Ian Birchall & Ben Watson: Balls Shot Off

Ian Birchall reviewed Ben Watson's Adorno for Revolutionaries in 'It's The Song I Hate', for Review31.co.uk.
Ben Watson replied in the article 'The Quivering Pschophysique'
Now, read on....

Jan Svankmajer: Karl Marx as a collection of butterflies

Dear Ben,

Many thanks for taking the trouble to respond so extensively and so vigorously to my brief review of your book. I thoroughly approve of sharp polemic and ad hominem argument, and on my day I can be quite good at them myself. I chose to write what I thought was a sympathetic review, with some reservations, because I actually liked quite a lot of the book, and wanted to encourage others to read it. But apparently nothing other than total adoration will do. I think it is you who believes that “changing the wall-hangings… is unforgiveable”. If I were to say, for example, that I find Samuel Beckett’s novels (not his plays) tedious and unreadable, I should be greeted with banshee-like howls of rage that would make Matthew Arnold in distress sound like Matt Monro.

I am accused of following Lukács in believing that “Sir Walter Scott is the apogee of modern literature”. In fact I have only read one novel by Scott in my life, and I have published various articles sharply critical of Lukács’s literary views, notably his total misunderstanding of Zola. But never mind facts or what I actually wrote – it’s much more fun denouncing what you would like to imagine I wrote.

In fact, the reference to Lukács you take exception to was a mild joke. Since your rage seems to have made you humourless, let me explain it to you. Lukács developed the idea of “imputed” class consciousness. For a Marxist this is an absolutely essential idea – unless we have reason to think that the working class has the potential to act in a quite different way to what it is actually doing at present, then the whole of Marxism collapses. But it also has dangers, primarily encouraging the belief that the party knows better than the class. I was suggesting that at times you were guilty of something rather similar – of thinking you know better than Adorno himself what Adorno really thought.

Nor am I against “speculation” – the phrase “provocative speculation” was actually a compliment, but you were too stupid to recognise it. Of course it is quite legitimate to measure a dead writer’s ideas against subsequent reality. Would Karl Marx have thought that Russia was a workers’ state? Highly unlikely.

But except where such arguments can be demonstrated by fairly rigorous textual references, they are, quite literally, speculation. Would Spinoza have liked Dusty Springfield? And I think such arguments betray some sort of nostalgia for the immortality of the soul. Adorno, like the rest of us, was a finite being who lived at a particular determinate time. To try to use some sort of disembodied, eternal Adorno to validate punk (why should it need such validation?) verges on mysticism.

You refer to me as “professor of French Studies”. This is inaccurate - I have never held a professorship, and I have not held any academic post whatsoever for the last eighteen years. Moreover, were I prepared to indulge in unbridled ad hominem attacks, I could point out that it is particularly bizarre and offensive for you, of all people, to use the word “professor” as a term of abuse. But I have sufficient good taste and respect for people who, despite everything, I think of as comrades, to pursue that.

Instead I’ll try and develop briefly my final points which were made in abbreviated form because of the word limit I was working to.

You reiterate that “all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything”. Tell that to some poor sod who’s had his balls shot off in Afghanistan. In your novel Shitkicks & Doughballs you imply that people you dislike (Simon Frith, Alex Callinicos) are sexless and impotent. I happen to think this is profoundly offensive to people who, through no fault of their own, are impotent, or who are asexual by choice. [The point would have been obvious if you had made them gay – but you wouldn’t have dared.] Somehow they are inferior to Ben who is banging away non-stop. For thinking that I am accused of both “postmodern doxa” and having my ideas formed by Sheila McGregor. That those two propositions might be contradictory does not seem to have crossed your mind.

Then you assert “there isn't a mention of Saussure in the book”. You really should stop trusting your index and read what you yourself have written. Page 17, footnote: “It is not with Ferdinand de Saussure but with Bishop Berkeley….. that the description of language as ‘a great number of arbitrary signs’ begins”. As far as I am concerned Saussure is like Newton or Darwin – his work can be modified, revised and built upon, but you can’t go back to what existed before. Can we really abandon the concept of the “phoneme”? And to reject the idea of the “arbitrary sign” is to lapse into the unconscious racism of the monoglot. If the word “dog” somehow has a non-arbitrary connection with the doggishness of real dogs, then “dog” must be its real name, and all those foreign idiots who call it a “chien”, hund”, “perro” or “kalb” are by definition inferior. You could sell that one to Nigel Farage.

You may put this on your website if you please. If you don’t please, you may wipe your arse on it. I reserve the right to circulate it to anyone interested.

And since the things we agree on are far more important than either Adorno or Beckett, I will conclude with comradely greetings and best wishes,

Ian Birchall, London, 12-xii-2011

Reply by Ben Watson

Ah, you’ve come back for more. I like that, Ian.

Although people who think cultural activity is all about mutual appreciation and networking (i.e. careerism) accuse me of being ad hominem and insulting, it’s really the truth of the matter I’m after. All the polite lies and evasions and silences make us dull. I believe vast swathes of contemporary boredom would be abolished if people dared say in public what they mutter to their spouses in private. If it makes people flare up, well and good. As all punks know, dry tinder just begs for the spark.

Samuel Beckett? I’m not sure he’s quite the monument he’s been made into, actually. More pertinent would be to contrast the works of Stewart Home (whom I know you detest) to your own novels. By breaking through certain correctnesses and inhibitions that keep your novels bland and patronising, Home manages to write books which convey some of the excitement and panic of revolutionary politics. This is possible because he breaks with the notion of novelistic realism you adhere to. You might disagree with Lukács about Walter Scott, but in his debates with Brecht and Adorno, you take his side, and refuse to see the breakdown of bourgeois novelistic realism as anything but decadence. Us Joyceans think otherwise. For the AMM, socialist politics which adopts the Lukácsian aesthetic has a topdown, bourgeois perspective: culture as personal property rather than a puzzle only democratic discussion and materialist analysis can resolve.

There’s something so obtuse and English about your statements, Ian. They remind me of Dr Johnson. Someone defined a horse to Dr Johnson as a “herbivore quadruped”. Johnson shot back: “What if the horse was missing a leg?” Likewise, you refute my statement that “all living humans unbullied by vicars and academics are capable of erotically-charged relations to anyone and anything” by saying: “Tell that to some poor sod who’s had his balls shot off in Afghanistan”. This sounds like a new movement in identity politics, you’d better copyright it quick: castrati denouncing all references to sex as personal insults! In fact, the existential project of paring down the human to its “essence” — devoid of language, culture, cuisine, physique, sex, eyes, taste, external limbs — is the comedy of Samuel Beckett, and when taken seriously ends you up with Gilles Deleuze and his “body without organs”. You say I’m wrong to equate orthodox postmodernist moralism with Sheila McGregor, but I see them both as woeful products of feminism’s insufficient critique: since it exploits sexuality, the bourgeoisie can only see those who aren’t ashamed of it as wicked, dirty and sexist.

Aha, so the accusation about being “profoundly reactionary” on sexuality comes from your reading my novel Shitkicks & Doughballs (you are very committed to the idea that a reviewer should review the person - i.e. the whole oeuvre - rather than the book in hand, aren’t you?). You say I didn’t “dare” make my characters gay. Well, it turns out Semen Froth’s “Trish” is in fact a boy, and Stewpot Hauser ends up buggering Out To Lunch (Lunch reflects: “This was like a Wyndham Lewis novel where the homo sex actually happens!”) although, in the event of writing, buggery was beyond my powers of fantasy, and I had to fold in a description from Larry Townsend’s classic The Leatherman’s Handbook.

You were right, I missed the fact that Saussure got mentioned in the book. I didn’t index “passing” references. In reply to what you say, I’ll simply cite the passage in question: “It was via structuralist semiotics that the idealist notion of significance as a transcendental, sealed-off, quasi-divine system was most recently smuggled back into desanctified philosophy and the secular humanities. Interestingly, it is not with Ferdinand de Saussure but with Bishop Berkeley, scourge of materialism and defender of Christianity, that the description of language as ‘a great number of arbitrary signs’ begins¹, though of course Berkeley’s idealism, like everyone else’s, is fundamentally a restatement of Pauline neo-Platonism.” That’s my thesis. Utterly out of kilter with current academic assumptions and fashions, but that’s where the AMM thinks Marxists should be.

You tastefully don’t “out” me by saying that Esther Leslie, my partner and the mother of our children, is herself a professor. Well, she is: Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at Birkbeck, a title she chose herself, and which derives from the collection of Marxist debates about culture (Verso, 1977) whose matrix of discussion and polemic I recommend in Adorno for Revolutionaries over taking a line from either Adorno or Lukács.² But the day Esther comes home and declares herself as a structuralist—Saussure’s linguistics as epochal as gravity or evolution—is the day we divorce. My digs against you being a “professor” are not to do with your day job, but to try and explain why your Marxism is so pragmatically political and unimaginative—so unMarxist. You’ve swallowed all that stuff you had to teach, Ian. Go and read Valentin Volosinov. He spells out precisely why a Marxist cannot agree with Saussure, much less credit him with a scientific leap forward. And to accuse someone who disagrees with structuralist linguistics of being racist; this is like the Com Dem government condemning “locals” who might object to new capitalist developments of “opposing progress”. Certainly, bringing to consciousness the actuality of the words in our mouths (“poetics”, something which makes you reach for your revolver) means becoming aware of our specific geographical location and tribal ancestors and all kinds of material facts an idealist (or Stalinist) Marxism would rather suppress (in favour of some global “class struggle” fought in the share-price pages of the Financial Times rather than by real people). But then this is the relevance of Finnegans Wake, which tried to imagine “dog” in every tongue and what that would mean to someone in touch with every language. Which is where, due to the huge movements of people brought about by capitalist insecurity, we actually are in London and all major urban centres. In fact, your equation of Saussurian linguistics with globalisation suggests many avenues for fruitful critique. Thanks!

You conclude by saying: “And since the things we agree on are far more important than either Adorno or Beckett, I will conclude with comradely greetings and best wishes”. I’m grateful for comradely greetings and best wishes, of course, but I cannot concur that this discussion is trivial and should be buried in the “deeper interests of the struggle” or whatever. This debate IS part of the struggle as far as I am concerned, and if there was somewhere else I could go to argue my Marxism, I’d go there and drop this. The AMM was formed by ex-SWP activists precisely because we think the argument about Lukács was wrongly postponed, and that the denigration of modernism and art extremism in the party (“inaccessible”, “elitist” etc) conceals blatantly bourgeois political aspirations and methods. Marxism has no truck with public opinion—neither in what we say about Obama, nor in what we say about an art exhibition or a pop hit. We believe the cosy “club” mentality of yore goes nowhere, does nothing and gratifies no-one but a few worn-out comrades with standing orders to party funds, and is completely irrelevant to the times we are living in. We don’t believe money can sustain, much less build, a revolutionary party, and we agree with those calling for a complete restructuring of SWP democracy. It’s the only way to make the party active again. We believe that the flames of honest expression about “subjective” issues which Adorno stood for CAN fuse with a public politics, and when it does the results will be explosive. These are the stakes of the debate.

Ben Watson, Camden, 13-xii-2011

--

1. George Berkeley, ‘The Theory of Vision Vindicated and Explained’, London: 1733, #40; Philosophical Works, Including the Works on Vision, ed. M.R. Ayers, Melbourne and London: Dent, 1975, p. 241.
2. Ben Watson, Adorno for Revolutionaries, London: Unkant, 2011, p. 154.