Ben Watson: The Quivering Pschophysique: A Reply to Ian Birchall

Ben Watson replies to Ian Birchall's review of Adorno for Revolutionaries, It's The Song I Hate, on Review31.co.uk

Political parties are clubs, and everyone likes to feel at home in their club. However, when Marx founded the International Workingmen's Association he proposed something rather different from the Carlton Club, or even a Workingman's Club. With his concept of the proletariat, Marx had arrived at a political constituency without a home: its internationalism was predicated on its lack of property, its lack of a stake in the bourgeois national state. So the classic statements of Marxism have never been about making people feel at home, or catering to their comfort, or their expectations, or their prejudices. Indeed, quite the opposite. Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and Lenin's April Theses were slaps in the face to their readers.

So I must say I was rather surprised to read Ian Birchall's review of Adorno for Revolutionaries, because its strongest suit is to say the book is querulous, weird and unusual, and therefore not to be taken seriously. In his preface to the second edition of Capital, Marx remarked that, in Germany, Political Economy was still an "outlandish science" ("audländische Wissenschaft"), but he didn't thereby imply it should be ignored. Birchall appears to be in a club where everyone is already agreed as to who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, and if you read something you think is exciting or insightful by the wrong guy, well then, you are out of the club. Everything worth knowing has all been decided long ago and you're a wrecker and a splitter for trying to stir things up all over again. The problem is, a club where everyone is asleep under their newspapers is not a very exciting prospect for newcomers.

Back in 1963, Adorno criticized the idea that "products of the mind can in esence be elucidated by appeal to the will and intention of their creator" (AfR, p. 48), comparing it to the plaster busts of great thinkers which used to grace middle-class parlours. Another comparison—proving how petty-bourgeois was the Stalinist concept of Marxism—could be the banners showing overlapping profiles of 'great socialist thinkers' which draped Moscow's Red Square as nuclear missiles were wheeled by on May Day. Perhaps Birchall is not so far from this concept as he should be. Lukacs's profile has replaced that of Stalin, but if you care to disagree with Lukacs's idea that Sir Walter Scottt is the apogee of modern literature, then you are suggesting changing the wall-hangings, which is unforgiveable. This is in fact simply old-fashioned philistinism, as lazy as it is collusive with others' laziness: not facing the specifics of an argument, but disagreeing by reference to some readymade league table of authorities.

Birchall excoriates me for talking positively about Brecht, because he failed to come to Trotsky's defence at the time of the Show Trials. Birchall—whose history-writing is apparently not 'shaky' like mine—appears to be mixing up various 'avant garde versus realism' debates at Marxism with what's actually in Adorno for Revolutionaries. Brecht is mentioned three times. Twice he's in a list of his Marxist contemporaries whose collective debates about art and society are recommended over and above taking a 'line' from Adorno (or Lukacs!)—and the last reference is to Kuhle Wampe, recommending Brecht's film for its realistic treatment of sexual relations amongst the young.¹

I'm also excoriated for proposing that Adornoism be applied to music that postdates him (I suppose we're meant to merely repeat what Adorno said about Mahler and Schoenberg: the kind of pointless recycling that characterises sleevenotes for Deutsche Grammophon releases). The 'historian' in Birchall rebels against such "provocative speculation". No doubt anyone writing a 'Marxist' analysis of the War on Terror—instead of, say, Chartism—is also guilty of "provocative speculation". If so, such provocative speculation is just what we need right now.

Birchall concludes with a paragraph that show how the professor of French Studies has won out over the revolutionary in his ideological make-up. Apparently my notion of "'natural' (normal, youthful) sexuality" is profoundly reactionary. Because I don't obey the postmodern doxa that only 'deviant' or 'subversive' sexualities are worth celebrating—because I'm a Marxist and a Freudian and think all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything—I'm not just 'reactionary', but 'profoundly' so. This is someone whose line on sexuality was established by Sheila MacGregor some thirty years ago—adopting the worst moralism and reality-evasion of the Women's Movement—and hasn't had a thoughtful time with a free hand and a fresh erotic idea since.

In his last comments, Birchall the Unshakeable appears very shaky indeed. Here he's run out of 'Marxist' arguments completely, and resorts to the oldest trick in the academic lexicon: Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of signs. No matter that there isn't a mention of Saussure in the book (Birchall must be recalling an old enthusiasm of mine for Valentin Volosinov, who laid the groundwork for a Marxist and revolutionary semiotics), Birchall can tell me with authority—being a Professor of French Studies—that I haven't "understood Saussure's theory of language". Well, that's for a very good reason: as a Marxist, I completely disagree with Saussure's blatant idealism (an idealism which underlies all the Parisian exports, from Althusser through to Badiou and Rancière). Prefering Wittgenstein to Freud, Birchall plumps for authorised abstractions versus analysis of the quivering pschophysique: that's well and good for the political-party neuroses of the repressed, mais ce n'est pas Marxisme, mon ami.


Ben Watson, Camden, 12-x11-2011


Ian's original review can be read here >>


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1. Editor: He's quoted favourably by Andy Wilson in the Preface too, Ben. And since that quote is about production/poesis versus bureaucratic fiat, we'll mention it again here: "Benjamin says that, when he mentioned ‘Lukács, Gábot and Kurella… [and] people like this’, Brecht commented; ‘They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production; production is the unforseeable. You never know what’s going to come out. And they themselves don’t want to produce.  They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Conversations With Brecht’, tr. Anya Bostock, in Adorno, et al., Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso Books, 2007, p. 97." - TGE