Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine

[josef k.]

What I find really interesting is the way the conflict passes up the chain, changing form as it does. The initial conflict is presented as: proletarian versus upper bourgeois, with the latter being denied - extremely aggressively - the right to speak on a topic of special concern to the former (work), by a mysterious third party speaking in the name of "we".

Amongst the most interesting statements here: "really, do we have to let him write about it?" Perhaps we should kill him, or send him to the gulag, or break all of his pencil leads, one after the other. As a side point, the same basic argument outlined here could also be made against the factory owner's son Engels, with respect to his book on the English working class.

But this initial argument also has a number of other threads. Botton's status as an intellectual is denied - he is an "'intellectual'" who has only "pretended they've read Plato..." So the subplot here concerns intellectual authority, who possesses it, who does not.

Botton does not, I guess, because of his class background - but then what about Engles? Or as de Botton himself points out, Tolstoy. The circle doesn't square - the real objection seems to come from elsewhere. Where? The subsequent translation into a conceptual conflict, strange under the circumstances, given the fairly unconceptual terms in which this argument began, doesn't resolve this question, but instead only anchors it, in the idea of universal justice and an axiom pertaining to the proper assignment of philosophy. The terms are now Oxbridge and the Ivy League, versus "the rest of us" - which may mean the red bricks, it isn't easy to say.

One party asserts that they speak from the (authentic) position of universal justice, thus legitimating their position - a position otherwise not easily justifiable. A similar move used to be made by the French New Philosophers, who used to say that they spoke on behalf of the victims of the holocaust and the gulag. So a positional and class conflict - between two intellectual classes - turns into a universal battle between justice and its enemies. Meanwhile, the cleaners - on whose behalf this battle is apparently being waged - stay silent.

I cannot understand how this is at issue here. I've never read de Botton and have no idea what he says, and these terms are in no way apparent in what is presented here.

NB - IT... is a she..

 

[josef k.]

Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak" is quite good on these questions. Available from here:

http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/subaltern-speak-spivak-pdf.html

 

[vimothy]

NB - IT [coughcoughcough] is a she..

The plot thickens... (he -- quite sure of that, at least -- says to steer the conversation away from his embarrassing knee-jerk assumptions).

 

[vimothy]

Strange that it is the very fact that De Botton does not need to work that annoys IT so -- as it seems to be the state that IT desires for herself. Assuming (again with the assumptions!), that is, that IT is a working class drone and not a genteel writer like De Botton.

 

[josef k.]

She's a philosophy lecturer, possessed of a fairly binary definition of work which serves to include her amongst the toiling masses and cleaners, despite the fact that she and de Botton would clearly seem to have more in common with each other (they are communicating with each other, after all) than either would have the cleaner, whose voice remains unheard.

It reminds me of a conversation I once had with this drunk actor guy. Dumbest guy I ever met. He was an actor and choral singer from Australia, who kept telling me that if he didn't work, he'd die. But what he understood by work was "acting jobs" - not working in a factory, or cleaning the streets. But he felt that it was all basically the same. He told me of his plans for the theater - he wanted to produce a play which would involve him clambering off the stage to shit on the faces of the audience. He felt that this would be a very political gesture.

 

[vimothy]

The over-identification with some kind of constructed notion of working-class identity seems like a very middle class preoccupation to me.

 

[vimothy]

Eh -- John Eden strikes again?!

The plot is now so thick it has lumps in it...

 

[john eden]

Eh -- John Eden strikes again?!

The plot is now so thick it has lumps in it...

craner edited his own post.

 

[vimothy]

Sorry -- I'm just trying to stir the pot... (and get rid of all these lumps)!

 

[john eden]

it's all good.

 

[vimothy]

Or maybe that's just what you want us to think....

 

[josef k.]

The over-identification with some kind of constructed notion of working-class identity seems like a very middle class preoccupation to me.

Its a very British preoccupation, certainly... Class is understood very differently in the US and Europe. The British model is often very mystifying. A noted example of this - the Laura Spence/Oxford case of a few years ago. Notably seized upon by Gordon Brown, who presented it in terms of snobbish Oxford dons denying a merited place to a hard-working northern girl. This was very strategic on his part - the essential point was to take a stand on class, precisely, here, on a moral plane. So that the underlying political structures are not considered more carefully.

The real question of class in the UK - and elsewhere - isn't really about hard-working northern girls on the one hand, and snobbish dons on the other. Its about the ways in which different groups, or circles of friends and associates, or unions, or institutions, exercise collective power by operating in tandem, to set agendas and reward each other for favors. And about the patterns of exclusion which operate alongside these inclusions, so that particular groups (for example, asylum seekers, for example, people outside of institutional remits) are left outside the system. Hence structures are maintained broadly as they were. Within the republic of letters, Private Eye is quite good on this point in their annual round-up of book reviewers reviewing the people who reviewed their books, blurbing their books, and so on.

Adorno has a very good point in Minima Moralia about this, with particular reference to the De Botton case. Let me see if I can find it...

 

[josef k.]

Ah yes:

For Marcel Proust. – The son of well-to-do parents who, whether out of talent or weakness, chooses a so-called intellectual occupation as an artist or scholar, has special difficulties with those who bear the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, that the seriousness of his intentions is doubted and that he is presumed to be a secret envoy of the established powers. Such mistrust is borne out of resentment, yet would usually find its confirmation. However the actual resistances lie elsewhere. The occupation with intellectual [geistigen] things has meanwhile become “practical,” a business with a strict division of labor, with branches and numerus clausus [Latin: restricted entry]. Those who are materially independent, who choose out of repugnance towards the shame of earning money, are not inclined to recognize this. For this he is punished. He is no “professional” [in English in original], ranks in the hierarchy of competitors as a dilettante, regardless of how much he knows about his subject, and must, if he wishes to pursue a career, display a professional tunnel vision even narrower than that of the most narrow-minded expert. The suspension of the division of labor to which he is driven, and which the economic state of affairs allows him, within certain limits, to realize, is considered especially scandalous: this betrays the aversion to sanction the hustle and bustle dictated by society, and high and mighty competence does not permit such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of the Spirit [Geist] is a means of abolishing such there, where it is not ex officio or contractually obligated. It does its work all the more surely, as those who continually reject the division of labor – if only in the sense that they enjoy their work – reveal, by this selfsame measure, their vulnerabilities, which are inseparable from the moments of their superiority. Thus is the social order [Ordnung] assured: this one must play along, because one could not otherwise live, and that one, who could indeed live, is kept outside, because they don’t want to play along. It is as if the class which the independent intellectual deserted from revenges itself, by forcibly pushing through its demands precisely where the deserter sought refuge.

[http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm]

 

[vimothy]

One party asserts that they speak from the (authentic) position of universal justice, thus legitimating their position - a position otherwise not easily justifiable.... Meanwhile, the cleaners - on whose behalf this battle is apparently being waged - stay silent.

Surely someone better read than I has a handy Foucault quote to interject at this point. But anyway, it seems that beneath the lofty claims about universal justice there is a more mundane kind of power struggle being waged. A power struggle not of the cleaners against the asset managers and financiers, but between two groups of the same class, a power struggle between writers, philosophers, internet celebrities... But I see that this is tying into your post below... (er, which is to say, above)

 

[vimothy]

Quo Vadis

And so perhaps the de Botton/Infinite Thought debate might better be thought of as some kind of insurgency -- though who the insurgent is and who the counterinsurgent is, is not really clear -- with the goal of seizing or maintaining control of the institutional framework that this particular "class" or social network is embedded in. Both seek the authority to represent 'the working man'; neither seem obviously of that group (if it even makes sense to speak of it as a group). Yet here is a struggle waged in their name. In a sense this is all local to a very specific millieu, but it also seems strangely universal.

 

[josef k.]

The fact that this is an argument between an editor at a magazine to which (I believe) de Botton has contributed is internally interesting to the politics of this magazine - though I doubt that this has been sanctioned internally. There are also ways in which the wider economic climate is now throwing up some wildcards in terms of the kinds of voices which are now entering into mainstream public discourse - the increasingly nationalist tilt of New Labour being one example of this. The question "Who speaks for the British Working Class" is a particularly live one in Britain at the moment. But judging from De Botton's comments on the webpage, I am not sure his own aim is precisely representational in that sense. He seems more interested in work in a sort of existential way. But I have no idea what he says in his book.

 

[vimothy]

No, you're right, I was being glib -- de Botton wants to represent, as in discuss, describe, and so on, the working class in his writing, whereas Infinite Thought wants to, perhaps, speak on their behalf (challenging the authenticity of de Botton's representation). But of course, the two things are not unrelated.

 

[josef k.]

I'm not sure his book is really "about" the working class though - it seems more like its about work itself, which is obviously not limited to the working class. Bank managers also work.

An outstanding question, incidentally, tending to slip through the cracks of this is whether there is really such a thing as universal justice, which it would be possible to articulate.

Interesting in this respect is the fact that IT grounds her point that "Writing obviously unfair, vicious polemic is something to be defended, and not just for its occasional comic value... there is something serious at stake in acts of dark linguistic violence that goes beyond any laughter they might elicit. There are truthful things that can only be said effectively in this way."

On a claim for universal justice. It would seem that particular justice ("obviously unfair, vicious polemic") needs to be sacrificed on the altar of universal justice.

 

[vimothy]

Ok, ok -- he wants to represent -- descriptively, not politically -- work and by doing so, workers. IT wants to challenge his ability to do so, based on de Botton's class, which would entail questionning whether someone who doesn't need to work can ever understand it, and therefore ever represent/describe it with any accuracy.

I think that this exchange does indeed have implications for the struggle for something like universal justice, but that thought will have to wait till later...

 

[josef k.]

But the relationship between work - and the figure of "the worker" is not at all simple. The latter largely tends to be identified with manual workers and "the working class" - a lingering effect of Marxism, which based its politics on a binary divide - reproduced in this case - of those who have capital, and those who have none. Marx believed that capitalist development was producing this binary for him - "the world is dividing into two great classes". Actually, the opposite occurred, and the gradients of class are now far more complex and internally variegated then they were in Marx's own time. Unions today possess capital, and investments. But of course, you know all this.

De Botton may even have a more sophisticated understanding of class than Marx and (some of) his followers. Max Weber certainly did: the need to work is also linked to status - its not just a question of providing basic economic amenities, but also of receiving a share of the social product, and the prestige that comes with it. If the worker is defined as someone possessing no status or social product at all (what Spivak calls the subaltern) we can pursue this question further. But this would entail talking about hard empirical facts - the condition, for example, of sex slaves - and of taking practical steps to combat that alienation. But this is not a topic that the intellectual advocates of the worker by and large wish to pursue, preferring to remain within the confines of their own status games and symbolic polemics against their intra-bourgeois enemies. Rendering the gesture of staging a claim on the basis of universal justice, I think, for this reason, a decoy.