by Osha Neumann
AND THE MINOTAUR MOOED
I believed as a child that the path marked out by reason was the path humanity must follow to achieve true happiness. I thought of reason as a kind of slow pleasure, a clean burning fuel, which would leave no unpleasant residue and would last a lifetime. Fill your tank with reason. Abjure the fast dirty pleasures of sex and the body, or at the very least, indulge in moderation and discreetly—those were the commandments I internalized. If I could but follow those commandments! My failure caused me shame and guilt. Alone in my bedroom I masturbated and indulged in sadomasochistic fantasies, while in his study Herbert was writing Eros and Civilization, arguing with Freud about Civilization and Its Discontents, and the relation between reason and happiness. Much is at stake in that argument. If the marriage between reason and happiness is annulled, we will take the side of happiness every time.
In my parents’ home I imbibed the mother’s milk of Marxism. I thought if I drank deeply enough my mind would open to the grand design woven into the fabric of history. But I stopped my intellectual breastfeeding too early and spent more time than was good for me reading Dostoevsky. Franz’s Marxism was of the social democratic variety. Before fleeing Germany he had been a prominent labor lawyer, and there was always something lawyerlike and precise about his thinking. It was brilliant, but it had little appeal to me.
Herbert, on the other hand, has been a lasting influence. The guiding principle of his thought is “the dialectic,” a logic that embraces contradiction as its guiding principle. Contradiction is not to be avoided. Reality is contradictory, and thought that hopes to grasp reality must embrace contradiction. The dialectic is a dance of being and thought to the rhythm of becoming and passing away. In the dance of the dialectic, idea and reality are intricately intertwined. Arm in arm they move across the dance floor, one, yet separate. Dancing the dance of the dialectic, the world and thought move forward through time and towards truth. Every doing is an undoing, every birth a funeral, every marriage a divorce. Each historical period generates within itself the forces that will crack it open, just as the egg incubates the chick that in due time will break the shell that imprisons it. Those who dance on the grave of the old order fulfill its promise. The dialectic is a tango of struggling combatants: what-will-be wars with and embraces what-is.
People in America don’t do the dialectic. It’s a European dance form. Herbert and his colleagues of the Frankfort school carried its secret steps across the ocean into exile. The dialectic was nothing, mere thought pitted against the Nazi war machine. But it seemed to me that woven into its steps was Ariadne’s thread, the clue to the maze, and therefore the key to the ultimate triumph over fascism. Very early in life, children pick up certain habits of mind from the adults with whom they live. As a young Waadabi boy might watch the dancing of his elders to learn the tribe’s traditional steps and rhythms, so did I watch the intellectual dance of my parents to learn the proper movements of the mind.
It is difficult for me in retrospect to decide whether or not the version of Marxism I grew up with included a belief in the inevitable triumph of what-ought-to-be. Was it inevitable that the System would fall apart from its own internal contradictions, and burst open like a piece of rotten fruit? Was the triumph of the proletariat—that class which was chosen by history as the designated agent of truth, and the custodian of denied possibilities—preordained? Perhaps the grownups themselves were not sure on this point.
Merely to say that something is possible is not to say it “ought” to be. Nor does saying that something ought to be imply its possibility. That something ought to be is not very interesting unless, at the same time, we can show that it is not merely a nice idea, or even a possibility in the sense that anything is possible, but a “real” possibility, an ought imprisoned within the “is,” an ought that is the truth of the “is.”
Marxism is not concerned with any “ought,” but this. It doesn’t moralize. The ought is the real in chains. Those chains can only be broken when the time is ripe. But time does not ripen by itself. It ripens through work, energy, and imagination. The fabric of history is never off the loom. The weaver learns the pattern from the weaving. The fabric weaves the weaver as surely as it is woven by her. So how can anything be inevitable?
The birth canal of what-is-to-be passes through the pelvis of human thought. The future is born in the painful contractions of consciousness, where nothing is inevitable even in the midst of the most dire necessity. Historians busy themselves with drawing up of a ledger of causes that purport to be sufficient to explain why history took the path it did. But their ledger is never complete. To say that something had to happen is to add nothing to the statement that it did happen. Inevitability is always retrospective.
I have a close friend, Alan, who is a doctor. His father, a physiologist, was the director of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod. Alan grew up surrounded by scientists as I grew up surrounded by philosophers. He spent hours in his father’s laboratories, playing with colored chalk on the blackboard, and as he grew older, helping with experiments. He combed the beaches, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by his dad, picking up horseshoe crabs, starfish, and jellyfish. He probed dead birds with a stick. He caught fish and dissected them. He swam and rowed in Buzzard’s Bay. His childhood was filled with light: the light pouring in through the windows of his father’s laboratory; the bright sunlight of beaches, dunes, and harbors; the clear and perfect light that Edward Hopper captured on the white walls of Cape Cod lighthouses, and the white sails of boats in the bay.
Alan’s father did research on the transfer of fluids through cell membranes. Frogs were his favorite experimental animals. In shades of green and brown they sat stoically in the corners of his laboratory waiting their turn to give their lives to science. Their throats were the only things that moved. Alan remembers helping with an elegant experiment to prove the ability of their skin to extract the amount of salt they need to survive from the fresh water ponds and lakes which are their natural environment. He peeled the skin from the hind leg of a frog, and fashioned out of it a small pouch. The skin remained alive. This was essential for the success of the experiment. He sewed the pouch shut at the knee and the ankle and then immersed it in saline solutions of varying concentration. After a time, the pouch would begin to fill with fluid. When he measured the salt content of the fluid inside the pouch he discovered that it remained remarkably constant, despite the variations in the saltiness of the water outside. Not only that, but the amount of salt in the fluid was consistent with that to be found in the tissue of living frogs.
Alan learned in the way that children learn such things, that in brine and bone there was beauty and order, a pattern within the flux. To be an adult was to know that order and have access to that beauty. As I knew that I was born to be a professor, preferably of philosophy, so Alan knew he was destined to be a scientist. While I veered off track into Motherfuckerism, he remained true to his calling, and became a professor of neurobiology at Berkeley before dropping out and bringing his wife and children to live with us at Black Bear. After Black Bear we both dropped back in. I went to law school, he to medical school.
My friend now lives in a house on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He takes his grandchildren on walks along the beach and encourages their interest in birds and beasts and all things natural, just as his father had done with him.
My friend and I grew up with different versions of reason. His was not murky. It did not contend with death camps and storm troopers, nor did it countenance the promiscuous commingling of “ought” and “is.” His science was clear and bright and clean. The wonderful correspondence between, for example, the Fibonacci sequence of number and the spirals of a nautilus shell, between the order of thought and the order of the world, became visible only when the salt of subjectivity had been drawn from the mind by the filtering membrane of scientific method. On one side of that membrane sparkled a clear pool of objectivity; on the other, o
ughts and shoulds formed a brackish puddle of pond-scum that had no place in a well run laboratory.
The cry of newborn hopes sounded in the gloom of unspeakable events.
In the laboratories of Alan’s childhood, fish swam in tanks, frogs sat meditating in terrariums, bones rested on shelves, glass tubes, slides, and microscopes were kept free from dust in cabinets. Thought was about things that the eye could see and the hand could touch. In my fathers’ studies there were books. Floor to ceiling. Row upon row of them. Books bound in cloth and leather. Books in Latin, Greek, German, French, and English. They smelled of cigarette smoke and held ideas. I learned that it was only through ideas that one touched the world, never directly. And the world my fathers had ideas about was first and foremost an historical world with nature as its background; a world filled with the smoke of battlefields, the groans of the wounded, the clamor of the marketplace, and the jubilation of revolutionaries celebrating their short lived triumphs. The cry of newborn hope sounded in the gloom of unspeakable events, and the light illuminating those events filtered through an uncertain thicket where what ought-to-be is forever caught in the brambles of what is.
I thought of my fathers’ books as a vast treasure of theory, dug from the soil of daily life and accumulated over centuries by humanity in its struggle to understand itself. Thought slumbered in those books, breathing softly like a hibernating bear, waiting to be awakened by the warm attentions of a reader. Franz retreated to his study from my mother’s dissatisfaction. Surrounded by his books, he would sit on the couch, smoke, and do the New York Times crossword puzzle. I would look in on him and wonder whether I too, would seek the sanctuary of theory when I reached my manhood. Would I inherit his treasure?
I would not. I left home and ran from theory into action, first to the wordless mimicry of painting, then to Motherfuckering on the streets of the Lower East Side, and later still to country life in the fir forests of Northern California. At Black Bear, snowed in in the winter and running naked in the summer, I milked goats in the darkness of an old wooden barn that smelled like the inside of an animal. The goats shifted from foot to foot on the milking stand. They allowed my hands to squeeze their warm udders. Their milk pinged on the bottom of the pail. They never said a word. I assumed that somewhere else someone was taking care of theory. It didn’t need me. Others would milk life for its meaning better than I ever could.
When I have sought in the world for a body of thought as bright, light footed, and compelling as the one I imagined my fathers brought over from Europe, I have generally been disappointed. Perhaps no such theory exists or has ever existed.
I remember one day when I was still in high school in the Bronx, I found a flier lying on the sidewalk outside the subway stop at 242nd Street and Broadway. It was an invitation to attend a lecture on dialectical theory sponsored by some obscure socialist party whose name I have long since forgotten. I was anxious to find in the world some echo of the ideas discussed at my parents’ table, so I stuffed it in my pocket, and on the appointed evening took myself to the address it listed, which turned out to be an undistinguished warehouse building. I followed the signs up the steps to a large barren loft. The walls were the color of old oatmeal. Hung here and there were portraits of Marx, Engels, and Trotsky, and posters in red and black of workers in heroic poses. At one end of the room was a table behind which the lecturer sat reviewing his notes. Facing him were rows of wooden folding chairs, mostly empty. There were about thirty people in the audience, all older than myself by far, all men. I remember them as stooped and graying, and dressed in shabby wrinkled clothing. A number of them turned and smiled at me encouragingly as I took my seat in the back.
The lecture began. The speaker produced a large chart that he propped on an easel next to the desk. The chart depicted the stages of history beginning at the bottom with the age of dinosaurs and ending at the top with the triumph of communism. Dialectical theory, the speaker explained, revealed the driving forces behind all history. Each thing that is, contains what will be within itself as its contradiction. Each stage of history develops within itself forces that will become irreconcilable, bringing on a crisis which will be simultaneously its death throws and the birth pangs of a new age. A new synthesis will emerge and at the same time new contractions, and so on. As mammals that scampered beneath the feet of dinosaurs, timid and unremarked, in time supplanted the dimwitted reptilian rulers of the savannahs, so the merchant class, trading in the shadow of the palaces of feudal lords, would in due course seize the reins of state and behead the monarchs of the old order. In this manner history progresses from epoch to epoch. The future now belongs to the working class whose mission it is to destroy the world order of capitalism and whose victory will introduce the final stage of history, the abolition of classes, and the worker’s paradise.
The lecturer explained the dialectic by offering as an example the growth of plants. The seed gives way to the seedling, the flower to the fruit, each later stage being the fulfillment of the former, and its destruction.k I tried to follow his analogy but it was hard for me to see the great struggles of history—workers building barricades, tearing up cobblestones for ammunition, troops laying down a withering hale of gunfire to disperse the demonstration—in the mute unfolding life of plants. I became distracted. An image of a potted geranium popped into my head. It was starved for water and sunlight. It sat root-bound in its clay pot on the windowsill of a dark loft. Poor plant. I felt sorry for it—and for me.
As the speaker wound towards his conclusion, I tried to pay attention, but succumbed to a deep weariness and lost track. Why, I thought, if they know so much, are there only thirty old men and me in this musty lecture hall? Why is it that no one cares? Or listens? What use is this truth, so large and unwieldy, smelling of dust and old newspapers? I left and never returned, despite my promises to the kind gentlemen who thanked me profusely for coming and reminded me of the dates of future presentations.
In Tony Kushner’s Slavs!, Aleksii Antedilluivianovich Prelapsarianov, “the world’s oldest Bolshevik” seeing the hopes of the Russian revolution shattered as a dream is shattered by the jangling of an alarm clock, bemoans the loss of a “theory.” He wishes for a theory as Archimedes wished for a platform, from which he could move the world.
“[S]how me the Theory,” he cries, “and I will be at the barricades, show me the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you these blind eyes will see again just to read it, to devour that text. Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent.”41
As a child, I imagined Marxism to be a theory that could “reorder the world.” It was the crowning achievement of reason, the culmination of its long struggle with lies and illusion. Reason’s aspirations to universality matched those of the System itself. It taught that, just as all commodities have in common their monetary value, so all workers have in common their fundamental condition of wage slavery. The process of abstraction and exploitation that creates generic monetary value for the capitalist also creates “the worker,” the universal, generic, source of wealth. The working class is that class, which, by struggling in its own interest, struggles in all our interest. The pursuit of its class interest would lead to the abolition of classes.
It is a grand vision, but it no longer captures the imagination of the “masses” as it once did. Where are the “masses”? They’ve dried up like puddles in the summer sun. The heroic “worker” has gone with them. People have multiple identities. “Worker” is only one, and it’s not necessarily privileged over the others. Marxism, we are told, has been “discredited” by the historical failure of its predictions. Capitalism has not collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. On the contrary, Russia, the worker’s paradise, has fallen into ruins, exposing for all to see gulags of filth, brutality, and corruption. Marxism, we hardly knew you, and now we miss you.
The Soviet Union is gone and so is theory. Fundamentalists of all stripes, post-modernists, anti-foundationalists, and deconstr
uctionists, as well as many whose resistance to the System is based on racial or gender identity, have proclaimed the end of “arrogant absolutist reason”—may she rest in peace. Proclaim they may, but it still remains the case that the most profound challenges to the System have come from movements of social change which have at their heart a rationality that is not arrogant, a rationality that has something to say about what ought to be.
The Southern civil rights movement took on an entrenched system of segregation and white supremacy. Bus boycotts, marches, and sit-ins exposed that system as unjust and irrational. The System revealed its true nature in its response to those that challenged it: in the murder of civil rights workers, the bombing of churches, and the clubbing of non-violent demonstrators. The truth revealed itself in shared struggle. It revealed itself not to an “I” but to a “we”—the “beloved community” generated in that struggle. The true nature of the System came into view at the moment it ceased to be accepted as necessary and inevitable. At that moment it revealed itself as contingent and vulnerable because it was built on false foundations.
A rationality that considered values beyond its scope and confined itself to the manipulation of concepts and things would have been utterly alien to the thinking of the civil rights movement. The pursuit of justice and the exposure of irrationality were linked. Their common goal was freedom.
Freedom! The word expands like a flower, like the succulent prickly bud of an artichoke. It reminds us of intimate longings whose names we have forgotten, and collective grief we’ve come to take for granted. It links the language of law to the language of the heart. It links the practical to the utopian, the personal to the political, earthly struggles to dreams of flying. Its demands are eminently reasonable and they transcend reason, for the ultimate aim of freedom is to romp in the sweet by and by, to throw off every fetter, to cast aside all the clothing of inhibition. And who in the midst of orgasm thinks of rationality in any of its forms? Reason as the foreplay of pleasure? Perhaps.