Beyond the Blank Slate

This post started as a reply to Carl’s comment below, but grew a bit cancerous, so I’ve transposed it into a post of its own…

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Hey Carl – thanks for these – I’m probably more on board with the Durkheim than with the Sorel, although you’ve reminded me that I should put up something about the notion of “cleansing” violence, and about related conceptions of revolution as the instantiation of a New Man or New Society… I’m after something more evolutionary – in the biological science sense: the notion that the future we make descends from our past, but it’s a descent with modification. This doesn’t mean the change can’t be quite dramatic in character, but it does mean we’re never in the position of working from – or creating – a historical blank slate. Revolution within this framework is a hack of history, in the same sense in which Francis Crick reportedly claimed that “God is a hacker, not an engineer” – working with the modification of what exists, opportunistically tweaking what’s currently there, rather than creating from scratch via some sort of blueprint model.

Sorel’s reflections, to me, long for a blank slate. I suspect this is also part of the appeal of more recent theorists like Badiou. There’s a relation between this kind of theory, I think, and unscientific (comfortably scientific?) desires for a firm and incontrovertable ontological foundation for revolutionary practice: both are oriented to a transcendent foundation – one believes it can know what that foundation is; the other believes such a foundation isn’t accessible – at least not to thought – and then concludes that action can therefore be driven by nothing other than myth.

I’m after something more Benjaminian – in the sense Benjamin uses in his reflections on the Concept of History, where he speaks about the remarkable lack of selfishness present generations have toward the future, and suggests that what motivates us are our present desires:

‘One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,’ writes Lotze, ‘is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.’ Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.

I think we can explore those present desires scientifically – in the tentative, exploratory sense I’m trying to use for science here – the sense reflected in the Durkheim quote you’ve used. One of the things I think Marx is particularly good at, is looking at the practical bases of our desires – tracing desires back to things we actually do, and therefore pulling them down from the aether of disembodied desires, and back into the microfoundations of everyday practices through which we suggest to one another that particular things are possible in the real world. In this way, Marx begins to make the “scientific” case that particular desires are not in fact utopian – that there are significant dimensions of our collective experience that suggest the possibility to realise these desires in concrete, realistic, institutional forms.

There’s still a level of uncertainty around the whole enterprise, because of course the aspects of our current experience that suggest certain possibilities are offset by countervailing aspects of our social practices – there’s still a gamble involved in trying to work out what it would mean to institutionalise certain possibilities in new forms. But this is nothing like the sort of abstract, roll-the-dice, gamble implied in conceptions of the revolution as the Great Blank Slate, the revolt of Will Against History, etc. Marx’s method is intended to provide the resources for something much more concrete – to give us a sense of the aspects of our history that seem to be inviting specific emancipatory hacks.

And it’s providing these resources in a context where the question of whether to have a revolution has been settled: capitalism itself already figures as a revolutionary force – overturning traditional forms of life, and then deposing the post-traditional forms themselves in turn, tossing human and animal populations around the globe in unprecedented numbers, unpending cultures and languages and governmental forms, endlessly altering the fabric of everyday life. Marx believes this experience habituates us to planning for revolution – he thinks we already do this, all the time – just generally to non-emancipatory ends. Marx is trying to get us to hack this existing revolutionary process for emancipatory purposes – he’s trying to suggest the possibility for splicing into our historical inheritance some specific institutional transformations whose implications, while not completely predictable in advance, are nevertheless at least partially and tentatively knowable from a thorough exploration in the laboratory that is our existing society and history.

On the one hand, Capital is a work that heavily thematises unintended consequences – the introduction of a market for labour-power figures in Marx’s narrative as one of these, as does the accidental enactment of a kind of disembodied equality for labour values, as does the development of technology and the growth of scientific knowledge, and so on. So the possibility is constantly on the table that our practices, our innovations, will have unintended consequences, will generate unpredicted – and yet retrospectively comprehensible – impacts that could fundamentally change the historical game.

On the other hand, Capital is informed strongly by this sense that one of these accidental and unanticipated consequences of our past historical practice is that we have primed ourselves to become aware of the possibility of deliberately hacking history to achieve specific human goals. We may do this now to shore up the pieces left after a major crisis, to try to glue back together what was just smashed – but Marx suggests that only a slightly different selection from the diversity of existing practice is required to think we might apply similar energies to a more emancipatory end.

So Capital systematically maps the genome of capitalist production, trying to document the internal practical variability that already exists within this peculiar species of material reproduction, in order to try to make the case that this internal variability is already sufficiently diverse and contradictory to enable us to select from within it the building blocks of a very different form of social life. It’s a vision of revolution that doesn’t require that we be godlike, all-powerful, or all-knowing – a vision that acknowledges the groping, uncertain, largely accidental character of human history. And yet also holds out the possibility for creating some quite new – not by wiping clean the historical slate, but by adapting creatively to our current surroundings, by applying a slightly different sort of selective pressure, which will enable us to appropriate a different subset of existing practical potentials, and thus speciate a new form of social life…

I’ve probably pushed the evolutionary metaphor a bit farther here than I really want to take it… 🙂 I’m experimenting with ways of communicating what I’m trying to get across, so take the specific imagery with more than a small grain of salt…

But the blank slate conception of revolution is one of my targets – one of the historical ruts that seems, to me, to crop up recurrently in particular kinds of political and social theory – a rut that I don’t think is productive of good thinking about possible concrete social institutions, a rut that seems more likely, to me, to be productive of massacres than emancipatory institutions.

My argument would be that, in spite of superficial appearances, the blank slate approach – whether expressed in abstract notions of cleansing violence or in some other eschatological standpoint – is precisely not motivated by an attempt to be more aware of the boundaries of our current understanding. The motivation is rather a sort of magical belief that those boundaries can be smashed, once and for all, by some action we can take now, or by some sort of historical rapture that will magick up the worthy if they await its coming faithfully enough. These approaches may agree that we can’t think our way past the limits of our current understanding – but they haven’t given up on the notion that there is some sort of action within our control that can shatter the barrier between ourselves and some sort of absolute.

I think that Marx is after something radically different. He’s after an approach that allows us to acknowledge that our actions might have unpredictable consequences – to hold that we are in no position to dictate the end point and culmination of all social development – to maintain that future generations will have their own ideas about the sort of society they want to live in: we can do all this – refusing to write recipes for the cookshops of the future – and yet we can still put forward actual concrete proposals for the global institutional structures we’d like to see, as alternatives to the ones we have right now. And we can ground this analysis in actual analysis of the implications and possibilities suggested by actual empirical things, that we can experience now or have experienced in the recorded past. And we can therefore base political proposals on a kind of concrete, non-utopian foundation – that carries with itself the realisation that it, too, is still groping forward, limited in its ability to foretell consequences that will no doubt be transparently clear and sensible to those who come after, but that is nevertheless mining as well as it can the insights available within our own time.

At least, that’s the general idea…