Günter, Super Grass
Complicity, guilt and confession, like some purging medieval monk, German literary history post WWII has often been a sadomasochistic exercise in a type martyrdom that is promethean in its denial of redemption. An ecstasy of guilt forever caught in the unabsolved, the unforgivable remaining unforgiven. An eternal return that has you chained to the rock of history as your liver is eaten out of your complicit body. As if this, like some romantic ideal of 'fragment', could point to a totality of redemption, an absolute absolution.
When Michael Jürgs speaks of the "Ende einer moralischen Instanz", the end of a moral institution he is perhaps expressing more anger with Grass as a liar than he is as some traitor to some confessional moral cause of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" - after all, he was the biographer who was duped - the one scoop he didn't get and that renders his work obsolete. I suppose this brings us to the idea of conscience. As Nietzsche once so aptly put it in an aphorism: "One can train it to kiss as it bites".
Is this what lies behind Günter Super Grass? One can only speculate. A burden kept back to drive the creative process? A skeleton in the cupboard to keep the tension of the charlatan high enough for him to write his fictions? Perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps the shame was so great that it was unspeakable and therefore unspoken for so long?
The question remains, why now Günter? Why after the Danzig Trilogy and the sad ballads of looking for redemption in all the wrong places does it come out now? Some have suggested an earlier confessional would have jeopardized the Nobel Prize, others that this is a publicity stunt in an era when Gruppe 47 are more likely to be miscategorised as a pop group. Maybe they have a point. The hand-wringing of his generation seems increasingly irrelevant in a Germany where everyone is happy to be seen singing the national anthem at the world cup. In this context is not the confession simply self-serving, or at best, self-indulgent?
Is this simply a function of a new uncomfortable condition: namely, that once the vanquished have joined the victorious and a threshold of history has passed from the immediacy of the post-war years? That the discourse has entered a realm of historical distance, more abstracted and dispassionate, led perhaps by the desire that the sins of the fathers are consigned to a past that does not carry the critical burdens of historical determinacy?
Francis Wheen has got to be one of my favourite columnists. His new book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World looked to be a cracking read whilst nursing a bad cold and an even more severe bout of misanthropy over Christmas.
On the face of it, I was prepared to agree, gleefully and wholeheartedly, over hot Lemsip on the witty analysis Mr Wheen was about to dish up.
His central premise is that the ideals of the enlightenment have fallen victim to the critical seeds they sowed. The critique of universalism and concrete value has lead to a permanent and destructive questioning without purpose or end - chiefly because purposes and ends are the very things which must be questioned. The scourge of the post-modernist jester strikes again. Vexing questions which along with limitless applicability also have infinite scope. All of a sudden nothing is sacred and the mumbo-jumbo starts to leak into the vacuum.I could not agree more. However the devil, as they say is in the details. I could not help feel Francis Wheen threw some babies out with the copious amounts of dirty bathwater. His dismissal of Adorno and Horkheimer on page 192 I felt was pretty misguided. Sure, it's not the greatest work ever written, but he missed the point when he lumps critical theory in with the post-modern. There are concretes and absolutes for Adorno, he just has a hard time letting abstract philosophy come up with any practical experience except for the
negative. He does believe in power and his critique is about how power comes about from the identity thesis. It's not advocacy. It's pretty pessimistic and comes from a 'damaged life'. So I was annoyed that Francis Wheen had lumped in good old Theodor with the likes of Gayatri Spivak and the Mumbo-Jumbistas.
The key question for me is how the popular view of the critical question can be made less, well frankly, silly. There is a part of me the cringes when I read of the great moral equivalences that people espouse when declaring everything as text and interpretable. It seems to suffer from that most terrible of academic conceits: smugness in logic. There is a real world out there and what's more it's filled with value and that's because people lead meaningful lives (I'm not speaking personally, mind you). The worst turn in this regard was the 'deconstructive turn' - to simply defer meaning and (inter)play in a limbo-world of texts and subtexts is a denial of responsibility, oh and irony just don't cut it, sorry Richard Rorty. Francis Wheen is right to point out the excesses and absurdities here. This is possibly why I prefer the German philosophical tradition, it's possibly simply more depressed. From romanticism and notions of "Fragment" to Hegel and Marx through to Adorno and Heidegger the world is not abstract and it's a rich pre-existing context before we even enter it. Experience and criticality are the keys to understanding here, the purposes are not abstract they are about life. The social and political conditions for the possibility of power are relevant philosophical questions. There is no removing damaging power-relations by simply declaring reality to be an equal and free interplay of texts and putting on the trucker cap of irony. People die, starve and suffer in the real world. Critical questions, enlightenment questions need ends. I think there is something to be said for being critical of enlightenment hegemony, if only to keep it honest. Not least, because reason does not exist in a vacuum either, it has political and social context. To fail to be aware of that is to effectively sanction tyranny. Mumbo Jumbo may be the intellectual equaivalent of Philip K Dick's "kipplisation" but chucking out all critique of enlightenment hegemony, especially when it offers real critical questions bugged me.
I can only hope my cold abates before the new year and I'm in a better mood.
The real critical questions ought (yeah, sue me I used a moral imperative) to be focused on power-relations. If philosophy is to be about anything it is to be about life. Life is above all, a practical bloody slog through social institutions, economic conditions, cultural identities and psychological problems. Not to mention all the Lemsip and Tesco chewable vitamin C to stave off the old mortal coil shuffle at the end. It's about meaning and meanings are powerful. My bedrock here is use, what that use exactly is - now there's a question.
It's fair to say I've ranted off track there a fair bit. Overall I did laugh a great deal with the good Mr Wheen and throughly enjoyed his wit. I did find him a bit clumsy when he chucked in good ol' Theodor with the quacks. I'm glad Francis Wheen put a sharp boot up the jacksie of the left who cling to "idee fixe" ideology and can't see beyond the abstract when they think about the practical
The man cannot let it lie.
It's disturbing to see an esteemed thinker like John Gray feel it necessary to engage in personal attacks on Comte who he seemingly credits (if that's what it is) with the disasterous malaise of englitenment hegemony. His analysis veers wildly from the sweeping statement to the minutae of the most passing detail. I hope this isn't some Hitchens-like bluster to cover for poor intellectual rigour. He seems to present his anti-rationalism stance as some great revelation. His opening thoughts on the phony war that was the cold war were interesting but offered little by way of exclusivity and ran to some pretty staid platitudes. Yes, the project of impostional order to a rational ideal was common ground but the material differences have to count for something. He runs roughshod over too many details here where it suits him. The crass dismissal of Nietzsche here was pretty staggering. I had the darkening sense that this was but one baby to be thrown out with the bathwater in the pages to come.
Once we get to August Comte however no headstone is left unturned. He accuses him of mental illness at one point. What kind of low ad hominem set up is that? You can't set up a pluralist opposition to categoric rationality and determinsim and then go and call the man a nutter.
The main thrust of the book is a statement (which he thinks is brand new but isn't) that the enlightenment project suffers from the inhumanity of its impostion, the forging of men to tasks (maybe he never read Grundrisse either?) is an evil dystopic nightmare of the west; mainly Comte's fault for making both a religion and 'science' of economics which was, in his view, the most speculative of metaphysics at best and barely deserving of the pages of harry potter at base, only to hash out a very loaded thesis on Globalisation.
From that lofty crag he underscores his main point: Al Quaeda are not an anomaly or an anachronism of the dark ages come to haunt us like some operatic ghost - they are the inevitable (dare one say immanent?) bi-product of the enlightenment, the remainder in the equation of rationality after Kant. The Pure Critical Unreason, if you will. The accused in the quid juris. It's a fair point. Just so badly made and so well made in frankfurt before the war.
Anyway before I'm dragged off to Houghton Street WC2 for a tongue lashing and am handed a bus ticket to the old bailey for slander, maybe read it for yourself. tell me what you think.