[27a] ‘Return Journey’, Art-Language, Vol. 4, No. 1, May, 1977, pp. 5-10.

RETURN JOURNEY: a sort of logic; a blundering away from – decidedly away from – a single world of effect. Oh, historiography hurts! Squeaky pointed shoes or very heavy boots are all you see in the shops.

The cultural or quasi-cultural pursuit of a ‘social optimum’ is often knobbled by its idealist constituents. There will, of course, be a funny ‘media-ted’ neighbourliness of ‘practical goals’ and ‘ideological’ entrenchment (mediation as the ‘authentification’ of analysis ® action); and this can be the entrenchment of ‘superstructurally’ (culturally) originated (artily originated) social optimalism. This is (passively) reactive empiricism or, worse (actively), salesmanship, i. e., intervention in the superstructure over the heads of unsightly others, in the pursuit of a (view of a) social optimum. In all cases it will be founded on the absurd idealisation that someone occupies a quasi-production space which is not dialectically compact; a privileged someone who simply consumes that which he deems ‘outside’ the various categoric relations of capitalism; someone who ‘produces’ (e.g., ‘intervenes’ in ideology) and manages to leave things just as they were.

To call such an ldealisation absurd is not to invoke the equally absurd proclamation that there is no escape and we are all doomed (but some of us clever ones know it). The dread in and of overdetermination is often just an apology for aphasia, and is, at best (e.g., when it underwrites ‘activity’ of some sort), only a naive aspect-blind ideality of a maximalising (or optimalising) action and an equally pointless assumption that all actions are ontologically coherent (are palpable in relation to the same ‘world’ of determinations). Adding on a few noetic trappings is no way out of porcine circularity – supposing you see the danger of porcine circularity.

Why is the rejection of any hope of ‘effectiveness’, of wanting to see oneself ‘changing minds’ and ‘social conditions’, not individualistic, high-intuitionist idealism itself? There is a complexity to compactness in (for) all social relations such that ^thistory’ tells us nothing directly. Over-determination does not reach the point (the antiquity) of ‘will and necessity’. The set (a set) of necessities does not mirror a ‘natural’ entailment in any sense that might be captured by Wissenschaft. We may know some things, but we can’t be ‘knowing’ about how we come to be determined in (e.g.) our social relations. To be unable to say something and mean it is not like being unable to fly. It would be with the instrumentalism of the natural sciences that we would meet the spurious requirement that soft individualism be contrasted with ‘corporate’ self-entrenchment. NaturWissenschaft doesn’t get cleaner or clearer. It retains its ultra-futuristic architectural appliquée. (The production of) ideology and/or ‘knowledge’, notwithstanding ‘its’ forms and guises (and notwithstanding the lumpy generation of antinomies by thinkers), cannot be a function of a ‘collectivity’ – an optimalists’ collectivity.

The tragic error is the attribution of, the expectation of, a ‘monadological’ space in which contributions to ‘collectivity’ are made. We don’t say that the optimalistic collectivity is claimed to be monadic; it seems more accurate to suggest a monad-ising of class spaces (or interests) in what is hoped for, or presupposed (and this in turn is to presuppose a discrete world of ‘effects’ – however ‘privately’) via what must be an additional (‘supervening’) monadological space. Such a non-analysis of Wissenschaft and collectivity may be a condition for the grossest fixations with leisure and consumption. The apparently frayed edges of a single world (view) of possible (cultural) effects and actions, on the one hand, and of a class-definitive self-interest on the other, dovetail neatly in the pursuit of Lebensraum.

For the privileged someone-who-would-change-people’s-minds-without-changing-his-own, the pursuit of a ‘social optimum’ is pursuit of Lebensraum in disguise. The ‘practical goals’ which he aims at in furtherance of his concept of (macroscopic or microscopic) collectivity are mere extensions (idealisations?) of his ‘sense of himself’ and of his ‘needs’. Many fancy modifications may have been made to idealisations of class (and production) spaces (as power conditions immanently held, or something), but these modifications remain idealistic – i.e., reactive.

Think about ourselves; it’s hopeless if we are just penitent bourgeois. Very few of our difficulties and problems have been synthetic. This is to say that, in isolating or criticising actions (practice) as ‘failed’, or ‘hopeless’, we are seldom, if ever, discussing things in respect of, or in retrospect of, a dualism of (good/bad) ‘intensions’ (intentions) and behaviour. This dualism is the bourgeois self-preserver’s apology for various formal weaknesses (paradoxes). To say that you’re overdetermined can be a way of pleading that you are ‘hung up’ on a paradox, are the victim of contradictions, in a situation where someone else might say that you don’t even have choices, i. e. where he would see the obligations as straightforward. And it wouldn’t be hard to sort out tokens for disagreements of this type, which even the ‘Guardian’ reader would have to recognise as occasions of class conflict.

The chastisement of non-populists (us, and others ... Vic Burgin (?), etc.) has been founded on a poor analogue of inductive and statistical reasoning (sic). This is piss poor. And worse, the pseudo-basis of popularity (or obligatory populism) has to be identical with the behaviouristic basis of induction – or, rather, inductivism ... and bluster on. We’re not likely to feel very deeply those ‘obligations’ which are imposed by someone’s (customarily negative) idealisation of the level of consciousness of some others. Similar bluster is encountered with respect to the sticky cutlery of ‘practical reasoning’; a valuation becomes an idealised member of a set of functions which enjoys some sort of higher status than all antecedent actions. Ah oui, critique! Practice must involve (‘include’) critical practice, but the latter cannot be detached from the compactness of ‘action’, from the unpacking of (ideological problematicness vis-à-vis) specificity of actions. That is to deny meta-practice; compactness is compactness; criticism is compact – to all valuations.

Notwithstanding the fact that the (‘historical’) prospect of ‘material force’ has been smashed to fragments – fragments which in being smashed no longer tesselate – we may be forgiven for suggesting that there may really be a form of akrasia (weakness of will) even though incontinence of this kind is dynamically limited to high-bourgeois penitent-individualism and its noble antinomies. A description of actions as ‘weak-willed’ must depend on an idealistically complete view of the ‘background’ against which it is seen as distinguished, or on a non-compactness of description and action with respect to the history of ‘political’ action and ‘non-political’ action. We could, however, be charged with anti-materialism, psychologism, if we dropped akrasia as a valuation complex (insofar as there might not seem to be much else to fall into). Yet as a valuation cemplex, it doesn’t add up to much. It does seem a little strange, however, that characterisations of events (actions) as accidental, which are often apologetics for ‘weak’ actions, or for failed populism, should be accompanied by (assertions of) a fairly strong determinism. Determinations as a-hysterical? Some may try, but not even the Freischwebende Intelligenz, or the would be French kunstler, can screw out under (or should it be rise above?) both ‘historicity’ and ‘will’.

Now, the above faces the charge of ‘internalism’, a charge which is much more serious than any mostily intuited allegation of ‘elitism’, since it is so easily generalised. Internalism is an antique mode of desocialisation which can be found in political theory: internal and external limits are clearly, if not beautifully, marked and characterised; closure and identity conditions are not just different types – in relation to analytical Erlebnisse; these absurdities which are thought to arise as the ‘category mistakes’ of confusing (say) the ‘micro-conditions’ and the ‘macro-conditions’ of society are themselves conditions (and aspects) of hegemony. What is ludicrous about the over-clear historicist limit is that it imposes quite arbitrary closure on the range of reference appropriate to each ‘category’.

The humourless respecters of ‘political theory’ fetishise ‘history’ and their relations in ‘it’ and to ‘it’. The obliquity of the content of Political Theory, the indirectness of its relations in ‘production’, overviewing the wretchedness of the people ... the Earth ... signals self-reification. And because the identities of subsections, etc. are compact to and for those subsections, self-reification must be actual desocialisation in extremis.

An historical action, condition, etc. cannot be qualified: existence assumptions and their families are complex and compact valuations; they are ideological life, not just empty dialogue ‘within ideology’. Now the non-causal, non-pragmatical problems of valuation – the question of its ideological embeddedness – must be taken seriously. And doing just that may be thought of as a ‘critique of action’. That would be wrong: the eschewal of ‘natural’ causalist or pragmatist valuation is no more than an everyday possibility of substantive action. But, nota bene, the ‘everyday possibility’ does not wallow in a ‘commonsense’ metaphysics, and we are not advocating sizing up the job from as far back as possible. Uncertainty and risk are ‘internal’ to historicity. But when riskiness or ‘risk’ occurs post festum in the bourgeois Lebensraum it becomes a particularly gratuitous ‘valuation’. ‘Lebensraum’ is used here with the intention of conjuring up the sense of a reliance on hegemony, domination (and/or blindness to it) – plus dialectical schematism with respect to the history of such dominance, etc. A high cultural form of ‘risk’ is not to be found associated with uncertainty, probability, problematicness, etc., but with the metaphysical statuary of ‘determination’ in the locale of ‘reflexive’ Lebensraum. The only ‘risk’ is contained in the social epistemia; self-proclaimed half-hopelessness-normal-normal Utilitarian ideology. This has no ontological significance, save in the ideological ontology of bourgeois Lebensraum: a sort of fundamental evaluativeness. This fundamental evaluativeness is ‘philosophically’ apart from solid but ‘actual’ reality. The thing-ness of the latter’s thing-ness is a powerful weapon for (and product of) desocialisation, masked by – perpetuated as a consequence of – the very ‘ordinariness’ of the utilitarian’s half-hopelessness.

Self-reification requires the Lebens-totality and vice versa. The bourgeois self-image is ideology that refuses to recognise the historical actuality of compactness. The ‘force’ and ‘clarity’ of power relations datur in the NaturKultur can be stuffed into the bourgeois self-image only in a ‘paradoxical’ way. But they do get stuffed in. Semiotic detailing (within certain parameters – ‘choices’) merely contributes to the consumption service industry, furthers the contemplation of ‘intellectual life’ and its mis-identification (mystification) with critical activity. And this is offensive. The horror or the stupidity of such detailing may be found in the non-mitigating condition, viz., the assumption (pre-Hobbes) that the State and Sovereignty enjoy existential ‘personality’.

Why didn’t I take photographs of the couple I passed yesterday afternoon? A woman looked for firewood in the hedge bottom, a man pushed an old pram; one dog followed the woman, another sat in the pram, watching her.

They deserve no further reification ... that’s the schematic answer.