Marx, Abi Titmuss and sensuous existence
I happened to re-read the bit in the Communist Manifesto about the bourgeoisie holding wives in common. It gives you good reason to think, anyway, that Marx would have enjoyed Celebrity Love Island. So Rod Liddle here is just showing his ignorance, as Infinite Thought says.
I was looking at Marx to try and find a line I vaguely remember about materialists starting by considering people in their real, sensuous existence. I suppose I was thinking of this from the German Ideology, although it doesn’t match up exactly with what I remember:
> The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises
> from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals,
> their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they
> find already existing and those produced by their activity.
Meanwhile, I was watching Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. It’s a bit hyperactive, particularly the attempt by Joel to ‘hide’ his memories as they are being erased, which seems like evidence of the incorrect assumption that the film needed to have some sort of plot. My dad objected that we never find out anything but the most superficial generalities about the central relationship of the film. I think that’s true, and a better film would have shown us the specifics of a relationship which nonetheless remained genuinely universal (that would have been a good use of the time taken up by chase scenes). Still, it’s not a fatal flaw, because the film is about relationships in general (the form rather than the content, if you like), or, even more generally, the idea that k-punk has mentioned a few times recently, that the fundamental structure of belief is not simply belief without evidence, but belief _in spite of_ evidence.
A too-quick subordination of the rational to the empirical is a surrender in favour of how things are, not how they could be. In that sense, what appears to be the most arbitrary plot convenience in the film turns out to be a representation, simply, of the general form of love: starting a new relationship depends on the conviction that, though we are still the same people as we always were, _this_ time it’s going to be different.
This is, not coincidentally, analogous to the form of political practice, a reminder of Žižek’s point about anti-communism as objective pro-fascism, and a sufficient rejoinder to harrumphing like Liddle’s about continuing affection for Marx. The true defence of Marxism is not to deny that Mao, or Stalin, or Lenin, where Marxists — of course they were. The point, though, is to deny the relevance of this. Yes, yes, we know about the purges and the gulags. But this time, things will be different.
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A nice book in this context is ‘Marx without Myth’, by Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale.
Comment by steff @ 7/31/2005 11:27 am
“This time, things will be different” is rather weak, donchatink? And it leaves yourself wide open to the Hegelian objection that a concept’s failure to actualise in practice points to a weakness in the concept itself. Which is why I don’t think one should concede that Mao and Stalin were Marxists, and why I do think you need to defend Lenin…
Comment by bat020 @ 8/1/2005 1:38 pm