relationship between them (Ankersmit 1994:103–5; 1996:xiv). Since representation introduces or performs what is not immediately at hand, people or things (or facts or relations) may be invoked that do not ‘really exist’, that are only believed to exist, that exist ‘only’ in the imagination. From the very beginning, representational practices are haunted by the existential question: to be or not to be? ‘A represents b’ does not commit us to the actual existence of what is represented, nor even to its existence being possible (Ankersmit 1994:103). For Hobbes, in a first famous statement of the problem of political representation, persons may represent both other persons and things, ‘whether Truly or by Fiction’; and there are but few things which cannot be fictionally represented (1968:217–19). Representation is ‘how the thing is made present, and who considers it so’ (Pitkin 1972:10). Immediately beyond the readily demonstrable and point-at-able, representation becomes a matter of belief and credit and hence of the authority and credibility of the representer. Modern ‘representational’ societies, which routinely maintain extensive networks of time-space distanciation, therefore crucially rely on mechanisms of trust and belief (in symbolic tokens such as money, in systems of technical accomplishment, and in professional expertise) which are of course immediately related to variable absences in time and space (Giddens 1990:26ff). This also implies that all representative acts are crucially implicated in struggles over trustworthiness and legitimacy. At the heart of representation lurks the permanent danger of usurpation: the risk that spokespersons may take the place and usurp the power of the subjects and objects which they represent. Put more sharply: spokespersons by definition speak in the name of, and hence in the place of others, who must first be reduced to (or seduced into) silence before they can effectively be spoken for (Bourdieu 1990b:186; 1991:209; Callon 1986:214–16). In a paradigmatic critique of the ‘priestly modesty’ of the spokesperson, who frontstages a commanding reality while making himself absent, Nietzsche

Speaking the spokesperson 3 satirized Wagner’s gift of turning himself into an oracle, a mouthpiece of the Ansich of things, ‘a telephone of the beyond’, a ventriloquist of God (1996:83). Inherent in the nature of representation is therefore an aboriginal risk of alienation, which derives from the false modesty of the spokesperson who says: ‘I am nothing, but the reality for which I speak is an all-constituting totality.’ The spokesperson conveniently hides behind his/her ‘thing’, object, or constituency: the scientist may hide behind objective reality or a unique discovery, the priest behind an all-powerful demon or God, the politician behind the sovereign people (the proletariat, the nation, public opinion, etc.). Such is the paradox of priestly humility: I am only a representative of God or the People, of Reason Itself or the Facts of the Matter; but if what I represent is everything, I am Everything by proxy (Bourdieu 1991:211). Given my current interest in the role of intellectuals in and out of politics, I shall not pursue further generalization about the cultural symbolic here, but focus instead on some important continuities and differences between two regimes of representation which have long been axiomatically divorced and polarized: science and politics. The very insertion of an encompassing term such as representation already suggests that the split between the act of representing the people or the citizenry and the act of representing scientific facts or natural objects might be less wide than entrenched scientific and political vocabularies are willing to acknowledge (Callon 1986; Latour 1993). Now that political and power metaphors have once again infiltrated to explain the inner workings of science, sharp essentialist or philosophical demarcations are giving way before weaker boundaries, relativist mixtures and graded continua. Departing from the other pole, the conceptual gap is narrowed by an increasing awareness of the representational or symbolic character of politics, which is viewed as a ‘field of ideological production’, as the site of struggles for symbolic power, for the legitimate representation of the social world (cf. Bourdieu 1991). Do natural or social facts speak for themselves, or must they be spoken for by a spokesperson, by a professional elite of fact gatherers? Can democratic citizens speak for themselves, or must they be represented by an elite of political professionals? Which analogies or even homologies are discernible between the epistemological sovereignty of the facts and the political sovereignty of the people? What, in both cases, are the conditions for legitimate spokespersonship? In order to get a firmer grip on such questions, let me briefly fore-ground three recent theoretical contributions which, although sharply different in their intellectual styles, disciplinary backgrounds, and substantive arguments, have turned this relationship between scientific and political spokespersonship into a centrepiece of their analysis: those of the Dutch philosopher of historiography and aesthetics Frank Ankersmit, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the French ‘ethnographer of science’ Bruno Latour. All three reject any sharp dichotomy between science and politics,

4 The Intellectual as Stranger and suggestively argue for an integrated comparative treatment of the two regimes of representation. All three also utilize the concept of representation as a way of escaping ‘sideways’ from the venerable polarity between subjectivism and objectivism. In various different ways, they also contribute to a shift from a ‘mimetic’ or ‘reflective’ view of representation towards a performative conception, which is also traceable in other strands of critical thought (cf. Butler 1990, 1997; Hacking 1983; Hall 1997; Seidman 1997; Soja 1996). Ankersmit mobilizes an aesthetic metaphor in order to depict the logic of representation in both history writing and politics as a form of ‘substitution’ or ‘replacement’, in order to emphasize the ontological distance or hiatus between representers and represented over against all conceptions of resemblance, identity, or similarity. Bourdieu draws science and politics together in a generalized sociology of agonistic fields, where the stakes of the symbolic struggle for authoritative speech are invariably dual and interest-bound, without relinquishing the idea of the structural autonomy of science and politics as separate domains of action. Latour’s theory of ‘translation’ as ‘acting at a distance’ more decisively levels the traditional distinction between the representation of people and things, culture and nature, citizens and facts; but his radical semiotic ‘symmetrism’ and agnostic descriptivism also beg the question of the boundaries between the two domains and aggravate the risk of a monistic or identitarian form of representation which both Ankersmit and Bourdieu critically argue against. Representation as substitution In a number of intriguing recent publications, Ankersmit has focused on a specifically ‘aesthetic’ conception of representation in order simultaneously to improve our understanding of the craft of the historian and to clarify the relationship between representers and represented in the game of politics (Ankersmit 1994; 1996; 1997). In both domains, a ‘mimetic’ conception which establishes a relationship of correspondence or identity between representer and represented is rejected, and traditional realist views of historical and political reality are bracketed and problematized. Scientific (historiographic)2 reality does not so much emerge as a result of the mirrorlike representation of an independent, pre-given object of inquiry, but only in and through the process of representation itself. Analogously, political power is not the effect of a direct reflection of the interests and preferences of the people or the electorate, but is only realized in and through the act of representation. Neither the reality of the past nor the reality of the polity are exclusively produced at the site of the represented or that of the representer, through the actions of the object or those of the subject; both emerge somewhere in between, in the open space and the mutual interaction between the traditional polarities of epistemology and political theory.

Speaking the spokesperson 5 The historical past is not capable of enforcing a decision with regard to its definitive or exhaustive meaning; it invariably needs to be constructed or manufactured through narrative interpretation: ‘the past has no face and the masks made by historians are all we have’ (Ankersmit 1994:100). Instead of mirroring it, the historical narrative enjoys a distinct autonomy vis-à-vis the facticity of the past, even a peculiar intransparency or opacity with regard to what it narrates. In Ankersmit’s view, this representational independence finds nearest expression in the vocabulary of modern aesthetics, and more particularly in the theory of substitution which is advanced by philosophers such as Gombrich and Dan to. The origin of artistic representation, indeed, is not to imitate reality but to put something else in its place; all image making is rooted in the creation of substitutes.3 The historical text does not purport to resemble the reality of the past but performs as a substitute for it; it has an essentially metaphorical character (cf. 1996:254ff). Since Gombrich’s theory of substitution still suffers from a residue of naturalism and risks slipping back into the epistemological trope of resemblance, Ankersmit ultimately prefers Danto’s version of the theory, for its more explicit statement that a representation can never be exchanged for what it represents, but always in some way duplicates its object. Artistic representation does not reflect reality but ‘puts it at a distance’. Naming the invisible always implies that reality is represented ‘in a certain disguise’ (1994:110). Representation places us in opposition to reality, and only through this metaphorical opposition are we capable of object-ifying it (Ankersmit 1994:110–13; 1996:45–8; cf. Sloterdijk 1983:652ff). It is the same conception of substitution and autonomy which Ankersmit draws upon in his approach to the problem of political representation, where he proposes to radicalize Schiller’s idea of the ‘aesthetic State’ (1996:21ff; cf. Chytry 1989). Traditionally, in the debate over political representation, two main viewpoints confront each other. There is once again first a mimetic theory which claims that the representative body must be a perfect replica, a flawless image and the most accurate reflection of the people represented, and which hence idealizes the identity between representer and represented as the most essential form of political representation. It is confronted by the ‘aesthetic’ theory, which once again emphasizes difference: ‘the absence of identity of the representative and the person represented, is as unavoidable in political representation as the unavoidable difference between a painted portrait and the person portrayed’ (1996:28, 43–5; cf. Pitkin 1972:60ff, 86). Classical epistemology and classical political theory accordingly share a parallel structure. The ideal of reflection or resemblance which since Descartes has modelled epistemological representation finds its equivalent in the persistent attempt to ground political philosophy as a form of naturalist social physics, and hence to conceive of political representation as a revelation of what already essentially and unchangeably resides in the nature of man and society (1996:30–4, 45–50).

6 The Intellectual as Stranger However, both in the realm of thought and in that of action, the foundations of the mimetic theory have been undermined. It is not the identity but the difference and opposition between representer and represented which provides the source of political will formation. In creating an opening between both, it furnishes both with a separate space for movement. As in scientific representation, political reality cannot do without the act of representative ‘distancing’ and opposition which simultaneously brings it into existence. Political power is not the property of one of the parties to the exclusion of the other, but arises in the force field between elector and elected, in the ‘hollow’ or ‘lee’ between electorate and representative body. Rather than being a faute de mieux for direct democracy, representation is the indispensable and only constitutional procedure for generating political power. The idea of popular sovereignty must be rejected, since it conflicts with the nature of representative democracy itself. The state must create sufficient distance from society in order to be able to act in an effective manner. On the other hand, it is only the ‘aesthetic’ demarcation of the origins and place of political power which enables citizens to properly exercise their citizenship rights (Ankersmit 1996:xv–xvi, 45–50, 56, 104ff). In the present context, I cannot do justice to the true depth and subtlety of Ankersmit’s defence of the essentially aesthetic, postmodern or ‘Romantic’ nature of democracy; nor can I address what I judge to be major flaws in his argument, such as a stylized agnosticism and a recurrent backtracking towards quasi-essentialist vocabulary (cf. Pels 1993:158–60). Let me merely retain the crucial point about the ‘essential brokenness’ of both cognitive and political reality, the ‘unbridgeable aesthetic gap’ which separates what is represented from its representation (1996:18), and the critical contrast which emerges between a theory of mimesis or identity and a theory of substitution, distance, and difference.4 One infirmity of Ankersmit’s aesthetics of representation at least seems to be that his picture of the social-political effects of this representative difference is painted too rosily and optimistically, and insufficiently acknowledges what Michels already described as the ‘cruel antinomy’ of all forms of representation in social organizations (Michels 1992:147; cf. 1962:317–18). The abstract postulates of substitution and autonomy are not bolstered by a more ‘realistic’ sociological inquiry into the practical interests of the political or scientific professionals who actually do the representational work. In this regard, Ankersmit’s case for an aesthetic politics and historiography ‘beyond fact and value’, by radically distancing itself from traditional foundationalist axiology and empiricist social-political science, promotes a disdain for the world of facts which leads him to underestimate the dark side (and thus the ‘duality’) of both intellectual and political representation. This darker side has traditionally been acknowledged by a more ‘realistic’ and critical sociology of knowledge and intellectuals.

Speaking the spokesperson 7 The absent spokesperson The work of Pierre Bourdieu may usefully ‘represent’ this broader critical sociology, as it is likewise centrally preoccupied with the social logic of representation and delegation, and hence with the performance of authorized speech and the position of the spokesperson. His ‘levelling’ conception of the social space frames both the field of science and that of politics as an arena of struggle for field-specific forms of legitimacy or authorized spokespersonship, where the stakes of competition possess an intrinsic duality, inseparably ‘technical’ and ‘interest-bound’, intellectual and strategic, scientific and political struggles are simultaneously oriented (although in different ways) towards the affirmation of representational competence and the acquisition of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1981; 1997; 1999). Balancing and complementing this decidedly ‘political’ conception of scientific competence-and-authority is an ‘intellectual’ conception of the political game which emphasizes its capacity to conserve or transform the social world through the conservation or transformation of the symbolic vision of the social world and its principles of division or classification. Political capital is described as a form of symbolic credit which is founded on belief and recognition and exists only through representation. Politics hence ‘takes the form of a struggle over the specifically symbolic power of making people see and believe, of predicting and prescribing, of making known and recognized, which is at the same time a struggle for power over the “public powers”’ (Bourdieu 1991:127, 172, 181, 192–3, 236). With regard to both fields (if I may provisionally bracket their vital differences),5 Bourdieu hence accentuates the ‘double game’ played by the professionals of representation, who are simultaneously oriented towards their constituency (social reality, the citizenry) and their professional rivals (fellow scientists and politicians). In science, the selection of research areas, problematics, and methods is concurrently determined by criteria of content and context, by intellectual ‘disinterest’ and social interests; scientists necessarily rival for intrinsically two-fold stakes which force them simultaneously to observe the world ‘out there’ and to keep a keen eye on the exploits of their scientific competitors. In this sense, whatever (social) scientists may say about reality is always partly determined by their monitoring orientation towards their rivals. In politics, the competition between the professionals similarly overdetermines their representational relation with the world. Since the production of politically effective and legitimate forms of perception and expression remains a professional monopoly, and the majority of citizens necessarily find themselves dispossessed of this political capital, the relationship which the politicians maintain with their clients (the voters) is always mediated by their relation with their competitors (1991:246–7). Even when they adopt positions that are most in conformity with the interests of the represented, they simultaneously pursue, without necessarily admitting it, the satisfaction of

8 The Intellectual as Stranger their own interests, as these are assigned to them by the structure of positions and oppositions in the field (1991:182–3). In accentuating the inevitable duality of representational practices, Bourdieu opposes the same identity theory which served as a critical foil for Ankersmit’s aesthetic model, while he simultaneously ‘darkens’ the picture by redescribing representational difference as an inherent conflict of interest between professional spokespersons and laypersons. Representational difference there must be, but this difference is equally productive as it is dangerous: representation and usurpation make up two sides of the same political coin. Spokespersons who represent the interests of the group may always replace the group, in order to appropriate not only its voice but also its power. In ‘Delegation and Political Fetishism’, Bourdieu specifically discusses the intricate circular transmission of legitimacy and power from the group to its representer, in the course of which the group apparently creates the person who speaks in its place and in its name, whereas in reality it is just as true to say that it is the spokesperson who creates the group. The signifier expresses and represents the signified, but also brings it into existence, displays it, and thereby mobilizes its power. Political fetishism precisely means that this original circle of representation has been concealed. Echoing Michels, Bourdieu points to the ‘original antinomy’ which is inherent in the political sphere, and which stems from the fact that individuals cannot constitute themselves as a ‘vocal’ group, and hence as a political difference that makes a difference, unless they dispossess themselves in favour of a spokesperson; one must always risk political alienation in order to escape political alienation (1991:204). The constitutive danger is that the delegate substitutes himself for the group and blackboxes this process by means of a pose of representative identity. What Bourdieu calls the ‘mystery of ministry’ precisely issues from this self-consecration of the delegate, who stands in a metonymic relation to the group, but who usurps its totality in an act of magic which transforms the collectivity into a single person. As with Ankersmit, Hobbes’ Leviathan is cited as one of the clearest and most concise formulations of this theory of Unitarian political representation (Bourdieu 1991:208–9). The self-identification of the spokesperson with the group is necessarily modest and self-effacing. In Bourdieu’s view, a kind of structural mauvaise foi attaches to the delegate who, in order to usurp the authority of the group, must abolish himself in the group, must reduce himself to that which authorizes him (1991:209–10). The mystery of ministry only works if the minister makes his confiscation invisible, asserting that he is nothing but an ordinary minister and merely announces and transmits the reality of the group. Repeating the Nietzschean critique of philosophical asceticism and priestly hypocrisy cited above, Bourdieu points to the peculiar ventriloquism of the ‘oracle effect’, according to which the priestly spokesperson, while giving voice to and performatively creating the entity

Speaking the spokesperson 9 (God, the People) in whose name he speaks, abolishes himself completely in its favour (1991:210–11). Such self-authorization enables the oracular spokesperson to exercise a legitimate form of symbolic violence over each of the members of the group. Political alienation therefore results from the mystification of the representational double play as single play, and from the misrecognition of the symbolic violence which is perpetrated through this identitarian fiction. The enactment of identity or of a mirror-like representation of interests both occludes, and through this very occultation sanctions and solidifies, the practice of representational difference. In wishing to reveal this mimetic distortion, which disguises the performative activity of ‘absent spokespersons’ who miraculously let the class, the nation, social things, or scientific facts speak for themselves, Bourdieu hence reanimates a classical topos and concern of the critical theory of reification.6 It is quite possible that the preceding account has slightly stretched the terms of the Bourdieuan analogy between scientific and political representation. If I were to put this more polemically, Bourdieu does not seem prepared to radically ‘symmetrize’ the issue of representation in science and politics and to fully extend the analogy both ways, and hence resists a rigorous application of the political logic of performativity to science itself (and more particularly, to his own critical science of society) (cf. Pels 1999b; 2000). His relational-realist and lingering holistic conception of the social universe prevents him from seeing that the problem of spokespersonship is much more intrinsic to social theory than initially calculated; which induces a systematic underestimation of the performative impact of (his own) sociological descriptions and explanations. Despite scattered professions to the contrary, Bourdieu acts as if the sociologist is ultimately capable of withdrawing from the arena of universal objectivation and disqualification, of crossed lucidity and blindness, in which everyone is a good sociologist of the opponent’s position but an apologist for his own, in order to encompass the game ‘in itself in its objective structural totality (Bourdieu 1981:283; 1990b:181, 184, 195; 1997:38; 1999:334; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:259–60). The sociologist is somehow credited with the privilege to extract himself from the logic of authoritative definition, which intriguingly brings into existence what it describes, and to stand aloof from the daily contest over ‘the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups’ (1991:221). Constructivism is primarily (and restrictively) adopted for the level of agents’ own representations of the world, which are taken to performatively contribute to its very construction; but these representations are in turn seen as dictated and defined by an objective positional structure (which is of course dictated and defined by the sociologist himself).

10 The Intellectual as Stranger We need to turn to Latour and Callon and their theory of ‘translation’ in order to find a more radical generalization of the logic of performative spokespersonship to science and sociology itself. While encouraging a more symmetrical treatment of scientific and political representation, which not merely includes an account of the performance of natural facts but also describes how sociology performs the social (cf. Callon and Latour 1981; Callon 1986; Latour 1986), their approach also recommends an a-critical or agnostic distanciation from the debunking or disqualifying tendency of all critical social theory—including Bourdieu’s general theory of symbolic violence, which is dismissed as another form of intellectualist imposition upon the subtle self-consciousness of ordinary actors. Not wishing to exceptionalize themselves from or epistemologically rise above the practices of the actors studied (who are described as duplicitous, since they opportunistically mix realism and constructivism), Latour and Callon deliberately abandon the critical contrast between an identitarian or mimetic and a differential or performative conception of representation (of people and things) which is still heralded by Ankersmit and Bourdieu. From my perspective, therefore, they in turn fail to mount a successful challenge to both natural and social reification, and give in too much to the magic of identification which enables the ‘absent spokesperson’ to speak for society or nature as if these entities spoke for themselves. Rather than offering a critical target for the theory of translation, reification, and the search for representative identity, appear—even though by proxy—as stated and legitimate objectives for it (Pels 1995, 1996). It seems useful to inspect this identitarian drift a bit more closely, in order to measure how a radically performative description of social and natural spokespersonship, which is transmitted by Latourian actor-network theory, and a critical theory of identification, which is supported by Bourdieuan sociology, may mutually reinvigorate rather than excommunicate each other. The duplicity of the moderns Latour and Woolgar’s classic Laboratory Life already irreverently describes scientific work as a construction process in which scientific rationalities and strategic, political calculations intrinsically co-operate in order to render scientific facts (‘Nature’) as objectively hard and thing-like as possible: there is no separation between the politics of science and its truth, and the objective of science is to erase all traces of this construction work in order to render the spokesperson invisible (Latour and Woolgar 1986). Translation, more generally, is a procedure which establishes a maximum of identity between spokespersons and their things or facts; it comprises ‘all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force take, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force’ (Callon and Latour 1981:279). The objective is first to render the spokespersons

Speaking the spokesperson 11 indispensable, in order subsequently to let them coincide with their actants or allies (be they things or people), so that they speak as one man and in a single voice: ‘In order to grow we must enrol other wills by translating what they want and by reifying this translation in such a way that none of them can desire anything else any longer’ (Callon 1986:223; Callon and Latour 1981:296). This identity form is explicitly encountered in Callon and Latour’s modelling of the Leviathan as the grand social Black Box, inside which all individual acts of will have been subsumed under the absolute knowledge power of a single spokesman (and which hence tendentially underwrites Hobbes’ own authoritarian ideal of representation).7 But it can equally be recognized in their symmetrical analyses of the stabilization of subjectively modalized statements into the objective ‘voice of Nature’ as a result of the knowledge-political construction work of scientists in the laboratory—as illustrated by Latour’s various accounts of Pasteur’s spokespersonship for the microbes, or by Callon’s analysis of scientific spokespersonship for the scallops of St Brieuc Bay (cf. Callon 1986; Latour 1983; 1988; 1992; 1999a).8 This work of descriptively ‘following the actors’ in order to see where they take us, is ruled by a consistent semiotic motive to ‘replace the analyst’s prejudiced and limited vocabulary by the actor’s activity at world making’ (Latour 1992:131). In the case of Pasteur, to follow his efforts to redefine and incorporate others’ interests, of staging crucial experiments, of changing the scale of micro and macro, and of mixing science and politics and confusing content with context, is also to see the futility of a critical approach which seeks out unconscious ideologies, hidden interests, or devious motives which are apparent only to the analyst. We ‘merely’ have to describe what Pasteur actually did in his laboratory as a scientist, which was to add to all the forces that composed contemporary French society a new force for which he stepped forward as the only credible spokesman: If you reveal microbes as essential actors in all social relations, then you need to make room for them, and for the people who show them and can eliminate them. Indeed, the more you want to get rid of the microbes, the more room you should grant Pasteurians. This is not false consciousness, this is not looking for biased world views, this is just what the Pasteurians did and the way they were seen by all the other actors of the time. (Latour 1983:157) Agreeing with Woolgar (1981) about the impossibility of traditional sociological imputations of putatively ‘hidden’ interests, Latour also remarks that, although there is no objective or independent way of knowing how society looks, this ‘does not stop anyone from convincing others of what their interests are and what they ought to want and be. He

12 The Intellectual as Stranger who is able to translate others’ interests into his language carries the day’. In this universal bidding, the sciences (including sociology) are ‘one of the most convincing tools to persuade others of who they are and what they should want’. If we care to follow through how the sciences are used to translate interests and transform society, we begin to see that social interests are a consequence, not an independent cause of the (in this case, Pasteur’s) work of translation. Looking at Pasteur’s ‘interest work’ in this way also removes the old controversy about realism versus constructivism, since Pasteur himself practically resolves it by self-consciously juxtaposing, crossing and shuttling between these seemingly incompatible philosophies of science. Pasteur’s experiments invariably create two planes: a constructivist one in which the narrator or spokesperson is active, and a realist or reificatory one in which the action is delegated to another, non-human character. Once shifted out, the stage manager withdraws from the scene and the entity (the microbe, the yeast) becomes automatic and autonomous. There is a reversal of authorship and authority: ‘Pasteur acts so that the yeast acts alone’; he ‘authorizes the yeast to authorize him to speak in its name’. Pasteur creates a scene in which he does not have to create anything. And he is not plagued by false consciousness, being forced to wipe out the traces of his own translation work as he goes along, because ‘he explicitly stages these two contradictory requirements’ (Latour 1992:141–4; 1999a:113ff). Once again we must not impose our own critical categories but merely deploy those of the actor himself, who (in Latour’s own translation of the latter’s practices) incessantly reifies and objectifies his entities to render himself absent, while remaining fully aware of the construction work which is required in order to perform and re-present them. We must learn to live with (and listen to) two contradictory voices speaking at once (Latour 1987:13). This duplicity of the actor (which must not be criticized but respectfully described and reflexively duplicated for science studies itself) is targeted in more general terms in Latour’s recent work on the ‘Modern Constitution’. In his view, this Constitution has sealed a fateful historical separation between the scientific representation of things through the medium of experimental science and laboratory practices and the political representation of citizens through the medium of the social or political contract (Latour 1993). The effective beginning of this diverging evolution may be situated in the philosophical dispute between Hobbes, the inventor of the political Leviathan, and Boyle, the inventor of the laboratory and of experimental natural-scientific facts. I cannot analyse the paradoxical and con testable alignment of this Constitution’s various ‘guarantees’ in any detail here (cf. Pels 1995; 1996).9 Let me merely recall that its unique efficacy is to perfectly occlude the intriguing double play of the moderns, who incessantly recombine realism and constructivism, purification and hybridization, reification and translation. The official, dichotomous

Speaking the spokesperson 13 structure of the Modern Constitution induces a misrecognition of what it secretly permits and promotes: the mixing together of ever greater masses of humans and non-humans. As soon as we learn to see both sides of this process—both purification and hybridization and their necessary coalition—we cease to be modern; we suddenly realize that we have ‘never really been modern’ at all. This is not identical to the revelation of a plot, or the uncovering of a form of false consciousness. It is not the concealment of translation processes behind purification rituals which boosts the proliferation of the hybrids, because this translation work remains somehow apparent to the moderns themselves—who are merely guilty of never considering the work of purification and translation together. Ideology critique of the Modern Constitution is superfluous and misplaced. We simply have to ratify and acknowledge what we have been doing all along (1993:40–8, 144). Once again we notice that, translated into our own terms, Latour c.s. always consider the staging of identity between the spokesperson and his/ her ‘thing’ (reification) and the staging of difference (performativity) together in such a way that both epistem/ontologies are projected into the ‘actual practice’ of the actors/scientists. These accordingly ‘speak with a forked tongue’ because they flexibly calculate and shuttle between reification and construction. As inside traders, they are always privy to at least half of the game (they know it, and they know it not).10 These two representational styles, being simultaneous, complicitous, and more or less articulate, do not need to be brought in a critical relationship with each other. For the non-critical observer, it is simply what we all do and have always done in the past, so that there is nothing for an outside analyst to improve upon: (s)he merely has to ensure that this duplicitous logic is also copied on the metalevel of the sociology of knowledge and science studies. This approach invites a number of empirical and normative difficulties which tend to unhinge this intricate account. One is that the a-critical stance itself circularly depends upon a description of modernist representational practices which is in many cases empirically con testable. It is textually risky, for example, to project a strong form of constructivism into the ‘actual practices’ of Pasteur—who always wrote Science with a capital ‘S’, and in his writings on the philosophy of science proved himself to be a militant objectivist and realist (cf. Pasteur 1922 II:47, 128, 487ff; VII: 326ff).11 The bold reading of Hobbes and Boyle as realists and as constructivists avant la lettre, invites a similar conundrum. Hobbes’ scientific politics reifies the Leviathan in much the same way as Boyle’s experimental philosophy reifies the matters of fact. Both political and natural facts are presented as mirrors of Nature and reveal a similar foundationalist pattern of epistemic closure. It is quite an imposition to suggest that Hobbes complicitously ‘invents’ the artificial creation of society and the state (at least in a strong actionist or performative sense), or that Boyle ‘invents’ the artificial creation of laboratory-made matters of

14 The Intellectual as Stranger fact. It is rather Latour who invents that the founders of the Modern Constitution ‘invent’ social and natural constructivism for him. The upshot of this anachronistic projection, and my second difficulty, is that there is no room for normative improvement upon the strategic and opportunistic plying back and forth between reification (speaking for facts in such a way that they speak for themselves) and translation (acknowledging performativity, or the politics of knowledge). This to-andfro is instead taken to define our universal (and happy) epistemic condition. From my own perspective, however, this particular duplicity, by halfcondoning and half-underwriting the practice of reification, gives away too much to the identitarian logic which enables the scenographer to withdraw from the scene and to become an oracle for his own inventions. Latour actively and reflexively ‘proves’ this point through repeated strategic withdrawals which enable his actants (Hobbes, Boyle, Pasteur and the other moderns, the hybrids which they enthusiastically but clandestinely propagate) to come forward and speak in their own voice. Claiming identity with them, and wiping out his own performative tracks, Latour operates as the exemplary ‘absent spokesperson’ for the ‘actual practices’ of his subjects, who does not critically oppose his own alternative interpretation of what they do to their self-interpretations, but ‘shifts it out’ towards their practices in order subsequently to download it to his own acritical description of them. The classical ideology-critical discrepancy between self-consciousness and observed practice, or between ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ (which ultimately polarizes what you yourself say you are doing and what I, the critical observer, say you are ‘in fact’ doing), is projected into reality (or reified) to take the shape of a really existing (dialectical?) paradox. Rather than directly contradicting the moderns, Latour prefers to enclose them in a performative contradiction, to let them speak with a forked tongue.12 On the one hand, the identity between the spokesperson and his ‘thing’ is the universal and stated goal of all translation/representation. On the other, translation inevitably issues in treason, because there are no faithful representatives, and spokespersons always speak in the place of silent (silenced) others, having appropriated their voice, and speaking simultaneously for themselves. The point of this paradox, for Latour, is to reveal the duplicitous competence of all actors as ‘construetivist realists’, including scientists and observers of these scientists, and thereby to undermine the modernist practice of critical unmasking (nothing is concealed). From my own perspective, however, identification and reification easily function as forms of symbolic violence which precisely enable the actor (the scientist, the metascientist, the philosopher) to conceal the fact that his translation is a betrayal. It blots out the discursive autonomy of the spokesperson and the gap which separates him/her from the objects or subjects represented, which as a result always remain entitled to raise their own voices.13 ‘Treason of the intellectuals’ is an endemic

Speaking the spokesperson 15 feature of their role as spokespersons; or to put it in reverse: the true ‘treason’ of the intellectuals is to dissimulate this ineradicable discursive betrayal, and to pose as transparent ‘telephones of the beyond’. This departure clears a space for a critical theory of spokespersonship which retains a normative opposition between reificatory identity and constructivist difference, and hence guards a critical niche over against the practices of ‘ordinary’ actors (social scientists included) in so far as they continue to believe in the virtuous necessity and epistemological exclusivity of ‘reflective’ or ‘photocopy’ forms of representation. The question of to what extent actors are conscious of committing epistemological duplicity, to what extent they deliberately mix reifications with constructions and performances, is not pre-empted but focused as an unresolved, empirically open question.14 The capacity for critique If we have learned from Latour (against Bourdieu, who still seeks to totalize the intellectual field from the privileged stance of an impartial spectator) about the deep performativity and constructivism of sociology itself, and from Bourdieu (against Latour, who refuses to choose between realism and constructivism) about the importance of a critical account of identitarian representation, my main question still remains the following: how are we able to reclaim the critical capacity, the critical wedge between saying and doing (and hence the idea of ‘false’ consciousness) without sliding back into modernist and foundationalist ‘denunciation’? Many exercises in this book are indeed critical, ‘unmasking’ exercises which repeat some of the conventional gestures of ideology critique and its vocabulary of suspicion and reductive ‘interest attribution’. Chapter 2, for example, ‘reveals’ the Marxian proletariat as a ‘double’ for the revolutionary intellectual, while Chapter 3 accounts for Durkheim’s universalist science of social things as concealing but also obliquely supporting a project of professional sociological independence and political solidarism. Chapter 4 is critical of Mannheim’s persistently totalizing vision of the ‘free-floating’ intelligentsia and the sociology of knowledge, while ‘anti-intellectuals’ such as Sorel, Barrès, Freyer, and Schmitt are similarly ‘accused’ of ventriloquizing for allegedly sublime categories such as the Nation or the Volk—which are ‘in fact’ reducible to no more than ontological metaphors. My project is also roundly critical in its (symmetrical!) attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ the right-wing intellectual project of ‘national’ socialism as equally problematic and authoritarian as the politically more congenial left-wing project of a ‘proletarian socialism’. It therefore openly redistributes praise and blame, actively redefines the order of grandeur of various intellectual groups and their political projects, and hence indulges to some degree in the exercise of particularization as it was classically recommended by Mannheim (1968:254–6): the diminutive

16 The Intellectual as Stranger operation which reduces the whole to the part, the universal to the particular, the conscious to the unconscious, the disinterested view to the interested partial standpoint and, in doing so, aims to ‘disqualify’ the assertions that are analysed by restricting their validity to a narrower scope.15 As noticed above, this disqualifying effect is precisely what is disqualified and criticized by a-critical approaches which insist on the radical performativity and contingency of all sociological explanations. From their point of view, the exercises in this book only turn the accusation back upon the original accusers without altering the diminutive style of the attribution itself. Marxist historical materialism and Durkheimian positivist sociology, indeed, offer classical exemplars of this ‘debunking’ ordinance; it might also be argued that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and of the intellectuals does not much improve upon this logic, even though it undertakes to generalize it and to render it more reflexive. All these sociologies represent ‘systems of suspicion’ which initially dismiss the reasons, motives, and causes which are invoked by the ‘common sense’ of ordinary actors, in order to appeal to ‘unconscious’ forces, laws, motives, impulses, and interests which act behind their backs, but which are somehow transparent to the scientific analyst. In Marx’s familiar strong view, all science would be superfluous if the appearance and the essence of things would immediately coincide; while Durkheim’s methodology similarly presumes that social phenomena cannot be explained by the conceptions/prenotions/prejudices of the participants themselves, but only by deeper social causes that elude their consciousness (Marx 1974:88; 1973:825; Durkheim 1982). These unconscious motives are simultaneously seen as false motives, rationalizations, illusions, ‘ideology’; but the scientific sociologists are not duped by them but proceed to unveil what hides itself beneath such false appearances. But of course, the same figures of speech, the same competences, the same repertoires of unmasking and accusation are invoked by ‘common sense’, whenever lay actors seek to explain other actors’ behaviour that puzzles them, disturbs them, or elicits their disapproval. In ‘critical’ situations, when there is a break in communicative routines and justifications are called for, actors often refuse to take other actors at their word, start to look beneath ‘appearances’ to ‘reality’, and proceed to infer from deeper causes what ‘forces’ their opponents to say these reprehensible things or to act in this inexplicable manner. Actors are then often motivated to contextualize, to diminish the horizon of validity, to particularize their opponents’ beliefs by situating their knowledges against the background of more ‘objective’ knowledge-distorting conditions, drives or interests (e.g. cognitive defects, psychological disturbances, careerist drives, devious calculations, a lust for honour, power, or money). Due to this basic similarity or symmetry between everyday justifications and accusations and those made by scientific researchers, critical sociology loses the

Speaking the spokesperson 17 foundational high ground for its own critical judgements (a transcendent nature, a transcendent social reality), and finds itself in no better position than ordinary actors when it wants to tell other people who they are and what they want. In Boltanski and Thévenot’s phrasing, critical sociology must therefore give way to a sociology of criticism or a ‘pragmatics of reflection’; it must give up the critical attitude in order to recognize and describe the normative principles which underlie the critical activity of ordinary persons. We need to remain as close as we can to the justificatory practices of ordinary actors, to follow their movements without affording ourselves a scientifically overarching view, and hence without adding to or intervening in the critical operations which actors themselves engage in (Boltanski and Thévenot 1991:25, 427; 1999:364; cf. Latour 1993:43–4). In the perspective which I try to develop here, this a-critical descriptivism rightly insists on the fact that problems of spokespersonship are inveterate to these classical ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and rebound with a vengeance. Of course, to offer to speak for the part against the whole, for hidden interests against professions of universalism, for the ‘real thing’ against commonsense prejudice, is not to supersede and resolve but simply to duplicate the problem of spokespersonship for the social—which remains embedded in the circular problem of how to define the situation for knowledges which are thus critically situated. The a-critical theorists also rightfully suggest that such realistically ‘external’ explanations, notwithstanding their professions of neutrality and objective certainty, perform their accusations unwittingly or in a roundabout way, since the critique is not immediately and visibly installed in the scientific description itself but seen as a logical derivation from it: constatives clandestinely operate as criticisms (cf. Boltanski and Thévenot 1991:16, 50; Bourdieu 1991:127ff).16 The logical intimacy between classification and judgement, between categorization and public accusation (kategorein), is not epistemologically accounted for. Sociological Zurechnung is often a cleverly dissimulated form of Abrechnung. But this means that the a-critical theorists involuntarily repeat the ideology-critical gesture against their critical antagonists; and moreover, that they once again beg the question of ordinary actors’ empirical awareness of the denunciatory, stigmatizing quality of their own critical explanations. ‘Following the actors’ would rather reveal that in many (if not most) cases they stabilize their suspicions about the (in)validity of their opponents’ justifications and settle their disputes with them by means of objectivist assertions about what ‘really’ makes them tick. The descriptivist and agnosticist ‘withdrawal’, while openly criticizing reification and essentialism on the level of scientific interpretation, loses its critical edge against all commonsense reification or ‘everyday essentialism’ by its unwarranted and hasty projection of a performative epistem/ontology into everyday practices. Reversing the arrogant polarity between observer’s truth and actors’ error (and the strict separation between facts and values)

18 The Intellectual as Stranger which characterizes objectivist-critical sociology, the sociology of criticism falls into the opposite trap of presuming that everyday classifications more or less articulatedly retain the immediate alignment of description and performance (of facts and values) which is occluded or lost in professional social science. If one proceeds to ‘take seriously’ actors’ own justificatory competences on this contestable assumption, and does not wish to add anything to their informal epistemologies, one ends up by authorizing these reificatory closures in quite the same way as does objectivist sociology. The symmetrical move to recognize subtle competences of critical unmasking in everyday disputes over the relative grandeur of particular subjects and objects, rather than absolving ‘common sense’ through a congratulatory understanding of its essential sophistication, should rather turn the critical tables on both sociological and common sense, in so far as particular approaches on both levels of inquiry adhere to a reificatory logic that removes the storyteller from the story and creates a thing that speaks for itself. Why, indeed, are professional sociologists suddenly deprived of the critical competences and resources that are generously and indiscriminately attributed to ordinary actors?17 Critical asymmetry does not run between ‘omniscient’ science and ‘ignorant’ common sense (which anyhow cannot be seriously counterposed as singular and unitary discourses) but between reificatory and performative approaches in both professional and lay reasoning; critical theory must challenge authoritarian epistemologies, whether they operate on a formal or an informal level (cf. Pels 2001). Over against the a-critical theorists, I like to reverse the question: why cannot a constructivist sociology, which has shed its foundational arrogance and its transcendental self-certainty, and is fully abreast of the ‘treacherous’ character of its own spokespersonship for social reality, unmask and accuse, render entities greater and smaller, perform the social just like everybody else?18 Why is a constructivist sociology disallowed from constructing a version of the world which is interestingly different from that which is offered by ‘common sense’? Accusatory realism I like to illustrate these considerations in terms of an inevitable example which will occupy us in further detail in a later chapter: the constellation of reciprocal suspicion and accusation which bound together the Dreyfusard intellectuals and the anti-Dreyfusard ‘anti-intellectuals’ in early twentiethcentury France (cf. Bering 1978; Charle 1990; Jennings and Kemp-Welch 1997; Pinto 1984). Both parties to the dispute—which has rightly been identified as the birth hour of the modern intellectual, both of the left and the right—perpetrated a strategy of disqualification which principally contested their opponent’s invocation of a broader, more global ‘belonging’, in order to critically reduce his claims to the particular prejudices and local interests of a section of the community, such as a class,

Speaking the spokesperson 19 a disaffected elite, or a self-serving corporation. In this first historical contest over the relative grandeur of the intellectual spokesperson, the Dreyfusards were quick to enclose their nationalist opponents in a ‘merely’ partial point of view, tied to the forces of militarist tradition and religious superstition, while they themselves claimed to rise above this particularity in their communion with the broader constituencies of humanity, the common good, science, and natural law. The anti-Dreyfusards, for their part, sought to represent these left-wing intellectuals as an artificial psychological type belonging to a new caste of mandarins which was spawned by the republican school system, and which, as a result of its abstract rationalist and egalitarian prejudices, had severed itself from the more concrete realities of the life of the nation. Its universalist appeal to the values of truth and justice, and to the disembodied rights of l’homme and le citoyen, merely disguised the intellectualist usurpation of a group of déracinés who, while claiming to speak for the whole community, only represented its smallest and most anomic part. This reductionary ‘unmasking’ of universalism as partiality, however, did not prevent these anti-intellectuals to similarly define the ‘part’ which they claimed to represent as a transcendent and promissory whole for which they offered themselves as disinterested spokesmen. What this example begins to demonstrate is the ubiquity, mundanity, and essential reversibility of such crossed invocations of (relative) universalism and particularism, in the course of which the position of the other is objectified by referencing partial interests which are masked by arguments pitched to disinterestedness or the common good. As Boltanski and Thévenot have argued, such mutual unmasking can not only be realigned with the ordinary activity of actors when they seek to devalue one form of justification in order to revalue another, but is also entirely continuous with what they call the ‘professional relativism’ of the social sciences (cf. 1991:414–21). The classical situating and contextualizing gesture of the sociology of knowledge (and of traditional standpoint theory, including early feminist versions, cf. Hekman 1999:30ff) typically aims at diminishing the grandeur of the allegedly disinterested and self-effacing spokesperson (the [male] philosopher, intellectual, and politician), by particularizing or disqualifying his grandiose claims by appealing to a generalized theory of power or group interest. But I have also suggested that such alternative representations of a supposedly more concrete particularity, which usually takes the form of a realist attribution of interests, tend to suffer from the same epistemological fragility and undecidability as the holistic representations which they attempt to overturn. The problem of spokespersonship only repeats itself on the level of the part (the group, the situation, the standpoint), not so much because the part is once again taken to stand for the whole, but because its representation adopts a similarly ‘mimetic’ or identitarian form which allows the spokesperson to disappear from the scene of representation.

20 The Intellectual as Stranger That a reflexive re-inscription of the place of the spokesperson is different from sociologically ‘adding in’ the intellectuals and their specific group motives and interests, can be brought out with the help of a connected and contemporary example which will likewise concern us in richer detail later. It marks the historical ‘duplication’ of traditional Marxian class analysis as, for example, elaborated in Mannheim’s reflexive generalization of the ‘total’ concept of ideology, or as disputed on a broader political front in terms of the Intelligenzler-Frage, the acute questioning of the role of the intellectuals as theorists and political leaders which frantically divided the socialist movements around the turn of the previous century. The classical revisionist gesture, in encircling the specificity of the intellectuals as an autonomous stratum or even a ‘new’ class, while carrying a critically divisive effect against traditional assertions of proletarian class homogeneity, did not touch the epistemological structure of the argument itself, which remained enclosed in the logic of sociological ‘identity realism’ and objectivist (re)classification. The same applied to other attempts to ‘divide up’ and ‘destroy’ the alleged unity and integrity of the working class by proposing the sui generis character of cross-cutting sociological entities such as the new middle classes, the state, the national community, women, ethnic groups, or different generations. An immediately adjacent controversy, as classically raised by Robert Michels, was deployed around the supposedly inevitable differentiation between leaders and led within the socialist and other mass organizations. Michels’ argument ‘realistically’ advanced that the party of the German proletariat was ‘in fact’ dominated by a small group, many of whom were intellectuals, whose interests had become divorced from those of the rank and file. The ‘law of aristocratic differentiation’ (Michels 1992:91) demanded that a democratic and egalitarian organization would inevitably split into a dominant and a dominated group. This of course tended to break up the presumed identity of the larger subject of representation: the organization which was formally represented as one, now ‘in reality’ consisted of two parts in necessary tension.19 Put more generally, and adapted to the language of crossed descriptive accusation: those who considered themselves to be at one with the group (Tu sei Vltalia. Il partito, sono io! Der Partei ist Hitler, Hitler ist der Partei) were judged by critical others to be ‘objectively’ separate from it and as enjoying their own particular existence and sui generis interests. All such critical recuttings of the social cloth tend to build up or break down particular social entities and affect the credibility of their spokespersons by means of putatively objective classifications (‘there are only two classes’…‘no, there is an intermediary one’…‘no, there are many’…‘we live in a classless society’, etc.). Evidently, the revisionists who inserted the ‘objective’ sociological heterogeneity of a separate intellectual stratum or political elite into a proletariat which was presumed to be homogeneous aimed to disqualify (and were seen to disqualify) what they called the ‘formalist’ conceptions of those socialist intellectuals and leaders

Speaking the spokesperson 21 who claimed an organic unity with the class they were certain to represent, but which was now represented differently. It was rightly interpreted (and angrily dismissed) as a performative attempt to ‘drive a wedge’ between those representatives and their natural constituency. The sociological realism of revisionists such as Michels clearly was an accusatory realism, although the accusation was not straightforward but was densely packed into the classical differentiation between self-representation and ‘actual practice’ (between saying and doing), in which the actual practice, while being actively denied by the actors themselves, was deemed amenable to objective sociological analysis by their opponents.20 If I plead a reflexive ‘reduction’ to the place of the spokesperson in social narratives, this move is therefore distinct from the characteristic particularizing move of the sociology of knowledge or traditional standpoint theory, according to which social theorists are keen to criticize what other actors say because they claim privileged access to what they ‘actually’ do or want—which of course issues in another way of saying, another representation. Once again, it is not to privilege the part over the whole or to pitch ‘two-ness’ against ‘one-ness’ (although I do defend difference against identity in another sense), but to bring out the epistemological complicity of realist definitions on both levels. Intended is rather that all situations for situated knowledges are subject to prior definition, that all standpoints are discursively constituted, and that all collective subjects and identities (the proletariat, the intellectuals, the nation, humanity, strangers) must be ‘spoken’ or ‘staged’ or ‘performed’ in order to gain (or lose) reality in specific explanations of the world. This notion about the ubiquity of representation does not so much ‘reveal’ the corporate interests of the professionals of representation as it indicates the fundamental discursivity of all sociality. It does not say that there is nothing in the world but representations, discourses or texts, but underlines that all realities come with their spokespersons. They always enter the stage together (cf. Latour 1987:71). It also implies that all realities are in a continual state of being performatively upsized or downsized, due to the fact that social descriptions (including the accounts offered by professional sociologists) materially co-produce the realities which are thus described. Identification with the group makes the group. The confession (‘as a black lesbian mother…’) builds up the object of belonging instead of objectively ‘reflecting’ it. This view of performative witnessing translates into a general critique of reification, of the transformation of projects into objects and of performances into things which effaces the representer and eliminates the representative gap in favour of the identity form. It extends towards a general critique of essentialism (and of its kid brother: realism), even though it would be well to nourish the sceptical afterthought that antiessentialists may be unable to escape a residual essentialism, and that antirealists will always need to appeal to a ‘reality’ which they find interestingly different from what ‘really exists’ according to others.

22 The Intellectual as Stranger This performative or knowledge-political21 view of spokespersonship hence also mediates between a venerable polarity which is often positioned as the beginning problem of the modern sociology of intellectuals: the opposition between an idealized normative versus an empirical analytical approach, or that between a moralist and a realist interpretive tradition (cf. Eyerman 1994; Feuer 1971; Karabel 1996:205–6). Voltaire, Zola, Benda, Orwell, Habermas, Havel and Said could be seen as personifying the former, while Marx, Mannheim, Michels, Gouldner, Bourdieu, and Bauman plausibly represent the latter tradition. The contrast is the familiar one between a high-strung missionary view which assigns the intellectuals, as natural dissidents and critics, a special responsibility as guardians of truth and justice (‘speaking the truth to power’) and a more sublunar and disenchanted view which focuses realistically (pessimistically) upon the intellectuals’ institutional placement and the collective interests which attach to it. The very connotations of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or ‘light’ and ‘dark’ in this traditional polarization already indicate that all definitions of the intellectual rhetorically (performatively) build up or break down the intellectual role itself and assess the worth of individual exemplars, and are therefore deeply implicated in what Boltanski and Thévenot have called ‘regimes of justification’. As Bauman has also underscored, any attempt to define the intellectual is an attempt at self-definition, which is at bottom based upon a binary opposition between intellectuals and non-intellectuals (1987:8–9). Every definition draws a normative boundary around the intellectual’s identity, marks an opposition, excludes its own alterity, and moreover, tends to silence the necessarily divisive effects of this operation. Like all functional or role concepts, the concept of the intellectual installs a normative hierarchy which ranges from good through indifferent to bad practice, and remains ‘essentially contestable’ as a result of this judgemental overload. The classical separation of facts and values has never really worked (cf. Pels 1990; 1993). The normative definition always entails a description of best performance (cf. Popper’s description of science), which turns into unwarranted idealization if this limited practice is universalized into an authoritative rule for all (cf. Kuhn’s objections and his defence of ‘normal’ science). It is countered by a realism which, rather than ‘merely’ describing the social anchorage of intellectuals in a dispassionate way, effectively denigrates their role, brings them down to earth, discredits their self-adopted high mission, accuses them of muffling their mundane interests behind solemn gestures and sublime sounds. The starting point for this accusatory realism, as we have seen, is a perceived divergence between the intellectuals’ selfawareness, which is subjected to immediate scepticism, and their actual social doings and attachments which objectively contradict it—which is what other intellectuals, who are distanced from the former in time, space, sentiment, profession or political taste (and who sometimes call themselves sociologists) critically say they do.22

Speaking the spokesperson 23 The duality of representation This reflexive approach to spokespersonship may also usefully renegotiate the old contrast between what might be called an ‘anarchist’ and an ‘elitist’ tradition with regard to both scientific and political spokespersonship, and hence returns us to what Michels already identified as the ‘cruel antinomy’ of all forms of representation. On one side, we encounter the old Rousseauist tradition about the unrepresentability of the sovereign people or the impossibility of faithful political delegation (which led Rousseau to identitarian conclusions), as it is precisely captured by the slogan of Sorel, Berth, and other anarcho-syndicalists: ‘toute representation ne peut être que trahison’. In this view, all professional intermediaries, whether they are intellectuals, politicians or other spokespersons for the people, are unproductive usurpers (cf. Berth 1926:265–6); a sentiment which is closely echoed by Foucault and Deleuze when they announce the demise of representation and ‘the indignity of speaking for others’ (1977:206–9). At one point even Bourdieu speculates about the need for a ‘final political revolution’ against the usurpation which always potentially resides in delegation (1991:219). Latour’s assertion of the ‘nonprofessional’ nature of political action and his rejection of elitist expertise (both as Socratic rationalist philosophy and Sophistic rhetoric skill) likewise betrays an anarchist inspiration (1999a:216ff).23 It is fruitful to remain briefly with this defining moment of the turn-of-thecentury dispute among the anarcho-syndicalists. This is not merely because their approach to the risk of representation resembled most contemporary ones (whether apologetical or critical) in viewing the problem of the intellectuals and that of political leadership as near-synonymous, but also because the opposition to this refusal to speak the representative word was initially formulated ‘from within’ and in immediate reaction to it by the future elitist Robert Michels. Reversing the Sorelian slogan in a watershed article of March 1907, which announced his retreat from the anarchosyndicalist faith, Michels famously objected that all organization, including syndicalist organization, required representation, and that it was therefore not some outside corruptive force but organization itself that engendered embourgeoisement, decadence, and deviation. With respect to the intellectuals, Michels argued that the socialist movement, which was after all born from a union between proletariat and Idea, required the presence of the intellectuals as ‘enlighteners’ (éclaireurs); the socialist worker needed a theory, and for theories one needed theoreticians (1992:147–8).24 With respect to leadership roles, as we already saw, Michels similarly suggested that the universal necessity of political representation destined all democratic organizations to develop an internal differentiation between a dominant elite and a dominated mass, and hence to promote a form of oligarchy which would inevitably oppose the interests of the representers to those of the represented (1962:50–1, 364ff; 1992:219ff).

24 The Intellectual as Stranger If our ambition is to reconcile these two opposite traditions, a first impulse would be to reassert and rearticulate something like the intrinsic ‘duality’ of representation, which acknowledges its liberating and productive dynamics but simultaneously calculates its intrinsic tendency to repression and usurpation. The task is to ‘realize’ both truths in a single normative-descriptive framework which enables us to think its liberating and its catastrophic potential in a single thought, in one go; not to seek a golden mean but to preserve the power of these conflicting judgements in a dialectical (or perhaps trialectical) unity of opposites (cf. Jameson 1991:47, 62; Pels 1993:142–7; Soja 1996:60–1). The idea of a differential and performative theory of spokespersonship, as pieced together through my various discussions of the writings of Ankersmit, Bourdieu and Latour, may provide a clue to how this double truth might be convincingly accommodated. The ruling out of all mimetic or mirror-like correspondence between representers and represented already marked the distancing or ‘estranging’ movement of representation which, in framing an autonomous position of spokespersonship, creates a substitute for reality (political, scientific, everyday) which is manifestly different from it and may enter into conflict with it. 25 This tensionful substitution is simultaneously the source of social, political, and intellectual innovation (new groups and new facts can only come into existence and grow in strength by being spoken for) and the embryonic germ of usurpation (because spokespersons always silence those subjects and objects in whose name they speak). As Latour and Callon would phrase this dialectical dilemma: since we all need to translate what others are and what they want, we inevitably betray them, and have to renounce all hope of a faithful, literal translation. However, because they paradoxically retain the identity form in their a-critical supposition that to translate is simultaneously and knowingly to reify reality, to force a coincidence with what is represented, Latour and Callon lose at least one important resource for critically tracing how practices of representation may shore up symbolic domination, precisely because such reifications absolve the treason which makes identity work. Let me try briefly to spell out what such a dual and differential theory of representation would accomplish for a reconsideration of scientific, especially sociological, representation. Once again, the rejection of the epistemological ideal of pictorial resemblance gives us an always prepresented and performed reality which would be helplessly absent if it was not continually realized by the activity of its mediators and spokespersons, both lay and professional. This strong view about the ineradicability of representation and the discursivity of the social again implies that (social, sociological) representations in some way substitute for their realities: they ‘put something else in their place’ which is tendentially opposed to them and may enter into conflict with them. The real world is not there to be faithfully reflected as in a mirror, but to be taken distance from, in an

Speaking the spokesperson 25 ‘unfaithful’ act (an act of treason?) which objectifies it by keeping it at arm’s length. This could at least be one translation of the constitutive task of science (which both Marx and Durkheim knew about) to ‘know better’ and say ‘strange things’, i.e. to reach towards a different reality behind ‘appearances’, to take distance from the judgements of common sense, and to speak for the invisible (for what is not yet seen by others). Rather than wishing to conform to the world, scientific narratives should be nonconformist.26 This approach traditionally contrasts with the ‘anarchist’ refusal to grant the scientific spokesperson any special epistemological advantage which, like the idea of the unrepresentability of political reality, resonates with postmodern notions about the impossibility of ‘testimony’ or ‘witnessing’, the inherent blindness of all insights, and the resultant undecidability of all propositional claims. The two conflicting approaches can once again be synthesized in terms of a critique of the identity form which acknowledges on the one hand that all these emergent realities need to be performed and spoken for in order to exist but, on the other, that the break which science enforces between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ merely announces another spokesperson, another appearance, and thus another ‘treacherous’ performance. The approach adopted here might then also negotiate between critical sociology and its a-critical, a-modern counterpart in their opposite attitudes towards the universal game of unmasking and accusation in which everyone objectifies everybody else (and to which, the agnostics affirm, critical sociology still remains prisoner). A critical theorist such as Bourdieu, we saw, retains the traditional ambition to escape from this play of crossed blindness and lucidity, and wishes to rise above the struggle in the field in order to attain something like a ‘total’ view of its structural reality and laws of functioning (a plot of transcendence which preserves the identity form). But rather than merely ‘following’ the actors in their subtle competences of world making and polemical justification, as the agnostics would alternatively recommend, sociological representations may very well be offered as critiques, as ‘strange’ descriptions of what actors are and do which are interestingly opposed to their familiar self-descriptions. This is not once more to reclaim an overarching and privileged point of view, but merely to add another proposition, another representation to the many (both lay and professional) which are currently circulating in the field. It is to rehabilitate the disqualifying tendency of sociological imputation, which reaches ‘behind the backs’ of ordinary actors towards putatively ‘hidden’ motives or interests, as simply another instance of the universal practice of trying to make sense of other people’s puzzling or disconcerting behaviour. It is to speak for the invisible without the added poison of an accusatory realism. It reconsiders the critical topos of saying versus doing as a different, because principally contestable way of saying what others are ‘actually’ up to—a critical operation which the victims of this sociological imposition can immediately reverse against our own positions and

26 The Intellectual as Stranger interests. If rephrased in this way, such epistemic ‘opportunism’, rather than issuing in a regrettable rehearsal of realist defamations, appears as an endemic feature of the ‘microdynamics of scepticism’, or the universal attempt to account for the cognitive resilience of those who happen to disagree with us (cf. Herrnstein Smith 1997). Every sociologist is indeed a good sociologist for the opposition but a bad one for his own position. The blind spot ‘behind the eye’, which Bourdieu attempts to encircle and supersede with the help of a rigorously scientific reflexivity, always travels along with us ‘backside’ of the sociological gaze. Contra Bourdieu (e.g. 1992:409–10; 1999:334), there is no need for sociology to command a science-led escape from this neverending shadow play of mutual distanciation and polemical objectivation. It (they, since ‘sociology’ is of course a misnomer for a plurality of rivalling approaches which mutually objectify and disqualify each other) must be content to add its (their) strange sounds to all the other sounds that are produced in the interminable sense-making chatter that fills the social world. As Latour rightly suspects, the awareness that there is no objective way to ascertain how the social is made up, does not discourage anyone from classifying and thereby (dis) qualifying others. Not even sociologists. But it does make an important difference to the way in which we engineer these conversations, to the way in which classifications threaten to do violence to and ‘debunk’ others, if one factually accepts this groundlessness and this performative circularity—something which Latour appears to take for granted but which is very far from characterizing the empirical awareness of both ordinary people and professional sociologists. The real treason of the intellectuals, I have already said, is to conceal this inevitable treason, to forget about and let others forget about the ‘original circle of representation’ which affects all their efforts to speak for the social. It is to dissimulate and euphemize that all intellectual representations are ‘caught’ in a self-affirming circle, are ‘victimized’ by an infinite regress that forces their justifications into a self-supporting appeal to their own initial assumptions. But ‘circular reasoning’ does not represent an inherent flaw in (other) people’s cognitive behaviour, but defines both the modest ethic of the intellectual spokesperson and the critical epistemology which (s)he may bring to bear upon lay and professional rationalities. If the ‘debunking’ critique comes from the fiction of identity which erases this circle, and builds upon a prior reification which removes the scenographer from the scene, a performative and circular critique aims to re-inscribe this person, to re-present the definer of the situation for situated knowledges. These proposals about ‘essential’ discursivity, undecidability, and the autonomy of the spokesperson are not offered as realist but as circular ones; but far from being tragically (or comically) selfimploding, they forward their own in-house criterion for critical judgement.27 Circular ideology critique: that is exactly the spirit of the exercises which I have undertaken in this book.

2

The proletarian as stranger

Three farewells to the proletariat ‘The Marxist intellectuals,’ Rudolf Bahro has written, ‘have always had an idealized picture of “the worker”, one that referred to no one other than themselves’ (1981:193). The possibility of such an idolization dwelled in the earliest germ of the communist idea of the party, e.g. the demand for a historical unification of philosophy and the proletariat. The young Marx’s theses about a coalition between revolutionary intellectuals and the working class, the ‘head’ and the ‘heart’ of the impending revolution, already harboured the seeds of a future dominance of the head over the heart. The socialist parties were from the outset both parties of and parties for the proletariat; their founders and leaders were, with few exceptions, intellectuals who issued from the intermediate strata. ‘It was not the working class who gave itself them as its leadership, but they who gave themselves to the working class,’ writes Bahro in another of his scathing epigrams. In Marx and Engels we find clear residues of this characteristic blindness of the subject towards itself (1981:194–5). Manifestly, such reproaches focus a critique—in the present case, a neoMarxist self-critique—which is as old as Marxism itself. Marx testifies against Marx when, in an unguarded moment, he reassures Engels: ‘We have received our nomination (Bestellung) as representatives of the proletarian party from no one else but ourselves’ (Marx 1970:436). In his manner, he closes the vicious circle previously signalled by Bahro, in which philosophy arouses the proletariat to a historical mission which it cannot formulate on its own; but, instead of reflecting his normal self-awareness, this statement rather stands as an unfortunate lapsus, a slip of the tongue, emitted in a fleeting mood of disappointment or cynicism. One is tempted to recall the withering judgements lavished upon Marx and his doctrine by contemporaries such as Stirner, Heine, Heinzen, Annenkov, Proudhon, the members of the London Bureau of Correspondence of the (first) International, or Bakunin. One among them, the liberal democrat Karl Heinzen, perceptively noted that these gentlemen-communists were ‘head 27

28 The Intellectual as Stranger over heels in love with the proletariat’ and hence, by calling themselves ‘proletariat’, were indulging in a subtle form of coquetry (1846:56–7).1 But it was especially the protracted contest with the anarchists that painfully opened up this central pathology of the Marxist system, eliciting, among other things, Marx’s ruthless criticism of Stirner in The German Ideology, his interrupted exchange of letters with Proudhon and his bellicose pamphlet La misère de la philosophic, the heated debate on Bakunin’s Staatlichkeit und Anarchie, and the unseemly bickering about the authorship and the historic significance of the 1870 Paris Commune. This late twentieth-century ‘farewell to the proletariat’ has therefore something of a history. From the turn of the century, it roughly follows three historical trajectories: three routes of revision, which branch out more or less simultaneously from the orthodox intellectual tree, and which subdivide and distribute classical Marxism over rivalling interpretations and contesting political movements. The first route is the social-democratic one, which conducts us from Kautskyan reformism towards Bernsteinian revisionism and the ‘cultural socialism’ of Hendrik de Man. The second route is taken by Sorel and his anarcho-syndicalist Nouvelle école, which will also exert a predominant influence upon revolutionary nationalist and fascist thinkers.2 The third road is the Bolshevik or Leninist one, although its farewell to the working class is conducted much more painfully and ambiguously than in the other branches of the Marxist tree. In Bernstein, we already encounter a string of critical apercus concerning Marxism’s idealization of the proletariat, its dramatic overstatement of the political maturity of the popular masses, the link between such utopianism and its penchant for political putchism, as well as the prediction that the proletarian dictatorship would issue in little else but a dictatorship of ‘club orators and literati’. This romanticization of the proletariat represented a need and an invention of ‘would-be proletarians’ (Affektations– proletarier), a large majority of whom originated from the bourgeoisie (1993:35–8, 205–8). Bernstein duly ironized the ‘comic rage’ that a doctrinaire such as Plekhanov directed against all socialists ‘who did not see the entire class of proletarians as being already what it is their historical vocation to become…For—the proletariat is myself!’ (1993:206). Similar criticisms recurred in more acute form in the works of the Belgian theorist and politician Hendrik de Man (cf. Dodge 1966; see Chapter 4). In his epoch-making The Psychology of Socialism, which appeared in its German original in 1926, de Man asserted, for example—anticipating Bahro by more than half a century—that socialism, in its historical origins, was less a doctrine of than for the proletariat, elaborated by bourgeois intellectuals whose socialist sentiments should principally be accounted for in terms of a psychological analysis of intellectual motives, rather than of economic class interests. In order to preserve its unconditional linkage between class interest and way of thinking, Marxism stubbornly refused to countenance the multiplicity and complexity of socialist motivations (1928:26–7). In the

The proletarian as stranger 29 process, an image of the proletariat was created which showed little resemblance to reality: socialist philosophy was conceived by bourgeois intellectuals. Their inclination was to idolize the proletariat; and they did this the more enthusiastically, the less they were acquainted with actual proletarians. When a modern socialist intellectual, and above all a modern Marxist intellectual, speaks of the proletariat, it is with a reverent vibration of voice, such as might have been heard when an early Christian was talking of the Saviour, or when an 1848 democrat mentioned the People. For to the Marxist, the proletariat is the Saviour, the Power, the Will, predestined to satisfy the longing for a better world, the longing for a ‘socialist hereafter’…To the Marxist, the proletariat is a pure concept, an instrument for the realization of other concepts, one term in the algebraical formula of the social revolution. (de Man 1928:31, 33) De Man insisted at various turns that this heroic cult of the proletariat was inversely proportional to the sociological attention given to the intellectuals as a social class; a systematic psychological connection existed between the deification of the working class and the self-exemptions and self-denials of the socialist intellectual, the voluntarily or involuntarily declassed academic (242–6, 268). The proletarian myth burdened the with a selfinduced inferiority complex, since he could identify himself as a socialist only by nullifying himself and changing into a different being. This selfsuggestion was most acutely present in radical Marxists of bourgeois origin, where it produced the typical amalgam of humility and arrogance of revolutionaries, who on the one hand kneeled down before the proletariat, but on the other treated it ‘as merely a piece on the chess-board of their revolutionary-dialectical combinations’ (1928:204–12). De Man’s characterization of worshippers of the working class such as Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Gorter, or Pannekoek, is not readily or integrally applicable to Georges Sorel or, for that matter, to V.I.Lenin. Intriguingly, the anarcho-syndicalist revision straightforwardly acknowledged the mythical and utopian character of the Marxian conception of the proletariat, not in order to depart from it and return to social reality, as Bernsteinian revisionists claimed to do, but in order to proclaim it a ‘beneficial myth’. Sorel’s writings pertinently suggested that, ultimately, the substance of the myth carried less significance than its ability to kindle and maintain the revolutionary fire in the popular masses. In this fashion, the emotional and performative structure which grounded the theory of the proletariat was liberated from its rationalistic justificatory shell, in order to re-emerge in the form of a naked, ‘irrational’ urge towards revolution. The path of intellectual development taken by the erstwhile syndicalist Robert Michels demonstrated where this might lead. His unmasking of

30 The Intellectual as Stranger intellectuals ‘who are all glad to hear themselves spoken of as authentic proletarians and to be glorified as the class of the future’ (1962:87) was swiftly transcribed into a self-conscious intellectual elitism which clearly prefigured his subsequent fascist leanings (cf. Beetham 1977). Mussolini’s ‘farewell to the proletariat’, in his intellectual swerve from syndicalist Marxism to revolutionary nationalism, followed an identical sequence (cf. Gregor 1979). Such criticisms were also rife among those Nietzschean intellectuals in Weimar Germany who pleaded the imminence of a conservative ‘revolution from the right’. Spengler, for example, saw it as his prime duty to liberate ‘German socialism’ from Marx, and especially to free it from the latter’s ‘literature-drenched, literature-contrived, and literature-sustained’ conception of the proletariat. Marx was dreadfully mistaken in ascribing the ‘Prussian’ concept of socialism to the proletariat and the ‘English’ concept of capitalism to the bourgeoisie, while terms such as socialism and capitalism more nearly performed as the good and evil of an ‘irreligious religion’. The bourgeois acted as the devil, the worker as the angel in this new social mythology (Spengler 1919:3, 77). Carl Schmitt similarly highlighted such romantic projections by picturing the Marxian proletariat as the ‘pure negative’ of the bourgeoisie, as a class that epitomized ‘social nothingness’ (das soziale Nichts) and embodied a chronic ‘state of exception’ in capitalist society—veering surprisingly close to some expressions of the young Marx himself. In Schmitt’s view, radical Marxism merely extended the long tradition of the rationalist coalition between ‘philosophy’ and ‘the sabre’ which had been inaugurated by Enlightenment thought. Its projected proletarian dictatorship would in fact issue in a ‘dictatorship of education and of the educators’, to be manned by an avantgarde of rationalists, a new type of philosopher-king who found metaphysical certainty in the apocalyptic structure of the Hegelian dialectic (Schmitt 1926:66–76). The third great transformation of Marxist orthodoxy likewise opted for the revolutionary road, even though its goodbye to the working class was more reluctant and haphazard, and was never truly consummated. The Leninist revision displayed a curious amalgam of rejection and acceptance of the myth, in so far as its glorification of the proletariat went hand-inhand with an explicit acknowledgement of the vanguard role of revolutionary intellectuals, who at least temporarily compensated for the factual immaturity, degeneracy, and even historical absence of the working class by acting as a ‘substitute proletariat’ (cf. Sweezy 1970). In the transition from Leninism to Stalinism, this dictatorship of substitutes was imposed according to an increasingly cynical scenario, without abandonment of the metaphysical adoration of the working class itself. Swept along by a strangely self-fulfilling prophecy, the substitute proletariat, as it consolidated its revolution from above, actually created for itself an entirely new working class, which it conceptually merged with

The proletarian as stranger 31 the ‘people’, so that the proletarian state could in the end truthfully be proclaimed a ‘state of the whole people’. The Bolshevik revision hence effectively ended where the syndicalist-fascist one had taken its point of departure two decades earlier: in the recognition and glorification of the productive role of leadership and the political elite, and of the enduring national community as it was represented by an entrepreneurial and ‘developmental’ state. A philosophical double In their different ways, the three revisions fasten upon a central ambiguity that traverses Marx’s original concept of the proletariat, in which empirical-historical descriptions and idealizing projections are seamlessly continuous. Thrice they react to the disconcerting fact that the ‘really existing’ working class refuses to behave in a theoretical or philosophical manner. This is not to imply that the Marxian proletariat never existed anywhere outside the brains of Marxist intellectuals. In Marx’s own time, the philosophical projection (Proletariat) and the empirical category (proletariat) could more easily be telescoped into one another, since the borderline between the tangible misery of the nineteenth-century working class and the eschatological notion of ‘alienated labour’ remained appropriately vague. But in principle, of course, a growing discrepancy could arise between a philosophically defined class consciousness and the actual consciousness and behaviour of the working class which, as it amassed sociological weight and organizational power, seemed to act less and less in conformity with its presaged revolutionary calling. In response, the revolutionary intellectuals chose to profile themselves as spokesmen and guardians of its deeper-lying, ‘essential’ interests, as the—not overly gentle—pedagogues of its ‘coming to self-consciousness’, as the organizers of the proletariat into a truly philosophical class. With some regularity, critics have concluded that Marx’s theory of the revolution laboured under a philosophical and normative surplus meaning, and that the empirical working class has been burdened with properties that it did not have in historical reality (Feuer 1969:53ff; Kolakowski 1981:127–31). It seems that one can take this familiar argument one step further by hypothesizing—following in the footsteps of de Man, Bahro, and Gouldner (1974, 1985)—that the Proletariat represented a simultaneous enlargement and concealment of the missionary complex and the existential conditions and lifestyle of bohemian political intellectuals such as Marx and Engels themselves. The Proletariat was more than the favoured class, or the external guarantee of the vanguard’s cognitive and moral righteousness: it was the intellectual’s philosophical double, his false shadow, his ontologically-inflated Self. This ‘identity swap’ and attendant camouflage has been lucidly described by Zygmunt Bauman, who has remarked upon

32 The Intellectual as Stranger the uncanny resemblance the stage actors of ideological scenarios bore to the intellectual scriptwriters. Whoever happened to be named as the sitter in a given portrait-painting session, the product was invariably a thinly disguised likeness of the painter. In organic ideologies, the intellectuals painted their self-portraits, though only rarely did they admit this to be the case. (Bauman 1992:1) This self-portraiture goes far towards explaining why the adieu to the proletariat has been such an arduous and heart-rending affair, and why every generation of Marxists—that of Bernstein, that of de Man, that of Bahro and Gorz—has been forced to go through virtually the same intellectual motions. More than the mere rejection of an outdated scientific category, or the melancholy confession that the beloved class had failed to fulfil its historical mission, it has been a shock of self-recognition, of catching one’s own shadow, of shedding a false identity. Seen in this light, a number of qualities which are attributed to the ‘really existing’ proletariat acquire a different meaning. This certainly applies to the idea that the proletariat stands with one foot in bourgeois society, with another foot outside it; that it is precisely this ambiguous, marginal position which helps it to gain a better view of it; that the proletariat embodies the negation and rejection of this society both in practical and theoretical terms; that the proletariat has no fatherland; that it is devoid of material property; that it has superseded the bourgeois form of the family and lifestyle in its own conditions of existence, etc. All such projections involuntarily refer back to the personal existential conditions and the calling for criticism and resistance which are typically experienced by the ‘postnational’, exiled, declassed, and marginalized intellectuals themselves. The Proletariat is the idol to which they subordinate themselves but which simultaneously empowers them: in the sense of a reified, ‘alienated’ autobiography.3 In view of such metaphoric, self-referential functions of the concept of the proletariat it is useful to descend further into its psychological infrastructure, since it speaks the secret of Marx’s existential reality and his most profound impulses and anxieties. Next to fathoming such psychological depths, it is also fruitful to re-examine its epistemological fabric, in order to see whether proletarian standpoint theory contains suggestive material for a conception of intellectual creativity and innovation in which marginality constitutes the conceptual linchpin. Precisely because it harbours distinctly self-regarding elements, the epistemological properties of the ‘proletarian standpoint’ may be generalized in order to link up with theoretical notions that constitutively link positional marginality to creativity, productive distanciation and even objectivity (cf. Bauman 1991:75ff). To what extent does ‘alienated labour’ metaphorically stand for ‘strangerhood’ as such? Which are the

The proletarian as stranger 33 epistemological privileges, and which the epistemological obstacles that are typically encountered by the outsider, the ex-centric person, the stranger? Which are those of the residents, the established, the native citizens? We have already recognized that the parable of the proletariat is a complex and stratified one, which invites us to carefully disengage its various layers of meaning. A first level and conceptual key is found in a 1843 letter of Marx to Ruge, which contains two crucially programmatic statements. First, the postulate of total and radical critique: the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’; second, to ‘develop from the indigenous (eigenen) forms of existing reality the true reality as its norm (Sollen) and its final goal’ (Marx and Engels 1972:8–9).4 The addition of both claims produces the characteristically left-Hegelian justification of critical theoretical practice and its teleological continuity between Sein and Sollen. Philosophy is assigned the task of locating the central contradiction that rends asunder existing reality, of articulating its inner dynamic, and of raising this ‘self-supersession’ of reality to the level of reflexive and action-oriented human consciousness. According to Marx’s contemporary Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), the coming revolution can only be a revolution of ‘radical needs’ felt by a class that is forced to undertake the universal emancipation of society from its particular existential situation. It is a class with ‘radical chains’, a class of civil society which simultaneously stands outside it, which embodies humanity’s utter loss of self, and hence is compelled to strive for complete human self-recovery. This class is the proletariat. When it announces the supersession of the present social order, it only expresses the innermost secret of its existence: it is already the practical supersession of this world. Human emancipation needs an intellectual and a material force; it needs both a head and a heart. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the abolition of the proletariat; the proletariat cannot abolish itself without the realization of philosophy (Marx and Engels 1972:20–3).5 The dialectical figuration which spawns the proletariat as missionary actor of history returns somewhat later in Marx and Engels’ The Holy Family (1845). Remarkable, as in the earlier texts, is the deductive reasoning according to which the ‘indignation’ of the proletariat results with necessity from the contradiction which arises between its ‘human nature’ and a current ‘life situation’ which utterly denies it. It is not, Marx adds for clarity’s sake, a matter of what the individual proletarian or the class as a whole pictures as its goal, but what it is in actuality, and what ‘according with this being, it will historically be compelled to do’ (Marx and Engels 1972:105). But who, one may legitimately ask, has construed this essential contradiction? Who speaks for the ontological essence of the proletariat? Who is the missionary, who the portrait-painting artist? Marx’s adjacent claims, in The German Ideology, that communism is not

34 The Intellectual as Stranger an ideal (i.e. not an arbitrary or Utopian programme cooked up by intellectuals) but ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’, and that ‘the conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence’ (Marx and Engels 1972:126), elicits a similar questioning: whose premises? Who speaks for the ‘real movement’? Who predicts the abolition? Who is so certain?6 Evidently, the proletariat emerges in Marx’s early writings as the end result of a dialectical syllogism which conveniently removes the active reality-construction of the dialectician from sight. The claim that Hegelian dialectics should be turned ‘from its head back upon its feet’ and thereby be revolutionized, suggests that the ultimate spring of dialectical method is located in a primordial, pre-discursive urge for a ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’, which is objectively ascertained so that it no longer appears as a motivational a priori of the revolutionary critic himself. Marx’s indignation about the existing order and its misery, suffering, and loss of self is not produced by incontrovertible necessities and immanent contradictions; such dialectical contradictions serve rather to sublimate a ‘pre-logical’ and epistemologically irreducible sense of indignation. This penchant for radicalism of the declassed intellectual is projected on to the ‘disinterested’ class par excellence: the ‘impartial party’ that provides the ultimate epistemological guarantee of revolutionary science. But if the proletariat is thus revealed as the false shadow of the revolutionary theoretician, it has at least three critical consequences for dialectical method itself: 1 the ‘impartial partiality’ of the proletarian standpoint conceals (and by concealing, enforces) the partial and interested standpoint of the revolutionary critic; 2 the ‘objective’ contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie conceals (and by concealing, enforces) the ‘subjective’ conflict between the revolutionary intellectual and all those against whom he directs his enmity; 3 if ‘Proletariat’ is (also) an honorific title which the declassed intelligentsia confers upon itself, its substance, as that of the counterconcept ‘Bourgeoisie’, is in principle indeterminate and refillable. Beyond their shifting empirical content, they carry a philosophical surplus meaning, which is tendentially enlargeable towards a Schmittian opposition between We and the Other. It is perhaps disconcerting to realize that the intricate dialectical scaffolding raised by the young Marx turns out to be little more than a justification of an initially aimless and potentially opportunistic ‘doctrine for the enemy’. The proletarian standpoint So far, we have uncovered only one major node of self-reference in the

The proletarian as stranger 35 Marxian conception of the proletariat. A further set of references is contained in the connections that are forged between: 1 the negatory or denying character of the standpoint of the proletariat; 2 the forced and involuntary nature of this standpoint and this denial; 3 the compulsory character of the learning process through which the proletariat becomes a class ‘for itself; and 4 the fact that this enforced self-reflexivity simultaneously represents knowledge of the ‘concrete totality’—which legitimates the transmutation of particular interests into the general interest. Let us briefly consider the converging positions taken by modern Marxists as different as Georg Lukács and Louis Althusser. In his essay ‘On Marx and Freud’, Althusser has advanced that ‘simply in order to see and understand what happens in a class society, it is indispensable to adopt proletarian theoretical class standpoints’.7 In the necessarily conflictual reality of capitalist society, it is impossible to see everything from everywhere. Different from the ‘position zero’ claimed by positivistic ideology, one can discover the essence of this conflictual reality only if, in this conflict, one occupies specific standpoints rather than others. Machiavelli has written: ‘One must be people in order to get to know the Princes’. Marx, according to Althusser, does not claim anything different. If he writes that Capital ‘represents the proletariat’, he declares in effect that one must take the positions of the proletariat in order to get to know capital: ‘one must be proletariat in order to know capital’. It is evident that Althusser’s translation of Machiavelli is addressed not so much to the empirical proletariat as to its philosophical double; the problem to be resolved is that of the role of the revolutionary intellectual: In order to adopt the theoretical class standpoints of the proletariat, there exists no other means in the world than practice, i.e. personal participation in the political struggles of the primary forms of organization of the proletariat. Through such practice the intellectual ‘becomes proletariat’, and only when he has ‘become proletariat’, i.e. as soon as he has displaced himself from bourgeois and petty bourgeois theoretical class standpoints towards revolutionary theoretical standpoints, is he capable of knowing ‘capital’, like Machiavelli said that one must be people in order to know the princes. But for an intellectual there is no other means to be ‘people’ than to become so, through practical experience in the struggle of this people. (Althusser 1993:229–30) In Lukács one finds a similar contention that ‘one cannot see everything from everywhere’. In History and Class Consciousness it is (notoriously) argued that ‘only with the rise of the proletariat…knowledge of social

36 The Intellectual as Stranger reality finds its complete fulfilment; only the class standpoint of the proletariat offers the point from which the totality of society becomes visible’. This ‘methodical viewpoint of the totality’, apart from obliquely expressing the proud self-certainty of the revolutionary intellectual, also posits a quite general relation between the access-providing, disclosing power of the ‘proletarian’ standpoint and the (socio)logical distance which is defined by its (socio)logically transcendent position. It is the ‘critical position’ of the proletariat that forces it to criticize ‘everything existing’; it is its marginality, its condition as social outcast, which enables it ‘to see better and more’. Since it embodies the most extreme loss of self, the proletariat cannot do other than raise itself to the level of reflexive selfawareness, and hence to knowledge of the conditions of universal emancipation. This self-knowledge is qualitate qua insight in the social totality (Lukács 1983:2–3, 19–21, 23, 163–6, 205–9).7 The formal properties of the proletarian standpoint hence compose the following picture: 1) it is a distance-creating standpoint that opens up the concrete totality, displays its kernel structure, and in this sense aspires to objectivity; 2) it is simultaneously a partisan or performative standpoint in so far as knowing reality is coincident with denying it; 3) distanciation and denial do not constitute voluntary options, but are produced by social constraints. Self-awareness represents a ‘vital need’; its oppression, distress, and alienation induce the proletariat to articulate its class instinct into reflexive class consciousness. The process is one of forced identity formation, governed by the inexorable laws of the grand class conflict. That is also why knowing reality and changing it are intimately bound together. To vary Nietzsche’s enigmatically essentialist phrase: it is only in the course of the class struggle that the proletariat actually becomes what it is. The objective stranger In light of the above, it is hardly coincidental that all farewells to the Marxian proletariat have opened up towards a more general theory of social marginality or strangerhood. When the working class is no longer credible as a world-historical actor—because it is sociologically insignificant or ideologically immature, or because it has settled into comfortable embourgeoisement—one begins to quarry the arsenal of ‘substitute’ proletariats; and as soon as this supply is exhausted, one turns one’s hopes towards the societal fringe. In a first conceptual move, any social category that possesses the appropriate alienation coefficient is redescribed as proletariat, so that the title of ‘worker’ is bestowed on the strength of being alienated rather than the other way around. In a second manoeuvre, even this residual labour criterion is dropped in favour of a generalized theory of déclassement. Examples of both exercises are found in Sweezy, whose conception of the ‘substitute proletariat’ effectively trades the materialist criterion of class origin for the idealist criterion of correct

The proletarian as stranger 37 consciousness; as noted earlier, the contributions of Lukács and Althusser exemplify a similar tendency (Sweezy 1970; cf. Gouldner 1985:22–5). The drift towards the metaphorics of strangerhood is also clearly discernible in the works of Fanon (cf. Bhabha 1994:40ff; Franklin 1970; Wallerstein 1979) and the early Debray, in the Maoist conception of social classes, in the anarchist theory of revolution, in Marcuse’s theory of ‘fringe groups’, and more recently, in Gorz’s conception of the ‘non-class of non-workers’. Gorz’s post-industrial ‘neo-proletariat’ is a classless class which lacks social status or security, since it embraces all those who find themselves in some way exiled from the social process of production. They are the generically excluded, those without place or perspective, social vagabonds who can no longer be defined in terms of their productive or functional position. This free-floating, mobile non-class is perceived as the embodiment of a ‘liberated subjectivity’ (Gorz 1982:82–3).8 The indigenous script of the Marxian theory of the proletariat is therefore sufficiently regulative as to direct the ‘shopping’ for new agents of social change towards a generalized theory of alienation. This involves both the revolutionary intellectuals themselves, whose political leadership is considered legitimate on account of their superior consciousness, i.e. their theoretical radicalism, and the marginals or declassed tout court: those who literally have nothing to lose but their chains, the ‘class cloaca’ that is functionally outside the ongoing social structure (Draper 1978:476). From the outset, proletarian standpoint theory silently presupposes this epistemological perspective of the stranger; and as soon as the ‘really existing’ working class has become a well-groomed resident of civil society, its calling and its epistemological privileges are automatically transferred to the Lumpen-intelligentsia and the Lumpen-proletariat (cf. Draper 1972; 1978:453ff). Such a generalized alienation theory of objectivity is also suggested by Georg Simmel in his famous ‘Excurs über den Fremden’ (1908). Strangerhood as sociological form, as a distinct variety of social interaction, is characterized by a specific synthesis of proximity and distanciation. The stranger is not so much the one who arrives today and leaves tomorrow, but the one who arrives today in order to stay. He is a potential wanderer, an element of the group itself, but one whose membership simultaneously involves outsidership and confrontation. This tensionful fringe position, of being near and far at the same time, offers unique opportunities for objectification. The stranger is not committed to or transfixed by group actions and group norms, and hence is capable of experiencing and treating even close relationships as though ‘from a bird’s eye view’. He is objectively disposed towards them, not in the sense of pure detachment and nonparticipation, but in terms of a specific mixture of involvement and detachment (Simmel 1950:402–5). The stranger, as Schutz likewise indicates, is the one who naturally places in question nearly everything that seems to be unquestionable to the group members themselves (1944:502).

38 The Intellectual as Stranger The marginal member’s objective vision thus results from his relative freedom over against the life form and the thinking-as-usual of the group. This ‘negative’ freedom is a function of social distance: the relationship between aliens and residents is more abstract than that among the residents themselves. The stranger’s detachment is a relative condition which varies with the specific proportion of nearness and remoteness of the relationship, and the variable tension which is experienced between both elements. This detachment is a positional datum, a function of a determinate life form which offers specific epistemological advantages. Simmel’s liaison between strangerhood and objectivity hence suggestively recalls a number of previously listed formal characteristics of the proletarian standpoint, by focusing a positional logic which links the possibility of (or rather, the necessary drive towards) objective knowledge to a critically distanced social position which simultaneously implies partisanship and engagement. This standpoint logic also governs Alfred Weber’s and Karl Mannheim’s image of the ‘relatively free-floating intelligentsia’, which likewise presumes a close partnership between positional estrangement and objectivity of vision. It is the ‘semi-detached’ intelligentsia that offers the (socio)logical locus of the development of a new synthetic perspective, and enjoys a unique epistemological access to the social ‘totality’. The intelligentsia, in other words, now comes face to face with itself, and recognizes the proletariat as its own double; but only in order to position itself in the social space between (above?) the dominant classes, and to understand the mission of elaborating the intellectual synthesis as uniquely its own. While, as ‘organic’ intellectuals, they still preferred to remain invisible, hiding behind ‘the broad shoulders of their ostensible heroes’, the intellectuals now appear without disguise, as part of their own historical plot, as ‘organic intellectuals of themselves’ (Bauman 1992:1–2; 1987:177). The point of departure of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, of course, is that every form of thought is rooted in the concrete social position of the thinker (Standortsgebundenheit des Denkers), and that all knowledge is hence existentially determined (Seinsverbundenheit des Wissens) (1968:8–9, 25–6, 70ff, 239). This idea of ‘situated knowledge’ not only extends towards the conceptions of the adversary, but offers a generalizable method which cannot halt before a thorough selfexamination. Participation in collective strivings does not by definition trouble our view of reality; the purposively oriented will is also a source of understanding of the situation. Objectivity does not arise by withdrawing from all action and valuation, but requires a specific involvement, and hence a certain type of situational determination. But if all knowledge is positionally or relationally determined, the question arises: ‘which social standpoint vis-à-vis history offers the best chance for reaching an optimum of truth’ (Mannheim 1968:71)?

The proletarian as stranger 39 That all political and social knowledges are partial and partisan does not prevent their possible integration into a more comprehensive perspective; but this synthesis itself requires the emergence of a strategically intermediate, ‘third’ position between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The free-floating intelligentsia is precisely this intermediate, relatively classless stratum that is not too firmly situated in the social order, and on account of this relative marginality is oriented towards intellectual synthesis. Its social basis is sufficiently diverse to preclude its formation into a distinct social class; its common educational heritage serves to equalize various differences of birth, status, occupation, and wealth, and furnishes it with a uniquely transcendent medium of thought and action. The intelligentsia’s sociological particularity hence dictates its unique historical mission as ‘the predestined advocate of the intellectual interests of the whole’; it is the only force that can play the part of ‘watchman’ in the ‘pitch-black night’ of the ideologies and the utopias (1968:140–3). Mannheim hence reiterates the most salient epistemological characteristics of the ‘proletarian’ class standpoint for his own identification of the intelligentsia: its marginal condition entails distanciation, synthesis of contrasting perspectives, and hence ‘superior vision’; while it also inscribes a critical, emancipatory mission which presumes a substantive identity of interest between part and whole. One major difficulty in Mannheim’s conception is the lack of consistency (and of reflexivity) that prevents him from duplicating the connection between relative marginality and relative objectivity for the internal articulation of the intelligentsia itself: for the free-floating intelligentsia within the free-floating intelligentsia. A reflexive focus upon this secondorder marginality displaces the analytic emphasis from the ‘critical’ position of the intelligentsia vis-à-vis the main economic classes towards positional differences between marginal and established intellectuals, and towards the adversarial relationships between intellectual groups, currents, or schools.9 As Bauman has argued, Mannheim did not foresee or failed to take sufficient note of what might be called the ‘neolithic revolution of the intellectuals’, which in our century has turned previously homeless and freefloating subjects into established experts, consultants, and functionaries of the warfare/welfare state. In this process, the free intellectual does not disappear but becomes an exception: somebody who is at war not so much with a closed, parochial society as with ‘the parochiality of his better established, sated, and self-satisfied colleagues’. Increasingly, marginalized intellectuals are strangers not just in relation to the ‘natives’ and their dominant values, but especially ‘in relation to the fellow members of the knowledge class…the universality they seek is forged out of the opposition to that very particularity for which their own knowledge class…serves them as a prototype’ (Bauman 1991:91–3). In his subsequent writing, Mannheim admitted that he had not sufficiently distinguished between the socially unattached intelligentsia

40 The Intellectual as Stranger and other types of intellectuals; calling this an omission which had regrettably triggered some misunderstandings (1956:111). But his later essays likewise placed the analytical emphasis more squarely upon what unified intellectuals than upon what separated them; upon the intelligentsia as a collective type (e.g. as collective ‘renegade’ over against its classes of origin) more than upon specific types of intellectuals (e.g. renegades or dissidents); upon the transcendent reflexivity which was considered fundamental to every intellectual process more than upon the transcendent impulses of intellectual innovators. Mannheim also insisted more clearly later that the intelligentsia was a social aggegrate between rather than above the main social classes, and did not constitute an exalted stratum that could cut itself loose from its social moorings. The adjective ‘relative’ in ‘relatively free-floating intelligentsia’ was not an empty phrase (1956:104–6). But he continued to identify the intelligentsia as a ‘classless class’ which was strategically positioned for developing an impartial, neutral, and synthetic perspective. Mannheim’s loyalty to the basic premises of the Marxist model of class prevented him from viewing the intellectual and material interests of the intelligentsia itself in class terms, and hence to acknowledge the partisanship of the intellectuals in terms of exclusion and hardening of class-like social privileges (cf. Gouldner 1979). 10 Hence there is ample reason for the following emendation of his theory: intellectuals are not objective because, but in so far as they are free-floating: a variable condition, which involves not merely other classes or social groups but also their own (embryonic) knowledge class. While intellectuals may indeed float relatively freely visà-vis the constitutive interests of other social classes, they are normally strongly devoted to the interests, prejudices, and legitimations of their own social class. Thus Mannheim’s conception of the semi-detached intelligentsia, if radicalized in this fashion, similarly folds back towards a social epistemology of strangerhood. The stranger is the fringe member, who stands with one foot outside and another inside the group; he is the marginal man, who is forced to see critically rather than to participate directly, and accordingly learns to ‘see better and more’. Indeed, was not Marx a consummate stranger, thrice exiled, not even feeling at home in the London circle of German emigrés? And what about Simmel, the nonrespectable Jew in the Berlin haut monde, or Mannheim, the Hungarian exile who made his sociological name in Germany before having to flee to England? In Marx’s case, for example, it is hardly far-fetched to explain his accelerating intellectual and political radicalization in terms of a swiftly aggravating condition of estrangement, caused by a spiralling movement of external blockade and exclusion, which triggered inward resistances and self-exclusions, from which arose new blockades and exclusions, which in turn triggered new radicalizations, etc.11 Marx’s battle with the Prussian censorship before and during his editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung and

The proletarian as stranger 41 the obstruction of a future academic career after Bruno Bauer’s dismissal from the university in March 1842, soon lent his intellectual dissidence an uncompromising political edge, and charged his debates with his intellectual rivals (e.g. all the established and semi-established, old and young Hegelians, academic intellectuals and socialist party leaders) with the urgency of a ‘ruthless’ critique of ‘everything existing’. Marx was not only a stranger in Paris, Brussels, and London; he was also a stranger in Bonn, Cologne and Berlin; and he was a stranger not solely in the company of ordinary citizens and politicians, but also, and especially, in the company of his fellow intellectuals. The feminist stranger Intriguingly, the recent reinvention of the idea of ‘situated knowledges’ by feminist standpoint theorists (e.g. Haraway 1991; Harding 1991; 1992; Hartsock 1983) reaffirms some of the epistemological virtues but also repeats some of the indigenous flaws of the classical myth of the proletariat. Similarly arguing against the ‘view from nowhere’, feminists have recast the notion of objectivity (in Simmelian and Mannheimian terms) as a peculiar composition of nearness and remoteness or involvement and detachment, and have divorced the idea of objective knowledge from conventional ideals of value-freedom, neutrality, impersonality, and absence of interest (cf. Hill Collins 1986:15). Harding’s advocacy of a ‘strong’ partisan objectivity, for example, celebrates a vision which starts from the perspective of the dominated (in this case, ‘from the perspective of women’s lives’), which is taken to generate ‘less partial and distorted’ accounts than research that starts from the perspective of the powerful (Harding 1991; 1995). Feminist standpoint theory hence approximates a different version of the epistemology of marginality, in so far as women are accounted ‘valuable strangers’ to the dominant social order, and their distinctive position as generic ‘outsiders within’ is taken to generate a special type of disclosure of existing reality. In order to gain a critical view of the values and interests that structure dominant institutions, practices, and conceptual schemes, it is best to start from outside them, e.g. ‘to start thought from marginal lives’ (Harding 1992:581; 1995:342). It is remarkable, however, that feminist standpoint theory indulges in the same mistaken identity game as classical proletarian theory, in so far as it tends to conflate the standpoint of marginal intellectuals with that of the female subjects which they claim to represent and speak for. In a continual metonymic slippage between the broader category of ‘woman’ and the more restricted one of ‘feminist’, the historical subject is romantically embellished (or burdened) with properties of intellectuality and marginality which more nearly fit the self-image of the spokespersons themselves. In this respect, we may adapt Bahro’s critical

42 The Intellectual as Stranger gloss and say that feminist intellectuals have drawn an idealized picture of ‘the woman’, which actually referred to no one other than themselves. Ironically (especially in view of the gendered nature of the Marxian metaphor), the ‘head’ still indirectly rules the ‘heart’, in so far as women’s experiences and beliefs do not sufficiently legitimize a feminist standpoint, but must be processed by feminist theory and feminist politics in order to count as a standpoint in the first place (cf. Harding 1991:123– 4, 167, 286–7; Hartsock 1983:284–5, 302–4). De Man’s and Bahro’s comment that socialism was a doctrine both of and for the proletariat is quite uncritically echoed in at least one influential version of (black) feminism, which is said to consist ‘of ideas produced by Black women that clarify a standpoint of and for Black women…one role for Black female intellectuals is to produce facts and theories about the female experience that will clarify a Black woman’s standpoint for Black women’ (Hill Collins 1986:16, 24; 1991:22). Statements such as these clearly suggest that, rather than reflecting the standpoint of the ‘class’ of women as a whole, it is the peculiar situation of the female feminist thinker, her status as an outsider who operates in the centre, which generates the ‘double consciousness’ which provides standpoint thinking with its critical epistemological edge. Recent versions of feminist standpoint theory, especially where they have encountered the cross-cutting identity politics of race, and are distancing themselves from an exclusively gender-based perspective, are almost naturally drawn towards a generalization of the epistemology of strangerhood (see, more extensively, Chapter 7). In saying ‘farewell to Woman’ as an homogeneous ontological essence, feminism, like Marxism in its farewell to the working class, is shopping for new agents of history and knowledge (cf. Harding 1991:268ff), and finds them in the generically marginal and oppressed. In doing so, however, it still retains a tendency to intellectualize this condition of strangerhood (and hence surreptitiously to universalize the intellectual mode of life) in a manner that closely resembles the neo-Marxist drift from a materialist class theory to an idealist criterion of ‘correct consciousness’. Because women, it is argued, are treated as aliens by the dominant social institutions and conceptual schemes, their exclusion provides them with a special cognitive advantage. But once again it is feminist theory that must teach women (and men) how to see the social order from an outsider’s perspective, how to think marginally, how to ‘see strange’ (Harding 1991:125, 289). Critical theory thus precedes, defines, and validates the standpoint, which curiously reverses the orginal impulse of standpoint theory itself, according to which reflexive criticism is ‘enforced’ by a primordial ‘critical position’. Once again, consciousness is decisive, not situation or place. In their update of Machiavelli and Althusser, feminist standpoint thinkers have advanced from the idea that ‘one must be woman in order to know patriarchy’ to the more general proposition that

The proletarian as stranger 43 ‘one must be marginal in order to know the centres of power’. But in the end, they appear to trade this insight away again for the tautological and self-regarding suggestion that ‘one must be a feminist theorist in order to know better’. The social distribution of doubt It is sufficiently clear from the above that the parable of the proletariat, notwithstanding its intellectual camouflages and its unacceptable ontological pretensions, contains useful building materials for a reflexive social epistemology. This was also Karl Mannheim’s view, who traded the semi-detached proletariat for the semi-detached intelligentsia as privileged subject of knowledge and history, and partially absorbed the self-references of proletarian theory in a self-conscious intellectual elitism. It also defines the intuition of various feminist standpoint theorists, even though they appear to lack a Mannheimian awareness of the special outsidership of intellectual spokespersons vis-à-vis the larger category with which they identify—and with which they share the gendered condition of ‘being a woman’. In my critical exposition, I have followed the somewhat different option to generalize the epistemology of historical materialism along the axis of marginality and strangerhood, and to neutralize the intellectualist or ‘theoreticist’ presumptions which still invalidate both the Mannheimian and feminist extrapolations. This approach can now be summarized in a few tentative propositions. 1 All knowledge production is situationally determined and inescapably tied to a standpoint logic or a politics of location; moreover, all positions are partisan and perspectival, and hence deliver only partial knowledge. This radical positionality is a simultaneous source of epistemological opportunities and impediments: it both enables and limits what we can know. There is no disinterested ‘point zero’ that stands aloof from all struggle and conflict, which enables us to cognitively encompass the world with a universal, transcendent, and totalizing gaze. Even the relatively free-floating third position does not escape this contextualist dynamics; while partisans of the third position may well remove themselves from a specific partisanship and the knowledge interests which animate it (e.g. Mannheim’s intelligentsia in between bourgeoisie and proletariat), they do not escape the new interest which is defined by the third position itself (Pels 1996:288). This implies that the social theory of knowledge is still committed to inquire which positions offer a better view than others (the classical question initiated by Marx and Mannheim, and reposed by feminist and postcolonial thinkers) but must pursue this question in the sceptical awareness that there is no position without partiality, and thus no lucidity without blindness.

44 The Intellectual as Stranger 2 In order not to be read as a repetitive move which reinstates epistemological objectivism at a second-order level of explanation, this approach (as already urged in Chapter 1) should be reflexively qualified in a number of ways. First, of course, it is asserted as a normative/ descriptive counter-position against the traditional rationalist rhetoric of detemporalized truth and delocalized subjectivity, and hence stands out more clearly in its nay-saying quality than as a positive proposition. Secondly, radical positionality and perspectivism must simultaneously be adopted for the epistemological position which is defended in this book, which does not intend to jump over its own shadow or miraculously supersede its own referential frame. It consequently ‘suffers from’ a radical contingency which is also expressible in terms of a selfexemplifying or ‘question-begging’—and hence virtuous—circularity (cf. Herrnstein Smith 1997; Pels 2000). Thirdly, one needs to be alert to the intrinsic ambiguity and reflexive reiterability of terms such as ‘position’, ‘standpoint’, ‘situation’, ‘point of view’, ‘interest’, and ‘context’ across the whole range of permutations and derivations of the basic Marxian/ Mannheimian theorem about the ‘existential determination of thought’. Who indeed positions these positions, points out these standpoints or points of view, situates these situations, takes an interest in these interests, or textualizes (or cons!) these contexts? Terms such as these inevitably beg the question of the adequacy of attributive positionings who put others in their place in order to contextualize (and thereby justify or undercut) their motives, interests, values, and ideas. Otherwise put: there is no position and no interest without discursive definition, and the whole idea of ‘situated knowledge’ is necessarily complexified by the reflexive difficulty of how to define the situation for it. Who credibly explains the ‘existential situation’ which is taken in turn to determine (others’) thought? Who speaks for the social (context) and with what authority (scientific or otherwise)? How do such placings and positionings hold up in the whirlpool of classifications which people employ in their ordinary accounts and justifications? 3 In line with the above, I shall propose that ‘objectivity’ is not so much the product of the ruses and artifices of scientific method, which supposedly neutralize positional biases, but rather results from ‘lived’ or perceived distances between observer and object and the ‘natural’ or ‘visceral’ distanciations and abstractions which are engendered by it. Such objectifying distanciations—which have little to do with epistemological neutrality, but intriguingly mix detachment and attachment—occur in a great variety of forms and may increase or decrease as a result of horizontal or vertical mobility (e.g. of the traveller, the social climber, or someone sliding down the social scale) or mixtures of both (the Bohemian, the vagabond, the transsexual, the anthropologist afield, the spy in enemy territory). Flirting with objectivistic vocabulary, one may say that such distances are first of all

The proletarian as stranger 45 contextually ‘given’ and only subsequently (if at all) articulated, consciously adopted and methodized. On this account, Cartesian methodical doubt seems less a voluntary option which is universally and democratically available to all rational subjects, than a property or quality which is unequally distributed between concretely situated individuals and groups: in this sense, ‘lived’ social and psychological distances do indeed precede and define distanced theory. Intellectuals, however, present their doubt (or the lack of it) far more commonly as disinterested and freely chosen than as partisan and as dictated by their (limited) social and biographical experiences. The more fruitful question, however, is not how every rational individual can attain objectivity through invariant methodical procedure, but who are the ones that find themselves (define themselves, situate themselves) in an objectifying, detached position? Who feel themselves compelled to take distance? 4 Hence the need for a social (and psychological) epistemology of marginality or strangerhood. The stranger’s position is both critically partisan and objectifying, because (s)he occupies a position of ‘lived’ distanciation; (s)he scrutinizes and judges dominant values and beliefs in their systematic entirety from an outsider’s perspective. This suggests a rough established-outsiders model which emphasizes the indissoluble link between horizontal spatial distance (centre versus periphery) and vertical social distance (dominant versus dominated, propertied versus property-less). Marginality or ex-centricity is of course a variable and relational condition, both in a social-structural and territorial sense and in terms of the life course of individuals and groups (which may be marginalized by others and/or marginalize themselves; or which may establish themselves, conduct successful careers, assimilate, etc.). One may perhaps draw a continuum ranging from positions in the centre to positions of increasing outsidership, which is simultaneously a continuum of psychological attitudes, sentiments, and a prioris, and which defines the knowledge chances and blockades of individuals and groups in terms of their variable positionings across it (the ‘horseshoe model’ of the political spectrum which I will outline in the following chapters is one way of concretizing such an established-outsiders continuum). But once again we must avoid the objectivist quandary and remain reflexively wary of the essentially contestable nature of all positionings and self-positionings in terms of such concentric circles of establishment-outsidership or centre-periphery. As we shall see further on, established or dominant groups (e.g. relatively privileged academic intellectuals) may effectively pose as outsiders, swayed by a Bohemian romanticism which vindicates their self-congratulatory sense of promissory alienation. Centre and margin are not objectively identifiable places but performative definitions of the situation which admit of all the fluidity and theatricality of the ‘acting as if’.

46 The Intellectual as Stranger 5 Marx’s postulate of the ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’ represents itself as occupying the farthest extreme on an objectively scaled continuum of centrality/marginality. In taking this ‘proletarian’ critical standpoint for the royal road to scientific objectivity, Marxists have committed the same fallacy as their neutralist ‘bourgeois’ adversaries. They have similarly presented a psychological or sentimental a priori, the product of a specific social location, as a methodological option, and by this transmutation have simultaneously camouflaged and legitimized it. In addition, the metonymic (and romantic) identification of the revolutionary intellectuals with their philosophical double, the Proletariat, effectively veiled their particular situatedness as ‘outsiders within’, which is a third position that is not only distant from the dominant centre but also in some appreciable way differentiated (if not ‘estranged’) from the dominated periphery itself. The proletarian intellectuals never contemplated the true strangeness of their interstitial location between margin and centre. If marginality can be said to offer ‘better’, more ‘objective’ vision, it is this second-order or elite marginality of intellectual spokespersons who have sufficiently appropriated and savoured the cultural capital of the centre in order to be able to apply it critically, and to articulate their biographies of ‘outside’ marginal experience in terms which transform the official canon from the inside. This applies to male intellectuals of white lowermiddle class origin in their struggle against the technocratic academism of their own ‘knowledge class’, just as it does to female intellectuals in resistance to the exclusionary practices of male scientific ‘insiderism’, or to black intellectuals who are working their way up against the prejudices of a white cultural establishment. 6 Another pregnant suggestion which is offered by the parable of the proletariat is that understanding reality and understanding oneself are often produced by the same ‘vital need’, even though the Marxian dream about the utter self-transparency of the revolutionary subject and its unimpeded access to the ‘concrete totality’ is irreparably shattered. A truly empirical sociology of knowledge should take the experience of the inner world as seriously as the experience of the world ‘out there’, and acknowledge more fully that every form of world-description enunciates autobiographical elements. The spokesperson is always speaking about himself when (s)he speaks about others. This reflexive understanding is especially urgent with a view to the crucial lack of self-awareness that invalidates the proletarian myth, which makes the positional and epistemological interests of the intellectuals evaporate into metaphors, in a vanishing trick which has transformed their narrative of the proletarian revolution into a self-effacing and thus ‘alienated’ autobiography. 7 If there indeed exists a structural linkage between marginality and distanciation, an old question still waits for an answer: is the margin

The proletarian as stranger 47 epistemologically privileged? Does the stranger see more than the established citizen, the people more than the Prince? Minimally, one may assume that different knowledge positions and knowledge interests produce different vision: if we do not see better from the margins, we do indeed see differently, and we do see different things. The spectral ‘law’ of social distanciation dictates that the centre only becomes visible in its entirety and systematicity from an ex-centric position. Here we find at least some warrant for an epistemological ‘praise of marginality’, since it is safely assumed that social and conceptual innovation (in the sense of revolutionary, code-breaking change) is born at the margins and is ‘carried’ by strangers: those who feel uncomfortable and out of place in the current order of things, and muster sufficient energy and stamina to reinvent themselves against all odds and, in doing so, manage to reconfigure the entire positional field. The margin is the place where distance from inherited conceptualizations and settled norms is sufficiently large to enable them to be criticized as a system, as a comprehensive and coherent pattern of rules, norms, and beliefs. The centre, on the other hand, is the locus of ‘conservative’ creativity, of ‘normal’ or incremental change, and of stagnation. But the same rule which states that the established have difficulty in viewing themselves from a distance, also predicts that marginals themselves remain comparatively blind to what is nearest and closest to them: the margin itself. Both knowledge positions and thought styles suffer the advantages and liabilities of their different location. Both are easily lured towards translating their particularity into generality or even universality. From this perspective, it is clear that both established and outsiders need to acknowledge that they cannot easily monopolize the logic of intellectual innovation, which rather requires an incessant rivalry between their different forms of stubbornness and prejudicial styles of work.12 In the following chapter, I will address a contrasting way of speaking for the social, which does not attempt to totalize a particularist standpoint or to re-centre a putatively marginal position, but precisely represents the objectivist truth-teller as a universal subject and as an advocate of methodological distanciation and careful neutrality. Far from being a standpoint thinker, Durkheim was precisely castigated for promoting a holistic, consensualist, and intellectualist project of disciplinary sociology and reformist socialism by radical critics both on the left and right who argued from a more militant proletarian or nationalist perspectivism. Being identified (and identifying himself) with the republican-democratic centre of French politics, Durkheim was challenged by a sustained polemic coming from intellectual outsiders situated at opposite extremes of the political spectrum, who celebrated the objective marginality of the collective entities they claimed to speak for (the dispossessed but

48 The Intellectual as Stranger potentially revolutionary working class, the dispirited Nation in the grip of cultural decadence) as promising a greater objectivity of vision, a firmer moral certainty, and a more immediate grasp of the concrete ‘sensuality’ of the social whole than was offered by the dry rationalism of the new positivist social science.

3

Speaking for social things Sociology and socialism in Durkheim, Sorel and Barrès

What indeed is a thing? Emile Durkheim The very concept of totality is but the abstract form of the concept of society: that whole which includes all things, that supreme class under which all other classes must be subsumed. Emile Durkheim

The project as object Ancestor-worship, or the cult of the great dead, is as common in the history of sociology as in that of any other secular religion. The myth of the city’s founder is essential to the mythology which justifies its existence and renders its identity secure. Tracing one’s lineage to an inaugural and heroic past, naming great names, reciting past battles, is to underwrite and vivify tradition; the spiritual communion with its heroes enhances the solidity and worthiness of one’s current enterprise. The legend of the founder certifies the citizens’ proprietary claims to their collective domain, protects the built-up area of their institutions, and disciplines their domestic mode of production. By setting present concerns into the past tense, it invariably mingles descriptive storytelling with normative justification.1 Now tradition has it that Emile Durkheim was one of a legendary generation that founded sociology as a distinctive and positively grounded science of society. Durkheim, it is said, transformed sociology from a speculative into an empirically based doctrine, clearly delineated its field of application, and codified its method of impersonal objectivity. Since Durkheim, sociology exists as a recognized academic discipline and learned profession; it was Durkheim who classically instituted it as a science of social facts, of rigorous definition, and of systematic and cumulative theorizing. In grateful acknowledgement, Durkheim has sometimes been celebrated as the ‘complete sociologist’; and elements of this laudatory image have become entrenched in disciplinary sociological folklore far into the twentieth century. 49

50 The Intellectual as Stranger The legitimizing legend woven around Durkheim has tended to focus upon three strategic and closely-knit conceptions. First, that scientific sociology is demarcated from ideology and common sense by means of a principled distinction between explanation and evaluation, or between the work of knowing and that of transforming social reality.2 Secondly, that there exists something like ‘society’ as an ontological sui generis reality which sociology may rightfully claim as its distinctive subject-matter. And thirdly, that there is available an impersonal method of generalizable doubt which neutralizes everyday ‘prenotions’ in order to provide direct access to these social realities and accurately reflect them ‘as they are’. It is this trinity of disciplinary beliefs which has long defined the core elements of the classical view of professional (as opposed to lay) spokespersonship for the social. Since the early 1970s, however, a critical counter-tradition has arisen which has successfully challenged this holy trinity. It has been argued, although with varying degrees of radicalism, that such iconic convictions did not so much represent context-free intellectual discoveries which justified the institutionalization of sociology as an autonomous discipline, but largely rationalized a prior strategy to establish a new project in an already crowded intellectual field; i.e. that these methodological and ontological principles themselves derived from a knowledge-political will to carve out a domain, a method, and a repertoire of problems for sociology which were peculiarly its own, and which promulgated its unique relevance to social and political practice (Clark 1973; Filloux 1970; 1977; Giddens 1977; Karady 1979; Lacroix 1981; Lukes 1973; 1982; Tenbruck 1981). Whereas scientific and institutional rivalries are usually thought to derive from prior differences of doctrine, it is plausible to argue that much of the substance and form of these Durkheimian principles is instead attributable to the historically specific rivalries which Durkheim engaged in when claiming for his sociological enterprise a place in the intellectual sun (cf. Pels 1998a:147ff). Let me summarize this critical case in my own, admittedly rather radical, terms. First, the demarcation of sociology from ideology in terms of the value-fact polarization appears to have less substantive than polemical purchase. On inspection, it is wielded as a passepartout device for eliminating miscellaneous rival creeds: not only Comtean ‘speculative’ sociology or Spencerian individualism, but also conventional morality and ethics, classical political economy, traditional political philosophy, socialism, and communism are dismissed one after the other as being mistakenly concerned with ‘what should be’ rather than ‘what is’ (Durkheim 1958:39–40, 51–2; 1965:31; 1970:84–5, 137–8, 151, 225; 1982:60–2, 68, 160). Moreover, Durkheimian sociology itself can reasonably be suspected of practising the very same mixture of science and ‘art’ which it so stringently censured in its competitors; the ruling distinction between understanding and transforming the world is

Speaking for social things 51 continually challenged and transgressed in the performative deep structure of Durkheim’s major conceptions and propositions.3 In this sense, Durkheim’s project is political through and through (Filloux 1977; Lacroix 1981). It is also arguable, on the second count, that Durkheim’s ‘discovery’ of society was conditioned in no small degree by sociology’s prior need for an object which would legitimize its distinctive cognitive efforts and establish its disciplinary independence. In a suggestive formula, Tenbruck has described this reversal as ‘the birth of society from the spirit of sociology’. In his view, the assumption that sociology is the privileged science of the social is traceable to a set of tacit presuppositions which actually prefigure or preconstruct the object; ‘society’ is not so much discovered as it is deduced from the prior territorial and knowledge-political demands of Durkheimian sociology (cf. Cormack 1996:85; Donzelot 1984:77; Lacroix 1981:62ff; Tenbruck 1981:343–5).4 Tenbruck also signals another, perhaps even more ponderous intellectual claim. If sociology is to be characterized as the study of a social reality sui generis, the sociological project may easily overextend beyond the assertion of territorial independence to the conquest of neighbouring lands. As is further documented below, sociology may confidently pose as the generative matrix of all the other sciences of man—a ‘master science’ which rightfully issues conquistadorial claims and forcibly invites the other human disciplines to sociologize (and socialize) themselves (Tenbruck 1981:247n; cf. Pels 1998a:126ff).5 Thirdly and finally, Durkheim is also among the first to break his own methodical rule (which immediately derives from the fundamental precept to consider social facts as things) that ‘one must systematically discard all preconceptions’ in order to view social facts as strange (1982:36–7, 72). The very distinction between ‘ideas’ and ‘facts’ or between definitions de concept and definitions de chose which populates his writings is seen to rest upon untenable positivistic assumptions (cf. already Alpert 1939:116), and reinforces an imperious rhetoric of demarcation between science and ‘common sense’.6 The emphatic distinction between ‘things sui generis’ and ‘mere verbal entities‘ (cf. 1951:310) conveniently occludes that these ‘things’ are themselves verbally or discursively construed by the sociologist. Seen from this reflexive perspective, Durkheim’s universalistic Cartesianism easily papers over a rather selective distribution of doubt and certainty, of blindness and insight, of questioning and complacency. It includes a methodical refusal to doubt the idiosyncracies, infrastructural sentiments, normative commitments, and practical prejudices which are implicated in the production of its own object. Following a Foucaldian track, we might hence conceive of this disciplinary project as simultaneously an instrument and effect of power, as a discursive regime which enunciated and justified specific terms of intellectual self-assertion and organizational power play. The object (‘society’, ‘social facts’) is constituted as the correlative of a particular will

52 The Intellectual as Stranger to know; its essential features ‘correspond to the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth’ (Foucault 1978:98; cf. Rose 1999:112–19). Affirming the new science’s disciplinary autonomy, this discursive politics simultaneously concealed the very object which its discourse sets out to reveal. Policing its own statements, and disciplining them by means of its ‘rules’, it effectively repressed the autobiographical elements of emotion, ambition, and political passion which were present at its inception, and which continued to feed it with subliminal energy. As Bourdieu recalls, sociology (at least in France) was born from a central contradiction or misunderstanding. Durkheim’s strained effort to lend sociology a ‘pure’, purely scientific and neutral image, turned it from the beginning into ‘an ambiguous, dual, masked science; one that had to conceal and renounce its own nature as a political science in order to gain acceptance as an academic science’ (Bourdieu 1993:27–8). The object of Durkheimian sociology, one might also say, was a reified expression of its personal, professional and political project (cf. Lacroix 1981:62ff; Pels 1998a:153, 274n). In critical retrospect, it would therefore be more interesting to view sociology as performing a distinctive project than as being in possession of an object which it can distinctively call its own.7 An artful science This ‘alienated’ performance of the social by incipient sociology, which resulted in a splitting-and-inversion of its project and object, is concisely illustrated in the first chapter of Durkheim’s thesis on Montesquieu, which was originally written in Latin and published one year prior to De la division du travail social, it is significantly entitled ‘The Conditions Necessary for the Establishment of Social Science’ (Durkheim 1965 [1892]). This text offers a package of programmatic statements which one finds scattered all over Durkheim’s early writings, but are here presented in highly concentrated form. Its general outline can quickly be summarized as follows. In order to be ‘true to its proper nature’, science must be separated from ‘art’; and only this separation will provide it with a real and certified object. Science studies what is rather than what should be; it does not act but contemplates. It distances itself from sentiment, spontaneity, and considerations of utility. It is not pressed by urgency, but progresses in patience. It concerns itself not with ‘inner states’ but with ‘the veritable order of things’; and its method is equally fitted to the nature of the things studied as to the exigencies of science itself. It is only after this composite demarcation that science and ‘art’ may be recombined; indeed sociology, thus purified, is expected to furnish the only proper basis for it. A discipline does not deserve to be called a science, Durkheim begins to say, if it lacks a definite field [objet] to explore. Science is concerned with things, realities. If it does not have definite material [donné] to describe

Speaking for social things 53 and interpret, it exists in a vacuum…Before social science could begin to exist, it had to be assigned a definite subject matter… each science must have its own specific object; for if it shared its object with the other sciences, it would be indistinguishable from them. (Durkheim 1965:3, 8; cf. 1970:87,143; 1975a:23, 38) Evidently, sociology here discursively manufactures its own object as an imprint of its will to autonomy, and immediately reifies it as a natural reality. It first gives itself what it subsequently takes as given, transforming its capta into data which are objectively available in the external world.8 This inversion is repeated in the methodological view that science describes the facts by classifying them ‘according to their natural distinctions’, defining them in such a manner that their essence is revealed; and that its further task is to causally interpret or explain these facts by bringing out their law-like interconnections: To interpret things is simply to arrange our ideas about them in a determinate order, which must be the same as that of the things themselves. This presupposes that an order is present in the things themselves, that they form continuous series, the elements of which are so related that a given effect is always produced by the same cause and never by any other…Hence, a choice must be made: either social phenomena are incompatible with science or they are governed by the same laws as the rest of the universe. (Durkheim 1965:10; cf. 1975a:16, 140; 1982:74–5) Until very recently, Durkheim argues, disciplines such as social and political philosophy have not been able to consider social facts as things which possess their own objective characteristics and regularities; they continued to see them as somehow dependent on human volition. In obedience to this idea, philosophers sought to know not the nature and origin of social phenomena, not what they actually are, but what they ought to be; their aim was not to offer us as true an image of nature as possible, but to confront our imagination with the idea of a perfect society, a model to be imitated…Whether they completely disregard reality or pay a certain amount of attention to it, they all have a single purpose: to correct or transform it completely, rather than to know it. They take virtually no interest in the past and the present, but look to the future. And a discipline that looks to the future lacks a determinate subject matter and should therefore be called not a science but an art. (Durkheim 1965:4)9

54 The Intellectual as Stranger Once again, the Is/Ought criterion is harnessed to the quest for sociological independence, while ‘art’ (i.e. practice, morality, ideology, politics) functions as a blanket formula for everything that social science is not (or should not be). It is enamoured with ideas instead of attending to facts, it depends upon prejudices and vital needs, it is future-oriented, and it is hasty in its judgements. True science, in Durkheim’s conviction, cannot rush to conclusions: Art is action; it is impelled by urgency, and whatever science it may contain is swept along in its headlong rush. True science does not admit of such haste. The fact is that whenever we have to decide what to do— and such decisions are the concern of art—we cannot temporize for long; we must make up our minds as quickly as possible because life goes on. (Durkheim 1965:5–6) If science remains chatteled to practice, it can only improvise, operate without method, offering nothing but doubtful probabilities which carry authority only because they agree with our personal feelings and spontaneous inclinations. It is evident to Durkheim that our likes, dislikes and desires form nothing but obstacles to our reflection. True science, by contrast, attaches itself not to mere states of mind but to the factual order of things: Science is so different from art that it can be true to its own nature only by asserting complete independence, that is, by applying itself, in utter disregard of utility, to a definite object with a view to knowing it. Far from public or private debate, free from any vital necessity, a scientist must pursue his endeavours in the peace and quiet of his study, where nothing impels him to press his conclusions beyond what is justified by his evidence. (Durkheim 1965:7) However, this initial separation between science and ‘art’ does neither imply that science is completely absent from it (all art incorporates a certain amount of science) nor does it preclude that, ultimately, science can be converted into something practically useful. Indeed, the sharper the distinction, the more useful science can be to art; ultimately, only science is capable of determining what a healthy state of society consists of (1965:7– 8). In The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim repeats that one might pass from science to art ‘without any break in continuity’ since art is only the extension of science; adding in his unfinished manuscript ‘Introduction à la morale’ that ‘there is no science worthy of the name which does not issue in art: otherwise it would be mere play, intellectual distraction, pure and simple erudition’ (1982:87; cf. 1964:33–4; 1970:142–3; 1975b:317).

Speaking for social things 55 There is therefore some justification in concluding that Durkheimian sociology is an ‘artful’ science in more than one sense of this term. First, it is presented as being ultimately continuous with art; the initial break is performed in order to more effectively bolster the claim for a scientifically informed morality and politics. But there is also a deeper sense—which remained largely occluded to Durkheim—in which elements of ‘art’ (sentiment, interest, valuation, politics) seep into the epistemic infrastructure of Durkheim’s most prominent concepts and propositions. Perhaps one should therefore not censure some of them (such as science, solidarity, religion, or socialism) because they entangle or mix (up) value and fact (cf. Giddens 1977:266; Richter 1960:170), but rather because they are not explicitly offered as such performative mixtures, as definitions of normative facts which partly anticipate and even co-produce what at first view they only appear neutrally to describe. If, then, sociology contrives to speak for social facts in such a manner that social facts speak for themselves,10 it is burdened from the very outset by a spokespersonship problem which is effectively comparable to (if not identical with) that which resides in the Marxian conception of the invisible workings of capitalism and the historical mission of the proletariat. If it is not deemed important ‘what the individual proletarian or the class as a whole pictures as its goal, but what it is in actuality, and what according with this being, it will historically be compelled to do’ (Marx and Engels 1972:105),11 the scientific spokesperson claims a privileged form of access to this deeper actuality and this historical being which remains categorically barred to ordinary actors. Marx’s confident declaration that ‘scientific truth is invariably paradoxical from the standpoint of everyday experience, which can only observe the deceptive appearance of things’ (1973:129) is matched by Durkheim’s equally confident intention to explain social life ‘not by the conception that those participating in it have of it but by those deeper causes that elude consciousness’ (1986:132)—but which similarly except the more detached contemplation of the scientific sociologist. In Durkheimian social epistem/ontology, this spokesperson problem is concentrated in the intriguingly complex category of ‘things’ or ‘social facts’. To consider social phenomena as things is the same as saying that one should consider them ‘in themselves’, from the outside, detached from the conscious beings who form their own mental representations of them. Social science must liberate itself from the fallacious notions which hold sway over the mind of the ordinary person (l’esprit du vulgaire) (1982:36, 70, 73). Being the opposite of both ideas and ideals, ‘things’ are not immediately accessible to the mind but are invisible and recondite. Adequate knowledge of them requires one to step outside of oneself, to make tabula rasa of one’s own and other people’s prenotions, which are imbued with subjectivity and passion and hence are ‘without any scientific value whatsoever’ (1982:35–8; 1970:158–9). Like the Baconian Idols,

56 The Intellectual as Stranger idea(l)s are like a veil that is interposed between the things and ourselves, which conceals them even more effectively because we believe them to be transparent. That is to say that things or facts must also be confronted as strange and unknown entities (choses ignorées) in the face of which one must exercise a radical doubt and distanciation (1982:36, 61, 72; 1958:55). In the present state of our knowledge, we simply do not know with certainty what the state, sovereignty, family, property, morality, economic organization, political freedom, democracy, socialism, or communism actually are (1958:40; 1982:65). Hence if there exists such as science as sociology, ‘it can only be the study of a world hitherto unknown’ (1951:310; 1970:159). Proclaiming a social entity to be ‘thing-like’ is therefore to engage in a precarious double game of social representation and disciplinary advocacy. The pious admission of extensive ignorance (and the disparagement of all lay knowledge of the social world) inaugurates, presupposes, and effectively demands an equally extensive deployment of scientific sociological energies. The sharp rupture from common sense is proclaimed in the same breath as is the certainty that the object is made objectively available for scientific investigation. Describing social facts as both invisible and strange is to have them virtually clamour for sociology to do them the honour of a scientific explanation; while the postulate of an independent realm of social facts shores up the independence of the science that is uniquely positioned to know it. These data, I have suggested, are entities which the sociological spokesperson affords himself—and which are not so readily given to others. What ‘is offered, or rather forces itself upon our observation’ (1982:69) is also something which is discursively forced upon laypersons and rivalling social professionals. In this fashion, Durkheim’s rules of method offer a classical instance of dispossession/repossession of entities by an absent spokesperson for the invisible social, whose findings are takings or tokens which are fetishized into scientific facts.12 The stratified project Durkheim’s project, we notice, is a partially repressed one, and that is why it is transsubstantiated into an object. Apart from the will to distinction which is evident in the demarcation between science and art, the will to autonomy which induces the discovery of the object, and the will to certainty which results in the proclamation of universal rules of sociological method, there is also a will to transform all these wills into something different and more objective. In consequence, the will to know which produces the discourse of sociology is a composite and stratified affair. Let me first concentrate on a significant knowledge-political strand, which is revealed by noticing Durkheim’s systematic hesitations regarding the scope of application of (his) social science, which continually oscillated between the modest study of the part and the less

Speaking for social things 57 modest appropriation of the whole. ‘Society’ referred to relations and institutions intermediate between polity and economy, while simultaneously inscribing the social totality under which both political and economic relations were to be subsumed. This ambiguous delineation of the object, I argue, reflected a basic ambiguity in the project, serving the double aim of both affirming and occluding the sociological ambition to impose itself as a ‘master science’ in a contested and rapidly changing intellectual field. This ‘dialectical’ oscillation between part and whole was never halted or resolved, fuelling a form of sociological imperialism which wedged itself between the two older and competitive imperialist projects of political economy and political philosophy. Despite the perceived inadequacies of the Comtean vision of sociology as science maîtresse, Durkheim clearly conceived of his own enterprise as a more sophisticated successor to it (cf. 1975a:158–9).13 A 1903 article, written in collaboration with Fauconnet, for example, sought to reconcile two territorial claims which at first sight appeared mutually intolerant. Sociology, the authors contended, was both a generic science of social facts and a distinctive science with a special object and a proper individuality. Although Durkheim viewed this as a retreat from the grandiloquent ambitions of Comte, his reservations did not so much bear upon Comte’s penchant for generality and comprehensiveness as upon his indifference to detail and specialized research. Scientific progress, he insisted, demanded the dissolution of grand questions into a growing number of special questions, ‘in order to ensure the co-operation of different minds and successive generations’. Only on this condition would sociology acquire the collective and impersonal character without which scientific research could not proceed. Our business was to overcome the grave inconvenience of theories which remained attached to the personalities and temperaments of their authors. If each thinker remained encapsulated in his own doctrine, all division of labour, all continuity of research and, consequently, progress would be rendered impossible (1975a:128, 144). In a subsequent programmatic article, sociology was similarly characterized as the corpus of the different branches of the science of mankind, of which there existed as many as there were different kinds of social fact. Sociology was not an encyclopedia, as Comte had envisaged it, but a synthetic science which brought together the general conclusions of all the particular sciences; and since all of them studied social facts, there was room to investigate what established the unity of the genre, what characterized ‘the social fact in abstract’ (Durkheim 1970:146–7, 152). Durkheim went on to distinguish between a social morphology, which occupied itself with the substrat social (an amalgam of social geography and social demography) and a social physiology, which was subdivided into religious, moral, juridical and economic sociologies; these constituted the principal branches of sociology (1970:150; 1975a:20ff, 113). Elsewhere he

58 The Intellectual as Stranger argued that ‘special sciences’ such as political economy, the comparative history of law, religion, demography, and political geography should no longer be considered as independent realms in isolation from one another, but should be treated as branches of a science unique which encompassed them all ‘and to which one gives the name of sociology’, signalling ‘a profound renovation of all the sciences which take the human realm as their object’ (1975a:32–5). It is here that we most explicitly encounter the double ambition to establish both an autonomous research tradition and to make an imperial bid for a unified science of society which demanded the integration into one system of ‘all the special disciplines which have an essentially sociological character’ (Durkheim 1975a:167). A master science, in order to advance but simultaneously to conceal its expansive territorial claims, typically defines its object hesitatingly, dialectically, permitting a continual slippage between a partial and a total object and project (Pels 1998a: passim). It was not surprising that the task of shuttling between these ontological levels and of enforcing the new division of intellectual labour befell on sociology, which legitimately set the terms and parameters for whatever specialization there was going to be. Special activities, as Durkheim argued, currently developed in an unconscious manner and were insufficiendy organized. It was sociology which provided them with ‘a sense of their solidarity’; to organize their division of labour constituted sociology’s veritable calling (1975a:113, 158– 9, 168–9). The Durkheimian project, I have presumed, incorporates different strands, which can perhaps be systematized by briefly distinguishing between three analytic layers, ascending from a personal level through the pedagogical or ‘ecclesiastical’ one towards the platform of ‘big’ politics. First, there is the naked force of ambition: the private demon that urged Durkheim on, that lent him his sense of grandeur and historical mission, and infused him with an adventurous, conquering intellectual spirit. Sheer ambition, or the drive to excel, constitutes a crucially significant productive force, both in the field of theoretical as in that of practical innovation—and one which is scarcely thematized as an independent variable in the social psychology of knowledge. We need to account for the amazing perseverance, force of energy, and singlemindedness of Durkheim, who consecrated and sacrificed both himself and others to the cause of establishing a rigorous science of social facts. This quasi-religious or missionary quality of Durkheim’s personality was commented upon by many observers; among them, Hubert Bourgin’s portrait surely remains the most memorable one. 14 But if Durkheim was the ‘warfaring and battling Priest’ of which Carlyle speaks (1974:152),15 We must realize that such characters do not spring fully-armed from Athena’s forehead. We need to know what makes them so, and how they acquire their demon. This question is compounded as soon as we dig up another layer in the

Speaking for social things 59 project, that of the pedagogical drive, or the will to found a school. Bourgin has recalled that even at the time when the sociological school ‘counted only one individual, its creator, it was already a school’ (1938:215). As suggested before, Durkheim’s theoretical system positively invites (if not forcibly demands) such an organizational project, and derives much of its intellectual significance from this subliminal ‘scholarly’ appellation. The expanding Durkheimian school swiftly generated what is known as l’effet de la chapelk, accelerating the flywheel of its collective enterprise through developing an internal ‘state system’ and a foreign policy, by breaking into new academic territories, by ritualizing its language and methodical procedures, and by entering upon and sustaining organizational rivalries and demarcation battles. We need to remind ourselves of the rather similar reactions which the Durkheimians elicited from critics as diverse as Péguy, Espinas, Izoulet, Deploige, Agathon, Besse, or Bourgin, in order to recognize how ecclesiastical and political their collective enterprise must have looked when viewed from the outside (cf. Bourgin 1938:91; Clark 1973:162, 193–4; Lepenies 1985:49ff; Lukes 1973:306n, 363ff). Filloux has similarly argued that Durkheim’s original project was inseparably pedagogical and political, being galvanized by a strong missionary desire which accounted both for the doctrinaire allure of his thought and for the particular social vision which it contained. His entire teaching revolved around the misery of the isolated individual and the plenitude and warmth of group life. But if Durkheim had such a strong will ‘to teach men to find their veritable existence in the Group’ (Filloux 1977:1, 34– 49), what did this signify for Durkheim as an individual? As a final strand in the project, we may refocus Durkheim’s reformist will, or his drive to recombine sociology and ‘art’ in a vision of a scientifically grounded politics that anticipated a rational resolution of the social question. This vision was already critically spelled out by Bourgin, who not only described Durkheim as a moralist and a secular priest, but also disparaged him as a Saint-Simonian legislator and socialist (1938:219). As interpreters such as Giddens, Lukes, and Filloux have elaborated— countering an entrenched interpretative tradition which has accentuated the conservative implications of his thought—Durkheim’s original project was focused upon a redefinition and reconciliation of both liberal individualism and socialism, with a view to rethinking their foundations and presenting sociology—or the science of social solidarity—as a more scientifically reliable alternative to both. Like Jean Jaurès, Durkheim saw a revised socialism not as the opposite but as the logical completion of individualism; it would be the task of sociology to supersede these polarized perspectives in order to develop a scientific programme for remaking society in accordance with the ‘nature of things’ (cf. Lukes 1973:326).16 Or, as I have argued elsewehere, in setting his sights upon ‘the social’ as the privileged object of sociology, Durkheim rather envisaged a

60 The Intellectual as Stranger ‘third object’ intermediate between the market (the traditional province of political economy) and the state (the traditional object of political theory); while simultaneously supporting a political project of corporatist intermediation which negotiated a ‘third way’ between the existing projects of liberal individualism and socialist or nationalist collectivism (Pels 1998a:147ff; cf. Boltanski and Thévenot 1991:347–56). Socialism as object and project La sociologie sera socialiste ou ne sera pas. Enrico Ferri Le socialisme sera sociologique ou ne sera pas. Alfred Fouillée

In the following, I intend to elucidate my previous contentions about the epistemology and politics of speaking for the social by attending to some of the breaks and continuities which operate between sociological ‘science’ and socialist ‘art’. Despite the force of its initial demarcation from socialism, Durkheimian sociology, as many commentators presently agree, is less scientific and more socialist—and both more intriguingly so—than its author would have been willing to concede (cf. Filloux 1977; Gane 1992; Giddens 1982; Gouldner 1958; Lukes 1973; Muller 1993; Pearce 1989; Pels 1984). The definitory contrast between sociology and socialism once again clearly exhibits the Durkheimian will to intellectual power: the need to draw sharply hierarchical boundaries vis-à-vis rival doctrines, the ritual institution of a new domain and a new nomenclature, and the quest for an incontrovertible methodical foundation. The initial distinction, and the refusal to admit socialism’s scientific status, represented moves in a complicated game of definitory inclusion and exclusion which legitimated a double act of dispossession of current socialist ideology and the appropriation of its intellectual ‘capital’ by sociology. Like the broader epistemological separation between science and art, Durkheim’s definition enacted a splitting rhetoric which exiled personal, professional, and political concerns from scientific consideration, while simultaneously channelling his ambition to reappropriate socialism and sociologically improve upon it: to draw the foundations of a socialism that was nonproletarian, non-egalitarian, and non-revolutionary, and as a result, was taken to be uniquely scientific. It was the job of science, Durkheim insisted in a familiar voice, solely to describe and explain what is and has been, not to speculate about the future. Socialism, on the contrary, is entirely oriented towards the future. It is above all a plan for the reconstruction of society, a program for a collective life which does not

Speaking for social things 61 exist as yet or in the way it is dreamed of, and which is proposed to men as worthy of their preference. It is an ideal. (Durkheim 1958:39, 51–2) While formally doubting the feasibility of a scientific socialism, however, Durkheim never denied the possibility, nor did he renounce the expectation of a rational or ‘positive’ foundation of morality and politics. As Bourgin correctly saw, socialism was meant to be ‘the social and political art which complemented the social and political science which was constituted by sociology’ (1942:73). The real point of Durkheim’s distinction therefore appeared to be that the practical doctrines of his age insufficiently expressed ‘what is or has been’, and failed to base their envisaged reforms on laws which were discoverable through rigorous sociological observation. Above all, the socialist solution was dismissed as premature’, socialism had simply not taken the time to conduct a careful investigation of reality: It aspires to a complete remolding of the social order. But in order to know what the family, property, political, moral, juridical, and economic organization of the European peoples can and ought to be, even in the near future, it is indispensable to have studied this multitude of institutions and practises in the past, to have searched for the ways in which they varied in history, and for the principal conditions which have determined these variations. And only then will it be possible to ask oneself rationally what they ought to be now—under the present conditions of our collective existence. But all this research is still in its infancy. (Durkheim 1958:40) Socialism, the hasty science, was seen to precipitate itself towards radical conclusions, whereas sociology maintained its circumspection in the face of a reality which it conceded was largely unknown. Calmness and moderation thus constituted scientific virtues par excellence; and socialism was not so much rejected because it was a theory of reform, but because its statements were categorical and its ambitions totalist; because its underlying sentiment was revolutionary. This was where the true accent seemed to fall: socialism was identified with a complete remoulding of the social order and seen as entirely poised towards the future; whereas sociology’s sentiment was basically reformist and forbade one to rush to conclusions—a preference which was not recognized as a product of political sentiment or temperamental prejudice but was thought equally derivable from the ‘nature of things’ as from the ‘nature of science’ itself.17 Closely related to this was Durkheim’s view that socialism was a set of ‘prenotions’ rather than a detached expression of facts—a conviction

62 The Intellectual as Stranger which, we noticed, was generously extended towards political economy, political philosophy and sundry rival creeds. Socialism was above all a product of passion, of feelings of justice, of moral sympathy and the like: it was ‘a cry of grief, sometimes of anger, uttered by men who feel most keenly our collective malaise’. Like individualism, socialism was ‘above all a ferment which affirms itself, although it may eventually ask Reason for reasons with which to justify itself. That is why it should be looked upon as a symptom of social illness, not as an adequate diagnosis of it; doctors, Durkheim’s revealing metaphor ran, should not accept the groans of a sick man as scientific truths. As a ‘cry of collective anguish’, socialism should itself be considered as a fact, not as a scientific formulation of facts; it was not a product but an object of science (1958:41–2). To consider something as a fact or thing, of course, was Durkheim’s favourite way of saying that we should detach ourselves from its outward appearance or our acquired notions about it, and face socialism as ‘a thing we do not know, as a type of unexplored phenomenon’ (1958:55). Our commonly accepted notions of it were inconstant and contradictory, and only wedged themselves ‘between us and things’. Casting the sociologist and the socialist in the roles of doctor and patient, and deprecating socialist common sense as distorting the facts, was of course simultaneously to shore up the alternative reformist prenotions of sociology. Hubert Bourgin, in an effort to justify his defection from what he called ‘socialo-sociologie’ as well as from socialism, clearly cornered such prejudices of Durkheim and his disciples: The regulatory and universal but evolutionist and reformist socialism of Durkheim did not constitute the culminating point of a sociology which was construed without preconceived idea; on the contrary, it was the preconceived idea which determined, sollicited, and engendered Durkheimian sociology. (Bourgin 1942:78) The problem of the definition of socialism was therefore resolved by an intricate piece of circular rhetoric, the upshot of which was to introduce Durkheim’s own conceptions as logically and scientifically inescapable.18 Among the ‘commonly accepted’ notions which ‘wedged themselves between us and things’ were at least three which Durkheim was anxious to dismiss as logically, empirically, and morally deficient. First, the idea of socialism as a negation of private property was considered too broad, because ‘our economic organization’ itself already worked towards the restriction of absolute property rights, and because the elimination of inheritance, far from constituting a denial of the idea of private ownership, instead embodied its full realization. Secondly, the idea of socialism as a ‘narrow subordination of the individual to the collectivity’ was rejected because this subordination was in a sense characteristic of all community life; additionally, it was not characteristic of all

Speaking for social things 63 socialist doctrines—anarchism offering the most notable exception. Thirdly, Durkheim rejected the identification of socialism as a movement for improving the condition of the working classes through the introduction of greater equality in economic relations. Equality, he argued, was not a prerogative goal of socialists, since economists had also concerned themselves with it. In addition, the pursuit of equality was more radically premeditated in communist systems, which could not be regarded as a simple variant of socialist ones. And finally, socialism went ‘beyond the working-man’s problem’ because it was only of secondary significance in systems such as those of SaintSimon or those of the ‘academic’ socialists (Durkheim 1958:57ff; 1975c:169). Such eliminative arguments, which can be sampled throughout Durkheim’s writings, automatically privileged the conception which was left standing (cf. Lukes 1973:31–3; Richter 1960:189). If socialism was not definitionally tied to the liquidation of private property, if it was not collectivist but left ample room for individualism, if it was not proletarian or geared to the attainment of economic or political equality, socialism was adding up to something which sociology might look upon with sympathy. The most conspicuous ‘fact’ informing the new definition was offered by the anomic state which in Durkheim’s view unbalanced modern liberal society, i.e. the state of incongruence which resulted from an absence of connection between a hypertrophied state and the unruly and diffuse character of an unorganized economy. Departing from his own baseline of functional moral solidarity in a normal state of society, Durkheim regretfully observed that economic activity took place mainly outside of the collective consciousness as it was represented by the state. His definition of socialism clearly intended to remedy this anomic situation: We denote as socialist every doctrine which demands the connection of all economic functions, or of certain among them, which are at the present time diffuse, to the directing and conscious centers of society. (Durkheim 1958:54, 56) Although this definition made a gallant bow before the demands of generality (‘all the doctrines ordinarily called socialist agree on this claim’), Durkheim’s own preferences were immediately apparent. First, it was obvious that the comprehensive character of the definition was only saved by the demotion of possibly divisive contrasts (such as that between ‘mediate’ and ‘immediate’ connection) to a secondary place. The wish to reconnect economy and polity did not imply that every action should issue from the latter. On the contrary, it was natural that it received from it as much as it gave it. The idea of continuous communication between the ‘social brain’ and the economic functions was therefore immediately qualified towards an ideal of equal interchange, and thus tended to single out the mediate or corporatist form of interaction as preferential. The

64 The Intellectual as Stranger qualifying clause ‘or of certain among them’ revealed a similar purpose. The covert significance of this clause was that only some economic functions should be attached to the state while others reverted to secondary centres such as the corporations (Filloux 1977:267). Underscoring the necessity or naturalness of a fundamental reciprocity between state and economy (the key concept of organic solidarity was itself strongly imbued with this norm), Durkheim ruled a centralized state socialism out of court: ‘Socialists do not demand that the economic life be put into the hands of the state, but into contact with it’ (1958:56).19 Third way socialism Our salvation lies in socialism discarding its out-of-date slogans or in the formation of a new Socialism which goes back to the French tradition. I see so clearly what this might be! Durkheim to Léon 1915

Durkheim’s phrasing makes it quite evident that the very generality and neutrality of his definition actually supported a positive valorization of the ‘third way’ socialism which was envisaged by it. Since all the various socialist schools were animated by the same general spirit—a ‘fact’ which Durkheim’s definition was designed to reflect—it could no longer be seriously brought against socialism that it offered the confusing spectacle of a ‘multitude of irreconcilable Churches’. His early adoption of Schäffle’s corporatist socialism and its defence against the views of theorists such as Fouillée and Belot, who interpreted socialism as the opposite of individualism and as neccessarily centralist and despotic, evidenced a similar partisanship (Durkheim 1970:66, 179). The same political motive subtended Durkheim’s distinction between socialism and communism. In part, it was meant to combat the ‘confusion’ of orthodox economists who disparagingly but mistakenly equated socialism with a resurrection of primitive communism. According to Durkheim, however, ‘far from being a retrograde step, socialism as we have defined it really appears part and parcel of the very nature of higher societies’ (1986:120). But his discussion of communism also repeated the eliminative and splitting rhetoric with which we are already familiar. Communism, it was proclaimed, considered private property as the major source of social evil and selfishness, and strove for its complete abolition, whereas socialism ‘touches private property only indirectly, to the degree required to change it so that it may harmonize with the economic arrangements’. In similar fashion, the abstract and totalizing character of communist thought was unfavourably contrasted with the concrete and empirical temper of socialism. Egalitarian and revolutionary socialism stood condemned, while meritocratic and reformist socialism was quietly incorporated into the project to which sociology held the key (Durkheim 1958:72; Filloux 1977:283).

Speaking for social things 65 Hence socialism, to Durkheim, was essentially a movement to organize; it was a process of economic institutionalization and regulation which aimed at the conscious pilotage of economic forces by the ‘knowing and managing organs of society’. Amelioration of the workers’ fate was only one goal that socialism derived from the economic organization it wanted, just as class war was only one of the means by which this reorganization could result. Durkheim’s own moral conviction of course dictated that class conflict was unfortunate and abnormal, and that the working man’s problem was secondary and derivative, and had to be solved by different means. The crux of the issue, in his view, was the inability on the part of workers ‘to do business directly with society’ as a result of their dependence upon the capitalist class. The only means of tempering its subjection was to moderate the power of capital by introducing another force of equal or superior strength, which could only issue from the state (Durkheim 1958:60). While Durkheim thus went so far as to envisage a complete suppression of the ‘medium of the capitalist’, he did not sufficiently trust the working class to take its own interests in hand. Doubting the fullness of its dedication to the general interest, he claimed that the State embodied it as a matter of definition. What workers desired, Durkheim argued, was ‘to be no longer kept at a distance from the centres presiding over collective life but be bound to them more or less intimately’. Material changes were merely one form and result of this projected rapprochement, and greater economic equality was secondary to and resultant from greater organization. In sum, socialism was not to be conceived in terms of Louis Blanc’s tried formula about ‘the organization of labour’: it was economic organization tout court (cf. Filloux 1993:221; Pels 1998a:152–3). The definition of socialism, in other words, accommodated two different types or currents: a ‘socialism from below’ or workers’ socialism which reached towards the highest regions of society, and a ‘socialism from above’ or state socialism which reached downwards. At root each was only an extension of the other, implying each other as different aspects of the same need for moralization and organization. Among them, state socialism easily presented itself as the most congenial and logical expression of the genus of socialism itself. In telling fashion, Durkheim himself was led to explain the different attraction of either type from the different place which was occupied by the theoretician: the point being whether the latter was ‘in closer contact with workers, or more attentive to the general interests of society’. On this level, therefore, the reversal of Marxism could not be more complete. It was not the state that would whither away as soon as private property was abolished through the working class’ revolutionary effort. On the contrary, the mission of the state was to circumscribe private ownership, discipline the capitalist class, and draw the proletariat into its regulatory orbit. Still, it would be to misrepresent Durkheimian socialism if too much emphasis would be

66 The Intellectual as Stranger placed upon this etatist strand. What emerged from his writings was a case for a managerial, technocratic and corporatist socialism which envisaged a restoration of the corps intermédiaires between individual and state, and a dual concentration of important economic and political competences in the hands of these professional corporations (Gane 1992; Pels 1998a:152). While proposing an ‘organic’ division of labour between state and a corporatively organized civil society, the division of powers between the two levels expressed basic values of reciprocity, interdependence, and social solidarity. As Lapie sensed as early as 1894, Durkheimian socialism was grounded in the solidarist project which already lay ensconced in De la division du travail social, a book which not simply presented a scientific account of the historical emergence of organic solidarity, but simultaneously included a political plea to institute it (Lapie 1894). In sum, Emile Durkheim has not been the anti-socialist thinker that interpreters such as Coser (1960), Nisbet (1966; 1974), Parsons (1968), Therborn (1976), or Zeitlin (1968) have made him out to be—who for various reasons, and coming from different intellectual backgrounds, largely took for granted Durkheim’s own demarcation of sociology from socialism.20 This myth of the conservative origins and pathos of Durkheim’s thought has conveniently united both conservative sociologists, conflict theorists and Marxists, who invested in this demarcation either to justify a particular conception of sociology, or to defend a preferential form of socialism.21 A different picture emerges as soon as Durkheim’s reformist zeal and socialist leanings are taken more seriously, and his boundary-work is accordingly seen as expressing a deep and unresolved ambivalence towards current socialist theory and practice (cf. Richter 1960:188).22 This is also Filloux’s view. Durkheim, he remarks, could hardly remain neutral in front of this particular object. While his ‘sociology of socialism’ on the one hand marked the distance between the reformist project of sociology and revolutionary socialist doctrine, socialism also stood at the origin of the sociologist’s vocation, as an inevitable compagnon de route, a competitor who was at the same time a natural ally (Filloux 1977:259–60, 304ff). From this perspective, Durkheim’s social and political theory might better be characterized as a French version of ‘academic socialism’, which closely approached and resembled the near-contemporary revisionist efforts of party- and movement-based intellectuals such as Jean Jaurès, Eduard Bernstein, and Hendrik de Man. It offered an outwardly detached, sociological version of some of the main themes that were broached in works such as Sombart’s Sozialismus und Soziale Bewegung (1896), Bernstein’s Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (1899), Jaurès’ Etudes socialistes (1902), Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society (1921) or de Man’s Zur Psychologie des Sozialismus (1926). This revisionist thematic was perhaps most explicit in Durkheim’s 1899 review of Merlino’s Formes et essence du socialisme—even though

Speaking for social things 67 he merely repeated some of the convictions which he had arrived at as early as 1886 when reading Schäffle’s Quintessenz des Sozialismus, which anticipated the revisionist critique of socialism by almost two decades (Schäffle 1894 [1874]).23 Here Durkheim restated his ambition to liberate the socialist idea from a number of contestable and obsolete hypotheses which compromised it, in order to realign it with recent scientific advances. Such impedimenta included the doctrine of historical materialism, the Marxist theory of value, the iron law of wages, the primordial significance of class conflict, and the notion that the social question was identical with the question of the proletariat. Following Merlino’s distinction between a socialisms des socialistes and a socialisms des choses, which neatly harmonized with his own distinction between ideas and things, Durkheim stated as a matter of principle that this ‘objective’ socialism of ‘things’ had nothing to do with the spirit of revolution, but only intended to develop and augment what was already in existence (Durkheim 1986:136ff).24 Apparently, this reformist socialisme des choses was the socialism of one who still preferred to be known as a social scientist. Durkheim’s attitude towards official socialism always remained ambivalent. On the one hand, as Mauss recalls, the young Durkheim adopted a socio-political point of departure ‘through personal inclination and in an atmosphere animated by political and moral interests’, and never lost his fascination for the social question. His early contributions to the Revue philosophique all revolved around the socialist problematic; in that period, he consistently defended Schäffle’s ‘authoritarian’ and corporatist socialism against mis-translations and misinterpretations. A 1893 ‘Note on the definition of socialism’ (Durkheim 1986:97ff) was expanded into a lecture course conducted in 1895–6 on Sismondi, Saint-Simon, and the Saint-Simonians (Durkheim 1958). It would have been supplemented by courses on Fourier and Proudhon, which Durkheim prepared for the academic year 1896–7, and by courses on Lassalle, Marx, and German Kathedersozialismus. The project was abandoned in 1896, when Durkheim founded l’Année sociologique, but he always regretted the interruption. On the other hand, the scientific-sociological critique of socialism is likewise traceable to early beginnings. The original plan (1881) of what would finally be published in 1893 as The Division of Labour in Society was entitled ‘Relations between individualism and socialism’, which was altered somewhat later into the more neutral and ‘thinglike’ caption ‘Relations between the individual and society’, finally to turn into ‘Relations between the individual and social solidarity’ (Durkheim 1984:14; Filloux 1977:14).25 As Mauss reports, Durkheim, in the course of writing the first draft of The Division of Labour, gradually came to see that the solution of the ‘abstract’ problem of the relationship between individualism and socialism ‘belonged to a new science, sociology’. Thenceforth, he chose to consider the doctrine of socialism ‘from a purely scientific point of view, as a fact which the scholar

68 The Intellectual as Stranger should look upon coldly, without prejudice, and without taking sides’; it became a matter of ‘explaining an ideology’ (Mauss 1958:33). However, it is arguable that this change of subject title and the dropping of both ‘isms’ reflected not so much a change of interest or subject-matter as a change of intellectual tactic. The shift from a politically motivated comparison of rival ideologies to a scientific apprehension of social facts was to some extent diversionary, since the relationship and possible synthesis of both ‘isms’ remained Durkheim’s lifelong preoccupation. Perhaps, therefore, Durkheim’s ‘scientific imperative’ can also be viewed as rationalizing the ambiguous situation of not being able to take sides in well-demarcated sociopolitical terrain. Mauss records that, in spite of his sympathies for socialism, Durkheim ‘never gave himself to it’, being repelled by organized socialism’s ‘violent nature, its class character—more or less purely working-men’s—and therefore its political and even politician-like tone’.26 While defiantly carrying l’Humanité, the socialist daily founded by his friend Jaurès and by pupils such as Lévy-Bruhl, Simiand, and Mauss, to his lecture courses at the Sorbonne; contributing to socialist journals such as the Notes critiques-sciences sociales; and being generally seen as ‘a certain kind of socialist, with a particular allegiance, that of the Jaurèsian reformists’ (Bourgin 1942:75; Clark 1973:188–90; Lukes 1973:320ff), Durkheim remained at best a fellowtraveller, a ‘politician without party’, who always refused to submit to the discipline of a political movement. Nevertheless, it would be to misread and misjudge Durkheim if we would adopt his own view that this commitment was nothing but a scientific one. As Mauss argues, the course on socialism satisfied not simply an intellectual, but also a moral demand. Durkheim ‘sought to take a stand and to justify it’, undertaking these studies to ‘justify himself in his own eyes, in those of his students, and one day in the eyes of the world’ (Mauss 1958:35). For Mauss, motives such as these appear merely to have influenced the offering of the course, not to have determined its method or content, or its dual knowledge-political objective of scientific distanciation from an imperialist absorption of socialism by sociology. However, Durkheim’s commitment was not simply to science but to a broader moral and political project which was reified into a scientific object in order to serve the ‘original accumulation’ of intellectual and professional capital. Like Marx and Weber, he ultimately did not (wish to) choose clearly between the vocation of science and the call of the political. The existential plight of the fellow-traveller, the sympathizing but reticent outsider, was rationalized into a posture of value-free detachment. The outsider’s commitment, however, is not the abolition of partisanship but a different form of it. The difference is gradual, not polar. Durkheim refrained from joining the socialist camp because he felt his priorities were differently arranged: his was a will to gain intellectual or academic rather than political power, a will to found a school rather than a state. Or at least he felt that the school should be founded first (cf. 1970:110).

Speaking for social things 69 Anti-intellectuals of the left and the right As we have amply seen, Durkheim’s spokespersonship for the social was not derived from a particularist standpoint, but emphatically insisted upon the universalist, non-perspectival, and neutralist authority of a scientific discipline which axiomatized the ontological unity of social reality, the integrity of scientific method, and the disembodied transparency of the epistemic subject. Its epistemic, pedagogical, and political project was carefully reified into a scientific object. But closer inspection of course revealed that Durkheimian sociology did feature more particular impulses and contextual groundings, being doubly interested in the institution of sociology as the new master science of a solidarist morality, and in supporting the ‘centrist’ democratic and liberal socialism which was gradually establishing itself as the dominant political force in the French Third Republic. In the context of the present argument, it may therefore be of interest to extend and round off my discussion of Durkheimian reformist social scientism by positioning this centrist position in a wider spectrum of intellectual and political options which flanked it on the left and the right. More particularly, I wish to pay attention to two variants of a more intransigent and revolutionary ‘standpoint’ argument which explicitly ranged themselves against it: the articulation of an uncompromising proletarian syndicalism by Sorel and his followers on the left, and the parallel and mirror-like articulation of a first ‘national socialism’ by anti-Dreyfusards such as Barrès and Maurras on the radical right (cf. Curtis 1959; Feuer 1971; Pinto 1984). The Dreyfus Affair, of course, not only spawned the classical figure of the universalist intellectual, who confidently embodied la vérité en marche (Zola 1995), but it was simultaneously the incubation time of the particularist ‘anti-intellectual intellectuals’ of the left and the right (Bering 1978; Lepenies 1985:49ff, 71ff). It marked the birth hour of what has been described as one of the most fascinating phenomena of the twentieth century: the battle of intellectuals against intellectuals (Nolte 1965:80). Intriguingly, both anti-republican movements were explicit in loudly opposing themselves to the pernicious influence of Intellectuals—a broadly delineated category which tended to include not merely artists, professionals, teachers, and academics (especially those attached to the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the ‘new’, equally left-leaning Sorbonne), but also described the left-liberal political establishment, which was suspected of being heavily influenced by the new interventionist master science of sociology and its imperialist pedagogy. In Durkheim’s own thinking, of course, the roles of intellectuals and politicians were not seen as strictly autonomous either. We have noticed earlier that social science was explicitly viewed as continuous with and oriented towards practical ‘art’; Durkheim’s political theory symmetrically included both an ‘intellectualist’ conception of the state and a distinctly ‘statal’ definition of the role of sociology. Identifying it as the intelligent command centre of a

70 The Intellectual as Stranger complex corporative hierarchy, Durkheim had described the state as the ‘social brain’, or the ‘organ of reflection’ which principally functioned to articulate the spontaneous psychic life of society. Enjoying a relative autonomy from the collective consciousness, its task was to concentrate and organize its diffuse sentiments and representations and raise them to a higher level of reflective clarity: statal reflection was essentially organized thought (Durkheim 1992:50–4, 79–80). Even if the task of the sociologist was formally differentiated from that of the statesman (Durkheim 1970:280; 1984:1), this view of the state as ‘collective intellectual’ minimally suggested that sociological enlightenment was indispensable to it. A similar suggestion exuded from Durkheim’s earlier-cited view that the state naturally embodied the general interest, as opposed to particularist groups such as the propertied bourgeoisie or the working class. When it was defined as ‘the sum total of social entities that alone are qualified to speak and act in the name of society’ (1986:45–7), this was of course not too far removed from the putatively holistic calling of sociology itself. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Durkheimian sociology was widely perceived as an intellectuals’ socialism of the centre, which cultivated a natural alliance with the solidarist project of the new ‘enlightened’ republican state.27 Solidarism, indeed, had developed into something like the official social and political philosophy of the Third Republic, galvanizing liberal and Dreyfusard reformers such as Bourgeois, Waldeck-Rousseau and Clemenceau (all of whom became prime ministers of the Republic), reformist socialists such as Jaurès, philosophers such as Renouvier and Fouillée, jurists such as Duguit and Hauriou, economists such as Gide and Walras, and sociologists of the Durkheimian denomination (Hayward 1959; 1960; 1961; 1963; cf. Donzelot 1984). The key text for this semiofficial hegemonic doctrine was Bourgeois’ La Solidarité (1896) which, partly because of the eclectic vagueness enveloping its central concept, rapidly circuited through and conquered the liberal intellectual and political establishment (Bourgeois 1896; Bourgeois et al. 1902). Directly influenced by Durkheim, Bourgeois proposed a naturalistic conception of social solidarity which was grounded in the fact of mutual social association and interdependence but simultaneously expressed an ineluctable law of social progress, and hence also grounded a moral imperative which was discoverable through scientifically guided reason. The description of social solidarity as already ‘essentially’ existent in the moral fabric of modern organic societies immediately implied a normative preference for the condition of social homogeneity as the normal one. For Bourgeois, as for Durkheim and Jaurès, this science-based social reformism was explicitly allied to a liberal socialism which attempted to open a third way between state collectivism and laissez faire individualism (Bourgeois et al. 1902:34, cf. 25, 44–5). From both the radical left and the radical right, this liberal socialist project was sharply criticized as a decadent and bourgeoisified ‘socialism of the

Speaking for social things 71 intellectuals’, which had to be countered either by an intransigent workers’ socialism or an equally intransigent and revolutionary ‘national’ socialism. Both radical counterpositions included a decisive rejection of neutrality and universalism in favour of an alternative particularism of class or nation which, if extrapolated towards moral and epistemological issues, also tended to support an alternative ‘classist’ or nationalist form of relativism.28 As we shall see in closer detail in a later chapter, these extremist anti-bourgeois positions also displayed a tendency to drift towards each other; rather than lying at opposite ends of a linear spectrum running from left to right, they can be more suggestively seen as being located at the tips of a political-ideational horseshoe—and thus as sharing a fringe location in relation to the ‘bourgeois’ centre which allowed for curious crossovers and unexpected coalitions between formal intellectual antipodes.

Figure 2 The French constellation

For the Sorelian left, the ‘normative fact’ of social solidarity as defined by the centre (cf. Hayward 1959:280) was both sociologically inexistent and morally pernicious; it had to be superseded by the equally normativefactual axiom of the essential Solidarity of class division and class struggle. In reviewing Durkheim’s work as early as 1895, Sorel claimed that (Marxist) socialism, in refusing to separate the analysis of the division of labour from class formation, added a crucial factor which was systematically neglected by the sociologists. Thanks to class theory, the socialists did not ascribe goals to imaginary entities, to ‘needs of the collective soul’ and other ‘sociological stupidities’, but to ‘real men associated in groups acting in social life’ (Sorel 1895:24). Younger Sorelians such as Lagardelle, Péguy, and Berth only deepened the rift with

72 The Intellectual as Stranger the solidarist establishment by insisting ever more radically upon the essential autonomy and self-sufficiency of the proletarian class and its need to effect a rigorous break with bourgeois culture. In a famous dispute between Lagardelle and Durkheim in 1906, the former argued that the class struggle (‘the mother of socialism’), presupposed a division of society into homogeneous blocks of people who shared an economic, moral, and intellectual infrastructure: this could be called ‘social insolidarity’. The working class found itself in absolute and total antagonism towards modern society: the ideas of property, family and nation were entirely alien to it. As a class of producers, it stood at the very centre of society; everything depended and rested upon it. If it would understand the deep antagonism between its productive role and the parasitism of the other classes, the class struggle would inevitably flare up (Durkheim 1970:282ff; Lagardelle 1907:107, 118; cf. Lukes 1973:542– 6). As Berth wrote in a similar mood around the same time, the working class did not at all view itself as part of a whole, but as constituting a whole in itself. It desired the total ruin of its adversaries, an absolute reversal of the bourgeois order and the creation of a workers’ order. Far from seeking to attenuate insolidarity, one had to deepen it, to pursue it to the very end in order to transform it into a veritable class war (cit. Duguit 1922:112). As the syndicalist view depicted the class unity of the proletariat as entirely analogous to national unities (cf. Sorel 1982:244), it was logical that Lagardelle, in his debate with Durkheim, insisted upon the danger of patriotism, claiming that the idea of the fatherland radically denied this imperative of class rupture. Although he allowed for a certain political patriotism on the part of the workers, the worker was first of all a producer and only secondarily a citizen; while the citizen incorporated himself into society, the producer had to separate himself from it (Durkheim 1970:284). In reply, Durkheim characteristically restated his own reformist view that the development of modern industry, rather than issuing from a ‘true malady of the social body’ was a product of normal development and did not necessarily disturb social harmony. In his view, the worker who was thus reduced to a producer represented nothing but an abstraction; there existed a moral and intellectual life in which the worker participated, which he could escape as little as he could escape from breathing the air around him (1970:285–6). As a prisoner of the Marxist materialist formula, Lagardelle seemed fatally forgetful of the factors of conscience, aspiration, and morality; bourgeois and workers lived in the same social environment and breathed the same moral atmosphere; whatever they thought of it, they were inevitably members of the same society and hence could not avoid being impregnated by the same ideas (Durkheim 1970:291). It is curious to note that, in both positions, the intellectual spokesperson tended to remain invisible behind the larger abstractions or

Speaking for social things 73 reifications which he claimed to speak for (the insolidary class of producers versus the solidary and functionally integrated social whole). Challenged by Durkheim, Lagardelle professed that his ideas were merely ‘the product of a spontaneous movement of the masses’, 29 and that intellectuals did not have a place in the autonomous movement of workers’ socialism. As a consequence, ‘the workers’ did not need to justify themselves before an intellectual such as Durkheim. An intellectual would not be able to understand their reasons; he could not have them pass exams (1970:287). As early as l’Avenir socialiste des syndicats (1898), Sorel had likewise connected the necessity of proletarian class revolt to a sweeping condemnation of all forms of intellectual spokespersonship and political representation. The root of the contemporary social hierarchy was the division of the workers into intellectuals and manual labourers, which had also driven a wedge between political professionals and the class which was represented by them. It was against this ‘representative dictatorship of the proletariat’ that syndicalists raised their protest. 30 The true vocation of the intellectuals was the exploitation of politics; a profession which was similar to that of the courtier and did not require any ‘industrial aptitude’. Intellectuals typically wanted to persuade workers that it was in their interest to bring them to power and accept the hierarchy of ability, which ended in subordinating the workers to politicians (Sorel 1921:55ff; 1976:79, 89, 93). At various turns, Sorel insisted that his own motivation was the very different one of a passionate love of truth and of an absolutely disinterested and selfless dedication to the proletarian cause, which squarely conflicted with the professional interests of intellectuals and politicians, including the ‘professionals of socialism’ (cf. 1921:63, 285; 1982:251n, 253).31 The revolution should be welcomed as a pure and simple revolt, where there was no place for ‘sociologists, gentleman-friends of social reform, or Intellectuals who embraced the profession of thinking for the proletariat’ (1972:169; cf. 1982:228, 244– 6). Lagardelle readily concurred that the intellectuals of socialism, like all other intellectuals, had only one thing in mind: ‘to realize the dictatorship of the Idea—and of the Idealists’ (1907:349). For the syndicalists, this starkly polemical antithesis between Intellectuals and Producers also entailed a standpoint-epistemological contrast between ‘abstract man’, the disengaged citoyen who had severed his ties with his social environment, and the ‘concrete’ worker in his workshop who still saw himself as firmly rooted in his social class. The intellectual was an abstraction incarnate, a ‘monster without entrails’, and the democracy which intellectuals envisaged was only interested in representing ‘pure minds, detached from all historical and natural bonds, hovering above Time and Space, lost in the contemplation of clear and distinct Ideas’ (Berth 1926:70, 73, 282–3). Berth gratefully adopted the Nietzschean idea—as elaborated in Sorel’s first book Le Procès de Socrate

74 The Intellectual as Stranger of 1889—that modern culture was a Socratic culture, being dominated by universalist science and of ‘theoretical men’, epitomized in Kantian epistemology and ethics, and most proximately incarnated by the sociologists of the Sorbonne.32 What was less accessible to the popular mind than such a transcendental idealism? Especially targeting the political socialists and anarchists, but effectively including all modernist intellectuals, Berth charged that these beaux-esprits understood nothing about the popular soul; they were decadents, profoundly ‘desocialized’ people who had lost all sense of social direction and all concrete knowledge of the social world (1926:285). The standpoint of the nation There are of course remarkable affinities between this self-styled ‘proletarian’ anti-intellectualism and the similar criticism of ‘abstract’ and ‘uprooted’ intellectuals which emerged on the anti-Dreyfusard right, where the concrete homogeneity of the proletarian standpoint was replaced by the equally concrete and homogeneous ‘standpoint of the nation’. Once again, the category of ‘Intellectuals’ functioned as cognitive weaponry in a particularist rhetoric against ‘Kantism’, humanism, and cold impersonal erudition (cf. Pinto 1984:27). It was sufficiently indeterminate to further the collective denunciation of a variety of professions (academic, financial, bureaucratic and parliamentary-political), which had settled as an essentially foreign and parasitic element within the national body. For radical-conservative writers such as Barrès and Maurras, as for the Sorelians, intellectuals were principally those who were convinced that society should be grounded on logic and science, and who accordingly failed to acknowledge that it actually developed according to laws which were foreign to human reason, being rooted in ancient dispositions which had been cultivated throughout the history of the nation as a cultural collective (cf. Barrès 1902:17; Sternhell 1985:274–5). There was no individuality to human reason, and no abstract humanity to man, since thought and moral experience were both rooted in the soil and the history of the fatherland. Closely repeating the syndicalist myth about the class gaining consciousness of its unique ‘personality’ and mission, Barrès specified that a nationalist was a Frenchman who had become conscious of this historical formation; nationalism was the acceptance of this cultural determinism (1902:10). This truth, Barrès was convinced, would never be understood by the ‘theoreticians of the University’ who were ‘drunk with an unhealthy Kantism’ and accordingly tended to judge everything in relation to universal moral imperatives. But absolute truth was simply not a thing of this world. These gentlemen had better discard grands mots such as ‘always’ and ‘universal’ and realize that they were first of all Frenchmen who were obliged to treat all questions in terms of the interest of France

Speaking for social things 75 (1902:34–5). The Dreyfus Affair was essentially an ‘orgy of metaphysicians’, a tumult raised by ‘aristocrats of thought’, who disdained the instincts of the crowd and judged everything in the abstract. The Dreyfusard intellectuals, or the ‘metaphysicians of sociology’ (1902:209) had made a mockery of France’s most revered social institutions and historical traditions. Their victory had elevated universalist Kantian morality to the status of an official state doctrine. Whereas it taught to see only an abstract, ideal man, always and everywhere identical to himself, one needed men who were solidly rooted in the soil, history, and national consciousness.33 Hence the necessity of a ‘national relativism’ which brought every cognitive and moral judgement in relation to France: What is truth? It is not so much to know things, but to find a certain point, a unique spot, this one, not a different one, from which all things appear to us in their veritable proportions. Let us be more precise. How I love that phrase by a painter who said: ‘Corot, that’s a man who really knows how to sit down’. I must sit down on the exact spot which my eyes require as the centuries have shaped them for me, on the spot from which all things arrange themselves according to the measure of a Frenchman. The ensemble of these just and true relations between the objects given and a specific human being, a Frenchman, represents French truth and justice; to discover these relations requires French reason. And the core of nationalism is nothing other than to know this point, to go and find it and, having reached it, to hold on to it in order to derive from it our art, our politics and all our activities. (Barrès 1902:12–13) This remarkably eloquent example of a nationalist perspectivism or ‘standpoint logic’ closely reiterated the syndicalist disqualification of the universal and its celebration of the concrete and the particular; while it also copied its total identification with the reified historical agency (the class, here the nation) which was singled out as the essential determinant of all intuition, valuation, sensibility, and articulate thought (Sternhell 1985:268). Like the Sorelians, the followers of Barrès and Maurras posed as absent spokesmen for a social-historical substance (the integrity of the national community, as represented by its Soil and its Dead, its age-old customs, its monuments and shrines) which was essentially capable of speaking for itself without intermediaries or representatives (‘we are the product of a collective that speaks in us’). Like them, they rendered themselves categorically invisible by adopting a splitting rhetoric which, in juxtaposing the hateful ‘intellectual’ to the supposedly benign quality of ‘intelligence’ (cf. Barrès 1902:44–5, 65), removed the generalized Other as far as possible from their own self-identity.34 History and Territory were

76 The Intellectual as Stranger viewed as imposing a ‘national discipline’ upon all thought and action, a self-explanatory ‘law of the race’ which drew the boundaries of a raison nationale beyond which real mutual understanding was unachievable. A true Frenchman was one who heeded ‘the call of blood and the instinct of territory’ (1902:88), and acknowledged that he represented nothing but an outgrowth of the nation’s material, cultural, and racial history. This identity was described as being menaced from all sides by strangers or déracinés: immigrants (such as the Dreyfusards Zola and Psichari), protestants, freemasons, official state moralists, academic intellectuals, and representatives of the haute finance—all of whom could be conveniently concentrated in the category of the nomadic Jew (cf. Nolte 1965:164–5, 170). Since no truth or justice could exist except within the boundary of the same species or race, the strangeness of Jews such as Dreyfus sufficiently ‘proved’ that they were capable of treason (Barrès 1902:152).35 As one of those putative strangers, Durkheim was anxious to demarcate his universalist and liberal-socialist position from this nationalist standpoint logic. Replying to the right-wing publicist Brunétière, who had accused the Dreyfusard intellectuals of cultivating an irresponsible and anarchic individualism, and of concealing it behind grand phrases such as Science, Truth and Method, Durkheim defended the legitimacy of a form of moral and cognitive individualism which was sociologically grounded but nevertheless was still universalist in orientation (Durkheim 1970:293ff; cf. Lukes 1973:335–7). In other debates, such as that which opposed him to Lagardelle, he defended patriotism as a legitimate expression of the highest form of organized society currently in existence, while rejecting all forms of chauvinism which elevated France above all other nations in order to celebrate the nation as a rigorous, absolutely binding unity. The patrie could never be the extrapolation of a single class, since a single organ could never constitute more than a fragment of an organism; but neither could it be identified with a single nation at a time when it was gradually extending into a European patrie or even a patrie humaine (1970:294, 299–300). This view remained close to the Solidarist conception of the fait-nation and to Jaurès’ advocacy of workers’ emancipation within a national framework which was defined by the social-individualist and cosmopolitan legacy of the French Revolution.36 Against this background, it is perhaps less surprising that the left-and right-wing extremes ‘touched’ each other in the aftermath of the Dreyfusard upheaval, leading to an unprecedented coalition between ultraleft and ultra-right thinkers and a remarkable synthesis of revolutionary ‘proletarian’ and ‘national’ socialism which spawned what has been called the first modern fascism (Nolte 1965:104; Sternhell 1996). For disillusioned Dreyfusards such as Sorel, Péguy or Berth, the social-liberal victory had merely confirmed the rise of a new republican aristocracy, a new elite of intellectuals (Sorel 1910); and as they increasingly came to recognize that the revolutionary proletariat could not be expected to sever

Speaking for social things 77 the bonds of nationality, they inevitably drifted closer to those nationalist revolutionaries who, like Barrès, consistendy advertised themselves as national socialists whose calling was to protect the French working class against the encroachments of foreign (‘Jewish’) capital, foreign intellect, and foreign parliamentarianism, and who wished to integrate it more closely into the national community (cf. Barrès 1902:64, 429ff; Curtis 1959:49–50; Sternhell 1985:205ff; Stewart Doty 1976:153ff).37 Gravely menaced by this plutocratic ring, France had effectively become a proletarian nation; and her mission was to combat this foreign invasion in her own body and mobilize the national solidarity of all classes against it. This idea of a proletarian nation, which (like anti-semitism, the myth of ‘production’, the cult of heroism and élan, and the homology between Work and War) offered such a convenient conceptual crossover route from left to right, remained only incipient in Barrès and Sorel. It emerged in fully articulated shape in the writings of Italian followers of Sorel such as Michels, Labriola, Panunzio, and Olivetti and those of Italian revolutionary nationalists such as Corradini, Prezzolini, and Mussolini, for whom the idea of fusion of the anti-capitalist class war and of antiimperialist national resistance reflected a more acutely critical political situation (Gregor 1979a:119ff, 152ff, 179–80; 1979b:71–3; Roth 1980:69ff). It was also present in those of Berth, who in the early 1910s collaborated with the Maurrasian Valois in establishing the Cercle Proudhon, an association which explicitly intended to create intellectual links between Sorelian syndicalism and the new nationalism of the Action Française (cf. Berth 1926:84, 292n, 355). From that moment onwards, the concept enjoyed a remarkably fruitful career, being transplanted from French and Italian proto-fascism to the most radical of the ‘conservativerevolutionary’ thinkers of the Weimar Right (cf. Zehrer 1931),38 and entering into the political vocabulary of wide range of national-socialist currents, sects, and parties, including Niekisch’s National Bolsheviks and the Strasserite left in the NSDAP (Schüddekopf 1972; Sontheimer 1978). It also defined one of the lineaments of néosocialisme, a patriotic and stateoriented revisionist current which broke off from mainstream democratic socialism in France during the 1930s under the leadership of Marcel Déat, who had begun his career as a Durkheimian sociologist and a Jaurèsian socialist, but had also absorbed the intellectual influences of Sorel, Barrès, and—importantly—de Man (Déat 1930:96; Goodman 1973; Sternhell 1996:23–4, 142ff).39 Looking back over this chapter, I have identified three different ways of speaking for the social (a centrist-reformist view and two radical left-wing and right-wing perspectives) which, notwithstanding their dramatic differences, all departed from an identitarian logic of social representation which tended to hide the representer from view. The Durkheimian spokesperson, by ruling that social facts should be treated as things, identified with a universalist logic of objectivity which offered a neutrally-

78 The Intellectual as Stranger detached and privileged lookout point which remained out of reach for ordinary observers, whose mundane sentiments and sectional interests were thought to interfere with an accurate and unbiased representation of the social whole. I have called it an ‘alienated’ performance of the social, because it entailed the artful substitution of a scientific object for an original knowledge-political project, which resulted in the reification of social reality as a box of facts which did not require a spokesperson to make themselves present. The underlying scholarly, pedagogical, and political drive which energized this project was taken to originate in—and here my criticism fraternizes with the ‘unmasking’ exercises of the contemporary standpoint theories of the Sorelian left and the Barrèsian right—the positional interests of a rising stratum of ‘intellectuals’ who aligned themselves with the broader liberal-socialist agenda which was emerging as the hegemonic ideology of the French Third Republic. The standpoint theories of class and nation, however, despite their explicit support for the unique cultural perspective and political interests of a ‘particular’ social agent, similarly managed to let it speak for itself without the need for professional intermediaries. In addition, they likewise defined it as the privileged part that already contained the whole in embryonic fashion and legitimately shouldered the mission to realize this totalizing essence in historical time. The convergent left-right unmaskings of the centrist position as an intellectualist one, i.e. as one that essentialized science, truth, and justice, were therefore matched by and predicated upon alternative essentializations of the historical agencies of Class and Nation. Aided by this three-cornered comparison, we may discern a peculiar mirror play with the tropes of alienation and strangerhood and the epistemological significance of situated knowledge. For Barrès and the nationalist intellectuals, situatedness was explained in terms of acceptance of one’s national grounding, while the uprootedness of the generic ‘alien’ (Maurras’ barbares and métèques, or Barrès’ déracinés) was identified as an unproductive, epistemologically and morally sterile condition. But contrapuntally—and this observation would seem to be generalizable to other instances of nationalist xenophobia—there played an equally powerful subtheme about the alienated condition of the Nation itself, whose core identity was viewed as lying under acute threat from both internal and external forces (cf. Curtis 1959:198ff), and whose essential part/whole (what Maurras and his followers referred to as the pays réel as opposed to the pays legal) carried the redemptive calling to supersede this pathological and ruptured condition and restore the national Demos to its essential harmony. In addition, there was a lingering awareness on the part of these ‘counter-intellectual’ spokespersons about the significance of their own alienation in face of the liberal-democratic establishment in Paris (cf. Barrès’ lyrical embrace of the soil and ‘soul’ of his native Lorraine), and of the epistemological privileges and moral duties which were conferred by this specific form of (up)rootedness.40

Speaking for social things 79 This ambiguous insider/outsider constellation is not too dissimilar from that which is encountered in Sorelian thought, where ‘bourgeois— intellectualist’ alienation from the proletarian reality of production defined an ‘abstract’ condition of moral decadence and cognitive sterility, while good Marxian doctrine of course also emphasized the ultimate promissory calling of the proletarian class (and the privileged consciousness of its spokespersons) as issuing with necessity from its generic alienation from the capitalist productive system. It is interesting to include the third party in this comparison, since the democratic intellectuels negotiated a different but equally intricate balance between establishment and estrangement. Rejecting the stigma of being déracinés, they preferred to see themselves not as social strangers but as désinteressés, who grounded their scientific professionalism and its supplement of humanist moral-political engagement upon (the presumed superiority of) universalistic values of truth and justice, which were certified through a generally accessible method of estrangement which, according to Durkheim’s formula, made available social facts not in terms of a particular perspective, standpoint, or project but as objective ‘things’, to be grasped by an abstract knowing subject. The ‘reduction’ of Durkheimian positivism to its underlying knowledgepolitical project, as I have undertaken it here, does at first view seem to rely upon a version of the situated knowledge argument; but naturally, as I have tried to clarify in the first chapter, I have no intention of reinstating alternative essentialisms such as those of proletarian or national identity. My approach particularly wishes to avoid repetition of the ‘oracle effect’ (Bourdieu 1991:210–11), which consecrates the spokesperson as a necessary but absent interpreter of a recondite, sovereign order which is taken to determine more visible and immediately graspable social experiences. In all three cases of absent spokespersonship, the interpreter acts as a megaphone of the social part/whole, without drawing attention to the mechanics of discursive magnification by which these social entities are instituted and performed. Durkheimian social scientism is not the only reifying epistem/ontology in our field of discussion; the proletarian and nationalist standpoint theories similarly reify their projects into objects. Their shared animus against the Intellectuals, and the splitting rhetoric they jointly employ in order to spirit away their own presence as counterintellectuals, precisely invite a backlash of unmasking suspicion against their own position as professional representers; in all three cases, it is a matter of professional spokespersons who project or perform the social rather than discover it as a ready-made object. If, therefore, our aim is to outline elements of an anti-essentialist view of situated knowledge, we need to develop a more principled perspectivism which dismantles all such claims to representative identity, and which reinforces the notion of representative difference which reflexively acknowledges the special mediating position of the professionals of social representation in order to

80 The Intellectual as Stranger include it in the representation itself. That is why the next chapter will focus more attentively on some difficulties in the work of Karl Mannheim, who has been among the first to sociologically describe and reflexively incorporate the distinct situational experiences, interests, and perspectives of this strange breed we call intellectuals.

4

Missionary sociology between left and right Karl Mannheim and the right-wing challenge

Between totality and estrangement A core issue in Mannheim’s intellectual legacy is defined by the intriguing dialectic between two closely entangled motifs: that of totalization, or the prospect of theoretical summation of divergent group perspectives in a dynamic cultural synthesis, and that of alienation, or the epistemological promises and pitfalls which are incident upon the sociological situation of marginality and strangerhood. In Mannheim’s characterization of the intelligentsia as a relatively free-floating social stratum, these twin themes almost seamlessly intertwine, even though some of the most poignant ambiguities in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge originate from their potential tension and contrariness. The intellectuals float freely because, sociologically speaking, they possess a heterogeneous, unstable, intermediate social identity and, by virtue of this, are thought capable of superseding partial perspectives and particular interests, and of grasping the totality of a given historical situation. Their strategic marginality translates into a unique competency of intellectual and political mediation. But of course, if the sociological stranger is thought to have privileged access to the whole, the issue arises whether Freischwebendheit, or existential distanciation, is to be considered a generic property of all intellectuals, or specifically refers to marginal cases, Bohemians, exceptional types, drop-outs, or intellectual outsiders (cf. Bauman 1991:91–3). Soon after completing Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim apparently realized that his account was too little differentiated, and that the opportunity ‘to test and employ the socially available vistas’ in fact remained restricted to particular types of intellectuals; admitting that his earlier presentation had suffered from a failure to distinguish ‘the particular type which I called the “socially unattached intelligentsia” from others’ (Mannheim 1956:106, 11 In). But even on this reductionary proviso, the main issue, of course, remains in what sense one can plausibly construct an epistemological corridor which leads from estrangement to cognitive synthesis and knowledge of the totality. This theme of totality was handed down to Mannheim through 81

82 The Intellectual as Stranger German metaphysical idealism, which first elicited his enthusiasm during his gymnasium years when, inspired by his mentor Lukács, he translated a number of texts by Hegel into Hungarian. The Hegelian thought style, channelled through its Lukàcsian cultural-revolutionary adaptation (cf. Arato and Breines 1979; Kettler 1971), would have a lasting impact upon his work. Mannheim’s 1918 dissertation was already conspicuously enframed by the Hegelian vision of Geist as a developing totality which represented the unfolding summation of all cultural expressions and sedimentations of a given historical period. Henceforth he remained spellbound by Hegel’s famous and fateful dictum that ‘the truth is in the whole’ (cf. Jay 1984:206–9). Lukàcs soon discovered this promise of truth and wholeness in the revolutionary proletariat, which by virtue of its historical alienation was thought capable of viewing (and superseding) capitalism as a comprehensive system. Mannheim, however, while recurrently wrestling with the highly captivating argument of History and Class Consciousness (Lukàcs 1923),1 instead undertook to radicalize the Marxist theory of ideology in the direction of a generalized sociology of knowledge, transposing the idea of totality and historical mission from the proletariat to the intelligentsia itself (and in a subsequent move, to the elite of social planning). Not political economy but sociology would act as the true master science and as the privileged organon for a scientific politics, which was only imaginable as a science of the social totality (cf. Mannheim 1953:195ff). Ideology and Utopia’s central essay on ‘The Prospects of Scientific Polities’ famously argued the possibility of superseding the fundamental partisanships of political thought in a creative synthesis, which was formulated by the intelligentsia which, through its lack of social attachment, could act as a catalyst for a synthetic view and perform as ‘the predestined advocate of the intellectual interests of the whole’ (Mannheim 1968:140).2 The profits and risks of alienation likewise defined a theme that insistently accompanied Mannheim’s life and deeply infiltrated his sociological work (cf. Kettler et al. 1984a:14–15). Being of Jewish descent but having to find his bearings in a Christian-dominated culture; leftleaning but unwilling to join a political party; and a wandering student who felt more at home in the expansive German-speaking universe than in his more confined native culture, Mannheim had been a sociological nomad from his early student days. Refusing to follow Lukàcs into the Communist Party in December 1918, he did not resist an appointment (also by Lukàcs, who briefly served as People’s Commissar for Education) as academic lecturer in philosophy in the following spring, when the moderate socialists were replaced by a communist-dominated coalition. At the fall of the communist regime in August and the beginning of the Horthy terror, Lukàcs fled to Vienna. Mannheim initially followed in his tracks, but soon set out on his own course. Arriving in Heidelberg and beginning to frequent the Weber Kreis, he once again found himself (as in the Budapest Sunday

Missionary sociology between left and right 83 Circle) in a milieu that wedded an intellectual fascination for socialism to a marked distanciation towards the organized socialist movement. At the newly-founded university of Frankfurt, where Mannheim accepted a chair in sociology in 1930, he kept aloof, as a sympathizing fellow-traveller, from Horkheimer’s cultural Marxism, while making overtures to the unorthodox ethical socialism of Tillich, Mennicke, and de Man. After 1933, during his second English exile, he finally came to settle at the London School of Economics—a fellow-travelling institution which was firmly anchored in the tradition of English intellectuals’ socialism. Once again, Mannheim had to adjust to a strange language and a different culture; predictably, this second emigration turned out to be considerably more difficult and painful than the first. It is hardly surprising that this compounded experience of Heimatlosigkeit and marginality also found expression in Mannheim’s sociological ideas. We have already noted how the free-floating intelligentsia was described as generically estranged from bourgeois class society and the values of bourgeois culture. The figure of the fugitive or exile also appeared more proximately in a brief text from 1945, in which individuals who had assimilated two or more cultures were assigned the uniquely constructive task of serving as living interpreters between them. Outsiders, Mannheim advised, could more naturally offer novel solutions to particular problems than insiders (Mannheim 1945). Somewhat earlier, he had remarked in a more general vein that persons who were confronted more frequently with situations in which they could not act habitually and unthinkingly, and who therefore continually needed to reorganize themselves, had more occasion to reflect on themselves and on situations than those who had adapted themselves once and for all and functioned ‘without friction’. This explained why mobile types of persons, such as Jews, tended more frequently towards abstraction and reflection than socalled stable and more deeply-rooted types (1940:57). In Diagnosis of Our Time (1943), Mannheim briefly discussed the similar social placement of youth. In the language of sociology, being young usually meant that one was marginal and in many respects occupied the position of an outsider. Young people were not yet completely involved in the status quo of the social order, and tended to view the conflicts of modern society from without. It is this fact which made youth the ‘predestined pioneer’ of any change in society. Their ‘penetration from without’ and openness to the new made youth especially apt to sympathize and link up with the outsider’s attitude of other groups and individuals who dwelt on the fringe of society for different reasons, such as oppressed classes, unattached intellectuals, disaffected poets or artists (1943:35–6).3 In the same work, Mannheim also forged an interesting link between strangerhood as an institutional condition and the defence of privacy and individuality. Privacy in the sense of ‘renunciation of the world’ was in fact invented by the medieval monastic orders, which elevated contemplation,

84 The Intellectual as Stranger spiritualization and religious sublimation into an art, and turned it into the privileged possession of a new kind of specialists. An ‘elite of inwardness’ arose, who had mastered ‘the art of isolation’, and deliberately created pride in a life of ascetic withdrawal. Mannheim concluded that a dynamic society could not exist without such Fremdkörper, without a large reservoir of nonconformist individuals who gave unexpected answers when traditional mechanisms of adaptation were seen to fail (1943:158–9). Such insights about the outsider’s epistemic predicament and special lucidity were also reflexively returned upon the sociological observer himself and thus immediately personalized. Lecture notes from 1931–2 show that Mannheim himself explicitly connected the ‘sociological imperative’ to the researcher’s own life situation, even introducing alienation as a criterion of sociological enlightenment: ‘Those who have not yet despaired of their situation cannot really find their way to sociology and should give it up’. This also applied to the alienation of the intellectual: ‘Only someone who has, as an intellectual, taken notice of the fact that he is esteemed above all others as a cultivated person but counts for nothing in the world of bourgeois and proletarian, that he knows everything and can do nothing, that everyone needs him and that he is nevertheless rejected— only such a person is able not only to arrive at a general theory of the spirit’s impotence but also to see it as the fate of a social stratum, and thus to understand himself as a product of a social situation’ (cit. Kettler and Meja 1995:128–9). But such an overt sense of frustration about the ‘impotence of the spirit’ continued to sit uneasily with Mannheim’s simultaneous claims for intellectual totalization and the disciplinary sovereignty of sociology; and there is some justification in presuming that this motif of holism partly served him as a means of sublimating and depersonalizing the special suffering, anxiety, and perspectival narrowness which were inscribed by his Jewish identity, his chronic exilic status, and his precarious balancing act at the boundaries of social science and political action (cf. Gábor 1983:8–10). The conservative romanist and literary critic E.R.Curtius, in reviewing the argument of Ideologic und Utopie, was at least one who suspected that Mannheimian sociology, while claiming to present universally valid knowledge, might perhaps be more fruitfully read as a personal confession; both its pathos and limitation, he argued, were rooted in the fact that the author reasoned from a situation of personal distress, from an existential discomfort (Lebensverlegenheit) which did have supra-individual validity but nevertheless remained a particular point of view. In a remarkable rehearsal of the basic reproach levelled by conservative critics such as Barrès and Brunétière at Dreyfusard intellectuals such as Durkheim, Curtius went on to describe this existential distress as a variety of ‘European nihilism’, i.e. the state of consciousness which was characteristic of ‘uprooted modern intellectuals’. But of course it was methodically suspect to construe a radical change in direction of human history out of

Missionary sociology between left and right 85 the shock of one’s inner sentiments (Curtius 1982 [1929]:418–19). In reply, Mannheim denied both the similarity with the French Third Republic and the emergence of sociology out of the ‘shock-neurosis’ of the previous 15 years; suggesting that it was in all its elements fused with ‘the fundamental structure of our social and spiritual being’. Dynamic relationism, he added, had nothing whatsoever to do with nihilism, but precisely arose out of attempts to supersede the narrowness and encapsulation of all standpoints and to suspend the habitual self-hypostatization of thought. It was improper, he felt, to reproach the doctor who offered the diagnosis for the illness with which one was afflicted (Mannheim 1929, in Meja and Stehr 1982:430–2). The mission of the intellectuals and that of sociology In the following, I want to trace some of the modulations of this dialectic of totality and estrangement, especially zooming in upon the crucial years between 1929 and 1933, i.e. the period between the publication of Ideologie und Utopie and the beginning of Mannheim’s second exile after the Hitler coup. On all accounts it was a trying period of his life, in which professional success and academic settlement were matched and balanced by a more than equal measure of existential and political unsettlement. Both his newly-acquired professional security and the growing political insecurity which threatened as a result of the rise of national socialism exercised a definite impact upon his thought—even though these developments seemed to pull his views about the political calling of sociology in opposite directions. An important focus for assessing such tensions will be the text of a lecture entitled ‘Die soziale und politische Bedeutung der Intelligenz’, which Mannheim presented in the autumn of 1932 at the University of Amsterdam, and which until recently has not been widely available to an English-speaking audience (Mannheim 1993).4 Still, this brief text remains important enough to merit retrieval and closer study. Apart from providing a concise, at times even poignantly ‘raw’ summary of the political views of the young professor of sociology (at the time of delivery still under 40 years of age), closer analysis of it also appears to call for significant modifications in established views of Mannheim’s intellectual itinerary during these years, especially with regard to his conceptions about the stature of sociology and the political mission of the intellectuals. In 1930 Mannheim had moved from Heidelberg to the new university of Frankfurt in order to succeed Oppenheimer as Professor of Sociology. In the same year, Max Horkheimer became Professor of Social Philosophy and director of the Institute for Social Research. Between the Chair of Sociology and the Institute, housed in the same building, an atmosphere of ‘friendly rivalry’ developed (Löwe, cit. Loader 1985:126; cf. also Jay 1974; Schivelbusch 1985:19; Woldring 1986:32). Over against the radical

86 The Intellectual as Stranger cultural Marxism promulgated by the Institute’s members, Mannheim, as we saw, remained more sympathetic towards social-democratic revisionist ideas, loosely associating with a group of non-Marxist and reformist ‘ethical socialists’ which included Frankfurt luminaries such as Paul Tillich, Adolf Löwe, Carl Mennicke, Kurt Riezler, and Hendrik de Man (cf. Kettler et al. 1990:1446–7). The excessive attention which has been heaped upon the Frankfurter Schule in recent decades has unfortunately tended to eclipse this ‘other Frankfurt’, whose members’ sensitivity to issues of social psychology, to the sociology of culture, and to a socialist humanism was less constricted by the framework of Marxist materialism. The intellectual history of this ‘other Frankfurt’ still largely remains to be written.5 In April 1933 Mannheim, like many other Frankfurt colleagues, was forced into ‘leave of absence’ by the new Nazi Reichsminister of Culture. He immediately departed for Amsterdam, lodging for a few weeks with Révèsz, Professor of Psychology at the university. Révèsz, who had taught both Mannheim and his wife Juliska at the University of Budapest, but had likewise fled Hungary after the Horthy coup, had already acted as his host in October of the previous year, when Mannheim gave the lecture referred to above. The Netherlands continued as a kind of crossroads or transit point for Mannheim and other emigrants even after his arrival in England in May 1933. In September of that year he found himself once again in Amersfoort, at a conference which also hosted Tillich, Mennicke, Buytendijk, and Cassirer. A year later a similar conference in the same place was attended by Buber, Plessner, Laski, Gurvitch, Mennicke, and Löwe. During these years Mannheim also gave lectures at the universities of Groningen, Leiden, and Utrecht (Woldring, 1986:41). In discussing the Amsterdam lecture, I will selectively focus upon three interlaced points of interest which highlight some substantive continuities in Mannheim’s thought. The first of these concerns Mannheim’s missionary conception of the role of intellectuals and his enduring ambitions for sociology as a science of synthesis. The second theme highlights the continuing presence of Marxian class theory as a modelling framework for sociological generalization. The third issue, which has so far received scant attention in the literature, centres upon Mannheim’s reaction to the embarrassing challenge posed by major social thinkers associated with the radical right, who professed sympathy for and variously attempted to incorporate Mannheim’s philosophical and sociological conceptions. I shall focus more particularly upon the enthusiastic appropriation of Mannheim’s theory about the intellectuals’ historical mission by Hans Zehrer, editor of the influential right-revolutionary journal Die Tat (Zehrer 1929; 1931), and the similar radicalization of his theory about the ‘volitional’ rootedness of thinking by Hans Freyer, another young lion of Weimar sociology, whose striking pamphlet Revolution von Rechts (193la) had likewise propelled its author to the intellectual forefront of the movement which called itself the ‘Conservative Revolution’.

Missionary sociology between left and right 87 Let me begin by noting that the missionary view of the intelligentsia as a privileged carrier of the ‘self-discovery of the present’ was as strongly worded in the 1932 lecture as it was in Ideologic und Utopie of 1929; the same applied to the holistic calling of sociology and more particularly, the sociology of knowledge. In Hegelian cadence, Mannheim described the process of coming-to-consciousness as the most essential achievement of the present age; the task ahead was not only to promote this consciousness, but also to move towards a rationally controlled transformation of the world. This process developed through four main stages, which were identified by four perspectives of self-understanding, each of which absorbed and surpassed the preceding one: the perspective of God, that of Reason, that of History, and finally, that of Sociology (Mannheim 1993:71). Sociological self-consciousness first arose in the proletariat, but subsequently spread to other categories, to such an extent that presently all social groups had come to adopt sociological and class-oriented ways of thinking. The intellectuals were in fact the last group to attain consciousness of itself as a separate category, being impaired in this by the pre-existence of an already fully-elaborated framework of interpretation, that of the proletariat. Nevertheless, intellectuals most proximately embodied the capacity for a comprehensive sociological reorientation of thought; their historical calling was to bring the process of selfconsciousness to completion and live according to its newly-won insights (1993:80). This theory of four stages of self-interpretation therefore celebrated sociology as the provisional culmination of a long progression of increasingly inclusive axiomatic systems. The less abrupt, more smoothly elaborated version which was posthumously published in 1956, retained the claim that sociology represented the ‘inescapable ground of selfvalidation’ in the modern world (1956:94).6 This appears to call into question, or at least to moderate, the view of commentators such as Heeren (1971:1, 8) or Longhurst (1989:81–3) that, by the early 1930s, Mannheim was significantly playing down his elitist notion of the mission of the intellectuals as advanced in Ideologic und Utopie. This view remains unconvincing, not only because Mannheim did not see fit to revise any of his strong wording in its 1936 English translation, where so much else was revised, but also because the idea of a historical mission as deriving from the intellectuals’ peculiar social location steadily reverberated through his writings of the 1930s and early 1940s.7 Surely, Mannheim appeared to qualify somewhat the presumption of totality which governed his earlier statements: both the anticipation of a grand politico-ideological synthesis and the identification of the intellectual stratum as the predestined spokesman for the whole were absent from the Amsterdam lecture and from its elaborated 1956 version. Both texts, however, retained an acute sense of the mission of sociology and of the imperative necessity of the politicization of the intellect. They similarly retained the idea that the interstitial, more labile social position of the

88 The Intellectual as Stranger intelligentsia, and the peculiar motivations inculcated by its training, equipped it to absorb a variety of political and social perspectives, and hence enabled it to see better and more (e.g. 1956:105). This view also throws doubt upon the more general interpretation that Mannheim, in this transitional period, was reverting towards a more neutral, depoliticized stance, and grew closer to accepting a stricter academic professionalism and a Weberian imperative of value-freedom (cf. Kettler et al. 1984a:69–76; Kettler and Meja 1995:5–6, 26–7, 116; Loader 1985:145–6). For Kettler et al. this also implies that Mannheim distanciated himself from the conception of the sociology of knowledge as mediator in the ideology process and as a privileged organon for a new rational politics, in favour of a more modest description of sociology as a disinterested and specialized academic discipline. Both Mannheim’s personal urge to establish himself as an academic professional, and his intellectual reaction to the rising threat of fascist irrationalism are cited in order to explain this major shift of position (Kettler et al. 70 1984, 74–5; Kettler and Meja 1995:74–6, 115–7). However it seems that, at least in late 1932, Mannheim was rather far from embracing an academically disengaged position. Contrary to Loader’s view (1985:145), who argues that his contemporary characterizations of the function of the sociology of knowledge increasingly accentuated conscious neutrality over and above conscious partisanship, it is the latter attitude which Mannheim increasingly appeared to advocate. In 1932, his explicit defence of the duty of intellectual politicization was framed by the following rather harsh condemnation of Benda-like intellectual detachment: Julien Benda…laments that the uncommitted thinker is becoming extinct and that everything turns political. However, Benda appears to be mistaken. Politicization also entails an important advantage. The traditional cult of the exclusively self-oriented, self-sufficient intelligentsia is in the process of disappearing; and let us be straightforward about the fact that we can no longer bear this aesthetic type; we must finish with this socially aimless, socially useless thinking. It is absolutely essential that the intellect becomes combative, if not after the fashion of contemporary Germany, where one first bashes each other’s head in and only then begins to think! Fundamentally, the intellect should recognize that his intellectual identity prescribes certain duties: he must learn to cherish the fact of his intellectual education as an obligation. (Mannheim 1993:79) Hence it appears that Mannheim, perhaps despairing of the chances for an ideologically synthetic, politically mediating (and thus relatively neutral) role for sociology and for the intellectuals, strategically retreated to a kind of Kautskyan or Gramscian position, according to which intellectuals

Missionary sociology between left and right 89 should go to their classes of origin and their organic parties in order to articulate various class interests, even while taking care to defend their relative positional autonomy and the freedom of the spirit. It may be recalled that, in Ideologie und Utopie, Mannheim had already indicated two main courses of political action which could be historically taken by the intellectuals: 1 2

‘a largely voluntary affiliation with one or the other of the various antagonistic classes’; or ‘scrutiny of their own social moorings and the quest for the fulfilment of their mission as the predestined advocate of the intellectual interests of the whole’ (1968:140, 142).

In the early 1930s, and facing the rise of the Nazi movement, Mannheim appears to have concluded that the latter option was temporarily unrealistic, so that the self-conscious mission of the intellectuals had better be redirected from the whole to the political parts.8 Meanwhile, this must not be read as a claim to resolve the obvious tensions between involvement and detachment which seem to ravage Mannheim’s work from beginning to end. The explicit critique of the valuefree conception of the sociology of knowledge in Ideology and Utopia (1968:79–80, 84, 145n, 166–9) continues to sit uneasily with more Weberian adhortations found a little later in the encyclopedia article on ‘Wissenssoziologie’ (1968:265–6), in Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie (1932:39–40), in Mensch und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter des Umbaus (1935:vii), and in the introductory chapter of Ideology and Utopia itself (1968:34–5). Simultaneously, one must account for the contrary evidence contained in the 1932 Amsterdam lecture and the longer manuscript published in 1956, for the unchanged ‘political’ formulations in the body of the 1936 translation of Ideology and Utopia, and for the activist drive which is implicit in Mannheim’s elaborate theory of rational planning of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Contrary to those interpretations which tend to approximate Mannheim too closely to Marxian engagement or Weberian detachment, or suggest major transitions through distinct phases of his work, it is more prudent to maintain that this tension remains fundamentally unresolved. The sociology of knowledge as master science Even while temporarily retreating towards a more ‘partial’ political role for the intellectuals, then, Mannheim did not appear to relinquish the underlying idea about their mediating mission or call into question the holistic pursuit and ultimate political relevance of scientific sociology. This strong synthetic or synoptical drive of the sociology of knowledge had emerged as early as his 1921–2 article on Weltanschauung (Mannheim 1952:34ff); a 1925

90 The Intellectual as Stranger programmatic statement referred to it as the ‘focal discipline’ (1952:136), while the discussion which was triggered by his famous 1928 lecture on ‘Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon’ again saw Mannheim drive for a ‘synthetic situational analysis’ to be undertaken by sociology (Meja and Stehr 1982:397, 401). In Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie of 1932, the initially modest description of sociology as a positive Einzelwissenschaft, which recalled a formula propagated at the time by Von Wiese, was in fact strategically subordinated to a far stronger claim about sociology as a Grundwissenschaft which worked its way towards a social-scientific synthesis (1932:22ff; cf. Lepenies 1985:388). A 1934 review article on the development of German sociology between 1918 and 1933, written for an English audience, again clearly positioned sociology as a master science which (not so implicitly) appeared to culminate in Mannheim’s own sociology of knowledge (Mannheim 1953:209, 220ff).9 An even more powerful imperialistic sentiment was vented in a 1936 programmatic statement on ‘The Place of Sociology’, which heralded it as ‘the basic discipline of the social sciences’, which should consciously aim for a ‘complete theory of the totality of the social process’ (1953:203). The interest of this 1936 essay is that it virtually copied some of the programmatic claims made by Durkheim about the synthetic drive and panoramic vision of sociology in the first decade of the century (see Chapter 3). Like Durkheim, Mannheim started out from the difficulty of co-ordinating the different specialized branches of the science of society, and the paucity of consistent efforts to bring together ‘those elementary facts which are fundamental to all of them’ (1953:197). Special sciences such as politics, psychology, history or economics all demonstrated a synoptic, generalizing impulse, leading away from their own spheres and object-matter into the domains of the sociologist. But this movement towards a holistic picture of society remained ‘spontaneous’ and the various special sciences were ultimately unfit to escape from their limited perspectives. A fruitful organic co-operation between the different social sciences could only be presided over by a scientific discipline which had as its raison d’être ‘the construction of a consistent general theory of society— and that discipline be Sociology as the basic discipline of the social sciences’ (1953:203). Similar to Durkheim, Mannheim also dismissed earlier sociological systems as having reached their conclusions in haste, on the basis of ‘generalizations ahead of facts’ and on ‘rough and insecurely founded theories’. This had prompted the specialized inquiries which had yielded the various facts that only a ‘structural’ sociology was now in a position to bring together in a comprehensive synthesis. Unless sociology was introduced in school and academic curricula as a basic science, there was neither a chance of educating good specialists, nor of educating citizens to a correct understanding of the functioning of society, which in turn determined whether, in future, the social process was to be guided by reason or unreason (Mannheim 1953:208). If this statement is allowed to stand as a summary of Mannheim’s views

Missionary sociology between left and right 91 in the early 1930s, it also provides a pointer towards the somewhat similar position which was occupied by sociology in the Weimar Republic and the Third Republic in pre-war France. In both locales, sociology was favoured by the new social-liberal governments as an intellectual ally and a possible tool of social reconstruction, perhaps even promising the lineaments of a new secular morality or civic religion which would help strengthen the new republican regime by rationalizing the cultural and educational system (cf. Lepenies 1985:408–9). Both Durkheim and Mannheim were keen to advertise sociology as the privileged medium of the ‘re-education of the educators’. As in France a few decades earlier, the Prussian government actively promoted and protected social science by establishing new chairs at various universities, including the one which Mannheim occupied at Frankfurt until 1933. These structural resemblances between the metapolitical position of sociology and the comprehensive claims made on its behalf were once again not lost on a conservative champion of humanist Bildung such as Curtius, who entered upon an extended polemic with Mannheim about the territorial demands and intellectual legitimacy of sociology’s claim to provide a rational grounding for political action. In Curtius’ judgement, Mannheim unwarrantedly sought to elevate sociology from a special science into the most modern ‘central’ science, which was called upon to rethink the totality of the historical process and to offer a scientific diagnosis of the times—a calling which, in his contrary view, remained the exclusive birthright of philosophy and metaphysics (Curtius 1982 [1929]; cf. Lepenies 1985:377ff). That Mannheim’s sense of political mission for sociology and for the intellectuals did not abate during his British exile—which Heeren mistakenly describes as an even more detached and pessimistic phase—can be most clearly illustrated by reviewing his close affiliation with the socalled ‘Moot’ circle from about 1938 (Kettler et al. 1984a:129–44; Kettler and Meja 1995:251ff; Loader 1985:151–62; Woldring 1986:59–60; Ziffus 1988). The Moot was formed on the initiative of Joseph Oldham in order to preserve the intellectual momentum of the international conference on ‘Church, Community, and State’ which he had convened in July 1937 at Oxford. Oldham, already renowned as a Christian publicist and educator, Africanist, and propagandist for international missionary co-operation, succeeded in gathering an informal group including clergymen (among whom archbishop William Temple), literary men (Middleton Murray, T.S.Eliot), philosophers (Baillie, Hodges, Lindsay, and Polanyi), historians (Oakeshott, Dawson), as well as some of the refugee representatives of what I have called the ‘other Frankfurt’, such as Mannheim, Löwe, and Tillich. Interestingly therefore, some of the moderate left and religioussocialist atmosphere which Mannheim had breathed in Frankfurt was transposed to Britain, where it joined forces with a secularized, reformoriented Christianity with a mission of its own. Mannheim quickly came to the fore as the Moot’s most creative and prolific social theorist; indeed, he

92 The Intellectual as Stranger seemed to be on a veritable mission among these missionaries (Kettler et al. 1984:134). Taking his cue from Oldham’s project of an ‘order’ of Christian laymen, Mannheim developed notions about an ‘active order’ which could initiate a ‘revolution from above’ which was to be conducted by an elite of intellectuals. These notions significantly repeated and radicalized his earlier views on the free-floating intelligentsia (cf. Ziffus 1988:211–12). The synthetic ambition to encompass the whole of social knowledge in a ‘Summa for our age’, which would require a ‘total mobilisation of our intellectual and spiritual resources’ under the hegemony of sociology, was conceived as preliminary for a social technics which envisaged a permanent education of all citizens and the rational planning of all areas of society.10 In a chapter of Diagnosis of Our Time, which was originally prepared for and intensely discussed by the Moot, Mannheim outlined the need for spiritual integration in a planned society, and projected a new type of party system ‘in which the right to criticize is as strongly developed as the duty to be responsible for the whole’. A new form of education and a new sociologically informed morality had to inculcate a consciousness of the whole, which would require new forms of discipline, self-control and authority (Mannheim 1943:101–12). In this context, Mannheim even postulated a functional equivalence between the single-party system and the ‘historical leadership’ which was currently expected of the elite of intellectuals, holding up the ‘management techniques’ of the Germans, Russians, and Italians as offering a ‘new opportunity and a new obligation’—although the purposes for which these techniques were used were duly rejected as ‘wrong and even atavistic’ (Kettler et al. 1984:139– 40). To Jean Floud, Mannheim’s preoccupation with the activism of intellectuals as social planners and re-educators of the public repeated an age-old Platonic prejudice, and clearly veered towards a kind of ‘authoritarian democracy’ (Mannheim 1940:109; cit. Ziffus 1988:217; cf. Kettler et al. 1984:140).11 If Mannheim’s missionary elitism never left him, neither did he ever escape the lure of the concept of totality (Jay 1974:77–8; 1984:207); both remained present as possible conduits towards a form of intellectual authoritarianism. Marxism, fascism, and the class nature of intellectuals A further issue which is highlighted by the Amsterdam lecture is Mannheim’s enduring fidelity to some major premises of the Marxian and Lukàcsian doctrine of class consciousness—even though he expressly pleads its generalization towards the sociological situation of other groups such as women, youth, and intellectuals.12 The sociological method, we have seen Mannheim explain before, first arose in comprehensive form in ‘the thinking of the proletariat’; it was proletarian class consciousness which provided the first instance of sociological self-interpretation.

Missionary sociology between left and right 93 However, since the proletariat interpreted all social life from the perspective of its own class situation, it tended to block the intellectuals’ reflexive awareness of their independent social station. Class analysis imposed a stark analytic alternative according to which the intelligentsia was either a class, and therefore something, or it was not a class, and accordingly nothing (Mannheim 1993:74). In order to surmount this ‘sociological self-justification of the proletariat’, the intelligentsia needed a more radical application of the same method which transgressed the narrow framework of class analysis in order finally to acknowledge the intellectuals’ distinctive sociological identity. It is striking that Mannheim still tended to view the proletarian sociologic as an unwarranted generalization of a conception which remained ‘relationally’ valid; Marxian universalist class theory was judged ideological because it obfuscated its origins in the relatively limited existential situation of the proletariat. That is to say, Mannheim did not entertain the speculation that ‘proletarian’ ideology, this partiality-madeabsolute, perhaps took its departure from and expressed a much more proximate social location; that, to be more precise, the very notion of the proletariat was not merely a product but simultaneously an oblique selfcelebration of intellectuals who fashioned themselves a ‘proletariat’ after their own missionary self-image. That is why Mannheim still introduced Marx as a thinker who so fully understood the proletariat that ‘it’ could adopt the theory which he ‘gave’ it as fully its own, instead of realizing that Marx in large measure ‘invented’ a proletariat which was fully tailored to his own theoretical and political requirements. Marxian class theory, as I have argued in Chapter 2, did not simply impede the sociological selfassertion of the intellectuals, as Mannheim suggests, but also assisted it in a very specific sense, precisely by concealing the knowledge-political interests which radical intellectuals might have in passing off their interpretation of the world as the ‘interpretation of the proletariat’. Class theory’s reduction to sociological nullity of the intellectuals, which Mannheim was so much concerned to reverse, also functioned as a convenient vehicle of selfeffacement which legitimated a peculiar play of presence and absence in which ‘workers’ metaphorically substituted for their invisible spokespersons. In this respect, the sociology of knowledge liberated one of Marxism’s hidden impulses by substituting its covert celebration of the intellectuals’ historical mission by a comparatively overt one.13 This ideological ‘coming out’ of the intellectuals was facilitated by Mannheim’s combined assertion of their sociological specificity and his retention of a basic analytic framework which definitorily denied them any commonality of class-like interests. Speculating about the significance of the ‘cultural and spiritual participation’ which singled out the intellectual, for example, Mannheim consistently emphasized the opportunities for openness of mind, empathy and ecumenical mediation which were provided by the intellectuals’ free-floating social position and distinterested

94 The Intellectual as Stranger vocational training (cf. 1993:76). Participation in a common educational heritage, as he had already argued in Ideologic und Utopie, tended to suppress differences of birth, status, and wealth, and hence overdetermined the specific class affiliations of the intelligentsia to such an extent that it was able to subsume in itself a broad range of different interests. By virtue of its diverse recruitment and levelling educational experience, the intellectual stratum offered both a kaleidoscope of and a mediating switchboard for wider social (i.e. class) tensions and struggles, and in this respect could be considered representative of the whole (1968:138–40). While recognizing the independent social weight of knowledge and culture, even remarking that cultural participation resulted in ‘a tremendously important form of social differentiation’ (1993:76), Mannheim thus did not fully confront the eventuality that cultural participation itself, while loosening up the established class structure, might coagulate into new forms of cultural property which would engender new class-like interests and novel forms of social closure and inequality (cf. Pels 1998a:192ff). In the Amsterdam lecture, as elsewhere, Mannheim reasserted his conviction that the intelligentsia was not a class, and hence was ‘not in a position to form its own party’ (1993:75; cf. 1956:104; 1968:143). This statement was less innocent than may be suggested by its flat constative surface. Its annunciatory tone rather disclosed it as a performative conjuration which fed upon a peculiar mixture of fact and value. That is why it can perhaps also be read in reverse. The intellectuals, Mannheim apparently wished to say, should be dissuaded from thinking that they were capable of forming a collective political organization ‘in their own right’, and accordingly should not think of themselves as constituting the equivalent of a Marxian class. Otherwise, a specific political danger might raise its head, which Mannheim took care to specify in explicit terms: ‘the formation of a party of intellectuals would inevitably lead to fascism’ (1993:75). Let us note that this tantalizing suggestion had little precedent in Mannheim’s previous writings, even though here and there a vague connection was established between free-floating intellectual outsidership and the radical critique of the Enlightenment.14 In Ideologic und Utopie, for example, Mannheim rather summarily identified the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin, the syndicalism of Sorel, and the fascism of Mussolini as a continuous ideological tradition which was spearheaded by putschist-minded outsider intellectuals. The theory of political elitism was likewise characterized as a ‘counter-ideology’ which was developed by ‘counter-intellectuals’ (Mannheim 1929:106, 108). But this suggestion about the intellectual credentials or intellectual support of fascism was not clearly articulated; nor did Mannheim ever revisit the issue in his subsequent writings. Should we then discard it as a cryptic aside or loose theoretical end? At first notice, there may be ample reason to do so. Both popular and scholarly

Missionary sociology between left and right 95 conviction still seem largely disinclined to credit fascist ideology or the fascist elite with spirituality of any kind. Fascism is still often dismissed as the révolution sans phrase, as the political ‘moment of truth’ of an irrationalistic, anti-intellectual activism; while its leadership is routinely pictured as a troupe of nihilistic political adventurers who subordinated all ideation to an opportunistic search for power. However, as I will spell out more clearly in Chapter 5, a recent spate of revisionist historical studies has begun to dislodge this common preconception. Seeking to account for the obvious fascination which fascism and revolutionary nationalism held for many contemporary intellectuals, these rewritings have called attention to the long cognitive heritage of fascist ideology, the causal prominence of ideological factors in the twentieth-century right-wing movements, and the curious intellectual kinships and rivalries which connected fascism to its ideological competitors, particularly Marxist socialism (cf. De Felice 1965; Golsan (ed.) 1992; A.J.Gregor 1969; 1974; 1979a; Herf 1984; Hewitt 1993; Nolte 1965; Sternhell 1983; 1996; Sternhell et al. 1994). Together such studies have fleshed out the unique ideological identity of fascism as resulting from a novel synthesis between Sorelian revolutionary syndicalism (and its anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois revision of orthodox Marxism), and the Barrèsian tradition of ‘integral’ and revolutionary nationalism. Against this revisionist background, the idea of fascism as a revolt of the broad middle classes, led by a vanguard of nationalist, ‘antiintellectual’ intellectuals appears less far-fetched, even though our image of the intellectual content and sociological structure of the fascist revolutions comes more closely to resemble that of the communist ones. Zehrer and Die Tat On the strength of this interpretation, Mannheim’s warning about intellectuals striking out on their own in politics appears less disconnected and wild. But I suspect one can offer an additional, more historically specific reason why Mannheim floated this particular suggestion in this theoretical context at this particular point in time. This reason, I speculate, can be found in the peculiar and disconcerting reception which the argument of Ideologic und Utopie enjoyed at the hands of a highly influential section of the right-radical ‘counter-intellectual’ movement which had been spreading in Weimar Germany under the banner of the ‘Conservative Revolution’. I shall refer more specifically to the intellectual Kreis which developed around the journal Die Tat subsequent to its new radical departure in 1929, and to the programmatic article ‘Die Revolution der Intelligenz’, authored by its future editor Hans Zehrer, which set Die Tat upon its new revolutionary course (Zehrer 1929). Unfortunately, this right-revolutionary connection is not given proper attention in recent reviews of the Weimar debate on Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge and intellectuals (Meja and Stehr 1982); it is equally absent

96 The Intellectual as Stranger from recent interpretative discussions of Mannheim’s intellectual development in his transitional Frankfurt period (but see Lepenies 1985:409ff). It is reasonable to suppose, nevertheless, that Mannheim was acutely conscious of these unsolicited right-wing enthusiasms (Zehrer publicly acclaimed him as ‘one of the most topical thinkers of our time’), and deeply suspected what he may have felt were unwarranted political extrapolations of major elements of his sociology of intellectuals. Once again, the connection was traced by a critic such as Curtius who, in his Deutscher Geist im Gefahr of 1932, went so far as to suggest that the comprehensive claims which Mannheim filed on behalf of sociology led to a dangerous celebration of revolution, which brought him in curious vicinity of the Tatkreis—which was disparagingly described as sustaining ‘an emphatic intellectualism of academic-sociological imprint’ (Lepenies 1985:386, 409). It is probable, given such interpellations, that Mannheim’s strategic retreat from the idea of a holistic mission for the intellectuals was dictated in large part by this embarrassing right-wing reception; while the example of Zehrer and Die Tat may also have enhanced his misgivings about an autonomous class politics on the intellectuals’ behalf. Accordingly, while authors such as Heeren, Kettler, and Loader suppose that Mannheim reacted to the threat of fascist ‘irrationalism’ by becoming less political and more academically detached, I argue that he did something like the opposite, and did so in the face of a very specific ideological challenge which crucially implicated his own work. Hence it was not so much the ‘cruel parody’ which the successful Nazi movement wrought upon Mannheim’s design for a synthetic science of politics (Kettler et al. 1984a:75; Kettler and Meja 1995:114), but the more concretely disturbing redeployment of his own political sociology by ‘free-floating’ right-wing counter-intellectuals, which prompted Mannheim’s hesitation concerning some of the propositions offered in Ideologic und Utopie, and which compelled him to adopt a more partisan political stance. Quite probably, it was Zehrer’s resolute conservative-revolutionary claim about the holistic mission of the intelligentsia which temporarily halted Mannheim’s vacillation concerning the two alternative courses of action to be taken by the intellectuals, and reactively steered him towards a more modest but also more leftist position. Soon after its publisher Eugen Diederichs had placed his young protégé Zehrer at the helm, the ‘new’ Tat speedily developed into the leading organ of modern radical conservatism in Germany, quickly increasing its circulation thirtyfold from 1000 in 1929 to more than 30 000 copies in 1932, and sprouting a veritable archipelago of local discussion clubs.15 More than most other neo-conservative intellectuals, Zehrer and his collaborators stood open to ideas coming from the left, and freely borrowed from Social Democratic ideology and professional sociological research. In this respect, Die Tat was consciously groping towards a ‘third position’ which would include a creative synthesis of the ideologies of the

Missionary sociology between left and right 97 radical left and the radical right (Zehrer 1931; 1933). Zehrer’s programmatic article appeared shortly after the publication of Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie, and its author explicitly acknowledged the great impression which the book had made upon him. Alternative connections also existed. Two other young editors of Die Tat, Eschmann and Wirsig, were recruited by Peter Diederichs, Eugen’s son and successor, from assistantships at Heidelberg University when Mannheim was still teaching there. The former was also a pupil of Alfred Weber, who had inspired Mannheim on the subject of the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’ and had coined the term (Demant 1971:66, 70–73; Sontheimer 1959; Struve 1973:356–8).16 What Zehrer was seeking to establish in ‘Die Revolution der Intelligenz’ was, first, that the intelligentsia could under specific historical circumstances constitute itself into a distinct social class, and second, that it was called upon to play a crucial role as the future political elite in the coming revolution of the Mittelstand. Fastening upon what he described as a central aporia of Marxist thought, Zehrer extensively upbraided the older Kautsky for having dropped the radical idea of the class nature of the intelligentsia which he had embraced in his younger days.17 While in equilibrium states of society, the intelligentsia remained fluid and difficult to demarcate, in times of upheaval it could distance itself from its normal social commitments and ties, adopt a more cohesive class-like identity, and feel more responsible for the totality. Here Zehrer explicitly combined Mannheim’s idea of Bildung as the unifying social bond of the intelligentsia with Hendrik de Man’s conception of the intelligentsia’s common will-toculture, working both ideas into a radical Paretian elite theory according to which the Intelligenz was historically called upon to liberate the middle classes from their double subordination to the powers of capital and the masses (i.e. the socialist mass parties). The parallel proletarianization and intellectualization of modern life were producing new strata of technical and managerial personnel, which would form the sociological Kerntrupp of this coming ‘revolution from above’ (Zehrer 1929; 1931). In Zehrer’s radicalization of Mannheim, therefore, notions about totality and political synthesis were immediately made serviceable to the providential dialectics of a middle class revolution which was directed against both capital and labour.18 Whereas Mannheim still took care to preserve a measure of distance between the roles of intellectuals and politicians, Zehrer had no qualms about the intellectuals’ capacity for political transcendence and active political leadership, and hence deliberately collapsed the two roles into one another (cf. Struve 1973:367). A subsequent article by Eschmann in Die Tat likewise celebrated sociology as a science of immediate action and effective intervention, a true ‘science of community construction’ (Baulehre der Gemeinschaft) which was organically allied to the unfolding German revolution (Eschmann 1934; Lepenies 1985:409–10). The principle of value-freedom implied a liberal

98 The Intellectual as Stranger refusal of all decision, and hence amounted to the self-abolition of sociology. However, as a ‘practical science of the people’ in service to the national community, sociology could once again become the Zentralwissenschaft of an entire epoch (Eschmann 1934:955–8, 966). In these high expectations, the ‘Salon-National-sozialismus’ of Die Tat (Sontheimer 1959:255) demonstrated the same fatally misconceived intellectual arrogance towards the Nazi movement which exuded from other conservative-revolutionary writings of the time (e.g. those of Ernst Jünger or Edgar Jung), and which would soon reach a philosophical culmination in Heidegger’s equally abortive attempt to spiritualize national socialism and to ‘lead the leaders’ (cf. Wolin 1990). It is intriguing to note that the editors of Die Tat found themselves virtually alone on the right in explicitly referring to the intelligentsia (and to sociology) in a positive vein, and in celebrating it as the core (wisdom) of a future political elite (Struve 1973:354). Walther Rathenau’s idea of a managerial planning elite, Franz Oppenheimer’s and Leonard Nelson’s hopes for a ‘rule of the wise’, Kurt Hiller’s project of a Logokratie, Keyserling’s notion of the ‘ruler-sage’, and Hendrik de Man’s IntelligenzlerSozialismus had all been developed in a left-liberal or non-Marxist socialist atmosphere.19 It was Zehrer’s innovation to appropriate the idea of an enlightened dictatorship of the intelligentsia for the right (Struve 1973:358). However, even though the majority of conservativerevolutionary thinkers remained hostile to everything the appellation ‘intellectuals’ stood for, they were themselves middle-class intellectuals whose self-celebratory conception of the future elite explicitly included modernist, managerial and technocratic elements (Herf 1984). Except for the term itself, so highly charged on the right, Die Tat’s basic conception of this elite thus closely resembled that of most other revolutionaryconservative thinkers. In the broad current of the ‘anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals’, Zehrer was virtually the only one to escape recriminatory verbalism and to add the word to the deed.20 Freyer’s ‘ethical’ sociology Soon after Hans Zehrer had announced the coming revolution of the intelligentsia, a young but already renowned professor of sociology at Leipzig University published a stirring pamphlet celebrating the presently accelerating ‘revolution from the right’. The failure of the revolution from the left, its author Hans Freyer proclaimed, now opened up space for the völkische revolution, which would be acted out by the State as the vanguard and conscious political expression of the German people on its predestined road towards a truly national socialism (Freyer 193la). Published by Diederichs Verlag, Revolution von Rechts was immediately hailed by the radical nationalist intelligentsia, particularly by the editors of Die Tat, as a prophetic sign of the times.21 Like Mannheim, Freyer already

Missionary sociology between left and right 99 counted among the best and brightest of the Weimar intelligentsia; as a trained philosopher and accomplished historical sociologist, he perhaps stood as the most formidable of his intellectual peers and competitors. While the mainstream of German sociology was distancing itself from politics and gradually took on a more value-free and professional character, Freyer continued to advocate a radically activist commitment for sociology, in a wide-ranging attempt to muster the sociological tradition for a revolutionary nationalist and etatist ‘German socialism’ (Muller 1987:12, 18, 23). Freyer had attentively digested Mannheim’s Ideologic und Utopie when, in 1930, he published a programmatic work called Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, which fared rather badly with established academic sociology but was received well both by the activist right and the activist left. Extending Mannheim’s own somewhat hesitant criticisms of the principle of value-freedom, Freyer held forth more radically that Sein could never be divorced from Sollen, since it was evident that the sociologist could never escape existential involvement with his object of analysis. Sociology accordingly had to be practised as an Ethoswissenschaft, as an overtly moral and politically committed enterprise (1964 [1930]:91, 210, 298–9). Drawing upon Mannheim’s suggestions about the volitional and activist grounding of social and political knowledge, Freyer agreed that a will to change reality lay at the core of all sociological conceptualization. This volitional substance and ‘developmental’ ethic constituted the axis of the epistemological attitude. Sciences of reality were simultaneously ethical sciences, not so much in the sense that they recovered or applied ethical norms, but in the sense that their object of knowledge embodied a definite direction of will. 22 Sociological knowledge was hence necessarily ‘utopian’ in Mannheim’s sense of the term. As a systematic and intrinsically historical discipline, sociology stood in clear contrast to conceptions and currents which sought to elevate it to a universal standpoint, ‘a standpoint above standpoints’, a last instance of interpretation, and a critique of all other sciences and ways of thinking. Instead of mirroring reality, all science was a consciously selective formation or construction (Umformung) of reality (1964:12, 206). Like Mannheim, Freyer maintained that the concrete standpoint (Standort) of observation, including the specific transformative will with which it approached the object, did not simply narrow down the field of vision, but precisely rendered visible determinate connections between facts (cf. Freyer 1932:674). The will did not constitute a secondary addition for the theoretical understanding of ‘what is’, resulting in a scientific-sociological concept of the present which as such would be position-free (standpunktfrei). On the contrary: ‘only they that want something socially, see something sociologically’ (Freyer 1964:298–9, 305). In line with this, the Mannheimian notion about the volitional basis of knowledge was given a much sharper decisionist turn. To Freyer, it was precisely the decision to

100 The Intellectual as Stranger act which made knowledge possible; commitment and political will were the prerequisites of sociological truth. Hence he concluded his book with an arresting slogan which represented its entire argument in capsule form: ‘Wahres Wollen fundiert wahre Erkenntnis’ (Freyer 1964:307). While adopting Mannheim’s historicist and contextualist conception of knowledge, Freyer did not share the former’s belief that the sociology of knowledge was capable of synthesizing the major political perspectives and thus lay the groundwork of a true ‘science of the whole’. Polemicizing against the universalist ideal of Bildung, he affirmed that it had become self-evident to relate human thought to its rootedness in a determinate social-existential base (soziale Seinsbasis). Particularly in crisis times such as the present, in which all unifying and harmonizing order had disappeared, the entire existence of human beings was determined by their social position, and whoever claimed to represent the whole did not represent ‘the truth of the times’ (1931b:609, 616–18, 622). Radicalizing the Weberian image of the searchlight, Freyer suggested an alternative conception of Bildung as the ‘spiritual sovereignty of those who stand fully conscious of their historical situation in the movement of their time’. Such situational consciousness was only possible on the basis of a determinate standpoint (Standort) and hence a specific decision (Entscheidung) (1931b:624–5). In consequence, Freyer also questioned Mannheim’s hopes for the mission of relatively unattached intellectuals to take a wider integrative perspective beyond existing political partisanships and to become the bearers of a dynamic synthesis. In view of his more radical politicization of science, he had no use for such transcendent impartiality: I do not believe in a free-floating intelligentsia. Of course, it does exist in individual specimina. But what I do not believe is, first, that it is anywhere historically important…Secondly, I do not believe that it offers a conception of Bildung that is valid for us. This ‘floating’, i.e. this ability to view far across and beyond, is merely an immanent quality of the intellect. It is simply characteristic of the intellectual attitude itself over against immediate practice. But in its real existence, and hence also in the complete content of its viewpoint, every intelligentsia is anchored. Every historical intelligentsia has been, and every one will be. It stands, but it does not float. If it does, it carelessly surrenders all functions in the real world. (Freyer 1931b:624) Initially, Mannheim appeared quite taken by Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, as is evident from marginal comments scattered about his personal copy of Freyer’s book (Muller 1987:182). Only after the publication of Revolution von Rechts in the following year did he come to have misgivings about the radical conclusions Freyer had drawn from his notion of existentially bound thought (cf. Mannheim 1968:266). These

Missionary sociology between left and right 101 reservations were enhanced by Freyer’s increasingly radical pronouncements on educational policy in the course of 1931 and early 1932. While pleading a reversal of the liberal separation between education and state, and a radical politicization of the university, Freyer repeated his core idea that knowledge was a function of political will, and that, accordingly, Bildung could only be based upon the decision of the educator to commit himself in the contemporary political struggle. The proper role of scholarship was to clarify the authentic substance of an age, that which was valid and future-oriented within it. Such knowledge was obtainable only on the basis of political commitment (Freyer 1931b; Muller 1987:190, 218–19). This, surely, was too close for intellectual comfort, and Mannheim saw himself forced to clarify his position and draw the line. The occasion was imminent. In February 1932, Leopold von Wiese called a convention in Frankfurt of all Dozenten in sociology, with the aim of furthering the standardization of teaching and the institutionalization of the discipline in German educational establishments (Muller 1987:182–3). In previous years, Von Wiese and his campaign for sociology as a value-neutral Einzelwissenschaft had figured among the prime targets of Freyer’s scientific and political critique. Predictably, the ‘Frankfurter Dozententagung’ became the scene of a sharp conflict between the supporters of Von Wiese’s and Freyer’s diametrically opposite conceptions of the vocation of sociology. Mannheim had been asked to deliver a keynote speech, which was published as Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der Soziologie later in the year. With Freyer present, he appeared to shift his position closer to Von Wiese—even though, as we have seen, his adoption of a disciplinary conception of the sociological domain had a somewhat opportunistic ring and remained embedded in a wider holistic framework. Without identifying his opponent, he warned that if his argument about the existential grounding of thinking was to give rise to dangerous and exaggerated assertions such as ‘true will provides the grounding for true knowledge’, the door would be opened ‘to every kind of arbitrariness in theory’. If exaggerated in this way, the insight no longer served selfcriticism and distanciation from existential bonds, as it was originally intended, but could instead legitimate every conceivable kind of partisanship (Mannheim 1932:39–40).23 In 1929, however, Mannheim had still passed over this value-free option for the sociology of knowledge in favour of a more evaluative one, which did not reckon with a sharp separation between facts and values, and was more favourably disposed towards the epistemic productivity of the existential-volitional element itself (1968:83–4, 165–71). Soon, however, he began to insist that his activist reconceptualization of knowledge was not intended ‘to open the gates to propaganda and value-judgements in the sciences’, but was rather meant to alert to ineradicable residues of volition in knowledge which, at best, could ‘be raised into the sphere of the controllable’ (1968:266). Thus Mannheim’s position gradually turned

102 The Intellectual as Stranger more defensive on this point, edging closer towards neutrality, and shifting the weight of emphasis from the cognitive opportunities offered by volitional interests more exclusively towards their cognitive liabilities and risks (Kettler et al. 1984a:73–5; Kettler and Meja 1988:631; 1990:1459– 60; 1995:116–17). Soon after, however, Mannheim appeared to regain his balance. In the introductory chapter written for the English edition of Ideology and Utopia (1935), the importance of volitional or activist access to the knowledge object was vigorously reasserted (1968:4–5). Complete restraint of the will, he argued, did not foster objectivity but instead constituted ‘the negation of the essential quality of the object’. He added at once that the reverse position—the greater the bias, the greater the objectivity—was equally invalid. Hence it was essential to retain the élan politique, but it had to be subjected to intellectual control and become aware of its own limits. ‘Man attains objectivity,’ Mannheim concluded, ‘not by giving up his will to action and holding his evaluations in abeyance but in confronting and examining himself (1968:42–3). Against this background, I am disinclined to think that Mannheim, even if he retreated from some of his earlier formulations, ever arrived at a distinctly neutral or academic definition of the task of the sociology of knowledge. Reacting against Freyer’s radical assimilation of Sein and Sollen and of science and politics, Mannheim did indeed insist upon the necessity of distanciation from existing political partisanships, and of maintaining a functional distance between the roles of intellectuals and politicians. But he still seemed to hesitate between detachment and involvement, refusing to adopt a principled Weberian separation between facts and values, and blurring the demarcation line between the intellectual and political domains. As the Amsterdam lecture testifies, Mannheim continued to emphasize the need for politicization, even though he was now more than ever alert to its inherent dangers (1993:79; cf. 1968:34–5). In this respect, he perhaps took seriously Freyer’s case for the inevitability of political commitment—only to apply this lesson more reflexively on the other side of the political fence. The people’s point of view The above account has begun to demonstrate that Mannheim’s theorem about the existential determination of knowledge was widely shared by many of his Weimar intellectual contemporaries. The basic notion of the socially situated character of knowledge stretched across a broad, horse-shoe-shaped political spectrum, running from Lukàcsian ‘proletarian’ standpoint epistemology on the radical left to revolutionary-nationalist standpoint epistemologies on the radical right. On the way, it passed through an intermediate range where Mannheim’s own version of the synoptic standpoint of the relatively ‘freefloating’ intelligentsia rubbed shoulders with similar approaches such as Tillich’s religious socialism and de Man’s ‘socialism of the intellectuals’.

Missionary sociology between left and right 103 Notwithstanding the differences between them, in all three versions of standpoint theory a specific partial social category was considered capable of totalizing society and of representing its essential future interest; all three versions, moreover, tended to view this ‘partial whole’ in terms of an initial condition of alienation and outsidership which would be redeemed through the telos of a missionary historical destiny. The Lukàcsian proletariat and the Mannheimian intelligentsia were thus not alone in transmuting strategic marginality into a claim to represent the whole; the same logic also characterized conservative-revolutionary attempts to read a political destiny in the allegedly marginalized and threatened condition of the national culture, as it was most immediately represented by the disaffected middle class and its vanguard of ‘anti-intellectual intellectuals’. As in turn-of-the-century France, the revolutionary conservatives offered themselves as spokespersons for the entire nation; but it was a divided, oppressed and humiliated nation, threatened from all sides by Uberfremdung, which needed to become conscious of its cultural and political essence and to purge itself from alien elements in order to regain its lost organic wholeness.

Figure 3 The German constellation

Like Lukàcs and Mannheim, right-wing representatives of sociological and political existentialism such as Freyer, Jünger and Schmitt tended to view knowledge, science, and ideology as contextually rooted, perspectival, and hence as conditioned by intrinsic evaluative and political drives (cf. Pels 1998a:229–31). In his 1928 lecture on cultural competition and subsequently in Ideologic und Utopie, Mannheim sympathetically paraphrased Schmitt’s attack upon the neutralism and intellectualism of liberal political ideology, which mistakenly supposed that ‘rational tensions grounded in existential differences’ could be reduced to differences in thinking, and that these could in turn be ironed out by virtue of the

104 The Intellectual as Stranger ‘uniformity of reason’. By divorcing evaluation from theoretical explanation in a principled manner, liberal theory refused to recognize the phenomenon of existentially determined thought, of a thought ‘containing by definition, and inseparably, irrational elements woven into its very texture’. This self-deception deprived it from seeing that behind every theory stood collective forces that expressed group purposes, group power, and group interests (Mannheim 1952:216–17; 1968:133). Carl Schmitt’s writings on political sovereignty and parliamentary democracy from the early 1920s had dismissed the same rationalistic ‘belief in discussion’ and truth-finding—and in parliamentary representatives as embodying the ‘particles of Reason’—as fatally dependent upon the liberal dogma of free competition within a pre-established harmony of interests. The utopia of ‘government by discussion’, according to Schmitt, artificially divorced the conflict of opinions from the struggle of interests, and severed argumentative discussion from negotiation, ignoring the ‘need for decision’ as striking ontologically deeper than any set of communal norms (1988a:5– 8, 41–2).24 While the ‘Western’ or liberal concept of truth remained bound to neutrality and consensus, for Schmitt theorizing and concept formation retained an intensely polemical and political character: the struggle for words, names, and concepts was constitutive of the knowledge process itself and represented an immediate extrapolation of the struggle between social groups, classes, and peoples. This closely approached Mannheim’s agonistic view of the knowledge process as carried by the desire for power and recognition of particular social groups who wished to make their interpretation of the world the universal one (1952:196–7; cf. Pels 1997; 1998a:227–9). In the political struggle, concepts were quite different from empty sounds; they were charged with energy, and often were very sharp weapons, since they expressed precisely elaborated oppositions and friendenemy constellations (Schmitt 1988b:191). All political concepts, images, and terms had a polemical meaning, were focused on a concrete situation, and turned into ghostlike abstractions when this situation disappeared (Schmitt 1996:30–2). This radical existentialist conception of the politics of knowledge, which Schmitt formulated as early as 1927, was reaffirmed in his inaugural lecture at the University of Köln of June 1933, where the scientific struggle and the war of concepts was immediately implicated in the currently intensifying war of existence of the German people. To engage in this struggle was the supreme honour of science, since there could be no free science in a people that was ruled by strangers, and no scientific struggle without this political freedom. ‘Let us remain conscious also in this place’, Schmitt admonished his academic audience, ‘that we stand in the immediate presence of the political, i.e. the intensive life! Let us do everything we can to endure the great struggle also scientifically, in order not to turn into slaves, but into free Germans’ (1988b:198).

Missionary sociology between left and right 105 Another widely noted inaugural address, held earlier in the same revolutionary year by Heidegger in his new capacity as rector of Freiburg University, likewise wedded explicit criticisms of scientific neutrality, academic freedom, and narrow professionalism to a clear conviction about the identity of the mission of science and the mission of the German people in its present spiritual-political fate. The university was redefined as the high school which was called upon to educate and discipline the leaders and guardians of the fate of the German people through science. The essence of science was not found in its ‘liberal’ independence and freedom from presuppositions (Voraussetzungslosigkeit), but in its submission to necessity (i.e. the political necessity of an alienated and threatened German identity), and in its immediate coalition with practice (i.e. the political practice of ‘knowledge service’ to the spiritual mission of the German people). It was this standpoint, that of ‘the German Volk in the extreme questionableness of its existence’, which also defined the true nature of objectivity (Sachlichkeit); it was only from this standpoint that objectivity could establish itself, i.e. find its character and limits (Heidegger 1993:35). Freyer likewise translated his view that standpoints were decisive for accurate sociological observation into the certainty that, in the contemporary European situation, it was the peoples which should be seen as the sphere of validity of the new knowledge and of the new constructive principle which would abolish the existing class structure. The important thing was that such standpoints and the decisions based upon them represented the ‘substance’ of the present and in this sense also reflected the future of a concrete situation (1964:305–6). If science was charged with presuppositions, it had to make sure that these were the ‘historically valid’ ones; i.e. that they grasped the foundational meaning of an age, its unique, non-arbitrary spiritual content, its valid future will (gültiger Zukunftswille) (1932:674–5). The university and science were theoretical organs of their people and state, and revealed to them what they really were, or rather, they ‘recognized it ahead of them’ (erkennt es ihnen vor) (1932:679). As Freyer proposed in Das politische semester of 1933, the new educational ideal was the ideal of the political man who was rooted in his Volkstum, who regarded himself as historically responsible for the fate of his state, and who devoted himself with spiritual sovereignty to the transformation of the future. The Germans were at long last becoming a political Volk. As such, they required not a ‘free-floating intelligentsia’ but rather ‘an estate of the politically educated’ (einen Stand politisch Gebildeter) (Muller 1987:232–3). In an article from 1934, this standpoint epistemology of the Volk was contrasted with a form of abstract ‘groundlessness’ in a manner which immediately recalled Barrès’ exposition of national alienation and déracinement. A life was bodenlos when it was cut off from its place and its roots, especially from the most primeval strata of one’s people. A will was

106 The Intellectual as Stranger bodenlos when it lacked a concrete standpoint within a historical existence. Knowledge was bodenlos when it pursued the abstract ideal of putting all presuppositions aside and hence arrived at pallid bits of evidence, rather than reaching conclusions that were tied to reality and valid for real life. The opposite of Bodenlosigkeit was Bodenständigkeit (groundedness, rootedness in the soil); it meant the recognition and affirmation of one’s essential foundations (seinsmässigen Grundlagen) in the concrete racial reality of the Volkstum which was present in its millennial depth, which had deposited itself in man’s bodily and psychic existence and conferred an intrinsic norm upon all the expressions of a culture, even the highest, most individual creations (cit. Muller 1987:262–3). That such epistemological nationalism could drift towards an explicidy racialist-culturalist conception of ‘situated objectivity’ was echoed in a remarkably explicit text by Schmitt from 1935, in a period of even closer alignment with the Nazi regime: We know not only intuitively, but on the basis of the most rigorous scientific insight, that all law is the creation of a determinate people. It is an epistemological truth that only those are capable of seeing facts as they are, hear utterances accurately, understand words correctly, and rightly evaluate impressions of people and things, who participate in an existential (seinsmässigen), species-determined (artbe-stimmten) way in the law-creating community, and belong to it with their very being. The human being experiences the reality of this belonging to his people and race not only in the deepest, least conscious impulses of his emotional life; it equally reaches into the smallest fibres of his brain. Objective is not he who wants to be so and believes in subjectively good conscience that he has sufficiently exercised himself to become objective. An alien to the species (Artfremder), no matter how critically and shrewdly he may act, no matter how many books he reads or writes, thinks and understands differently, because he belongs to a different species, and remains existentially determined by it in all decisive trains of thought. That is what constitutes the objective reality of ‘objectivity’. (Schmitt 1935:45) In this fashion, the Weimar spectrum of spokespersonship for the social showed remarkable similarities to the ideological constellation of Dreyfusian France, as it was summarized at the end of the preceding chapter. If perhaps Weber’s neutralist epistemology of demarcation and Von Wiese’s disciplinary professionalism occupied the central region of this spectrum, Mannheim’s hesitation was between this central position and a more left-wing and politically engaged standpoint (theory) which, while taking its distance from Lukàcsian revolutionary and ‘proletarian’ culturalism, retained a strong claim of social totalization on behalf of the

Missionary sociology between left and right 107 allegedly free-floating intelligentsia. Mannheim’s synoptic sociology of knowledge veered towards moderate left-wing engagement quite like Durkheim’s reformist sociology was attracted by the ‘third way socialism’ of the Solidarists and the Jaurèsian social democrats. While Durkheimian positivism was critically identified by both its left-wing and right-wing critics as a dissimulated form of intellectualism, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge retained a more concrete and reflexive awareness of itself as a standpoint and a deliberate project of intellectuals—even though this project issued in the same universalist claim of ‘speaking for the whole’ which remained more implicit in Durkheim’s naturalist epistemology of the social object. It was dismissed as a ‘standpoint above standpoints’ by right-wing engagés such as Freyer, Schmitt, and Heidegger; but their more radical politics of knowledge implied a situated and politicized conception of objectivity (or of its limits) which immediately singled out the missionary standpoint of the German people as the ultimate benchmark for all judgements of fact and value. Mannheim’s project of a sociological ‘reeducation of the educators’ was therefore matched by an even more arrogant drive for spiritual leadership on the part of the right-wing counterintellectuals (cf. Heidegger’s and Freyer’s celebration of the university as the ‘advance’ theoretical organ of the people and as the educator of the guardians of the people’s fate). In their political essentialism the Volk, as uniquely represented by its völkische spokespersons, was staged as the primordial and privileged part that embodied the ‘historically valid’ interests and the ‘true will’ of the (future) whole. In this fashion, the conservative-revolutionaries were perhaps more successful in hiding their intellectualist project behind the grand essences of People and State; although these collective agents were spiritualized (and hence made to act as alter ego’s) in more or less the same manner as was the Proletariat by their Marxist rivals. In the same way as Barrès and Maurras, the conservative revolutionaries of Weimar managed to politicize the spirit because they simultaneously spiritualized and aestheticized the political (cf. Curtius 1921:129; Pels 1998a:117–21). In Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, the intelligentsia similarly acted as the priviliged part that could substitute for the whole on the strength of a unique ‘third’ or mediating position which transcended the particularisms of the capitalist class constellation. In both the Marxist and the conservative-revolutionary approaches, this third position of the spokesperson remained more elusive and veiled; but the generalized epistemological connection which Mannheim assumed between the social condition of estrangement or in-between-ness (a ‘critical’ position) and critical intellectual vision was also affirmed by the right-wing counterintellectuals—even though in a more circuitous and ambiguous fashion. While they defamed the Bodenlosigkeit of those ‘free-floating’ individuals (aliens, Artfremde) who had severed themselves from the cultural and

108 The Intellectual as Stranger sentimental heritage of their race, and chose to define objectivity first of all in terms of existential belonging to the people, they also retained a strong opposite intuition about the epistemological linkage between objectivity and existential estrangement, and about the missionary, even revolutionary calling of the (German) people as resulting with necessity from, as Heidegger phrased it, the ‘extreme questionableness of its present existence’. For Mannheim, the intelligentsia (and its more personalized figure of the exile or expatriate) occupied a third, relatively estranged social-epistemological space, which enabled it, nay even constrained it, to dynamize and synthesize various social and political perspectives and thereby attain a transcendent but still situated objectivity. For the conservative-revolutionaries of Weimar Germany, this third transcendent space was claimed by the German People (or rather: its intellectual vanguard) which, by virtue of its broken identity, its decadence, and its alienation from its own soil and tradition, was similarly forced into the privilege of a ‘grounded’ objectivity which enabled it to redeem this historical pathology and make the world whole again. It is remarkable how clearly such ambiguities about the precise correlation or articulation between estrangement, perspectival lucidity, and innovation reflected those which had preoccupied Barrès and other national socialists in pre-war France. Such ideological filiations between the French and the German right did not go unremarked. In an early review of Barrès’ literary nationalism, Curtius already argued that his political will was governed by the same law as his relationship to art, and that both were defined by the quest for expression of a sum of spiritual-emotional (seelischen) realities. The politics of Barrès culminated in a transposition of an aesthetics of the Self into an aesthetics of the Nation, which were both grounded in the same ‘emotional energetics’, the same expressionist politics of feeling (Gefühlspolitik) (Curtius 1921:99–100, 129, 149ff; cf. Carroll 1995:19ff). This critical view of the Barrèsian ‘cult of the national Ego’ as political aesthetic prefigured Benjamin’s well-known formula about the Futurist and fascist ‘aestheticization of the political’, which in his estimate also characterized the writings of Weimar conservative-revolutionaries such as Spengler and Jünger (Benjamin 1973:241–2; 1930). Benjamin also commented on the ‘decisive influence’ which Barrès had exercised upon the generation of intellectuals whose formative experiences of youth and manhood had been in the war—a debt which was later explicitly acknowledged by Jünger (Hillach 1979:105–6). For the younger conservative-revolutionaries who assembled in the Tatkreis during the early 1930s, the spirit of Barrèsian national socialism was similarly alive; they claimed to recognize it for example in the French néo-socialists led by Marcel Déat, who were advocating a form of ‘left-wing fascism’ which they could look upon with sympathy (cf. Wirsig 1934). As we found earlier, this ‘intellectuals’ socialism of the right’ was not so far removed from Mannheim’s own formulations as to prevent unsolicited

Missionary sociology between left and right 109 right-wing appropriations of his views about the totalizing mission of the intellectuals and that of the discipline of sociology. It is perhaps too much to say that Mannheim’s post-1933 planism, his advocacy of a third way between left and right, and his reviving hopes for a ‘revolution from above’ by a missionary intellectual elite in the late 1930s and early 1940s, drew him closer to some of the political preoccupations which had electrified Die Tat in its agitatory heyday between 1929 and 1933. But it is at least intriguing to notice that Oldham’s Moot, like the Tatkreis before it, was inspired by the neo-conservative idea of an ‘order’ (cf. Struve 1973:369), self-consciously flirted with the vocabulary of ‘authoritarian democracy’, and elaborated a vision of a scientifically grounded managerial society as a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and totalitarian communism, which rehearsed some elements of conservative-revolutionary thought in a softer reformist and rationalist register. It will be the task of the next chapter to further explore this half-lit corridor between left and right by focusing upon the work of Hendrik de Man, who synthesized many of the intellectual currents which were reviewed in the previous chapters in his original ideology of Intelligenzler-Sozialismus; and whose dramatic political ‘crossover’ gives occasion to a more systematic presentation of the horseshoe model, which I think best captures the similarities in ideological range and in ‘emotional energetics’ which characterized the politics of both the Third Republic in France and the First Republic in Germany.

5

The dark side of socialism Hendrik de Man and the fascist temptation

The rationality of fascism Hendrik de Man, who was born in Antwerp in 1885 and died in Swiss exile in 1953, must undoubtedly rank as one of the most versatile, creative, and politically influential intellectuals of the twentieth century.1 In retrospect, there is little exaggeration in honouring him as the most ecumenical and systematic mind spawned by revisionist socialism—the true intellectual heir of more widely-known political thinkers such as Eduard Bernstein, Jean Jaurès, and Georges Sorel. Due to his remarkable linguistic proficiency, de Man became one of the few genuine internationalists in the socialist movement of his day. The cosmopolitan and sophisticated quality of his work eased the way for an innovative theoretical synthesis straddling the German, French, and Anglosaxon traditions of socialist theorizing. This synthesis was first embodied in The Psychology of Socialism (1926, published in English in 1928) and found subsequent expression in major books such as Constructive Socialism (1931) and The Socialist Idea (1933) and in a stream of articles and pamphlets. Apart from leaving a substantial and varied scientific oeuvre, de Man also exerted considerable influence upon socialist educational and political practice in the interbellum; his Plan of Labour effectively projected him as a major ideological founding-father of post-war social democracy. However, de Man tragically but decisively ruined his post-war intellectual reputation by entering upon political collaboration, halfhearted and short-lived though it was, with the Nazi occupants of his Belgian homeland. From 1940 on, this disconcerting ‘accident’ has weighed down heavily upon his intellectual legacy, which in the post-war period has either been rejected out of hand, or been silently cherished with only oblique and guilty reference to its original author. Hence also the curious absence of de Man’s name from the major histories of twentieth-century socialist thought, and the virtual non-existence of debate, except in Belgium and the Netherlands in recent years, about the significance of his revisionist conceptions.2 It is easier now, more than half a century since de Man was convicted in absentia by a Brussels military 110

The dark side of socialism 111 court for high treason, and more than four decades after his death, to detach ourselves from the severe alternative of angry rejection or guilty veneration, and address ourselves anew to the riddle of de Man’s extraordinary intellectual and political career. Self-evidently, my basic question will be this: why did one of the most imaginative thinkers of the inter-war socialist movement, who achieved such a timely and widelyacclaimed revision of orthodox Marxism, and who quarried the entire arsenal of contemporary social science for an impressive reformulation of the socialist idea, verge so closely upon the grammar and vocabulary of intellectual fascism as to turn collaboration with Nazi Germany into a legitimate intellectual and political option? Unavoidably, a closer scrutiny of de Man’s life and work takes us to the dangerous crossroads, also frequented by thinkers such as Sorel, Lagardelle, Michels, Déat, Sombart, and Freyer, where social science, socialism, and fascism meet and intercalate. If one wishes to explore this still insufficiently-lit danger spot, it appears necessary to allow a twofold hypothesis, which was already hinted at in the previous chapter: 1) that fascist ideology was capable of exercising fascination upon intellectuals not least on account of its genuine intellectual stature and rational content; and 2) that revisionist socialism and fascist ideology rode along parallel tracks departing from a partly common origin (e.g. the critique of orthodox Marxism) so that, given specific political and psychological preconditions, the former could open up intellectual corridors towards the latter. Put somewhat differently: while it is normally acknowledged that much good social science entered into the revisionist critique of Marxism, it is less readily accepted that much the same good social science also entered into fascist ideology (cf. Turner and Käsler 1992). Hence my discussion of de Man’s fateful itinerary needs to be prefaced by a few general remarks about the ‘rationality’ of fascism and its inimical proximity to rival ideologies, especially Marxist socialism, with which it seems locked in antagonistic embrace (cf. Pels 1998a:101ff; 1998b). In order to account for this hostile proximity or complicity, and to facilitate explanation of the curious but hardly isolated trajectory of ‘crossover intellectuals’ such as Hendrik de Man, I will need to replace the entrenched one-dimensional ‘wing’ model of the political spectrum, which opposes the positions of left and right in linear, one-dimensional fashion, by a two-dimensional ‘horsheshoe’ model in which les extremes se touchent, in order to retell the story of Hendrik de Man against the more differentiated historical background which this model appears to offer. Special emphasis will be laid upon the dialectical interplay between de Man’s political theory and political psychology, and upon the increasing convergence during the period 1933–40 between de Man’s then-developing ‘authoritarian socialism’ and the ‘German Socialism’ which was advocated somewhat earlier by right-wing intellectuals associated with the ‘Conservative Revolution’,

112 The Intellectual as Stranger who have often been seen as intellectual Schrittmacher of the Third Reich (cf. Stern 1989:156). According to an intellectual (and incurably German) joke from the 1930s, national socialist ideology constituted little else but ‘the World as Will without Idea’. From its inception, similar intellectual disdain was heaped upon the ‘theory’ of Italian fascism. After initial and soon regretted sympathies, Benedetto Croce, for example, came to think of it as a politics of childish adventurism and drunken activism (Hamilton 1971:42–4). Herman Heller condescendingly spoke of fascism’s programmatische Programmlosigkeit; Sigmund Neumann of ‘action substituting for programme’ (Schlangen 1976:32, 42). Walter Benjamin offered his influential interpretation of fascism as an ‘aestheticization of the political’, which substituted spectacle for ideological content and the cult of leadership and the apotheosis of war as compensatory for a lack of representation of the true interests of the masses (Benjamin 1973:251–2). Hermann Rauschning’s more abrupt slogan popularized the notion of fascism and Nazism as the ‘doctrineless revolution’ or the ‘revolution of nihilism’ (Rauschning 1942). With Rauschning, Heiden, Bullock and others in the first generation of biographers of Hitler and Goebbels originated the classical picture of the Nazi elite as a cohort of cynical, plebeian opportunists who lacked any substantive conviction, and indiscriminately robbed, exploited and falsified ideas in the service of a relentless lust for power. The fascist avant-garde in Italy was routinely subjected to similar disapprobation. Marxists such as Miliband typically described it as a band of ‘declassed adventurers, one of which had been a “revolutionary socialist” in his early years’ (1973:80). This make-believe socialist ‘fluttered’, in MacGregor-Hastie’s equally tendentious phrase, ‘from philosopher to philosopher, as he also fluttered from one woman to another, only to find in each only a short-lived satisfaction’ (Gregor 1969:90). Less philistine and demagogical but equally severe was Curtis’ view: ‘the rag-bag of ideas and myths on which political action was allegedly founded in the Italian Fascist and the German Nazi regime can hardly be considered an ideological system or as something that is worthy of intellectual respect’ (Curtis 1969:63–4).3 For a long time, fascist ideologues could not be ‘taken at their word’, because even the tiniest suspicion of their being possibly or partially in the right would engender revulsion and unease. Fascist ideological conceptions were either dismissed out of hand as barbaric nonsense or, following the more intricate and devious route of debunking ideology critique, ‘explained’ as deriving from retrogressive, e.g. anti-proletarian interests: those of mercenary officers of big capital, of desperate petty-bourgeois, of resentful Bohemians, or of gescheiterte Existenzen more generally. Even today, political folk wisdom often tends to expand ‘fascism’ into an unbounded category for the Other, the Barbarous, for ‘that which we are up against’. Its primary, and often also ultimate, function is to create a

The dark side of socialism 113 warlike psychological distance. Recent varieties of neo-Marxist, feminist, or anti-racist ‘political correctness’ continue to employ it in order to name an eternal, metaphysical Foe. It is increasingly evident, however, that this Manichean attitude can no longer be taken as fully representative of the political intuitions which determine our disenchanted turn-of-the-millennium. The view of fascist ideology as anti-intellectualistic, deliberately vacuous and essentially opportunistic, though not fully disestablished, does display cracks and fissures through which for some time doubt and uncertainty have been leaking in. Since the early 1960s, revisionist political historians have begun to recognize that fascism did indeed possess a complex, systematic, and coherent ideological doctrine which reflected a respectable historical ancestry, channelled an authentic revolutionary impulse, and was strongly directive of practical politics (e.g. Gregor 1969; 1974; Griffin 1991; Mosse 1964; Nolte 1965; Stern 1961; Sternhell 1979; 1983; Weber 1964). Increasingly also, ‘post-postmodern’ cultural and literary theorists have sought to recapture the attractiveness, intrigue, and sheer excitement which fascism and national socialism offered to an entire generation of writers and literary intellectuals—precisely because they were writers and intellectuals and embraced particular aesthetic and literary ideals. This reappraisal has reestablished fascist ideology and its political aesthetics as an indispensable referential frame for understanding the twentieth-century avant-garde and its curiously indefinite location between the political left and right (cf. Carroll 1995; Dasenbrock 1992a; 1992b; Hewitt 1993).4 The postmodernist critique of ‘disembodied’ rationalism and ‘abstract’ universalism, in addition, has fostered awareness and promoted a reappraisal of the deliberate if not programmatic nature of fascism’s alleged Programmlosigkeit, especially in the context of its conflict with major competing ideologies such as liberalism and Marxism. As exemplified by the writings of Sorel, Gentile, Spengler, Jünger, Valois, or Déat, the ‘irrational’ voluntarism of its actionist philosophy and its cult of intuition, character, the deed, and violence constituted a reasoned countercharge to the celebration of ‘rootless’ rationalism of which both liberalism and Marxism were considered the most prominent intellectual heirs. Hence the common conviction that the fascist movements were antispiritual, that their sparse ideas were merely negative, and that, on balance, ideology did not carry much weight, has increasingly been revealed as a misconception. Like all misconceptions, it carries a modicum of truth, but it also reflects the need to create utter distance from the supposedly rational, positive, and programmatically consistent theories and movements with which political opponents of fascism have routinely chosen to identify themselves. The bourgeois-liberal theory of totalitarianism and the Marxist theory of fascism, for all their considerable differences, have stood as natural allies here. Both consistently sought to

114 The Intellectual as Stranger balance the undervaluation of the rationality of fascist beliefs with an overestimation of their own rational substance and grounding (cf. Weber 1964:10–11). By contrast, it is currently recognized that fascism, in addition to its philosophical critique of rationalism, also provided reasonably coherent answers to other gaps and paradoxes in alternative ideologies, and more particularly, managed consistently to hit the Achilles heel of Marxist socialism. It highlighted not only manifest weaknesses and defects in its theory about the role of elites and political and intellectual leadership, but also uncovered silences and biases in its reductionist conceptualizations of social class, of the survival of national sentiment, and of the autonomous role of bureaucracy and the state. Repeatedly, fascist ideology also appeared to express, in barbarically realistic terms, what the socialist movement was stubbornly refusing to countenance: that it itself displayed elitist, etatist, often nationalist biases, and that it offered a breeding ground for new managerial bureaucracies and a new class hierarchy based on epistemocratic expertise. It does not require any sympathy for fascist ideological or political solutions in order to recognize that fascist theory, in all these different chapters of political thought, did offer solid handles for critique. Until quite recently however, fascism has not been given a serious hearing as a theoretical competitor of Marxism, or as an ideology which was pitched at an intellectual level comparable with its rival. Even though fascist and right-wing intellectuals are now increasingly ‘taken at their word’ (cf. Bendersky 1983; Golsan (ed.) 1992; Gregor 1979; Herf 1984; Muller 1987; Skidelsky 1975; Wolin 1990), the ‘crossovers’ of former Marxist socialists such as Sorel, Lagardelle, Michels, Mussolini, Déat, Sombart, or de Man are still routinely accounted for by suspecting them of the volatility of the intellectual weathercock, and by questioning the authenticity of their one-time socialist convictions. It is still rare, in this context, to acknowledge the constitutional failures of socialism and Marxism themselves, and the attractions which were exercised by the energetic counter-ideology of fascism. Two revisionisms Unsurprisingly, the idea of an intimate though tension-ridden kinship between the two rival ideological systems was by no means foreign to the minds of the crossover thinkers themselves. Writing in 1933, both as a former syndicalist Marxist and as the most prestigious political scientist of the Mussolini regime, Robert Michels pictured their relationship in the following manner: Fascism cannot be comprehensively understood without an understanding of Marxism. This is true not only because contemporary phenomena cannot be adequately understood without a knowledge of

The dark side of socialism 115 the facts that preceded them in time (and with which they are linked dialectically), but also because of the points of contact which, in spite of everything, remain. That which, to its advantage, distinguishes Italian Fascism from German National Socialism, is its painful passage through the purgatory of the socialist system, with its impressive heritage of scientific and philosophical thought from Saint-Simon through Marx and Sorel. (cit. Gregor 1979a:1)5 After the Second World War, Michels’ semi-autobiographical observation has been echoed only by relatively marginal revisionist historians such as Ernst Nolte or A.J.Gregor who remained outside the mainstream of both the liberal theory of totalitarianism and the Marxist theory of fascism.6 Since the publication of his seminal work Three Faces of Fascism (1965), Nolte has regularly insisted both upon the intellectual respectability of the fascist tradition and the disconcerting proximity between Marxist and fascist ideology, castigating the ‘remarkable forgetfulness of self with which Marxist thinkers have sought to construct an enemy after their own image. In a polemical variant of Horkheimer’s famous phrase about the capitalist antecedents of fascism, he has argued that ‘whoever does not wish to speak of Marxism misses the concept of Fascism from the very start’. If capitalism is indeed the soil of fascism, ‘the plant only grows to exorbitant strength if an exorbitant dose of Marxist fertilizer is added to the soil’ (Nolte 1982:76, 86).7 As early as his The Ideology of Fascism (1969), and in subsequent monographs about Mussolini, Michels, and Panunzio, A.J.Gregor has likewise attempted to dispel the comfortable conviction that fascism was solely of the right and had nothing whatsoever to do with the left. In his book Young Mussolini he set down to argue in a Michelsian vein that fascism, rather than representing a reversal of orthodox Marxism, as Nolte opined, represented one of its radical heresies, i.e. that the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was ‘sufficiently vague and porous to accommodate all the theoretical elements later put together by Mussolini and the first Fascists to fashion their revolutionary ideology’. Young Mussolini, like so many others in his political and intellectual environment, was a Marxist heretic who needed to be taken seriously in this capacity; indeed, fascism itself needed to be taken seriously as ‘a variant of classical Marxism’ rather than as its metaphysical opposite (Gregor 1979:xi). A more recently influential publication in which such connections are explored, Zeev Sternhell’s Neither Right nor Left (1996 [1983]), somewhat paradoxically repeated many of Nolte’s and Gregor’s more interesting hypotheses within a neo-Marxist framework. After the media storm which Bernard-Henri Lévy’s I’ldéologie française aroused a few years before, Sternhell re-pencilled Lévy’s message in a hardly less spectacular but much more scholarly and precise manner (cf. Pinto 1986). Having (belatedly)

116 The Intellectual as Stranger discovered Stalinism and the Gulag, Lévy had also stumbled upon the chasm of La France noire; the fatherland of the Rights of Man suddenly stood revealed as the privileged breeding ground of national socialist thinking. Fascism aux couleurs de la France, rooting in the intellectual heritage of Barrès, Maurras, Péguy and Sorel, had culminated in the authentically French Revolution of Pétain’s Vichy regime. Moreover, as a ‘deviation’ from socialism, it appeared to cultivate intimate intellectual and personal ties with its historical antagonist (Lévy 1981). Sternhell similarly but more impressively argued that fascism was as much a French ideology as a German or Italian one. Pre-fascist and fascist thinking in France had acquired a remarkable intellectual scope and operated at an extraordinarily high intellectual level which was matched only by Gentile’s writings in contemporary Italy. Precisely because in France fascism had not developed beyond a relatively abstract ideology and did not consolidate into a governmental regime, its conceptions were not compromised by practice and could therefore receive undiluted expression. French fascism hence constituted an autonomous and indigenous intellectual system; manifesting a solid conceptual framework which stood on equal footing with that of alternative ideological systems.8 In addition, fascism quarried its theoretical resources and recruited its political personnel from all sides of the political spectrum, finding them ‘even more readily on the left than on the right’. The essence of the ‘fascist equation’ was therefore found in a synthesis of two separate traditions of thought originating in the nationalist, antiliberal right and the socialist anti-bourgeois left: a fusion which became feasible only as a result of a continuous process of revision of Marxism. The history of fascism, Sternhell concluded, could largely be written as that of an uninterrupted attempt to revise Marxism, as a permanent quest for a ‘neo-socialism’ (1983:34; cf. Sternhell et al. 1994).9 Accordingly, fascist ideology’s relative success could not be separated from the manifest impotence displayed by Marxist socialism in the face of the current crisis of capitalism. To a considerable degree, it offered itself as a reversal of Marxism which claimed to repair its flaws but still preserved some of its most salient characteristics. One of these was a markedly progressivist, pianist, or managerial tendency; another feature was its intransigent revolutionary, anti-bourgeois sensibility. This was much more than romantic pose, but constituted an authentic trait which transformed fascism into a formidable rival of alternative revolutionary ideologies. Here Sternhell placed some emphasis upon the protracted struggle between the traditional right and the integral or fascist right, as it manifested itself most visibly in the conflict between Valois’ revolutionary Faisceau and Maurras’ more traditionally oriented Action Française. Fascism, in fact, stood opposed to the conservative right roughly as revolutionary communism stood opposed to liberal social democracy (cf. Nolte 1982:89ff). In sum, it attempted to fuse two theoretical traditions, one of which originated from the revision of Marx as elaborated by the syndicalist school of Sorel,

The dark side of socialism 117 Lagardelle, and Berth, while the other branched out from the new intransigent nationalism which was founded by Barrès and Maurras. The two lineages crossed and merged for the first time around 1913 in the ‘drawing-room fascism’ of the Cercle Proudhon, an intellectual salon jointly directed by Berth, the Sorelian, and Valois, who at that time considered himself a follower of Maurras. Roughly contemporaneously, Italy provided the scene of a similar ideological merger between revolutionary syndicalism and revolutionary nationalism by leading theorists such as Robert Michels, Arturo Labriola, Enrico Corradini and Benito Mussolini. Both in France and Italy a key mediating role was played by Georges Sorel’s ‘New School’ of syndicalist Marxism. The turn of the century therefore witnessed the rise of not just one but of two revisionisms: a liberal revisionism ‘of the right’ which was developed by Bernstein, Jaurès, Merlino and Turati, and a gauchiste, anti-liberal revisionism which departed from Sorelian Marxism and culminated in Hendrik de Man’s The Psychology of Socialism (1926) and Marcel Déat’s Perspectives Socialistes (1931).10 The most significant contrast between the two currents was found in the former’s growing rapprochement with the bourgeois-democratic system of representation. In France this was politically consolidated in the ‘Dreyfus pact’ between the moderate socialists and the bourgeois liberals, and the principled rejection of this compromise with the established order by the revisionists of the left. ‘Revolutionary revisionism’ (the phrase was coined by Robert Michels) considered itself anti-bourgeois, anti-parliamentarian, and anti-party. It celebrated a revolutionary spirit of combat without privileging the proletariat as world-historical actor; it thought of socialism less as an outcome of objectively determined economic revindication than as a matter of ethical choice; and it acknowledged the ‘authoritarian’ fact of leadership by political intellectuals, grounding its utopian expectations upon a novel union between this radical managerial intelligentsia and the broad ranks of the ‘people’ or ‘nation’. What Sternhell seeks to demonstrate, therefore, is not only that revisionism was a constitutive ingredient of fascist ideology, but also that the intellectual history of democratic socialism ran largely parallel to that of fascist thought. This constellation is indicative of the sheer variety of ‘third way’ ideologies which at the time clamoured for political attention, and which ranged all the way from liberal-socialist to fascist authoritarian solutions. In the course of the 1930s, social democracy likewise increasingly accommodated to the unexpected sociological survival and rejuvenation of the middle classes, the unmistakable prominence of political intellectuals, the oligarchical tendencies within the organized movement itself, and the political cohabitation which gradually developed with the state bureaucracy. As a result, it gradually refashioned orthodox class theory and increasingly came to opt for a broad coalition of all popular classes, while recognizing the national

118 The Intellectual as Stranger framework as an ineluctable sociological reality. The core distinction between right and left revisionism, therefore, is less concerned with the philosophy of materialism, class theory, or rival conceptions about state and community than with the attitude which is taken towards the established bourgeois order and the parliamentary system of political representation: compromise or intransigent opposition, reformism or revolution. Between the tips of the horseshoe From this thesis about the emergence of two revisionisms, reformist and revolutionary, only a short theoretical step is required to arrive at an intriguing reconfiguration of the traditional two-winged model of the political spectrum towards what has been described as a ‘horseshoe model’ of the same—a manoeuvre which, it must be admitted, sits rather uneasily with the basic inspiration of Sternhell’s neo-Marxist framework. As intimated before, the wing model represents a horizontal and one-dimensional continuum in which left and right are separated by the political centre in such a manner as to put both terminal positions at the greatest possible remove. The horseshoe figuratively bends this continuum into a curve in order to let both ends approach one another: les extremes se touchent (or almost). The horizontal scheme is thereby expanded to incorporate a vertical dimension which permits the measurement of differences along a second, ‘sentimental’ axis of conservatism-reformism-revolutionism, which is relatively independent of the differences which are plotted along the continuum of rationalized or articulated socio-political conceptions.11

Figure 4 The horseshoe model

The dark side of socialism 119 Since the horseshoe model severs traditional linkages between ‘left’ and ‘revolutionary’ and between ‘right’ and ‘conservative’, the onedimensional linearity of the wing model is exchanged for a more complex scheme which no longer feeds a simple dichotomous morality of Good and Evil. Because ‘structures of feeling’ are introduced as a relatively independent variable, the horseshoe also fosters an explicit critique of the intellectualist or idealist slant of the traditional left-right scheme, which normally considers revolutionary sentiment as a simple correlate or even product of specific (in this case left-wing) political conceptions. The vertical dimension of this dual axial system describes a sentimental or intuitive rather than a rational distinction between established and outsiders or between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘Bohemians’: between those who accept the formative rules of the established order and its orderly change through the procedural game of liberal-democratic politics, and those who reject it not so much in articulate terms but viscerally: the revokés of the left and right who run into each other’s company in the periphery of regularized institutional politics. The horseshoe model thus accommodates what Helmut Kreuzer has described as ‘arch-Bohemia’: the subliminal world of marginal men sans phrase, who are collectively opposed to the established bourgeois centre but lack firm or articulate commitments to either left or right. This antipodal position may harbour the ultra-radicalism of, for example, Marinetti’s Futurism or of surrealism’s ‘great refusal’. It is perfectly exemplified by Flaubert’s dark phrase: ‘About the whole of politics I understand only one thing: revolt’.12 It is likewise exemplified in Baudelaire’s resolve in 1848 to fight, not for the Republic but for the Revolution, which he appeared to love in and for itself, as an art pour l’art of revolt and transgression (Bourdieu 1992:115). In a previous chapter, I have already alerted to the positional similarities, the cross-breedings and some actual swings and crossovers between the Sorelian left and the Barrèsian/Maurrasian right, which intermittently ranged themselves as spokesmen of the great revolutionary refusal against a republican establishment which was guarded by the Solidarists, the social democrats, and the reformist sociologists of the ‘new’ Sorbonne. The Bohemian spot between the tips of the horseshoe defined the typical home of the avant-garde, where politics merged with aesthetics in a cult of innovation and élan which could vacillate between antagonistic ideological options, and which could equally shuttle between more individual or more collective forms of expression. This categorical ambiguity of the avantgarde (Hewitt 1993:21) was rooted in its Nietzschean tendency to erase the boundaries between art and life, to transform politics into artwork, and to oppose the uncompromising life of the (political) artist as homme révoké to ‘bourgeois’ reasonableness, formalism, and political professionalism. We have noticed that the ideological-political constellation of Weimar Germany, in its broad sweep from left-wing Lukàcsian cultural

120 The Intellectual as Stranger revolutionism through the ‘median’ represented by the democratic-socialist Weimar establishment towards the right-wing intellectual opposition which gathered in the ‘Conservative Revolution’, displayed a similarly curved shape which put the polarities at sufficiently close range as to permit unexpected mutual traffic between political rivals and antipodes. In the early 1930s in Germany, something similar to the horseshoe model was already consciously employed by a number of writers and political men of national socialist political inspiration. The myth of the Third Reich, for example, which was popularized by Moeller van den Bruck’s book of 1923, not only proclaimed that the sequence of historical empires initiated by the Holy Roman Empire and continued by Bismarck’s Zwischenreich would historically culminate in a Third Reich, but simultaneously included a summons to a ‘Third Party’ to take a ‘third standpoint’ outside the ‘liberalistic’ system which would supersede the antagonism between socialism and nationalism and dialectically synthesize left and right: ‘The Third Party desires the Third Reich’ (Mohler 1972:24; Sontheimer 1978; cf. Zehrer 1931:536–9). National Bolshevism, as represented by the Strasser brothers in the NSDAP and by the Neumann group in the KPD, likewise pleaded a fusion of radical socialist and nationalist aims and predicted a final struggle between the two ‘proletarian’ nations, Germany and the Soviet Union, against the capitalist West (Schüddekopf 1972). In 1932 a national-revolutionary orator explicitly invoked the HufeisenModell in order to circumscribe the ambiguous political position occupied by Otto Strasser’s newly established Black Front. In explicit rejection of the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ left-right scheme, the political centre was now placed at the upper curve of the horseshoe, while KPD and NSDAP were placed at the two lower extremes; the radical left and right were thought capable of striking an alliance in unanimous rejection of the bourgeois world (Mohler 1972:59). In this fashion, the horsheshoe model invites one to take the basic idea of a ‘Conservative Revolution’ seriously in its apparently oxymoronic collusion of terms (Sontheimer 1978:118–23; cf. Stern 1961:7). As a genuine revolutionary ideology standing in opposition to the ‘bourgeoisified’ Weimar Republic, it claimed to counter internationalist, democratic, and proletarian socialism by a truly ‘German’ socialism which was to be nationalist, elitist, and authoritarian in inspiration. This German socialism, Moeller van den Bruck claimed, would ‘begin where Marxism had left off. Hans Freyer, well-known sociologist and author of the influential pamphlet Revolution von Rechts, suggested that the very demise of the revolution of the left was presently creating room for a revolution from the right (Freyer 1931a). In the preface to his synoptic pro-Nazi work Deutscher Sozialismus, Werner Sombart, while recommending an intimate knowledge of Marxism as an ‘ineluctable demand’ for any participant in politics, considered it his calling ‘to direct the apparently strong forces that work for a completion of the national

The dark side of socialism 121 socialist idea in its socialist aspect…’ (1934: xiii, xvi). In Weimar Germany, as in France and Italy before the First World War, revolutionary conservatism thus partly developed as a revolutionary revisionism, i.e. as an anti-bourgeois, nationalist alternative to a Marxism and a proletariat which appeared to have traded its revolutionary impulse for a place of security and comfort in the established order. Between the tips of the horseshoe, where the left and right poles are in closest vicinity, lay the shady realm of revolutionary Bohemia, which was traversed by a curious cross-current of ideas, sentiments, and political positionings. It was the analogy or homology between Work and War (and the cult of Art as enveloping and ‘spiritualizing’ both) which, in various mixtures and combinations, provided much of the ideological stonework with which a subterranean corridor was built between left and right. Leftwards one encountered the Leninist and Stalinist variants of war-like proletarian socialism. Further descending into Bohemia, one would meet the Sorelian mixture of the myth of Labour and the esprit guerrier, as most pointedly represented by the pre-1914 writings of Berth, who had an intellectual foot both in Leninism and in the protofascism of the Faisceau. It likewise defined the thinking of Péguy, who privileged art as a totalizing model for politics and celebrated the spiritual-temporal figure of the Soldier/Worker as the founder of a harmonious city-state (Carroll 1995:51ff). For Berth and Péguy, and for other social revolutionaries who step-by-step inclined towards nationalist forms of socialism, the Intellectuals made up the caste that occupied the bourgeois high ground of state and academy; suffering from a double incapacity to fight and to labour, they would never be able to comprehend the heroic values of Guerre and Travail Berth and Péguy’s close identification and aestheticization of War and Work and their longing for an anti-bourgeois revolutionary heroism not only anticipated the thought of French neosocialists such as Déat during the 1930s, but also closely prefigured that of post-war German radicals of the right such as Spengler, Jünger, Freyer, and Sombart (cf. Berth 1926:52, 258, 268). As the privileged abode of the déclassés, the uprooted and the estranged, political Bohemia accommodated various strands of anarchism and authoritarianism, and hence performed as a switchboard for a strange merger of opposites. Furthest from the bourgeois centre one encountered something like the ‘lunatic fringe’ of anarchism, as exemplified in the explosive negativism of Bakunin’s and Nechaev’s Revolutionary Catechism or that of terrorist Nihilism. Closer to the right-wing pole stood Marinetti’s Futurist celebration of dynamism and transgression, which projected a warlike, technocratic, and nationalistic ‘socialism of the artist’ which was galvanized by the energy of a vast ‘proletariat of geniuses’ (FalascaZamponi (1996:52). In Italy as in France, the Sorelian left imperceptibly shaded over into the Sorelian right as soon as the ‘abstract’ notion of class war was replaced by the supposedly more concrete idea of national war

122 The Intellectual as Stranger (waged by a ‘proletarian’ nation such as Italy against ‘bourgeoisplutocratic’ ones such as England) which, while changing the identity of the warrior, preserved the crucial bridging myth of violence and war itself. This close concatenation of Work and War, and the idea of socialism as a totale Mobilmachung or war-like mobilization for the purpose of a grand national resurrection, was retained if one would draw still nearer to the right-wing tip of the horsheshoe. From Sombart’s and Spengler’s early pamphlets (Händler und Helden 1915; Preussentum und Sozialismus 1919) up to Zehrer’s 1929–32 articles for Die Tat, Freyer’s Revolution von Rechts (1931), Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (1932) and Sombart’s Deutscher Sozialismus (1934), the conservative-revolutionary intellectuals of Weimar Germany concurred in the elaboration of a new myth of the KriegerArbeiter-Künstler in which the political element of war-like struggle decisively overpowered the economic and proletarian connotations of more familiar types of socialism. When Bürger and Krieger were placed in universal and implacable opposition, the conflict was pitched between different types of Geist or intuitive Gesinnung rather than between different economic categories or rationally definable interests. National (in this case ‘German’) socialism logically resulted from the necessity of permanent and total mobilization for war. This mobilization effort inevitably required an authoritarian state which could perform as Spitze or vanguard of the revolutionary insurrection of the People. Intellectuals’ socialism Although the horseshoe model of the ideological-political spectrum incorporates Sternhell’s fruitful (though not entirely original) insights in the revisionist antecedents of fascist ideology, it also unearths a formidable contradiction in his overall approach which appears absent from the earlier conceptualizations advanced by Nolte and Gregor. Indeed, even though his thesis about the two Marx revisions introduces a greater relativity and complexity in traditional views about left and right, Sternhell still ultimately tends to derive his criterion of ideological virtue from the unilinear wing model and from a leftist stance which is identified with a rather unrevised proletarian Marxism. Paradoxically, then, he is ultimately forced to adopt a principled anti-revisionism: i.e. the conviction that to substitute idealism for materialism and to say ‘farewell to the proletariat’ is to place oneself, by definition and by an immanent logic of things, on an ideological downward slope along which one will inevitably rush from bad to worse (1996:212). Hence Sternhell residually suffers from the same intellectual impotence which overtakes other anti-fascist scholars as soon as they realize that the revision of orthodox Marxism potentially opens up an ideological no man’s land where familiar lines of political demarcation threaten to become blurred. For Sternhell, the social-democratic revision of Marxism is deeply suspect precisely because it so closely parallels the

The dark side of socialism 123 development of fascist ideology. The real challenge, however, is to vindicate the basic legitimacy of revisionism, and from thence to account for the fact that left-wing and right-wing thought so easily commingle and interwine. It is only by facing this challenge that we may begin to lay bare the unprecedented kinships and cross-fertilizations which lend the ideological mosaic of the interbellum its complex ambiguity. This paradox is especially glaring in Sternhell’s account of the life and work of Hendrik de Man, whom he chooses to parade as the chief ideologist of the new gauchiste revisionism. It is de Man, ‘the single author who can rightfully claim the title of successor to Sorel’ (1983:292, 151; 1996:269, 133–4), who in the course of the 1920s and 1930s elaborated an ideology which departed from an idealist revision of Marxism in order to arrive at a worldview which was essentially and thoroughly fascist. In this respect, de Man’s itinerary resembled that of Marcel Déat in France, who captioned his ‘neo-socialist’ deviation from the SFIO with the slogan ‘Order, Authority, Nation’. It is thus hardly a matter for surprise, Sternhell suggests, that de Man convinced himself in 1940 that the Nazi victory inaugurated the construction of a new socialist order. The notorious June Manifesto in which the current chairman of the Belgian Labour Party invited his comrades to face the facts and enter the road to collaboration, should therefore be considered a ‘classic of fascist literature’ (1996:22). However, if one is prepared to take the ‘two revisionisms’ thesis further than this, in order to escape from the rationalist and materialist prejudices which still linger in Sternhell’s model of intellectual degeneration, the explanation of the crossover route of former revolutionary Marxists such as de Man must follow a different line. This approach is not only removed from the anti-revisionist bias which serves to quarantine Marxism from fundamental criticisms such as were advanced by de Man as early as 1920, but it is also more faithful to the shifting patterns of interaction between theory, intuition and sentiment in his writings and political practice which are revealed by the horseshoe scheme. Indeed, one curious and unique fact about de Man’s career is that, in the course of an intellectual lifetime, he travels the entire span of the horseshoe, pausing at regular intervals which are marked by major personal and political ‘moments of truth’. Departing from the lower left pole around the turn of the century, he first embraces a rather militant form of Marxism, then enters upon a more quiet reformist and revisionist course in the early 1920s, only to ‘bend down’ once again in the course of the late 1930s to gradually approximate the lower right pole of a ‘revolutionary revisionism’. In this respect, de Man’s crossover path differs significantly from that taken by, for example, Robert Michels, whose celebrated work on Political Parties marked a moment of ‘value-free’ academic detachment in comparatively quick transition from revolutionary syndicalist to revolutionary nationalist commitments (Beetham 1976). Benito Mussolini and other Sorelian syndicalists crossed over even more swiftly along a more linear path.

124 The Intellectual as Stranger

Figure 5 Crossover intellectuals

After a ‘visceral’ and anarchic revolt against his origins in the Antwerp upper bourgeoisie, de Man, in his first period of socialist agitation, gradually cut his intellectual path through a rather vague and eclectic anarcho-syndicalism towards a more ‘German’ and scientific brand of revolutionary Marxism. In the period leading up to 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War, Marxist scientism supplied the rational vehicle in which his sentiments could move, offering the war-like certainty about the revolutionary goal which his rebellious emotions were subconsciously groping for. In this period emerged what would turn out to be an element of remarkable continuity in de Man’s political thought: a basically distrustful attitude towards the institutions of ‘bourgeois’ parliamentary democracy and a hope for more substantive and direct forms of political representation. The year 1914, one of truth and reckoning for so many other socialists, also found de Man, still a convinced anti-militarist and internationalist, in the trenches in defence of his Belgian homeland against the German invader. The existential break of his war experiences drove an irremovable wedge between life and doctrine, and provoked the farewell to Marxist orthodoxy which was first announced in The Remaking of a Mind (1919), to be finally summarized in his mature work The Psychology of Socialism (1928). This reorientation first followed a classical trail which led through an intermediate Kautskyan or Jaurèsian reformist position towards an even more reformist brand of revisionism such as had been elaborated by Bernstein. De Man’s articulate rejection of Marxism’s rationalistic and deterministic certainty about the pre-ordained calling of the proletariat, and his advocacy of an ethical socialism and a ‘socialism of the intellectuals’ (Pels 1984), was thus immediately triggered by a more subliminal, sentimental distanciation from his former revolutionary

The dark side of socialism 125 romanticism. One of the harshest lessons of the war, de Man now also recognized, was that revolutionary Marxism had always underestimated the importance of political democracy for the liberation of the working class; from a mere means to the revolutionary end, political democracy was now embraced as an end in itself (de Man 1919). It is during this second reformist-revisionist phase that de Man produced his major theoretical writings, developing a distinctively synthetic version of an ethical and cultural socialism which turned out to be vastly influential across a broad intellectual and political spectrum. It not only included many European social democratic parties, but also Weimar sociologists such as Mannheim and conservative-revolutionary thinkers such as Freyer and Zehrer. Unlike Mannheim (but like Zehrer), de Man did not hesitate to refer to the intellectuals as a class in its own right, nor did he object to the intellectuals running on their own rather than another class’ political ticket. If Mannheim’s more guarded intellectualism was already vulnerable to misappropriation by the radical right, de Man’s more straightforward clarion call to the intellectuals to shed their ‘social inferiority complex’, take conscience of their historical mission, and give free rein to their indigenous will to power, renders it even less possible to ignore the issue of its proximity to the ideological and political challenge of fascism— particularly in the light of his subsequent record as a fellow traveller of National Socialism in the brief but tragic years 1940–1. Before continuing my account of de Man’s slow-paced crossover, it appears useful to briefly draw the main outlines of his missionary conception of the intellectual class. It was a little peculiar, de Man argued, that Marxism, although it was conceived by intellectuals, had no place for these in its description of society. It typically split up that class into two or three fragments which it assigned to the capitalist class, the proletariat, or the middle class, according to the specific acquisitive interests which predominated in one fragment or another. In this way, it severed ‘a decisive and indubitable tie (the community of functions and of motives for work)’ in order to retain ‘an accessory and problematic tie (the identity of acquisitive interests)’. This prevented it from seeing that there existed a social stratum distinct from the capitalist class and the proletariat which actually exercised all the directive functions in political and economic life (de Man 1928:209–10). These included first of all the functions of state administration, local government, the leadership of political parties, and the control of the press as the organ of public opinion. These political functions were not exercised by capitalists but by intellectuals; this was the class which actually ruled society today. Neither capitalists nor proletarians could actually spare the time to rule; politics was not ‘an occupation of leisure hours’ but a specialist’s job which demanded the existence of a separate stratum of professionals. Even in modern democracy it was only in an extremely indirect and theoretical sense that politics was the affair of the people: it was above all the affair of the politicians. This also meant that the

126 The Intellectual as Stranger state was much more than an executive committee of the ruling class, but acted as a sui generis structure with an independent sociological will, because its machinery was entirely in the hands of the class of intellectual specialists; no other class had so distinctly tied its own fate to that of the state (1928:196–7, 199–201, 219).13 Proceeding beyond the Gramscian portrayal of intellectuals as organic (rather than marginal) functionaries of the superstructure, who exercised social hegemony in service of a particular class bloc,14 de Man effectively claimed that the intellectuals were becoming an essential social grouping which might form the core of a new historical bloc which potentially replaced both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat or at least significantly reduced their socio-economic importance. This expectation was unmistakable in a passage in which de Man optimistically stated that A slight change in the social volition of the intellectuals, such as the emergence of a desire to use their functions of domination in order to grasp the totality of power, would transform the capitalist class into a more or less superfluous, and certainly powerless, appendage to production and circulation. The emergence of this will-to-power in the intellectuals would eliminate capitalism as the ordering principle of society, would replace the motive of gain by the motive of service throughout economic life, and would transform production into a social service carried on for use and not for profit. All aspiration towards this end is the socialism of the intellectuals; that is to say, it is a socialism which aims at making the motives inherent in the social function and the method of work of intellectuals, the foundation of the whole social order. (de Man 1928:222) This axiomatic separation between mechanical ‘interest’ and an organic and functional ‘ethic of work’ defined much of de Man’s benevolent view of the intellectuals’ social and political calling. In both capitalists and proletarians, the will-to-work was falsified to become a will-to-acquire, and was geared towards quantitative values. The intellectual on the other hand incorporated quality with the two quantities, money and labour power, ensuring that ‘spiritual quality’ constituted the real measure of his social value: The motive for work which predominates in the intellectual is, therefore, not gain, but work for work’s sake; that is to say, from the community’s point of view, work for the performance of service… This stratum of intellectuals…contains the only persons among modern productive workers whose economic function is such as to make purposive organization, the quality of production, the service of the community, their main motive for work. (de Man 1928:215, 218)

The dark side of socialism 127 Hence the natural inclination of intellectuals was to seek the best environment for the deployment of their creative abilities, which might inspire them to look beyond the present state of society towards socialism. The intellectual inclined towards socialism in proportion as he felt that the capitalist organization of society put hindrances in the way of the fulfilment of his desire to work after his own fashion (1928:218, 224). The social inferiority complex of the intellectuals therefore resulted from the functional restriction which they suffered through the degradation of the innermost laws of their profession, and had little to do with motives of acquisition or domination. Socialism was expressly more than a power question or a simple reversal of capitalist property relations, since it also demanded a cultural renovation, i.e. the dislocation of private power or profit motives by socialist motives of community feeling (de Man 1976:214).15 This optimistic functionalism rather closely approached the intellectualist bias of Durkheimian ‘sociological’ socialism and its providential theory of the state as the ‘social intellect’ which was called upon to articulate the inchoate strivings of the conscience collective and define the moral purpose of the community. While confirming the presumed near-identity between intellectuals and politicians which had been a commonly shared theme of Durkheim, Sorel and Barrès alike, it rendered explicit the intellectualist project which Durkheim still tended to cover beneath an objectivist epistemology of ‘social things’, but which his left-wing and right-wing detractors had exposed as such from their ‘counter-intellectual’ proletarian and nationalist standpoints. De Man also approached and anticipated Mannheim’s model of the relatively detached and disinterested intelligentsia, without however halting at the theoretical boundary which prevented the latter from unreservedly picturing it in sociological class terms. As a consequence, his left-wing New Class model was more easily appropriable by an ‘intellectuals’ socialism of the right’ which, like that of the Tatkreis, integrated a providential vision of epistemocratic leadership with a ‘developmental’ view of the state which would serve national regeneration by means of a (national) socialist revolution. Pianist socialism from above If ‘theoretical’ revisionism and ‘sentimental’ reformism, along the upper left bend of the horseshoe, may still develop in parallel fashion and in immediate mutual implication, they gradually diverge if one does not halt there but continues further downwards along the right-hand curve. From about 1930, in an atmosphere of aggravating economic and political crisis, de Man was increasingly swayed by resurging revolutionary feelings, and once again came to discard the emotional and intellectual presuppositions of gradualist and reformist democracy. His newly recovered esprit révolutionnaire,

128 The Intellectual as Stranger however, could no longer be corralled and accommodated by Marxist doctrine, but presently erupted in the quite different theoretical framework of a thoroughly revised ethical and cultural socialism. This curious and novel amalgam of theory and sentiment defined much of the paradox of de Man’s post-1933 theory of planisme. Since a return to Marx no longer offered a workable ideological option, the revolutionary motive could no longer flow along traditional doctrinal channels. In this fashion, the ideology of planism could be said to issue from and represent a largely emotional change of colour of Bernsteinian theoretical revisionism (Pels 1987). In a peculiar mixture of reformist and revolutionary motives, planism started out by demanding the immediate socialization of the commanding heights of banking and credit, followed by that of the monopolistic key industries, without touching other sectors in which private property and market rationality were to be left undisturbed. In order to tear down the ‘Wall of Money’, socialism was in need of a strong state which was capable of staging a revolution from above in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people. Presumably, this new state machine was to be manned by intellectuals such as de Man who would fill it with a new cultural-revolutionary mentality and a new ethic of service. Shady internationalism would give way before the practical need to begin with ‘socialization in one country’, since whatever socialism was possible in the present age had to adapt itself to the national framework. This—and little more than this—was the meaning of socialisme national as it was advocated by Spaak and de Man at the end of the 1930s. The first and second Van Zeeland governments, which featured de Man in key ministerial posts (including that of Finance), did temporarily succeed in reducing inflation and unemployment, but failed to implement any of the structural reforms envisaged by the Plan. As the decade drew to a close, de Man’s criticism of the parliamentary system, which had sufficiently proved its impotence and inadequacy before the ‘Wall of Money’, grew more radical. Previously considered alternatives, such as industrial democracy and corporatist decentralization (a major feature of the Plan of Labour) evaporated before the urgency of an ‘authoritarian’ socialism which accentuated the need for leadership and a strong state, with a view to reestablishing the ‘primacy of the political’ over the recalcitrant powers of capitalism. Fascism was taken seriously, not merely as Planism’s historical foe, but as a genuine competitor in the theatre of social revolution. Fascism matched plan-socialism not only on the strength of its anti-capitalist Sehnsucht but equally on account of its intransigent critique of parliamentary ‘decadence’ and its plea for the undisputed primacy of state authority. The worst which social democracy could do, de Man warned, was to counter the fascist attack upon the established order with an essentially conservative defence of what he referred to as a ‘false capitalist democracy’. Hence his spicily ambiguous slogan of the time: ‘In order to beat the fascists, we must not practice anti-fascism but socialism’.

The dark side of socialism 129 After the Nazi victory in early 1940, de Man became more strongly convinced that the collapse of capitalist democracy was final, and that the war constituted the destructive phase of a formidable revolution which promised the end of capitalism and offered unprecedented opportunities for socialist reconstruction. In his notorious Manifesto of June 1940, de Man, who had succeeded Vandervelde as chairman of the Belgian Labour Party, advised his fellow socialists to face the facts and join the ‘movement of national resurrection’ which would shortly gather all the vital forces of the nation in a single effort to realize ‘the sovereignty of Labour’ under the guidance of a single party and a totalitarian state (de Man 1976:381–3). From now on, he added in a 1941 speech, democracy and socialism ‘would be authoritarian or else would cease to be’. Despite substantial differences between the presently accelerating Belgian revolution and its German counterpart, de Man still wished to acknowledge German National Socialism as ‘the German form of Socialism’, and to co-operate with the Reich ‘within the framework of a unified Europe and a universal socialist revolution’ (1976:391–4). Authoritarian socialists such as himself, he explained, differed from conventional ones in that they ‘really wanted’ the future socialist order, whereas the latter remained satisfied to play only a small part in the existing regime: ‘I, for one, lean the more heavily to the authoritarian method to the degree that I more strongly crave for a socialist order’ (1943:154).16 Contrary to Sternhell’s hypothesis, therefore, I do not believe that it was nationalism but rather a specific authoritarian conception of intellectuals’ socialism that led Hendrik de Man on to the path to collaboration.17 As indicated before, Sternhell presumed the existence of something like an autonomous logic of degeneration which necessarily pushed all deviation from proletarian Marxism, and its canonic theory of private property and the state, over the edge towards the doctrinal opposite of revolutionary fascist nationalism (1996:142ff, 270–2). I have implied, to the contrary, that de Man’s critique of Marxist orthodoxy was revelatory and prophetic, and did not in any logical sense entail a ‘Mussolinian’ deflection from the myth of the Proletariat to that of the Nation; although it did engage a type of totalitarian statism and New Class developmentalism which was not all that far removed from the Leninist and Stalinist degeneration of Marxism itself (Dodge 1987). When Hendrik de Man’s revisionism turned revolutionary, as it did in the years which separated the high hopes and subsequent débacle of the Plan of Labour from the onset of the Second World War, it did not so much increase this rather reluctant and pragmatic ‘nationalism’ but first of all quickened the implicit authoritarianism in his notion of the general interest and the providential statism of his ‘socialism from above’—as it also accentuated his elitist confidence in the mission of a disinterested, serviceoriented class of intellectuals to implement this revolution from their high statal seat. When in his memoirs of 1941 he described his efforts to

130 The Intellectual as Stranger establish a ‘truly national socialism, which would be the concern of all and the constructive principle of the State’, his emphasis clearly fell upon the necessity of strengthening the authority of the state as the expression of the singularity of the will of all, as the repository of a reined general interest (1941:296–7). It is this progressive etatization of de Man’s political thought which appears more than anything else to explain his collaborationist turn in 1940. We have noticed that the horseshoe model, by presupposing a relative disjunction between the level of formalized theory and that of intuitive sentiment, allows one to follow in some detail how waxing and waning ‘irrational’ sentiments may dialectically influence a ‘rational’ succession of ideological frameworks. The ‘letter’ and the ‘spirit’ of a theory may vary independently and co-determine each other. Because ideological systems (in the present case, orthodox Marxism) can accommodate and rationalize a variety of sentiments or Gesinnungen (e.g. all the various shades and mixtures of a revolutionary or intransigent and a reformist or conciliatory spirit), the boundaries of such systems are relatively flexible and may opportunely expand and contract. But this elasticity of theoretical frameworks is not indefinite: breaking points are likely to emerge where specific sentiments can no longer be incorporated, and where one is constrained to go beyond formal system limits (in the present case, Au-délà du Marxisme, as de Man’s major work was appropriately entitled in French translation). This dialectic of political theory and political psychology may also work in the opposite direction. Pre-existing ideological frameworks may be ‘repleted’ and metamorphosed by a range of emotions which differ from those from which they originally sprang, and as a result, may lend a dramatically urgent tone to its major constitutive ideas. While orthodox revolutionary Marxism may, for example, be softened and ‘normalized’ to turn into Kautskyan reformism, Bernsteinian revisionism may be sharpened up in the direction of a Sorelian or Michelsian or de Manian theory of revolution. The virtue of keeping this dialectic in full view is that one escapes from the two-way reductionism which either tends to derive rational convictions from irrational passions, or too easily conceives of political acts of the will as derivative of and founded in scientific rationality. Ideological systems, on the other hand, while representing knowledge-political investments which are not easily displaced and which impose their own logic of determination, are always vulnerable to the incursion of new political sentiments which may unexpectedly break out within and transfigure old theoretical frameworks from the inside.

6

Treason of the intellectuals Paul de Man and Hendrik de Man

What (t)reason? Since Julien Benda, ‘treason’ is the easily-flung and stinging curse whenever intellectuals are judged to fall below some resolute moral standard put up by their accusers—who are more often than not rival intellectuals. Since such standards normally diverge, the vocabulary of treason can be a vicious poison that easily spreads in all directions and creeps back into any hand that administers it. By forcing upon intellectuals (or deviants, or strangers) a sentiment of self-contradiction in the face of an imperious consensus, its work is to instil and exacerbate culpability; not simply by confronting designated sinners with this consensus’ outside social power but, more insiduously, by gaining a foothold on the moral inside and co-opting the forces of bad conscience. ‘Treason’ and ‘bad faith’ are words that police the dissident by transforming him into an utter alien. Hence, there appear to be as many forms of ‘treason of the intellectuals’ as there are offered firm criteria of virtue by which their performance may be judged (cf. Jennings 1997). One can very well begin by distinguishing two opposite meanings of the term which have stuck in the public mind ever since controversy arose about Benda’s classical pamphlet. One of these continues its rationalist impetus by accusing politically engaged intellectuals of a sacrifice of the unique spiritual calling which resides in the disinterested quest for truth and justice. Treason, in this primary sense, is the descent of intellectuals from the ivory tower into the political marketplace, where they come to play the game of political passion and turn into the spiritual organizers of the virulent ideologies of race, class, and nationality (Benda 1946). But there is a second tradition (a doubletracked one, because it is itself politically divided between left and right) which reverses the accusation, and finds treasonable the very fact that intellectuals arrogantly sit in their ivory tower, and prefer the worship of allegedly universal values to the mundane work of justice and practical devotion to a social or political cause. In a previous chapter, we have seen Karl Mannheim voice this criticism against Benda in the early 1930s. Constating that the ‘traditional cult of the exclusively self-oriented, selfsufficient intelligentsia’ was in the process of disappearing, Mannheim was 131

132 The Intellectual as Stranger straightforward about the fact that it was better to ‘finish with this socially aimless, socially useless thinking’. It was absolutely essential that the intellect once again became combative (1993:91). If, for a moment, we decide to respect this broad choice of theoretical alternatives, the two protagonists of my story can be described as ‘combative intellects’, as partisans of partisanship rather than of political detachment—at least in the turbulent period which I will presently review. In 1940, at 54, Hendrik de Man was both leader of the Belgian Workers’ Party and Belgium’s most prominent collaborator; a strange and tragic crowning of a truly astounding career as ideologue, educator and politician in the Belgian and German socialist movements of the inter-war years. At first glance, of course, de Man’s disturbing swerve from left-wing to rightwing ‘treason’ tends doubly to underwrite Benda’s warnings about the pitfalls of the political, precisely because his personal drama individualized the historical one of the curious proximity between socialism and fascism. For his young nephew Paul, only 20 years old in May 1940, intellectual collaboration marked not so much the end as the beginning of an equally checkered professional career, which culminated in a celebrated professorship of literature at Yale—a false start which his subsequent philosophy of deconstruction appeared simultaneously to envelop in silence and cryptically to correct. Spurred by his uncle’s ideas and example, the budding and ambitious literary critic answered to the call of a political age, in which literature would emerge from its barren objectivity and engage in the revolutionary task of national reconstruction. His subsequent theoretical work can be viewed as a long but oblique reflection upon the delusion of these early revolutionary hopes and the acute danger of all totalizing conceptions and sweeping appeals to historical logic.1 The turn to ‘inwardness’, the principled insistence upon non-involvement, and the ironic relativism of ‘undecidability’ of the later de Man then appear as the residue of a classical conversion: that of the ‘twice-born intellectual’ who buries his youthful engagement and retreats into the disenchantments of maturity (Waters 1989b:398). Although on the face of it, therefore, the ‘Benda equation’ seems to work, I think it is ultimately difficult, in both cases, to sustain our present terms of discussion. If Paul de Man appears to revert to a Benda-esque position of intellectual distanciation, there is no trace of the imperative rationalism of Truth and Justice which Benda so valiantly raised against the political intellectuals of the interbellum, and which critics such as Steiner, Bloom and Finkielkraut still brandish against those of today. Indeed, if ‘treason of the intellectuals’ would still be a meaningful expression in the deconstructionist vocabulary, it would turn Enlightenment beliefs about the true ‘calling of the spirit’ inside out, and find fault with all of those, Benda included, who refuse to face up to the inbuilt contingency and contextuality of all cognitive and moral propositions. If we take our bearings from the opposite position, the

Treason of the intellectuals 133 fundamentals of the ‘Benda equation’ equally fall to the ground. Hendrik de Man’s ethical socialism furnishes a case in point where political activism is organically grounded in the same rationalistic values which Benda categorically placed in the ivory tower. Thus it is of some interest to note that Hendrik de Man—Mannheim’s colleague at the progressive University of Frankfurt in the early 1930s—did not locate the intellectuals’ betrayal in their lowly inter-course with politics as such, but in the fact that, while engaging themselves, they turned into servants of the crowd rather than servants of the ‘truth’. The true calling of the intellectual, in his conception, was to work for justice in the everyday world of political causes, but never to renounce the separate obligation of the creative elite to the higher demands which were imposed by the ‘spirit’.2 ‘Treason of the intellectuals’, therefore, is by no means a singular or transparent thing, but takes multiple forms according to competing constructions of reality and ethical character. For Curtis, defending the rationalist tradition against the likes of Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras, the true treason of the intellectuals resided in the attack on the process of intellectualization itself (1959:264). For Sorel, Barrès, and Maurras, on the other hand, the treason of the Dreyfusard (or Jewish) intellectuals (or of the Intellectuals as such) was to have distorted and ‘abstracted’ the true identity of the people in its different particularities as working class, nation-in-arms, or racial community (we may recall Barrès’ awfully paradigmatic dictum: ‘That Dreyfus is capable of treason, I conclude from his race’). Accordingly, since ‘treason of the intellectuals’ is easily abridged to a term of abuse, an opportunistic gloss for the malpractices of the opponent, the term should invariably be approached with the greatest caution. Its harshness stems from the self-righteous, arrogant objectivism with which it is usually pronounced. The accusation of betrayal, more specifically, seems always complicit with forms of essentialist reification— of the interests, identities, or calling of a nation, a class, or a race; or alternatively, of those of the spirit, history, reality, or morality. Feeding upon a Schmittian politics of the zero-sum, it turns dissidents into enemies and differences into crimes. However, we cannot compromise our capacity for moral judgement by dispensing altogether with the vocabulary of guilt and responsibility— unthinkable in the double case of political and intellectual collaboration which I am going to discuss. If we decide to relinquish the idiom of betrayal and bad faith, because we recognize that all proclamation of moral responsibility is necessarily circular and begs the question of its own subjective beginnings, we are still capable of forming judgements which do not hide behind such reifications, and in which this ‘unfounded’ point of departure remains at all times reflexively visible. In the account which follows, I will make such an attempt at circular explication;3 by trying to specify my own calculation of the various forms of ‘treason’—

134 The Intellectual as Stranger those of opportunism and of idealism, those of interest and of disinterestedness—which we encounter in the extraordinary story of Hendrik de Man and Paul de Man. A family affair From a European vantage point (more narrowly: a Belgian and Dutch one) and from the perspective of political science rather than literary theory, the revival of interest in Hendrik de Man in the wake of the incendiary debate over the collaborationist past of his already-controversial nephew Paul, has all the looks of an ironic reversal. Until very recently, moreover, the appearances made by Hendrik de Man in this derivative role counted as less than satisfactory. Even though some of the grossest biographical and philological mistakes have by now been corrected,4 several of those who attempted to measure the possible influences of the uncle upon the nephew apparently worked from hearsay or from insufficiently balanced sources both primary and secondary. Terry Eagleton’s passing allusion (which antedates the painful discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime writings) that ‘de Man’s uncle, an ultimately disillusioned socialist, was politically involved in the Second World War period’ (1984:101) wedded a misrepresentation to an understatement that is not easily surpassed. Juliet MacCannell somehow credited Hendrik de Man with the belief that ‘the Marxist version of historical development would “naturally” prevail over the evident decadence of capitalism’ (cit. Norris 1988b: 74), a belief which he had begun to reject as early as 1918. Lindsay Waters’ closely argued introduction to a collection of Paul de Man’s essays, although better on the uncle, took its cue rather one-sidedly from Sternhell’s Neither Right nor Left, mistakenly fastening upon the temptations of nationalist ideology as the uncle’s high road to collaboration (Sternhell 1996; Waters 1989a:xxii). Jacques Derrida’s embarrassed apologia for a lost friend included an extended footnote on ‘that uncommon man, Henri de Man’ which illustrated his presumption that the latter’s influence was ‘powerful and determining’, but which failed to specify what this influence consisted of (1989:158–9). Christopher Norris similarly exonerated Paul de Man by pointing to his youthful age and to ‘pressures of political and personal circumstances’ of which the only tangible one turned out to be the looming presence of his uncle (1988b:178).5 In view of such inadequacies, it might be helpful to readjust the balance and reconnect the ‘American problem’ of Paul de Man to the ‘European one’ of his older relative, who in many accounts still performs as an enigmatic background figure. This is also required because Hendrik de Man’s impact upon his nephew appears more significant than so far indicated and can be more accurately pinpointed and gauged—which also helps to acquire a more adequate sense of their points of agreement and difference (cf. Lehman 1991:196–7). In the following, I will therefore set

Treason of the intellectuals 135 out by recapitulating in a more detailed fashion than was done in the previous chapter the various phases of Hendrik de Man’s intellectual and political career. This will set the stage for an examination of the years immediately preceding and following 1940, when I will slow down my narrative in order to prepare for the entrance of the young nephew. Then I will do some shuttling back and forth between the two, with the purpose of showing the extent to which the nephew’s critical themes are in tutelage to those of the uncle and where they diverge. Generally I will claim that, while Paul de Man’s philosophical and political views bear the evident imprint of his uncle’s thinking, the nephew displayed a much stronger affinity towards cultural nationalism and irrationalist vitalism than the uncle, whose road to collaboration was paved by different enthusiasms. The nephew’s literary criticism from these early years has the additional interest of showing how an imperious political ideology is ‘refracted’ by the laws of a professional field, the autonomy of which is upheld and rationalized at the same time that new entrants see fit to proclaim a ‘primacy of the political’ over against their more established rivals. This precarious balance may inform us about the plight of the cultural collaborator who, hovering between engagement and distanciation, believes that he can keep both his disciplinary and political conscience clean by serving a double cause.6 A further point which I wish to make is that, although there is some ugly opportunism in both uncle and nephew, this must largely count as a subsidiary matter which should not eclipse the genuine idealism which led them both into the adventure of collaboration. Paul de Man appears genuinely to have believed in the congruence of nationalist resurrection and some kind of socialist reconstruction, and in the renovation of artistic sensibility and style which would follow in its wake (Carroll 1995:249, 259; Lehman 1991:143ff; Waters 1989a:xv). In Hendrik de Man’s case, it is even fair to say (and I have suggested so much in the previous chapter) that he travelled along with national socialism because he took socialism itself so very seriously, much too seriously indeed: there is truth in Peter Dodge’s remark that ‘his very act of reluctant approval of Nazism may be taken as an index of the passion of his devotion to socialism, defined in his terms of the repudiation of the bourgeoisie’ (Dodge 1966:213). Let us recall that it was the opportunist of the hour, Paul-Henri Spaak, who somehow found himself on the good and ultimately winning side, while his intransigent former comrade-inarms was convicted for treason in 1946.7 Hendrik de Man was born in Antwerpen in 1885 from a well-to-do bourgeois, highly cultured, and cosmopolitan background, and died in Swiss exile in 1953. Having enlisted with the youth organization of the Belgian Workers’ Party as a high-school student, he soon turned into a seasoned socialist militant who neglected his formal studies at the universities of Brussels and Ghent for the more mundane school of political life. Increasingly estranging himself from the class and family of

136 The Intellectual as Stranger his birth, de Man departed in 1905 for Germany, the promised land of Marxist theory and socialist organization, in order to write for the radical Leipziger Volkszeitung and study economics, philosophy and history at Leipzig university. The ‘Marxist intoxication’ which fired his left-radical agitation in both the SPD and the BWP only subsided in 1914, the year of the fateful démasqué of the International. Until then a convinced antimilitarist and internationalist, Hendrik de Man volunteered for service and spent long intervals in combat at the IJzer front (perhaps at some stage opposite another still-unknown soldier, Adolf Hitler). It was this uprooting war experience which triggered a momentous overhaul of his previous beliefs. The first inklings of this revision were already evident in his English-written book of 1919, The Remaking of a Mind, which was published after visits to Russia in 1917 and North America in 1918. But his farewell to Marxism received full elaboration only in Zur Psychologic des Sozialismus of 1926 (de Man 1928), which he began to write in 1922 when he had once more settled in Germany. Teaching at various academic institutions in Darmstadt and Frankfurt, Germany remained his home until 1933, the year of publication of his second major German work, Die Sozialistische Idee, which was burned not later than May of that same year on the Frankfurter Römerberg by enthusiastic brown-shirted students. De Man’s supersession of Marxism included a number of key ideas which can only be listed here in summary fashion (for a fuller treatment, see the previous chapter and Pels 1987). First of all, his powerful critique of Marxist rationalism and determinism prepared the ground for an ethical socialism which aspired beyond narrow class interests in order to appeal to universalistic human values. Secondly, his dismissal of the proletarian myth introduced a non-exclusive politics of coalition which admitted intellectuals and other social classes as equal partners to the working class. The rejection of class socialism also implied a more constructive conception of the state, which was supposedly capable of acting as lever for a broad popular movement against the core powers of capitalism which were housed in the system of credit and banking. Finally the class struggle, though not denied in fact, was rejected as a political value, and both the democratic system and the national community were accepted over and above class intransigence and the romantic internationalism which had so miserably failed in 1914 (Pels 1984). As previously seen, however, one can trace a gradual change in de Man’s mood from the early 1930s under the impact of the new hard-hitting economic crisis and the meteoric electoral rise of national socialism, which ended by giving these revisionist themes an entirely different coloration. Increasingly, de Man felt that the path of step-by-step reformism was closed, and that a revolutionary situation was unfolding which demanded a novel kind of socialist initiative. The most tangible result of this infusion of theoretical revisionism by a resurging revolutionary sentiment was the new

Treason of the intellectuals 137 theory and tactic of planisme. At the celebrated Christmas Congress of the BWP in 1933, de Man’s Plan of Labour was adopted amidst unprecedented scenes of enthusiasm; it soon developed into the platform for a broad popular agitation which two years later swept the socialists into office. However, the first and second Van Zeeland governments, which included de Man in key ministerial posts, while temporarily slowing down unemployment and inflation, failed to implement any of the structural reforms laid out by the Plan. Disillusioned by the impermeability of the ‘Wall of Money’ and fatigued by his tropical years in office, de Man now radicalized his critique of the parliamentary regime, which he had distrusted as fundamentally undemocratic from his earliest days as a militant Marxist. Previously considered alternatives such as industrial democracy and corporatist decentralization (a central feature of the ‘third way’ socialism which was outlined by the Plan), gave way before an authoritarian socialism which emphasized leadership and a strong state which would be able to contest the powers of Money and Credit and reestablish the primacy of the political. Plan-socialism, therefore, although it emerged as the only powerful riposte of inter-war socialism to the political advance and attraction of fascism, also curiously approximated several of the latter’s key ideological themes. Fascism was indeed taken seriously as a genuine movement of revolution, not only on the strength of its anti-capitalist Sehnsucht but equally on account of its critique of parliamentary decadence and its plea for the undisputed primacy of state authority. It was dangerously wrongheaded, de Man felt, if social democracy would attempt to counter the fascist attack on the established order with an inept and essentially conservative defence of what he called ‘false capitalist democracy’. From neutrality to collaboration This well-considered duplicity towards fascism—if added to his pacifist convictions and his fierce opposition to the French policy of revenge after Versailles—also helps to explain why de Man emerged as one of the major architects of the politics of strict neutrality, which were inaugurated in 1936 by means of the revocation of the Franco-Belgian military treaty of 1920. Belgium precariously maintained this voluntary neutrality in the face of growing domestic opposition from the Austrian Anschluss and the Munich Agreement up to the Russo-German Non-Aggression Pact and the attack on Poland in September 1939. During the winter of 1938–9, de Man even initiated talks at the highest dipomatic levels in all the major European capitals in order to sell his idea of a general peace conference; a dream which quickly perished due to the sly indifference of Ciano and Ribbentrop. In October 1939, when he found himself virtually alone, as deputy prime minister, in supporting what was still official government policy, de Man semi-anonymously penned a sensational article ‘Enough Sabotage of

138 The Intellectual as Stranger Neutrality!’, which was printed in the Labour Party’s new theoretical monthly Leiding (Leadership), of which de Man himself was chief editor. The ‘three-star-article’, as it became known, was widely discussed in the press; subsequent issues of Leiding itself carried a relentless polemic between the ‘Three-Star-Man’ (whose identity had never been much of a secret) and Max Buset, de Man’s former companion-in-arms from the campaign for the Plan, and presently one of the leaders of the emerging anti-planist and internationalist faction in the Belgian Labour Party. This sharp debate between the neutralists and the anti-neutralists sets the stage for the entrance of young Paul de Man, whose first political articles in Jeudi, the weekly of a left-liberal student cercle at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (where his uncle continued to hold a chair in social psychology) were concerned with the outright defence of Belgian neutrality. Reacting against statements which had appeared earlier in Jeudi, Paul de Man went against the grain of majority opinion at the ULB that responsibility for the war belonged entirely to Germany, and that the war itself had to be seen as a crusade of the democracies against the Nazi dictatorship. He restated his uncle’s long-standing conviction that war had never been able to resolve anything, because there were always two losers in the game. The notion of an ideological war was wrong and infinitely less justifiable than a war of defence or even, given certain circumstances, a war of conquest. For Poland war was logical, for Belgium in its present situation the best solution was neutrality (1988:9–10). In an article from January 1940, the young student took an approach to Hitlerism which was quite close to that adopted previously by his uncle. A military victory over Germany would not suffice, since in order to overcome Hitlerism one would have to cleanse the soil on which it had been able to grow so prosperously. The errors of the democracies were not limited to the domain of international politics, but resided equally in ‘our incapacity to resolve our proper economic and social problems’. One cause of the attraction of the totalitarian mystique for the masses had been their loss of confidence in the capacity of the existing regime to remedy unemployment and introduce the most elementary welfare. Winning the war would only be meaningful if it served as prelude to a total revision of the foreign and domestic policy of all the European countries (1988:13– 14). Another piece in the monthly journal of the same cercle, which Paul de Man began to edit in February 1940, dismissed the dangerous simplification that the present war was a straightforward struggle of the Occident against the forces of barbarism: The factors of decadence are encountered in all nations, in all individuals, and the victory of the democracies will only be a victory of the Occident to the extent that one will be able to establish an order in which a civilisation can re-emerge of the type which is so dear to us. (P.de Man 1988:19)

Treason of the intellectuals 139 Although this sounded somewhat vague, it did broadcast a strong feeling that decadence was universal, that the present war was not a simple contest between Good and Evil, and that the democracies would, when victorious, be forced to engage in serious social transformations. In the spring and early summer of 1940, however, after the brief and pitiful campaign of the Belgian army and the ignominious fall of France, it seemed that the democracies had been defeated so thoroughly that they would never be able to rise again. Hendrik de Man had stepped down from the government in January to reshoulder his duties as chairman of the BWP and to head the army welfare organization; he had served as aide-de-camp to the queen-mother and as advisor to King Leopold during the hostilities in May. The Nazi victory, he now persuaded himself, pronounced an incontrovertible historical verdict on the collapse of capitalist democracy— which should not be taken as an unmitigated disaster but, as his notorious Manifesto of 28 June 1940 proclaimed, as ‘a deliverance for the working class and for socialism’. The war was nothing more or less than the destructive phase of a formidable revolution which sounded the death knell for capitalism. The collapse of a system which called itself democratic, but which was in fact dominated by the money powers and the professional politicians, presently cleared the way for a regime in which the enhanced authority of the state would undercut the privileges of the propertied class and replace unemployment by the universal obligation to work. The socialist order would be realized, not as the concern of one class or one party, but as the good of all, in the name of a national solidarity that would soon be European if not world-wide. The political role of the BWP had come to an end. De Man advised his comrades to join the ranks of ‘a movement of national resurrection’ which would include all the vital forces of the nation ‘in a single party, that of the Belgian people, united by its fidelity to its King and its will to realize the sovereignty of Labour’ (1976:381–3). Here, in de Man’s June Manifesto, are encountered the bare outlines of a revolutionary but non-proletarian ‘dictatorship of labour’ which was no longer satisfied to reform the system of parliamentary democracy but aimed to abolished it in order to concentrate all executive and legislative powers in the hands of the state. Doing away with partisan rivalry in favour of a single party of national unity, it would extend a powerful statal grip over all forms of cultural expression and reproduction. De Man’s blueprint was saturated with a fierce will to unity, a totalitarian singleness of purpose which no longer had any use for political discord, which categorically identified with the general will, and which was entirely bewitched by the severe logic of the ‘revolution from above’. Notwithstanding some substantial differences between the unfolding Belgian revolution and the German one, de Man was now prepared to recognize National Socialism as ‘the German form of Socialism’, and to cooperate with the Reich ‘within the framework of a unified Europe and a universal socialist revolution’ (1976:391–4).

140 The Intellectual as Stranger The revolutionary temptation These portentous statements may suffice to preface a discussion of the wartime writings of Paul de Man, who during this first year of the German occupation stood in close contact with his uncle and godfather (Hamacher et al. 1989:xii; Lehman 1991:196–7). In fact, the nephew acquired his first regular job on the censored Le Soir through the intervention of his uncle with its new editor-in-chief Raymond de Becker. De Becker, a former progressive Catholic journalist who had been an enthusiastic advocate of planism, was also the one who had edited the 1937 interviews with Spaak and de Man in which they had collectively defended the ideas of an ‘authoritarian democracy’ and a socialisms national. Like de Man, he had frequented the salon of the Didier couple in Brussels, which had provided an informal meeting ground for pianists, ‘new order’ Catholics and sympathizers of the New Germany. On July 4, de Becker had printed de Man’s Manifesto to the members of the BWP in Le Soir. In December Le Soir, now more securely controlled by the German Militärverwaltung, printed the first of what would become a long series of about 170 articles and notices by its new literary and art critic Paul de Man. One may fruitfully begin to read these articles from behind a veil of ignorance, as presenting the fragments of a remarkable tableau of cultural life in the first occupation years by an obscure author—as if a historian of Belgian politics and culture had accidentally hit upon a nicely compacted set of data, deciding somewhat haphazardly to focus upon one Paul de Man, literature and art critic for the collaborating, or as it was known streetwise, the ‘stolen’ Le Soir. A first impression would probably be that much of everything carried on as usual; that the cultural realm, as represented through this succession of reviews, remained to a large extent distanced and sealed from the stormy events on the political exterior. Concerts were being played, art exhibitions held, lectures listened to, books published, literary prizes competed for, and all these events were duly reported and evaluated by our critic. Increasingly, however, these unremarkable reports are punctuated by intruding historical realities, although they present themselves as often in literary clothing as in nakedly political guise. This is the case when an Italian academic lectures on the ‘first purely fascist’ generation of Italian poets, and the young critic for Le Soir celebrates the ‘très belle et originale poésie’ which has been able to develop in the fascist climate, concluding his piece with an appropriate quote from Mussolini. Or when a report on fascist education in Italy, which stresses its egalitarian structure and practical orientation, is reviewed with a great dose of sympathy. Another lecture on the intellectual sources of the Risorgimento occasions our critic to discern a parallel with the contemporary plight of Belgium where, similarly, national revolution is on the agenda of the day, and where, likewise, pensée nationale and pensée sociale are called upon to supplement

Treason of the intellectuals 141 one another. Belgium, Paul de Man advises, must not search for its forces of regeneration beyond its own frontiers, as Italy at the time looked for them in France, but in the specific qualities which have become apparent throughout its domestic history. Apparently, the frontiers alluded to, did not include the rather ineffectual ones which at that time separated occupied Belgium from occupying Germany. A number of reviews of first reactions of literary France to the military defeat and the installation of the Vichy government further fleshed out de Man’s definition of the political and cultural situation. Works by Drieu la Rochelle, Gide, Fabre-Luce and above all de Jouvenel’s Après la défaite, served to articulate his own sentiments about the wholesale decadence of the French and Belgian ancien regime and the mortal weakness of its liberal-democratic political system, which had so swiftly crumbled ‘before the perfect conduct of a highly civilized invader’. Systematic misinformation spread by French and English propaganda had bred a massive ignorance of the social and political accomplishments of Germany, of the ‘intense effort at reconstruction’ which had been undertaken in that country. The war had closed the account on an entire civilization which was already at its last gasp. It had inaugurated a cleansing revolution which would renovate all domains of social and cultural life and reorganize European society along lines of greater equality (1988:51, 55, 66, 153). The new intellectual and literary generation which was touched by this souffle révolutionnaire could no longer remain individualistic and politically detached. Of course, the mental saltimbanque which the new historical reality imposed would come more naturally to a people with a highly developed sense of the collective, a people who had spontaneously arrived at less individualistic ways of life than the French (1988:130–1). In a curious reflection on the political testament of Richelieu, de Man condoned the French cardinal’s power politics vis-à-vis a divided Germany only to reverse the lesson for the immediate present. In certain ages, Richelieu had declared, a nation could find itself in such a deplorable state of division and weakness that it would voluntarily be guided and dominated by its neighbours. France, de Man added, was proudly and stubbornly ignoring the changes which the successes of Bismarck and subsequently Hitler had worked in its political tradition, and was at this very moment paying dearly for this error (1988:136). The present revolutionary situation offered a wealth of practical opportunities for replacing a disastrous political apparatus by an organism which would ensure a more just redistribution of goods. Never would one find oneself in circumstances more propitious to total renovation than at this moment when all institutions were in the process of total overhaul. Undeniably, the organizing force of this revolution emanated from Germany, and only Germany could organize the continent; this was why immediate collaboration was a necessity which now imposed itself on all objective minds (1988:138, 154, 253). The future of Europe could now

142 The Intellectual as Stranger only be predicted within the framework of the capacities and needs of the génie allemand. This entailed something more than a mere addition of reforms; it was the final act of emancipation of a people which found itself in its turn called upon to exercise hegemony in Europe (1988:158, 207). If one takes in this composite picture, put together from remarks scattered over a full two years of journalistic writing, a state of mind emerges which was quite common among progressively minded collaborating intellectuals (cf. Brenkman 1989:268; Kaplan 1989:25), and which closely repeated but also translated the political sentiments expressed on a broader stage by Hendrik de Man. Although Paul de Man— at least as he emerged from these writings—seemed less of a socialist and more of a nationalist than his uncle, his belief in the revolutionary opportunities of the hour was apparently genuine; as was his general faith in the virtues of collectivist organization over and against bourgeois (and arguably also capitalist) individualism. Victorious Germany, in any event, had made more effective inroads into the decrepit economic and political regime than democratic socialism had ever been capable of doing before the war; now that this necessary work of destruction was done, one could begin to build a new and more equitable social order. In this new order the Flemish spirit would collaborate with the German one against the residues of French individualism; although Flanders also had to resist the temptation to dissolve in the Germanic community, which would efface everything which constituted its deepest originality. The German genius versus the French At this point, I would like to descend more deeply into the postulate of a contrast of substance between a ‘Germanic’ and a ‘Latin’ spirit, both in order to expose how Paul de Man’s cultural nationalism is set to work in the field of literature and art, and to underscore some of the dissimilarities between his aesthetic nationalism and the socialisms national which was defined and defended by his uncle. For Hendrik de Man, the idea of nationality never became an end in itself but acquired political significance solely as a ‘necessary precondition for the higher unity of internationalism’. As the working class ascended towards social citizenship, it developed closer ties to the national cultural tradition. Socialism itself, to the extent that it adopted the positive idea of the state, inevitably also became a carrier of the idea of the nation (de Man 1927:344, 225, 236). Socialisms national, as already inscribed in the theory of planism, emphasized the instrumental priority of socialization within the national framework over and above a romantic and ineffectual internationalism; while simultaneously broadening the socialist project from the exclusive concern of one class or party towards that of a broad popular, and in this sense national, coalition (Pels 1987).8 When Hendrik de Man’s revisionism turned revolutionary, as it did in the few years which intervened between

Treason of the intellectuals 143 his governmental debacles and the beginning of the Second World War, it did not so much increase this rather hesitant nationalism but first of all aggravated the implicit authoritarianism of his articulation of the general interest and of a pianist socialism that would be initiated by the state and by the intellectuals which made up its leading personnel. As suggested earlier, it was this progressive etatization of de Man’s ‘socialism of the intellectuals’ which appears more than anything else to account for his turn towards collaboration. The spirit of radical nationalism, however, more definitely configured the outlook of Hendrik de Man’s young nephew. His wartime journalism did not tire of evoking a sweeping opposition between the typically French or ‘Latin’ and the typically ‘Nordic’ artistic genius; an opposition which was imagined as set by unspecified hereditary or otherwise deeply constant if not eternal properties of the two different races. In general, de Man laid out a typified contrast between a cold tradition of objectively disengaged, abstract psychological analysis, and a warmer, more intuitive and poetic tradition which set a higher store upon simple homespun morality over against haughty intellectual aloofness. While the French novelistic tradition from Stendhal through Flaubert to Proust was overwhelmingly spiritual and rational, the new Nordic writing was inspired by the pictorial and the plastic. Certainly, de Man did not in any simple sense put his cultural bets on either one of these to the exclusion of the other. But even though he repeatedly defended the idea of a creative osmosis of the two genres or styles, 9 his intellectual and aesthetic sympathies were quite consistently poised towards the newly-emerging Germanic literary sensibility. In unorthodox French writers such as Giono and Ramuz, for example, he praised the return to nature, the restoration of themes of the ‘open air’, which had been eclipsed by the psychologism of the Romantic school and had suffocated in the serres chaudes of Gide and Mauriac. Analogously, he applauded the narrative turn which announced itself in modern German and Flemish writing, which rehabilitated simple storytelling and hence might reverse the traditionally high esteem of the roman d’idées or roman d’analyse in which anecdotal narrative was a mere means of psychological study rather than an end in itself. In the new generation of Belgian novelists such as Magermans, Willems and Libert, he discerned a spiritual turnabout which exchanged the cerebral and premeditated craft of the analytic tradition for a style of greater directness, subjectivity and vitality. Whereas the previous art of the novel left an overwhelming impression of scholarly study, in which the author remained impersonally hidden behind the characters created by him, here one encountered an overtly personal experience and emotion. The French novel, he went on to say, studied and observed without judgement of moral character and appealed to capacities of pure intelligence which were highly uncommon. By contrast, the modern German novel largely bypassed psychological drama and staged a clear-cut

144 The Intellectual as Stranger conflict between good and evil. It introduced personages of extreme simplicity, men and women who were all of a piece and always remained equal to themselves. What this ‘rude and elementary art’ lost in descriptive rigour, it quickly regained in poetic charm, originality of vision, emotive depth and musical quality of language (1988:75, 109, 116, 126–7). Ernst Jünger was perhaps the writer who incarnated the new spirit in its most noble and attractive form. His writings moved out of the realm of explicative intelligence in order to recover the lost domain of the mythical.10 His style was pure evocative narration, marked by a view of the world which did not see it as an object of investigation for an inquisitive spirit but as a meeting ground of the eternal and antagonistic forces of Good and Evil. As such, Jünger symbolized the leading role of German letters in contemporary world literature, which witnessed the growing penetration of French artistic values by those of Germanic origin. His serene, quiet insight into human character remained naturally remote from the method of psychological novelists such as Proust or Gide, who made themselves into a centre and only had an eye for the doings of others with respect to their own ego. Jünger was also praised for having shown, through his remarkable study Der Arbeiter, that modern German sociology had found a way to discover knowledge ‘not along purely rational, scientific paths, but by other means’ (1988:216, 244–5, 319, 331, 349). In this manner, the sins of abstract intellectualism, cool distanciation, didactic elitism and artificial posturing were all condensed in an idealtypical French spirit; a package which compared unfavourably with the more subjective and supposedly more democratic spirit of German and Flemish art, which remained closer to nature, to popular emotion, and the poetry of everyday life. As de Man put it, the Germanic nations practised an art which was more völkisch than the Latin nations and France in particular; if völkisch was taken to mean that a work of art was not solely the product of an individual imagination but also possessed virtues which belonged to a people as a whole (1988:178, 194, 201). Although de Man took care to emphasize that it was a matter of difference, not of superiority or hierarchy, his overall distribution of favours did something to undercut such studied reticence. Cultural nationalism and the critique of rationalism If the question is raised about the specific quality of Paul de Man’s nationalism, it is unmistakable first of all that his view of the ‘specific genius of a people’ was defined from a cultural rather than a racial or even anthropological perspective. Secondly, the whole business about national character appeared somehow tributary if not subordinate to the transcending purpose of literary and aesthetic criticism; more specifically, to the erection of powerful critical dichotomies such as those which opposed rationalism and vitalism, individualism and collectivism, or

Treason of the intellectuals 145 objectivism and subjectivism. ‘France’ and ‘Germany’, on this reading, were to an appreciable degree cultural phantoms, reifications of battling spiritual forces, rather than primary generative essences or material unities of blood and soil. True enough, de Man regarded something like the ‘national essence’ or ‘the spirit of the nation’ as the foundation of modern civilizations. ‘What is proper to our time,’ he wrote, ‘is the consideration of this national personality as a valuable condition, as a precious possession, which has to be maintained at the cost of all sacrifices.’ This he claimed to be a sober faith, a practical means to defend Western culture against decomposition from the inside and against inundation by neighbouring cultural norms. This also provided the context for inserting the ugly phrase: ‘A sincere artist can never renounce his proper regional character, destined by blood and soil, since it is an integrating part of his essence, which he has to give expression’ (1988:302–3, 322). It remains questionable to what extent this constituted true belief or an opportunistic accommodation to the language of the day. De Man simultaneously took pains to underscore that ‘true artistic nationalism’ was never synonymous with pettiness or narrowness of spirit, and that indeed periods of the most outspoken nationalist sentiment had often cradled the most captivating forms of universalism. Nationalism only became a mortal evil as soon as it turned into a tyrannical obligation and was subordinated to purely political goals. This, de Man fancifully claimed, was perfectly understood in present-day Germany; that is, if one took notice of the ‘clairvoyant’ words of Reichsleiter Baldur von Schirach, who was quoted as saying that National Socialism would never advocate the creation of a party-imposed form of art, since every true work of art embodied a unique value and fulfilled a national mission of its own (1988:201). Hence cultural nationalism, for Paul de Man, not only implied a balanced autonomy of the artistic and literary field, but also performed within that field as an indispensable vehicle for the critique of rationalism and ‘abstract’ individualism (cf. Carroll 1995). One would miss much of de Man’s ambiguity if one chose to disregard or underestimate the sheer intellectual quality of his nationalism—which was the nationalism of an intellectual in rivalry with other intellectuals and, as such, simultaneously expressed his political accommodation to the hegemonic ideology of the day and his professional interest in safeguarding the logic of the cultural field and the material and spiritual profits to be gained therein. As an engine of cultural critique, nationalism first of all offered a foggy collective noun for everything that contrasted favourably to the cold objectivity of the analytic mind, to the artificial, disembodied cerebrality which was associated with the ‘Latin’ literary tradition. In this respect, de Man’s celebration of poetic vitality and moral simplicity, of the pictorial versus the abstract, of raw nature versus studied artefact, and of emotional subjectivity versus the impersonal intellect, continued an already venerable critical heritage. As we saw in Chapter 3,

146 The Intellectual as Stranger ever since the attacks by right-wing publicists such as Brunétière, Barrès, and Maurras on les intellectuels at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, the antirationalist imagination of the right-wing counter-intellectuals had been fired by a form of spiritual and aesthetic nationalism. Against the ‘rootless’ brilliance of the self-centered cosmopolitan individual, nationalism celebrated the sociological and foundational concreteness of the national collective, and volunteered to repair the ill-bred separation between the abstract mind and the body both individual and social (Bering 1978).11 It was precisely this vitalist or intuitionist attack on disembodied, rootless intellectualism which stood at the core of the nationalist temptation for many radical intellectuals; which was one reason why they could be lured onto a path of slippage towards harsher discriminations which easily spilled over into national chauvinism and raised the frightful enemy image of the Jew. In view of this, there is heightened interest in briefly discussing the contrast between Paul de Man’s anti-rationalism and the psychological critique of rationalist Marxism which since 1926 had propelled his uncle Hendrik to intellectual fame. The Psychology of Socialism argued, among other things, that socialist convictions were not primarily grounded in rational insight but were rooted in ‘complexes of sentiment’ which articulated themselves into an ethical sense of justice. De Man’s refusal of scientific socialism mobilized a psychology of sentiment and a pragmatist epistemology which unravelled its forced objectivism and manifested a particular attentiveness to the forces of myth and utopian belief. It must be taken for certain that precocious Paul de Man had digested his uncle’s chef d’oeuvre and had benefited in some way from its widely-discussed Bergsonian (or rather Sorelian) philosophy of knowledge. Indeed, the young nephew could be said to approximate the Romantic celebration of sentiment, intuition, and the irrationality of pure activism much more closely than the uncle, who adamantly rejected all irrationalist readings of his work. Like Mannheim in his reaction to Freyer’s decisionist appropriation of his sociology of knowledge, Hendrik de Man argued that the philosophical critique of rationalism precisely aimed at establishing the limits of rational knowledge, never to abandon it to the chaos of wholesale intuitionism and vitalism—a view which converged with Mannheim’s resolve to ‘rationalize the irrational’ (Mannheim 1952:229; 1968:118). ‘When I combat the superstitions of Reason’, de Man wrote as early as 1926, ‘this is precisely proof of my undiminished desire to believe in it’ (1927:361–2). This conviction was eloquently repeated against the irrationalist features of Nazi ideology: It is one of the least fortunate traits of the present spiritual situation that the scientific (re) discovery of the large role of affective, pre-logical and symbolic thinking has invited a pseudo-scientific deification of the fashionably instinctive, the primitive, the irrational, even the antirational. (H.de Man 1931b:24)

Treason of the intellectuals 147 Ethical or humanistic socialism logically presupposed a universalistic framework for both ethical values and factual claims, as well as a principled rejection of the relativistic fragmentation of universalistic criteria of valuation and cognition through the historicism of nationality or social class. Having previously exchanged the narrow motive of proletarian class chauvinism for ethical motives with a potentially all-human appeal, he did not retract now before the similar fragmentation of universalistic rationality which was advocated by the new radical nationalism. Since the Hegelian Völkergeistern, he claimed, bourgeois thought had become unfaithful to its true intentions: ‘The betrayal of the intellect of its own grounding principles is expressed in the fact that the educated of today seem with little exception to have forgotten that the true fatherland of the spirit is humanity’ (1931b:28). Clearly, his young nephew Paul, while already being swept by what his uncle called the Modekrankheit der Vergötterung des Irrationalen, proved himself equally susceptible to this second germ of intellectual treason. Anti-semitism as anti-intellectualism Early in the Le Soir series, on 4 March 1941, we encounter the notorious article ‘Les Juifs dans la Litterature actuelle, which at its discovery so deeply disturbed Derrida and many others both of and outside the deconstructionist school. Part of a page-long item ‘Les Juifs et Nous. Les aspects culturels’, it joined forces with similar reports on Jewish painting and Freudian psychoanalysis as a Jewish doctrine in order to produce as good a catalogue of anti-Semitic cultural clichés as can be found anywhere in the fearful tradition of Drumont, Barrès, and Maurras. The odious lead article defined the génie juif as essentially foreign and radically opposed to ‘our own’ blood and mentality, which had insinuated itself into all sectors of national life via international channels such as freemasonry, liberal capitalism and Marxism. It typically projected into the spirit of this metaphysical Foreigner those very same evil drives which animated its own soul: an arrogant racism, a rigid exclusivism, a fierce will to power, and a talmudic contempt for (in this case) the goy. The article on painting accused Jewry, if not of having invented cubism and surrealism, at least of having given these a violently subversive and destructive turn which led to the most virulent anarchism; fostering a ‘sarcastic and morbid art’ which lived on the spirit of pessimism and the nihilistic deformation of life. Freudianism was called a subtle and seductive poison, a destructor of morality and true love which exploded all social cohesion, removed all respect for social hierarchy, and ruined the essential notions of responsibility, duty, and guilt; it was a ferment of decadence which was utterly foreign to the Western outlook. Paul de Man’s handling of literature in this context differed, if alas only slightly, from these depressing platitudes, because in the process the young

148 The Intellectual as Stranger critic also revealed some of the inner moral strain or inner ‘sinuosity’ of intellectual collaboration. Indeed, de Man began his article by warning against the dangers of ‘vulgar’ anti-Semitism which condemned large parts of literature in an a priori manner because it had sniffed out a number of Jewish authors. Not even in the turbulent twenties, he stipulated, had Jewish influence been able to touch literature so dramatically that one could speak of a littérature enjuivé. Aesthetic evolution followed powerful laws of its own which largely kept it sealed from political or economic upheaval. The present development of the novel, for example, still followed the tradition of psychological realism and analytic objectivism which was established by Stendhal. In poetry, apparently revolutionary innovations such as surrealism or futurism were rooted in orthodox antecedents from which they could not easily be detached. Contrary to a myth which had been popularized by Jews themselves, their influence turned out to be extraordinarily weak, notwithstanding a pronounced trait of the Jewish spirit which served to predispose it towards the analytic lucidity which the novel required: its cerebral penchant, its capacity for assimilating intellectual doctrines while simultaneously preserving a certain coldness towards them. In spite of this, Jewish authors remained in second file and never counted among the inventors or leaders of literary genres. This, de Man added, was a comforting thought for Western intellectuals, whose vitality was proven by the fact that they had safeguarded the important domain of literature from the intrusion of the essentially foreign Jewish spirit. In the same breath, de Man concluded that a solution of the Jewish problem which envisaged a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not carry regrettable consequences for the literary life of the Occident: ‘The latter would lose, all in all, some people of mediocre value, and would continue as in the past to develop according to its own great laws of evolution’ (1988:45).12 If our first impression is of course marked by de Man’s reprehensible bow to anti-Semitic ideology,13 the second and more intriguing one is defined by the specific intellectual quality of his anti-Semitism and his defiant assertion of the intellectual autonomy of literature, which, naturally, is also a wishful incantation of the relative purity of the literary critic himself (cf. Carroll 1995:249–50). In its subtle trade-off between involvement and detachment, de Man’s text demonstrated both the measure of his opportunistic accommodation to a largely ‘foreign’ political ideology and his silent protest against its evident crudeness, which was so graphically illustrated elsewhere on the same page. But by tracing the limits of his genuine belief in it, it also showed that his anti-Semitism was not all opportunistic façade, because it was parented to the same critique of rationalism and intellectualism which informed his many other writings of the period. Anti-Semitism became a possibility, a concrete temptation, because it ‘merely’ represented a more radical extension of an already inhabited

Treason of the intellectuals 149 ideological world.14 Indeed, de Man established a rather straightforward connection between the Jewish spirit and the intellectualist, coldly dissecting, analytical tone of modern (i.e. French) literature, which he elsewhere consistently contrasted with the more subjective, poetically intuitive and morally engaged genius of modern German writing. Of course, his text remained contradictory at core, since it asserted the relative impermeability of literature to Jewish influence while associating this quality with the permanence of the same French analytic spirit with which the Jewish character supposedly communicated so easily. Moreover, the large case of Proust was entirely passed in deafening silence. In this respect, de Man also gave evidence of the sheer confusion and the very real ‘sacrifice of the intellect’ which such ideological accommodation apparently required. But it also displayed his genuine resolve to collaborate, and to claim relative professional independence in doing so. This attitude will remain forever inexplicable if one misses the critical enthusiasm and hence the intellectual seriousness of a type of anti-Semitism in which the Jew is little more (but also nothing less) than an opportunistic synonym for the rootless intellectual or the ‘cultural stranger’. The opportunism and the treason, in other words, do not reside in the critique of rationalism as such, but in the apparent facility with which it is inserted into a much more comprehensive and vicious politics of racial purification. But more than anything else, perhaps, this text bespeaks the youthful arrogance of one who claims to speak for the purity, not of any Nation or Race, but of Literature itself and its inexorable and self-sufficient historical laws; one who does not worry much over the excision of a foreign body, precisely because it is nothing but the liquidation of intellectual mediocrity.15 This dark side of the critique of Enlightenment rationalism, which may degenerate into a creeping incrimination of the Jewish spirit, is also intermittently present in his uncle Hendrik de Man. As it turned out, the universalistic premises of his ethical socialism were not solid enough to prevent the eruption of the soft kind of anti-Semitism which is encountered in his wartime memoirs Après Coup (1941). These were written, among other things, to justify his socialist road to collaboration, and quickly became a bestseller only a few months after he had landed his nephew his job on the ‘stolen’ Le Soir. Many of the embarrassing slips of the pen which occurred in the book were erased or subtly played down in the revised postwar edition of 1948, Cavalier seul, and in the third version, the Germanwritten Gegen den Strom, which appeared in 1953, the year of his death in Swiss exile. Of course, one might argue that Hendrik de Man’s anti-Semitic statements of 1941 evidenced deeper leanings which had always been present, and that his clever repair work of 1948 represented the sly determination of a former fascist collaborator to sweep his own trail. This would fit an interpretation such as put forward by Sternhell (1996), for whom, as we have noted, de Man was a potential fascist as soon as he

150 The Intellectual as Stranger began to turn his back on the classical canon of proletarian socialism. Sternhell, however, simply assumes the latency of anti-Semitic prejudice in an a priori manner, fails to record any such tendency previous to 1941, turns a blind eye on other written sources from the years 1940–3, and does not care to account for de Man’s explicit criticism of racism and antiSemitism both prior and subsequent to the Second World War. In my view, therefore, the weight of de Man’s undeniable opportunism must be placed elsewhere. His anti-Semitism of 1941 largely appeared as an anomaly which had little precedent in his previous writings and was quickly dropped at the first possible notice. The opportunism, in brief, was that of 1940, not only that of the immediate post-war years. On this caveat, it is useful to inspect some of these compromising utterances, and see how de Man is ‘caught in the act’ when erasing or subtly modifying them in 1948. The first of these was an autodescriptive remark which provided an appropriate thematic link with the contemporary mood of his young nephew. Here Hendrik de Man described his innate disposition as Flemish, i.e. as either inclined towards concrete realities or towards mythical reverie, but in either case as refractory to abstract reasoning. This inclination not only surfaced, he claimed, in his resistance to philosophical conceptualizing in general but, more particularly, in his impatience vis-à-vis the abstract intricacies of Marxism. ‘Here,’ he went on to generalize, ‘one touches upon the innate difference and historical conflict between Germanic and Jewish thought’ (1941:45–6). Needless to say, this plain-spoken association between intellectualism and the ‘Jewish spirit’ was cut from the 1948 version. Another telling example was contained in his reminiscence of the winter of 1907–8, when he took a semester off from the university of Leipzig in order to study in Vienna— about the same time that young Adolf Hitler roamed the streets of that city and enjoyed his portentous revelations about the insiduous omnipresence of world Jewry. Still a convinced Marxist, de Man realized that Marxist orthodoxy did not provide a solution to the twin problem of Jewry and nationality, which he had never before encountered in that stark and virulent form. In the Belgium of his youth, he recalled, Jews had been few in number and highly assimilated; anti-Semitism only existed in the benign form of classical plaisanteries or small-time individual teasing.16 Although, as he wrote in 1941, he had ‘long been convinced of the necessity to eliminate from our political organism the foreign body which is constituted by all the residues or embryos of the Ghetto’ (a statement for which his previous work adduced no proof), he simultaneously professed that ‘the problem of the protection of the race’ was only soluble in terms of international order and agreement. But in order to reach such a conclusion one had to begin, contrary to the orthodox Marxist attitude, by acknowledging the reality of the problem of race and the irrepressible character of ‘Aryan reactions’ wherever the ‘racial particularity’ of the Jews was linked to social privilege or a particularly tight internal solidarity. Both

Treason of the intellectuals 151 were evident in Austria and even in the bosom of the socialist move-ment itself, which was split between a leadership of Jewish intellectuals and a rank-and-file of Aryan workers (1941:83–5). These paragraphs underwent a number of subtle changes in the post-war version, which preserved their overall framework while wisely diverting the meaning of several core terms. In the passage about eliminating residual or embryonic manifestations of the Ghetto, the capital G was exchanged for lower case, so as to dilute its meaning from an unmistakable reference to the ‘Jewish problem’ towards a vaguer sociological statement about ‘ghetto formation’ as an instance of social or cultural isolation. In the second part of the sentence, de Man replaced the phrase about ‘le problème de la protection de la race’ by the plural and much less specific ‘les problèmes de ce genre’, and added ‘in a humanitarian spirit’ to the requirement that these problems would have to be resolved by means of international agreement (1948:67).17 A similar game of high subtlety is revealed when one compares the two versions of a passage about Otto Bauer, in which de Man sought to account for what he described as the former’s ‘lamentable failure in all of his enterprises’. The fact that, as a citizen of Austria, Bauer was tied to a political corpse, did not furnish sufficient excuse for this, since the fate of his nation would have been different if he had not torpedoed the voluntary Anschluss when it was still possible. In 1948 de Man ingenuously changed this into ‘l’Anschluss volontaire à l’Allemagne de Weimar’, thus craftily steering clear of the apparent justification of the semi-voluntary Anschluss which happened on 13 March 1938. Another part of Bauer’s failure had however to be accounted to his intellectual character. Like the great majority of Jews (this was diluted into ‘comme à tant de Juifs’), Bauer lacked something which was as essential as was the ballast for a fast sailer: receptive to the smallest gusts of wind, he navigated brilliantly in whatever direction they blew, without ever arriving anywhere, and only to capsize at the first squall. He belonged to those who understand everything and who act as if a thing explained was a thing accomplished. This grand intellectual lacked the roots and radicles of instinct, and the literal unanimity with his people which, for example, characterized a man such as Masaryk. Erratic in his action, vacillating in his motives, he was invariably out to convince by means of demonstration rather than by the force of fact; never erring when reading a map, he nevertheless always managed to take the wrong road (1948:133).18 The association between Jewishness, rootlessness and dogmatism was less pronounced in de Man’s judgement of the Bolshevik intellectuals, although much of the damning portrait of Trotsky in his 1941 memoirs accentuated the same restlessness and arrogant irresponsibility which was elsewhere more easily linked to the Jewish spirit. A final example is provided by his rather impatient description of Frankfurt University, ‘that intellectual hothouse, so utterly remote from nature and reality in

152 The Intellectual as Stranger general’, where he had lectured in social psychology until the Nazi takeover in 1933. As a young university, Frankfurt had attracted many ascendant thinkers who had divided the student body in numerous little chapels where one prayed to the newest gods. Moreover, a growing proportion of Jewish professors (which apparently included Mannheim) added what de Man called ‘an element of intellectual restlessness, instability and analytic dissolution’ (this sentence, needless to say, was cut from the 1948 version); so that the whole made the impression of a brilliant pandemonium, of a ‘magnifique mécanique cérébrale tournant à vide’ (1941:187–8). Looking back over this evidence, it is fair to conclude that anti-Semitism in any virulent sense was absent from the writings of Hendrik de Man, even though it was in the line of temptation as soon as he radicalized his critique of rationalism (and rationalist Marxism) into a denunciation of the rootless and restless intellectual. Although the temptation would seem to be permanent—as was indicated by one or two earlier remarks19 and by the fact that he did not suppress everything in 1948—de Man did not seriously yield to it previous to his collaborationist venture; and this, as I see it, was primarily for opportunistic reasons. Moreover, this type of critique of the ‘cultural stranger’, which may deteriorate into a limited intellectual antiSemitism, is only one among a number of ideological strands which must all be tied together before the abstract image of the Jew will turn into an effective Manichean myth of universal alterity. The pertinence of this is enhanced if one realizes that de Man’s own planiste socialism of the mid1930s, and its wholesale attack upon the citadel of Credit, approached Nazi anti-capitalism and its call for the Brechung der Zinnsherrschaft without ever identifying the rule of Capital with that of the international Jew. De Man was too accomplished a historian and sociologist to allow his planism to be continuous or complicit with full-fledged anti-Semitism, even when his socialism took on an increasingly authoritarian and etatist complexion in the late 1930s and the early 1940s. Nowhere in his writings were the fateful ingredients permitted to blend into an all-encompassing biosocial theory which would throw all types of enemy in a single bag and capitalize upon the crude certainty which a racialized enemy image provided over and above a cultural or sociological one.20 Nevertheless, there existed a passage to a softer, more sectoral type of anti-Semitism through the back door of an aggravated critique of rationalistic modernity and ‘decadent’ intellectualism. Normally, this door would remain shut; but in the stormy conditions of political collaboration it could easily swerve open in order to rattle and admit gusts of bad air. Reification as intellectual treason In conclusion, let me relate my initial theme of intellectual treason to what at least provides one disturbing trait d’union between Paul de Man’s early

Treason of the intellectuals 153 cultural nationalism and his mature deconstructionist scepticism: the critique of Enlightenment rationalism. Indeed, it is part and parcel of the deconstructionist predicament, and that of postmodernism more generally, to come to terms with the embarrassing affinities between its own critique of rationalist epistemology and a major intellectual strand in the ideology of fascism. For some rationalist commentators, who can see in fascism little else but irrationalism’s political ‘truth’, this association already constitutes sufficient proof of irreparable intellectual guilt. Whether they plead a return to the safe haven of a Benda-like spiritual detachment, or continue the old Dreyfusard belief in a rational politics and the politics of rationality, fascism remains the quintessential enemy, and the migration from left to right the vilest paradigm of intellectual treason. But as is amply demonstrated by the trajectory of twentieth-century socialism, the germs of totalitarian treason have always lived in the house of the Enlightenment itself. The totalitarianisms of left and right have often been difficult to tell apart, which has to some extent dismantled their traditional univocal logic of opposition. As I have argued before, to interpret Hendrik de Man’s political development in terms of a ‘fateful swerve’ from left to right is prejudicial and facile, since it not only conveniently neglects the totalitarian virus which hides in socialism itself but also the curious historical proximity between the two radical extremes which he so fatefully personified. Hence, ‘treason of the intellectuals’ cannot be simply defined from a rationalist position of unpolitical spirituality or of left-wing political activism, since one then ignores the potential treason which is inherent in transcendental reason itself. That is why I have gestured at the more hazardous route through, rather than around, the political minefield, which takes the critique of rationalist modernity seriously even where this requires a partial rehabilitation of some of the content and style of fascist ideology. If one genuinely desires to understand the intellectual fascination which fascism exercised, it is imperative not to put it at the farthest possible remove but to sense the uncanniness of its sheer vicinity to our own intellectual concerns. If we wish to understand something about Hendrik de Man and Paul de Man, we must cultivate our sense of proximity to them and share their intellectual enthusiasms and temptations, precisely in order to see where they went wrong. If we venture in this direction, it would be apt first of all to distinguish between a ‘treason of opportunism’ and a ‘treason of idealism’, with the precise aim of estimating how these opposites are intertwined and how one immeasurably drifts from the one to the other. Treason of the more ‘lowly’ kind needs no elaborate definition here, since it is evidenced by the everyday sordidness of step-by-step accommodation to an overpowering alien creed. Treason of the more ‘respectable’ or ‘disinterested’ kind should then be identified in such a manner as to bypass the horns of the rationalist dilemma. This might be accomplished by locating it in the universal

154 The Intellectual as Stranger practice of reification: the mindless transfiguration of concepts and categories into quasi-objective things which simultaneously hide but also celebrate the subjective and interested presence of their intellectual enunciators. By elevating the intellectuals into earthly spokespersons for impersonally commanding realities or laws (of History, of the Nation, of the Spirit, of Culture, of Literature), reification lends them large powers of mobilization without exposing them as the originators and wielders of those powers. In this specific sense, reification is the great flaw of rationalism, but also that of the irrationalist doctrines which constitute its historical counterpart. At once more general than the liberalisms and the socialisms of either left or right, it constitutes something like the original sin of all intellectual domination. On an excusable simplification, Hendrik de Man and Paul de Man, in the first years of the German occupation of Belgium, could be said to exemplify this reifying intellectual in the two familiar historical guises of the revolutionary socialist and the revolutionary nationalist. In Paul de Man, the objectivism of nationality and historical destiny was overdetermined by a strong emphasis upon the sui generis lawfulness of the literary domain and the resultant self-sufficiency of literary criticism—views which found more than one echo in the linguistic determinism and the rhetoric of impersonality of his later theory of deconstruction (cf. Corngold 1989b; Jay 1988; Lehman 1991). In his uncle, the objectivism of historical destiny expressed itself in a form of authoritarian socialism which was conceived as the immediate representation of a reified will of all by an elite of disinterested intellectuals; as their instruments, the single party and the strong state orchestrated a singularity of will which the totalizing fiction already presumed as pre-existing in the inner depths of the popular soul. If Hendrik de Man’s socialist idealism proved susceptible to such authoritarian treason—the more so as he recovered some of his youthful revolutionary ardour—his young nephew’s revolutionary nationalism perhaps had a more opportunistic tinge, since it was so strongly imbued with his intuitionist attack upon the ‘French’ spirit of intellectualism. The genuineness of Paul de Man’s celebration of political nationalism may well remain open to conjecture; but it is less doubtful that he believed in the political calling of literary art in times of national revolution, and perforce in his own professional duty to gauge the dimensions of the historical conflict between national artistic sensibilities which was presently reaching such a dramatic climax. Paul de Man may have been to some degree the ‘brilliant opportunist’ which Le Soir (3.12.87) claimed to discover in its former collaborator; but nevertheless much of his spiritualized nationalism had an authentic ring, and neither his youthful age nor the temptations of owning a prestigious newspaper column diminish the fact that it sprang from a true idealism of the spirit. Similar things may be said about what undoubtedly constituted the worst part of the collaboration of both uncle and nephew: their painful and

Treason of the intellectuals 155 inexcusable flirtation with anti-Semitism. On the one hand (and perhaps fortunately, if this expression fits the bill) anti-Semitism appeared as that extremity of their respective ideologies which was most tainted by opportunistic compromise—as was demonstrated not just by its relatively soft and episodic character but also by the evident contradictions and confusions which both Hendrik and Paul de Man had to engage in in order to make it work. Paul de Man’s tortuous essay of March 1941 exemplified some of the intellectual perplexity of having to explicate and transport what was perhaps not more than a vague plebeian prejudice into the heart of literary theory. Hendrik de Man’s cleverly consistent editing of his 1941 memoirs after the war similarly evidenced a profound anxiety about views which constituted a direct betrayal of his own previous sociological and psychological convictions. Nevertheless (and unfortunately) both Hendrik de Man and Paul de Man were capable of sacrificing their intellects and of committing this type of treason; which I think is only explicable if one sees that their evident opportunism was never merely opportunistic but emerged as an ugly extension of genuinely held critical convictions. As we have seen, the rejection of rootless rationalism had been equally germane to Hendrik de Man’s supersession of Marxism as it was to Paul de Man’s critique of the ‘Latin’ artistic spirit. In the honeymoon years of the German occupation, the gap which remained between this critical theory and the first outposts of intellectual anti-Semitism could rather easily be closed. Since Barrès’ attack upon the Dreyfusard intellectuals as instinctless ‘logicians of the absolute’, the critique of intellectualism had been embedded in a racial nationalism which had been unscrupulous in identifying everything foreign with the international Jew. Paul de Man may have been somewhat more sympathetic to this tradition than his uncle. But it remains sad to realize that even Hendrik de Man, that stubborn and eloquent critic of all nationalist and racialist exaltation, was so blinded by the opportunities of the hour and by a relentless will to power for socialism that he allowed himself to be dragged into the platitudes of National Socialism’s polymorphous xenophobia.

7

Strange standpoints

The point of standpoint theory Standpoint epistemologies have long counted among the most powerful challenges to the conventional view that true knowledge is value-free, disinterested, and situationally transcendent. Severing the traditional epistemological linkage between objectivity and neutrality, and measuring truth claims in terms of particular social locations and experiences, standpoint theories typically assert that (scientific) knowledge is inescapably position-bound, and hence both partial and partisan in character. Accordingly, they plead a conscious and reflexive politicization of knowledge, and a novel assessment of the balance of opportunities and risks which positionally determined knowledges might entail. The search for truth ‘for its own sake’, in the sense of acceding to a universally valid and contexttranscending ‘view from nowhere’ (what Haraway engagingly calls the ‘god trick’), is abandoned in favour of a new social-epistemological question: ‘which social standpoint offers the best chance for reaching an optimum of truth?’ (Mannheim 1968:71). Given the fact that all human beliefs, including our best scientific propositions, are socially situated, we require ‘a critical evaluation to determine which social situations tend to generate the most objective knowledge claims’ (Harding 1991:142).1 Standpoint epistemologies, as has been amply illustrated before, come in a great variety of historical forms.2 Perhaps it is Machiavelli, in the famous dedication which prefaces The Prince, who offers the first powerful intuition. Excusing himself for his apparent presumption, as a man of humble condition, in venturing to discuss and lay down rules about princely government, he goes on to say: For those who paint landscapes place themselves on low ground, in order to understand the character of the mountains and other high points, and climb higher in order to understand the character of the plains. Likewise, one needs to be a ruler to understand properly the character of the people, and to be a man of the people to understand properly the character of rulers. (Machiavelli 1988:4)3 156

Strange standpoints 157 But of course, it is especially the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave and classical Marxism’s adoption of the class standpoint of the proletariat (as refined and updated in the writings of Lukács and Althusser), which have set the generative matrix for all subsequent versions. As we have seen in earlier chapters, an additional and so far unjustifiably neglected source is found in radical nationalist or ethnicist (in German: völkische) affirmations of the ‘standpoint of the nation’ or of ‘the people’ as expressing a culturally or racially homogeneous essence. An early example was provided by the outcry of nationalist and racist ‘anti-intellectuals’ such as Barrès and Maurras against les intellectuels during the Dreyfus Affair in Third Republican France. Truth and justice, we saw Barrès argue, were predicated upon finding a standpoint and adopting a perspective from which ‘all things arranged themselves according to the measure of a Frenchman’ (Barrès 1902:12–13). This standpoint logic was even more articulate in conservative-revolutionary intellectuals of Weimar Germany such as Freyer, Heidegger, and Schmitt. Standpoint theories of knowledge hence emerge in strength simultaneously from the radical left and the radical right, in order to pressurize the liberal idea(l) of autonomous and value-neutral knowledge and science from both ends of the political spectrum. Socialism and nationalism, the great ideological contenders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mirror each other in intriguing fashion in advancing their alternative identity politics of the working class and the nation.4 In past decades the left-wing Marxian inspiration, as generalized in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, has been rekindled especially by feminist theorists, although similar arguments have recently been deployed by lesbian and gay theory, by post-colonial cultural criticism, and by the interesting hybrid constituted by black feminist thought. If we add some representative arguments favoured by religious fundamentalists and neonationalist radicals from the New Right, one might even say that standpoint arguments, for good or ill, presently offer the most persistently popular rationale for a politics of knowledge which is framed by particularist identities and the reclamation of cultural difference. While Mannheim extrapolated but also defused proletarian standpoint theory by privileging the mediating position of the ‘free-floating’ intelligentsia, recent conceptualizations preserve the more radical particularist impulses of both left-wing and right-wing identity politics, while shopping for new historical agents of emancipation such as women, lesbians, people of colour, or people of third-world descent (cf. Gouldner 1985:22–5; Harding 1991:268ff).5 The common point of departure inherited from classical standpoint thinking is the baseline conviction, already clearly supported by Machiavelli, that in a hierarchically structured and conflict-ridden society ‘you cannot see everything from everywhere’. In such a society, there exist objectively opposed locations which generate disparate social experiences

158 The Intellectual as Stranger which define divergent, partial points of view with variable chances of faithfully representing social reality. As Hall declares: we all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned…Representation is possible only because enunciation is always produced within codes which have a history, a position within the discursive formations of a particular space and time. The displacement of the ‘centred’ discourses of the West entails putting in question its universalist character and its transcendental claims to speak for everyone, while being itself everywhere and nowhere. (Hall 1990:222; 1996:446) Following this axiom about inevitable situatedness and perspectivity, standpoint theories characteristically introduce a second principle, equally adumbrated by Machiavelli, the self-styled ‘man of the people’: that the dominated or marginal not only see differently but also see better and more.6 Althusser has appropriately updated Machiavelli for advanced capitalist class society: in a class-divided society ‘one must be proletariat in order to know capital’ (1993:229). Harding outlines a more generalized vision, which is also inclusive of hierarchies structured by gender inequality and/or racial apartheid: In societies where power is organized hierarchically—for example by class or race or gender—there is no possibility of an Archimedean perspective, one that is disinterested, impartial, value-free, or detached from the particular, historical social relations in which everyone participates. Instead, each person can achieve only a partial view of reality from the perspective of his or her own position in the social hierarchy. And such a view is not only partial but also distorted by the way the relations of domination are organized. Further, the view from the perspective of the powerful is far more partial and distorted than that available from the perspective of the dominated; this is so for a variety of reasons. To name just one, the powerful have far more interests in obscuring the unjust conditions that produce their unearned privileges and authority than do the dominated groups in hiding the conditions that produce their situation. (Harding 1991:59) In order to gain a critically objective view of society as whole, the best method is therefore ‘to start thought from marginal lives’ (cf. also Harding 1992:581; 1993:50). Haraway thinks that ‘there is good reason to believe vision is better from below the brilliant space platforms of the powerful…There is a premium on establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths’ (1991:190–1). Hartsock similarly believes that

Strange standpoints 159 in systems of domination, the vision available to the rulers will be ‘both partial and perverse’, in contradistinction to the vision from below, such as represented by women in patriarchy: ‘women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point which can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy’ (1983:284). This epistemic asymmetry between the standpoints of the dominant and the subaltern, in its feminist version, implies that ‘starting off research from women’s lives will generate less partial and distorted accounts not only of women’s lives but also of men’s lives and of the whole social order’ (Harding 1993:56; cf. 1991:48; 1995:344). Drifting towards the stranger In the following, I will loosely (though not exclusively) focus upon the feminist critique, and elucidate the promises and limits of standpoint theory’s basic epistemological claims primarily in terms of gender inequality rather than in terms of class or race. In doing so, I trust that the formal structure of the argument does not dramatically vary between the three versions, even though both feminist and anti-racist cultural studies have critically modified and fine-tuned important elements of the original class-based Marxian framework. In the variegated spectrum of social markings, class, gender, and race are regularly identified as a ‘holy trinity’, clustering the most divisive or inequality-generating social identifications (cf. Appiah and Gates Jr 1995:1). Earlier versions of standpoint theory, such as proletarian Marxism, radical nationalism, or political racism, have typically been seduced by an essentialist epistemological politics according to which the preferred criterion of social belonging (economic property, cultural particularity, racial identity) not only indicated a homogeneously closed ontological condition, but also defined a distinct hierarchy of primary and secondary causal determinations (in terms of ‘last instance’ causality). Economic, political, religious, or cultural fundamentalisms—or those of nation and race—typically single out one ‘innate’ master identity as exclusive and ultimately decisive, which defines, incorporates, and even constitutes all others. Feminist critical theory, both in its early and more contemporary variants, still shows traces of such a gender essentialism; while postcolonial criticism is similarly embarrassed by potent residues of an essentialism of colour.7 But increasingly, modern critical theorists have retraced the historical path of Bernsteinian revisionism in relativizing the ‘last instance’ impact of either class, gender or race, acknowledging that none of the three markings (nor any alternatives ones) are empirically observable in a pure or solitary state.8 This is enough to shuttle all ontological priority claims, even if they are channelled through sophisticated multi-directional models of ‘last instance’ determination. Recent feminist theory, in its historic encounter with postmodernist

160 The Intellectual as Stranger philosophy and the cross-cutting issue of race (e.g. black feminism), has taken the lead in recognizing both the precariously constructed, performed and performative nature of all social identities, but also the sheer difficulty of abstracting the various social signifiers (or markers of oppression) from the complex web of their multiple interactions. The idea of an ‘interlocking system of oppression’ and of domination as a ‘multiple system’, which has not accidentally emerged from black feminist thought (cf. Hill Collins 1986, 1991), reflects a parallel movement in postcolonial criticism, which is likewise engaged in distancing itself from a reductionist and missionary identity politics, in order to approach visions of hybridization, cultural syncretism, and multiple identity (Appiah and Gates Jr 1995; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1990; 1996). Perhaps paradigmatic is Stuart Hall’s identification of the shift from an essentialist notion of ‘the’ Black experience as a singular and unifying framework towards what he calls a positive conception of ‘the ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery’. Hall charts a transformation from a ‘mimetic’ or expressive towards a constitutive or ‘formative’ notion of the representation of black culture, which puts an end to innocent accounts of an essential black subject, and registers blackness as principally a constructed category which lacks transcendental or transcultural fixity (1996:442–3). 9 This also implies that issues of race always appear historically in articulation with other categories and divisions and are constantly crossed by categories of class and gender. We are all ethnically located; but this insight calls precisely for a politics of ethnicity that is predicated on difference and diversity (Hall 1996:447, 465ff). In analysing and evaluating recent standpoint analytics, I presently focus upon its recapitulation of a theme which is directly inherited from its classical left-wing and right-wing predecessors: that of marginality, outsidership, or strangerhood. As we have noticed, the trope of marginality, and of the redemptive and promissory character of the condition of alienation, has been equally intrinsic to the Marxian analysis of alienated labour and the missionary role of the class ‘with radical chains’, as it has informed right-radical spokespersonship for the oppressed and humiliated people or race—viz. the descriptions of France or Italy as a ‘proletarian nation’ by the national syndicalists in the decade before World War I, or the similarly missionary alienation which, after the war, was attributed to the German Volk in its ‘darkest hour’ of military defeat and economic depression. This recurrent topos of alienation, and of the redemptive privilege of outsidership and marginality, remains a persistent and magnetic theme across the entire history of standpoint theory, and only gains in visibility and pertinence in its present-day elaborations. This is evident in the ubiquitous feminist references to woman’s position and life experiences as those of a generic ‘stranger’, ‘outsider within’, or ‘resident alien’, which supposedly generate a ‘bifurcated consciousness’ or ‘double vision’ which offer a privileged view of male-dominated society (cf. Bar On 1993; Harding 1991; Hill Collins 1991; Smith 1988; Wolff 1995). Hall’s

Strange standpoints 161 earliercited conception of an ‘ethnicity of the margins’ indicates that postcolonial theory is similarly attracted to metaphors of ‘dislocation’ and ‘inbetweenness’, and to the epistemological virtues of ‘double consciousness’ in a ‘third’ or ‘hybrid’ location (cf. Bhabha 1994; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1990; 1992; Said 1990).10 Departing from their primary anchorages in class, gender, or race, and shedding all residues of ‘last instance’ thinking, recent standpoint theories thus tend to converge upon a generalized discourse of marginality— which to some extent is defined against the standpoints which they originally started out with. This is already a marked feature of neoMarxist standpoint theorizing, which has in various (revisionist) ways said ‘farewell to the proletariat’, and in the process, has gradually eclipsed the materialist criterion of non-propertied, alienated labour in favour of a more flexible accentuation of alienation as such—a move which is variously illustrated by Fanon’s idea of the ‘wretched of the earth’, Sweezy’s notion of the ‘substitute proletariat’, Marcuse’s high expectations about various ‘fringe groups’, and Gorz’s view of the postindustrial ‘non-class of non-workers’ (cf. Chapter 2). This decentering movement is equally discernible in modern feminist and postcolonial conceptions. Harding’s writings, for example, have increasingly shifted between the idea to ‘start thinking from women’s lives’ and the more general admonition ‘to start thinking from marginal lives’ (e.g. 1991:125, 150; 1992:581). The marginality of the ‘outsider within’ has become a powerful topic in the black feminism of, for example, Lorde (1984), hooks (1984), and Hill Collins (1986, 1991). Haraway’s ironic myth of the cyborg, a hybrid creature that transgresses all conventional boundaries and fractures all traditional identities, perhaps offers the most radical expression of this epistemological trend (Haraway 1991). Black cultural studies exemplifies a similarly generalized metaphorics of displacement and alienation. Gilroy, for example, stylizes the black experience in terms of a Black Atlantic diaspora, in which black particularity is situated and constituted simultaneously inside and outside of Western culture. The concept of diaspora (which is modelled after Jewish experiences of dispersal) and its satellite metaphors of hybridity, homelessness, and exile, are offered against the continuing obsession with absolutist conceptions of a timeless and totalized ethnic subjectivity, which disregard internal divisions in terms of class, gender, sexuality, age, or political consciousness. Against such roots- and rootedness-oriented conceptions, Gilroy associates the black experience of modernity with ‘the standpoint of dislocation’, and prefers to view identity as a process of movement and mediation, as a ‘changing same’ (Gilroy 1993). This convergent theme of the ‘outsider within’ who enjoys ‘double vision’ establishes a powerful epistemological point, which might even be taken as the enduringly relevant ‘summary’ of standpoint theory in its various historical manifestations. What standpoint theories ultimately seem

162 The Intellectual as Stranger to offer is a more general or abstract social epistemology of the stranger rather than a more concrete and particularized epistemology of class, gender, or race; an epistemology of diversity or multiplicity rather than of singular identity; of the double consciousness of ‘crossover’ identities, rather than the single and stable consciousness of ‘taking responsibility for one’s roots’. In this sense, the theme of the stranger handsomely resonates with classical sociological conceptions about the advantages of a ‘third’ position, as for example found in Simmel’s remarks on the objectivity of the stranger’s versus the native’s gaze, or in Mannheim’s argument about the visionary capacities of a free-floating intelligentsia which finds itself sociologically remote from both the dominant and the dominated classes in contemporary capitalism. Innovatory, rule-breaking knowledge is perceived as a function of marginality, of the location of the ‘outsider within’, in all domains of social and professional life; an insight which can profitably be generalized beyond the more particular identifications espoused by Marxism, feminism, and anti-racism. An intriguing point about this generalized epistemology of strangerhood, as already intimated, is that this secondary identity must be partly secured against the primary affiliations of class, gender, or race with which it is initially defined as continuous; in all three cases, it tends to break up their supposed homogeneity and closure and to kill residual claims about ontological priority. The ‘class trouble’ which infected classical Marxism has presently spread to feminist ‘gender trouble’ and postcolonial ‘ethnicity trouble’; proliferating an excess of difference which creates a more generalized ‘difference trouble’ (Seidman 1997). Marxism’s historic farewell to the working class is now vigorously copied in analogous farewells to Womanhood and Negritude. This threefold suspension or even dissolution of previously substantial figurations of identity has also triggered a systematic dilution of the determinative significance (the imputed sociological weight) of such primary situations for any credible conception of situated knowledges. Indeed, the epistemological salience of the primary determinations of class, gender, and race can only be rescued by way of recasting the various bearers of social identity (proletarians, women, blacks) as generically estranged from the dominant social and political order. But in principle, the stranger’s condition focuses a more abstract and remote social situation—not so much a location but a dislocation—since (s)he suffers and benefits from the cross-fertilization of views that arise in (and in-between) disparate experiential contexts. The stranger, by being partially estranged from his or her primary identity, occupies a ‘standpoint against standpoints’ (or an identity ‘in-between’ identities) which exceeds any preferential combination of elements from the classical trinity of identity/difference. A social epistemology of strangerhood, by focusing this second-order standpoint and its epistemological effects, hence also (strangely?) returns us to an element of the traditional transcendental view of knowledge which

Strange standpoints 163 standpoint theories have historically risen against. Indeed, while holding on to the principle that knowledge is positionally determined and contextually relative, it simultaneously helps to recover the fruitful core suggestion of the rationalist ideal: that knowledge, in order to be interesting or creatively new, must be relatively context-free, must be able to rise above and transgress its primary situatedness. 11 The pregnant suggestion of an epistemology of strangerhood is to delineate a specific social situation which mediates between the ‘view from nowhere’ of the celebrated unitary and universal subject, and the politicized and particularized ‘view from somewhere’ which is canvassed by traditional standpoint epistemologies of the primary kind. It is the stranger who somehow embodies and preserves the ancient philosophical promise of transcendence and distanciation; but (s)he simultaneously remains intensely place-bound, committed, interested, and partisan. The stranger moves across contexts and encompasses them in double vision; but this location is never a universal one which commands a totalizing view. (S)he does not float above interests, but embodies a different interest. There is no universal mediation, no shifting in and out of all conceivable situations, in order to become once again the ‘nowhere (wo)man’; but a spatially and temporally bounded migration or switch between two or three contexts or lifeworlds, in a third space which stretches somewhere in between the local and the global.12 The metonymic fallacy of feminist intellectuals At this point, I want to introduce a second theme, which intriguingly spins around and resonates with the theme of marginality and suggests a more critical balance of what standpoint epistemologies have to offer. Like the first theme, it highlights a secondary location of the situated knowledge subject which, to some extent, remains ensconced behind primary proletarian, female, or black identifications. Also like the first, it focuses an identity and a ‘difference trouble’ which is embarrassingly common to various standpoint theories, although it normally remains silenced and suppressed. This secondary social persona is that of the spokesperson or the (‘organic’) intellectual All major variants of standpoint epistemology, I have repeatedly insisted, confront a ‘spokesperson problem’ which arises from the fact that standpoints do not simply exist in the real world in order to be ‘recognized for what they are’ or ‘taken responsibility for’ (cf. Rich 1986:219); all standpoints need to be spoken form order to become constituted as standpoints in the first place. Identities cannot simply be adopted as deep structures or natural kinds, but must be attributed, constructed, and performed; they need to be intellectually filtered and processed. This intellectual work of performance and construction is usually not taken into full reflexive account by the constructors themselves, who are easily seduced to ‘take on’ a substantialized identity which is aligned with a larger emancipatory cause, and which enables them to hide

164 The Intellectual as Stranger their secondary will to empowerment behind the supposedly primary one of a particular class, gender, or race. This pars pro toto identity play has already been described as the ‘metonymic fallacy of the intellectuals’. Feminist standpoint theory, in consciously borrowing the architecture of Marxist epistemology, also tends to recapitulate some of its basic cognitive dilemmas. I have argued in Chapter 2 that proletarian theory was in a revealing sense a standpoint theory of its intellectual spokesmen, who hid behind the broad back of the proletariat in order to receive its historical grace for their own sense of revolutionary mission. More concretely, it was an expression of the standpoint of marginal intellectuals, revolutionary critics out of place with and resentful against the established bourgeois order, who tended to appropriate and construct a primary ontological identity by adding some salient characteristics which in fact more readily reflected their own secondary one. As a result, the ‘really existing’ historical proletariat was embellished (or burdened) with properties of intellectuality (a superior view) and marginality (a class with radical chains, a revolutionary class) which virtually guaranteed its self-transformation from a class ‘in itself’ into a fully-conscious class ‘for itself’, which was firmly motivated to pull off its preordained historical mission. But of course, this historical mission was ordained first of all by the revolutionary intellectuals themselves; the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ was first of all their own; even while the proletariat was acclaimed as the primary agent of the socialist revolution, it was theory (and theorists) that operated as such, by inventing, constructing, and representing its historically ‘necessary’ standpoint. From its inception, therefore, proletarian standpoint theory was caught in a vicious circularity and a self-abnegating intellectualism. Feminist standpoint theory, in so far as it has extrapolated the Marxian epistemological structure, appears caught in a similarly circular conflict between primary and secondary identities, offering similar opportunities for an identity swap and for the resultant ‘absent presence’ of intellectual spokespersons. The Marxist slippage between proletarians and intellectuals is repeated in terms of a similar metonymic transcription from the broad category of ‘women’ to the more restricted one of feminists—who are usually intellectuals (and more often than not, also marginal ones). As in classical Marxism, this secondary identity is tendentially repressed, even though it is feminist critical theory which exclusively claims to define the situational interests and strivings of women in the first place.13 Like the proletariat, which Marxists picture as the collective stranger in capitalist society, women are perceived by feminists to be collectively estranged from patriarchal or male-dominated society. But once again, such characteristics appear more readily ascribable to a small political elite or intellectual vanguard than to the represented constituency as a whole. Indeed, if feminist standpoint arguments are investigated more closely, it turns out that it is not so much the contradictory or marginal location of women as such, but precisely

Strange standpoints 165 that of the female feminist thinker which is deemed to offer epistemological advantages. It is her peculiar intermediate condition of an outsider within, her distinct position of marginality in the centre and the double consciousness which is induced by it, which is taken metonymically to reflect the standpoint of the ‘class’ of women as a whole. As in other critical projects of emancipation (nationalism not excepted), one identity is foregrounded as primary while another one is held back. The frontstage identity (womanhood, whiteness or blackness, class or national affiliation) is invariably mediated by and processed through the backstage identity of intellectual spokespersonship. Usually also a self-consciously marginal identity, it dictates and projects a number of characteristics (of intellectuality and marginality) which structure the larger categories of class, nation, gender, and race which it undertakes to speak for and represent. In this fashion, marginal intellectuals create a false shadow of themselves, an ontological double which enables them to align their critical claims with a broader historical force and a more compelling sociological reality than their own. Perhaps the rules of this mistaken identity play may be further spelled out by drawing a formal distinction between three epistemological positions. The first and second positions together define the dualistic field of contest which is identified by the various critical theories: bourgeois versus proletariat, male versus female, white versus black (in generalized form: dominant versus dominated, or established versus outsiders). The critical theories invariably assume that it is advisable to depart from the standpoint of the latter in order to attain a more reliable view of the structure as a whole: the view from below is attributed better epistemological vision than the view from the centre. However, by foregrounding the contest between the first and second positions, the critical theories tend to silence a third position, which is the position from which they themselves speak (cf. Pels 1996). This third position is not only marginal vis-à-vis the powerful centre, but also marginal (although to a lesser extent) vis-à-vis the situation of the powerless or dominated themselves. This is why Bourdieu identifies intellectuals as ‘dominated dominants’, and insists that their positions are perhaps homologous but not identical with those of the dominated (Bourdieu 1991:243–5; 1993a:43–5; 1993b:44–5). Critical intellectuals indeed find themselves in a contradictory social location, because they identify with the oppressed but simultaneously take their distance from their unmediated experiences of oppression. Marginal standpoints by themselves do not suffice; they must be intellectualized, pass through theory; which evidently requires the guiding presence of the professionals of theory themselves. Let me now further illustrate and substantiate the claim that, in feminist standpoint arguments, this defocalized intellectual persona secretly dominates the focalized one of ‘being a woman’. My aim, in highlighting

166 The Intellectual as Stranger this self-referential aspect of feminist theory, is of course to emphasize the situational difference between representers and represented, the gap or hiatus which separates the spokespersons from the realities (or groups) that they speak for, i.e. to signal their peculiar autonomy and ‘strangeness’ over against their objects (or subjects) of representation. This implies a sustained critique of the tendency on the part of the representers to identify themselves with the represented (with the chosen class, gender, or race), in a classical metonymic disappearance trick which paradoxically ensures a unique legitimacy and authority for those who have formally disappeared from the scene. Hartsock’s influential extrapolation of Marxism towards a feminist historical materialism already evidences the basic pattern of slippage between ‘woman’ and ‘feminist’ which is repeated in many subsequent critical texts. She makes abundantly clear that at least two additional factors are required in order to transform women’s experiences into credible feminist standpoints: science and struggle—which not accidentally count among the unique assets and dispositions of politically committed (feminist) intellectuals. Whereas ‘women’s lives make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point which can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy’, this standpoint ‘must be struggled for and represents an achievement which requires both science to see beneath the surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the education which can only grow from struggle to change those relations’ (1983:284–5). The feminist standpoint is achieved rather than obvious; it represents a mediated rather than immediate understanding (288, 302–4). This closely follows the Marxian model in which the proletariat must likewise be educated through science and struggle in order to be transformed (by its political educators and leaders?) from a class ‘in itself’ into a class ‘for itself’.14 As Marxists draw epistemological consequences from the economic division of labour, so Hartsock intends to revalue the sexual division of labour in terms of a radical epistemological claim (and, once again, one typically made by professionals of theory). In the process, ‘women’s situation’ is subjected to a string of positive idealizations, which prepare it for its function as ontological grounding and teleological guarantee of the feminist critical project. Women’s activities, it is argued, stand closer to the necessities of material life, embody a more intimate unity with nature and the reproduction of life, and are oriented to use rather than exchange. They also exemplify a closer unity of mind and body and cultivate a more relational and connected sense of self, whereas men typically define themselves as separate and disconnected (1983:290ff). Taken together, such female experiences evoke a stark contrast with what is called ‘abstract masculinity’ and its constitutive dualisms of culture versus nature, mind versus body, connection versus disconnection, or reason versus emotion.

Strange standpoints 167 The feminist standpoint based on women’s relational self-definition and activity exposes the world of men and their understanding of it as ‘partial and perverse’. Hartsock also copies the antinomic structure of the Hegelian/Marxian dialectic, in order to frame the historical mission of women in a manner which is reminiscent of the young Marx’s eschatology of the proletariat: By drawing out the potentiality available in the actuality and thereby exposing the inhumanity of human relations, [the feminist standpoint] embodies a distress which requires a solution. The experience of continuity and relation—with others, with the natural world, of mind with body—provides an ontological base for developing a nonproblematic social synthesis…which does not depend on any of the forms taken by abstract masculinity…Generalizing the activity of women to the social system as a whole, would raise, for first time in human history, the possibility of a fully human community. (Hartsock 1983:303–5) Idealization and identification The romantic transcription of the proletariat thus finds a close match in more recent versions of standpoint theorizing which ‘change the (epistemological) subject’. They all proceed from an idealization of the represented primary identity to an identification with it, and hence legitimize a covert self-idolatry or self-aggrandizement of the spokesperson and his/her professional way of life.15 In Chapter 2, I have cited Karl Heinzen’s comment on communist intellectuals such as Marx that these gentlemen were actually ‘head over heels in love with the proletariat’; matching a more recent remark by Bahro that the Marxist intellectuals painted an idealized picture of the Worker which referred ‘to no one other than themselves’. Apparently, there is also a definite sense in which feminists are in love with womanhood in general, which testifies to a more intricate and ambiguous self-centredness, precisely because ‘being a woman’ constitutes the identity of women intellectuals in a more radical and intimate fashion than proletarian identifications are able to do in the case of bourgeois males.16 Such ‘loving’ identifications are also cultivated by Hill Collins (1986; 1991), who has extended feminist standpoint logic to black feminist thought, and hence begins more specifically to address the issue of the crossing of marginal identities. Black women’s experiences and ideas suggest the contours of a distinct ‘Afrocentric’ worldview which is in all respects opposed to the ‘Eurocentric’ one, although it remains unarticulated and is not fully developed into a self-defined black feminist standpoint. African-American women occupy a peculiar ‘outsider within’ status within Eurocentric culture, which stimulates a special Black

168 The Intellectual as Stranger women’s perspective on self, family, and society. However, the black women’s standpoint may not be clear to black women themselves; which is why black feminist intellectuals must ‘produce facts and theories about the Black female experience that will clarify a Black woman’s standpoint for Black women’. Black feminist thought hence consists of specialized knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women (1986:16, 24; 1991:22). As in white feminism, a process of transformation is needed, which must be guided and processed by critical theory and by struggle for self-definition and self-revaluation. In thus articulating the taken-for-granted knowledge shared by African-American women, Black women intellectuals provide ‘unique leadership for Black women’s empowerment and resistance’ (1991:31–4). It is sufficiently clear that the actual focus of Hill Collins’ efforts is precisely the peculiar ‘outsider within’ status suffered by black women in academia, or that of black feminist thinkers in social and political thought more generally. Her stated project is to prove and reclaim the authenticity, coherence, independence, and viability of an intellectual tradition of Black feminist thought (1991:xiv). The collusion of gender and race oppressions even produces a triple marginality, which is induced by the exclusion of Black women’s ideas from mainstream academic discourse and the curious placement of African-American women intellectuals in both feminist and Black social and political thought. Black women intellectuals remain ‘outsiders within’ in all three communities, since ‘the assumptions on which full group membership are based—whiteness for feminist thought, maleness for Black social and political thought, and the combination for mainstream scholarship—all negate a Black female reality’ (1991:12). In Hill Collins’ work, the metonymic slippage between representers and represented is therefore reiterated in terms of an identification of the marginal standpoint of a new type of intellectual spokespersons with that of ‘African-American womanhood’, which is attributed with a generic estrangement from the Eurocentric world and worldview and a native resistance against its characteristic pattern of dualistic thinking.17 Female black culture also potentially exudes an alternative humanist vision of social organization (1986:21), inasmuch as its practices of ‘sisterhood’, ‘othermothering’, its woman-centred communalism, and its unique forms of creative expression (cf. the black female blues tradition), yield novel definitions of self, family, work, and community which profitably add up to an authentic and comprehensive Black humanism. Afrocentric culture is also said to provide the lineaments of a new anti-dualistic, antipositivistic and dialogical epistemology, for which the call-and-response discourse mode of church services offers the original matrix and epitome (1991:236–7).18 It is interesting to digress briefly to Gilroy’s criticism of black feminist thought, precisely because he shows himself to be vulnerable to the same

Strange standpoints 169 residual glamorization of black experience for which he rather severely castigates Hill Collins. Despite her overt distancing from all types of gender essentialism, Gilroy nevertheless senses that another version of racial essentialism is smuggled in through the back porch. In Hill Collins’ transposition, the term ‘black’ is assigned a double duty, since its epistemological and ontological dimensions are taken as entirely congruent. The term ‘Afrocentric’ appears both as a synonym for ‘black’ and as an equivalent of the word ‘feminist’. This constant elision imports a classically Leninist vanguardism in Hill Collins’ writing. Since black women are incapable of articulating the standpoint, ‘they need to be helped to do this by an elite cadre of black feminist intellectuals who vaccinate ordinary folk with the products of their critical theorizing…Experiencecentred knowledge claims…simply end up substituting the standpoint of black women for its forerunner rooted in the lives of white men’ (Gilroy 1993:52–3). Here as elsewhere, Gilroy demonstrates an acute sensitivity to the role of ‘uneasy spokespeople of the black elite’, who are seduced into fabricating a larger populist identity ‘as an expression of their own contradictory position’. In doing so, they persistently mystify the (increasingly problematic) relation of relatively privileged castes within the black community with the black poor, who, after all, supply the elite with a dubious entitlement to speak on behalf of the phantom constituency of black people in general… Today’s black intellectuals have persistently succumbed to the lure of these romantic conceptions of ‘race’, ‘people’, and ‘nation’ which place themselves, rather than the people they supposedly represent, in charge of the strategies for nation building, state formation, and racial uplift. (Gilroy 1993:33–4) More disconcerting is to notice that Gilroy—who tends to ignore Hill Collins’ paramount theme of the ‘outsider within’, which is so close to his own hermeneutics of double consciousness—indulges in a quite similar romanticization and intellectualization of black culture. In his reading, black musical expression presumably reproduces a distinct counterculture of modernity, since it is interpretable as a philosophical discourse which refuses the modern occidental separations of ethics and aesthetics and of culture and politics—albeit in the form of an intuitive folk knowledge (36– 9). This subculture, it is claimed, often appears to be the intuitive expression of some racial essence but is in fact an elementary historical acquisition produced from the viscera of an alternative body of cultural and political expression that considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation. In the future, it will become a place which is capable of satisfying the (redefined) needs of human beings

170 The Intellectual as Stranger that will emerge once the violence—epistemic and concrete—of racial typology is at an end. Reason is thus reunited with the happiness and freedom of individuals and the reign of justice within the collectivity. (Gilroy 1993:39) Among feminist cultural theorists, it is perhaps Haraway who is most acutely aware of the intellectualist tendencies which engender such metonymic idealizations; her work on cyborg feminism also marks the most prolific shift from the idea of primal, innocently centred identities towards metaphors of estrangement, heterogeneity, and hybridity (cf. Prins 1995). Although she sets a premium on establishing the capacity to see ‘from the peripheries and the depths’, Haraway also cautions that there is ‘a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions’. To see from below ‘is neither easily learned nor unproblematic, even if we “naturally” inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges’. While such standpoints seemingly promise more adequate accounts of the world, ‘how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the “highest” technoscientific visualizations’ (1991:191). The standpoints of the subjugated are never innocent; they do not provide immediate vision. Subjugation is not sufficient grounds for an ontology; it might at most be a ‘visual clue’. ‘Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity’ (1991:192–3). This requires one to seek points of view that are mobile, perspectives that are unexpected and extraordinary, which do not express fixed identities but require split and contradictory selves who can critically interrogate such positions. The promise of critical objectivity is not found in the subject position of identity, but in ‘partial connection’, in the joining together of partial views (1991:195).19 Whose science? Whose knowledge? The work of Sandra Harding arguably represents the most comprehensive and lucid expression of modern feminist standpoint theory, and may hence be most informative about its generic strengths and difficulties. As in previously cited examples, Harding’s writings feature a ubiquitous and inclusive ‘we’ which permits a systematic elision between the broader category of ‘woman’ and the narrower one of ‘feminist’, i.e. the feminist scientist or intellectual; while her self-identification as an ‘outsider within’ is also transcribed into a larger ontological marginality of women as such. The gap between the two identities and positions is characteristically bridged by means of critical theory and political struggle: women’s experiences, although they provide an initial standpoint which promises a less partial and distorted perspective on male-dominated society, must be

Strange standpoints 171 informed and corrected by feminist theorizing and feminist political engagement in order to create truly critical perspectives. Women’s experiences, or the things women say, do not in themselves provide reliable grounds for knowledge claims. They may be good places to begin research, but cannot adjudicate which knowledge claims are preferable. Experiences may lie to us, and must therefore pass through the lenses of feminist theory; overcoming this spontaneous experiential consciousness is often a painful process of ‘second birth’. In this sense, standpoint theory differs from an ‘ethnoscience’ or an ‘identity science’ project (Harding 1991: passim; 1992:582–3; 1995:343–4). The feminist standpoint hence projectively recasts the ontological condition of women as an experience of marginality which critically invalidates traditional categories of (scientific) knowing. Whereas ‘androcentric’ epistemologies conventionally define the scientific habitus as one of dispassionate, disinterested impartiality, as a concern with abstract principles and rules, what it means to be a woman is to be emotional, to be interested in the welfare of family and friends, and to be concerned with concrete practices and contextual relations. Because women are assigned the care of bodies (including men’s) and of the localities where bodies exist (houses, offices, etc.), because they take up the care of young children, and are more generally occupied with emotional work, they natively resist theories that tear knowledge from its social, sentimental, and partial contexts and describe it as transcendental and disinterested (Harding 1991:47). Women are, as such, ‘valuable strangers’ to the social order, while men remain natives whose life patterns and ways of thinking ‘fit all too closely the dominant institutions and conceptual schemes’. This alienation offers unique epistemological advantages, although once again it is feminist theory which must intervene in order to teach and adjudicate what is strange: Because women are treated as strangers, as aliens—some more so than others—by the dominant social institutions and conceptual schemes, their exclusion alone provides an edge, an advantage, for the generation of causal explanation of our social order from the perspectives of their lives. Additionally, however, feminism teaches women (and men) how to see the social order from the perspective of an outsider…Feminism teaches women (and men) to see male supremacy and the dominant forms of gender expectations and social relations as the bizarre beliefs and practices of a social order that is ‘other’ to us. (Harding 1991:125) The corollary of this strategic interposition of theory (and theorists) is that the constitutive principle of standpoint theory about the causal link between being and consciousness or objective position and subjective

172 The Intellectual as Stranger positioning is effectively reversed.20 There remains a critical (and fully exploitable) ambiguity about the notion of the standpoint as a category of lived experience and of ‘being positioned’, or as a wilfully achieved category of identi-fication and position-taking. Indeed, it is in all respects (feminist) theory which constructs and validates experience, and effectively dictates how ‘to see strange’. As in the Marxist parable of the proletariat, one assists at a curious reversal of terms: while the (class, gender, racial) standpoint is taken as point of departure of objectivity claims, it is to all effect the claim itself, the correct (proletarian, feminist, anti-racist) consciousness, which defines and validates the standpoint. Standpoints need spokespersons in order to be constituted as such; it is their representational work that ultimately defines the situation for situated knowledges. In a distinct sense, therefore, theory also liberates from standpoints: the correct consciousness opens up the correct standpoint, even if one ‘naturally’ occupies an incorrect one. Theory provides an alienative methodology, a procedural code of distanciation, which is in principle accessible for all subjects of rational or emancipatory good will. Once again we are returning full circle to the methodological voluntarism which standpoint theory started out to combat. According to Harding, ‘thinking from the perspective of women’s lives’ makes strange what appears familiar, which is ‘the beginning of any scientific inquiry’. Actually, however, such thinking must start in the lives not just of outsiders but of outsiders within (or feminist intellectuals), who are better placed to detect the relationship between outside and inside or margin and centre (1991:131–2, 150, 289; 1993:65–6). It is they who actually occupy epistemically resourceful contradictory positions (‘a woman thinker is a contradiction in terms’), and may therefore exploit the frictions and dissonances which arise between their disparate experiences. The ‘monster problem’, which is usually phrased in terms of the supposedly incongruous identities of male feminists or white anti-racists (Harding 1991:274–5; cf. Jardine and Smith 1987), is perhaps more internal and ‘visceral’, because it marks a variably suppressed identity conflict of female or coloured intellectuals themselves. Indeed, whose science and whose knowledge are at stake here? Like Marxist intellectuals such as Althusser, who claim the ability to become ‘proletariat’ by adopting theoretical proletarian standpoints (1993:229–30), feminist thinkers effectively suggest that one may turn into a stranger by thinking differently (Harding 1991:289). In principle, therefore, it is not necessary to have lived the experience of oppression in order to understand other oppressed identities or to generate what Harding calls ‘traitorous’ analyses. Rather than marking out existentially given positions, the ‘traitorous’ or ‘disloyal’ social locations which Harding wishes (us) to occupy, are largely a matter of conscious engagement and self-education. Traitorous locations, one might say, are actually traitorous

Strange standpoints 173 agendas (cf. Harding 1991:292), which can be methodically adopted, learned, and generalized beyond the scope of any specific primary social identity. Consciousness is decisive, not situation or place. Knowledge, or critical thought, may in principle emancipate itself from all situational determination. It is this vicious circularity and voluntarism which ultimately turns standpoint theory inside out, and closely approximates the conventional transcendental view which it originally set out to criticize. If marginality is so much a matter of theoretical and political choice, the radical epistemological impulse of standpoint thinking is effectively eradicated. The reflexive spokesperson In this book, I have begun to expose some of the hidden intellectualism afflicting the three dominant versions of standpoint theory, which consistently underestimate the performative role of spokespeople in constituting the primary identities of class, gender, and race. All three markings in the holy trinity of social identification invite gestures of idealization which resemble Machiavelli’s own somewhat deceptive claim as a ‘man of the people’ (more nearly of course, as a representative of the intellectual bourgeoisie and of the ‘popular’ party) to be able ‘to understand properly the character of rulers’. The three standpoint theories, I have also noted, tended to maintain this intellectualist posture in their converging drift towards a more abstract epistemology of strangerhood. In attributing epistemic privilege to a generalized condition of outsidership, they pictured it as ontologically continuous with the primary subject positions of workers, women, and people of colour, while surreptitiously identifying the more ambiguous situation of the ‘outsider within’ (i.e. of proletarian, female, or ethnic intellectuals) as the proximate embodiment of such privileged estrangement. A first-order identity swap is thus overhauled by a second-order one: the intellectual, while no longer exclusively posing as authentically (organically) proletarian, female, or black, now also acts as a generalized stranger, pooling the hermeneutic advantages of all three marginal identities into a new dream of ‘being everywhere’ (cf. Bordo 1990:135–6). Theories about situated knowledge, in sum, are likely to suffer from a vicious circularity which results from their efforts to derive objectivity claims from ontological situations which must first be defined as real before such claims can be contextually situated. The presumed ‘last instance’ determination of proletarian, female, or black life experiences simultaneously conceals and justifies the ‘first instance’ domination of theorists who intellectualize the worker, the woman, or the black person; and in a secondary movement, also intellectualize the condition of marginality which is collectively attributed to them. In this fashion, the social determination of knowledge claims ultimately dissolves into a certain

174 The Intellectual as Stranger free-floating voluntarism of marginal intellectuals who are unwilling to calculate the interests and advantages which define their specific inter-esse or ‘in-betweenness’. The ‘outsider within’ perspective, towards which the various standpoint theories interestingly gravitate, hence still underestimates the ‘monster problem’ of critical, emancipatory intellectuals who prioritize their class, gender, or racial identities above their identities as marginal intellectuals, and, in doing so, erase the inequalities which separate them from the groups with which they politically and emotionally identify. Arguably, this secondary identity is less welcome because it is partly shared with the enemy (i.e., with his organic intellectuals), and as such inevitably transsects and dilutes the stark Manichean polarizations of male and female, black and white, or bourgeois and proletarian, which nourish political correctness and a defiant psychology of war. If our purpose, then, is to preserve standpoint theory’s kernel suggestion about the structural connection between marginality and creativity, we need to incorporate the performative logic of spokespersonship and the second-order marginality of intellectuals more intensely and reflexively into standpoint theory itself. Instead of denying the specific ‘treason’ which inevitably accompanies their ‘translation’ of social identities, marginal intellectuals need to more definitely acknowledge the force fields that structure their specific role as strategic intermediaries between social movements and the academy. This requires a more precise demarcation between the condition of alienation, which situates the intellectual outsiders as ‘dominated dominants’ in the social field, and that of oppression or exploitation, which describes the situation of the dominated tout court, which many variants of standpoint theory easily tend to conflate. Subjugation, Haraway rightly presumes, is not sufficient ground for a critical ontology; instead, oppression and exploitation normally invite the quite contrary reactions of particularism, closure, and apathy. This requires a novel recognition of intellectual elites as special groups, whose distinctive ambitions engage them in productive, ‘consciousness-raising’ tension with their primary constituencies—in a form of reflexive elitism which counts on their interested interaction rather than disinterested identification with the ‘masses’ which they claim to represent. What, finally, does this reflexive radicalization of positional thinking imply for the celebrated connection between marginality and conceptual innovation, which I have identified as the enduring ‘proceeds’ of standpoint theory in its various historical manifestations? In answering this question, we may recollect a distinct ambiguity in the original Machiavellian metaphor of the landscape painter who, unlike peoples and princes, may freely move between low and high places in order to collect a comprehensive picture of the natural landscape. The first part of the metaphor expresses the conventional idea (which is also encountered in Mannheim), that positional objectivity is enhanced through the complementarity and synthetic reworking of various partial perspectives.

Strange standpoints 175 The second part, however, implies that such free exchanges are unlikely to occur between high and low places in the social pyramid, and that the spectral logic of the standpoint must acknowledge a principled dispersion of perspectives and the impossibility of their full totalization. It is unclear, moreover, to what extent Machiavelli presumes symmetry of epistemic resources between the people and the Prince, or rather anticipates an asymmetric claim such as the Marxist one, which, while dismissing as absurd any idea of free circulation among the class positions of bourgeoisie and proletariat, would nervously resists any suggestion that, if one needs to become ‘proletariat’ in order to know ‘capital’, perhaps one also needs to be ‘capital’ in order to know the ‘proletariat’. Machiavelli’s balance between the epistemic powers of people and Prince may well express the ambition of the self-styled ‘man of the people’, if not to become a prince himself, then at least to become closer to the prince, as an advisor to the throne who commands a more comprehensive view of the political landscape than his sovereign master. Sen has argued that, notwithstanding the parametric dependence of observation and inference on the position of the observer, objectivity may still be enhanced because different persons can occupy the same position and confirm the same observation, while the same person can occupy different positions and make dissimilar observations: observational claims can be both position-dependent and person-invariant (Sen 1993:126, 129). More radical standpoint theories, however, rightly object that such personinvariance and positional transcendence are socially unlikely; that, in a hierarchically structured society, you cannot see everything from everywhere, and that class-, gender-, or racially-defined social experiences yield partial perspectives on the social world which cannot easily be totalized from any one of these perspectives. Positional parameters or markings of social difference differ dramatically to the extent that they operate closures and install boundaries which prevent individuals from crossing over to other places in the social universe. While Machiavelli’s landscape artist may travel from low to high, the people and the Prince do not change seats so willingly or easily. The only ‘changeling’ in the social world, who is forced into transcendence of place and is able to view transpositionally, is the marginal person or ‘outsider within’, who, like Machiavelli, undertakes to mediate between low and high or between margin and centre. Not a ‘nowhere (wo)man’ or universal subject, but not a firmly-rooted and particularized subject either, the ‘outsider within’ holds a place between places and embodies an interest that mediates other interests. This enables him/her to operate local transcendences, take third positions, and forge partial connections, which together delineate the small measure of synthesis and objectivity which is still available in the chronic ‘war of positions’ which is waged in the social world.

8

Privileged nomads

The Desert People are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are closer to the First State and are more removed from all the evil habits that have infected the hearts of settlers. Ibn Khaldoun

Exercises in nomadology It has become a cliché for connoisseurs of postmodern sensibility to say that we live in a world of flux, where mobility, experimentation, and transgression have turned into core signifiers of the daily management of lifestyles. To seek adventure, to live the experimental life, to probe the limits of one’s identity, has become a singularly powerful motif in popular and elite culture alike, ranging all the way from ‘low’ transgressions and kicks such as bungy-jumping, wind-gliding, mobile phoning, drug use and sexually promiscuous holidays towards more costly and rarified pursuits such as surfing the internet, high-tech mountain climbing, continuous cosmopolitan travel, transgenderism, and intellectual ‘nomadism’. The universal spread of such codings of movement and transgression bears witness to an unprecedented popularization and banalization of the cult of Romantic individualism and its core themes of authenticity, alienation, and the aestheticization of the mundane. The precarious and elitist experimentalism of nineteenth-century Bohemian artists and intellectuals has trickled down and become more democratically accessible, as the interval of ‘growing up’ has been lengthened and Bohemia itself (the social margin) has been expanded and institutionalized into a fully legitimate and subsidized social sanctuary (Pels and Crébas 1991:363). A few snippets from the cultural mosaic may serve to illustrate the pervasiveness of such performative imagery. For some years now, a worldwide billboard campaign by Peter Stuyvesant, displaying well-chiselled men and women striking suggestive poses against a vaguely cosmo/metropolitan background, has been running the caption: ‘There are no borders’. Chesterfield has promptly responded by posting a similar billboard message: ‘Every one is an original’. Not so long ago, an article in the Dutch

176

Privileged nomads 177 press on flexi-work typically argued that (post) modern employees would be unwise to surrender to single lifetime employment, and had better turn into ‘work nomads’ migrating from assignment to assignment and from job to job; which led at least one commentator to criticize this as a sell-out to the postmodern ‘trash philosophy’ of nomadism (De Volks-krant, 1.7.1995 and 11.7.1995). In the Netherlands as elsewhere, politically correct multicultural festivals are typically named ‘Crossing Borders’ or ‘Roots Unlimited’; ‘Cultural Nomadism’ was also chosen to serve as the leading motto of the 1993 Venice Biennale. Closer to intellectual home, a successful 1995 lecture series at the University of Amsterdam (‘Nomadism: On Boundaries and Identity’) once again displayed the whole gamut of currently fashionable inflections of the discourse of mobility, exile, and transgression. Around the same time, a research group on Transnationality and Multiculturalism’ of the deconstructivism-inspired Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, after having digested a heady batch of articles on nomadism, hybridity, and exile, went on to test its readings in a ‘real-life’ situation, and set out on a ‘field trip’ to the Tropical Museum exposition on ‘Nomads in Central Asia’—thus bringing would-be intellectual nomads face to face with representations of weather-beaten shepherds herding flocks of skinny goats across the endless tundra. In this chapter, I will be especially concerned with the way in which this discourse of nomadism has recently turned into a cognitive plaything of the educated elite, into its newest fad in self-stylization and selfcelebration.1 It hence takes issue with a powerfully suggestive, but also risky and misleading set of metaphors which celebrate the traveller, the migrant, the exile, the stranger, or the nomad as the quintessential postmodern subject, and especially, as the quintessential role model of the modern intellectual. Vocabularies of travel, migration, and movement indeed proliferate copiously in present-day cultural criticism (Berman 1983; Chambers 1994a; Robertson et al. 1994; Van den Abbeele 1992), which in this respect appears to have turned into a vast ‘travel literature’. Typically, (post)modern intellectuals like to think of themselves as ‘on the move’ (towards a ‘place called elsewhere’), ‘in transit’, ‘moving across frontiers’, ‘in a state of diaspora’, or ‘living between worlds’. They tend to sacralize the desirable state of ‘ambivalence’, ‘contingency’, ‘diffraction’, ‘hybridity’ or even ‘monstrosity’ (in the sense of combining unfitting, disparate identities) (Haraway 1991; 1992; Law 1991), and preferably adopt the pose of the dislocated ‘traveller’, ‘tourist’, or ‘ethnographer’ (who Lévi-Strauss already described as a ‘professional stranger’). Nothing is worse than being suspected to be ‘native’, ‘sedentary’, ‘rooted’ or ‘immobile’. Said’s notion of ‘travelling theory’, to take a first example, has— somewhat at cross-purposes from its author’s apparent intent—been read as implying that there is something essentially mobile or itinerant about theorizing, thinking, or intellectual life in general; a view that is

178 The Intellectual as Stranger close to Clifford’s description of theorizing as ‘leaving home’ (Braidotti 1996; Clifford 1989; Davies 1994; Said 1983; Wolff 1995). More recently, Said has modelled the vocation of the critical intellectual after the unaccommodated, dislocated condition of the ‘exile’ or ‘expatriate’, which is duly metaphorized into an attitude of intellectual disengagement and dissent: ‘Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others’ (1994:39). 2 Another illustration is provided by Iain Chambers, who similarly elevates the conditions of migrancy, travel, homelessness and exile into core symbols of our postmodern condition, and immediately lends them strong intellectual connotations. His celebration of ‘the nomadic experience of language, of wandering without a fixed home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world…’ suggests, as do Said and Clifford, that thinking has an intrinsically nomadic or ‘travelling’ character: ‘Thought wanders. It migrates, requires translation’ (1994a:4). Among the seminal tributaries to this new discursive trend must be included Marinetti’s Futurist celebration of dynamism and limitless invention (Falasca-Zamponi 1996); Benjamin’s famous stylization of Baudelaire as the metropolitan flâneur and dandy (a characterization which subtly extends towards nomadic and bohemian intellectuals such as Benjamin himself (cf. Shields 1994; Wolff 1995:46–7); the theme of ‘eccentricity’ as broached by Lacanian psychoanalysis; Bakhtin’s theory of linguistic hybridity and heteroglossia; Foucault’s theme of ‘heterotopia’ and his interpretation of the Enlightenment ethos as a ‘limit attitude’ of transgression and permanent self-invention (itself strongly inspired by Benjamin’s Baudelaire) (Foucault 1984); and, especially, Deleuze’s Nietzschean vision of ‘nomadic thinking’, which has been extremely influential throughout postmodernist philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies (Deleuze, 1977; Deleuze and Guattari 1980:434ff; Kaplan 1996:85–91). 3 Deleuze’s model of nomadic subjectivity precisely legitimizes this metaphoric shift from the real or literal to the imagined and self-styled condition of migrancy, inspiring a romanticized image of nomadic life which is much better suited to the flight of ideas (of fancy?) than the flight from economic hardship or political oppression. His nomad, after all, is not necessarily one who moves: some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity. Even historically, nomads are not necessarily those who move about like migrants. On the contrary, they do not move; nomads, they nevertheless stay in the same place and continually evade the codes of settled people. (Deleuze 1977:149) This set of emblems and topics is encountered across a broad spectrum of disciplines, schools, and strands of thought which overlap considerably in

Privileged nomads 179 their conceptual tastes and general direction of interest. British-AmericanAustralian cultural studies, for example, as serviced by journals such as Cultural Studies, Critical Inquiry, Theory, Culture and Society, or Arena, and anthologized in Ferguson et al. (1990) or Grossberg et al. (1992), ceaselessly multiply the modish metaphors of nomadism, expatriation, and dislocation (Chambers 1994a; 1994b; Grossberg 1988; Hartley 1992; Morris 1988; Radway 1988). Among a wealth of examples, let me only cite Hartley’s use of ‘expatriation’ as an appropriate signifier for cultural studies: The ‘expatriate intellectual’ is thus much more than a description of those people who have literally left home; it is offered here as a category to describe those who undertake cultural studies. Disciplinary, gender, and theoretical displacements, as well as mere geographical ones, are one of the distinctive features of that interdisciplinary trade, whose practitioners are united only in dispersal, a diaspora of differentiators. Expatriation in cultural studies is identifiable as migratory writing and principled uncertainty in the exploration of exchange. (Hartley 1992:451)4 Cultural studies in the nomadic mode seamlessly join the recent tradition of postcolonial criticism or colonial discourse analysis, which effusively celebrates the black or subaltern experience as an exilic or diaspora experience which generates double consciousness, cultures of hybridity, creolization, and an ‘ethnicity of the margins’ (Bhabha 1994; Gates Jr 1988; Gilroy 1993; Hall 1990; 1992; 1996; Said 1990; Spivak 1990; West 1994; Young 1995). Hall, for example, canvasses an explicitly metaphorical conception of diaspora, which is defined not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. (Hall 1990:235)5 Postcolonial studies, in turn, map on to recent feminist and ‘queer’ critical writing which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, are likewise strongly attracted by tropes of strangerhood, marginality, and outsidership, and endlessly talk about double vision, hybridity, ‘traitorous identities’, and ‘inappropriate(d) others’.6 The standpoint epistemology of Hartsock (1983) and Harding (1991) here extends towards the lesbian and black (and black lesbian) feminism of, for example, Audre Lorde (1984), bell hooks (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) and Carole Davies

180 The Intellectual as Stranger (1994); which is also variously exemplified by Kristeva’s idea of women as generically exiled (1986), De Lauretis’ vision of ‘eccentric subjects’ (1990), Hill Collins’ theme of the ‘outsider within’ (1986; 1991), Haraway’s cyborg feminism (1991; 1992), Braidotti’s (1994) figuration of women as ‘nomadic subjects’, and Butler and Seidman’s notion of ‘queering’ reality (Butler 1990; 1997; Seidman 1997). This feminist and queer writing in turn shades over into the romantic celebration of ethnography and the modelling of the intellectual as ethnographer, both in modern constructivist and reflexive anthropology (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Clifford 1988; 1992; Radway 1988), in cultural and media studies of the Birmingham School (e.g. Hall et al. (eds) 1980), and in modern ethnographic studies of science (e.g. Knorr Cetina 1983; Latour 1987; Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Woolgar 1988).7 Other significant variations on this prolific theme emerge from the new sociology of mobility (a magnetic subject in sociological postmodernism), especially as it derives from MacCannell’s (1976) vision that ‘tourism’ constitutes the most typical feature of modernity, and is especially characteristic of modern social theorizing (Clifford 1992; 1997; Culler 1988; Morris 1988; Robertson et al. 1994; Urry 1990; 2000; Van den Abbeele 1980; 1992), or from the new cultural geographies and sociologies of space, which vary the themes of ‘liminality’, ‘heterotopia’, nomadism and ‘third space’ (Hetherington 1996; Shields 1991; Soja 1996). Finally, there is the broad current of social-philosophical theorizing on strangerhood and homelessness as core emblems of (post) modern times, as a presence that concentrates both the promises and urgencies of our contemporary predicament (Berger et al. 1974; Bauman 1991; 1995; Chambers 1994a; Harman 1988; Kristeva 1988; Maffesoli 1997). Berger et al. typically picture modern man as suffering from a deepened condition of homelessness, from a ‘metaphysical loss of home’ which is the correlate of the migratory character of modern experiences of society and self (1974:77; cf. Shotter 1993). Bauman strings some of the most salient metaphors together in his discussion of pilgrimage and strangerhood: I propose that in the same way as the pilgrim was the most fitting allegory of modern life strategy preoccupied with the daunting task of identity-building—the stroller, the vagabond, the tourist and the player offer jointly the metaphor for the postmodern strategy moved by the horror of being bound and fixed. (Bauman 1995:91, 126) The intellectual traveller This titillating talk of travel, and the mutual resonance or crossmodulation of the images of the stranger and the intellectual which is engendered by it, represent a postmodernist inflection of what we have

Privileged nomads 181 learned to interpret as a venerable topos in the history of modernist social thought. Metaphors of peregrination, mobility, and otherness have of course long been inscribed in modern intellectual discourse as indicative of the intellectual experience itself, as tracing the universal itinerary of reason: truth is homeless, and homelessness, in reverse, breeds truth. Accordingly, the figurations of the intellectual and the stranger have regularly played a game of discursive hide-and-seek; their close metaphoric conjunctions traditionally opened up vast possibilities of cross-reference and mutual substitution. The stranger has often been envisioned as both the historical and normative prototype of the true intellectual, possessing a unique set of epistemic advantages; while the true intellectual has preferably been defined as a ‘displaced person’: as someone estranged, uprooted, marginal to his culture of origin and its parochial customs, values, and beliefs. Hence the long-standing connection between estrangement or distanciation from local cultures and beliefs, and claims about better vision, a deeper reflexivity, increased objectivity, cognitive innovation, access to larger truths (Kolakowski 1990:57). As we have noted in some detail in Chapter 3, this cross-modulation of associations and ideal types already emerges in the very birth-hour of the intellectual: the Dreyfus Affair which tore apart turn-of-the-century France (Charle 1990:183ff; Ory and Sirinelli 1986). At this point in time, the ‘abstract’ and disengaged condition of the left-wing intellectuals was conceived by themselves as a title of honour and as an ethical and epistemic promise, while their right-wing adversaries, the spokesmen for the Nation and of ‘native’ thought, preferred to read it as a curse and a conspiracy. Les intellectuels themselves felt capable and called upon, by virtue of their professional autonomy and its resultant detachment, to speak for universal values of truth and justice; their disinterested universalism was thought to found and legitimize a unique competence to mingle in public political controversy. Nationalists such as Brunétière and Barrès, however, considered such ‘Kantian’ intellectuals to be dangerously alienated from French culture and the French race. Truth, reason and justice, they claimed, had no imaginable existence beyond blood and territory: a historical and cultural situatedness which such ‘logicians of the absolute’, who celebrated the universality of humankind and the transcendent unity of human reason, perversely sought to deny. They were hence little else but outsiders, without ‘feet in the ground’, déracinés who unjustifiably claimed to exercise political judgement notwithstanding their lack of competence and their abstract verbalism. As also noted previously, subsequent cognitive developments have only fortified such associations between uprootedness and intellectuality. Two highly influential and mutually reflective cases in point were offered by Georg Simmers portraiture of the stranger as (in effect) an intellectual, and by Karl Mannheim’s depiction of the freischwebende Intelligent, as

182 The Intellectual as Stranger collectively estranged. Simmel’s stranger, we saw, was not the barbaric alien who lacked any commonality with the group and completely fell outside of it (as in Schmitt’s vision of the stranger as existential enemy, cf. Schmitt 1996). Strangerhood rather exemplified a special type of social interaction and mutuality. The stranger ‘who comes today and stays tomorrow’ was a potential traveller who, while still perceptibly marked by his mobility, was able to connect group membership organically with outsidership and opposition. The specific mobility of the stranger, and the amalgam of detachment and involvement which he embodied, laid the foundations for a specific form of objectivity. In contrast to the established, the stranger was capable of observing even that which was close to him from a bird’s eye perspective: ‘He is freer, practically and theoretically; he surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective; he is not tied down in his actions by habit, piety, and precedent’ (Simmel 1950:405). Although Simmel initially adduced the merchant and the Jew as historical incarnations of this marginal position, his formulations rather suggested that it was the modern intellectual who functioned as his proximate point of reference. Similar connections between social marginality and a more reflexive or synoptically objective view were of course elaborated by Mannheim. His (semi-) detached intelligentsia was defined as a relatively classless stratum which lacked a firm anchorage in the social order. Its social basis was sufficiently differentiated to prevent confinement within a parochial group view, which enhanced the expression of and negotiation between a multiplicity of perspectives. Such a heterogeneous, unstable identity and the exchange of perspectives facilitated by it, enabled the intellectuals to develop a synthetic view of the totality of a given historical situation. Their detached, nomadic position provided a sociological springboard for the specific ‘impartial partiality’ of the sociology of knowledge, of which the free-floating intellectuals were considered to be the privileged stadtholders. As we have seen, Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia suggested the possibility of superseding the partialities of social and political thought in a dynamic synthesis, according to which the socially unattached intelligentsia, by virtue of its specifically dislocated position, was able to act as ‘the predestined advocate of the intellectual interests of the whole’ (Mannheim 1968:140). Let me briefly list a few more recent examples of this close concatenation of the themes of estrangement and intellectual vision. Kristeva’s Etrangers à nous-mêmes (1988) displays the full set of metaphoric oscillations between the condition of modern man as a ‘stranger unto himself’ and the more particular condition of exiled intellectuals which suffer from and celebrate a hybrid identity (such as Kristeva herself)—feeding a romantic dream of autonomy and transcendence, as well as a fair amount of narcissistic self-fascination. Kristeva’s stranger, like Simmel’s, is first of all

Privileged nomads 183 the distanced person who is capable of wider contemplation than the members of his group; the interval that separates him both from the others and from himself enables him, if not to dwell in truth, at least to relativize and self-relativize where others are victimized by ‘the routines of monovalence’ (1988:16).8 Iain Chambers’ Migrancy, Culture, Identity, as already indicated, likewise metaphorizes notions about migrancy, travel, homelessness and exile into core symbols of our present condition; symbols which are similarly overdetermined by strong intellectualist connotations. But Chambers also remains aware of the analogy’s seamy side, and retains something like a ‘bad consciousness’ about its cognitive risks. Still, in his view, it is a risk to be run: In the oblique gaze of the migrant that cuts across the territory of the Western metropolis there exists the hint of a metaphor. In the extensive and multiple worlds of the modern city we, too, become nomads, migrating across a system that is too vast to be our own, but in which we are fully involved. (Chambers 1994a:14) Where previous margins have folded in to the centre, the migrant’s sense of rootlessness, of living between worlds, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of our (post) modern predicament (Chambers 1994a:6–7, 27). A more sociologically sobered-up version of the same connection of ideas is offered by Zygmunt Bauman’s various discussions of strangerhood and the nature of ambivalence (1991; 1995). As in Kristeva and Chambers, Bauman’s stranger is perceived as the most representative emblem of (post) modern times, the true embodiment of the ambivalence and indeterminacy which constitutes modern life in the metropolis, which is typically ‘carried on by strangers among strangers’ (1995:126). Bauman likewise tends to intellectualize the stranger, in a manner which is reminiscent of Simmel’s seminal suggestions, but also to read the link between strangerhood and objectivity ‘the other way’, by modelling the task of the critical intellectual after that of the quintessential nomad. Especially when describing the historical experiences of European Jewry as ‘strangerhood incarnated’, as the epitomy of nonterritoriality and homelessness, he tends to interpret this allegedly most radical and universal condition of estrangement as articulating the very pattern of universality. His para-phrase of Kafka imperceptibly verges on acceptance when it is claimed that ‘The stranger is universal because of having no home and no roots. Rootlessness relativizes everything concrete and thus begets universality’ (1991:90).9 The epistemological link between marginality and objectivity, and the transmutation of particularity into universality remain intact even as Bauman enters an important sociological specification, which usefully complicates and duplicates Mannheim’s idea about the semi-detached intelligentsia; it is rather felicitously described as the ‘neolithic revolution

184 The Intellectual as Stranger of the intellectuals’ (see Chapter 2). In our century, the intellectuals have collectively passed from a nomadic towards a more settled existence as a result of professionalization, rationalization, and institutionalization, and have turned into well-settled and well-salaried servants of the knowledge society. The free-floating intellectual does not disappear, but becomes an exception: somebody who is at war not so much with a closed, parochial society as with ‘the parochiality of his better established, sated, and selfsatisfied colleagues’. Marginalized intellectuals are strangers not just in relation to the ‘natives’ and their dominant values, but first of all in relation to the members of their own knowledge class: their sought-for universality is forged out of the opposition to the very same particularity of which their own knowledge class furnishes the immediate exemplar (Bauman 1991:93). However, this promising duplication of the condition of nomadic marginality, which no longer covers the position of intellectuals as a generic social category but restricts its epistemic privilege to marginal types, appears to be abandoned and negated in favour of another universalizing gesture which once again reverses the connection. In doing so, Bauman reintroduces a sociologized and historicized version of the romantic view of the modern subject as a universal stranger which is encountered in more psychoanalytic terms in Kristeva and in more culturalist terms in Chambers. The ‘neolithic revolution of the intellectuals’ is read as a rather spectacular episode in the much wider process of the universalization of strangerhood itself. Following Luhmann, the modern individual in a differentiated and functionally segmented society is depicted as a priori socially displaced, always a partial stranger, an inhabitant of divergent worlds. The experience of strangerhood, or more generally that of existential and mental ambivalence, sheds its particularity in order to turn into a universal human condition. Closely repeating Kristeva, Bauman concludes by affirming that, once rootlessness becomes universal, particularity is effaced and strangerhood in effect has dissolved: ‘If everyone is a stranger, no one is’ (1991:97).10 Nomadic narcissism The previous accounts are not simply indicative of the cognitive force, but also begin to clarify the knowledge-political risks which are inscribed in the long-standing connection between the condition of outsidership and the vocation of social criticism. Indeed, the association has proven to be as misleading as it has been suggestive. While detachment from local beliefs and set conventions has legitimately been viewed as an epistemic precondition for accessing new, different types of knowledge and styles of thought, intellectuals have typically also flirted with strangeness and marginality. They have been led to transmute Bohemian self-fascination and self-complaint into political apology and self-aggrandizement, and have often staked their historical bids for power and privilege upon their

Privileged nomads 185 self-appointed spokesmanship for larger classes which they projectively construed as marginal and estranged. The Marxian view of the proletariat only represents the most familiar of such self-denying and simultaneously self-magnifying projections. The appointed and summoned subject of historical transformation (but who effectively issues the summons?), is defined in such a manner as to obliquely refract the most salient social and psychological characteristics of the ‘critical’, estranged, nomadic situation of the revolutionary intellectual himself.11 The risk involved in the epistemic conjugation of intellectuality and marginality is therefore effectively the same as the constitutional paradox which traverses all representational practices, the universal danger that resides in the very logic of speaking for others: which is to disregard the inevitable hiatus between representer and represented, and to underestimate the existential ‘strangeness’ which persists between spokespersons and those who (or that which) is spoken for (the working class, the fatherland, the seals, the ozone layer, Planet Earth, the innocent unborn, etc.). It hence subsumes crucial positional differences under a postulate of identity which camouflages the particular identities and interests of the representers, precisely by projecting them as more general or even universal ones (see Chapter 1). This is what Robert Michels (1987:147) already referred to as the effet de mirage of spokespersonship, and what Bourdieu more recently described as the ‘mystery of ministry’, the mistaken identity which intellectual spokespersons postulate on the basis of the structural homology between their own contradictory position as ‘dominated dominants’ in the fields of cultural and political power, and that of the dominated tout court in the broader social field, or the field of social classes. This homologous position feeds a (symbolically effective) misrecognition of the fact that spokespersons always speak for themselves in the act of speaking for others (Bourdieu 1991:182–3, 214–16, 243–8). The postmodernist narrative of nomadism, despite its deep-lying suspicion about generalizing the particular and its incantation of difference, still liberally permits such a camouflage to unfold into a new version of intellectualism, or a new ‘narcissism of the intellectuals’. Construing the migrant, exile, or nomad as alter ego of the modern intellectual, or beyond this, as a privileged metaphor for modern subjectivity, often leads to an intellectualist domestication and appropriation of the experiences of ‘real-life’ migrants or exiles, while euphemizing the comparatively settled, sedentary, and privileged situation of academics, who are invited to indulge in fictions of social weightlessness and dreams of perpetual transcendence in boundary-breaking journeys of the critical mind.12 Metaphorizing the nomad easily induces affectations of estrangement which support an exaggerated and self-complimentary rhetoric of creativity and innovation. In this respect, the self-stylization of intellectual nomadism is only the latest ‘character mask’ of academics settled and salaried enough to be able to flirt with uncertainty, mobility,

186 The Intellectual as Stranger and radical individuality, while in reality their movements are comfortably bracketed in terms of job autonomy, somewhat more adventurous holidays, larger chunks of free time, speeding across the electronic highway, and institutionally-paid transcontinental flights.13 The jet set intellectual may well imagine herself a true nomad in body and spirit, ‘like a rolling stone’, avid for new experiences and new ideas; but often her practical mobility does not extend very far beyond the airport lounges which she transits en route towards another international meeting of her peers. Border-crossing, if it does not refer to such banal situations, usually boils down to little else but a well-intended resolve to disregard the limits of one’s home discipline (in efforts towards transdisciplinarity which have meanwhile become a common staple of modern academic life) or, maximally, shuttling between and combining different styles of writing.14 This new narcissism (of bourgeois posing as Bohemians, of the ‘classy’ posing as déclassé, of the comfortably settled imagining themselves to be reckless risk-takers) is easily complicitous with new forms of political correctness, as soon as the metaphorics of nomadism also facilitate identification between such counterfeit strangers and ‘real-life’ migrants, refugees, guest workers, or illegal aliens, feeding vanguard illusions which are structurally comparable with those which are promoted by the allegedly defunct grand narratives of modernity. Especially if identities are claimed which accumulate several indices of alienation, such as a Jewish, gender-oppressed, politically dissident, or ethnically migrant background, symbolic profits are rife; living in the crossfire of such multiple oppressions is often said to make for enhanced epistemic reflexivity and legitimacy of spokespersonship.15 But even such multiplied or kaleidoscopic nomads do remain intellectuals who purport to speak in the name of others; and as such, easily tend to ignore and euphemize their own specific strangeness, the specific sociological difference which they make as professionals of the mind and the word. (Another romantic strategy is to magnify a rather quiet index of alienation, such as indifference towards academic mores or political dissidence, into an indicator of generic bohemianism or outsidership.) Once again, we encounter the pars pro toto logic which we have identified as constituting the orginal sin of social representation: the logic of identification which conjures away the strangeness of the representer over against the represented, precisely by metaphorically representing him as a generic stranger. This is not to suggest that awareness of such spokesperson problems is absent from the strands of thought which I have been reviewing. One finds many contrapuntal statements which in some way balance the account, by warning against the seductions of romantic hyperbole, or by measuring the political gap between representers and represented. Both Said (1990:362– 3) and Clifford (1992:107), for example, are sharply conscious of the differences which set apart ‘cosmopolitan’ exiles from mass immigrants or refugees (cf. Kaplan 1996:112–22, 127–39). Wolff goes further in

Privileged nomads 187 connecting the metaphoric discourse of travel, and its misleading suggestion of universal and equal mobility, with ‘exclusionary moves in the academy’: it is obvious to her that ‘we are not all “on the road” together’ (1995:129). But it appears that the problem is not tackled in a focal manner, and that the sociological specificity of the marginal intellectual still tends to be ‘held back’ behind the allegedly more general and ontologically primary condition of marginality or hybridity as such. While conceding that hybridity may easily turn into ‘a celebratory notion where everything is wonderful, a place without struggle or pain’, and distancing himself somewhat from the idea of the postmodern nomad, Hall nevertheless does not let go of the Gramscian notion of the ‘organic’ intellectual (Hall 1996:502; Terry 1995:60, 68–9). Gilroy, in turn, is quite sensitive to the authoritarian effects of essentialist identifications between privileged black elites and their less privileged constituencies, and to the dangers of ‘pastoralization’ that lurk in attempts to theorize black identity in terms of the experience of diaspora; but he tends to reproduce the same mystificatory spokesperson logic in his evident romanticization and intellectualization of black musical expression and black popular culture more generally (1993:31–9, 72ff, 81, 101). The feminist nomad Before concluding this chapter, let me elaborate a final example of this play of particularity and generality in a more detailed manner: Braidotti’s Deleuze-inspired figuration or fiction of the ‘nomadic subject’ as informing a radical feminist politics of sexual difference (Braidotti 1994). Braidotti offers an interesting case because, different from e.g. Deleuze, Kristeva, or Chambers, the scope of universalization of the metaphor is generously restricted to humanity’s better half, and hence articulates a closer, more differentiated, and also more consciously political politics of location. Simultaneously, however, Braidotti reinstates an essentialist notion of sexual difference that tends to absorb and over-ride alternative, potentially crosscutting axes of social stratification, pleading a postulate of gender identity which ignores at least one crucial sociological difference which separates feminist intellectual spokespersons from the female subjects they claim to represent. The project of empowering women as speaking and thinking subjects is consistently identified with ‘the positivity of the difference that feminist women can make’. This identification of feminist and female, of representer and represented, is legitimized in terms of a political ontology which affirms an essential, undeniable, because bodily inscribed, asymmetry between the sexes. Modernity is invariably associated with masculine discursive power, or what is called the ‘phallogocentrist’ regime, which supports stable identities, dualities, and hierarchies; while the female world and female bodily experience are conceived as essentially shifting, uncertain, ambivalent, and hence postmodern and nomadic almost by definition.16

188 The Intellectual as Stranger This suggests that Braidotti’s essentialist figuration of the nomad is first of all a myth for the radical feminist intellectual, and operates a pars pro toto logic which is quite similar to the vanguardism of more ‘patriarchal’ narratives of emancipation.17 The novel definition of female subjectivity aspired to is a feminist and thus theoreticized subjectivity, or the critical subjectivity claimed by feminist theorists who wish to cut an iconoclastic, subversive figure against conventional ‘sedentary’, ‘phallogocentric’ thought. Although inspired by experiences of peoples or cultures which are literally nomadic, ‘it is the subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of traveling’ (1994:5). As a subject which has ‘relinquished all idea, desire or nostalgia for fixity’, the nomad defines the protoype of the ‘woman of ideas’, a female feminist subject whose becoming-subject is typically sustained by ‘the will to know, the desire to say, the desire to speak, to think, and to represent’ (1994:22, 120, 159; my italics). Even though philosophy and high theory are ferociously criticized as examples of overinvestment in the theoretical mode, one simultaneously encounters a passionate glorification of ideas as ‘beautiful events’ and of thinking (in a Deleuzian vein) as living in the fast lane, as ‘life lived at the highest possible power’ (e.g. 101–2).18 Typically, feminists must shoulder a double responsibility ‘for and towards the act of thinking’ and for ‘our gender’ (202, 187, 256). In addition, as in Kristeva and Chambers, the nomad is stylized as a linguistic merchant (in fact a cultural capitalist): a polyglot in permanent state of translation, who, by finding herself in permanent transit between languages, has become an expert in the treacherous contingencies of language, and hence is capable of ‘some healthy scepticism about steady identities and mother tongues’. Her ‘acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries’ and her ‘intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing’, provisionally restricts itself to the world of the academic intellect, to allegedly revolutionary practices such as transdisciplinarity and the mixture of various speaking voices and writing styles (1994:36–7). Thus modulating between the generic experience of women and the more selective ambitions of women of ideas, Braidotti’s nomadic subject remains predicated upon a grand epistemic binary which remains undeconstructed, even while dualistic thinking is strenuously rejected as constituting the inner logic of patriarchy: that of a fundamental incommensurability between the sexes, which is not considered one difference among many, but rather as a founding structural difference from which all others tend to emerge (e.g. 1994:117). Her politics of positioning therefore presumes a grand duality of the sexes as an ontological or metaphysical last instance, which subsumes all differences which potentially operate within the category of womanhood under the postulated identity of female embodied experience. Although she does at one point allude to the hiatus between intellectual women and the ‘domestic foreigners’ in our Western metropolises, and points out the ‘paradox of proximity, indifference, and

Privileged nomads 189 cultural differences between the nomadic intellectual and migrant women’, this hiatus is not focally addressed and remains sub-merged in the postulate of sameness of gender and women’s generically nomadic condition (cf. 255–6). Even though female identity is defined as a ‘site of differences’, the starting point for feminists, in Braidotti’s view, must remain the conviction that Woman is ‘a general umbrella term that brings together different kinds of women, different levels of experience and different identities’. Hence the self-imposed ‘paradox of woman’ is never resolved: the fact that feminism is based upon a notion of common, even essentialized, female identity, while the postmodern nomadic critical style demands full deconstruction of all such fixed and essential identities. Her continued belief in womanhood as a positive essence, and her strategic re-essentialization of female sexual embodiment, therefore turn Braidotti into a perversely paradoxical spokeswoman of the ‘ontological desire’ of women, which in large measure reveals itself as the desire of feminist intellectuals to be something, to make a difference in the intellectual world. Indeed, whose self-legitimation is at stake here? Who is actually being empowered, if not a new type of academic intellectual? In the third space Amidst many possible conclusions with regard to the epistemological advantages and risks of the discourse of nomadism and marginality, let me emphasize a fairly obvious one. It concerns the danger of homogenizing and over-generalizing something like a nomadic state, and the dire need for empirical sociological specification which (minimally) registers category differences between privileged ‘migratory elites’ (such as metropolitan strollers, jet set professionals, cosmopolitan academics, and leisuring tourists) and underclass strangers: victims of political exile, ethnic cleansing or economic poverty. Within all such categories, from high to low, one may go on to distinguish between the relatively settled and assimilated and the relatively marginal and hybrid (cf. Bauman’s contrast between established and outsider intellectuals), without forgetting that even marginal intellectuals remain privileged nomads and that, more generally, intellectual spokespersons, by dint of their sociological specificity, retain a specific ‘strangeness’ towards or distance from the groups for which they speak, even if they do their utmost to merge and become identical with them. If this hiatus between representers and represented is more attentively addressed, there is a better chance of coming to terms with the painful paradox that ‘underclass strangers’ are often attracted to virtually the opposite of what nomadic intellectuals so enthusiastically propagate. They tend to embrace an essentialist politics of identity which banks on cultural traditionalism, social closure, and ethnic fundamentalism, in which the redemptive dream of a return to the homeland and the eternal roots is kept

190 The Intellectual as Stranger vigorously alive (cf. Esman 1994:7, 176ff). From this perspective, the ghettoized immigrant poor are easily caught in a debilitating localism which affords little room for the hybrid and cosmopolitan identifications which are pleaded by the cultural elites (Friedman 1997:83–5). According to Castells, the fundamental dividing line in the modern ‘dual city’ precisely opposes the cosmopolitanism of such nomadic elites, who live on a daily connection to the whole world, to the tribalism of local communities, ‘retrenched in their spaces that they try to control as their last stand against the macro-forces that shape their lives out of their reach’ (1994:30). Although mass travel and mass migration have speeded up every-man’s pace of life, social inequality also increasingly expresses itself in terms of mobility, opposing a globalized ‘travelling class’ of the ‘speedy’, who lack a clear sense of place and easily adapt to alien cultures, to the space-bound, sedentary class of the ‘slow’, those who have difficulty in adapting to strange places and tongues, and as a result, maintain a strong sense of cultural boundaries and cultural identity (cf. Castells 1989:227, 350). There is thus an acute political ambiguity in the abstract tropes of mobility, diaspora, and liminal space; the dream of ‘being everywhere’, while potentially disruptive of essentialist narratives of nation, race, and place, may also celebrate collaboration in the hegemonic narratives of a global and mobile capitalism (Mitchell 1997:551). In this fashion, the self-celebration of postmodern intellectuals as nomadic ‘wandering stars’ is only the latest in a long series of romantic projections which transform the oppressed into missionary forces of historical emancipation, by reclaiming their empirical consciousness as a critical consciousness typically favoured by the intellectual elite itself. This may induce a stricter distinction between two existential situations which are too easily collapsed in postmodernist thought: the condition of marginality, which refers to the relatively privileged situation of intellectuals (including marginal and subaltern ones) as ‘dominated dominants’, and the less ambiguous and contradictory condition of oppression/exploitation of the dominated as such: those who literally have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’. A condition of simple oppression or subjugation often does not so much clarify as stultify, and enforces a cramped affirmation of cultural patricularism and exceptionalism. Intellectuals who claim to represent the oppressed had better recognize that the marginality which they celebrate in such generic fashion first of all describes their own precarious position as outsiders within, as new entrants in the dominant cultural game, who occupy a mediating third position which is not only removed from the centre but also distanced from the standpoint of the oppressed themselves.19 Hence we may (roughly) draw three positions, distinguishing between the dominant centre, the dominated periphery, and the third space of the ‘dominated dominants’, who occupy positions in the cultural field which are relatively marginal to both. Within the larger stratum of the

Privileged nomads 191 ‘dominated dominants’, we once again need to specify differences between established and marginal intellectuals, e.g. first-generation academics issuing from oppressed class, gender or racial backgrounds, who often act as ‘outsiders within’ the centres of cultural reproduction. There are two ways in which such ‘outsiders within’ may attempt to euphemize or escape their condition of double marginality; two ways of transmuting particularity into universality, and of elevating their specific intermediate location into a transcendental ‘view from nowhere’. Nomadic thinking offers a convenient vehicle for both forms of escape (and promotes ‘nomadic narcissism’) by offering a strategic denial of place, a withdrawal from the epistemological field, a way of being not there. The first strategy operates through the ‘metonymic fallacy’ which we have repeatedly discussed before, according to which intellectuals organically identify their positional interests with those of an idealized and allegedly more powerful historical subject such as the working class, womanhood, or the black community. The second option is to reinvent the ‘view from nowhere’ in a dream of endless motion and social weightlessness, which effectively returns the self-styled nomad to the old privileges of the transcendental subject and his freely wandering mind. The discourse of nomadism, in other words, easily induces selfidentification with either the centre or the periphery, and tends to camouflage the third position as a specifically interested place from which the critical intellectual speaks. Suspended in-between the dominant and the dominated, the hybrid intellectual’s continual negotiations with both build up a position of interest which derives from his/her inter-esse, from professionally ‘speaking in-between’. Both identifications, on the other hand, suggest disinterestedness, although in the contrasting sense of seeking truth for truth’s sake, or selflessly dedicating oneself to larger causes of human liberation. Ultimately therefore, they do not acknowledge a politics of location that clearly registers the double game of spokespersonship, in which particular intellectual interests continually mediate and overdetermine the pursuit of more general interests of truth, justice, and emancipation, and spokespersons simultaneously serve themselves while serving the cause of others (cf. Bourdieu 1991:180–3). Such a contextualization of third intellectual spaces may also return us to the question of the cognitive profits of marginality, which has haunted the sociology of knowledge from its very beginnings in Marx, Simmel, Lukàcs, and Mannheim. It could well be argued here that, in our era of professionalized Big Science, the pursuit of innovation has become a routine enterprise, which has been institutionalized in a separate social domain which is driven by competition for originality and distinction. Conversely, as was suggested above, Bohemia has also become regularized and normalized, and hence no longer necessarily counts as the privileged spot where newness enters the world. If mobility, transgression and experiment have thus become routinized features of mainstream culture, it

192 The Intellectual as Stranger is nevertheless important not to lose the distinction (relative though it may be) between ‘normal’ invention, which follows the rules of a previously invented art of inventing, and the ‘heretical invention’ which challenges the very principles of the old (scientific or social) order (Bourdieu 1981:271– 2). 20 Such extraordinary invention still seems to be the privilege of newcomers or ‘outsiders within’, who are able to forge a delicate but crucial mediating link between periphery and centre. That is why the Deleuzian negation of the centre as ‘dead and empty, where nothing grows’ is equally spurious and deceptive as the reverse romance of ‘dwelling at the gates of the city, where nomadic tribes halt for a brief pause’ (Braidotti 1996:34; cf. Seidman 1997:106). It is precisely the ‘elite marginality’ of the hybrid intellectual, who reflexively acknowledges her dependence on the centre even while struggling against it, which may offer a place where the intricate connection between creativity and estrangement, which is so easily appropriated by the privileged nomads of Western academia, still holds. Minimally, one may assume that different positions and interests in the intellectual and social field yield different perspectives: if perhaps we do not see better from the margins, we do look differently at different things. The centre only becomes fully visible from a position of ex-centricity. Hence there is some room for an epistemological ‘praise of marginality’ because, presumably, social and conceptual innovation (in the above sense of heretical, code-breaking change) is usually born at the margins and is embodied and promoted by ‘strangers’. Recently indeed, the new wave of marginal intellectuals who have emerged from the feminist and postcolonial movements have made a large dent in the academic world; they have introduced new ways of seeing, opened up new fields of inquiry and fostered new democratic attitudes with respect to the mores and rituals of academic life. But the same rule which claims that the established have difficulty in viewing themselves from a distance, also predicts that marginals themselves remain comparatively blind to what is nearest and closest: the margin itself. The new feminist, black, and queer academic elites have also fostered new forms of political correctness, down-playing the constitutive strangeness which distanced them as cultural professionals from their classes of origin, and which has often permitted them to advance towards positions of academic prestige and power. Intellectual nomads, they may have come from faraway places and inauspicious beginnings; but many of them have arrived and settled, as outsiders within the centre; strangers who have come in order to stay.

9

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood

Agoraphobia This concluding chapter is devoted to a more systematic inspection of the precarious relationship between ‘situated’ knowledge, the topology of strangerhood, and the opportunities for intellectual originality, creativity and innovation. Its purpose is to weigh the time-honoured Sorelian adage that ‘one must be outside in order to see properly’ (cf. Berth 1926:25) against the epistemological vigilance which we have come to adopt as a result of the foregoing studies of intellectual spokespersonship, which have illustrated the depth of the ambiguity of speaking for the social and of defining the situation for situated knowledges. Performances of identity (of the proletariat, of the intellectuals, of women, of ethnic belonging), we noticed, imply a circular play of definition which co-produces what it names; and this logic also reflexively extends to the role of the outsider or the condition of strangerhood itself (cf. Bauman 1991:75ff). Normality and strangeness, centre and margin, are not objective placings but relational performances or forms of classificatory ordering which require an incessant work of definition in order to be held steady. Centres may be redefined as peripheral, while peripheries may be centralized; marginal people may redefine themselves as central, while ‘centrals’ may pose as ‘eccentrics’; the polarization itself is probably too crude to accommodate the various tangles, permeations, and liminal shifts (the various ‘third’ positions) which I have tried to identify in my preceding studies. Instead of being mythified as a counter-hegemonic space, a place of resistance against the concentrated normality of the centre, the margin could be a far more complex ‘heterotopian’ zone where order meets and mingles with disorder (cf. Hetherington 1997; 1998:123ff; Soja 1966). In view of these uncertainties and circularities of the work of (de) centering, what precisely is left of our Sorelian intuition about privileged vision and ‘making a difference’ from an ex-centric position? In order to prepare an answer to this commanding but elusive question, I shall first revisit the ‘primal scene’ of differentiation of the intellectual life, conceived as a life of distanced contemplation which is specifically 193

194 The Intellectual as Stranger ‘estranged’ from the communal and action-oriented life of the city, as it is famously articulated in the Platonic dialogues. This will bring to the fore the peculiarly hesitant and incomplete nature of this estrangement, and retrieve some of the critical discussion of scientific and political spokespersonship which I embarked upon in the first chapter. Plato’s Seventh Letter sets a classical pattern in clarifying that his ‘invention’ of the philosophical life was deeply involuntary and serendipitous, resulting from a series of disappointments and dashed hopes (the ultimate shock being the trial and execution of his teacher and friend Socrates by a democratic regime), which wrecked his ‘natural’ ambition to devote himself to politics and to the public life of the city, which was still seen as the central focus of the good life (cf. Plato 1978:113–14; 1987:292). Repeated disgust over the wickedness, confusion, and irrationality of politics motivated Plato to force a withdrawal, a de-centering, to clear a new space which required a major overhaul of established conceptions of citizenship and of the ‘good life’ itself. The life of philosophy, in dedication to the disinterested pursuit of rational knowledge, demanded an estrangement from the open spaces of the agora and a withdrawal into the semi-private spaces and secluded debates of the ‘academy’—an ‘unnatural’ life which was effectively ridiculed as such by Callicles and other sophist partners in dialogue. Still ‘waiting for the right moment for action’, Plato finally concluded in resignation that ‘the condition of all states is bad’, and designed a notorious revolutionary cure, which of course required nothing less than that ‘either true and genuine philosophers attain political power, or the rulers of states by some dispensation of providence become genuine philosophers’ (1978:114). Philosophy thus steps into the world as a disappointed politics and remains oriented towards a total renovation of its principles, anticipating an ultimately triumphant return to replace the existing haphazardness and confusion with a rationally grounded form of social regulation: what, in effect, amounts to a political dictatorship of reason. If, for a moment, we are allowed to focus on the phase of withdrawal rather than that of return, this primal scene also gives us the classical ‘Socratic’ definition of the intellectual as eternal critic or essential naysayer, as one may encounter it in the liberal tradition stretching all the way from Benda to Popper and Said. In this tradition, Socrates personifies the ideal type of the critical intellectual and his struggle for cultural autonomy, who deliberately estranges himself from his fellow men and the powers that be in his consistent appeal to reason against orthodoxy and dogma; forever searching, but never arriving at the truth, he continually confronts his fellow citizens with embarrassing questions which aim at unsettling their ‘common sense’. The Socratic intellectual is ‘a permanent stranger on his native grounds’, not because he is from another place, but ‘because he listens to his critical reason with an abnormal degree of diligence’ (Goldfarb 1998:24, 37; cf. Coser 1965:viii, 360). A perennial outsider, dissenter, and disturber of the status quo, he is the ‘author of a language

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 195 that tries to speak the truth to power’ (Said 1994:xiv, 7, 71–2). As we have seen in an earlier chapter, this idealized image has not gone undisputed. Nietzsche famously nailed Socrates as the first ‘man of resentment’, the destroyer of all heroic values, in order to deride modern ‘Socratic’ culture as being fatally corrupted by such decadent and ‘theoretical’ men. Anarchosyndicalists such as Sorel and Berth likewise sided with the sophists (‘those patrons of all traitorous intellectuals’, as Benda (1946:90) chided them), as have many postmodern thinkers—including an a-modernist such as Latour (1999a:216ff). The central focus of the dialogues is therefore the articulation of a novel conception of the good life which is set in contrast to the ideal which was then current in Greek democratic city politics: the life of the citizen as devoted to public service and debate in the open spaces of the agora, which was the place where mature men engaged in free deliberation in order to govern their city (and effectively themselves). It was not politics or rhetoric, i.e. the ability to speak effectively in public gatherings and mobilize the masses through skilful persuasion, which represented the truly noble and virtuous activity, but philosophy or theoria: the dispassionate and impersonal search for truth for its own sake, the pure love of wisdom which was liberated from all mundane craving, ostentation, reputation and pride, and which remained sovereignly indifferent to all pursuit of power or material luxury. Philosophical dialogues were not focused upon performance or strategic accomplishment but purely upon the achievement of rational understanding; being oriented to factual explanation rather than evaluation, they did not aim to persuade but solely to educate. The dramatic novelty of this ‘flight’ from the publicity of politics into the comparative privacy of theoria was that a new locus of virtue was carved out somewhere in between the public and the private, in between agora and oikos, at a time when the privacy of the household economy was still associated with the presence of women and slaves, and hence represented a domain of existence where true virtue and freedom could not possibly flourish. From the perspective of the sophists, this strange withdrawal entirely validated the accusation that the Socratic philosophers were ‘fleeing’ the public sphere in pursuit of an unnatural isolation and distance, which put them completely out of touch with reality and human nature. In Callicles’ scornful objection, philosophy might perhaps be good for young lads, but when I see an older man who hasn’t dropped philosophy, I think he deserves a good thrashing…because he is avoiding the heart of his community and the thick of the agora, which are places where, as Homer tells us, a man ‘earns distinction’. Instead he spends the rest of his life sunk out of sight, whispering in a corner with three or four young men, rather than giving open expression to important and significant ideas. (Plato 1994:485de)

196 The Intellectual as Stranger The philosopher will typically retort that sophist rhetoric can only produce ‘conviction’, not rational understanding, and that there is no other road to rationality and true expertise than the secluded and ascetic life of contemplation. Socrates formally declares that he is ‘not a politician’ since truthful opinions do not come by the vote, and his interest is not in convincing large numbers of people: ‘I only know how to ask for a single person’s vote, and can’t even begin to address people in large groups…I canvass only for your vote, without caring about what everyone else thinks.’ Producing a large number of witnesses is a procedure which is ‘completely worthless in the context of the truth’ (1994:474ab, 476a, 472a). Rhetoric, indeed, is a form of demagogy or flattery rather than true knowledge, because it only seeks pleasure and power and as a result ‘panders to the people’; it indulges in their needs and desires, and merely tells them what they want to hear. The sophists thus teach nothing but the conventional views held by the mass, which they mistakenly call a ‘science’ (1987:288). True philosophy, on the other hand, being grounded upon real knowledge of the true and the good, must stand up to the crowd, face common sense, and tell the people some uncomfortable truths: it should rather aim at ‘confronting the Athenian people and struggling to ensure their perfection’ (1994:521a, 513c, 517b,c). Polus the sophist appropriately fears that, if Socrates is indeed telling the truth, ‘human life would be turned upside down, because everything we do is the opposite of what you say we should do’. Socrates, for his part, is quietly convinced that, unlike the sophists, he is the ‘only genuine practitioner of politics in Athens today’, ‘the only example of a true statesman’, because his arguments always aim at moral improvement rather than gratification and pleasure (1994:481c, 512d). Socratic doubts In terms of the critical analysis of spokespersonship which I have outlined in the first chapter, this theatre of invention of the philosophical life presents a remarkably suggestive but also richly ironic situation. Let me begin by marking the proximity and similarity between the two models of the good life which are on offer here, before concentrating on their equally significant differences. First, we may notice that intellectual and political representative roles are not (yet) separated by an unbridgeable gap: both offer models of proper speaking (about truth and error, right and wrong, the law of nature, the Athenian people) which are in contest about how to speak credibly, with what purposes and means, in which places and before what audiences or witnesses. They are also models of professional speaking, because both the philosopher and the sophist assume that their unique expertise and pedagogy set them apart from the mass and the knowledge of lowlier crafts and techniques. But of course, the two models of spokespersonship simultaneously offer competitive models of

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 197 professional statesmanship, since even Socrates’ withdrawal from the agora (which is always reluctant and incomplete) is spurred by the dream of training the perfect politician and of the ultimate return of the philosopherking. The self-invention of the philosophical spokesperson and of the autonomous ‘life of truth’ is predicated upon a form of detachment which remains entirely enthralled by what it is distancing itself from, and which ultimately wants to re-engage the battle and reconquer the public scene with better armoury and more sharply-pointed weapons. It is rational Truth, of course, understood as the absolute knowledge of Virtue, Justice, and Beauty, which furnishes this new deadly weaponry, and which builds up a more formidable power that is able to defeat the already considerable power of rhetorics. The break with the sociality of the agora is at once a political-institutional and an epistemological break, because it simultaneously loosens conventional social ties and devalues conventional wisdom in favour of a more reliable and objective vision. Philosophical truth, indeed, in invoking the fundamental contrast between episteme and doxa, true knowledge and mere opinion, pierces the veil of common sense belief in order to access a transcendent world of invisible essences, pure and perfect shapes of which ordinary things in the world are but pale shadows and reflections. This distinction is never allowed by the common man and by those who wish to be popular with the crowd; which means that philosophy is ‘impossible among the common people’, who are anyway just ‘sophists on a grand scale’ (Plato 1987:287–9). The power of philosophy is to establish an absolute boundary between what is and what is not by means of logical definition and rational demonstration, departing from a stringent opposition between things as they appear (to commonsense) and things as they really (essentially, absolutely) are (i.e. as they appear to the properly trained philosophical mind).1 In comparison, rhetorics is bound to be a smaller power because it entirely lacks such rational understanding; it is mere technique, mere persuasive or performative speech which can only deploy flattering tricks and passionate flourishes which aim at winning over a large and noisy public meeting. It is also weakened, one might add, because it frankly admits its metaphorical character and its quality of being ‘power speech’, and does not care to hide its subtle purpose of mobilization and empowerment. In this fashion, the Socratic dialogues offer a primordial scene for the entrance of the ‘absent spokesperson’, as we have repeatedly encountered this ambiguous figure in the previous chapters. Since the philosopher’s essences exist ‘in themselves’ in sovereign transcendence, immutably, as universal images and perfect shapes, they do not require representations, interpretive framings or performances to enter the world. Privileged access to such Forms supports the spokesperson’s claim to possess absolutely perfect, indeed almost divine knowledge. Due to its perfect singleness and autonomous objectivity, ‘reality’ is capable of enforcing universal assent; knowledge of it, as voiced by the philosopher, is compellingly true.

198 The Intellectual as Stranger However, this persuasive force is mobilized in virtual absence of the persuader, who views himself as a transparent vehicle, an oracular speaker through which the Forms assert themselves and make themselves known. Platonic essentialism (and all its philosophical and scientific heirs) remove the knower from the known in a circular act of reification which turns representations into things, which are empowered to speak for themselves without the assistance of a mediator or magnifier. We have noticed with some regularity how this powerful way of being both absent and present is facilitated by the very distinction between truth and belief which, if identified with the classical ideology-critical distinction between things ‘as they are in themselves’ and things as they ‘merely appear’, channels a particularly arrogant way of claiming to know better without having to speak up for it. The dialogues hence stage a peculiarly intricate play of identity and difference, some strands of which I briefly like to dissemble. We have seen that the initial differentiation between truth and power, or between philosophy and rhetorical politics, always aimed at the ultimate closure of their divide, the final overcoming of their separation, because truth was calculated to provide a secure grounding for power and to extend into power. Truth was the formidable force that strengthened the philosopher’s resolve to confront common sense and to stand up against the crowd. This criticalconfrontational stance, which emphasizes difference from mundane beliefs, is ‘bought’ with an identity theory of philosophical representation which automatically turns the philosopher into an absent spokesperson for his ‘things in themselves’. Socrates therefore engages the same ideal of ‘copying’ resemblance on the epistemological plane which he debunks in Callicles’ defence of rhetorical skill which deliberately aims at ‘echoing’ his audience and becoming one with them. Callicles’ identity rhetoric of political representation clearly conceals an elitist imposition; but Socrates, who openly admits that he thinks differently from the crowd, likewise claims that philosophy provides the most accurate description of its true sentiments and needs and should also consolidate its political representation. Both Socrates and Callicles, in this way, are fatally attracted to notions of representative identity which enable them to hide behind their groups (the Athenian people) or their things (Forms, essences, facts), to speak through them, to amplify their own voice while its source is rendered invisible. Given this similarity, it is right on target for Latour, in his intriguing recasting of the Gorgias, to insist upon the impossibility of framing this classical dispute as it has always been framed: as the inaugural showcase of the battle of Reason against Power or of Right against Might. Indeed, Callicles’ Might does not enter the scene as naked force, as sheer will-topower, but as a form of intelligence which appeals to natural right in order to assert the superiority of the clever people over all the rest. His power of rhetorical persuasion is as much an intellectual power as Socrates’ power of rational demonstration; and while Callicles personifies the ‘rightful might’

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 199 of the lonely aristocrat against the superior numerical force of the masses, the reasonable Socrates appeals to an even greater power, that of epistemic truth, in order likewise to dominate all merely ‘practical’ knowledge and get the better of ‘common sense’. The contest between Socratic rationalism and sophist rhetorics is therefore a contest between two types of expertise, a secret settlement which hides the common ambition of both spokespersons to dominate and disable the knowledge of the laypersons. Socrates and Callicles engage in an unacknowledged elitist conspiracy against the people, in which the people are necessarily silenced and pushed offstage as the ‘excluded third’ (Latour 1999a:216–35). The stated emphasis of Latour’s exercise is to trace a new pragmatic or ‘anthropological’ demarcation between science and politics. It is to retrieve the Body Politic from its historic perversion by Socratic rationalism, to free political practice from its ‘delegitimation’ by epistemic knowledge and absolute morality, and to reconstruct the ‘conditions of felicity’ of political truth-saying which have long remained buried beneath this misleading settlement between Socrates and Callicles. Now Latour appears quite successful in removing old epistemological obstacles such as the mighty dualisms of Might versus Right or Reason versus Power, which indeed can no longer preside over a demarcation in which science always gets the better of politics and puts it in its place. However, he expends much less interpretive energy upon the reverse question which has traditionally framed the demarcative exercise, and for which these powerful dichotomies originally raised a defensive shield: how to rescue science from politics, or how to establish and defend the distinctive autonomy of intellectual work over against the ever-present threat of totalizing encroachment of the political. From the perspective adopted here, Latour therefore ends up by modelling the practice of science too closely after that of the political (moreover, in a rather con testable conception of it), and understates the reverse conditions of felicity of science as a practice which thrives best in relative isolation from the publicity, the pressure to act and the interminable talk of thousand competing voices in the agora. This is simultaneously to undervalue the conditions of felicity for critique, of being able to say something different, which are classically specified by Socrates as conditions of estrangement or withdrawal from the agora, even though he seeks to enforce them by means of unconditional claims of right reason, demonstrative logic and disinterested truth, and with the aid of policing distinctions between episteme and doxa, fact and value, or Right and Might which we no longer credit as epistemologically useful—indeed, which we have come to see as dangerous masks of epistemic violence.2 Instead, we need to take seriously the pragmatic conditions of the critical habitus and of the place of science as half-inadvertently set by Socrates—and as consistently ridiculed by Callicles—on condition that they are stripped of their transcendental scaffolding and no longer serve to single out one practice as superior or more valuable than the other.3

200 The Intellectual as Stranger Philosophical agoraphobia is defined by some very down-to-earth and non-philosophical features which set it apart from the demands of urgency, publicity, immediacy, and simultaneity which characterize political deliberation in the agora. It clears a space for semi-private discussions between a few professionals talking amongst each other, in localities which are to some extent shielded from the public eye; which treat of ‘unimportant’ issues, i.e. issues which are non-pressing, which do not require immediate decision, and which can be taken selectively, one at a time, in an elaborate division of intellectual labour. They permit of quiet turn-takings (e.g. articles and counter-articles, books and counter-books) and a slow turnover of arguments (e.g. writing or reading rather than speaking, conversations with partners far removed in space or time) which do not press for swift closure or split-down-the-middle compromises. Such practical requisites imply some sort of regularized autonomy from the centres of decision making, a deliberate and institutionalized form of outsidership which also defines a studied impracticality or ‘strangeness’ over against what is ‘commonly’ taken for ‘reality’.4 This estrangement is not secured by the ascetic of ‘ignoring honours and following the path of truth’. It has little to do with the sublimated love of wisdom, the ethic of disinterestedness, the restraint of value-freedom, the immunity from lower bodily urges and emotions, or the indifference to power-mongering and material greed which mark the discipline of the true Socratic philosopher. However, while breaking its hard epistemological casing, we need to vindicate the profound intuition which is preserved in the idea of Socratic doubt, the ‘rational kernel’ which is only half-hidden in and by the Socratic idea of truth: the necessity and ability to ‘confront the Athenian people’, to voice criticism, to say something different which disturbs them rather than echoes what they want to hear. Epistemological truth-saying is the wrong way of mustering courage to stand up against the crowd. A pragmatic theory of distances, or a phenomenology of critical distanciation, must draw its energy from a different source than from this realm of transcendental obligation. Claiming that it is the ‘calling’ of intellectuals to differ, to invent new realities rather than merely to ‘follow’ what ordinary actors are saying and doing, also rebounds critically upon Latour’s own peculiar love of the demos and the subtle flattery which is involved in his sustained attempts to let les acteurseuxmêmes, the muted and bedazzled members of the Third Estate, speak for themselves. In Chapter 1, I have already commented upon this ‘identitarian’ drift in the Latourian approach to representation, which sometimes appears to parade a populist sentiment which looks disparagingly upon all forms of scientific or political professionalism. Political reason, for Latour, cannot possibly form the object of professional knowledge (the knowledge of the few) but can only be ‘the distributed knowledge of the whole about the whole’. This conviction is sustained by recurring expressions about the demos ‘representing itself to itself and

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 201 reflexively seizing itself as a totality, or about political representation as a process of ‘fermentation’ (autophuos) by which the people ‘brews itself towards a decision’ (Latour 1999a:228, 237, 240, 244, 247, 250–1). Even though such terms of identity appear to be counter-manded by explicit criticisms of the resemblance theory (the ‘echo chamber’ conception of politics) which assert the political distance and mediation between representers and represented, this fermentation theory, by permitting only a ‘slight difference between the Body Politic and itself (1999a:252) remains close enough to what Latour elsewhere calls the ‘foolish dream of transparent representation’ to be really convincing.5 In this view, political and scientific expertise primarily serve to ‘shut up the crowd’ rather than to engage it in critical confrontation. If political representation is like the ‘kneeding of a dough’, it is not the professionals but the demos itself that is expected to do the kneeding. Of course, the body politic cannot rely on expert knowledge alone but requires a broader distribution of pragmatically ‘situated’ knowledges. But Latour tends to underestimate the need for professional autonomy and for critical interaction between specialists and laypersons both in science and politics, and likens both practices to a totalizing and populist stylization of the democratic agora which misrepresents the conditions of felicity for making a difference to it.6 Cartesian doubts The reluctant invention of the autonomous ‘life of the mind’ by the Socratic philosophers, who needed to co-invent a harshly sublime, other-worldly fetish of Truth in order to empower their break from practical sense and political reason, offers a paradigmatic scene of differentiation in the course of which a new social topology and a new elite become institutionalized which gradually make a difference to the dynamics of social and intellectual innovation. Speaking in structuralist terms, the decentering and autonomization of the intellectual life equals a cellular fission which restructures the order of the (political) whole by installing a relatively independent (transcendent if not transcendental) sphere of ‘theory’ which generates a new level of productive tension between it and ‘itself. The institutional estrangement which is protectively installed within the boundaries of this relatively decentred cultural order frees energies for a new type of social fermentation, initiating a new dynamics of competition and conflict between differently situated elites and their different interests, performances, perspectives and knowledges. More specifically, it antagonizes a ‘centered’ elite of political spokespersons who are absorbed in the daily routine of decision making to a more ‘abstract’, socially distanced and ‘unhastened’ elite of ‘intellectuals’ who tend to call the former to account by virtue of their claimed access to deeper transcendental truths (‘speaking the truth to power’).7 The new framework entails a ‘professionalization of strangerhood’ and an ‘institutionalization of doubt’

202 The Intellectual as Stranger which simultaneously fixes something like a social distribution of doubt which is now unevenly apportioned between the political and the intellectual functions. The hermeneutics of suspicion and the function of ‘thinking differently’ materialize into a new set of institutions which effect a ‘permanent rupture’ in the ordinary flow of events: a routinized ‘stalling’ or ‘halting’ which transforms the critical, reflexive moment of everyday action into a methodical form of life.8 The intellectual stranger thus turns into a professional stranger; but as we have seen, the Socratic moment also stylizes philosophy as a profession ‘by default’, a disaffected politics, which emerges in political ‘injury time’, during intervals of disgrace and enforced leisure, exile, or retirement; flourishing in moments of withdrawal from the centre of affairs, it never abandons the righteous hope of a triumphant return. Its critical reflexivity invariably seeks deeper principles and causes which may account for an unexpected and disturbing interruption of the stream of political events. This ‘time out’, which is stolen from the business and publicity of the political everyday, also characterizes the advent of many great Renaissance and early Enlightenment philosophies, whose authors enact different variations of the Platonic pattern of withdrawal-and-return. One dramatic example is offered by Machiavelli who, being catapulted from his diplomatic career after 45 years of service, turned into a theoretician almost against his will, enjoying an enforced leisure which was punctured by repeated attempts to regain the Medici’s favour. The same force field is traceable in the career of Bacon, who only in his political afterlife, after his disgrace and fall from a prolonged Chancellorship of England, was able and willing to devote himself fully to his new experimental philosophy. The intellectual fortunes of both Hobbes and Locke rose and fell in tune with their political connections and (opposite) loyalties, which forced them into various periods of exile in France and Holland. Such anecdotal evidence at least suggests that the estrangement which prompted a more regularized differentiation between the intellectual and the political life was often occasioned by an involuntary ‘forward retreat’, recalling Benjamin’s image of the angel of progress who moves backwards into the (difference of the) future with its gaze firmly trained on the past. If this logic of enforced estrangement is generalizable to a broader institutional pattern which is less immediately attuned to political life, we may note in the same impressionistic vein that the sociology and psychology of strangerhood cling to the intellectual habitus like an eternal shadow. A roll call of the giants of philosophy, from Socrates to Descartes, Spinoza, and Rousseau, from Comte to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein to Heidegger and Foucault, presents a litany of great strangers, a grand parade of productive misfits, malcontents, and maladjusted types, which appears to confirm to excess the familiar Freudian view about the creative imagination as originating from an insufficiency, a lack of satisfaction, an absence which invites or enforces a

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 203 distance. True enough, the ‘deficiencies’ that induce or accelerate such estrangement compose an extremely varied catalogue of variables: a frail constitution, psychological disturbances, religious heresy, political dissidence, the anxieties of exile, independent gentlemanly means, mismatching class affiliations (e.g. declassed noblemen or lower-class intellectual upstarts in bourgeois cultural settings) or other structural properties which have more recently upset white cultural establishments, such as womanhood, ethnic difference or homosexuality.9 In the context of the present argument, such a haphazard and incomplete listing merely serves to frame a general proposition which I will argue for more specifically below, which is to suggest that intellectual originality is less a matter of the dutiful application of disembodied and universalizable methodical procedures than of a ‘lived’ estrangement which is always situational and particular to contexts. Doubt and discovery are not ruledirected or easily teachable, although they may be routinized into a ‘methodical life’.10 Descartes, the philosopher of methodical doubt, may be invited to exemplify a more radical pattern of intellectual estrangement than the Socratic one, which abandons all ambition to return to the centre of worldly affairs; in this sense it ordains a more principled form of intellectual autonomy which more closely reflected the new philosophical and scientific professionalism which arose in the Renaissance and the early Enlightenment. It is famously captured in the image of the professional soldier and adventurer who in between ‘engagements’ turns into a solitary thinker in his stove-heated winter room near the German city of Ulm (Descartes 1988:25). Indeed, Descartes’ life almost methodically alternates between such times of adventurous commitment, of direct experiences of transgression and experimentation, in which he engages as a self-professed participant observer (a ‘spectator rather than an actor’) in the comedies of the world; and periods of extreme isolation and intellectual concentration, which find their apotheosis in his 20-year-long sojourn in the Netherlands, where he is content to dwell amongst a ‘great mass of busy people’ in order to live a life ‘as solitary and withdrawn as if I were in the most remote desert’ (1988:35). Professing a Socratic indifference to fortune and fame, which are ‘opposed to that tranquillity which I value above everything else’, and preferring a state of ‘uninterrupted leisure’ above ‘the most honourable positions in the world’ (53–4, 56), Descartes adopts a deliberate and intensely lived (or suffered) strangerhood in order to liberate himself from (his own) conventional wisdom and the bookish knowledge of the scholarly community of his day. It is one of the great paradoxes of epistemological folkore that this exceptional, experimental, and estranged life, which continually hesitated and shifted between studies ‘in the book of the world’ and studies ‘within myself, has been able to legislate the universalist, disembodied, and impersonal conception of scientific method which informs the classical

204 The Intellectual as Stranger Enlightenment view of how to gain truthful knowledge. As a travel story, an autobiographical journey of discovery which is told in the first person and the past tense, Descartes’ discourse is of course presented in a manner and style which is exactly the opposite of that proposed by the method itself (Brown 1994:11–12; Lang 1990:45ff; cf. Schuster 1986; Szakolczai 1998:21).11 The principles of true method are gradually elaborated in a narrative of experiential testing and private conversion, as a quest for personal discipline or a methodical form of life rather than as a universalizable set of rules which can be applied by a subject which is essentially substitutable for another. Descartes indicates as much when cautioning that his aim is ‘not to teach the method which everyone must follow in order to direct his reason correctly, but only to reveal how I have tried to direct my own’. Indeed, the ‘simple resolution to abandon all the opinions one has hitherto accepted is not an example that everyone ought to follow’; it is an aim which he fears may well be too bold for many people (1988:21, 27). Methodical doubt is here depicted as the product of an inimitable psychology and of strange, non-standard social experiences, which are pragmatically and retrospectively systematized in an epic of selfdiscovery; correct philosophical method is articulated as a contingent selfprescription rather than as a prescriptive ruling for a universal subject. Nevertheless, the idea of Cartesian doubt and the Enlightenment conception of method, as it has been recovered by traditional epistemology, of course precisely supports the opposite move of universalizing the particular and of methodologizing and moralizing the exceptional.12 In its canonical version, the idea of scientific method manifestly contrasts with the Platonic description of the ‘good life’ of reason as attainable only for the few, who are naturally more fitted for philosophical and political leadership than others. The new epistemological question, which simultaneously arises within the rationalist and empiricist branches of the new experimental philosophy, is not so much who is capable of acquiring true knowledge by leading the ascetic life but how, by which general procedures or rules of right reasoning is true knowledge attainable for all? The new conception of rationality exchanges elitism for (apparent) democracy in optimistically assuming that men are created equal also in terms of their capacities to doubt and think, and that truth is not dependent upon or constrained by context, social station, differential interest or point of view but opens itself to all who learn to apply the ‘natural light of reason’ which is innately present in all human individuals. Descartes famously professes this fresh optimism in the famous opening lines of his Discourse on the Method, arguing that ‘good sense (le bon sens) is the most evenly shared thing in the world’ and that the capacity to correctly distinguish the true from the false ‘is naturally equal in all men’; which implies that ‘the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others, but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things’ (1988:20).

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 205 Bacon echoes this sentiment from the inductivist side of the new philosophy when assuring that ‘the course I propose for the discovery of sciences is such as leaves but little to the acuteness and strength of wits, but places all wits and understandings nearly on a level’ (Bacon 1901:62–3). Evidently, there exists a conceptual intimacy between epistemological individualism, the democracy of reason, and the idea of a unitary and universal method, of a novum organum which is teachable and accessible to all reasonable men. Descartes’ ‘indubitable’ first principle of cogito ergo sum (I think—or I doubt—therefore I am) of course immediately stages the subject of true knowledge as a disembodied, unsituated, and immaterial entity ‘whose essence is solely to think’ (1988:36); an axiom which severs the impulse to systematically question everything that cannot be proven ‘beyond the shadow of a doubt’ from any particular social or psychological context or ‘existential determination’. It universalizes the exceptional experience of the wandering scholar and turns the stranger into a transcendental outsider, occluding the particularity of existential doubt as it emerges from a ‘doubtful’ situation, transforming it into a normative model and a methodical command. Being (a stranger) determines consciousness (doubting everything), but Descartes completely reverses the order of causation in order to derive existence unilaterally from consciousness. The pragmatic conditions of felicity of the intellectual life, such as tranquillity, leisure, inconspicuousness, mobility, and decentredness, which define a social distribution of doubt and a partial perspective, are seen as dictated by the calling to seek an essential, impartial, and apodictic truth by means of universal rules of right reasoning which possess an inherent power to convince (a doubt that ends all doubt). In this respect, the Cartesian cogito provides a particularly strong formulation of the original sin of intellectualism: the double-dealing democracy of reason which surreptitiously elevates philosophy, the life of the disembodied thinking male, into a paradigmatic ethic for all of ‘mankind’, while misrecognizing its pragmatic conditions of felicity. The duplication of strangerhood In these pages, I want to develop the view that strangerhood or existential distance provides a fruitful entrance to an anti-methodist and nonuniversalist view of critical distanciation and intellectual autonomy. According to official Socratic and Cartesian legislation, as we saw, the doubtful attitude which originates from a specifically ‘doubtful’ situation (induced by personal alienation and/or the collective alienation of a profession which demands leisure, slowness, privacy, and tranquillity) is ordained by a normative scientific ideal, a logic of discovery which builds on a universal cognitive mindset and offers a set of universal tools which enable everyman to become a systematic procurer of new knowledge. A relative socio-psychological condition is transmuted into an absolute

206 The Intellectual as Stranger conditional; existential necessity changes into epistemological virtue. A social epistemology of strangerhood, on the other hand, which is interested in specifying pragmatic conditions for objectivity and originality, will look at/for ‘original lives’ or ‘strange experiences’ rather than rules that may turn everyone into an original. As a first-order conditional, it encircles the autonomy of an institutionalized form of intellectual life which is distanced from ‘worldly’ interests and affairs only relatively, pragmatically, and ‘politically’—although both Socratics and Cartesians of course only want to settle for it in absolutist and transcendentalist terms. Such an autonomous life form creates a broad margin of play for estranged experiences, distanced behaviours, and alienated personalities, and hence affords a proliferation of perspectives which are likely to differ from those which arise from everyday routines.13 It turns the ‘flight from reality’ into an independent institution; ex-centricity and liminality paradoxically turn into a system. If there is method in this, it is first of all the ‘methodical life’ or ‘inner-worldly ascetic’ which is imposed by a scholarly practice which is placed at some distance from the centres of political interest and economic management. This ethos or habitus is intimately bound to the mundane pragmatics of the scholarly situation: relative seclusion or ‘retirement’, based upon a regularized income (institutional privacy, professional autonomy), relative absence of publicity (a restricted audience of colleagues), a time economy which is set at a slower pace than the everyday and the politico-economic (‘unhastened’ practices), selective and ‘leisurely’ attention to issues, etc. As borderzones of institutionalized marginality, such places provide a shield for relatively undisturbed reflection and experimentation which may offer the surprise of non-conformity and of unexpected, provocative thoughts. Such a pragmatic linkage between autonomy and creativity, or between social estrangement and cultural fermentation, has always informed the drive for autonomization of intellectual work in inaugural locations such as the seventeenth-century scientific academies, the eighteenth-century coffeehouses and salons, or that of artistic and intellectual Bohemia from its nineteenth-century Parisian beginnings (cf. Coser 1965). Wrapped in transcendentalist and foundationalist legitimations, the same pragmatic ideal is discernible in the classical idea of the university as it was prefigured in Kant’s claim for freedom of the ‘lower’ faculty of philosophy vis-à-vis the politically constrained ‘higher’ ones of theology, law, and medicine; and as it was more fully realized in Humboldt’s vision of Einsamkeit und Freiheit, which presided over the reorganization of the German universities after the Prussian defeat of 1806 (Anrich 1956:377; Kant 1992; Proctor 1991:71). For Kant as for Humboldt, ‘solitude’ and ‘freedom’ implied freedom from state control but also governmental funding and protection, distanciation but also a guarded abstention from politics, even though philosophers and scientists could offer their services as councillors to the throne, or even speak freely and critically in public, keeping alive the

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 207 Socratic ideal of ‘speaking the truth to power’.14 Within the university, philosophy acted as the master discipline which sat in critical judgement over all other forms of knowing, Bildung, and practice, since it stood itself under the higher jurisdiction of Reason and embodied the disinterested interest in science as pursued ‘for its own sake’. This foundational project of a tribunal of ‘right reason’ hence immediately identified the claim to intellectual autonomy with a presumptuous and missionary claim to cultural sovereignty, in which epistemology put all the sciences in their place and acted as a supreme judge over the whole expanse of culture (Habermas 1983:9ff). In the knowledge-political conception of intellectual autonomy which I am suggesting here (cf. Pels 1995), the new settlement is no longer performatively fixed and secured by means of essentialist ontological, epistemological, or normative claims. The demarcation of science from politics and everyday life no longer requires the traditional signature of disinterested truth-seeking and the singularity of method; it can do without the demands of neutrality and value-freedom and the collateral distinctions between ideas and things, words and worlds, values and facts, truth and power, or might and right which have shaped the modernist epistemological canon. It exchanges the maximal normativity of the quest for truth for the minimal normativity which is implied in the defence of the pragmatic, interested, non-neutral, and political conditions of intellectual estrangement (such as relative privacy, a slow-gear production economy, selectivity and non-pressingness of issues). Intellectual objectivity, in this view, does not so much result from following rules of method but from inhabiting an ‘objectifying’ situation, of occupying an institutional space which is set apart, if only relatively and incompletely, from the ongoing stream of ‘ordinary’ social interaction. The moralism of method is to elevate the impure, contaminated practicality of this methodical life into a purified ethos, translating partial distance into principled transcendence, a ‘lived’ estrangement into a universal duty to be strange, a context-ridden fact into a universal value, and a moderate and subsidized carefreeness into a demand for absolute liberty. A view from somewhere (from a relatively marginal place) changes into the ‘view from nowhere’ of the disembodied subject of true knowledge. Naturally, the first-order demarcation which is implied in such a ‘minimally normative’ defence of intellectual autonomy will remain fruitlessly abstract if we do not immediately specify a second and third and even further orders of estrangement. The institutionalization of the scholarly life, while affording a perspective on the world which is typically ‘unhastened’, leisurely, non-decisional, and issue-selective, simultaneously subverts and neutralizes the logic of visionary estrangement through this very same process of institutionalization. The academy also promotes an industrialization and routinization of intellectual work (and of innovation) which renders its collective

208 The Intellectual as Stranger objectivity essentially partial, flawed, compromised and imperfect; in establishing a new centre, it is invariably non-distant towards the politics, interests, and privileges which accumulate as a result of its own professional routines. The specific lucidity of the scholarly gaze is incurably diminished by the equally specific blindnesses which issue from the professionalization of intellectual strangerhood. This deep ambiguity is hinted at by Bauman in his view of the ‘neolithic revolution of the intellectuals’, who pass from a wandering life to settlement as holders of jobs, salaries, careers, and reputations in the expert institutions of the emerging knowledge society (1991:90–4). It is also what Bourdieu expresses as the ‘scholastic fallacy’ which follows from a transcendental misrecognition of the special social conditions of skholè, the privileges of the scholastic disposition which form constitutional blindnesses of the ‘theoretical experience’ and the scholarly gaze (Bourdieu 1997). This paradox of professionalization calls for a duplication and triplication (and beyond this, even further extensions and radicalizations) of the presumed linkage between liminality and objectivity. First, one obviously needs to take account of the manifold differentiations and rivalries within the academy itself, which create different interests and perspectives and hence yield a plurality of truths and methods; pitting disciplines, schools and approaches against each other which may be differently placed in terms of field-specific and historically changing centralities and marginalities (cf. the lowly but promissory status of philosophy in Kant’s Contest of the Faculties, and its triumphant sovereignty in the Humboldtian idea of the university). Within each field, discipline, or school, one may witness an incessant strife between established scientists and newcomers who may act as strangers and challenge the intellectual status quo (Bourdieu 1981; 1988). Moreover, as soon as disciplinary demarcations are firmly entrenched, opportunities arise for creative marginality through the transgression of disciplinary boundaries and the establishment of new hybrid approaches and studies (cf. Dogan and Pahre 1990). Thirdly and most significantly, a new margin is created by intellectual outsiders who refuse the Enlightenment settlement, drop out of professional academic life, and strike out on a more ambulant, nomadic, or Bohemian existence. This ‘Romantic’ duplication and deepening of the social logic of strangerhood, which reclaims the special lucidity of the ‘free spirit’ over against the dry intellectualism and bureaucratic methodism of a university which is criticized for its lack of true universality (cf. Bauman 1991:93), creates a new threshold at the boundary of academic institutions and fields such as art, journalism and politics where a new type of intellectual stranger can act out a new irreverent reflexivity. In this new differentiation, it is not so much the disaffected politician who takes time out or is forced into contemplative retirement, but the disillusioned bourgeois academic or ‘anti-intellectual intellectual’ who adds a deeper

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 209 ‘Bohemian’ marginality to that which has become institutionally anchored within the academy itself.15 In previous chapters, this new fissure has been consecutively traced in the ambiguous case of Marx’s nomadic politics and outsider science, in the Sorelian and Barrèsian critiques of the ‘new’ Sorbonne and its professionalized elite of scientific intellectuals, and in the closely allied attacks of the German thinkers of the ‘Conservative Revolution’ on the Enlightenment conception of Bildung and the whole of bourgeois-academic Zivilisation. If Descartes illustrates the paradox and drama of the stranger who ultimately cannot recognize himself as such, it is of course Nietzsche who personifies the opposite drama of the ambiguous celebration of a doubtful life as an ineluctable fate, as a dictate of radical existential estrangement which is proudly accepted as the sign of a unique aristocracy of the soul (‘I, the exception’).16 In its formal structure, Zarathustra’s lonely progression through the mountains in disdain for town and marketplace might not be very far removed from Descartes’ tale of travel and self-discovery; but there is little trace of the democracy of reason which still enabled the latter to escape from his exceptionalism and moralize his life into logic and method. In this respect, Nietzsche’s ‘reversed Platonism’ realigns with the elitist Platonic view of truth-seeking, which is not projected as the life of the many but remains the privilege of a few educated strangers. The genealogical method is less a method than an art of living, an experimental conduct which presupposes a strained relationship of the thinker to himself, a loss of his taken-for-granted identity (Szakolczai 1998:46). Nietzsche’s sustained attack on the vision of ‘pure spirit’ and ‘the good in itself, main icons of the ‘ascetic’ philosophy which arguably connects Plato to the Enlightenment thinkers, issues in a radical redescription of all knowledge as inherently perspectival, historically placed, context-bound and ‘existentially determined’; but precisely because of this he is once again able to exchange the methodist question: ‘how can everyman attain the truth’ for a knowledge-political and genealogical one: ‘who wants this truth and why?’ (Nietzsche 1990:32–3). Although the ascetic philosophers profess neutrality and disinterestedness, they are in fact ‘advocates who do not want to be regarded as such’, because at closer look they all rationalize their prior desires and prejudices into truths; every great philosophy must be seen as ‘a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’ (1990:37). Ultimately, of course, these underlying drives, desires and interests are rooted in the will to power, which for Nietzsche defines ‘the condition of life as such’. The will to truth is only a very paradoxical, twisted, and sublimated instance of this will to power: one that strenuously attempts to deny itself as such in order to clothe itself in the mantle of dispassionate and impersonal reason. The principled and overt separation between truth and power is revealed as an ingenious manner of covertly uniting them so as to harness a new spiritual power. This unmasking of academic philosophy and

210 The Intellectual as Stranger its ascetic ideal of truth is joined to a sharp critique of the ‘Platonic’ intellectual spokesperson. His asceticism functions as the ‘highest licence’ of power, because it covers and condones his absence from the scene of representation, where essences, things, facts of nature, and social groups are permitted to speak for themselves. The ‘oracular’ spokesperson, who identifies with the ‘in itself’ of things, acts as a ‘telephone of the beyond’ who officially just relays the voice of authority and reality while unofficially performing and producing it (Bourdieu 1991:210–11; Nietzsche 1996:83). In contrast, Nietzsche himself poses as the present spokesperson, the heroic stranger who embraces the aristocratic honesty of nihilism and the inevitability of perspective and interpretation. Nietzsche may be the stranger who recognizes himself as such; but he also revels in his estrangement, eulogizes the ‘dangerous life’ (of the mind) as the only life worth living, and hence also generalizes his particular experience of powerlessness into a universal ontology of power. Methodological voluntarism So far, I have provisionally indicated three degrees of estrangement which detail the abstract view of social differentiation that merely signals a broad demarcation of the intellectual life from politics and the broader society. The autonomy of the scholarly life (or the freedom of the academy) establishes a first degree which is necessarily complexified by a second degree of intra-academic differentiations and rivalries (e.g. between disciplines and schools, or between newcomers and established scientists) and a third degree of ‘Bohemian’ freedom and resentment against the professionalized academic centre. This multiplication of the margins (or of the forms of distanciation) entails a further decentering and fragmentation which breaks up the ‘professional strangerhood’ of the academy, by adding further autonomies and liberties which extend the social distribution of doubt and hence trigger a new dynamics of experimentation and innovation. It is especially the challenge posed by Romantic, Bohemian intellectuals to the academism of the established Bildungsbürgertum (cf. Giesen 1993:131ff, 176) which installs a new margin of doubt and a new moment of critique, and initiates a social antagonism which intensifies creative tensions and the push for novelty. Apart from offering a new institutional space for thinking and acting differently, the Bohemian margin also establishes a corridor between academy and society which enables the intellectual to move in and out more freely in order to play broader political or cultural roles.17 The point of such a social epistemology of (degrees of) estrangement is to emphasize that taking critical distance is always a practical effort, the limits of which are largely dictated by the pragmatic conditions of a dense local culture. If the proclivity to doubt is unequally distributed and distanciation is situationally spread, there is no way in which a singular and

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 211 situationally neutral method can legislate de omnibus dubitandum, and enforce a ‘right reasoning,’ the conclusions of which lie beyond controversy. What is subjected to doubt and how much it should be doubted will vary with the ‘lived’ distanciation which is conditioned by various forms and degrees of social withdrawal. The academic ‘industrialization of doubt’, which proclaims an intrinsic democracy of reason, leads towards a methodologization of estrangement which once again conceals this positional and contingent grounding of questioning and critique. It easily turns alienation into methodology, into a procedural code of distanciation which is driven by epistemological norms of neutrality and disinterestedness. Such methodological voluntarism once again removes the representer from the scene of representation, and turns into an elective option what is to a large extent a social predicament or a social fate. Objectivity, however, does not so much result from methodical neutrality but from the specific composition of nearness and remoteness, the unstable equilibrium between distancing and identification which is typically concentrated in the precarious condition of strangerhood (cf. Bauman 1991:75–84; Simmel 1950:402; Todorov 1993:347). Strangerhood implies that nothing in the situation is natural or given: both self and the world are problematic, are in need of examination, handling, management (Bauman 1991:75). It defines properties or dispositions which are of course refinable, which can be routinized into a set of craftsmanlike skills; but it appears you cannot—at least not in a radical sense—learn to become a stranger: the doubt and the incongruence must first be lived before it can turn into a method. This approach of course re-emphasizes the familiar contrast between ‘methodism’ and ‘positionism’, or between traditional neutralist epistemology and a positional or standpoint-related politics of knowledge such as I have articulated throughout this book. In Chapter 2, I have listed a few general intuitions which can be salvaged from classical (Marxist) standpoint theory, and which have been followed through in some of their modern reformulations. In the first place, if objectivity results not so much from neutralizing positional bias but from local, existential, and ‘visceral’ distances between subjects and objects, one must epistemologically attend to institutions and individuals that embody such situated distanciations. Secondly, if knowing the social world is immediately connected to affirming or critically denying it, and hence implies commitment or partisanship, one must not try to neutralize one’s interested perspective but accept the blindnesses that accompany the insights it provokes. More specifically, one should be aware of the performative nature of all referential knowledge: all representations also co-produce the reality they describe.18 Thirdly and relatedly, classical standpoint theory defines the knowledge drive of the situated subject as a ‘vital need’ to become reflexively aware of itself, and hence never separates world-knowledge from self-knowledge. In this book, I have tried to articulate an approach to intellectual spokespersonship which is

212 The Intellectual as Stranger able to accommodate this reflexivity and performativity, and which has focused upon the ‘doubtful’ condition of strangerhood as defining the vital need to know which is required for thinking differently. It exchanges the abstract Socratic adhortation to ‘know thyself’ for a situational question: who is forced to know him/herself and why?19 It is remarkable to follow to what extent the methodologization of estrangement and the paradox of professional strangerhood has infiltrated classical and modern epistemological vocabularies. Descartes’ ingenious displacement of existential towards methodical doubt has set the template for many subsequent approaches to philosophical and scientific methodology, feeding an ambiguity which has also settled in some positional or standpoint-oriented approaches, both classical and modern. In classical positivist sociology, for example, Saint-Simon’s injunction to first live the original and experimental life, to move as a participant observer across a great variety of social stations and professions, and only in a contemplative afterlife compare them and sum them up in a new philosophy, can be set in contrast to Comte’s more impersonal and more strictly methodical view of scientific experience, observation, experimentation, and comparison (Comte 1975:20–41; Saint-Simon 1951:60–1). The latter’s methodism is even more clearly incorporated in Durkheim’s rules of sociological method, which famously ordain a generalized and impersonal doubt which eradicates all preconceptions and prejudices in order to provide access to ‘the things themselves’. In Chapter 3, I have already indicated that Durkheim’s ruling to treat social facts as things immediately implied the need to treat them as strange, as things unknown, in the face of which one should exercise a precautionary distanciation. This deliberate estrangement enabled the social scientist to perform an epistemological break with common sense, while simultaneously euphemizing it by concealing the institutional distances, interests, and privileges which separated the world of scholarship from the web of ‘ordinary’ action. A similar methodological voluntarism is implied in Lukàcs’ and Althusser’s paradoxical injunction to intellectuals to adopt ‘proletarian’ class standpoints (to become ‘people’ in order to know the Prince), i.e. to position themselves at the viewpoint of a class which is sufficiently estranged from the capitalist system to be able to apprehend it in its full exploitative systematicity (on Lukàcs, cf. Jay 1984:104–5). This methodical refooting is already implicitly recommended by the classical Marxian formulations, which similarly deploy the idea of the generic alienation of the proletariat to conceal the specific double alienation of the intellectual spokesperson as an ‘outsider within’. As we have seen, this voluntarism is also traceable to Harding’s conviction (and that of other feminist standpoint thinkers) that it is feminist theory and politics that can teach women (and men) to see the social order from an outsider’s perspective; subjects can learn to think differently, are able to ‘see strange’ and generate ‘traitorous’ analyses, if they

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 213 are willing to change places and accept to reason from women’s experiences of oppression.20 As in the Marxist matrix, the generic estrangement of ‘women’ likewise tends to euphemize the more particular and ambiguous estrangement of the feminist spokesperson who acts as an ‘outsider within’ and occupies a third position which is perhaps equally estranged from the category which is spoken for as from that which is spoken against. Even a performatively sensitive approach such as Foucault’s ‘aesthetic of existence’ virtually legislates the transgressive ethos or ‘limit attitude’ of the (intellectual) outsider as the methodical life of all, as a technology of incessant self-invention (Foucault 1984:32ff). The paradox of professional strangerhood is arguably most acute in the case of ethnography, which has always needed to negotiate and compromise between the alienating (and hence putatively ‘visionary’) effects of physical displacement, loneliness, foreignness, and prolonged culture shock, and the prescriptive methodologization which has followed an increasingly routinized practice of fieldwork and academic writing (Agar 1980; Bourdieu 1990a; Clifford 1988:21ff; Stocking Jr 1992).21 If the anthropologist may indeed be characterized as a professional stranger (Lévi-Strauss), how much of his vision is accountable to the local chaos of lived estrangement in the field (and the reverse distance taken from it when returning to the West and the academy), as compared to that of methodological canons of distanciation and systematic training in research design?22 A similar query arises for those fields and approaches which have gratefully appropriated the ‘ethnographic imperative’ of estrangement and thick empirical description as constitutive of their own distinctive research identity, such as cultural studies, social history, or various strands in ethnomethodology and constructivist science studies. Ethnomethodology still displays a residual Cartesian impulse in so far as it continues to methodologize the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ which it has inherited from Schutz’s sociology, to legislate the ‘Martian’ point of view which is encouraged by Wittgenstein’s pragmatics of language, or to routinize the methodical alienation which was first displayed in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. As an admittedly (but decreasingly) marginal business, ethnomethodology often indulges in a rhetoric of strangerhood which salutes its unconventional character and its essential distanciation from professional academic sociology (cf. Button 1991; Sharrock and Anderson 1986; Zimmerman and Pollner 1971). Methodism and the imperative of strangerhood are also ubiquitous in science studies, where the Bloorian principles of symmetry and impartiality, which recommend an even-handed and neutral explanation of conventionally true and false scientific beliefs, translate a context-sensitive and knowledge-political critique of Whiggish explanations of scientific success into something like a universal heuristic (Bloor 1991; cf. Pels 1996). In the subsequent development of science studies from Bloor to Collins, Woolgar, Callon, and Latour, these principles have been extended and

214 The Intellectual as Stranger escalated in such a fashion as to yield a slate of methodological rules which putatively derive from a range of agnostic and ethnographically thick descriptions of scientific activity. In general, the ethnographic imperative has modelled a habitus in science studies which celebrates a methodical estrangement from established scientific beliefs (Knorr Cetina 1983; Latour 1987; 1993). In a text which is widely considered as paradigmatic, Shapin and Schaffer for example ‘symmetrically’ reverse the familiar by adopting a ‘stranger’s perspective’ to Boyle’s experimental programme and something close to a ‘member’s account’ of Hobbes anti-experimentalism (1985:12– 13). Woolgar likewise recommends the perspective of the stranger as a way of highlighting the taken-for-granted practices of the natives (the scientists) under study; the ethnographic spirit typically implies a ‘commitment to make uncertain’ which reveals the routine beliefs, assumptions and practices of scientists as strange (1988:84–5; 1992:336).23 Third positions If, as I argue here, the idea of methodical and prescriptive estrangement defocalizes the simultaneously eye-opening and eye-closing effects of practical, site-specific, and lived distances between observers and observed, there is an interesting linkage to be explored between such situated strangerhood and the spatiality of the ‘dialectical third’ (cf. also Soja 1996). As we have repeatedly recorded in previous pages, there exists a natural affinity between the typical double marginality of the ‘outsider within’ and a third epistemological position (a third identity or a third way) which arises from the double refusal of the opposed terms and interests of an entrenched ideological dualism. The originality and effectiveness of the third party precisely resides in its ability to escape the double bind of a binary opposition whose protagonists find themselves locked in an antagonistic complicity. The third element rebels against the shared understandings which structure a specific collision/collusion in a bounded space of conceptual contraries, which can only be put at a distance by proclaiming ni l’un, ni l’autre, ni Dieu ni Maître. Both Simmel’s stranger and Mannheim’s ‘free-floating’ intelligentsia bear a strong suggestion of this epistemological advantage of the dialectical third; as do all the third-way historical projects which in some way claimed to supersede the political options of left and right: the liberal socialism of Durkheim, Mannheim, and de Man, the national socialism of Barrès, Maurras, the Italian fascists, and Déat, and the conservative revolution advocated by Jünger, Zehrer, Freyer, or Schmitt.24 The horseshoe model of the political spectrum, which bends left and right in such a way that they nearly touch each other, presents one way of visualizing this logic of the critical third. My various discussions of standpoint theory, both classical and modern, have repetitively underscored the enduring relevance of the third position of intellectual spokespersons and their ‘double vision’—even if this implied taking distance from the typical tendency of such ‘third persons’ to

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 215 efface themselves and reduce the contest to a dyadic one: i.e. to act as the voice of the silenced and oppressed in a binary ordering of dominant and dominated. Bauman suggests the same general link between strangerhood and the third position when he identifies strangers as ‘undecidables’ who are neither friends nor enemies—the two contrary parties who mutually define each other in a ‘cosy antagonism’—but who precisely militate against the familiarity of this either/or (1991:53–6). Perhaps it is a natural architectonic of human thought to organize itself in twos, to dichotomize, to spread itself out across clarifying polarities—a tendency which is sociologically realized by the dynamic of intellectual rivalry—and to supersede such dualistic stereotypes by the unexpected intercession of third positions—which may for example be adopted by a new generation which is naturally distant from the dyadic quarrels of a previous one (cf. Mannheim 1952; Pels 1998a:225ff). The pertinent suggestion of the notion of the dialectical triad, at least, is that human thinking typically progresses from the closure and inversionism of the either/or to the comparative lucidity and distanciation of the both/and, which in turn installs a new either/or which may be superseded by another third which places itself tangentially to it. The third interactive term, while balancing the interlocked blindnesses of the first and second positions and synthesizing their insights, thereby immediately creates its own blind spot, which can only be revealed by new distanciations in a further progression of an intellectual dynamic which is intrinsically also a social and historical one (cf. Tate 1998:35–8).25 The rhetoric of intellectual innovation often stages an unwelcome opposition (sociological examples would include: subjectivism versus objectivism, agency versus structure, facts versus values, the cognitive versus the social, the social versus the natural) which is destabilized and superseded by a ‘laughing third’—and which is therefore always vulnerable to the seduction of definitive closure and the false certainty of totalization. While postmodernist philosophies tend to transfigure this movement into a universal method and a prescriptive law (Down with all the binaries! Forever into the ‘beyond’!), the present approach positions the third term as always time- and site-specific, as tied to the historically and socially situated dualisms which happen to be singled out for critical review, and therefore as stabilizing new first and second positions and new binary oppositions which offer themselves in turn for deconstruction by those who place themselves rectangularly to them. One is reminded of the sometimes unqualified celebration of ‘third spaces’ of hybridity or inbetweenness in authors such as Bhabha (1994) or to some extent Soja (1996), which resonates with a larger body of literature about liminality, fluidity, transgression, and intellectual nomadism which I have critically addressed in the previous chapter. These literatures insist on a principled avoidance of demarcation and stabilization, and entertain a generalized suspicion of

216 The Intellectual as Stranger conceptual classification as exclusionary and violent, preferring disorder, complexity, and fluidity above the alleged fixity and pre-emptive closure which is associated with all forms of binary ordering. Such epistemological restraint is not demanded by my staging of the dialectical third, which provisionally supersedes and closes a particular dualism by its tangential self-positioning, in a synthetic gesture which immediately opens up a new binary and a new field of contestation.26 Rather than heralding a universal habitus of transgression and of chronic in-betweenness, the idea of the third position particularizes the effect of a local movement of estrangement which proclaims the irrelevancy of a context-specific set of dichotomies in a concrete historical space of conceptual possibilities.27 Two initial but highly suggestive (and easily multipliable) examples of such double distanciation and of the originality of the third are elaborated in Alpers’ interpretation of the genius of Rembrandt and in Bourdieu’s explanation of the unique ‘point of view’ of Flaubert. In Alpers’ view, it was precisely Rembrandt’s double negation of the cartographic and realist Dutch ‘art of describing’, as epitomized by Vermeer, and the Italianate narrative, mythical and idealist art of masters such as Rubens which defined his own creative idiosyncrasy. Sensing a deep ambivalence towards both poles of the aesthetic tradition in which he was raised, Rembrandt was able to develop a style which, while simultaneously refusing realism and idealism, was able to synthesize both in an intriguing way (Alpers 1983:222–8).28 Bourdieu similarly describes Flaubert’s originality as issuing from a logic of double refusal of historically contrary literary traditions, and hence from an attempt to reconcile what was widely considered to be irreconcilable at the time. In this case, the author wished to distance himself with equal vehemence from the moral conformism of bourgeois art and the opposite exaltation of the virtue of the oppressed which was found in ‘social’ or ‘popular’ art. This double estrangement, while uncovering the moralism which was shared by these inimical traditions, led Flaubert towards the studied ethical and political indifference of l’art pour l’art, the cold neutrality of a semi-scientific and experimental gaze which aimed to describe social facts as things, in a detached Durkheimian fashion (Bourdieu 1992:115ff, 147; 1993b:192ff). These examples also sensitize to the intriguing mixture of constraint and wilful assumption (or of being-defined and self-definition) that frames the double estrangement of the third position. My earlier approach to the positional determination of thought and the social distribution of doubt have suggested that this form of strangerhood is not so much freely chosen as it is socially constrained, ‘dictated’ in some sense by the current possibilities offered by the field and by the intuitions and sentiments that ‘force’ the artist or intellectual into the double refusal which ends up by defining him/her as a stranger. Standpoint theory in its various guises similarly suggests that distanciation and coming-to-consciousness are not voluntary options but forcibly arise out of social configurations of class,

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 217 gender, or ethnic conflict. At first merely a premonition, a feeling of incongruity and generalized unease, this estrangement places the future third party in a specific indetermination, an inability to take sides, a prereflexive neither/nor by which it is pushed sideways and backwards into unfamiliar territory; like Benjamin’s angel, it escapes backwards out of the dualism which is spread before it towards an uninvited and uncharted boundary. This accumulation of negations is also a process during which the inventor, who is initially also a stranger unto himself, has to reinvent himself in order to find his ‘destiny’; a process of identity formation and self-definition which may be retrospectively euphemized by turning painful estrangement into a charismatic calling or a voluntaristic logic of discovery.29 Because of these discomforts and constraints, there is every reason for the stranger to refuse such an anxiety-ridden identity, and to assume the posture of an impartial spectator or a visionary who merely voices the reality of a larger group or a larger whole. It is the perennial lure and liability of the third position to forget about its own blind spot and to imagine itself as encompassing, synoptic, and exhaustive; as being able to sum up the entire field of hermeneutic possibilities into a totalizing overview which arrests the wheel of history (cf. Van den Bruck’s dialectical myth of a Third Reich that would last a thousand years). The troubled history of standpoint theory, as I have traced it across a broad political canvas which paired left-wing to right-wing versions, offers many instances of this intimate connection between strangerhood and totalization. In the classical parable of the proletariat, of course, although you could not see everything from everywhere in a class-divided society, it was the alienated standpoint of the workers which nevertheless provided access to the ‘concrete totality’ of the capitalist constellation: a privileged part stood for and extended into the whole. For Barrès and other radical nationalists, it was instead the standpoint of the estranged nation (the part that needed to become whole again) that unveiled the drama of history in its true comprehensiveness. Durkheim’s third way socialism was neutralized and scientized with the help of a sociology that claimed to speak for society as a whole. Despite its more reflexive focus, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge still converted the collective estrangement and in-betweenness of the ‘free-floating’ intellectuals into a promise of perspectival totalization; a gesture which is repeated, though on a considerably more modest scale, in recent feminist and postcolonial assertions of the promise of ‘strong objectivity’ as resulting from the estranged experiences of women or ethnic minorities in male- and white-dominated societies. Modernist critical theories, as we saw, often configure a dualistic field of contestation (proletariat versus bourgeoisie, male versus female, black versus white, or in generalized form: dominant versus dominated, established versus outsiders) and thereby tend to silence the intervening third. Their Manichean structure forecloses the third possibility: tertium

218 The Intellectual as Stranger non datur. They tend to efface the specific strangeness of intellectuals who occupy the third space of ‘dominated dominants’ and go-betweens between centre and periphery, whose inter-esse creates the interested position of professionally ‘speaking in between’. It is this formal absence of the spokesperson which often encourages claims about a more comprehensive objectivity, according to which the oppressed group apparently speaks for itself (and for the whole). But even when the intellectuals are formally represented as an autonomous third, as we noticed in the case of Mannheim or de Man, it is hard to resist eulogizing its alleged panoramic view and synoptic function into a totalizing mission. Notwithstanding Mannheim’s own warnings against the Hegelian self-deception about the movement of the Absolute Spirit and his assertion of the dynamic, relative, historically transient nature of all possible syntheses (cf. 1968:134–5; 1982:180), his sociology of knowledge is still ambitiously geared towards formulating the ‘most comprehensive view of the whole which is attainable at a given time’ and to specify the social standpoint which enables this ‘fullest possible synthesis of the tendencies of an epoch’ (1968:135, 146). Reflexive dialectics Starting out from the same idea of the radical positionality of thought, but radicalizing it by inserting the second-order positionings and rivalries which structure scientific and intellectual fields,30 Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology exemplifies a similar ambiguity about the promissory relationship between estrangement and totalization. No longer playing the third between bourgeois and proletarian class positions but focusing upon the internal mechanisms of conflict on autonomously operating intellectual fields, Bourdieu’s sociological reflexivity is still geared towards disclosing the totality of a game in which each participant objectifies the interested partiality of his opponent but is blinded to his own one-sidedness. There are many semi-autobiographical references scattered throughout his work which suggest that this special reflexivity and second-order objectivity are peculiar to the experience of those who do not feel at ease or at home in the social world, and therefore are unable to take it fully for granted. The ‘special lucidity which is associated with every kind of social distancing’ (1990b:178) is also discernible in science where the most fruitful positions are often the most risky ones and therefore the socially most improbable. Like Marx, who derives the impulse to criticize ‘everything existing’ from the objectively critical position of the proletariat, Bourdieu identifies sociology as a critical science because it finds itself in a critical position (1993a:32, 8). This connection between social improbability and critical questioning is also personalized: Most of the questions that I ask, and that I put first of all to intellectuals…no doubt stem from the sense of being an outsider in the

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 219 intellectual world. I question that world because it calls me into question, and in a very deep way that goes beyond the simple sense of social exclusion. I never feel myself fully justified in being an intellectual, I don’t feel ‘at home’, I have the feeling of having to justify (to whom? I have no idea) what seems to me an unjustifiable privilege…The most elementary sociology of sociology confirms that the greatest contributions to social science have been made by people who were not perfectly in their element in the social world as it is. (Bourdieu 1993a:47) Originally formulated in 1980, this self-stylization of the sociologist as outsider and of sociology as an outsider discipline is still ambiguously retained in a position of remarkable academic success, after a veritable ‘trajectory of the miraculous’ has catapulted Bourdieu and his sociology to a position of incomparable authority and dominance in French (and global) intellectual life. But the stranger who has become an arrivé always interpreted his special position in the sociological field as sufficiently distant from its complicitous rivalries and entrenched interests (e.g. those tied to the grand binary of structuralism versus constructivism) to be able to objectify all the objectifications and hence as offering a point of view ‘on the ensemble of points of view’ (Bourdieu 1992:291). ‘Raising himself to the second degree’ in this fashion, the sociologist typically claims an intellectual sovereignty which transcends the contest of partial and partisan views in order to define the objective truth of the whole, the world ‘as it really is’ (cf. 1992:15, 458). The third position of the stranger is once again transformed into a ‘regal’ position which identifies with the whole (‘I am the field’), and dangerously approaches the initially rejected ‘view from nowhere’ of the impartial spectator who, in Bourdieu’s own apt characterization, is often the stranger who ‘does not recognize himself as such’(1990b:195). The advantage of defining the intellectual as a stranger or a relative outsider is precisely to disable this regal dialectic and its penchant towards objectivism and totalization. If situatedness and reflexivity are taken seriously, the totality must be considered forever inaccessible (cf. Kögler 1997; Pels 2000). If the third position defines a transcendence, it is a local one which may rise above and transgress a specifically situated opposition, while remaining intensely place-bound, interested, and partisan. Rather than breaking with all partial visions, the third position merely defines another partiality, a limited transcendence of a settled opposition which never adds up to a totalizing view. The ‘local transcendence’ of strangerhood thus interestingly negotiates between universality and particularity and intercedes between the global and the local. It does not rise above all interests but embodies a different interest; it is not an apodictic position outside the field but an inside perspective which does not reflect its ‘truth’ but performatively acts upon it (see Chapter 1). Whereas

220 The Intellectual as Stranger the objectivist dialectic suggests that the third term results with necessity from the tensionful double bind and the dynamic of contradiction of the first and the second, the reflexive dialectic which is proposed here instead presumes that the third term retrospectively defines and configures the first and the second as partial visions which are locked in complicitous opposition. In this sense, the dualism does not ‘really exist’ but is only arbitrated, positioned, and performed by the emerging third, which already embodies the will to escape from it and to transcend its repetitive negations and inversions. It is not the friends and the enemies themselves but the stranger who speaks for and performs the deeper structural collusion which forces them, from his third point of view, to oscillate between the fixed points of an ‘objective’ unity-in-contradition. If the third position manifests an ‘indifference’ or an ‘impartiality’, it must therefore not be taken in the strict sense of cold methodical neutrality. The condition of strangerhood is highly charged emotionally and (knowledge-) politically and, as Simmel already knew, always features a particular composition of involvement and detachment. The third party is merely disengaged in the sense of being less engaged in the specific issue in which the first and second parties find themselves more immediately embroiled. A social epistemology of strangerhood therefore has the additional charm of opening up a tentative third way in the old dilemma of neutrality versus partisanship. In this context, we may still profit from the ‘personalist’ and ‘vitalist’ approach to reflexivity championed by Gouldner, which itself offered a fine example of a third escape from the constraining constellation of 1960s value-free sociology versus politicizing Marxism, and which manifestly read and positioned these conflicting traditions with the resolve to critically supersede both. As a self-styled ‘Marxist outlaw’ and ‘outlaw sociologist’, Gouldner effectively posed as a ‘ridge rider’ who rebelled against the foundational objectivism which induced both traditions to conceal the presence of the spokesperson in the speech and thereby to hide its contingent and sentiment-relevant nature. Reflexive sociology, in Gouldner’s optic, needed to distance itself simultaneously from the professional myth of value-freedom as diffused by academic sociology and from the equally cerebral myth of ‘cool’ partisanship which was vaunted by its radical counterpart; both needed replacement by a third notion of reflexive objectivity as personal authenticity, which acknowledged the importance of personal presence and ‘sentimental’ commitment in all sociological accounts of the world (Gouldner 1970, 1973). The ‘impartial partiality’ of strangerhood may also offer an illuminating angle on the methodology of ‘symmetry’, as it has been ever more radically pursued in recent social and constructivist studies of science and technology. Despite the self-professed agnosticism of the original statement of the principle and of its radical extensions (Bloor 1976; Callon 1986; Latour 1993), symmetrical moves (e.g. to treat conventionally true and

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 221 false science even-handedly in terms of causal sociological explanation) invariably presuppose a third substantive position which critically reconfigures the field and introduces a new (weaker) asymmetry of truth (Pels 1996). While symmetricians usually content themselves with an anormative descriptivism which evens out the controversy between the protagonists in order to reveal their collusion, they beg the question of the critical stance from which such revelations make sense, and pose as ‘absent spokespersons’ for the structure that circularly links the first and the second to their own mediating third position. However, it is this intervening third perspective and its double distanciation (which does not necessarily imply equidistance from the field contenders) that actively construes the first and the second positions and stages their mutual ‘conspiracy’. The ascendency of the third induces a lateral extension of the field, and by introducing another partiality, modifies all the other parties. Its ‘neutrality’ performs the neutralization of a particular dualism—which requires a critical form of partisanship. Rather than merely ‘following the natives’, all symmetrical moves hence actively impose the lateral framework of a ‘laughing third’. The current methodologization of the principle of symmetry, on the other hand, appears to stage it as a new form of Cartesian doubt, as a rule-set which appears equally disembodied and extendable as its (universally dismissed) historic exemplar. It violates the idea of a social distribution of doubt which highlights the situated distance of the stranger and the interested autonomy of his/her third position. If, therefore, the local antagonism of the first and second positions constitutively depends upon the self-positioning of the third, and symmetries do not ‘really exist’ but are retrospectively articulated from the vantage point of their prospective dissolution, the dialectic of double distanciation also invites an incurable circularity which cannot be methodologically neutralized or surmounted (see Chapter 1). In passing, we may flirt with Simmelian expressions about the arbitrating role of the tertius gaudens who, in breaking the deadlock between the first and the second positions and defining their union, succeeds in holding the whole constellation together and in this respect ‘closes the circle’ (Simmel 1950:146, 154ff). The ‘sociological logic of the situation of three’, of which two are in conflict, potentially privileges the laughing third, who may even intentionally produce the conflict between the first and second in order to balance them out and gain a dominating in-between position. The radical version of hermeneutic circularity presented here may be seen as an (admittedly frivolous) epistemological version of this prophylactic function of the laughing third. The reflexive dialectic of double estrangement is a radically self-referential one which never leaves the original circle of representation. Circular reasoning, as I have observed in Chapter 1, is not a sure sign of our opponent’s irrationality, but an inherent and productive feature of everyday and professional sense-making. Whereas the objectivist dialectic upholds the fictions of identity and totality which erase the circle

222 The Intellectual as Stranger and hide the imposition of the third, my reflexive and circular dialectic retraces it and recovers the constitutive presence of a spokesperson, whose act of disclosure partly produces the reality which is disclosed. The owl of Minerva first flies backwards to describe a great circle which in the end returns it to its own beginnings. In praise of marginality In Chapter 1, I pieced together a differential and performative theory of spokespersonship which emphasized the characteristically distancing or ‘estranging’ movement of all representation. In marking the autonomy of the spokesperson over against what is spoken for, I argued, representation offers a substitute for reality which is manifestly different from it and can enter into conflict with it. Instead of claiming identity (‘I am the Proletariat’, ‘I am the Party’, ‘I am Woman’, ‘I am the Nation’, ‘I am Nature’), theories of social, political, and natural knowledge must not attempt to copy reality or strive for maximum resemblance, but should produce stories which are at variance with it, which create a disturbance, which add new realities to existing ones, which say something strange. A substitution theory of representation (Gombrich, Danto, Ankersmit) suggests that reality becomes visible only when we are able to place ourselves in opposition to it; representation does not mirror the world but resists it and puts it at arm’s length. Such an epistemology of critical distanciation recovers and validates the critical intuition of Marx, Durkheim, and Bourdieu that science performs a rupture with ‘common’ sense and offers insights which are interestingly estranged from it. However, this rupture does not require an epistemology of critical truthsaying which strictly distinguishes appearance from reality, power from discourse, and values from facts, or which steeply hierarchizes scientific, professional, political, and everyday knowledges. But it does require the presence of ‘critical people’ or ‘strangers’. This approach suggests a view of the intellectual calling which turns (neo-) conservative reproaches about the intellectual’s impractical ‘unworldliness’ inside out and celebrates it as a title of honour. The famous diatribes of Burke and Tocqueville against the ‘political men of letters’, the Enlightenment philosophers whose aloofness from practical politics, whose fanatical pursuit of abstract reason, and whose demagogic command over public opinion were held responsible for the radical intolerance that derailed the French Revolution (Burke 1968:211ff; De Tocqueville 1955:138–48), has set a critical pattern which anticipated the main outlines of Barrès’ opposition against the ‘abstract logic’ of the Dreyfusards, and of more recent sceptical noises about intellectuals as being impractical dilettantes whose critical penchant is induced by their position of being mere onlookers who lack direct responsibility for practical affairs (e.g. Schumpeter 1974:145–55). A radical conception of democratic difference

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 223 valorizes this impracticality and ‘lack of competence’ in a diametrically opposite fashion.31 On this reverse view, it is precisely the privilege and duty of intellectuals to be strange, to withdraw from everyday reality, to take up an outsider’s position, and in this sociological sense to ‘renounce the world’; and if they return to the agora to take up a public or political role, it is their very ‘impracticality’ and strangeness which enables them effectively to do so. Mannheim already suggested a general link between the ‘art of isolation’, as first invented by the medieval monastic orders, and the social function of nonconformity, concluding that dynamic societies could not exist without the presence of such institutionalized Fremdkörper which permitted unexpected differences to erupt (Mannheim 1943:158–9). In order to develop new perspectives, one indeed needs to inhabit distanced social sites; in order to add new realities to existing ones, one needs to multiply the orders of estrangement. A standpoint theory of knowledge, we saw, is one way of acknowledging that one cannot see everything from everywhere in a multi-layered and ‘disembedded’ society. There operates a law of reciprocal lucidity and blindness in social life which ordains that different standpoints produce different points of view, open up different realities in a different way, while being invariably shadowed by their own indigenous blind spot (since the eye always tends to look away from itself). But if a God’s eye view on the social universe remains out of our grasp, the human eyes that are not able to see themselves are capable of critically looking at each other. If perspectival seeing is the only kind of seeing there is, as Nietzsche famously maintained, objectivity is not a matter of finding the zero point of disinterested contemplation or of rehearsing the rules of correct method but of ‘accumulating different eyes’, i.e. of multiplying various knowledge interests and sentiments about a subject without the prospect of final totalization (cf. Nietzsche 1996:98). The idea of a social epistemology of strangerhood is to substantiate this desire by means of a social topology or theory of positional distances which emphasizes the social distribution (rather than the methodical production) of critical doubt. In summarizing this idea at the close of Chapter 2, I proposed a crude centre-periphery or established-outsiders model in order to validate the long-standing intuition of standpoint epistemology that, if distance brings understanding, there is something special about the vision from marginal positions which cannot be captured from a more central location. Even if the visionary and totalizing claims of social or political outsidership have been revealed as over-pretentious, there is a residual asymmetry between central and marginal positions which at least suggests that it is easier to see the centre in its full centricity and systematicity from the margin—even though the margin similarly retains a blind spot which is more easily discerned from the centre. In the present chapter, I have attempted to detail this crude concentric model and the presumed asymmetry of the margin in terms of three ‘orders’

224 The Intellectual as Stranger of estrangement and their pragmatic conditions of felicity. The first order described the institutionalization of cultural autonomy as a sphere of estrangement from political and, more generally, public life, which afforded the methodical life of intellectual investigation as a specifically secluded, selective, and slowed-down practice, promoting the specific distanciation of longer-term, impractical, more abstract and principled views which come naturally with a routinized ‘lack of haste’ and production for restricted audiences. As argued before, the objectivity which is generated from the particular viewpoint of this ‘impractical practice’ must not be predicated upon its neutrality or holistic grasp but rather results from the pragmatic (and hence relative) estrangement from everyday practices which is guaranteed by its institutional autonomy. The objectivity of science is not a disinterested objectivity but one which arises from the particular interest of a decentered social institution to which scientific observers are tied with all their interests. Its expert vision is not definitionally ‘better’ than the view from other professional or lay standpoints which are more attuned to quick decision making or the glare of publicity; but it is critically different from them in offering the combined insights and blindnesses of a specifically ‘unhastened’, ‘undecided’, professionally reflective habitus. The importance of recognizing and defending this first order of intellectual autonomy is not diminished by such overt scepticism about the traditional ‘outward’ demarcation of science in terms of universal truth or unitary method. It is equally important to recognize the pragmatic levelling effect of a second order of estrangement, which breaks up the abstract picture of the academy as a socially decentered zone in order to view it as itself differentiated and zoned into a plurality of mutually ‘estranged’ disciplines, schools, and perspectives, which cannot be totalized by an overarching philosophy which gathers their conflicting truths and presents their essential unity. This internal differentiation once again brings into play the crossed lucidities and blindnesses among differently positioned scientific professionals, revealing a theatre of rivalling truths and methods which adds another layer of scepticism about the presumed authority of scientific over other forms of expertise. In addition, I have identified a third order of estrangement which repeats and reverses the first decentering movement by developing a ‘Bohemian’ ring of marginality around a cultural and intellectual establishment which has itself developed into an ‘industrial’ centre. Many of the new voices and approaches which have recently asserted themselves in academia have originated in this ‘antiacademic’ margin; they have been instigated by marginal intellectuals who occupy a threshold position as ‘outsiders within’, and who exemplify a new distribution of doubt and a new link between relative estrangement and the rupture of intellectual routines. It is evident that the Platonic intellectual, who only reluctantly withdraws from the agora in the hope of eventually replacing the incompetent and irrational politician, cannot be typecast for a credible

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 225 defence of intellectual strangerhood and autonomy such as I am proposing here. Neither can the Cartesian intellectual, who exemplifies the more radical detachment of the ivory tower, but who retains a Platonic confidence in reason as the high court of culture, and finds himself readily confined in the parochialism and conventionalism of routine academic life. But even the more activist Voltairean or ‘Dreyfusard’ ideal of the intellectual as the essential nay-sayer who dares to ‘speak the truth to power’, still echoes these ancient ideals of the supremacy of reason and of privileged spokespersonship.32 The classical ‘eruption’ of the intellectual in politics during the Dreyfus affair clearly presupposed the prior autonomy of the intellectual field, which enabled him to ‘export’ norms which were internal to it to the field of politics; but this eruption was still premised upon the intellectual’s supreme confidence in the transcendent irreducibility of the values of truth and justice (Bourdieu 1992:186). True enough, the Dreyfusards effectively reversed the Platonic movement of withdrawal-and-return, entering the agora only temporarily with the aim of returning to their autonomous intellectual or cultural pursuits, and posing as amateurs who did not wish to invade the turf of the professional politicians but ‘merely’ to present a corrective and counterweight to their specific rationality (cf. Bourdieu 1989; Habermas 1989). But the moral of critical vigilance and intellectual citizenship which derives from this classic exemplar is still informed by a residually elitist and monopolistic view of rationality which enables the intellectual to know better rather than differently, and to assume a special moral responsibility from this unjustly appropriated guardianship of justice and truth. The tradition of ‘Socratic’ truth-telling which links Zola to Sartre, Said, and Havel, consistently connects the notions of intellectual dissent and outsidership to the high calling of ‘speaking the truth to power’. But as I have argued before, a social epistemology of strangerhood refuses to encapsulate the intellectual function in the traditional dualisms of truth versus power, might versus right, or knowledge versus interest. The intellectual interest represents a different and special power that is added to all the others (political, economic, cultural) in a liberal balance of powers. It enters the special voice and authority that is generated and protected by its institutional autonomy. Rather than speaking the truth to power, intellectuals mobilize the performative force of a more distanced and ‘abstract’ perspective in order to counterbalance other powers which speak a different truth.33 In this perspective, cultural innovation can be boosted by defending and differentiating the various autonomies, by multiplying the orders of estrangement, and hence by extending the zones of active tolerance for non-conformity and ex-centricity. Such an increased tolerance for strangerhood and difference merely extends a venerable democratic view about the importance of institutionalized opposition and the need to respect minority opinion, and radicalizes the old liberal demand for a

226 The Intellectual as Stranger balance of powers and liberties.34 However, a welcoming incorporation of differences must remain realistically aware of the fact that, in all conceivable forms of society, the creative ‘stranger’ will not be easily understood and will be experienced as threatening by the resident majority. But as the Dutch political theorist Jacques de Kadt remarked, one does not cease to streamline automobiles because there will always be resistance of the air; indeed, minimizing the resistance against ‘new people’ might help to accelerate the ‘cultural speed’ of a society (cf. Pels 1993:182). All attempts to streamline society in this manner will bounce against a limit, because newness is definitionally elusive and cannot be institutionally captured or domesticated. There is no recipe for creative deviance. But the insight that the exception eludes normal observation and prediction precisely because it is exceptional, is not sufficient reason not to broaden the margins from where it may emerge. The establishment needs ‘its’ outsiders in order not to become transfixed in sluggish routine and oligarchic self-indulgence. That is why liberal democracy is obliged to love its strangers, to include and subsidize rather than to extradite them, in order to be able to permanently and dynamically ‘undermine itself. But outsiders likewise need the resistance of ‘their’ establishments to sharpen their wits against, and in this agonistic process to become what they potentially are. Strangers do not simply spring forth from Athena’s forehead, but need the contest with the ordinary world in order to articulate their innovatory intuitions and make themselves more broadly understood. Without the need for infighting, innovators remain mute. The weight of prevalent opinion, which is empowered because it has acquired material form in social institutions and routines, is the indispensable sparring partner against which new ways of thinking and acting learn to measure their quality and strength. It is therefore a classical misconception of ambitious newcomers to presume that they do not need their established enemies and are only embarrassed and dragged down by them in their march to the centre. To become truly innovatory, the outsider must become an ‘outsider within’. Against this background, it is difficult to specify in general terms which structural requirements would guarantee a larger measure of constitutional freedom for dissidence and creative marginality. Let me venture one (admittedly abstract) proposition here. It is to ‘add another difference’ to as many functional domains and levels as is feasible, by extending the bipolar, dyadic model of ‘government’ versus ‘opposition’ with a third constitutional position, that of the outsider or stranger. In any routine institutional context, the opposition is still ‘Her Majesty’s Opposition’, and as such partakes of the established political or institutional game. The outsider or stranger escapes sideways from the antagonistic complicity of both parties, constituting a third party that is not pressured into choosing between them. This third position is potentially productive, because it offers an improved view of the contours and foundations of the larger

Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 227 constellation within which the first and the second parties nourish their mutual contestation. Simultaneously, it is acknowledged that the stranger’s position is not ‘out of play’ and cannot offer a disinterested view of the system as a whole.35 The adage that the eye always looks away from itself also applies to the third position. But its double distanciation discloses different things which cannot be discerned so easily from the first and the second positions. Truly revolutionary innovation hardly ever emerges from the centre. Each new power which has risen from the margins has, in the flush of victory, swiftly managed to forget this not-so-comfortable truth. It is this epistemological asymmetry which, in spite of all romantic indulgings of intellectual strangerhood, still warrants the small praise of marginality which I have raised in this book.36

Notes

1 Speaking the spokesperson 1 Different from the generality which is intended here, Schmitt immediately excludes the sphere of the private from the logic of representation in order to focus upon a higher, more ‘intensive’ species of being, which is the people existing as a sublime political unity. Schmitt’s approach, in other words, consistently presupposes the strong view of identitarian representation which I criticize throughout this book. 2 I studiously disregard Ankersmit’s strenuous (and I fear misguided) opposition between allegedly ‘aesthetic’ disciplines such as art, historiography and politics, and ‘reflective’ science (including social science)—which unnecessarily reproduces the obtuse and outworn division between the cultural and social sciences (e.g. 1994:103ff). Both ethics and science (and of course epistemology) are prematurely homogenized and assimilated to universalistic and rationalistic models. Since, moreover, aesthetics itself is notoriously divided among realist or naturalist and ‘anti-realist’ or non-figurative strands, to oppose ‘aesthetic’ to ‘mimetic’ representation is strictly speaking a misnomer. In the following, I shall simply act as if Ankersmit’s aestheticizing model is equally applicable to and valid for social and political science. 3 Luhmann has developed a similar conception of art as a ‘doubling of reality’ which splits the world into a real and an imaginary part, and as such offers a position from which ‘something else can be determined as reality’ (1995:229– 30). See note 25 for commensurable expressions in Latour (1999a). 4 This specific approach to the issue of identity/difference is somewhat tangential to but sympathetically disposed towards the vast discourse which has recently emerged around identity and difference in feminist, postcolonial, and other critical literatures. Among a wealth of sources, see e.g. Hekman (1999), Nicholson and Seidman (eds) (1995) and Seidman (1997). I will further examine this literature in Chapter 7 and Chapter 8. 5 In the course of his career, Bourdieu has increasingly emphasized the distinctions rather than the continuities between science and politics. Among the pertinent differences are the volume and composition of the recognitiongranting, authorizing group, which in science is progressively restricted to fellow scientists, i.e. competitors-peers, while in politics it is expanded to the largest possible number of voters. In politics, the production of ideas about the social world is always subordinated to the logic of the conquest of power, which is the logic of the mobilization of the greatest number. The spokesperson appropriates not only the words of the group of nonprofessionals, that is, most of the time, its silence, but also the very power of that

228

Notes 229 group, which he helps to produce by lending it a voice recognized as legitimate in the political field. The power of the ideas that he proposes is measured not, as in the domain of science, by their truth-value…but by the power of mobilization that they contain, in other words, by the power of the group that recognizes them, even if only by its silence or the absence of any refutation. (Bourdieu 1991:181, 190)

6

7

8

9

Increasingly, Bourdieu appears to revert to a traditional demarcation between truth and power. In a recent statement, the science-politics continuum is evidently pulled towards its ideal-typical extremes, where the scientific pole represents traditional ideals of truth, logical coherence, and compatibility with the facts, and where the political role of science is depicted in classical terms as ‘speaking the truth to power’ (Bourdieu 1999:338–40). In this light, it might be worthwhile to transpose some of his expressions (e.g. Bourdieu 1991:221, 249–50) about the performative logic of the political as ‘a symbolic struggle to make or unmake groups’ to scientific representations. I shall revisit this (big) issue in the final chapter. In doing so, he remains close to Simmel’s proposition, as revived by Coser (1956:111ff), that social struggles are intensified through the depersonalization of their purpose. If the object of contention acquires an impersonal, supraindividual character, and the parties involved conceive of themselves as mere representatives of transcendent forces or causes, the conflict acquires a radicalism and mercilessness which is typical for those who fight ‘in good conscience’, who are strengthened by the inner support of absolute righteousness. As soon as representatives tend to see themselves as the embodiment of the purposes and power of the group, they identify with it, make it a part of themselves, and hence disappear in it but also aggrandize themselves by viewing the group as an extension of their own personality. Intellectuals, Coser repeats after Mannheim, have been centrally important in ‘objectifying’ social movements in this manner (cf. Mannheim 1968:142: ‘It was primarily the conflict of intellectuals which transformed the conflict of interests into a conflict of ideas’). It is fair to say that Latour has recently distanced himself from this identitarian model of the Leviathan (1999a:263; 1999b:286, 348). However, as I shall reemphasize in the final chapter, his view of political (and by proxy, of scientific) democracy still remains disconcertingly close to a strong ‘Athenian’ (and Hobbesian, and even Schmittian) notion of the self-representation of the demos as a ‘fermentation’ through which the people ‘brews itself towards a decision’ on the basis of a ‘distributed knowledge of the whole about the whole’ (1999a: 237, 247). See also note 12. An important corollary of this approach is that from the standpoint of the spokesperson, who speaks for others that cannot speak, there is no longer any principal difference between the representation of people or things, of humans or non-humans (Latour 1987:71–2). According to the Constitution’s first official guarantee, the transcendence of Nature, Nature can be known objectively and can accordingly be dominated by man—while in actual practice nature is continually constructed by its human representatives. Its second official guarantee, the immanence of Society, implies that human beings artificially construct their social environment and may therefore freely determine their social destiny—even though in actual practice, society and politics are continuously stabilized by the mobilization of natural objects. Together, both guarantees offer the moderns the opportunity to do everything without being limited by anything. For this energetic Constitution to remain effective, however, the socialization of Nature must remain equally

230 Notes

10

11 12

13

14

invisible and clandestine as the naturalization of Society. In its third and most significant guarantee, therefore, the Constitution assures a strict separation between the two realms of representation. The price to be paid for this is that the moderns cannot openly acknowledge the clandestine work of hybridization and translation, and invariably speak with a forked tongue. Cf. Latour’s similar approach to fetishism (1996; 1999a), as critically discussed in Pels (1999a). Latour’s claim about the knowledgeability of the fetishist is much stronger than views about the inevitable duality of representation which stress that the representer knows that the idol simultaneously is and is not God—which is still compatible with a firm belief in the existence of God and in the inherent sanctity of the idol (e.g. Gombrich in Ankersmit 1994:111). Close inspection of Latour’s own citations of Pasteur’s 1857 text, for example, reveals a considerable over-interpretation of Pasteur’s own rendering of the relationship between theoretical conjecture and experimental corroboration. Latour never escapes the classical ideology-critical figuration in his incessant appeals to this presumably ‘objective’ gap between saying and doing. It features in his work right from the initial model of splitting-and-inversion of Laboratory Life (1979, co-authored with Woolgar), via ideas about the ‘Janus head’ of science in Science in Action (1987) up to We Have Never Been Modern (1993), which continually plays on the rift between the Modern Constitution’s official guarantees and the clandestine operation which is rendered invisible by it. Cf. his recent critique of Socratic epistemology as ideology (1999a:248, 258–60), and his Politiques de la nature (1999b), where he exploits to the full the assertion that ‘political ecology already does in practice everything that we affirm it should do’. It is clearer than ever that the distinction between saying and doing (in this case, between political ecology’s practice and its official philosophy) boils down to a distinction between two sayings, two philosophies, two conflicting descriptions: those of the ecologists and those of their critic (Latour) who ventriloquizes their actual practices and their future accomplishments (see 1999b:48 for a virtual acknowledgement of this!). Although Latour describes it as a ‘perilous distinction’, his defence of its application to political ecology remains singularly unconvincing (cf. 1999b:16–17, 34–8). On the circularity of exposing such ‘performative contradictions’, see also note 21. Against Bourdieu (1991:72–5, 105–9), I like to emphasize that it is in part the epistemological-linguistic form itself (e.g. its reificatory grammar), not solely the social authority of the spokesperson, that empowers the representative statement. Against Latour (1986), I like to maintain that there indeed exists a force of initial energy to empower statements, since it is also because of their reificatory form (the claim of representative identity) that statements retain their violence and travel more or less intact down the chain of command. Reification itself constitutes an original force of diffusion which enforces something very close to a ‘literal’ translation. Obedience is ‘accomplished’ because the reifications of the powerless closely match and reinforce those of the powerful. Political energy is preserved downstream because, as a result of this double misrecognition and fetishization, it appears as the pure charisma of the powerful. As evidenced by his most recent work, Latour ‘barely misses’ such a critical theory in contrasting the Platonic spokesperson, who ventriloquizes for an indisputable and transcendent Nature/Society (e.g. rationalist epistemologists, deep ecologists) with his favoured agnostic view which defines the spokesperson as ‘precisely the one who does not permit a definitive answer to the question “who speaks?”’ (1999b:359–60). Cf. also his juxtaposition of the ‘bald objects’ of epistemological naturalism and deep ecology, which render their producers invisible, and the ‘hairy objects’ of Latourian ‘political epistemology’, which permit their producers to appear in full daylight and explicitly include the work

Notes 231

15

16

17

18

19

20

of scientific construction as part of their own definition (1999b:38, 43, 115). The critical impulse is once again held back in the neutralized description of spokespersonship as ‘the whole gamut of intermediaries between the one who speaks and the other who speaks in his place, between doubt and certainty’. In my own approach, the continuum running from total doubt (the spokesperson speaks in his own name and not in the name of others) to total trust (when he speaks, it is the mandatories who speak through his mouth) (Latour 1999b:101, 108), should more explicitly be recast as a normative continuum in which the total trust of the identity form is actively undercut by means of a differential theory which renders the spokesperson visible at all times. Cf. Mannheim’s familiar contrast between a sociological inquiry into ‘how men actually think’ in their practical everyday reasoning, and the philosophers’ view, which is little but an over-generalization of their own way of thinking (1968:1– 5). Mannheim raises two main objections to traditional epistemology: its individualism, which separates thought from the group situation, and its intellectualism, which separates thought from action/doing. Evidently, this particularization is not meant to protect the relational validity of epistemology but is immediately critical of it. Mannheim’s sociological realism is an accusatory realism. Boltanski and Thévenot wish to minimize the risk that social-scientific constatives are transformed into criticisms. In their estimate, critical sociology denies itself the opportunity to grasp its own normative dimension, which leads it to insist abusively on the exteriority of science for the purpose of legitimating its practice. Blindness to its own normativity enables social science to furtively escape the demands of justification which ordinary actors have to face (1991:23–5). According to Herrnstein Smith (1997:xvi, 148, 209n) a certain amount of selfprivileging and of the pathologization of others seems inevitably to belong to the structure of all justificatory dispute, or to what she calls the ‘microdynamics of scepticism’. Given the ubiquity and fruitfulness of such epistemic opportunism, I think the first rule of symmetry, as established by the Strong Programme and widely celebrated in science studies, must be abandoned (Pels 1996). It might be remarked that both Bourdieu and Latour measure their distance from this game of unmasking and disqualification in quite similar fashion, even though their underlying reasons for doing so are sharply different. Given the ‘logic of the trial’, in which every sociologist is lucid for the opponent but remains blind to his own interests, a Bourdieuan sociology of knowledge intends to grasp the complete system of disqualifying strategies in order to gain transcendent control of the field. For Latour, disqualification is likewise everybody’s game, including that of the totalizing sociologist, which is precisely why the analyst should agnostically withdraw from it. My own ‘third’ proposition is to permit everyone, including the professional sociologist, to enter this game under the auspices of a critical anti-reificatory and anti-totalist epistemology. In dispute with Lagardelle, who claimed an exceptional status for the syndicalist movement, Michels was quick to emphasize that he took a strictly scientific and objective point of view which was informed by the iron laws of psychology and social organization (1992:218, 222, 224). Cf. Pels (1993:137ff) for a more extensive discussion of the ‘normative realism’ of classical elite theory. Following Serres, Latour notes the etymological affinity between the idea of a thing and that of a juridical case (1993:83). This kinship between causation and accusation is exemplified by the similarity of words like cause, case, and chose (cf. the ‘facts of the case’); see also Dutch nouns such as ding and geding, zaak

232 Notes

21

22

23

24

25

and oorzaak. In Chapter 3, I contend that Durkheim’s invocation of ‘social things’ accuses ordinary actors for their unscientific, imprecise, loose preconceptions and prejudices, which are correctible by scientific sociology. The idea of performativity sharpens the notion about the ubiquity of the political which still spreads ambiguity in, for example, Foucault’s genealogies of power/ knowledge and in early second-wave feminist approaches, which vacillated between asserting the ontological primacy of the political (cf. Schmitt) and the epistemological primacy of discursivity (cf. Derrida). In Hewitt’s estimate, a more radical politicization calls into question the category of the political itself as a privileged empirical discourse predating representation, introducing what he calls the ‘de-realization of representation’ (1993:165–6). The ubiquitous trope ‘in theory…but this theory is not in accord with the facts’ is an exquisitely roundabout way of saying that I disagree with the selected theory, without having to say this, without having to be visible and responsible as the nay-sayer. This form of ‘absent spokespersonship’ also characterizes the classical charges of self-refutation and that of dwelling in a ‘performative contradiction’. It signals the infiltration of the critic who tacitly presupposes and imposes the prior validity of his own epistemic authority, while staging the polemic between himself and the other as an acutely unpleasant debate between the other and himself, which does not require his attendance other than as a neutral and ‘irresponsible’ reporter. See Herrnstein Smith’s well-pointed analysis of the essential circularity of the self-refutation charge and of the ApelHabermas critique of performative contradictions (1997:73ff, 88ff). In my estimate, this critical analysis also applies to Latour’s absent spokespersonship for the moderns (see note 11). In the final chapter I will revisit Latour’s discussion of the anti-democratic settlement between Socrates and Callicles, in order to further measure the studied duplicity in his juxtaposition of an identity and a difference model of political and scientific representation. See also note 25. This revisionist view was restated in Political Parties (1962:293ff) and clearly anticipated the main lineaments of Hendrik de Man’s ‘socialism of the intellectuals’ (1928 [1926], see further Chapter 5). Michels subsequently complained about de Man having appropriated his main ideas without due acknowledgement (1987:209). In a brilliant piece of empirical philosophy, Latour reconsiders the idea of reference as an epistemic practice that does not mimetically reflect a real external world, but instead keeps something constant through a series of replacements. The soil of the Amazon forest is carried through a series of differences or transformations that establish a reversible chain of significations. Its purpose is not mimetic reflection but a process of transubstantiation. At each link in the chain the representation, though ballasted with reality, is not realistic: ‘It does more than resemble. It takes the place of the original situation…’ (Latour 1999a:24ff, esp. 56ff). This countermodel of ‘circulating reference’ is critically opposed to the canonical view that promotes an erasure of all mediation, and creates a single gap between the epistemological polarities of ‘words’ and ‘world.’ In this fashion, Latour comes closer than ever to the Gombrich-Danto-Ankersmit model of referential substitution—even though other passages in the same book continue to suggest a strong identity model for political representation (e.g. 1999a:237, 240, 244, 250–1). My slight amendment to Latour’s approach ‘merely’ entails recognition of the fact that ordinary knowledge practices (including scientific ones) are much more complicitous with this conventional mimetic model than Latour is prepared to see; as a true ethnomethodologist, he tends to congratulate his subjects for their ever-subtle reificatory blackboxing and their sophisticated ‘identity work’.

Notes 233 26 By reverse analogy, one might also reread Burke’s famous 1774 Bristol address, where he pleads for political delegation as ‘differential’ trusteeship against the (French) revolutionary conception of identitarian representation of the general will, for the purpose of enlightening scientific representation. For Burke, the representative is not a ‘tied’ delegate but a trustee who is capable of acting according to his own free judgement. Trust is a relation that provides room for the trustee to say something different. I shall link this view to a more extensive discussion of the social epistemology of strangerhood in the final chapter, where I will also seek to show how it differs from a ‘methodist’ theory of distanciation and from the ‘moralist’ intellectual tradition of ‘speaking the truth to power’. 27 Needless to say, this proposal about ‘inevitable’ epistemological circularity does not dodge its own logic to end in agonized self-refutation, but is itself deliberately offered as a circular statement. In my view, this reflexive, selfaffirming property does not invalidate or scandalize the proposal but precisely defines its intellectual (and ethical) virtue (cf. Herrnstein Smith 1997:47, 138, 147; extensively Pels 2000).

2 The proletarian as stranger 1 Heinzen sarcastically added that, unfortunately, this case did not validate the biblical proverb that ‘whoever lowers himself, shall duly be raised’ (1846:57). 2 Like Michels, Sombart, and Déat, de Man in fact positions himself on the crossroads of the latter two revisions. Sympathetically drawing upon Sorel, he argues for an ethical socialism, elite leadership and a strong state, and for a socialisme national which at a certain point in time will bring him in close vicinity to fascist ideas. See more extensively Chapter 5. 3 See Stirner’s critical remark on the spiritual self-alienation of the ‘involuntary egoist’: Sacred things exist only for the egoist who does not acknowledge himself, the involuntary egoist, for him who is always looking after his own and yet does not count himself as the highest being, who serves only himself and at the same time always thinks he is serving a higher being, who knows nothing higher than himself and yet is infatuated about something higher; in short, for the egoist who would like not to be an egoist, and abases himself (combats his egoism), but at the same time abases himself only for the sake of ‘being exalted’, and therefore of gratifying his egoism (1845:36) See also Bourdieu’s analysis of the ‘mystery of ministry’ and the fetishism of delegation (1991:203–19); and Connolly on the ‘transcendental egoism’ or ‘transcendental narcissism’ of those who seek to certify their contingent identities by tranforming them into naturalized or ontological necessities (1993:369, 373). 4 This translation is corrected both against the Tucker edition, which has ‘unique forms of existing reality’ (Marx and Engels 1972:9), and against the Colletti edition, which has ‘actual forms of existing reality’ (Marx 1975:207–8). 5 Feuer (1969:69) already pointed at the typical elitism of the head/heart metaphor. See also Gouldner’s apt commentary: The image of the proletariat that emerges from this is as the instrument and passive vessel through which reason and philosophy will be achieved; as providing philosophy with a ‘material basis’, which ‘philosophy’, being the

234 Notes ‘head’ of this emancipation, then guides, informs, emancipates—in other words, directs. Philosophy, the ‘head’—masculine, intelligent, and dominant; proletariat, the ‘heart’—feminine, feelingful, and passive. (1974:410–1) See also his comment on the Marxist contemplation of a possible ‘heart transplant’ which would replace the proletariat with another historical actor: students, blacks, third world forces, etc. (Gouldner 1973:120). See also Bauman on the Marxian vision of bridging theory and practice: ‘In the project of bringing together “those who suffer” and “those who think” the sufferers were assumed not to be thinking on their own, and the thinkers were accorded the task of bringing together’ (1987:175). 6 ‘The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination… These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way’ (Marx and Engels 1972:113). 7 In Lukàcs, the Proletariat, in representing the ‘objective possibility’ of the overcoming of reified consciousness, is the critical Intellectual. As Arato and Breines usefully point out, there are two enormous gaps in this conceptualization: ‘one is between the minimal consciousness of alienation of proletarian individuals and the self-consciousness of the class as the potential subject of history oriented towards the totality of capitalist society. The other is between the process of defetishization inherent in the life and work of the proletariat and the defetishizing movement of revolutionary theory itself (1979:136). See also Jay (1984:99ff). 8 ‘(The masses) originally included the large collectivity of those who in every respect were excluded from society—the great grey mass of people who are not persons, who represent quantity without quality…It is intriguing that even Marx, the actual founder of the doctrine according to which the proletariat turns into a class, characterizes the proletarian mass in his youthful writings… as the non-class, the non-society’ (de Man 1932:11–12). See also Stirner’s lucid characterization of the proletariat as ‘vagabond’ (1982:112–15). 9 See Mannheim’s more radical approach to intellectual rivalry in early essays such as ‘Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon’ (1952:191ff; Pels 1998a: 225ff). Subsequently, Mannheim appeared to revert to a more traditional distinction between political and academic discussion, which turned the partisan struggle among ideologies and utopias into an affair which was largely external to science itself. Political discussion was virtually identified with propaganda, which sought not simply to be in the right ‘but also to demolish the basis of its opponent’s social and intellectual existence’. It was ‘a rationalized form of the contest for social predominance’, while ‘knowledge’ merely aimed at disinterested classification (1968:34–6, 165–8). 10 This idyllic view of the historical place and calling of the intellectuals is reinforced by some of the a prioris of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, which is from the outset oriented towards the collective character of knowledge production. ‘Relationism’ entails a methodological preference for the analysis of group objectives, group power, and group interests; the existential, ‘irrational’ foundations of knowledge are primarily sought at the level of the collective unconscious (cf. 1968:28, 110). But this does insufficient justice to the differentiated character of situational determination, especially since intellectual dissidence, which brings individuals to resist taken-for-granted group beliefs, threatens to fall outside the field of vision. See also Chapter 7, note 11. 11 It is hardly fruitful to look for the point of entry of such vicious circles, although we may recall that the examination essay of the seventeen-year-old Marx already

Notes 235 demonstrates a strong sense of calling, in identifying (for the first, but certainly not the last time) ‘the well-being of humanity’ with ‘our own perfection’. We may also think of the concerned letters which Heinrich Marx sent to his son in Berlin, in which he speaks of ‘the demon which apparently inhabits and dominates your heart, and which is not given to every human being’, doubting at this stage whether it is ‘a good or an evil spirit’ (cf. Raddatz 1979:19–25). 12 This is a slightly more conflictual interpretation of the substance of Merton’s peroration to a well-known paper: ‘Insiders and Outsiders, unite. You have nothing to lose but your claims. You have a world of understanding to win’ (1973:136, cf. 129–30).

3 Speaking for social things 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8

Historiography as myth-making is not quite taken in the Sorelian sense of ‘myth’. Sorel does not question the Durkheimian separation between art and science but tends to take it for granted. Clearly separating ‘doing social science’ from ‘shaping men’s consciousness’ (former les consciences), his preference is for ‘social poetry’ rather than social science (Sorel 1921:186–8). The accuracy of the myth is an irrelevancy; it is not a description of things but an expression of wills (Roth 1980:19, 46; Sorel 1921:189; 1972; 26ff). It bears emphasis that Sorel’s peculiar synthesis of a ‘revolutionary revisionism’ operates precisely through this epistemological separation of Is and Ought; through a rather sharp distinction between the scientific description of social complexity and the simplifying, dichotomous, apocalyptic annunciation of a ‘moral catastrophe’. My different usage of myth views it as an instance of performative narrative which simultaneously expresses reality and a specific determination to act, hence as accommodating a natural mixture of explanation and adhortation (cf. Pels 1990, 1999b). In this perspective (and contra Elias 1978), the calling of social scientists is not simply to hunt down myths; they should also be concerned to replace weak myths by better ones. This fundamental methodological precept is of course shared with Weber, whose neoKantian axiom about the ‘absolute heterogeneity’ of factual and value statements is more principled than Durkheim’s version and has had a greater impact on the sociological conscience. Here I merely emphasize a methodological convergence which has been ‘ratified’ by Parsons’s familiar standardization of the classical tradition (Parsons 1968). See Lukes (1973:424–6). As in the case of Weber, these propositions paradoxically but significantly include the idea that facts and values are ‘naturally’ or ‘intrinsically’ separate and separable (cf. Pels 1990). Of course, this reversal is also captured by the splitting-and-inversion model of natural-scientific fact-making as suggested by Latour and Woolgar (1986); that is, if we explicitly pursue this as a critical account. See further Chapter 1. A prime example of this imperial motive is found in Durkheim’s ready adoption of the Saint-Simonian view that the economy is the social thing (Durkheim 1958:181, 236–9). See also Bryant (1985:36–40). For a useful inventory of critical debates about Durkheim’s Rules, see Gane (1989:69ff). Deepening this critical view—and taking an ‘intimist’ turn which Bourdieu would disapprove of—Durkheimian sociology can also be viewed as reified or alienated autobiography; as a flight from an insecure and ambitious self towards iron-clad objectivity and the cold, impersonal biography of social facts. See Alpert (1939:114). Perhaps this typicial sequence is most clearly revealed in the Preface to Suicide, where Durkheim insists that: 1) sociology must exist; 2)

236 Notes

9 10

11 12

13 14

that, hence, it must have an object all its own; 3) and so, there must be a reality that exists outside of individual consciousness (in order to establish the demarcation from psychology). In the same place, Durkheim also underscores ‘that there can be no sociology unless societies exist, and that societies cannot exist if there are only individuals’ (1951:37–8). However, social facts appear to have precisely that ‘borrowed existence’ (that precariousness or fragility) which elicits Durkheim’s ontological anxiety. Of course, this still leaves us with the problem how to account for the dominating constraints exercised by social realities which, as Durkheim says, are somehow greater than the individual himself. For similar statements, see Durkheim (1970:85) and (1975:109, 137–8). See the capital importance of rigorous definition in an intellectual system such as Durkheim’s. It is the initial definition which constitutes the scientific object and ensures that the sociologist ‘is immediately grounded firmly in reality’ (1982:74–6). Alpert has perhaps been the first to note this all-important function of definitions in Durkheim, and also to consider it ‘one of the weakest parts of his methodology’. In his view, this weakness is traceable to Durkheim’s failure ‘to appreciate the vital part played by initial hypotheses and a priori assumptions in scientific reasoning…Thus, his theory of definition ignores the crucial role of the definer, and seems to imply that somehow or other things define themselves’ (Alpert 1961:114). Coser substantially agrees that Durkheim’s definitions ‘may not give us…a “firm foothold on reality”, but they can give us a kind of privileged access to his own cast of mind’ (1960:219). On this, see also Giddens (1982) and Lukes (1982). See Marx’s famous assertion in Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ (1977:78–9), which evidently presupposes the more adequate vision of those who do know. This is a scientific version of the ‘oracle effect’ which Bourdieu describes in the context of ‘fetishistic’ political representation, in which the spokesperson likewise consecrates himself as an indispensable interpreter and mediator by producing the need for his own product, i.e. by producing the difficulty which he alone will be able to solve (Bourdieu 1991:210–11). See also Simon (1963:32–5, 45–6) on Comtists such as Littré and Lafitte, who exalted sociology as a science maîtresse which provided the basis of spiritual power and of effective social engineering. Hubert Bourgin was a former collaborator of l’Année sociologique who subsequently turned into a sympathizer with fascism. Having long lived under the spell of the ‘Durkheimian imperative’ (1938:470), he later penned the following vivid though perhaps exaggerated portrait of Durkheim as religiously devoted to his mission of instituting the science of sociology: Durkheim, aujourd’hui connu, et vanté, et aussi utilisé, exploité, comme le fondateur et le principal ouvrier de 1’école sociologique française, était sociologue par raison morale plus encore que par raison scientifique: la sociologie était pour lui le moyen, unique et sûr, de reconstituer la morale, dissoute par les conditions mêmes de la vie de nos sociétés trop vastes et trop distendues. Tout son être physique, toute sa personne morale 1’attestaient: il était prêtre plus encore que savant. C’était une figure hiératique. Sa mission était réligieuse…De même que le sociologue était armé, et seul armé, contre 1’indiscipline des moeurs, de même il était, et lui seul, contre 1’anarchie. Cet érudite et ce prêtre était done, comme ceux du Saint-Simonisme, en qui il se reconnaissait aussi des devanciers, un législateur. Les lois, les lois modernes, lui seul, avec les siens, était capable de les concevoir et de les formuler,

Notes 237 puisqu’avec la doc trine sociologique il tenait 1’unique inspiration, le moule unique. Et c’est pourquoi, et c’est en ce sens, qu’il était socialiste. (Bourgin 1938:218–20) See also several translated passages in Lukes (1973:367, 369, 377). 15 Interestingly, Carlyle noted that ‘It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things’ (1974:161). 16 Like Durkheim in his lectures on socialism, Jaurès appealed to the SaintSimonian tradition for this ‘third way’ liberal-socialist project of science-based social organization (cf. Jaurès 1903). 17 An intriguing reversal of this comparative judgement is provided by Sorel’s disparaging remark about the grands seigneurs of sociology, who effortlessly fabricate vast syntheses embracing a pseudo-history of the past and a chimerical future; adding virtuously that ‘socialism is more modest than sociology’ (Sorel 1921:58). 18 In this way, Durkheim came close to committing the same fallacy for which he had censured Belot in an earlier polemic: to present his personal view of socialism as the quintessence of it (Durkheim 1986:113). Durkheim’s ‘Note’ was written in reaction to a brief exposition by Belot which distinguished between an etatist and a co-operative version of socialism (Belot 1893). Once again, Durkheim employed his tried tactic of accusing the opponent of presenting a mere ‘idea’ of socialism, while himself offering a detached description of it as a ‘thing’. Commenting upon this polemic, Lapie early on turned the tables on Durkheim by concluding that the latter was ‘hampered in his research by a preconceived idea’. Lapie specifically objected to the organicism of Durkheim’s definition, which in his view placed far too much importance on the State, and excessively honoured politicians by describing them as the ‘brain’ of society (Lapie 1894; cf. Filloux 1977:268n, 302n). A similar point was made by Fouillée (1909:21). There is an extraordinary parallellism between Fouillée’s book and Durkheim’s courses on socialism, which at that time remained largely unknown. See also Filloux’s critical discussion (1977:263–9). 19 The earlier definition found in the 1893 ‘Note’ pressed another of Durkheim’s preferences upon the reader: ‘Socialism is a tendency that causes economic functions to move, either abruptly or progressively, from the dispersed state in which they exist, to an organized state’ (1986:118, my emphasis). Once again, Durkheim’s urge for an encompassing (and presumably noncontroversial) definition interfered with his evident sympathy for the reformist or ‘progressive’ option for socialism. 20 See also Bottomore’s quite Durkheimian conclusion that ‘despite the links— historical and institutional—between sociology and socialism they belong to quite distinct spheres. Socialism, as thought and action, arises from political interests and values; sociology, as a form of knowledge, from scientific values’ (1984:9). 21 In Parsons’ judgement, for example, Durkheim’s socialist leanings were largely classifiable as a juvenile sin. In his exposition of the four main stages of his theoretical development, socialism was barely mentioned; his discussion of corporatism was as meagre as it was deficient; while his suggestion that, on his own terms, Durkheim should be classified as a communist rather than as a socialist was manifestly unsound (Parsons 1968:310n, 338–42; cf. Giddens 1982:119). Nisbet devoted five pages to a discussion of Durkheim’s treatment of socialism and communism in order to conclude that his heart was not in it: ‘it can hardly be said that the subject was one of either great interest to him personally through most of his life or of significant consequence in the totality

238 Notes

22

23

24

25

of his work’ (1974:151). Instead, as I have argued, Durkheim’s heart was perhaps in it too much: the effort to sociologize socialism forced him into quite troublesome exercises in reconceptualization. It is also simply incorrect to hold, with Coser, that Durkheim rejected socialism; or to oppose Durkheim’s ‘abiding conservatism’ to the attitude of the liberal or radical thinker who contrasts an ideal with a real state (1960:214, 216). Alvin Gouldner’s views on Durkheim are intriguing because they are peculiarly unsettled, representing a transition towards the more radical Marxist standpoint which was adopted by Zeitlin and Therborn. In his 1958 introduction to Durkheim’s Socialism, Gouldner noted the tendency to overemphasize Durkheim’s Comtean heritage (especially in the wake of Parsons’ interpretation), thematized Durkheim’s polemic against Comte and his convergences with Marx, and ended up by conceiving of Durkheim’s work as an effort to mend the rift between Marxism and Comteanism—a compromise which led back to SaintSimon. In The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970), however, the rise of Durkheimian functionalism was associated with a ‘loss of historical imagination’ and a curtailment of the future-oriented perspective of early sociology that corresponded to the ‘mature entrenchment of the middle class’. Saint-Simon’s critical functionalism was now favourably contrasted with the unqualified functionalism of Comte, Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, and Parsons—a tradition which adopted ‘the need for social order and moral consensus’ as its perduring theme. Gouldner substantially repeated the list of ‘radical’ prejudices about Durkheim which Coser had already formulated; going so far as to debunk Durkheim’s critique of inheritance—which in 1958 was still marshalled as proof of his ‘Marxian’ leanings—as being not really ‘dangerous to the present’. Apparently, Gouldner’s initial impulse was to save Durkheim from Parsons and recruit him to his own project of negotiating between functionalism and Marxism; whereas in The Coming Crisis Durkheim was discharged without honour and held responsible for some of the more flagrant sins of Par-sonian functionalism (Gouldner 1970:107, 113, 117–18). As early as 1895 even Sorel, from his then-radical Marxist perspective, felt that Durkheim had ‘pushed his research as far as he possibly could without crossing the threshold to socialism; if he did, it would be a happy hour for social philosophy, because no scholar was as well prepared as he to introduce Marx’s theories into higher education’ (Sorel 1895:180). Schäffle clearly anticipates and informs Durkheimian (and Solidarist) ‘liberal socialism’, in its double demarcation against economic individualism and etatist socialism (cf. 1894:20, 55ff). Schäffle’s definition of socialism is adopted by Durkheim almost intact (e.g. 61), while Durkheim also copies the broad lineaments of Schäffle’s corporatism and his conception of the state as centre of social reflection. The centrality of Merlino’s work for French revisionist debates is exemplified by the fact that his distinction between a ‘socialism of the socialists’ and a ‘socialism of things’, and his expression about an ‘objective socialism’ was also repeatedly utilized by Sorel in his polemic against the ‘socialism of the Intellectuals’, as he saw it personified in Jaurès and Durkheim (e.g. Sorel 1982:90, 118). In his earlier formulation, Durkheim came close to the ‘third way’ project of a liberal socialism (or ‘a socialism in the service of individualism’) which would subsequently be formulated by Hendrik de Man and (perhaps most clearly) by the Dutch social-democratic theorist Jacques de Kadt (cf. Pels 1993). See the importance of moral individualism and the ‘cult of the individual’ in Durkheim (1970:261ff), and Jaurès’ view, stated as early as 1898, that socialism was the ‘logical completion’ of individualism (1931:88, cf. also 73, 87). For a concise

Notes 239

26 27

28

29 30

31

32

33

early statement of a liberal socialism which was heavily influenced by de Man, see Rosselli (1930). This ambivalence places Durkheim next to Weber, who often considered joining the SPD but never actually became a member. See Sorel’s early criticism, in an extended review of Durkheim’s first works, that ‘our author adopts the viewpoint of the statesman and writes for the statesman’ (1895:176). See also Lukes (1973:373–5) discussion of the ‘Durkheimianism of the State’, as it was defined in critical reactions of a.o. Péguy, Rolland, Massis, Besse, and Halévy. Bourdieu (1994:2) has likewise briefly remarked on the ‘state thinking’ towards which the Durkheimian system is biased. See the views of Lapie and Fouillée as reported in note 18. See Jaurès’s famous 1900 debate with Guesde on the deux méthodes of socialism, which ranged a spokesperson for ‘humanity’ against a standpoint theorist of the working class; and a socialism which, superseding all class antagonism, recognized universally valid ethical norms against a socialism which subordinated all spiritual values to class interests. To which Durkheim sharply retorted: ‘We know. You are the mass, you are a force. So what? Is that all you can say in justification?’ (1970:289). Sorel, like Lagardelle, dutifully excepted Marx and Engels from this sweeping damnation (Lagardelle 1907:222, 225–6; Sorel 1921:67n; 1976:78). Marxism was essentially anti-intellectualist and could not imaginably be the precursor of our socialisms universitaire (Lagardelle 1907:225). The intellectuals, Lagardelle added with significant verbalism, ‘are such because they are intellectualist’ (1907:506). This offered a flexible criterion which enabled the syndicalists to maintain that respected thinkers such as Marx, Proudhon or Owen were not intellectuals but penseurs or ‘ideologues’ who were motivated by theoretical convictions only and did neither share the ambitions nor the pretentions of the new aristocracy of thought (Lagardelle 1907:222, 226). See also Berth (1926:25–6), who failed to sufficiently counter the charge that the syndicalists were themselves intellectuals and hence were presumably capable of the same méfaits as the others. Elsewhere he recommended somewhat piously that ‘when one interprets a social movement, one should take it as it is and as it conceives of itself, rather than superimposing one’s own conception upon it’ (1926:288n)—as if the syndicalist myth of the general strike was not an intellectual representation but an immediate and natural emanation of the proletarian situation itself. On the next page, the myth of the general strike was said to express ‘the resurrection of a people becoming conscious of itself, of its complete personality, its spiritual unity, as an undivided whole…’ (1926:289). As Berth stipulated, only by giving primacy to intuition and action, as Bergson’s philosophy had recommended, could science be scaled down to a more modest function, denying it the status of an essential value (Berth 1926:259–60). This ‘right-wing’ intuition has meanwhile graduated into the core interest of constructivist science studies. Barrès’ first truly political novel, Les Déracinés (1897), described in detail how a group of young lycéens were uprooted from their Lorraine soil and cultural ancestry by the artificial school Kantianism of their republican professor, who turned them into ‘abstract’ men of reason and ‘abstract’ citizens of the Republic, who identified with ‘humanity’ rather than with concrete France, Frenchness, and Frenchmen. This universalist and secularrepublican ideal of school education was of course positively valued (as liberating rather than alienating) by the Durkheimians, while it also found an echo in Mannheim’s sociology of the free-floating intelligentsia (for Durkheim, education was ‘the nationalization as well as the socialization of the individual’ (Mitchell 1931:101)). This opposition clarifies the

240 Notes

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35

36

37

38

performative significance of both universalist and particularist descriptions in the essentialist mode. Defining the individual as an ‘abstract’ citizen or a particle of ‘humanity’ is simultaneously to abstract him forcibly away from local bonds and the prejudices of tradition; while defining him/her as ‘essentially’ rooted in the land and in tribal solidarity is to use equal force to ‘relocate’ him, to put him firmly in his place. See Barrès’ defence of la Haute Intelligence française, which contains a detailed plea for Science as a national productive force, as an armature for ensuring peace and for reinforcing the material power of the French nation (Barrès 1925). In Maurras’ earlier book on the future of ‘intelligence’ the term is used more loosely and ecumenically, referring simultaneously to the new dominance of the lettrés as to the historic opportunity for Intelligence to decide the historic contest between Gold and Blood, the Usurer and the Prince, the powers of Finance and the powers of the Sword (Maurras 1905:13–14). While maintaining on the one hand that ‘Everything useful and necessary undertaken by the Force of things, was misdirected or methodically contested by literary Intelligence’, Maurras also centrally included the noblesse de la plume in his conception of the future ruling elite (cf. Carroll 1995:76–8; Tannenbaum 1961:11). The splitting rhetoric and the play on identity/alterity would be closely copied by the Weimar antiintellectuals when they juxtaposed abstract, cosmopolitan Intelligent and concrete, nationally rooted Geist. See Chapter 4, note 20. Barrés also repeated Deroulède’s reverse formula: ‘There is no probability at all that Dreyfus is innocent, but it is absolutely certain that France is innocent’ (Barrès 1902:29). This literal notion about the ‘treason of the intellectuals’ was of course diametrically opposed to that popularized later by Benda (see further Chapter 6). For Berth, Jews such as Benda likewise personified the danger of ‘metaphysical’ rule and intellectualist aristocracy. The Jew was ‘this monster without entrails, this anachorete of the pure Idea, this abstraction turned into Man’, who stood in mortal opposition to the ‘carnal’, physical présence of the people in its concretely sensual, historical reality of blood, race and tradition (Berth 1914:40). Mitchell’s view that Durkheim’s hypostatization of (national) society foreshadowed and found a logical sequel in the integral nationalism of Maurras (1931:106) may be considerably overstated; but it is equally strained to deny all connection between them. It is evident, for example, that the universalist ideal of civic education, as promulgated by Durkheim and other republicans, factually implied the inculcation of a moderate cultural nationalism which was defined by the presumably unique ‘French spirit’, and hence aimed at the production of good Frenchmen—even though these good Frenchmen were of course different from those which Maurras wished to raise. It is easier to measure Durkheim’s social liberalism, his democratic corporatism, and his moderate loyalty to the patrie against Maurras’ more radical hypostatization of ‘France’ in terms of the horseshoe model of left-centre-right which I am developing here. The first long article which Sorel wrote for Péguy’s Cahiers de la quizaine was entitled ‘Socialismes nationaux’ (1902), in which he argued that each nation had a socialism of its own, according to its particular needs (cit. Curtis 1959:49). Maurras believed that a socialist, liberated from his democratic and cosmopolitan environment, could fit into nationalism ‘like a well-made glove into a beautiful hand’. The counter-revolution was in fact the combination of nationalism and socialism, for at the bottom of socialism there was a spirit of reaction, of conformity with the idea of traditional France against the bourgeoisie (Curtis 1959:50). The oxymoronic expression ‘conservative revolution’, which would be widely used in the Weimar Republic to (self)-identify a nationalist ‘German Socialism’, is found as early as 1900 in the writings of Maurras (cf. Nolte 1965:178).

Notes 241 39 As Déat wrote in 1934, collective regeneration could not be derived from the principle of class, which generated irreconcilable antagonisms, nor could it be undertaken in the name of humanity, which was a superior but abstract principle; it could only be undertaken ‘in the name of the nation, in the name of national solidarity, in the name of the general interest’. In the present period, it was unquestionably the nation and the general interest that were the true revolutionary principles (Sternhell 1996:179–80). In this fashion, Déat wedded Durkheimian notions about national solidarity and the national interest to a Sorelian/Barrèsian critique of ‘abstract’ humanism and a more exclusively Barrèsian conception of revolutionary nationalism. 40 The young Barrès of the first novels of the ‘Cult of the Ego’ significantly described himself as ‘étranger au monde extérieur, et même à mon moi passé, et à mes instincts, connaissant seulement des émotions rapides que j’airai choisies: véritablement Homme Libre’ (cit. Curtius 1921:31). Curtius pointedly argues that ‘In order to understand Barrès’ politics, one must acknowledge that it issued from the need of an unprooted intellectual who sought to enter into contact with the national energies’. It was an instructive contribution to the understanding of the psychological and sociological situation of the intellectual as type and the problematic of his political life (Curtius, 102). Another commentator drily agrees that ‘if there was ever a rootless intellectual it was Barrès’ (Stewart Doty 1976:153).

4 Missionary sociology between left and right 1 Mannheim began his teaching in Heidelberg in 1926 with a year-long seminar on Lukàcs’ book. In 1929 it was the subject of another seminar, offered in collaboration with Alfred Weber. 2 Kettler et al. (1984a:25ff) have argued that Mannheim’s Heidelberger Habilitationsschrift Altkonservatismus (1926) laid out a more ambivalent and ironic view of the intellectuals, as well as a notion of intellectual synthesis which was more modest than that expounded in Ideologie und Utopie of 1929. In the earlier work, Mannheim applied the appellation ‘socially free-floating intelligentsia’ primarily to the Romantic critics of the Enlightenment (which included Hegel and Marx as late examples), whose ‘romantization’ entailed a sociological and metaphysical alienation from bourgeois life and thought which was more dramatic than that of the Enlightenment thinkers. A negative trait in such free-floating intellectuals was that they were archetypical apologists, ‘ideologues’ who were masters at providing an intellectual foundation for any political cause they undertook to serve. But a positive side of their activity was that there always needed to be people ‘who are not so fully absorbed by their immediate connections that they only undertake the responsibility for the next step’ (Mannheim 1984:144–7). Kettler et al. emphasize that Mannheim’s earlier conception of synthesis is more proximate to Adam Müller’s concept of Vermittlung, which was less definitive and more ‘partisan’ than Hegel’s. In view of this, they find it significant that Mannheim’s manuscript breaks off precisely at the point where a more comprehensive discussion of Hegel is announced (1984b: 28–9, 32). 3 In view of this dialectic of totalization and estrangement, there is an intriguing chiastic opposition between Mannheim’s alienation theory of youth and Plato’s maturation theory about the education of the philosopher-king. 4 A transcript entitled ‘De sociologie der intellektueelen’ was published shortly after in the student’s weekly Propria Cures 244(7), 29 October 1932. Though briefly cited by Kettler et al. (1984a:69; see also Kettler and Meja 1995:80–3), it has remained virtually out of reach for those unfamiliar with the Dutch language.

242 Notes

5

6 7

8

9

10

As far as I have been able to ascertain, no German original exists, nor notes towards this end. A rough translation of Mannheim’s lecture was made in the early 1960s for David Kettler by E.W.Sikkema. My new translation has greatly benefited from the minute comments and criticisms raised by David Kettler and Volker Meja in their comparison with the Sikkema version. The lecture loosely follows and sometimes short-circuits the argument of ‘The Problem of the Intelligentsia’, written in German somewhere in the early 1930s, revised during Mannheim’s first years in England, but only published in translation in the mid1950s (Mannheim 1956); but it also displays a few novel accents and peculiarities which my following interpretation intends to highlight. For starters, see Michel Brélaz’s review of Hendrik de Man’s relationship to the Institute for Social Research (1985:557ff), Jay’s review of its members’ critique of Mannheim (1974), and Kettler and Meja (1990; 1995:108ff) on Mannheim and Tillich. See also Korte (1988:99ff) and Kilminster (1993) on the relationship between Mannheim and Elias. As Schivelbusch notes, there existed a wide consensus among all Frankfurters about sociology as ‘the key and pinnacle of all knowledge’ (1985:19). Heeren’s point about the novelty of the adverb ‘relatively’ in Mannheim’s later definition of the free-floating intelligentsia has a somewhat verbal ring (cf. Mannheim, 1968:137–8). It is also implausible that Mannheim proceeded from a normative towards a more scientific analysis of the modern intelligentsia. Rather, it appears that Mannheim continued an essentialist ‘discourse of identity’ about the intellectuals in which facts and values were inextricably mixed. Generally, I am led to think that the qualifications which Mannheim added in 1956 are clarifications of points which are implicit in the 1929 argument rather than constituting a new departure (compare e.g. 1956:111 and 1968:232). Struve (1973:359) argues that Mannheim continually hesitated between the two roles in Ideologie und Utopie. At times the difference indeed appears slight, as when Mannheim maintained that even the road of direct class affiliation ‘shows a tendency, even though it is unconscious, towards a dynamic synthesis’, so that ‘the intellectuals are still able to arrive at a total orientation even when they have joined a party’ (1968:142, 143). We may note, however, that the second road of self-analysis and the ensuing sense of political mission is still preferred as the more reflexively conscious one. In a more subdued manner, this view recurred in Mannheim (1935:7–10, 93ff), where he also referred to his earlier Gegenwartsaufgaben (1932b:115). The prime task of sociology was to synthetically represent the Strukturganzheit of society, translating the insights of the individual sciences towards the ‘interdependent thinking’ (Interdependenz-denken) which was required by planning (1935:201ff). This view was toned down slightly in the English version, even though sociology was still attributed guardianship of the work of synthesis and of representing ‘the whole of the problematic’ (Mannheim 1940:31–5, 41, 229ff). See also Mannheim’s contribution to Cattell, Cohen and Travers (eds) (1937:291–2, 300). The editorial is a manifesto for science as controller of human affairs through the medium of planning, and pleads a close co-operation between scientists and legislators in modelling social life after the pattern of scientific truths (5, 17). In the same volume, parallel (and hence competingly totalizing) cases were made by McDougall for psychology and Malinowski for social anthropology. As in the 1935 German version, Mannheim pleaded the formation of ‘a comprehensive framework in which the new knowledge in the various fields of learning can be fitted into place’ (1940:41).

Notes 243 11 ‘Authoritarian democracy’ was also the term increasingly used by Hendrik de Man in the years leading up to his collaboration in 1940 (cf. Chapters 5 and 6). 12 In the previous year, Mannheim had rejected the ‘undifferentiated’ class concept of a ‘dogmatic’ type of Marxism, and pleaded a refinement of the model of super- and substructure by incorporating not merely classes but also generations, status groups, sects, occupational groups, schools, etc. However, Mannheim did not intend to deny that class stratification was the most significant, ‘since in the final analysis all the other social groups arise from and are transformed as parts of the more basic conditions of production and domination’ (1968:247–8). This is a refined Marxism, not a transcendence of Marxism, as Kettler and Meja (1993) have it. More distance from historical materialism is taken in Mannheim (1940:19–22), but even here one encounters important residues of the basis-superstructure model. 13 Against interpretations such as forewarded by e.g. Jay (1984:207) and Ringer (1969:425ff), Kettler and Meja consider it a ‘decisive misunderstanding’ of Mannheim’s ‘admittedly ambiguous’ thesis about the role of the socially unattached intelligentsia to depict it as functionally equivalent to the classconscious proletariat. Its synthetic operations are more nearly ‘catalytic’ than ‘determinative’, and the synthesis is more like a ‘process’ than an ‘achieved state’ (1988:624–5). But if the class-conscious proletariat to some extent represents a ‘character mask’ of the intelligentsia, it is not so much a switch of functional roles but a switch of ideological fronts which is at issue here. 14 See note 2. 15 The most popular left-wing intellectual journal Die Weltbühne at that time counted a circulation of ca. 13 000 (Demant 1971:72). 16 Both Zehrer and Fried had studied with Werner Sombart in Berlin, who subsequently also contributed to Die Tat and published his Deutscher Sozialismus in 1935. Hugo Holborn, who like Mannheim lectured at Heidelberg until 1930, recalled that ‘one used to say in Heidelberg that the Tat was composed in the cellar of the Insosta (Institut für Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften). This was of course only metaphorically true’ (cit. Struve 1973:358, n17). 17 It is useful to recall at this point that Kautsky’s more subdued formulations of the problem in his summa of historical materialism (Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung, 1927) were directly inspired by his rejection of Hendrik de Man’s notion of an autonomous Intelligenzler-Sozialismus, as developed by the latter in Zur Psychologic des Sozialismus of 1926. De Man had not hesitated to use the class vocabulary in his sociological identification of the intelligentsia. Zehrer explicidy refers to this debate, and proves himself as much inspired by de Man as by Mannheim. De Man’s widely-discussed book had likewise been issued by Diederichs, the right-wing publisher of Die Tat, to which journal de Man also contributed several articles before its radical turn of 1929. After Mannheim’s move from Heidelberg to Frankfurt, where de Man was already employed as a Privatdozent in social psychology, they became mutually sympathetic though distant colleagues. 18 In an announcement of the restyled Tat in September 1929, this ambition was phrased as follows: ‘In the upheaval of our times once again a spiritual stratum must build itself which, in the struggle between capitalist and mass thinking, is prepared to sustain spiritual over and above other values and to depart from them for the reconstitution of reality’ (cit. Demant 1971:32–3). 19 An interesting contemporary version of the same idea, which remained virtually unknown as a result of linguistic marginality, was provided by the Dutch liberal-socialist theorist Jacques de Kadt, who was significantly influenced by Mannheim’s ‘third way’ (e.g. de Kadt 1935; cf. extensively Pels 1993).

244 Notes 20 Demant (1971:53ff) follows Sontheimer in overemphasizing Zehrer’s antiintellectualism (and in underestimating the intellectual quality of ‘revolutionary conservatism’ more generally). For Zehrer and other writers on the radical right, the appellation ‘intellectual’ was normally reserved for left-wing, rationalist, and Jewish thinkers, whereas their own kind was preferably included in a new völkische elite of Geist. However, Zehrer is far from consistent in opposing Geist to Intelligenz, as is of course evidenced by the title and contents of his 1929 programmatic article. This war of self-identifying and other-identifying words is part of the ‘battle of intellectuals against intellectuals’ which Nolte describes as ‘one of the most fascinating phenomena of the twentieth century’ (1965:80). On the opposition between Geist and Intelligent in Germany see also Habermas (1989:76–7). 21 Freyer had been closely involved with Die Tat far before this date; his first article in the journal dated from 1919. Die Tat had also carried Spengler’s laudatory review of Freyer’s war book Antaüs, which had been published by Diederichs in 1918. 22 See also Freyer’s adjacent critical discussion of Weber’s theorem of fact/value separation (1964:207–12). 23 Freyer’s 1935 article ‘Die Gegenwartsaufgaben der deutschen Soziologie’ (the title of which immediately echoed Mannheim’s 1932 pamphlet) argued that German sociology represented ‘the German fate in the epoch of bourgeois society’ and did not describe a natural end state but a necessity for change (Lepenies 1985:414–15). In citing Eschmann’s activist article in Die Tat of a year before (Eschmann 1934), Freyer only repaid a debt incurred by Eschmann’s earlier favourable references to his Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft and Revolution von Rechts. 24 Commenting on Freyer’s Herrschaft und Planung (1933) in British exile, Mannheim advanced that the author was right in assuming that planning was not a purely theoretical act and that it was inconceivable without power. This agreed with his own contention that all thought was volitionally and existentially determined. The fascist element in Freyer’s formulations to which he objected was an over-emphasis on the power element to suggest that power/ violence constituted the really decisive phase of planning. Dictatorship, in Mannheim’s view, was incapable of eliminating conflicts in the real world or of abolishing the mobility of elements. Instead, it froze the life-giving mobility of those elements which had the best chances of discovering new adaptations (Mannheim 1935:155n; 1940:194n).

5 The dark side of socialism 1 Major sources on de Man’s thought and career are Brélaz (1985), Claeys-Van Haegendoren (1972), Dodge (1966, 1979), Sternhell (1983, 1996) and White (1992). See also Pels (1984; 1987). Uncle and godfather to Paul de Man, the subsequent founder of deconstructionism in literary studies at Yale University, Hendrik De Man maintained close ties with his nephew during the first years of the German occupation of Belgium, when the latter wrote his incriminating articles for the gleichgeschaltete press. Their relationship, and the different nature of their political and cultural collaboration in 1940–3 are extensively treated in the next chapter. 2 De Man’s name is conspicuously absent from Leszek Kolakowski’s otherwise monumental history of Marxist socialism (Kolakowski 1978). Martin Jay’s acclaimed study of the Frankfurt School initially misspelled de Man’s name, misrepresented the title and date of his major work, and indirectly suggested

Notes 245

3 4

5 6

7

8 9

10 11

12 13

that his critique of Marxism entailed a form of irrationalism; the spelling errors have been corrected in the 1996 edition (Jay 1973; 1996:87). Nelson and Grossberg’s grand parade of cultural Marxism (1988) does refer to Paul de Man, but fails to mention his uncle, the true initiator of cultural socialism. Examples of such neglect and misrepresentation abound both in the general and in the more specialized literature. This misinformation has only partially been repaired in the wake of the recent Paul de Man affair. See Dasenbrock’s description of Hendrik de Man as a ‘formidably erudite and cosmopolitan writer and thinker’ who produced a brilliant, ‘enormously complex and variegated’ oeuvre (1992b: 235–7). See also Turner’s recent assessment of de Man as a formative influence on the sociological work of Shils (1999:127–30). On Harold Laski’s similar views see Lassmann (1992:225). An earlier example concerning Mussolini is provided by his political opponent Rosselli (1930:69–70). Dasenbrock underscores that there were three main aspects of fascist ideology that appealed to intellectuals: it was seen as a ‘modernizing dictatorship’, as a ‘post-Marxist’ form of socialism, and as a theory of politics which offered room for art and the artist (1992b:234). This historical contiguity between fascism and Marxism was already asserted in the 1920s by Corradini, Spirito, and Mussolini (cf. Gregor 1969:296–9). Anticipations of the idea of an ideological kinship between socialism and fascism are found in Burnham (1941), Hayek (1944:124ff), and Orwell (1948; see Lassmann 1992; 216). In the Netherlands, this idea is encountered as early as 1937 in the political writings of Ter Braak, De Kadt and Tas (see extensively Pels 1993). See Nolte’s familiar definition: ‘Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy’. A footnote relativizes the supposed originality of this definition because, among other things, ‘the basic paradox is already contained in the term “conservative revolution”’ (Nolte 1969:40, 583). See the objections raised by, for example, Sand, Winock, and Julliard against Sternhell’s rehabilitation of the ideological stature of fascism (Pinto 1986). Hence Sternhell takes a position on the ideological parentage between Marxism and fascism which interestingly mediates between the opposite exaggerations of both Nolte and Gregor. Fascism is neither a kind of ombre portée of Marxism (Nolte), nor a heretical variant of it (Gregor), but a synthesis of a specific antirationalist and anti-materialist revision of Marxism and of the new integral and revolutionary nationalism (cf. Sternhell et al. 1994:3–5). The English translation does not mention neo-socialism but includes the phrase ‘and create a national form of socialism’ (1996:20). Donzelot likewise names de Man as the original inspiration of the entire ‘neosocialist’ current (1984:166n). This model is an adaptation of the one offered by Helmut Kreuzer (1968:352– 63). Another variant recurs in a curious pamphlet by Jerome Tucille (1971). Alford and Friedland (1985:411) propose a similar two-dimensional model which complicates the left-right dimension by means of a tangential differentiation between power struggles at the ‘situational’, ‘structural’, and ‘systemic’ levels. Another significant example is offered by Hans Freyer’s war book Antäus (1918), as discussed by Muller (1987:71). The starting point and symbol of this ‘conquest of the State by intellectuals’ was the state monopoly of education, ‘for public education is the means whereby the stratum of intellectuals perpetuates itself as a social group’ (de Man 1928:201).

246 Notes 14 For an extended comparison between de Man and Gramsci, see Brélaz (1985:309ff). Brélaz recalls that Gramsci commented negatively on de Man’s work from about 1929 on, as soon as he had read The Psychology of Socialism in Italian translation in his prison cell. At the other extreme of the Italian political spectrum, Mussolini reacted favourably to the book in a famous letter to de Man from July 1930. 15 Such a hermetic theory of motivation needs an escape category which is significantly supplied by the despised alter ego of the déclassé intellectual. De Man is no exception to the large population of intellectuals (Marx, Kautsky, Michels, Mannheim, Geiger, etc.) who, in anxious flight from their nightmare identity, exorcise the ghost of the eternal Bohemian. In de Man’s view, the inferiority complex of the declassed is close to that of workers in that it is dictated by the economic instinct of gain, while it is also fed by feelings of envy and egotism. The early propagandistic phase of socialism was studded with such unhappy characters: ‘ambitious though briefless barristers; unpromoted or discharged civil servants; pseudo-scientists (many of them schoolmasters); unsuccessful inventors; unpublished poets; painters overburdened with originality; the ragtag and bobtail of Bohemia’ (1928:226). It carries no small significance that de Man generously included both Marx and Lenin (from whom he virtually copied this list of invectives) in this ‘Bohemia of the declassed’. Perhaps equally significant is that, a few pages onwards, he still took some pride in referring to himself as ‘voluntarily declassed’. 16 See Marcel Déat’s revealing comment on de Man’s June Manifesto: ‘C’est parce que socialiste, parce que révolutionnaire, qu’il se ralliait de plus à une conception autoritaire de 1’Etat’ (cit. Sternhell 1983:162). 17 Sternhell is quite mistaken in identifying de Man’s planiste advocacy of a measure of class collaboration or national solidarity with nationalism pure and simple. He chooses to neglect all the relevant sources which document de Man’s vocal critique of and consistent opposition to nationalism, both before the war and after. Apart from misreading The Psychology of Socialism on this count, he also fails to discuss obvious sources such as de Man (1931b; 1931c; 1946).

6 Treason of the intellectuals 1 For apologetic versions of this view, see Felman (1992); Hartman (1989) and Norris (1988a; 1988b); more critical of de Man’s convoluted amnesia about his former ‘literary fascism’ are Carroll (1995), Corngold (1989a; 1989b), Dasenbrock (1992b), Jay (1988), Kaplan (1989), Lehman (1991) and Mehlman (1989). 2 ‘The massive betrayal by the intellectuals of the demands of the spirit does not reside in the fact, as Julien Benda claims, that they have wished to become leaders of the masses, but inversely, in the fact that they have become servants of the crowd, salaried providers of goods that agree with the taste of the masses’ (Hendrik de Man 1931:90). 3 As argued in Chapter 1, it is not argumentative circularity itself which poses the major problem, but the forgetfulness about a circularity which I take to be inevitable and fecund. 4 Among which was the claim, in the New York Times article of 1.12.87 which first reported about Paul de Man’s wartime writings, that his uncle had been part of a collaborationist government in Belgium. More informed and balanced accounts of the relationship between the two de Mans are found in the Responses volume (Hamacher et al. (eds) 1989), especially in the chronology

Notes 247

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6

7

8 9

and the contributions by De Graef, Fries, Kaplan, and Colinet. See also Dasenbrock (1992b), Felman (1992:124–8) and Lehman (1991:192ff). There is a much more elaborate introduction to Hendrik de Man earlier in Norris’ book, apparently written before the discovery of his nephew’s philofascist writings, which suggests that his example had ‘a very definite bearing’ upon the content of his nephew’s literary criticism from the 1950s and early 1960s, since it illuminates at least one cause of the ‘profound disenchantment with politics’ which is obliquely expressed there. It is rather far-fetched and circumlocutory to relate Paul de Man’s political disenchantment of the 1950s to ‘the sobering memory of his uncle’s experiences in the interwar years’ (1988b: 17, 24–5). The same judgement applies to MacCannell’s view that it was the uncle’s involvement with schemes such as the Plan of Labour ‘that left Paul de Man with his abiding distrust of premature totalizing theories’, and that Paul de Man was ‘perhaps scrupulous to a fault to avoid repeating the mistakes of his notorious relative’ (cit. Norris 1988b:73–4). It was all much closer to home. This approach is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s similar effort to show how Heidegger’s political ontology ‘refracted’ the Conservative Revolution within the relatively autonomous field of philosophy (1988:9–14). In the case under consideration, a theory of refraction relieves the double strain of either having to reduce de Man’s early journalism to pro-Nazi writings (Wiener 1988) which served to ‘put high culture at the service of Nazi Europe’ (Sternhell 1989), or to view them as having no marked political bias at all (Stengers 1990:44). Bourdieu’s approach is usefully seconded by Carroll’s (1995) careful investigation of ‘literary fascism’, which must not be seen as an ‘outside’ application of fascist ideology to literature but brings out their ‘internal’ articulation. In exploiting the totalizing tendencies implicit in literature itself, literary fascism simultaneously promotes the politicization of literature and the aestheticization of politics, focusing the organic unity of the work of art as both an aesthetic and political ideal. In placing supreme confidence in the formative powers of art and literature, literary fascism does not subordinate itself to politics but strives to refashion the political after its own image. Its assertion of the primacy of the political in the literary field actually implies a reverse claim about the priority of literature over politics. On this view, political extremism and the defence of the integrity of culture are not polar opposites but constitute one and the same position. Paul de Man’s interest in defending the autonomy and integrity of literature, for example, was not antithetical to but formed the very basis of a political position that was nationalist, collaborationist, and profascist (Carroll 1995:7–9, 15, 249, 260–1). Similarly dual positions were taken by German conservative revolutionaries such as Heidegger and Freyer on the autonomy of a nationalist and politicized philosophy (or social science) and on academic freedom more generally. The purification tribunals fixed April 1, 1942 as the beginning of punishable collaboration. Hendrik de Man was considered an exceptional case, although he had renounced all public activity in the Fall of 1941 and had left Belgium in the following spring. Paul de Man was not indicted after the War, although he had continued to write for Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land well towards the end of 1942. On the issue of socialisme national see also Brélaz (1976) in response to Kramer (1976). As, for instance, in an article on Jünger in Het Vlaamsche Land, 26–7.7.1942, where he supposed that the formula of future European literature was contained in the fusion of Germanic mythical romanticism and French rational humanism (1988:321). See also Norris’ extended discussion of Paul de Man’s ambivalence on this point (1988b:159, 185–9).

248 Notes 10 See de Man’s remark about Montherlant: ‘What strikes one in the first place is not the psychological but the mythical element, his pantheistic veneration of natural primal forces, the persistent revelation of an overwhelming sensuality miles apart from all cerebral analysis’ (1988:305). 11 See the parallel sentiment in his review of a book by Drieu la Rochelle, where de Man sympathetically canvassed the author’s ‘anti-rationalist’ thesis, which overturned the primacy of mind over body in order to effect a unification of spiritual and purely physical values (1988:170). See also his views on Baudelaire’s poetry (1988:315). 12 Belgium’s first explicitly anti-Jewish ordinance, after an earlier one that aimed at Jews only indirectly, was passed in October 1940, a full five months before this article was written. It required that Jews register with the government and expelled them from the professions of law, teaching, journalism, and government service. 13 Probably the piece was written reluctantly and under pressure, reflecting the slight cowardice of someone who was in fear of jeopardizing his livelihood. Commentators such as Colinet, Sluszny, Jaeger, and Goriely testify to the general paucity of anti-Semitic statements in de Man (Hamacher et al. 1989:xv, 431, 434–6). See also Brenkman, Fries and Kaplan (in idem 32, 197–8, 273–5) for balanced interpretations which put the matter in historical perspective. Nevertheless, Carroll’s more critical assessment that Paul de Man replaced a vulgar anti-Semitism with a more sophisticated version which ‘despite its sophistication, was rooted in exactly the same myths as the vulgar version’ (1995:256) appears more on target here. See also notes 14 and 15. 14 That the anti-Semitic slant in Paul de Man’s writings was not a matter of a single isolated article is borne out by his evident admiration for Péguy and the latter’s ethical, neither-left-nor-right and anti-Semitic socialism. When reporting about Péguy’s meandering political career, de Man briefly laments the disproportionate role which was played by the Dreyfus Affair in the history of France, which, all things considered, was little else but ‘un grand fait divers’ (Le Soir 6.5.1941). Both Derrida (1989:147) and Norris (1988b:188) appear uncritically to footstep de Man in presenting Péguy as a Dreyfusard rather than a disenchanted Dreyfusard, and leave out all the militant nationalism of his later years (on Péguy’s aesthetic national socialism, see e.g. Carroll 1995:42ff). See also de Man’s anti-Semitic juxtaposition of Germans and Jews in Het Vlaamsche Land, 20.9.42. 15 Kaplan likewise suggests that the article appears motivated by an elitist sentiment much more than by racial thinking (Hamacher et al. 1989:273). Only in this sense is Derrida somewhat right when pronouncing that the critique of vulgar anti-Semitism is the ‘primary, declared, and underscored intention’ of the article. But this does not imply, as he scandalously goes on to suggest, that de Man, by condemning vulgar anti-Semitism, condemned anti-Semitism itself ‘inasmuch as it is vulgar, always and essentially vulgar’ (1989:143). On the contrary: de Man’s sophisticated, spiritualized anti-Semitism is quite compatible with the intellectual arrogance of an attitude which abhors vulgarity also in other beliefs. Derrida’s long-winded and reluctant coming-toterms with a piece of really bad news demonstrates the sheer convenience of his method of on the one hand/on the other hand (135ff)—which I venture to interpret here as another instance of intellectual treason. Felman argues with Derrida that Paul de Man’s silence, ‘although unspoken, speaks for itself, i.e. that his entire work bears implicit witness ‘to the very blindness of all witnessing’ (1992:133, 138–9). As an absent spokesperson for de Man’s silence, Felman perversely transforms a reflexive argument about the contestability of all witnessing into an absolution of literary fascism, anti-

Notes 249

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18 19 20

Semitism, political collaboration, and the convenient forgetting of all this in de Man’s subsequent writings. Cf. Lehman’s criticisms of Felman’s flattery and of what he calls Derrida’s ‘slithering elusiveness’ (1991:234ff). At this point de Man rather piously disclosed that, in the course of a schoolyard fight, he had stood up for a Jewish classmate who was jumped ten to one, ‘although he did not inspire any sympathy in me’ (1941:84). That the matter of ‘the protection of the race’ was taken very seriously at this time is borne out by point 9 of the secret programme, dated 19 June 1940, which de Man submitted to the King in preparation of a provisional government. It ran as follows: ‘Protection of the race and step-by-step reduction of the number of foreigners, given due respect for the commandments of humanity and the suppression of all illegal action’ (Claeys-Van Haegendoren 1972:398). Nothing of this was retained in de Man’s publicized Manifesto of June 28. There is a curious and crucial discrepancy between the Dutch version and Dodge’s translation, which has ‘step-by-step education of foreigners’ (1966:268)! This whole passage was left intact in the 1948 version (101–2). One of which occurs in The Remaking of a Mind, where de Man made a fleeting connection between the doctrinaire character of Bolshevism and the abstract cosmopolitanism of the ‘Jewish spirit’ (1919:85). This, to be sure, is precisely the gist of de Man’s explanation of the function of anti-Semitism in his Au-délà du nationalisme of 1946.

7 Strange standpoints 1 For further discussion of feminist standpoint theory see also the recent Signs symposium, especially Hekman (1997) and various responses by Hartsock, Hill Collins, Harding, and Smith. See also Hekman (1999). 2 I shall not dwell here on the exquisite parable of Tiresias, the blind seer, who lived seven years as a woman and seven years as a man—which triggers a welter of suggestive thoughts about the logic and limits of standpoint theory. 3 Translation modified. The Italian ‘coloro che disegnano e paesi’ may leave some ambiguity on this point, but the 1988 Cambridge translation ‘those that draw maps’ appears definitely unsound. Rather than referring to cartography, disegnare is equivocal between painting or picturing and describing. The recent 1998 Oxford translation appropriately reverts to ‘those who paint landscapes’. 4 See the antagonistic collusion between Afrikaner nationalism (cf. O’Meara 1983) and radical Afrocentric thought (cf. Asante 1989). Both Gilroy and Hall comment on the uncanny similarities between white racism and its black inversion (Gilroy 1993:34: Hall 1996:445, 472). Rattansi (1995:257) emphasizes that the language of difference and ethnicity has no necessary political belonging, and likewise points to apparently incongruous alliances such as those between cultural racists of the British New Right and British Muslim communities, or black nationalists such as Farrakhan and the white American extreme right. See also Goldfarb (1998:146ff) on Malcolm X and the legacy of black nationalism in the USA. 5 A note on terminology: often the notion of identity politics is deployed in opposition to traditional, supposedly ‘other-directed’ standpoint theories of class and nation. The Black feminist Combahee River Statement, for example, is explicit in its declaration that the ‘most profound and most radical politics comes out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression’. Citing the statement, Harding duly recalls that Hegel was not a slave, and that Marx, Engels, and Lukács were not proletarians (1993:62).

250 Notes

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Feminists, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly female, while most antiracists are themselves ‘people of colour’. Still, as my subsequent argument will clarify, there are fissures and ambiguities in such self-oriented politics which make the identifications upon which it rests rather less than self-evident. On the one hand, it is open to question in what sense feminist intellectuals actually speak for ‘their own’ when speaking for women in general. On the other hand, there is a strong sense in which, for example, Marxist intellectuals actually are the proletariat, not simply because they represent it politically and intellectually, but because they ‘duplicate’ themselves in the concept of the proletariat, which acts as a projective screen for their own ambitions and interests (cf. Chapter 2). Some of the arbitrariness of this claim is suggested by Nietzsche’s view (representing a broader elitist tradition), that there is better vision from the top (from the dominant Herrenmoral), and an urge to falsify from the standpoint of deferent and reactive ‘slave morality’. Nietzsche also unearths and criticizes the false identity play of ‘ascetic’ intellectuals posing as ‘the people’ which I am targeting throughout this book (Nietzsche 1996). See Judith Grant’s (1993) criticism of the reification of categories such as ‘woman’ and ‘experience’. See also the black essentialism and ‘nativism’ of, for example, Senghor (1993) and Asante (1989), as also recently defended in the journal Race Traitor. Neither feminist nor postcolonial theorizing have entirely freed themselves from essentialist identity readings, viz. the residual attraction of a ‘strategic essentialism’ in the work of, for example, Spivak, Hall, Gilroy, Rattansi, Fuss, or Braidotti. In Appiah such ‘strategic essentialism’ most clearly borders on an endorsement of the ‘ennobling lie’ (1995:106). See Althusser’s familiar argument that ‘the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state: the superstructures are never seen to step respectfully aside before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the “last instance” never comes’ (1970:113). This is echoed by feminists such as Bordo (‘Gender never exhibits itself in pure form…’) (1990:150) and Alcoff and Potter (1993:3–4). The latter likewise distance themselves from the conventional feminist commitment to gender as the primary axis of oppression, arguing that it can never be observed as a pure or solitary influence, but always appears in complex inter-relationship with other systems of identification and hierarchy. See the parallel expressions in Butler, whose performative theory of gender familiarly focuses upon the politics of representation, arguing that gender attributions are not expressive but performative, and that political signifiers such as ‘woman’ operate as performative rather than representational terms (1990:141; 1993:208–10). See also Seidman on homosexuality and queer theory, who registers that among the consequences of the constructionist questioning of essentialist (sexual) identities has been ‘the loss of innocence within the gay community’ (1997:139). See also Mohanty (1995) and other contributions to Nicholson and Seidman (1995). In Richard Wright’s novel The Outsider (1953), the white hunch-backed district attorney Ely Houston, talking to Wright’s protagonist, the educated black fugitive Cross Damon, identifies himself with blacks as a self-proclaimed outsider: Negroes as they enter our culture, are going to inherit the problems we have but with a difference. They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time. Every emotional and cultural convulsion that ever shook the heart and soul of Western man will shake them.

Notes 251 Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews…They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak…Coloured people have to wait a long time before getting what they have a right to. While they wait, they adjust themselves to living in a kind of No Man’s Land…Now, imagine a man inclined to think, to probe, to ask questions. Why, he’d be in a wonderful position to do so, would he not, if he were black and lived in America? A dreadful objectivity would be forced upon him. (Wright 1965:129, cf. 133) 11 In choosing the path of the stranger, we may also escape the constraints of an overly collectivist sociology of knowledge (cf. Harding 1991:59; Mannheim 1968:3–4, 25–9), which insufficiently acknowledges that innovative knowledge is often created in estrangement from or opposition to group beliefs and group values. Once again, this is a strong point of traditional individualist epistemology; it also calls for a more serious consideration of the psychology of knowledge (in the venerable tradition of Stirner, Nietzsche, and Freud) to complement and complete one-sided sociological approaches. This is effected not so much by reinstating the cognitive over against the social, but by theorizing the standpoints of marginal individuals. 12 At first sight, this may seem close to Bauman’s view that universality arises out of estrangement and that ‘the standpoint of the exile is the only cognitive determinant of universally binding truth’ (1991:84). In my conception, however, the stranger cannot be universalized in this manner, since (s)he precisely escapes the traditional opposition between the ‘immaculate conception’ of the transcendental subject and the immediate transposition of particularity into universality which is undertaken by traditional standpoint theories. 13 On this intrinsic circularity of standpoint theory see more extensively Grant (1993) and Prins (1997). 14 The slippage between ‘woman’ and ‘feminist intellectual’ is also evident in Smith (1988:52, 58, 86). See Lukács’ view that ‘historical materialism grows out of the “immediate, natural” life-principle of the proletariat; it means the acquisition of total knowledge of reality from this one point of view. But it does not follow from this that this knowledge or this methodological attitude is the inherent or natural possession of the proletariat as a class (let alone of proletarian individuals). On the contrary…’ (1983:21). 15 A telling example of such projections is provided by Kristeva’s somewhat hysterical intellectualization of experiences such as pregnancy and maternity and her depiction of woman as generically dissident and ‘exiled’, in a text which explicitly treats of the emergence of a new type of intellectual (1986:296–8). 16 But see note 4. Is this love Platonic or is it a more earthly, bodily, lesbian love? It is not far-fetched (or, I guess, overly-insulting) to surmise that lesbian intellectuals creatively mix the two. In any case, lesbian feminists have had an exemplary function for the movement as a whole (cf. Haraway 1991:137–8, 144), perhaps on account of their double (or triple, in the case of black lesbian feminists) experience of marginality. See de Lauretis on lesbians as ‘eccentric subjects’ (1990:145). 17 In her brief criticism of Bell Scott, Hill Collins is incidentally aware of this conflation between women and feminists (1991:19). 18 It is telling that Hill Collins, while promoting the idea of an anti-positivist potential slumbering in Afrocentric female culture, voices satisfaction that the values and ideas which an Afrocentric feminist epistemology identifies as characteristically Black ‘often bear a remarkable resemblance to similar ideas

252 Notes claimed by feminist scholars as characteristically “female”’ (1991:206–7). Apparently, an anti-positivistic dialogical theory of knowledge can be accessed from a variety of primary locations and perspectives, which are all identifiable as standpoints of ‘outsiders within’. See Harding’s view that the subject of liberatory feminist knowledge ‘must also be the subject of every other liberatory knowledge’ (1993:66–7). 19 Other criticisms of the ‘intellectualist fallacy’ from within feminism itself include de Lauretis (1990:121–2), Alcoff and Potter (193:14), and Mohanty (1995:71, 74). Mohanty targets what she calls the ‘feminist osmosis thesis’, which declares that ‘females are feminists by association and identification with the experiences which constitutes us as female’, so that feminism is a mere effect of being female rather than a highly contested political terrain where ‘we cannot avoid the challenge of theorizing experience’. Grant points to the same gap and tension: ‘if “woman” and “feminist” were the same thing…women could speak for themselves and would not have to be spoken for in elaborate academic discussions’ (1993:115). 20 In her recent work, Harding spells out more clearly that, although each of us occupies a determinate location in the matrix of social relations and oppressions, that location does not determine one’s consciousness (e.g. 1995:345).

8 Privileged nomads 1 Three more, quite disparate examples: 1) a recent symposium on ‘Spirituality and Business Management’ in Amsterdam featured a talk entitled ‘The Manager as Spiritual Nomad’, delivered by a university lecturer who evidently also imagined herself as one; 2) Sokal’s (1996) well-known hoax article, which triggered another incendiary round in the ‘science wars’, is cleverly entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’; 3) Kitaj’s First Diasporist Manifesto (1989) offers a peculiar (painterly) aesthetization of the presumed pariah condition of Jewish homelessness as a radically universalist form of witnessing. 2 See also his double romanticization of the exilic experience, both in its riskiness and ‘essential sadness’, and in its promise of mobile, plural, or ‘contrapuntal’ thought: Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience…Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure…Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew. (Said 1990:365–6) 3 One could add the contributions of an older tradition of right-wing political existentialism, as exemplified by Marinetti’s glorification of movement, speed, transgression, and exuberance, or Schmitt’s familiar notions of the ‘limit concept’, the ‘limit attitude’, and the ‘state of exception’ (cf. Schmitt 1996). 4 Another eloquent instance of intellectualist romantic hyperbole is found in Gabriel: By their intensity both in communication and the immediacy of their memory, nomads reflect par excellence the lifestyle of a free people. The impact of their art and their way of life has two important aspects: 1. The fundamental idea that all life, experience and existence is without fron tiers

Notes 253 or boundaries. 2. The foundational idea of not glorifying fulfillment in terms of territory or resources. Life of sedentary or settled peoples is mostly controlled by state apparati, codified and written laws, and is dictated by resources which they transform and use. In nomadic thought, all human settlement, related to the availability of resources, is only temporary. Nomads reject the formation of the state because it curtails their freedom of movement…Nomads have thus developed a way of life, and an aesthetic attitude, which defy and critique both the settlement and art inspired by the state…Intrinsic to the nomadic mode of expression is an ever-constant shifting of its form and content and the relationship among them and their audience. (Gabriel 1990:398–7, 406) 5 See also Mouffe’s view of cultural identity as resulting from ‘permanent hybridization and nomadization’: ‘By accepting that only hybridity creates us as separate entities, it affirms and upholds the nomadic character of every identity’ (1994:110–11). 6 Spivak, for example, identifies as a common cause of both deconstruction and feminism ‘an espousal of, and an attention to, marginality—a suspicion that what is at the centre often hides a repression’ (1990:378). 7 Critical of the traditional notion of the ‘field’ as place or home, Clifford emphasizes the essential aspect of mobility of cultures, and the importance of boundary areas (such as beaches) and of ethnographers and informants as boundary people: In tipping the balance toward traveling as I am doing here, the ‘chronotype’ of culture (…) comes to resemble as much a site of travel encounters as of residence, less a tent in a village or a controlled laboratory or a site of initiation and inhabitation, and more like a hotel lobby, ship, or bus. If we rethink culture and its science, anthropology, in terms of travel, then the organic, naturalizing bias of the term culture—seen as a rooted body that grows, lives, dies, etc.—is questioned. Constructed and disputed historicities, sites of displacement, interference, and interaction, come more sharply into view. (1992:101) Subsequently, following Morris (1988), Clifford exchanges the ‘bourgeois’ hotel setting for the more appropriately bohemian motel metaphor. Chambers rather prefers the perspective of a ‘leaky habitat’ in order to emphasize ‘a more open-ended sense of dwelling in culture’ (1994b). Even more wet, Gilroy elaborates the image of the (slave) ship as a moving micro-system of cultural hybridity and as metaphoric for Black diasporic culture (1993:4, 12, 16). 8 See also how exile is simultaneously intellectualized and universalized in an earlier text: Our present age is one of exile. How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex, and identity? Writing is impossible without some kind of exile. (Kristeva 1986:298) 9 See Gilroy’s pertinent critique of Bauman’s privileging of the diasporic experience of Jews as ‘the only non-national nation’, which in his view typifies a distinct Eurocentrism, and represents a misguided attempt ‘to lodge the dynamic interplay between modernity and ethnic particularity into the

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overloaded encounter between friends, enemies, and strangers’. Slaves stood opposed to their masters and mistresses as neither simply enemies nor strangers (Gilroy 1993:213–14). See also Harman’s view that the modern stranger, who for Simmel and Schutz was still an exception, has now become the rule: ‘to be marginal is, paradoxically, to be in the mainstream’ (1988:93, 159). Analogous accounts could be given of right-wing nationalist representations of the Nation. In an earlier chapter, I have already noted the curious parallelism between the Marxist theory about the Entfremdung—ultimately economic—of the proletariat and the radical-nationalist theory about the—political and cultural—Uberfremdung of the nation. See also Hitler’s description of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a ‘dictatorship of Jewish intellectualism’ in his closing address to the 9th Party Congress of the NSDAP in Neurenberg, September 1937. Susan Bordo has effectively criticized the deconstructivist fantasy of dislocation and ceaseless movement as a reinvention of the transcendentalist ‘view from nowhere’ in a new ‘dream of being everywhere’ (1990:142–3). Wolff likewise argues that the imagery of travel and nomadism, by suggesting ungrounded and unbounded movement, feeds an exclusivist deception, since ‘we do not all have the same access to the road’ (1995:128–9). See also Kaplan (1996: passim). Friedman similarly targets the ideology of hybridity as a form of intellectual porkbarreling of ‘the highly educated world travellers of the culture industries’, i.e. those who can actually affords cosmopolitan identity (1997:81). Van der Veer agrees in the same volume that ‘The celebration of hybridity, syncretism and multiculturalism in Cultural Studies needs to be examined critically. Bhabha’s claim that one can bring newness into the world, that one can reinvest oneself when one is writing from the cultural interstices, is a conceit of the literary-producing and consuming world’ (1997:102). See also Mitchell (1997). In strenuous efforts to imitate Nietzsche’s stylistic pluralism, and to accentuate Bakhtinian insights in the hybridity of language (cf. Bhabha 1994:59; Braidotti 1994:36–7; Haraway 1991:176, 181; Young 1995:20ff). See also the addiction to ‘new literary forms’ in constructivist science studies (e.g. Ashmore 1989). See the flirtation with multiple marginality in Lorde: As a forty-nine year old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an inter-racial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. (1984:114)

Or the celebration of ‘dual ethnicity’ in the image of the ‘Black Indian’ in hooks (1992). But see also the resistances against such ‘additive’ models of oppression in recent feminist standpoint thinking (Hill Collins, 1991). 16 ‘If fragmentation and an unstable identity are the defining characteristics of the poststructuralist condition, women have always been poststructuralist…’ (Braidotti 1996:20). The (Dutch) book where this statement appears (Wekker and Braidotti 1996) offers a range of telling examples of the ‘nomadic narcissism’ which I am criticizing here. 17 Alcoff and Potter more prominently thematize the ‘contradictory’ position of academic feminists, and worry ‘that we will commit the “metonymic fallacy” once again by assuming that what is liberatory for us is liberatory for all women’ (1993:14). See also Ahmed’s (1996:142) misgivings about the idealizing risk of Davies’ (1994) model of black migratory subjectivity.

Notes 255 18 Such expressions are curiously reminiscent of the theme of thinking as ‘living dangerously’ in the Sorelians and in the writers of the Conservative Revolution such as Schmitt, Freyer, and Heidegger. See e.g. Heidegger’s Rectoral Address of May 1933 (Heidegger 1993). 19 See also Ahmed’s suggestion, contra Davies, that a subjectivity of resistance is not simply located outside dominant categories, but ‘in the gaps within rather than “beyond” specific practices, in the “elsewithin” rather than “elsewhere”’ (1996:142). 20 While perhaps we have all become a little more strange, some of us are still stranger than others. It is arguable that the influence of such ‘deviants’ is often greater, in the long run, than that of those who count as eminent thinkers during their own lifetime.

9 Towards a social epistemology of strangerhood 1 In Chapter 1, I have argued that the epistemological gap between essence and appearance dissimulates a far less dramatic distinction between two appearances, that of so-called common sense and that of philosophical or scientific sense, which are both seduced into calling themselves ‘essence’, ‘reality’ or ‘fact’ in order to solidify their different claims to know better. Nevertheless, all science and all critique, as Marx well knew, would be superfluous if the essence and the appearance of things were simply to coincide. Our brief is then to devise an antiessentialist and anti-realist epistemology which ‘keeps up’ these appearances, but finds it useful to distinguish critically between workable and less workable ones. From this viewpoint, non-workable representations are those that still wish to anchor themselves in an essence or an objective reality. This is of course a circular point, but the whole point of anti-realist epistemology is that it is self-consciously circular—which itself is no more (or no less) than a self-confirming statement that predicates its own assumptions. 2 Socrates’ gesture offers a paradigmatic instance of universalism or essentialism as ‘wishful thinking’, that is, as the magical anticipation or conjuration which accompanies all performativity (especially if it denies itself), and which aims at creating a little more of what it axiomatically describes as already ‘essentially’ in place. In this case, the Socratic intellectual craves for a little more autonomy from politics, a little more distance from the agora than is currently acceptable for the politician or the sophist; but he acts as if this pragmatic condition is unconditionally dictated by a transcendental voice which happens to speak through his mouth. From this viewpoint, universalism is nothing but a ‘selfdenying’ demand to become a little less vulnerable, a little less local and particular, a little bigger; it is a claim to be already (and to have always been, and hence to have every right to be) in the place where you actually want to travel to. 3 In this fashion, I symmetrically add an ‘anthropological’ Socrates to the ‘anthropological’ Callicles which Latour sets up against a ‘straw’ Callicles and what, in my judgement, can only be a ‘straw’ Socrates (Latour 1999a:221). 4 In order to clarify the practical conditions of felicity of the scientific life, we might also reverse the view of Callicles, who only values the agoraphilia of the politician or rhetoretician, and take positively his list of negatives: that philosophy is something for children, not for mature grown-ups, that philosophers lack practical experience, play games, do not know how to address public meetings: in sum, that they are impractical, strange, other-worldly. 5 Latour is critical of the Socratic model of resemblance in philosophy and politics (in his view it is Socrates who misjudges ‘the great positive distance between what the represented and the representing are saying’), only to embrace virtually the

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same model of ‘echoing’ representation when it is offered by Callicles (1999a:248–52). My own ‘anthropological’ Socrates rather advocates a confrontational or differential model of politics, even though it is regrettably founded upon a mimetic theory of truth, while Callicles anticipates the mimetic theory of power which one may also encounter in Hobbes and Schmitt. Latour prefers to read Callicles as an accomplished practitioner of ‘translation’ avant la lettre, quite in the same anachronistic manner as he treats Hobbes, Boyle, Pasteur and the other moderns. On this, see more extensively Chapter 1. Politics should indeed be liberated from scientific professionalism, but can/need it be liberated from political professionals? Symmetrically speaking, if science must be liberated from the intrusion of politicians, should it forego expertise and specialism altogether? That would seem both impossible and undesirable. In Chapter 1, I have emphasized the duality of both practices as professional pursuits, and of their distinctive autonomy as intrinsically affording both utility and disutility, both representation and usurpation. A more liberal view of autonomy and professional difference in politics would highlight the conflictual play of mutual checking and balancing between politicians and citizens, revealing a form of ‘democratic elitism’ which I think is more appropriate for political life than Latour’s questionably utopian notion about ‘fermentation’ and self-representation, which seems simultaneously to reference the spokesperson and to abolish him/her. We recall Benda’s famous dictum that critical intellectuals dwell ‘in a kingdom which is not of this world’. The transcendental hyperbole performs a productive distanciation but also purifies it of all mundane interest. Such an incipient ‘social phenomenology of distancing’ follows up Beck’s adhortation that ‘anyone who would like to trace down the mysteries of productivity…must study the nature of doubt. Its source of energy is, one could say, the genetic code of creativity’ (1997:173). Ludwig (1995) has developed an empirically based template for exceptional achievement which includes features such as contrariness (an eagerness to reject the status quo), a capacity for solitude, physical vulnerability, a drive for supremacy, and psychological ‘unease’. This exploration benefits from Hadot’s description of classical philosophy as askesis, as ‘exercises in the art of living’, as a determinate lifestyle which engages not merely the cognitive faculties but the whole of self and being (1995:83–7, 264ff; cf. also Szakolczai 1998:12, 20). Beck similarly appears to suggest that the ‘art of doubt’ belongs to a definite form of life rather than an impersonal method (1997:161ff). The disturbance of Foucault’s (1984) view of the modern critical ethos and the ‘limit attitude’ might well be that it straddles a Kantian critical methodism and a Romantic stylization of the heroic life. At the heart of these approaches stand notions of ‘risky’ experience and ‘suspended identity’ which link up with the social phenomenology of strangerhood which I am exploring here. Lang (1990:45ff) similarly argues that Descartes, in narrating the discovery of scientific method in the first person singular, was torn between the conflicting impulses of method and style: a conflict which could to some extent be contained in the art of ‘meditation’. In a 1637 letter to Mersenne, Descartes averred that the title of his Discours was precisely chosen to make clear that he ‘did not intend to teach the method, but only to discuss it’. Following in the footsteps of Bachelard, Koyré, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, Schuster and Yeo (1986) comprehensively challenge the belief in a unitary, freely transferable and uniquely efficacious scientific method as a professional myth which has exercised tremendous rhetorical and apologetic power. In doing so, they curiously miss Mannheim’s early scepticism with regard to

Notes 257 methodology as a post hoc rationalization of what is actually going on in living research practices (cf. 1952 [1921/22]:37, 83). 13 Here we may recall Mannheim’s argument about the distancing and levelling effects of (higher) education, which tend to estrange people from the lived experience of their class origins and home environment. This alienating effect was regretfully noted by nationalists such as Barrès in their critique of universalist republican education in the Third Republic, which in their estimate fatally severed people from their regional and traditional roots and turned them into ‘abstract’ citizens. 14 See Kant in Perpetual Peace (1795) on the political role of the philosopher: It is not to be expected that kings will be philosophers or that philosophers will become kings; nor is it to be desired, however, since the possession of power inevitably corrupts the free judgement of reason. Kings or sovereign peoples…should not, however, force the class of philosophers to disappear or to remain silent, but should allow them to speak publicly. This is essential to both in order that light may be thrown on their affairs. Kant optimistically adds that ‘since the class of philosophers is by nature incapable of forming seditious factions or clubs, they cannot incur suspicion of disseminating propaganda’. As such, they have a legitimate claim to the attention of the power-holders: ‘The maxims of the philosophers about the conditions under which public peace is possible shall be consulted by states which are armed for war’ (Kant 1995:115). 15 In a fine-grained historical-sociological argument, Giesen (1993) has developed the connections between the social uprootedness of various generations of intellectuals and their spokespersonship for national (German) identity. The specific distanciation and ‘in-betweenness’ of the first Bildungsbürgertum and their academic strongholds is extended and duplicated by new Romantic or ‘Bohemian’ generations of intellectuals that react against it and take a special distance from the academic establishment. Giesen also develops the link between the status inconsistency of peripheral intellectual elites (what I have called their ‘third position’ of ‘elite marginality’) and their ambition to speak for the (nation as a) whole. 16 See also Rousseau’s famous confession: ‘I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different’ (1963 [1781]:17). Rousseau and Nietzsche paradigmatically exemplify the second withdrawal or the Romantic rupture with the established (philosophical) centre in search of a more radical authenticity and individuality. They are twin founders of the myth of the radical strangerhood of the critical intellectual which is deepened, among others, by Sorel and his followers in their drastic critique of the professionalization of thinking and of social representation (see Chapter 3). 17 Szakolczai emphasizes the precariousness of intellectual innovation which, on the one hand, must happen outside the official system of education and must be related to marginal knowledges but, on the other, must not remain completely isolated from the academic environment in order to retain its seriousness. In his view, thinkers such as Weber and Foucault evaded this trap and ‘managed to preserve their independence of mind, building up an original life project while preserving their links to the academic hierarchy, staying on the “hairline” between inside and outside academia, preserving liminality as opposed to an identification with marginality’ (1998:26, 142). Szakolczai’s book provides a wealth of material on Weber and Foucault as ‘reluctant professors’ in the mode of Nietzsche or Wittgenstein.

258 Notes 18 In this context, Gouldner already usefully circumscribed value-freedom as a ‘silence about the command implications of speech’ (1976:35). 19 Bauman emphasizes the simultaneity of being-constructed and self-construction in conditions of ambivalence: ‘The burden to resolve ambivalence falls, ultimately, on the person cast in the ambivalent condition. Even if the phenomenon of strangerhood is socially structured, the assumption of the status of stranger, with all its attendent ambiguity, with all its burdensome overand under-definition, carries attributes which in the end are constructed, sustained and deployed with the active participation of their carriers: in the psychical process of self-constitution’ (1991:75). 20 Defining exile as both an actual and a metaphorical condition, Said likewise suggests that the ‘exile standpoint’, which affords a double perspective and hence a wider, more universal picture, may be decisionally or methodically accessible: Even if one is not an actual immigrant or expatriate, it is still possible to think as one, to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities towards the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never traveled beyond the conventional and the comfortable. (Said 1994:124) This voluntarism is close to Deleuze’s view of ‘nomad thought’ as elective mind journeying which I have reviewed in the previous chapter. 21 As Stocking summarizes a rich chapter in a rich collection, the fieldwork style validated by Malinowski ‘was less a matter of concrete prescription than of placing oneself in a situation where one might have a certain type of experience’ (1992:112). 22 ‘The practical relationship that the ethnographer has with his object, that of the outsider (l’étranger), excluded from the real play of social practices by the fact that he has no place (except by choice or by way of a game) in the space observed, is the extreme case and the ultimate truth of the relationship that the observer, willy-nilly, consciously or not, has with his object. The status of an observer who withdraws from the situation to observe implies an epistemological, but also a social break, which most subtly governs scientific activity when it ceases to be seen as such, leading to an implicit theory of practices that is linked to forgetfulness of the social conditions of scientific activity. The anthropologist’s situation reminds us of the truth of the relationship that every observer has with the action he states and analyses, namely the insurmountable break with action and the world, with the immanent ends of collective action, with the self-evidence of the familiar world, that is presupposed in the very intention of talking about practice and especially of understanding it and seeking to make it understood other than by producing and reproducing it practically’ (Bourdieu 1990a:33). The intellectualist danger is to project this practical relation to the object—that of the stranger—into the object itself, or in the vocabulary adopted here: to render the spokesperson absent. 23 The notion of ‘queering’ reality bespeaks a similar hesitation between methodism and positionism. As Seidman argues, apart from making sexual theory and politics central to social theory, ‘queering’ is intrinsically also an effort ‘to make strange or “queer” what is considered known, familiar, and commonplace… How would social theory and politics be different if it were queer—that is, if it understood its own standpoint as local, as one among many, and if it took sexual differences and meanings as both structuring its knowledge and as a constitutive part of social organization and change?’ (1997:xi). Seidman immediately adds

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28 29

30

that this ‘queering’ perspective ‘does not assume any immunity from its own decentering spirit’ and occurs from a situated, particular standpoint. Among conservative revolutionaries, Zehrer perhaps most clearly argued the obsoleteness of the left-right polarity and the need for a third position which was slogazined as ‘right and left’ (1931, 1933). That the entire level on which this polarity acted no longer existed, was interpreted by Zehrer as a sure sign of political revolution (1933:8). Soja’s ‘trialectics’ or method of critical ‘thirding’ promotes a radical openness towards additional othernesses, seeing each ‘thirding’ as an approximative move rather than a closure. The critique is not meant to stop at three, does not construct a ‘holy trinity’, but intends to build further, to move on (1996:61). See also Beck (1997:1–3) on the generic supersession of the either/or by the both/and. Such views nevertheless understate the fruitfulness of the provisional closure which is generated by each concrete ‘thirding’. Soja especially appears to overvalue the disordering nature of the third and the nomadic fluidity of incessantly ‘going beyond’ (cf. 1996:83ff). Against this, I like to reassert a more dialectical mode of thinking and a more ‘Euclidean’ spatial imagination which acknowledges the active structuring of the first and second by the third, as well as some of the social constraints upon practical distanciation which can be identified through a social phenomenology of strangerhood. Following Soja and Law, and addressing some of my earlier work on Mannheim, White (1999) objects to the derivation of third positions from binary orderings as still introducing an undesirable state of fixity and foreclosure. He proposes a different trichotomous model which enacts a more principled fluidity and complexity—a view which is also retrojected into Mannheim, Kuhn, Latour, and others. Trinitary orderings are credited with an interactive openness which leaves the politics of knowledge in play; they replace the ‘closed fist’ of either/or logic with the ‘open hand’ of both/and. As suggested by the previous note, I am rather sceptical about the need to formalize this sympathetic move in this way. There is a certain aesthetic arbitrariness about this preference for the triple over the double. In any case, the self-referential and circular dialectic which I appeal to here precisely intends to recover the openness and fluidity which White welcomes, without reverting to the ontologization of fluidity and complexity which is risked by Law, Hetherington and other ‘Keelites’. Such postmodernist injunctions are rather close in spirit to the prescriptive generalization of alienation which is encountered in existentialist philosophical anthropology. See Heidegger on authenticity, Plessner on ex-centricity, Sartre on strangerhood and Camus on l’homme révolté, which all appear to transfigure the particular social experience of the intellectual into a universal ontological structure (cf. Bourdieu 1992:297). This ‘in-betweenness’ is caught with suggestive precision when Alpers points to Rembrandt’s fascination with blindness and the authority of the blind man that narrates (especially Homer) (1983:227). See Wright’s notion of the ‘dreadful objectivity’ which is forced upon the (black) stranger (Wright 1965:129) as ‘outsider within’, which illuminates the reverse danger of an essentialist definition of identity as ineluctably determinative, but also epistemologically remedial and promissory. See also Chapter 7, note 10. Like Bauman, Bourdieu thus provides a welcome duplication of the Mannheimian logic of situated knowledge and of the supposed privilege of estrangement, criticizing Mannheim’s conception of the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’ (1993:184, 41ff). The dialectic of conflict between established scientists and newcomers, and the choice which the latter face between a strategy

260 Notes

31 32

33

34 35

36

of succession and a strategy of subversion, similarly suggests the lucidity of (relative) strangerhood (Bourdieu 1981:270–2). See also Burkitt (1997). See also note 4 on Callicles’ list of negatives. Perhaps confusingly, I have not previously distinguished between the Platonic and Socratic models of intellectual critique. The latter is often identified with the more moderate Dreyfusard (or perhaps ‘Durkheimian’) version, which in my estimate rests upon a rather violent interpretation of the dialogues which leaves out altogether the ever-lurking pretence of the philosopher-king and of the dictatorship of reason. Given the drift of my present argument, it is not material to distinguish too closely or too normatively between career-committed ‘professionals’ who do not contribute to a broader public discourse and disinterested ‘intellectuals’ who do (for the opposite view, see for example, Said 1994:9, 55ff). In or out of the agora, the perspective they represent arises from a similar kind of estrangement and autonomy. However, it could be remarked that, to the extent that the intellectual intends to cut a public figure, (s)he becomes a hybrid by temporarily accepting the conditions of felicity of political work. See further Pels (1995:84–5). This praise of strangerhood is of course diametrically opposed to Schmitt’s notorious view that true democracy is essentially homogeneous and needs to exile and even destroy all heterogeneity (Schmitt 1988a). A more concrete exemplification of the utility of third or ‘strange’ positions would point to historical practices such as the custom in medieval cities to bring in judges from the outside, or the political mediation which was exercised between nobility and king by the Commons in England and the Third Estate in France. Current examples include the proliferation of external assessment boards and other control mechanisms of the ‘audit culture’; the widespread need for interim or crisis management, and for professional headhunting and management consultancy; the rise of parliamentary boards of inquiry and of trustees and ombudspeople in large organizations; the right of inquiry by external experts in risk issues; the industrial representation of consumer interests; and the increased political legitimacy of and legal protection for whistle-blowers (cf. recent affairs in British academia and the Van Buitenen affair at EU headquarters in Brussels). This list is sufficiently disparate to illustrate the general principle, although its political cutting edge is only revealed in some of the last-mentioned examples. One might also think of radical proposals about a basic income or a universal grant, which would have the effect of loosening individuals to some degree from their ‘greedy’ institutions, and install a kind of ‘Bohemian’ ring on the threshold of many of them. If freedom can be defined as estrangement from the institutions of which one is also a member, basic income schemes would interestingly serve to enlarge it. It might well be objected that the present account has insufficiently addressed the vexing issue of the representational character of social topology, including of course all social modelling in terms of centre and margin. Marginality is a situation which must be defined, imagined, assumed, and enacted as such in order to take performative effect. It is both a material and a metaphorical condition (cf. Soja 1996:10–11, 45, 65, on spaces as imagined-and-real). As we have seen, this discursive ‘margin’ is exploitable in the eternal play of self- and other-positioning by actors who affect outsidership while from a different viewpoint they appear centrally placed (e.g. bourgeois reinventing themselves as Bohemians). In previous pages, I have spoken about the ‘lived’ distanciation of strangerhood, both in order to accommodate this representational effect and to intimate that representation must not immediately be placed on an articulate level of discursive reflexivity but is bodily enacted and emotionally inhabited. See also notes 19 and 29.

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Index

aesthetic politics 4–6, 108, 112, 113, 119, 121, 247, 248 agnosticism 4, 6, 10, 17, 25, 213, 220–1, 230 alienation x, xv, xvi, xviii, xix, 8–9, 24, 31, 32, 36–7, 52, 78, 79, 81–5, 103, 105, 106, 108, 160–1, 171, 174, 176, 181, 186, 194, 199ff, 234, 241, 251, 254, 257, 259 alienated autobiography 32, 47, 235 autonomy xix, 4, 5, 14, 26, 53, 56, 70, 71, 89, 135, 145, 148, 166, 181, 182, 194, 199–201, 203, 205, 206–7, 210, 218, 222, 224, 225, 247, 255, 256 Althusser, L. 35, 37, 157, 158, 172, 212, 250 anarcho-syndicalism xiv, 23, 29–30, 69, 71–3, 95, 117, 123, 124, 231 Ankersmit, F. 2, 3–6, 10, 24, 222, 228, 232 anti-Semitism xvii, 75–7, 147–52, 155, 247–9 Bahro, R. xiii, 27, 28, 31, 32, 42, 167 Bakunin, M. 27, 28, 94, 121 Barrès, M. xi, xiv, 15, 69, 74–5, 76, 77, 78, 84, 95, 107, 108, 116, 117, 119, 127, 133, 146, 147, 155, 157, 181, 209, 214, 217, 222, 239, 240, 244, 257 Bauman, Z. xiii, 22, 31–2, 38, 39–40, 180, 183–4, 189, 193, 208, 211, 215, 234, 251, 253, 258, 259 Benda, J. xvii, 22, 87, 131, 132, 133, 153, 194, 195, 240, 246, 256 Bernstein, E. xiv, 28, 32, 66, 110, 117, 124, 128, 130, 159 Berth, E. 23, 72, 73, 76, 77, 117, 121, 193, 195, 239, 240 Bohemia x–xi, xiii, xvi, xviii, xix, 45, ]

81, 112, 118–22, 176, 184, 186, 191, 206, 208, 210, 224, 246, 253, 257, 260 (see also bohemian intellectuals) Bourdieu, P. 2, 3, 4, 7–10, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 52, 79, 119, 165, 185, 191, 192, 208, 210, 213, 216, 218–19, 222, 225, 228–9, 230, 233, 235, 236, 247, 258, 259, 260 Callon, M. 2, 3, 10, 11, 24, 213, 220 Cartesian doubt: see Descartes, R. circularity 26, 42, 44, 133, 164, 173, 198, 221–2, 230, 232, 233, 246, 251, 255 Conservative Revolution xi, xv, 30, 77, 86, 95–8, 103, 107, 108, 109, 112, 120, 122, 125, 157, 209, 214, 245, 247, 255 critique/critical theory xii, 8, 10, 11–18, 22, 24–6, 32, 36, 41, 107, 159, 164, 165, 170, 184, 199–201, 218, 221, 222, 230, 231, 235 crossover intellectuals: see intellectuals constructivism 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 99, 160, 163, 239, 250 Curtius, E.R. 84–5, 91, 96, 107, 108, 241 Déat, M. xi, xiv, xvi, 77, 108, 111, 113, 114, 117, 123, 214, 233, 240–1, 246 definition of the situation xiii, xviii, 17, 21, 26, 44, 172, 173, 193 de Kadt, J. 226, 238, 243, 245 de Man, H. x, xi, xiv, xvi–xvii, 28–9, 31, 32, 42, 66, 77, 83, 86, 97, 98, 109, 110ff, 131ff, 214, 218, 232, 233, 234, 238, 241, 243, 244–9 de Man, P. xi, xvii, 131ff, 244–5, 246–9 Deleuze, G. xviii, 23, 178, 187, 188, 192, 258

279

280 Index Descartes, R. 5, 45, 51, 56, 202, 203–5, 206, 209, 212, 213, 221, 225, 256; difference theory: see representation doubt: Cartesian see Descartes, R.; methodical see method; social distribution of xviii, xix, 38, 44, 202, 205, 210, 216, 221, 223, 256 Dreyfus Affair xiv, 18–19, 69, 74, 76, 133, 146, 153, 155, 157, 181, 222, 225, 248 duality/duplicity 6, 7–8, 12–15, 23–6, 137, 188, 256 Durkheim, E. x, xi, xiv, xv, 15, 16, 47, 49ff, 84, 90, 91, 107, 127, 212, 214, 216, 217, 222, 232, 235–41 Engels, F. 27, 33, 55, 115, 234, 249 essentialism xii, 21, 78, 79, 103, 106, 107, 133, 145, 159, 160, 169, 187–9, 190, 197–8, 207, 210, 239, 242, 250, 255, 259 estrangement: see alienation exile xvi, xviii, 32, 40, 83, 85, 91, 108, 110, 135, 149, 161, 177, 178, 179, 183, 185, 186, 189, 202, 203, 251, 252, 253, 258 facts/values 6, 17–18, 22, 33, 49, 50, 52–6, 60–1, 71, 88–9, 94, 98, 99, 101–2, 103–5, 107, 123, 156, 157, 195, 200, 207, 211, 215, 220, 221, 222, 235, 242, 244, 258 fascism x, xiv, xvi, 76, 87, 94–5, 96, 108, 111–18, 122–3, 125, 128, 132, 153, 137, 140, 214, 233, 236, 244, 245, 246, 247 feminism xi, xiii, xvii, xviii, 19, 41–3, 113, 157ff, 179–80, 187–9, 192, 212–3, 217, 228, 232, 249–52; black 157, 160, 161, 167–9, 179, 251, 254 fetishism 8, 56, 230, 233, 236 Foucault, M. ix, 23, 51–2, 177, 202, 213, 232, 256, 257, 258 Freyer, H. xi, xvi, 15, 86, 98–102, 103, 105–6, 107, 111, 120, 121, 122, 125, 146, 157, 214, 244, 245, 247, 255 Giddens, A. 1, 2, 50, 55, 59, 60, 236, 237 Gilroy, P. xvii, 160, 161, 168–70, 187, 249, 250, 253 Gorz, A. xiii, 32, 37, 161 Gouldner, A. ix, xiii, 22, 31, 37, 40, 60, 157, 220, 233–4, 238, 258

Habermas, J. 22, 207, 225, 244 Hall, S. xvii, 4, 158, 160, 161, 179, 180, 187, 249, 250 Haraway, D. xvii, 41, 158, 161, 170, 174, 177, 180, 254 Harding, S. xvii, 41–2, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 170–3, 179, 212, 249, 251, 252 Heidegger, M. 98, 105, 107, 108, 157, 202, 247, 255, 259 Hobbes, T. 2, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 202, 214, 229, 256 horseshoe model xv–xvii, 45, 71, 103, 106–7, 109, 111, 118–22, 123–4, 127, 130, 214, 240 hybridity xviii, 13–4, 157, 160, 161, 170, 177, 179, 182, 187, 189, 190, 191, 208, 215, 253, 254, 260 identity theory: see representation intellectualism 19, 43, 47, 71–4, 78, 79, 96, 107, 119, 125, 127, 143–4, 146, 148, 149, 152, 154, 164, 170, 173, 185, 187, 205, 208, 240, 251–2, 253, 254, 258 intellectuals: anti-intellectual xi, xiv, 15, 18–19, 69, 94, 95, 98, 103, 107, 127, 146, 157, 208, 240; bohemian 31, 178 (see also Bohemia); crossover xvi, 77, 109, 111, 114, 119, 124; counter see anti-intellectual; declassed xiii, 32, 34, 37, 76, 79, 84, 121, 203, 241, 246; freischwebende Intelligent x, 15, 38–40, 81, 83, 92, 93–4, 96, 97, 100, 102, 105, 107, 127, 157, 162, 181–2, 183–4, 214, 217, 239, 241–3, 259; metonymic fallacy of the x, xiv, 8, 31–2, 42, 46, 164–5, 166, 168, 191, 254; neolithic revolution of the 39–40, 183–4, 208; treason of the xvii, 14–15, 18, 25, 26, 131–4, 147, 149, 152–5, 174, 240, 248 Jaurès, J. xiv, 59, 66, 68, 70, 76, 77, 107, 110, 117, 124, 237, 238, 239 Jünger, E. 98, 103, 108, 113, 121, 122, 124, 144, 214, 247 knowledge politics 11, 14, 22, 56, 68, 78, 79, 93, 104–5, 107, 130, 157, 207, 209, 211, 213, 220 Latour, B. 1, 3, 4, 10–15, 17, 21, 23, 24, 195, 198–201, 213, 214, 220, 229, 230, 231, 232, 235, 255, 256, 259

Index 281 left/right x, xi, xiv, xv, xvii, 15, 18, 69, 71, 77, 96–7, 108–9, 113, 115–22, 131, 153, 157, 214, 217, 259 Lukàcs, G. 35–6, 37, 82, 102, 103, 106, 119, 157, 191, 212, 234, 241, 251 Machiavelli, N. 35, 156, 157, 158, 173, 174, 175, 202 Mannheim, K. x, xi, xv–xvi, 15, 16, 20, 22, 38–40, 43, 80, 81ff, 125, 127, 131–2, 133, 146, 152, 157, 162, 174, 181–2, 183, 191, 214, 215, 217, 218, 223, 229, 231, 234, 239, 241–4, 246, 251, 257, 259 marginality xi, xiii, xix, 32, 36–7, 39–48, 78–9, 81, 83, 103, 160–5, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 179, 181, 182, 183–5, 187, 189, 190–2, 193, 206, 208, 210, 223–7, 253, 254, 257, 260; elite 46, 192, 257 Marx, K. x, xiii, 15, 16, 20, 22, 27ff, 55, 67, 92–4, 111, 114, 115, 122, 128, 129, 136, 146, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166, 167, 175, 185, 191, 209, 212, 218, 220, 222, 234, 236, 238, 242–3, 245, 246, 249 Marxism: see Marx, K. master science xi, 51, 57–8, 69, 82, 89–91, 98, 207, 218, 236, 242 Maurras, C. xiv, 69, 74, 75, 78, 107, 116, 119, 133, 146, 147, 157, 214, 240 methodism: see method(ology) method (ology) xvii, xix, 50, 79, 172, 203–5, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210–14, 220, 221, 223, 233, 236, 256–7, 258 methodological voluntarism 172–3, 210–14, 217 metonymic fallacy: see intellectuals Michels, R. x, xvi, 6, 8, 20, 21, 22, 23, 29–30, 77, 111, 114, 115, 117, 123, 130, 185, 231, 232, 233, 246 mobility xviii, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 185, 190, 191, 253 Mussolini, B. xvi, 30, 77, 94, 114, 115, 117, 123, 129, 140, 245, 246 nationalism xi, xiv, 15, 71, 74–8, 79, 95, 105–6, 116–7, 120, 129, 143, 154, 157, 159, 165, 217, 246, 247, 249, 254, 257; cultural xi, xvii, 135, 142, 144–6, 153, 240 Nietzsche, F. xix, 2, 8, 30, 36, 73, 119, 178, 195, 202, 209–10, 223, 250, 251, 254, 257, 258

nomadism x, xi, xviii, 82, 176ff, 208, 209, 215, 252–5, 258 objectivity xviii, xix, 5, 16, 32, 37–9, 41, 44, 56, 75, 77, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 156, 170, 174, 175, 181, 182, 183, 197, 206, 207, 208, 211, 217, 218, 220, 223, 224, 259 object/project xiv, xv, 21, 51–2, 56, 58, 60, 68, 69, 78 outsider within xix, 41, 46, 160, 161, 162, 165, 167–8, 169, 170, 172–4, 175, 180, 190, 191, 192, 213, 214, 218–19, 224, 226, 250–1, 257, 259 particularism: see universalism/ particularism Péguy, C. xiv, 59, 72, 76, 116, 121, 240, 248 performativity/performance xii, xiii, xix, 2, 4, 8–10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 25–6, 29, 36, 79, 94, 160, 163, 173, 174, 176, 193, 195, 197, 201, 207, 210, 211, 219, 222, 225, 230, 232, 250, 255, 260 Plato/Socrates xviii, 23, 92, 194–200, 202, 203, 204, 206, 207, 209, 212, 224–5, 232, 241, 255–6, 260 postcolonial studies/criticism xi, xiii, xviii, 43, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 169, 179, 217, 228, 250 postmodernism xvii, xviii, 25, 153, 159, 176, 180, 187, 189, 190, 215 proletarian nation 77, 120, 121, 160 realism xii, xiv, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 33, 216, 228, 231, 255; accusatory 17–22, 25 relational 8 reformism: see socialism refraction 135, 145, 148, 154, 247 reflexivity xii, xiii, 12, 21, 26, 35, 39, 43, 44, 79–80, 102, 133, 156, 174, 181, 186, 202, 208, 211, 218–20, 221, 233 reification xii, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 24, 26, 52, 53, 68, 72, 78, 79, 133, 145, 154, 198, 230, 232, 235, 250 representation x, xiii, xviii, 1ff, 56, 73, 79, 112, 118, 124, 158, 164, 166, 200–1, 210, 222, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 250, 260; mimetic/aesthetic 4–6, 8, 160, 228; identity theory of xiii, 4–6, 8, 10–15, 19, 21, 24–6, 77, 79, 166, 185–9, 198, 200–1, 222, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 255–6;

282 Index representation continued difference theory of xiii, 4–6, 8, 10– 15, 21, 24–6, 79, 160, 166, 185–9, 198, 201, 222, 228, 232, 233, 255–6; duality of 23–6 revisionism xi, xiv, xv, xvi, 20, 28, 59, 66–7, 77, 86, 95, 110, 111, 113, 116–8, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 159, 232, 238; revolutionary 117, 129, 136, 143, 235 right/left: see left/right Rousseau, J.-J. 23, 202, 257 Said, E. xix, 22, 161, 177–8, 179, 186, 194, 195, 225, 252, 258, 260 Sartre, J.-P. xix, 225, 259 saying/doing 14, 15, 21, 22, 25 Schmitt, C. xi, xvi, 1, 15, 30, 103, 104–5, 106, 107, 133, 157, 182, 214, 230, 228, 229, 232, 252, 255, 256, 260 science and technology studies xviii, 10ff, 180, 213–4, 220–1, 239, 254 Simmel, G. x, 37–8, 40, 162, 181–2, 183, 191, 211, 214, 220, 221, 229, 254 situated knowledge xii–xiii, xviii, xix, 16, 19, 38, 41, 44, 74–5, 78, 79, 102, 106, 107, 162, 156ff, 193, 201, 205, 211, 218–19, 259 social epistemology 55, 108, 156; of strangerhood ix, xix, 40, 42, 45, 162, 163, 173, 193ff, 233, 255–6 socialism: academic xiv, 63, 66, 67; authoritarian 92, 109, 117, 122, 123, 129–30, 137, 140, 143, 152, 154; corporatist 66, 67; cultural x, xi, xvi, 106, 125, 127, 128, 244; ethical 86, 117, 124, 125, 128, 133, 136, 147, 149, 233, 248; German 30, 99, 112, 120, 122, 129, 139, 240; intellectuals’ x, 23, 70–4, 97–8, 102, 108, 109, 124, 125–7, 129, 143, 232, 238, 243; liberal x, 59, 67, 69, 70, 76, 78, 117, 214, 237, 238, 240, 243; national xi, xiv, xvi, 15, 69, 70, 73–7, 86, 96, 106, 108, 110, 111, 112, 125, 115, 116, 120, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135, 136, 140, 142, 145, 155, 214, 233, 240, 245, 247, 248; néo-socialisme xi, xiv, 77, 108, 116, 123, 245; reformist xiv, xv, 28, 47, 59, 61–2, 64–5, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 86, 91, 107, 109, 118, 123, 127, 128, 130, 136; state 65–6, 99, 122, 127–30, 139, 152, 237, 238; third way see third

social things xii, xiv, 15, 51, 55–6, 62, 67, 79, 107, 127, 212, 216, 231–2, 235–6 Socrates/Socratic: see Plato/Socrates Solidarism xi, xv, 15, 70, 72, 76, 107, 119, 238 solidarity 58, 59, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72, 76, 139, 241, 246 Sombart, W. 66, 111, 114, 120, 121, 122, 233, 243 Sorel, G. ix, xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 15, 23, 28, 29–30, 69, 71–9, 94, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 123, 127, 130, 133, 146, 193, 195, 209, 233, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 257 spokesperson (ship) xff, 1ff, 55, 77–8, 106–7, 119, 160, 163–6, 167, 168, 172–4, 185–7, 189, 191, 193, 194, 196–7, 199, 201, 209–10, 211, 214, 220, 221, 225, 228–31; absent 8, 10, 14, 55–6, 72–3, 75, 78, 79, 93, 154, 164, 191, 197–8, 210, 218, 221, 232, 233, 248 standpoint theory/epistemology x, xii–xv, xvii–xviii, 19, 21, 32, 35–6, 41, 43–4, 47, 74–6, 78, 99–100, 102–3, 105–7, 156ff, 179, 211, 214, 216, 217, 223, 239, 249–52 Stirner, M. 27, 28, 233, 234, 251 symmetry xii, 4, 8, 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 175, 213, 214, 220–1, 227, 231 Tatkreis xi, xvi, 86, 95–8, 109, 127, 243–4 translation, theory of see Callon, Latour third; object 59–60; position xix, 39, 43, 46, 96, 107, 120, 162, 165, 175, 190–1, 193, 213, 214–21, 226–7, 257, 259, 260; space xix, 108, 161, 163, 180, 190–1, 214–20, 259; way x, xi, xix, 60, 64ff, 70, 107, 109, 117, 137, 214–18, 220, 237, 238, 243 totality/totalization xii, xvi, xix, 9, 15, 25, 35–6, 38, 46, 49, 57–8, 61, 70, 71, 78, 81–5, 87–92, 96, 97, 100, 103, 107, 122, 132, 162, 182, 201, 215, 217, 218, 219, 223, 231, 242 unhastening xix, 54, 61, 90, 200, 201–2, 203, 205, 206, 207, 224 universalism/particularism xiv, 19, 47, 51, 69, 71, 74–6, 77, 79, 99, 100, 107, 113, 136, 147, 149, 158, 163, 175, 181, 183–4, 185, 191, 197, 203–5, 207, 208, 215, 219, 239, 251, 255, 257, 259

Index 283 value-freedom/value neutrality: see facts/values Zehrer, H. 86, 95–8, 122, 125, 214, 243, 259 Zola, E. xix, 22, 69, 76, 225