Traditional
social theory begins with “the individual” taken from an ontogenetic standpoint
– almost as if that “in-dividual” could exist independently of the species and
indeed of the environment with which the species interacts. It is
understandable, then, why the passage from individual to society is so fraught
with antinomies and antitheses and contradictions – and why theories aimed at
filling this hiatus must necessarily be “transcendentalist” because they must
posit a “social contract” that is the pro-duct of an idealistic interest – a
“reason” or a “spirit” or a “freedom” – that is shared by all “in-dividuals”
and that allows them to co-exist. Social contract theories and rationalist theories
of “society” start from the building bloc of in-dividuum. Yet this notion of
in-dividuum is itself a concept that depends on a division of social labour so
extensive, so “specialized”, that it is possible to think and conceive of the
“individual” as independent of “society”! It is the very “a-tomisation” of
social life operated by Christian-bourgeois society that permits the
ab-straction of human beings from
their “being human”! All previous
social theory begins with the “in-dividuum” and conveniently forgets that it is
a pure fiction created by a particular type of society – and specifically by
Christian-bourgeois society with its religious notion of “soul” and its related
socio-economic one of “property rights” that then extend to “political and human
rights”. What we are seeking to do here is to develop an “immanentist” approach
to social theory that takes a phylogenetic approach to society and its
“members” – an approach that treats “human beings”
as “aspects of being human”. We are
trying to reset the building blocs of social analysis starting not from the
in-dividuum but rather from the “fact” of “species-being” – just as great
theoreticians did, albeit inconsistently, like Marx with the concept of Gattungswesen, Nietzsche with the
“ontogeny of thought,” and Hegel with the dialectic of self-consciousness”.
This lengthy quotation from Werner Jaeger’s Paideia (Vol.3) contains many of the
themes that we have discussed over the role of the Logos between poiesis and techne’ in connection with Nietzsche.
RHETORIC
AND CULTURE 61
More than any other sphere of
life, the art of oratory resists
the effort of systematic reason
to reduce all individual facts to a
number of established schemata, basic forms. In the realm of
logic Plato calls these basic
forms the Ideas. As we have seen,
he
took this three-dimensional mode of describing them from
contemporary
medical science, and applied it to the analysis of
Being.
In rhetoric we can see the same process in operation at
the
same time, though we cannot definitely say that it was
directly
influenced by Plato's use of the term idea.
Medicine and
rhetoric
were by their very nature the spheres in which this conception
of
basic forms or Ideas could be developed—for medicine
reduces
a number of apparently different physiological
events
to a few fundamental types; and rhetoric likewise simplifies
what
seem to be separate and distinct political or legal
situations.
The essence of both skills is to analyse the individual
case
into its general aspects, so as to make it easier to treat
in
practice. The comparison of these
general patterns to the
letters of
the alphabet here,
and later in Plato—was obvious enough.
The act of reading is just the same as that
of political or forensic or
medical diagnosis: a large number of variously
assembled shapes
are reduced to a limited number
of basic 'elements', and thus
the meaning of each of the
apparently manifold shapes is recognized.
59 In science too, the 'elements'
which make up physical
nature were first called by that
name in the same period, and
the same analogy, drawn from
language and the letters of the
alphabet, lies behind it.60
Isocrates
of course does not by any means reject the doctrine of a
rhetorical
system of Ideas. In fact, his writings show that he largely
adopted
that doctrine, and that he took as the foundation of his own
teaching
the mastery of the basic forms of oratory. But oratory which
knew
no more than these forms would be as sounding brass and a
tinkling
cymbal. The letters of the alphabet,
immovable and
unchangeable, are the most
complete contrast to the fluid and
manifold situations of human
life, whose full and rich complexity
can be brought under no rigid
rule.61 Perfect eloquence must be
the individual expression of a
single critical moment, a kairos,
and its highest law is that it
should be wholly appropriate. Only
by
observing these two rules can it succeed in being new and
original.62
62
ISOCRATES
In a word, oratory is imaginative
literary creation. Though
it dare not dispense with
technical skill, it must not stop short
at that.63 Just as the sophists had believed
themselves to be the
true successors of the poets,
whose special art they had transferred
into prose, so Isocrates too
feels that he is continuing
the poets' work, and taking over
the function which until a
short time before him they had
fulfilled in the life of his nation.
His
comparison between rhetoric and poetry is far more than a
passing
epigram. Throughout his speeches the influence of this
point
of view can be traced. The panegyric on a great man is
adapted
from the hymn, while the hortative speech follows the
model
of the protreptic elegy and the didactic epic. And, in
these
types, Isocrates copies even the order of his ideas from
the
well-established traditional order which was a rule in each
of
the corresponding poetic genera. More than that: the position
and
prestige of the orator are determined by this parallel with
the
poet. The new vocation must support itself on an old and
firmly-established
one, and take its standards therefrom. The
less Isocrates hopes or wishes to
succeed as a practical statesman,
the more he needs the prestige of
poetry to set off his
spiritual aims;
and even in the educational spirit by which his
rhetoric
is inspired, he is deliberately emulating what the Greeks
conceived to be the educational function of
the poets of old.
One aspect of logic and science as “languages” or systems of
symbols is that they make possible “the social synthesis” – that is to say,
they allow human beings to co-ordinate their actions and to fulfil their human
potential as members of the species. This is the “technical” side of the Logos.
The other aspect is the “poetic” one that elevates communication from the realm
of technique to that of creation or innovation or decision-making authority. Poiesis
itself can exist only for the in-dividual – because poiesis as such, ea ipsa,
is by definition in-communicable, in-effable. From the viewpoint of the social
synthesis, therefore - which is all that does and can matter for our being human
-, only the technical aspects of
communication can be the subject of political analysis and action. These
aspects correspond to the “executive” or administrative and bureaucratic side of social life, whilst
the poetic role is invariably invoked
to describe and rationalise the decisional and initiating, “creative” or
“authoritative” (from the Latin auctor,
initiator, author, creator) side of the social synthesis. The former role tends
to the “need-necessities” of social life, and the latter serves the artistic
needs. The very fact that the Sophists reduced the dialectical method that long
pre-dates the Platonic dialogues (themselves a written version of spoken
Socratic dialectics) from a dia-logue (thesis and anti-thesis) over a specific
theoretical topic aimed at “the truth” to a “public address” aimed at swaying
“public opinion” is testimony to the changing political role of techne’ and poiesis in the life of the Greek city-states, where political
orators were now called on to persuade assembled crowds rather than individual
debaters, and then even by means of prepared written public addresses and manifestoes (appropriately called
“propaganda”) rather than by verbal extemporizing (see on all this, Giorgio
Colli, La Nascita della Filosofia).
Nietzsche’s quarrel with the “scientific” and dialectical Socrates
(and Platonism, and Christianity as “Platonism for the masses”) starts with
this “formulation” of life, with the “idealization” of existence and its being
a “copy” of the world of Ideas – in short, with the reduction of individual
experience to “technique” by means of the “crystallization and coagulation” of
human communication to achieve this social synthesis. By contrast, his
elevation of the Sophists is based on their preference for the “earthly” and the
“real”, for the apparent and the tragic, for the kairos of seizing the moment to sway the audience. In other words, Nietzsche
seeks to overcome the very cleavage between poiesis
and techne’ that had been introduced
by the Logos, yet he does so by simply denigrating techne’, by reducing the social synthesis as such (tout court) to reification as against the
“authenticity” of poiesis - and
therefore in effect, by treating the two as opposites, he clearly ends up
“reifying” or hypostatizing all human communication and the social synthesis, just
as Weber’s Rationalisierung and Kalkulation will do years later. By
failing to identify the exact political forces that have led to and constitute
this “rationalization”, both Nietzsche and Weber commit the mistake of
asserting that “things” have power over human beings, however much they may end
up denouncing this “rationalization
and disenchantment of the world”. (Lowith, too, is wrong to claim that for Marx
also there is a “self-alienation of man” through the “reification” of
commodities – because if “alienation” is simply the “self-alienation of [abstract] Man”,
then clearly it is only “things” or commodities and not some men and women that can “govern” this supposed self-alienation
and impose it over other human beings.)
Because both Nietzsche and Weber start
with language as mere symbolic “exchange between
in-dividuals”, the former, and “socialization” as the rational settlement of conflict again “between in-dividuals”, neither of them manages to realise that both
communication and the division of social labour begin not with “in-dividuals”
(the sociological equivalent of a-toms in chemistry), but rather with the
phylogenetic unity of human being.
For Isocrates, it is the very committal of ideas to the written form
that “democratizes” them – which is why he must then insist on “imaginative”
literature to preserve the poetic “aura” of the rhetorician, and why for him as
for Plato the rhetorician and the philosopher take “poetical” precedence to the
“practical man” or “technician” or “specialist” or “statesman” – in all cases,
a bureaucrat. (Cicero ’s
De Oratore offers a similar elevation
of the mystique of oratory in Romano-Hellenic society.) Similarly, in Weber,
for whom bureaucracy was paramount in understanding all developed societies
(not just capitalist ones), the Sozialisierung
is a product of “the iron cage”, the conflict of individual needs, and runs
parallel to the Demokratisierung: the
more that the division of social labour reduces the provision of human needs to
techne’ or routine – to “bureaucracy”
-, the greater becomes the accessibility
of information required for the reproduction of society (the Kalkulation). Yet just as for Isocrates,
for him this only leads to the dependence of the decision-making hierarchy on a
few charismatic leaders that can sway “the masses” with their extraordinary
“poetic” or “charismatic” powers.
Thus for Weber, surprisingly, it is the very “specialization” that
requires the centralization of decision-making power, as in the American mass
parties (cf. Politik als Beruf). This
is befuddling because it is quite obvious that the more “technical” and
“specialized” a process becomes, the more open to democratic control it grows
precisely because, as Weber himself (and even Isocrates!) would most certainly
agree, (a) the “decision” is never and can never be a “technical” matter, and
(b) decisions based on more complex “technicalities” become more, not less,
open to democratic scrutiny because the “decisive” aspect recedes. Yet both Isocrates
and Weber attempt to turn even decision-making that is assisted by acute technical
skill and information, not into a truly participatory
democratic process, but rather into its opposite - into a matter of
“feeling” or aesthesis, as Jaeger
insightfully explains in connection with the Greek medical “profession”:
The
real doctor is recognized by his power to estimate what is
appropriate
for each individual case.38 He is the man who has
the
sure
judgment to pick the right quantity for everyone. There
is
no standard of weight or measure by which one could fix
quantities
on a general basis. That must be done wholly by
feeling (aisthesis)
which is the only thing that can compensate
for
the lack of such a rational standard.39 That
is where practising
physicians
make most of their mistakes, and he who makes
only
a small one now and then is indeed a master of his calling.
Most
doctors are like bad pilots. As long as the weather is all
right
their inexpertness is not noticeable, but in a bad storm
everyone sees that they are useless. (p.18)
The
pilot of a ship sailing in good weather requires only techne’; but in bad
weather
he needs to rise up to poiesis or
virtue (arete’). This
categorization
rhymes
with Nietzsche’s dualism of “the rational man” and “the intuitive man”,
of
science and art, of false necessity and freedom, of reification and expression
or
authenticity
(Heidegger, Sartre). Once again, Nietzsche’s political orientation is
exquisitely
“aristocratic”, erecting a barrier between the Ubermensch and “the
herd”.
Equally, in Weber the dualism is between the “soullessness” of the
bureaucratic
and administered individual who belongs to “the masses”, and the
Individualitat of
the charismatic leader or “hero” with his leitender
Geist.
Nietzsche’s
own “intuitive man” or “aesthetic man” – the individual who
possesses
this “aesthesis” or “feeling”, or even the Ubermensch
– is clearly the
precursor
of Weber’s “charismatic leader”. This aspect of demotic elitism is a
central
feature of middle-European social theory from Weber to Schumpeter
(although
it was first theorized by Pareto and Mosca). It is in a “crisis”, the
political
equivalent of this medical “storm”, that the Weberian leitender Geist and
its
“charisma”, the politics of “responsibility”, emerge prepotently. Similarly, it
is
Schumpeter’s
Unternehmer-geist (entrepreneurial spirit) that not only
inter-venes
in a
capitalist “crisis” by means of “Innovation”, but actually and actively causes
one! There
is an element of “initiation” or mysticism leading to authoritarianism
in all
this that Jaeger also identifies with truly astounding acumen when he
describes
the process whereby the Greek medical “profession” and its
demiourgoi sought to turn itself
into a select dictatorship of quasi-religious
or
charismatic leaders distinct from the demotai
or idiotes:
Our
word 'layman', originating in the mediaeval church, first
meant
a person not in holy orders, and thence a person not initiated
into
professional secrets; but the Greek word idiotes carries
a social
and
political connotation. It means a man who pays no attention
to
the state and the community, but simply attends to his private
affairs.
In contrast with him, the doctor is a demiourgos, a
'public
worker'—as indeed every artisan was called who made
shoes
or utensils for the public. Often laymen are distinguished
from
the doctor, viewed in this light, by being called 'the people'
(demotai).
The name demiourgos vividly brings
together the two
sides of the doctor's profession—its social and its
technical
aspects—while the difficult Ionic word cheironas (which is used
as
a synonym for it) signifies only the latter aspect.21
There is
no
word to distinguish the Greek doctor with his higher skill
from
what we should consider as an ordinary artisan; and the
same
holds for the sculptor and the painter. However, there is
something
in Greek medicine which resembles our use of the
word
'layman', with its implication 'uninitiated'. That is the
beautiful close22 of the Hippocratic Law: 'Secret
things are
revealed only to initiates. It is
forbidden to reveal them to
profane persons before they are
initiated into the mysteries of
knowledge.'
Here we have mankind divided, as if by a
religious
rite, into two classes, one of
which is severely debarred from an
arcane knowledge. This line of
thought raises the doctor's
importance above that of a mere
artisan, both technically and
socially…(p.11)
It is entirely obvious here that both Isocrates and Weber elevate
the poiesis of the leader well above
the techne’ of the artisan (or demotai or idiotes) on two specific premises: - one is that public or
political decisions to be made on the basis of the available information are
“conflictual” because (for Weber at any rate) decisions always involve conflictual and contro-versial
matters, including the interpretation of “available information” on which the decisions
are to be made; and the other is that the taking of decisions involves a demos (the public intended as
“spectators”, as “mass”) that plays only a passive role in that it needs to be
“led” and “persuaded” by a dictatorship of “initiates”. This second point is
strengthened by the spread of public addresses or rallies as against
“dia-logues” between two dialecticians (in the Socratic sense), and by the fact
that both public addresses and even dia-logues are committed to writing (even
by Plato, of course, who still qualified himself as a philo-sopher, a “lover”
of wisdom, but not as a “sophist” or wise sage like Socrates or Heraclitus or
Anaxagoras) so they may be “propagated” to a wide “public”. (Again, see G. Colli’s
brilliant short study on La Nascita della
Filosofia. The equivalent “structural change of the public sphere” in the
capitalist era was the focus of Jurgen Habermas’s homonymous masterful early
study.)
There is an obvious apory in Weber’s reasoning between the Demokratisierung (occasioned by the
spread and rise of the working class in capitalist industrial nations in his
time) that requires both the extension of “markets” and the spread of the
bureaucratic apparatus to regulate this process at a distance, as it were, so
as to give the impression that the social synthesis operates independently of
political control through “economic laws”: this is the Sozialisierung, on one hand. And then on the other hand there is the
need for this bureaucratic machinery to be “guided” by the “leading Spirit” of
the “charismatic hero”. This apory is why Marx instead reasons in the exact
opposite direction to Weber (in the Grundrisse
at any rate, because elsewhere he seems to justify Lukacs’s “artisanal
totality”): democratization and consequent socialization require higher
concentration of power so as to preserve the power of those already in control (the capitalist
managers) – which serves only to intensify the antagonism of the existing
social relations. (Benjamin Constant will describe this as the rise of the
“private rights” as against the “public freedom” of Antiquity – and so will
Hannah Arendt.)
Here is the polar opposition of “forces” and “relations” of
production – which certainly does not mean, as Weber wrongly took it to mean, a
mechanical relation between the wind mill and feudalism and the steam-mill and
capitalism (cf. Marx: "The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill,
society with the industrial capitalist", The Poverty of Philosophy, ch.2). Indeed, the notion of “force” of
production could never be intended by Marx in a “mechanical” sense (though
often in his more scientistic moments
he does give that impression), but simply to distinguish the direct relations
of production from their “legal” aspects, that is, the social claim to
“distribution” of what he called “surplus value”. There is no great merit,
then, in Weber’s attempt to reduce the Marxian metonymy to the crude
distinction of “base and superstructure” and then suggest instead the Sombartian
analysis based on the mixture of “Technik und Kultur”:
Es ist selbstverständlich an sich etwas
Willkürliches und sehr Zweifelhaftes, was man unter dem Begriff »Technik«
verstehen will. Marx gibt eine Definition des Begriffs Technik meines Wissens
nicht. Es steht aber bei Marx, bei dem sehr Vieles steht, was, wenn man genau
und pedantisch, wie wir es tun müssen, analysiert, nicht nur widerspruchsvoll
scheint, sondern wirklich widerspruchsvoll ist, unter anderem eine oft zitierte
Stelle des Inhalts: Handmühle bedingt Feudalismus, Dampfmühle bedingt
Kapitalismus. Das nun ist eine nicht ökonomische, sondern technologische Geschichtskonstruktion,
– und von der Behauptung selbst ist einwandsfrei zu konstatieren, daß sie
einfach falsch ist. (in http://www.zeno.org/Soziologie/M/Weber,+Max/Schriften+zur+Soziologie+und+Sozialpolitik/Gesch%C3%A4ftsbericht+und+Diskussionsreden+auf+dem+ersten+Deutschen+Soziologentage+in+Frankfurt+1910/Diskussionsrede+zu+W.+Sombarts+Vortrag+%C3%BCber+Technik+und+Kultur)
(This is Weber’s discussion of W.Sombart’s
lecture on „Technik und Kultur“.)
Of course,
abstracted from its specific socio-historical context, both the wind mill and
the steam-mill are “technological” and not “economic” entities. Here yet again
we see how sterile and “pedantic” Weber’s neo-Kantian formalism becomes the
minute one seeks to dissect human reality into separate “scientific”
categories. Doubtless, what Marx meant is that the steam-mill represents the
application of scientific practice to the production of commodities for a
“market” (steam allows the constant capital invested on its machinery to be
used round-the-clock and decreases its time of circulation), rather than the
application of traditional methods for local subsistence production (the wind
mill is subject to the vagaries of the weather)! There is an obvious
dif-ference between the two “machines” – and curiously this is a process that
Weber himself identified also (apart from Marx) in “Science as a Vocation” and
generally in his writings on capitalism as “the regulation of free labour under
the discipline of the factory” – a “regulation” meant to secure the pro-duction
of excess labour force or excess population (the unemployed) so as to maintain
the “discipline” of those who are employed.
The problem
for capitalism and its “regulated discipline” of wage labour is that it is
getting increasingly harder for this “excess” labour force to be kept in too
large numbers (rates of unemployment are shrinking relative to previous
historical “crises”) and too disenfranchised in terms of their dependence on
actual employment for their social reproduction (the living standards of even
the unemployed are generally rising, again, relative to previous crises). The
old distinction between “intellectual” and “manual” labour is fading away
because most labour processes now are technical or intellectual in kind. As we
have established in our study of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour (and in our critique of Cacciari’s
distinction of poiesis as against techne’ in ‘El Hacer del Canto’), no distinction is possible between
intellectual and manual labour for the simple reason that all human activity
involves mental and physical aspects that are impossible to separate let alone
distinguish! And with the fading of this notion and reality of “labour as
toil”, the related parallel notion that “knowledge is power” no longer applies
because with growing specialization and ease of communication it is not the
actual “knowledge” that individuals possess that determines their position in
capitalist industry and society - and therefore their “power”. Rather, it is
“access to information” that becomes vital to determining this political power.
The only
distinction possible is one based on specific “skills” required for certain
tasks. But these “skills” are de-fined by complex social “rules”, by the
“regimentation” of a society in a given manner. Now, it is precisely this
“regimentation” that is giving way because the skewed distribution of knowledge
is incompatible with its immediate accessibility as “information” – except for
legal-proprietary “barriers” erected by capital! In other words, the “distance”
between skilled and unskilled labour is reduced greatly by the facility of
“bridging” this distance through easier and faster means of communication. This
is what the incessant Demokratisierung
has achieved since at least the age of Gutenberg – something that Nietzsche and
Weber understood perfectly well. As did Kierkegaard:
»Kaiser,
Könige, Päpste, Jesuiten, Generäle,
Diplomaten
haben bisher in einem entscheidenden
Augenblick
die Welt regieren können; aber
von der
Zeit an, da der vierte Stand eingesetzt
wird, wird
es sich zeigen, daß nur Märtyrer die
Welt
regieren können.«
Das Eine, was not tut
(Emperors,
kings, popes, Jesuits, generals, diplomats have hitherto been able to govern
the world without batting an eyelid. But since the time of the rise of the
Fourth Estate [the working class], it has become evident that only Martyrs can
rule the world.)
The
repercussions of this realization are far-reaching and indeed revolutionary.
The fact is that it is becoming much harder for capital to reintroduce “pain”
(or “brawn”) and “brain” into the rationale of the wage relation and indeed of
its control over the allocation of “resources” or capital. However much its
distribution may be affected by “effort” or “skill”, the growing identification
of capital with “resources” evinces its growing
“socialization” as a productive force as against the “private” nature of its allocation, in that the process of
“allocation” involves virtually no “effort” on the part of the decision-maker
except for the “naked reality” of his “proprietary right” to make such
decisions (made increasingly political
rather than technical by the very
spread of knowledge-as-information!). The information revolution brings
prepotently to the fore the sheer brutality and naked violence – the real
terrorism! – of the capitalist command
over living labour. Not “effort”, not “skill”, determines the rule of capital
over our living labour any longer – but rather the sheer naked and violent
“fact” of the imposition of capitalist command over the allocation and
distribution of social resources.