Lukács and Instrumentality

First thought:

Lukács, writing in 1923, attempts to understand the all-pervading commodity-structure and its effect on the objective evolution of society. It is the Marxist concept of reification that Lukács brings to the fore, attempting to examine the thing-ifying nature of capitalism without resorting to the very mode of analysis that he is trying to critique. It is important to understand that a quantitative approach would impose the commodity-structure on the abstract notions that we are trying to explore, namely the psyche and time. It must be looked at qualitatively, at the way that this mode changes our perception of ourselves, our relationship to our own psyches and to those of others.

In service of reason, humankind has praised systematisation and classification, and in this, has sought to predict and control. It becomes apparent that the scientific method becomes not only the means to gain knowledge, but increasingly becomes the only criteria for value. Mechanistic qualities become the norm and humanistic qualities become "mere sources of error" [CR, 89]. The mind, the seat of Reason, sets out to make the world calculable, repeatable, known. Labour becomes abstracted in the division and restriction of time; just as time is chained to an instrument, the clock, man is tied to his labour, the 'thing' he now owns. Thus, in the understanding of himself, man can separate and fragment, calculate and reason. He is no longer holistic, but atomised, a possessor of "things", a seller and buyer whose parts can come and go. As the system increasingly becomes machine-like, something that as individuals we are unable to do, man finds himself no longer the true possessor of himself, rather, he must fit into the already normalised system; as Lukács says, he becomes contemplative rather than active. Less and less is man able to see past the veil of reification to the true nature of things, and more and more does this veil come to cover the whole world, subjectively, in the sense that it becomes the only way in which we see ourselves and others, our personal, human relationships, and objectively, in that over time, this mode of existence becomes the very structure of the world, no longer veiling, but building. How are we to see past this when it becomes the framework of our existence? It seems that the first modes of critique, that of identifying and separating out a concept in order to analyse and understand it, serves only to mimic the commodity-structure, reifying the reification process. It is this that I find Lukács unable to confront or adequately deal with. It is not that the commodity relation must be understood in its entirety, for that is the wrong way of thinking about it. Nor is it to be dismissed and ignored. We must attempt to balance the qualitative and quantitative nature of existence without attempting to know it completely. It is mystery that we must admire; art, spontaneity, intuition, irrationality, subjective feeling, error, praxis, music, the tactile and the sensual.

Another thought:

I recently read an article on artnet about Dada. I had always thought of Dadaism as the wonderful Tzara and the Ball/Hemmings cabaret fanfare, an admirable moment in history, based on an unrepeatable, unsustainable philosophy, much like nihilism. Something that came into existence to challenge the whole, to simultaneously say no and yes to everything, to hover and rage, to be static and surging, to call on everything and call on nothing. Complete negation.

In Berlin I found a book by Francois Jullien, professor at Université Paris Diderot, on chinese philosophy, called In Praise of Blandness. It speaks of the difference between the Western and Eastern conception of the bland. In Chinese, surrounded by Daoist and Confucianist ideas, the "dan" is the infinite ability of all things, it is the centre, the undifferentiated. It is flavourless because it is infinite and unfixed; unable be characterised or systematised. We would perhaps classify this as "nothing" or complete negation, but the opposite is true; it is complete becoming.

I have realised that Dada was an instance of this; not nihilism but complete becoming. The idea of this little movement was to be suggestible to everything, to be completely spontaneous in the face of mechanisation, to not be "nothing", but to live in undifferentiated freedom to become. As a matter of point, Tzara said Dada was finished as soon as it "is", in the sense that once classified, once "known" and understood, the it no longer exists except as an historical fact.

But what of Arendt?

"Evil is never "radical",… it is only extreme, and… it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension… It is "thought-defying"… because thought tried to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality"." (1964)

Is the bland the same as the banal? Can these two ideas ever co-exist, or must they be relegated to differing modes of thought, one of "becoming" and the other of negation, the "without".

I have just, on the recommendation of a Nihon Otaku, started reading "Heidegger's Hidden Sources; East Asian Influences on his Work". It shows Heidegger's debt to Daoist and Zen Buddhist philosophies; especially in his conception of Nothing, which comes as radically different to the Western understandings before it. Being, nothing, emptiness. Oh the joy. Actually, I am only up to the first chapter, but I am convinced. I wonder if Jullien has read this?

I leave you with Dada:

I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so manv books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs; a bath; pecuniary difficulties; a stomach with repercussions in life; the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with philtres made of chicken manure. With the blue eye-glasses of an angel they have excavated the inner life for a dime's worth of unanimous gratitude. If all of them are right and if all pills are Pink Pills, let us try for once not to be right. Some people think they can explain rationally, by thought, what they think. But that is extremely relative. Psychoanalysis is a dangerous disease, it puts to sleep the anti-objective impulses of men and systematizes the bourgeoisie. There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us / in a banal kind of way / to the opinions we had in the first place. Does anyone think that, by a minute refinement of logic, he has demonstrated the truth and established the correctness of these opinions? Logic imprisoned by the senses is an organic disease. To this element philosophers always like to add: the power of observation. But actually this magnificent quality of the mind is the proof of its impotence. We observe, we regard from one or more points of view, we choose them among the millions that exist. Experience is also a product of chance and individual faculties. Science disgusts me as soon as it becomes a speculative system, loses its character of utility-that is so useless but is at least individual. I detest greasy objectivity, and harmony, the science that finds everything in order. Carry on, my children, humanity . . . Science says we are the servants of nature: everything is in order, make love and bash your brains in. Carry on, my children, humanity, kind bourgeois and journalist virgins . . . I am against systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none. To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one's own littleness, to fill the vessel with one's individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies.... Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructivc action: *Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada; every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: Dada; abolition of prophets: Dada; abolition of the future: Dada; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity:* Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of every useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them -with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least-with the same intensity in the thicket of one's soul-pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE