"A cross section of today’s social structure would have to show the following: At the top, the feuding tycoons of the various capitalist power constellations. Below them, the lesser magnates, the large landowners and the entire staff of important co-workers. Below that, and in various layers, the large numbers of professionals, smaller employees, political stooges, the military and the professors, the engineers and heads of office down to the typists; even further down what is left of the independent, small existences, craftsmen, grocers, farmers e tutti quanti, then the proletarian, from the most highly paid, skilled workers down to the unskilled and the permanently unemployed, the poor, the aged and the sick. It is only below these that we encounter the actual foundation of misery on which this structure rises, for up to now we have been talking only of the highly developed capitalist countries whose entire existence is based on the horrible exploitation apparatus at work in the partly or wholly colonial territories, ie, in the far larger part of the world. […] Below the spaces where the coolies of the earth perish by the millions, the indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal hell in human society, would have to be depicted, the sweat, blood, despair of the animals. […] The basement of that house is a slaughterhouse, its roof a cathedral, but from the windows of the upper floors, it affords a really beautiful view of the starry heavens."
Max Horkheimer, M.
Dämmerung: Notizen in Deutschland,
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, Fischer: Frankfurt a.M, 1978, pp. 66-67; Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969, tr. Michael Shaw, Seabury Press: New York (1985) pp. 379-380.
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| OTL: Max's Cathedral |
This quotation (used by Marco Maurizi as the epigraph to his essay 'The Dialectical Animal') interests the AMM because when we visited Hamburg, the name of the left organisation whose meeting we spoke at was 'Dämmerung'. Ben Watson asks:
"How does Horkheimer know society is like that? How did he achieve this synoptic vision? How did he abseil down the side of the body politic to take this horrifying snapshot?" Marxism should try and envision the totality, but surely there should be traces of the social layers' own view of themselves. Isn't there something a little aristocratic about Horkheimer's vision, something a bit disengaged, a bit Buddhist? I don't know where he's speaking from, and I find that makes me distrust him. Could he in fact just be a pure Cartesian intellect viewing with distress the workings of his own body? And might this explain why the Hamburg Assoziation Dämmerung is so bloomin' depressed?
oh come on, Ben, that really sounds to me like the classic liberal objection to Marxism: "how do you know? why couldn't it be different? isn't it all subjective?". No, WE KNOW how society is, we know there are class conflicts. Recognizing our own privilage at the top of the social pyramid is not aristocratic, is perfectly MARXIST instead. Like Marx and Engels, Horkheimer knows his objective class position is there, but just like M&E instead of looking happily at the shooting stars he wants to pluck the imaginary flowers on the social chain. So he looks DOWN and unveils the laws of economic oppression, which was fortunately quite easy, since he read and appreciated Marx' "Capital". But he also saw that there's another form of oppression which is also bounded to class society: animal exploitation. This was a little more difficult to see and analize but fortunately, with a little help from Teddy the Bear, he managed to write "The Dialectics of Enlightenment" and now we are all advised.
ReplyDeleteMy comment might "sound like the classic liberal objection to Marxism" but it is not. It is a Freudo-Marxist objection to Horkheimer's paragraph. I've learned many things from Horkheimer and Adorno, but something I cannot swallow is the "tragic vision". The idea that if we've SEEN THE HORROR we are part of some club of initiates. I haven't "seen the horror", I'm having to live it! I'm not saying Horkheimer's vision is subjective, I'm saying it's not subjective ENOUGH: I don't know where he's speaking from (yes, I am daring to say that the super-dialectician is UNDIALECTICAL here - I suggested this to Ralph Dumain and he was interested but sceptical ... do you know his www.autodidactproject.org, you'd be better off checking that out than reading Lacan, although I know it's probably not a paying gig). When I read Capital, I get the Angst-in-the-pants of a man who needed to get his coat out of the pawnshop to get into the British Museum Library, the argumentation is furious, on-fire, loaded. I think if we start from Horkheimer's aristocratic vision of the totality we end up where Assoziation Daemmerung is, pessimistic about doing anything about the Horror, a rabbit frozen in the headlights. Marx makes me LAUGH at the idiots at the Stock Exchange. Give me Max Keiser not Max Horkheimer!!
ReplyDeletewhy should someone who has seen the horror become part of that club of inanities? Why do you read A&H with a feeling of guilt? that's sujbective, yeah, and of the worst kind. Seeing the horror behind the veil of social "normality" (and seing the horror we're ALL part of) is like getting a shock, you see things differently. That's the way it goes and you get it from Marx, just like you get it from A&H. I remember in an Adorno-conference in 2003 the RAGE of a speaker against Adorno: he considered the idea that Auschwitz and Hollywood are to be understood together wild, insane, offensive. Yes, please, gimme the truth. Don't you perhaps need some totem whose "purity" will redeem you (say, jazz, the body, the avant-garde both political and "artistic")? So you blame H&A for saying that there's nothing pure and uncontaminated by the fetish-carachter of capitalist exploitation? I accept that and that IS the reason why I need to fight against capitalism. If you don't, it's a pity and it's wrong: you act like the Munchausen Baron and see yourself outside the social nexus of reality (who is the Buddist now?). I also laugh sometimes reading Adorno, but I also cry, I get fascinated, I get upset and all the spectrum of human emotions that make me feel ALIVE.
ReplyDeleteI liked the quote when I first read it. If nothing else it puts animals back directly in the orbit of social reality. But I know what Ben means too - the panoptical 'organisation-chart' view of the world depicts the hierarchical ordering of things but leaves the viewer outside the scope of what's being depicted, which is no point of view at all. It is an image of hierarchical tyranny - but seen from outside, where there's nothing to be done except register the horror. But I'm not sure if that's so much about the image itself, but about Horkheimer, who often sounds that way to me (compared to Adorno, in 'Towards a New Manifesto' perhaps, where Horkheimer can hardly shift himself outside the circle of his negative judgement, while Adorno keeps dancing on the edge of that circle, threatening to break out). Anyway, for right or wrong, and whatever their solidarity in their work, Adorno crackles with energy looking for a focus, while Max drones on.
ReplyDeleteI only know Horkheimer thru Dialectic Of Enligtenment, which I understand Max and Teddy to be equal partners in. As such, my biggest problem with the above quote is it does not live up to the challenge & vigour of D.O.E. I had a moment of excitement when I misread and thought there was a view of the starry heavens from the slaughterhouse - but no, of course the view of the stars must be from the roof! Horkheimer's geological view of class society at first to me seemed correct - that is roughly how I see the layers even today - but I also don't know where that picture comes from, it seems familiar, but I can’t remember seeing it directly or thinking it - was it fed to me in some way? - it is a conventional view, a little too familiar, and is suspect for that reason. I agree it resembles passages in Marx and Engels, but with one clear difference - Horkheimer presents a geological "cross-section" (at a particular point in time), whereas in Marx & Engels there is always the feeling of movement. And there is movement in reality - all the time - a person's class status is always a living contradiction - and the existing "classes" are part of a dynamic contradiction - and far more vulnerable to seismic shifts than the actual subsoil horizons. I'm sure Max & Marco would agree with this, but there is no sense of that historical dynamism in the quote given & that is why it is uninspiring. The later part of Horkheimer's paragraph also reminds me a bit of the preacher's vision of hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - where Joyce took so much pleasure in describing the punishment & torment. As a Blakean I am forced to ask – why does Horkheimer’s energy only begin to fire up when he is talking about torment & pain? which supports Ben’s position that Horkheimer is describing his own body - the starry Heavens are Blake's crystal cabinet, Urizenic rationality separated from the corporeal pleasures of organic thought. But I do agree with Marco that animals are valuable and worthy of attention and analysis.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Ken and the Grand Erector for entering in. The problem is that Marco and Assoziation Daemmerung assume I'm against animals because I don't like the quote. That's not the case. I think their enthusiasm for animal rights has blinded them to the shortcomings in Horkheimer's paragraph. They are so excited to find an "authority" on their side they've chose to start from an incredibly undialectical thesis. But in the wider capitalist world - i.e. for the working class - Horkheimer has no authority at all! I'm against recruiting people for your politics among Frankfurters. Marco calls me a splitter but he's splitting off a shard from a split pea! I keep coming back to the quote: what stares us in the face. They keep referring to the "whole meaning" of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Adorno. These are the kind of claims made in academia, not by activists or poets. The AMM is for activists and poets, not academics ...
ReplyDeleteyes for sure you don't understand that quote if you don't know what DoE is all about. That's just a sketch of the young Max that was to be developed only later. That's not academic, it's just fair. I always read the young Marx with an eye looking at Capital. The reason why that image looks "static" is because the very foundation of class society, i.e.nature oppression (remember Engels' critique to Duehring, you can't have a slave if you're level of nature exploitation doesn't permits you to feed both with the work of one), is what NEVER changes in the history of class society. This causes class conflicts to move upon a stable basis, the ypokeimenon of exploitation. And this is the reason why Adorno loved to quote Kafka: "progress has not yet taken place at all". This is analogous to Engels saying that REAL history will only begin with communism, once blind animal activity (in the language of A&H: self-conservation qua natural, antinomic process) will be superseded by the true human, i.e. conscious self-organization of the working class. Strip away the undialectical opposition between animal/human and you get the thesis of DoE: class culture is nature's revenge aganist us, we cannot liberate ourselves from it if we don't liberate inner and outer nature.
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ReplyDeleteIt's true, whether Horkheimer knew it or not (and whether the rest of book bears the same scars or not), that this diagrammatic sketch leans gently towards Stalinised discourse, with its over-emphasis on objective structures. But it falls far short of being actively Stalinist, just as it also falls short of having much active subjectivity in it (although he admits his office is on the third floor down, between the military and the engineers. He didn't have to mention professors at all. He also admits to seeing that view from the "upper floors" himself.)
ReplyDeleteMost Marxists could probably overlook that leaning, provided it was only a thumbnail sketch, and that the society thus described was described correctly. Marxists who couldn't overlook that leaning are those who are acutely aware of standing in a beseiged libertarian Marxist tradition, those that sees their role as fighting academic objectivity (particularly in its Stalinised "objective sociology" forms on the academic left), and are hyper-sensitive to anything that looks like a flow-chart or an aerial view, anything behind glass. Basically, if MH was writing a novel, based on this sketch we'd be looking at Balzac rather than Joyce.
For myself, I'm in broadly in agreement with that libertarian Marxist view, and I'm backing Bloch against Lukacs (although I'd back Lukacs against the Post-Modernists). And I'd want MH to share some of Adorno's radical subjectivity before I'd back him firmly. But this sketch in itself wouldn't make me throw the book at the wall and say fuck him.
What MIGHT make me do that is the fact that some of formulations in the paragraph seem extremely dubious. Okay, I understand that the Capitialist countries survive on the rape of the Global South (the "Global South", I'm so fucking CHOMSKYITE). But it's a bit of a leap to extrapolate from this that "It is only below [the level of the proletariat] that we encounter the actual foundation of misery on which this structure rises". No it isn't. Because it's not just the "coolies" that are being exploited here, it's the working class INTERNATIONALLY. MH seems to be saying that the expropriation of Third World resources is the foundation of Capitalism. But surely it's wage labour, in every country, that forms the foundation of Capitalism. MH's view seems closer to a Third Worldist position, not a Marxist one at all. And, worst of all (and thence the DEPRESSION) one that brackets the Proletariat with the upper levels of exploiters.
Secondly, he brackets "typists" and "smaller employees" with "political stooges, the military and the professors, the engineers and heads of office". What kind of fucking cross-class mash-up is that? And THEN we get the petty Bourgeoisie. What, someone who owns a Greengrocers is lower down the chain than a typist? And THEN the Proletariat. This isn't a great objective analysis is it? Although at first view it may look like one.
On the other hand: A cathedral with a slaughterhouse in the basement: what could be a more eminently Marxist formulation? Its reduction of the celestial into the bodily, of the transcendent into the exploitative, of prayer into curse, is almost worthy of Marx himself, who (as we all know) pulls off similar moves regularly. (And who was it told the Indian spiritualist that "he could make more money as a butcher?")
I don't know if MH is marxistically "correct" in his class-analysis. The problem of where does the surplus-value come in the system of global market is difficult and I'm not sure I have a correct answer (Italian wages are higher than those in Eastern Europe...maybe because Italian economy - and so the workers, too, through the welfare state - live on the extraction of surplus-value in the third world? Is this third-worldism? could be). Anyway, I think this is irrilevant to what is crucial to MH's quote there. Which is what excites me and, so it seems, our German friends in Hamburg. The point of unveiling the exploitation of nature as part and parcel of every class society is not an accessory elemento of Critical Theory. In fact, it is their great discovery. Thus, the Slaughterhouse-image is not in that quote for chance, it is in fact the crux of the biscuit. MX does not analyze capitalism in the shape of a building and then suddenly "discovers" animal exploitation: "oh, look over there! there's a slaughterhouse in this building". He sees class society as a building BECAUSE he knows that nature exploitation is at its basis. And this determines the already mentioned "staticism" of that "metaphor", as well as the irrilevance of the "uncorrect" class-description of capitalism itself and the "optical illusion" of him speaking from "outside" the building.
ReplyDeleteBecause, looked from the perspective of the nature oppression, history cannot be but "frozen", class relations become opaque and tend to gain some clarity only in their similiariy to animal death (coolies, colonial slavery ecc.) and, most of all, we see the structure of class society as grouned on nature explotation only if we assume the point of view of the animals themselves! Which is both necessary and impossible. Necessary, because only assuming their point of view can we reconcile ourselves with animal nature (which is also our OWN denied and repressed nature). Impossibile, because the oppression of nature is the basis itself of "humanity" qua NON-animal, i.e. of civilization. The optical illusion of speaking from the outside is also due to the fact that it is not sufficient to SAY that we are animals in order to get rid of the spiritualistic heritage of dominion.
We must turn the whole system upside-down and liberate humans and animals from the system of exploitation which enslave them. Otherwise, to fight for our "animal" nature remains an idealistic phrase.
Yes we "must" but the nature/human logic gets so "pleated" with Marco I don't know whether I'm in power pitying or attempting my own self-emancipation. The confusion over surplus value and Marco's leanings towards third worldism follow. Are we powered by guilt or need? I argue NEED.
ReplyDeleteAre you allowed to comment on your own comment (where's PLATO to backwrite our dialogues into an ascendant conclusion)? All thought about the nature problem today means nothing without considering what Ronald Frankau had to say about world politics back in 1935 ... a fantastic mockery of fashionable Bloomsburyite back-to-nature silliness which is itself silly enough to be a dada affront to Hitler ... and an ur-source for Malcolm McLaren's Bow Wow Wow ... http://www.archive.org/details/LetsGoWild ... Do you get it??
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