Jeff Rubard
2003-10-21 09:00:48 UTC
Introducing Computational Marxism: The Art Of Losing
LEAPS!
-- Lenin, *Philosophical Notebooks*, 1915
A field of much contemporary interest is computational linguistics --
studying how computational dynamics in the human "mind/brain" enable
the language faculty and make possible effective computer mimicry of
it. On a "traditional" understanding, this subdiscipline is supposed
to have originated with the "Hard AI" efforts of the 50s and 60s; but
in this essay, I will suggest that the divining of properly
computational dynamics in language in its largest compass began with
none other than Vladimir Illyich Lenin, and that in terms of this
project the school of French political philosophers centered around
Althusser are both Lenin's authentic disciples and the best source of
intuitions about questions of "computational semantics" - the extent
to which meaning can be computationally comprehended, and the uses to
which this might legitimately be put.
I will also suggest that the intellectual project of Gramsci, often
considered a standard-setter for respectable "Marxism-Leninism", is
in fact motivated by theoretically opposite (and "practically
orthogonal") motives, and that of Lukacs "prior in order of thought"
to both -- i.e., a justification of the aims of the Bolsheviks in
terms of the worldview of the "long 19th Century"; such that
consideration of this "troika" as joined only by "cohesive" political
forces is necessary to determine whether anything of value remains
in the project of Soviet Communism (as well as the extent to which
highly touted "anti-Leninist" leftism compromises itself
intellectually or practically by leaving such problematics behind).
To begin the technical portion, in the last essay I spoke of the
work of the Moscow-Tartu semioticians in a critical manner; and at
times I have had occasion to speak critically of a somewhat similar
intellectual style in the American formal sciences, "Eastern model
theory". Model theory is the study of the relationships between
words and their designata in the most general compass, and
traditionally model-theoretic research has broken into two "styles",
"Western" and "Eastern". The distinction roughly parallels that
between type theory and set theory; "Western" model theorists study
very general features of an already general field, whereas "Eastern"
model theorists study particular mathematical problems using
model-theoretic means.
This distinction has fallen out of favor, as nearly all work conducted
in model theory at present would be designated as "Eastern", but it is
not obsolete; the concepts of Western model theory continue to inform
extra-logical disciplines -- philosophers have never been able to get
away from "The Concept Of Truth In Formalized Languages" by Tarski,
the standard-setter for the genre. If you are saying "Tarski?
Western?" you are poorly informed; there was in fact Tarski in
Berkeley, and Abraham Robinson in New Haven. Thusly was the world
divided in those days; but even then, the distinction was a little
misleading, as Robinson's own work (though more technical) is
genuinely careful in its formulation, a point we will return to later.
What is required right now is that we give a very general account of a
very Western definition of computability, namely the Church-Turing
thesis. Alonzo Church was Turing's instructor, and an important mind
in his own right (his magisterial *Introduction to Mathematical Logic*
is still a definitive account of the topics it covers); and in fact
the idea of computability, as it applies to computing machinery, grew
out of his attempt to provide an alternative foundation for
mathematics -- the "lambda calculus" (David Berlinski's account is
wrong on this original purpose for the lambda calculus). The lambda
calulus reverses the order of explanation set by Dirichlet and defines
mathematical objects in terms of functions, rather than functions in
terms of objects.
Church's proof of the undecidability of the predicate calculus
derives from this, rather than the separate work of Turing. The
famous "Turing machine" was not yet quite a computer -- that had
to wait for von Neumann's invention of memory -- but Turing took
the definition of computability down a notch in terms of abstraction.
The Turing machine is an ordered 5-tuple (that is to say, a set
consisting of elements from five sets in one-to-one-to-one-to-one
correspondence), <S,s,H,sigma,delta>. The famous "tape" analogy is
exactly that; S is a set of "states" which can be envisioned as
positions on the tape, s the initial position on the tape, H the
"halting" states (where no more movement occurs), sigma the set
of symbols that can be written on the tape, and delta the function
(graph) of the possible movements to the left or to the right on the
machine given certain inputs.
And the proof of the analogic character of this is that "Turing
machines" come in many different flavors, all of which are
computationally equivalent. But pace Blackburn, de Rijke and Venema
(whom we shall return to, as will become more common soon) Church's
thesis does not quite say that Turing machines define a robust
conception of computability, because Church did not work with Turing
machines (Church and Turing did their definitive work in the 1930s,
but the equivalence of their definitions of computability was proved
much later). And Church for once was being careful (having been
burned by the first true computer scientist, Stephen Kleene, who
precipitated the whole affair by demonstrating a paradox in the lambda
calculus), because deterministic Turing machines do not define a
robust conception of computability, just robust computability, and
even relative exotica like non-deterministic automatons (where delta
is a probabilistic function) do not capture everything we might like
to include under the ambit of computability (i.e., formal systems
which are used to compute, such as the simple theory of types Church
added to the lambda calculus to right it).
So, whatever the widespread use of digital computers tells us,
computer science is founded on a limitative result and truly can only
provide us more of the same; what Turing in effect says, in his famous
article on whether a computer could think, is that we have a choice as
to what we take as limited (either computers don't think, or thinking
is
something rather less romantic and more rote in all cases -- no
"observer outs" for scientists -- than we have previously thought).
Such thoughts are a traditional staple of Marxist thought about
concrete situations, going back to Marx's *Critique of the Gotha
Program* where Marx suggested to the nascent SPD that they not aim for
the
creation of a "free state" without clarifying exactly who was to be
free; and although we will return to technical issues later, I will
now begin my discussion of Lenin in this spirit.
Why Lenin? Why Now?
Today Lenin is widely reviled as the "architect" of the Bolshevik
Revolution, and thusly largely responsible for the widespread death
and terror of Soviet Russia following his death. Right off the bat it
is possible for the informed radical to say: neither is quite correct,
but perhaps we need to define terms before we can say what is truly
objectionable with each statement. Lenin was the spirit of the
"Bolshevik" (written in his hand with quotes) version of the Russian
Social-Democratic Party, and remains a much-admired figure in Russia
up to this day, but he was not properly speaking responsible for the
success of the October Revolution; that accolade goes to Trotsky, who
organized the Petrograd Soviet into a organization capable of
challenging the government's legitimacy and winning popular approval
for it, and the Red Army into a fighting force capable of defending
the Revolution against all comers (who were "Legion").
Lenin was not a practical man. What Lenin was responsible for was the
glowing image of Bolshevism among members of the worldwide socialist
movement, and this had been in the works for decades by 1917. And in
fact, this was worked by the fact that a great number of socialist
tendencies in other countries (ones not explicitly identifying
themselves as "Leninist") bore the stamp of his prerevolutionary
thought, concerned with the problems of radical democracy in an age of
empire and the limitation of the "covenant of labor" from whence
socialist parties derive their legitimacy to the proletariat proper.
With respect to revolutionism, Lenin was no shirker, but he was also
not a putschist; during the 1905 Revolution he posed a question (in
German), "Dare we win?", and tacitly answered it in the negative;
furthermore, the question of October is falsified if it is not
understood that a number of prominent Bolsheviks were opposed to the
Revolution and that the other Russian socialist parties held a
majority in the Constituent Assembly for some years following the
revolution.
"One Step Back, Two Steps Forward"
What, then, was October? Most accurately, it was a bureaucratic
reform along the lines of the American Constitution sans the Bill of
Rights (although it itself had a "Bill of Social Rights" regarding the
treatment of workers and liberalization of civil law, many provisions
of which were implemented immediately and have also been implemented
in other countries at later dates, individual rights such as we
understand them in the United States were never honored in the Soviet
Union), without constitutional legitimacy but with the tacit support
of the majority of the Russians and other peoples of the Empire. But
most pregnantly for contemporary life, it continued the Bolshevik
tradition of being something like a "quality control program" for
Russian socialism; Aleksandr Kerensky and the other
Socialist-Revolutionaries were nominally left-wing in orientation, but
simply had the goal of ending Tsarism and no particular scruples about
what came afterwards. (Furthermore, Leninists were aware of the work
of Frederick Winslow Taylor and by no means disturbed by it, owing to
the heavy emphasis on the discipline of the proletariat inculcated by
their workplace in Marxist thought).
For the part of the famed "Mensheviks", that majority of the RSDLP
which hewed much more closely to the Second-International line until
it dissolved in the "union sacrees" of World War I, even they had no
particular scruples about universal enfranchisement; and for Lenin's
part, his treatment of kulaks, smallholding peasants - that is,
execution of a small number - does not read as monstrous in the
context of Russian history henceforward *or* previous. The change of
the Bolsheviks' name to the "Communist Party" during the February
period was motivated by such concerns of scruple; Lenin advocated that
the party make it clear what they were about, rather than who they
were for. The sharper-eyed among us -- perhaps motivated by the
(ever-so-slightly fanciful) title of this section -- may have already
seen an interesting pattern here, namely the choice of *qualities*
(properties, singulary relations, to use Quine's elegant phrase) over
binary or worse relations in the public-relations methods of the
Bolsheviks.
This is immediately interesting because it is the singulary predicate
calculus (the logic of properties, rather than full first-order logic)
which is the maximally decidable (computable) logic; add intensional
operators and it becomes undecidable. So there is clearly something
of the computational in what is readily "understandable" by a wide
audience; attributions of properties, rather than complex "positional"
analyses of various figures in a situation (such as are readily
available in the correspondence of Lenin). This much is old hat
(although perhaps still new to some, and certainly still true), but
there is more to say on the topic of the computability of the
predicate calculus which has been obscured by the exiguous character
of computer science in recent years. But first, an "unpolitical"
comment on Lenin as philosopher, in the spirit of Pannekoek.
The question of considering the philosophy of Lenin is a frankly
tortured one, owing both to the extremely conjunctural character of
his
entire corpus and to the idea of the "international Communist
movement" as formulated after his death. His "major" work of
philosophy, *Materialism and Empirio-Criticism*, is a stream of
invective aimed at positivists naive and refined; and by philosophical
standards he was quite clearly the inferior of his political enemy
George Plekhanov, who is today unknown but was perhaps the first
person to pose the question of "non-reductive materialism" in full
generality, i.e. in its relation to the theory of history. Another
"work", the *Philosophical Notebooks*, is acclaimed by Lenin
enthusiasts; and in my opinion rightly so, but for the most part for
the wrong reasons.
The *Philosophical Notebooks* is a slim collection of comments on
Hegel's *Science of Logic*, written in stolen moments during Lenin's
exile from Mother Russia. As Hegel exegesis it is terrible, but it
is a very candid (and by no means disgraceful) picture of Lenin's
mind;
and furthermore, these notes (which were circulated rather widely
beginning in 1929) perhaps deserve the accolade of first having
posed Hegelian questions in a spirit apposite to late capitalism,
where premodern institutions have become merely symbolic in power. To
begin
with Lenin takes a rather Crocean line regarding the question of
"tarrying with the negative", Hegel as a "critical" idealist -
"What is necessary is not dead bones, but living life"; and a
frankly scientistic view of the Hegelian enterprise, quoting with
admiration Hegel's commentary on calculus ("All this is comprehensible
only to people with training in higher mathematics. Suggested title:
'Carnot - Metaphysics of the Infinitesimal Calculus'").
However, the crucial sections of the Philosophical Notebooks are
Lenin's commentaries on the sections "Measure", "Quality" and
"Relation". With respect to measure (and one would not be amiss
in considering this section of Hegel a preliminary consideration of
such concerns as appear in the mature theory of integration) Lenin
takes a near-idealistic line: "none of this is comprehensible without
leaps". But with respect to quality and relation Lenin's views are
"pragmatic" in the extreme: "semblance - the negative nature of
essence".
And here we come back to contemporary formal issues. As I said
before, Leninist doctrine is very "tractable" owing to the primacy of
qualities over relations, and in fact deserves to be understood as
something like "manufacturing understanding". Does this have
contemporary model-theoretic equivalents? No, a point we will return
to later, but there is a model-theoretic equivalent and that is the
theory of metamathematical ideals as expounded by Robinson.
For any consistent set of sentences K and J in a first-order language,
if J is consistent there exists another set of sentences J0 such that
all sentences which are provable from the "union" (disjunctive
collection - that is, permitting the selection of items from either of
two sets) of K and J and the "intersection" (conjunctive collection,
requiring the consideration of the totality of items present with each
subset) of that union with J0. Robinson calls this set of sentences
an
"ideal in J0 over K', and uses it as a test for consistency (not
completeness) for a first-order theory (K) including nonlogical
axioms applicable to observation sentences (J). The concept of the
model-theoretic ideal *simpliciter* is none too fascinating, but it
permits a great many rigorous operations relating theories with
non-logical axioms to be performed. As I said before, some of the
none-too-definite pronouncements of Bolshevism ought to be understood
as pragmatic moves, but as the *Philosophical Notebooks* show Lenin
was also concerned with problems of relation and in many respects the
"relational" goals of the Bolsheviks should be understood in
this spirit of "idealism" - perhaps "All Power to the Soviets",
famously never more realized than before it was promulgated,
should be understood as a "homomorphism" between ideals.
Furthermore, it is really quite clear that the Third International, a
demand for which was formulated by Lenin after the Zimmerwald
conference (when the "Zimmerwald Left" a working group of
anti-imperialist Marxists with both parliamentary strength and
obvious legitimacy owing to their incredible persecution was already
in existence) but before the October Revolution, was intended to be
"third" in the sense of Hegel's "third attitude to objectivity" (in
the shorter *Encyclopedia* Logic). Under this heading Hegel speaks of
the concern with "intuitive knowledge" possessed by many of his
contemporaries, and quite critically; but it is clear that Lenin's
researches on imperialism motivated him to consider the problems of
the workingmen's movement not only internationally but *globally*, and
that (with reference to Hegel or not) he realized that intuitive
concerns would be the only common denominator in such a wide scope.
So the problematic of "socialist humanism" was present for the Third
International from the start, and its subsequent renaming as the
"Comintern" and then disbanding in 1934 at the behest of Stalin cannot
but bespeak some kind of betrayal. And in this vein, it is clear that
the aesthetic problem of "socialist realism" was not present for
Russian artists and writers at the outset, and even for many years
during the 20s. But Lukacs did not write to no point, so perhaps the
realists were for all that unavoidable, and here we come to what I
believe to be the chief theoretical problem of Soviet Communism, that
it did not think the question of sovereignty and the "iconic" through.
The work of Russian futurists during the early years is justly famous
for its artistic quality, and the enthusiasm of artists such as
Mayakovsky, Malevich, El Lissitzky and Eisenstein for the Revolution
was in no way faked; during this early period artists and
intellectuals
were often not even Party members, much less apparatchiks.
But Eisenstein's *October*, a great work of art prepared in accordance
to a code much stricter than Hays, is not truly the "diegetic reality"
of the Bolshevik Revolution. Revolutions must be judged by their
tyrannicides -- and it is here that the libertarian communist and
thorough Hegelian exegete Bataille is nearer to the mark than than
Lenin. The concept of metamathematical ideal is not typically known
to contemporary mathematicians by that name; it is rather called a
"scapegoat theory", as this is the name given it in Elliot Mendelson's
*Introduction to Mathematical Logic* (a thorough and detailed
treatment, but difficult and in logical respects frankly outdated
as Church's never will be). As a "Western" ability to think of
the possible irrelevance of particular features of a theory
seems to be slipping among today's empirically-oriented
mathematicians,
the mathematical irrelevance of calling them "ideals" or "scapegoats"
will not sink in (this is almost guaranteed, as Robinson's book is
just out-of-print and from North-Holland, not Springer).
But another lack, the analytic philosopher's inability to see details
as
anything other than extraneous, complicates matters further: Lenin's
ideal is Bataille's scapegoat, the victim of the impossibly cruel
Chinese
"torture of a hundred cuts" (and this too can be formally understood,
as witnessed by the Derrida quotation in the second essay), but the
latter is for it all the same. Generally speaking, enthusiasm for
the French Revolution was strong enough to withstand the Terror
(details of which were well-known) and will be strong enough to
withstand an indefinite period of global Thatcherism, because the
French monarchy was so capricious and terroristic itself. By
contrast,
the murder of the deposed Romanovs (including their children) has
given rise to Disney-quality treacle, which will always have a
significant popular appeal.
Outside of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviki were admired almost
exclusively by artists and intellectuals; but the today-frequent
maligning of comments along the lines of Lincoln Steffens'
"I have seen the future and it works" betrays a malign partisanship,
as in truth such comments indicated nothing more than an awareness
of "exigency" such as conservatives have occasionally possessed
and an openness to "noble experiments". Far more significant
was the defusing of tepid-but-thorough support from radical
unionists in Europe and America, who were initially enthused by
what they took to be the syndicalist premises of the Soviets but
quickly disabused of an enthusiasm for anything but the Stakhanovite
masses. The story of Communists in American labor unions
(a happy story with a sad ending) is one for another time, as many
fine historical studies already exist; but a story which deserves to
be told much more than the Reds-under-the-beds paranoia promulgated by
the authors of *The Soviet World Of American Communism*, with just
enough justification (it is true that the CPUSA has historically been
in large part a front for Soviet espionage), is the story of John
Reed's Communist Labor Party (the reason why that's true).
The Communist Labor Party was formed before the inauguration of the
Third International, as a competitor to the Worker's Party founded by
immgrants and people with direct connections to the Bolsheviks; it was
the original attempt at "Communism, American style" and was quickly
folded into the Worker's Party (at the behest of the Soviet Union) to
create the CPUSA at the behest of the Soviet Union. Both parties
split off from the Socialist Party, then hugely popular in the
American Midwest; furthermore, many members of the Industrial Workers
of the World (though not members of the "Yellow IWW", an organization
founded by Daniel DeLeon in 1908 and promoting political action by
syndicalist unions) joined the Communists. Furthermore, something
which it has not been safe to say (for political and "practical"
reasons) is that the Communist Party was very popular with Northern
blacks due to its extremely principled anti-racism, and many
famed black Democratic politicians of an earlier era got their start
by
being involved with the CP, CP-controlled unions or "fronts". (I
personally have never supported the CPUSA, but it is an established
American political tradition and if they are "confused"
that's just tough.)
Excursus: The Althusserians and "Ordinary Stalinism"
The Truth About "Democratization"
If paranoia is starting again: well, if Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were
ever
national treasures in your book this is what me and a million
Paul Robeson fans were not-too-tacitly buying into -- but the question
why it should start at all, the CPUSA clearly never having had
insurrectionary intent in the US, is worth thinking on. To be fair,
the flip side of the idea of a "Red Scare" (the first of which
occurred before any Communist party was established in the United
States) is that "The Reds" were scary, and even for socialists;
furthermore, although Communism was genuinely popular in several
southern-European nations (only one of which ever got around to having
its own distinctive version), the Warsaw Pact clearly involved the
subjugation of most of Eastern Europe to the diktat of the Soviet
Union; Uncle Joe's affection was very much unwanted, as several
incidents "perpetrated" by rock-ribbed democratic socialists
indicated.
However, if life under Stalinist rule (which can be considered to have
ended, and not very cleanly, with Gorbachev) was not fun in the sun,
the recent vogue for studies of "ordinary Stalinism" as a progressive
variant is not unmerited. The cover of the Rowohlt paperback edition
of Brecht's Stalinist *Lehrstuecke* features a relatively natty Brecht
standing over an oafish man at a drawing-table, and in the context of
Brecht's first play *Mann ist Mann* the subtext is obvious; that is,
you have to think about it a little bit. The Stalinist "New Man" is
no prize pig, but he is neither a peacock nor particularly
uncomfortable; his ever-so-drab jib has an extremely generous cut.
(Compare with the Nudie suit, perhaps the ultimate expression of
bourgeois individualism; it is fitted to and decorated for a single
person, unsuitable for everyday wear; and costs tens of thousands of
dollars, such that only the most famous country musicians have ever
owned one and others rent them).
And this (the cultural life Francois Furet appreciatively calls
"para-political" in *The Future Of An Illusion*) is the appropriate
context for assessing the work of the Althusser school, not the
grotesque tragedy of Helene Althusser's slaughter by Althusser
in their conjugal bed. The question of Mme. Althusser (Althusser's
petite, slim, plain, Communist "answer" to Simone de Beauvoir) and her
murder invites some kind of detailed commentary, but that which has
appeared to date is of a piece with the Anglophone "interpellation" of
Althusser in general: garish and one-sided, pro or con. But perhaps
the
assessment of Althusser, who employed technical concepts in his
analyses of Marx which were beyond the means of his age, awaited a
renegade Bourbakist; and in this excursus I will try to do my bit to
"deface" the Althusserian corpus (and which the knowledgeable already
understand is appropriate, as the Althusserians recto verso were a
band, not Blondin and his lovely assistant).
Elsewhere I have dealt with Althusser's employment of the concept of
"global consequence" in his interpretation of Marx, and this is not
nothing; however, for the purposes of this essay the "scientific
interprettion of Marx" is not quite to the point, seeing as how a
revolt against scientistic readings of *Capital* was one of the few
theoretical issues the early European Communists could all agree on
(reports of Althusser's anti-Hegelianism are exaggerated to the
point of falsification, possibly by him as well). Rather, I will
suggest that Althusser's "Lenin And Philosophy" and Etienne
Balibar's "Elements for a Theory of Transition" provide genuinely
solid intellectual tools for the comprehension of Lenin; well-known
tropes from the former have already been alluded to in this essay,
but the latter is no joke.
The analysis of Marx presented in *For Marx* is tendentious and
"one-dimensional", and this not in a good way (save for the
extraordinarily perceptive chapter on Brecht and Bertolazzi), and it
is unfortunate that this is Althusser's best-known book because
Althusser's later work (some of it in fact composed post-homicide;
I do not refer to *L'Avenir Dure Longtemps*, although both
mid-Atlantic translators of which could have easily stretched out
a little bit and accurately rendered the title as *Tomorrow Is A
Long Time*) questions many of the "super-political" assumptions
of his earlier work. Furthermore, even the fragment of *Reading
Capital* available in English (excluding Ranciere and Macherey) is one
of the great scientific studies of the Twentieth Century, and that it
does not rate as a work of "analytic Marxism" tells you something
about the genuine political contours of analytic philosophy.
In this chapter Balibar examines the question of "primitive
accumulation" (Marx's economic analysis of Hobbes' supposed
"state of nature" for man) in light of Althusser's analysis
of the supposed "tendency of the rate of profit to fall",
that at that time open "cost-cutting measures" such as
flourished during the Victorian age were offloaded onto
structural features of employment, such that an auto worker
who "voluntarily" worked 100 hours a week, week in and week
out, for a good wage deserved to not be counted as an example
of economic progress, and the question of "diachronic" analysis
as [bracketed] by Saussure in favor of "synchronic" analysis,
systematic analysis of a "snapshot" of language. Balibar places
his considerations within Marx's problematic ("which was not
peculiarly his") of *periodization*.
Balibar's empirically-supported hypothesis is the liberal "myth"
of a period of primitive accumulation (belied by *careful* study
of pre-agricultural societies), which underpins certain crucial
axioms of (classical) economics, would not withstand a *retrait* in
the sense discussed in Essay #3, as his "disjunctive" rendering of
Marx's theory of reproduction - "either it is a matter of the
production of things, or it is a matter of the reproduction of the
(re)production of the social relations of production" makes it clear
that a "dynamic" is present in all economic activity which tends
toward consideration of social factors, rather than individual
welfare.
Upon this he bases a theory of transitions which is defined without
reference to state power. What more could Gerry Cohen ask for?
Furthermore, although many of its premises are outdated in a sense
perhaps it, like the rest of Leninism, was waiting for an opportunity
to be "realized in thought" (e.g., the theory of models is not in
essentials empiricist in orientation, although positivist
encrustations
made this difficult to see for decades; the weaknesses of
model-theoretic approaches in fact lie elsewhere, a current blindspot
among the cognoscenti); and the current more-than-resonances of
the title of Balibar's chapter should indicate this. Recent
theoretical work (~20 years) in computer science has included efforts
to develop a semantics for imperative programming languages (against
the wishes of partisans of "Gegenstaendlich" and recursive languages
based on the lambda calculus, these are far-and-away still the
programmer's bread and butter).
Broadly speaking, two approaches have developed: the denotational
semantics favored by Dana Scott (who has also developed the
realizability semantics for intuitionism), and the Propositional
Dynamic Logic developed by Vaughan Pratt. Roughly speaking, PDL is a
modal model of a Turing Machine which allows one to assign semantic
content to machine states based on the transitions they allow; and we
will have occasion to consider PDL in another essay, but right now
I will use it as a launch-pad for talking about the computational
character of frames for modal propositional logic (following
Blackburn, de Rijke, and Venema). Modal logics are evaluated on
structures <W,R,V>, a set of "points" or possible worlds (sets of
sentences), a binary "accessibility" relation between points, and
valuations (which of the sentences are true and which false in a
possible world).
Although people in analytic philosophy are typically used to thinking
of modal reasoning as simple matters of possibility and necessity,
Michael Dummett pointed out in "Could There Be Unicorns?" that the
multiplicity of modal logics currently studied (100+ different
systems) could be significant for philosophical argumentation
involving
"counterfactuality". I will now give an example. One "irregular"
modal
logic is called MK. MK is valid on what is called a "recession"
frame,
where you can only go one step back but you can go all the way
forward,
but this frame does not itself characterize the logic: the logic is
rather that from wherever you are in the system of "possible worlds"
you can access ("see") some world where that world can only access in
two steps what the world you're in can access another one.
If that seems a little "dry" to you, it is; but I swear this can get
pretty interesting, especially when one begins to compare
accessibility
relations with an eye towards their complexity and in terms of general
discussions of "counterfactuality". Now, talk about counterfactuals
in
analytic philosophy is common enough, but what philosophers typically
don't
understand is that modal logic doesn't underwrite just one
understanding
of "what could be, what could have been", different modal logics
underwrite different understandings. Should we choose one? There's
nothing in modal logic itself to suggest that's necessary, and
furthermore
plenty to suggest that different logics may be appropriate for
understanding different areas of discourse about possibilities. And I
think the easiest way to understand this is by thinking about musical
groups (although then again, I probably would).
Egaliberte and Reverence For The Concrete:
Freedom From Choice Is What You Want, Right?
Musical groups illustrate counterfactuality very well, because they
can
maintain a "domain" in the sonic panorama and "image" across albums
and
line-up changes, but there can also be changes, such that one can
wonder
whether the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra would be "the same" without
Mariss Jansons (such as AC/DC really is almost exactly the same
without
Bon Scott, much to everyone's amazement and edification). But the
kinds of continuity which are possible vary with the type of group
in question; it's a lot easier to keep a symphony orchestra together
than a four-piece rock band, for example, because none of the members
are particularly essential to the orchestra's mission; and so this
can give you a feeling for why different modal logics might be
necessary. And to give a more concrete example, the "duo" - the
smallest musical group possible - has a "logic" not unlike the modal
system D.
One of the most basic modal axioms, included in S5, is T: if
something is necessarily true, it is true in the actual world. But in
deontic logic, the study of obligatory and permissible actions, T
cannot be used: not everything which it is "obligatory"; for people to
do gets done, after all. Instead, an axiom called D is used: if an
action is obligatory, it is permissible -- you can't be forbidden to
do what you are morally obligated to do. The condition on frames that
defines the modal logic D is the idea of "dead end worlds", possible
ways the world can be such that *no* world, including that world
itself, can be accessed (the metaphor which is used by Hughes and
Cresswell for the accessibility relation is "seen") from said world.
If no world is accessible, then it is not possible for the statement
Mp (meaning "it is possible" or "it is permissible" depending on
whether you are speaking of alethic modalities, which pertain to
truth,
or deontic modalities, which pertain to obligation) to be true, since
this requires that the statement p betrue in some accessible world
and
in frames with dead-end worlds Lp ("it is necessary" or "it is
obligatory")
is true, since the statement is not false in any accessible worlds
(there are none), but Mp is false and D is invalid. As I said,
D-valid
formulas are not valid on "dead-end" frames (they only work for the
simplest modal logic, K); the simplest frame on which D-formulae are
valid is a serial frame, where there is always a continual path from
one world to another. And this makes sense in terms of the dynamics
of
dyads, because the only characteristic they need retain is continuity:
a duo *could* completely change their routine, move to another city,
play different instruments, whatever.
But there are "facts" about what the duo would be like if one member
was replaced, that'd be another duo; and at present we have an n-tet,
the
Althusser school (including figures other than the four already
mentioned),
to consider. The aesthetic of Althusserian work is often considered
rather
brutalist, but it is important to remember the cultural milieu from
whence
it came - the sub-society created by the PCF and its trade unions,
from
whence French Maoism sprang, and to remember (such as Furet does) that
there might actually be some genuinely nice parts of this; and in
fact,
this "microtransitions" of this world have already in part been
theorized. Althusser, like Derrida was a *pied-noir* from Algeria,
although such people are not all alike (those two were on different
sides of the "Ultrabolshevism" question, for example); the rest of the
60s/70s "social-theory" contingent of French poststructuralism, save
Foucault, were from a class of young French men more-or-less akin to
the
American type designated as "spud".
The Bearnaise Pierre Bourdieu was distinctively rural, and wrote about
the
restricted lives of the people in that region with great feeling and
sociological acuity ("I am qualified to speak on France not because I
live there, but because I study it" - Bourdieu), but that is only a
special case of this; and from the "Humanist Controvery" on, the
Althusser
group which Bourdieu, like Derrida, was not a part of spoke on the
concerns of this milieu rather than exclusively the life of the ENS
(although during his heyday the manic-depressive Althusser was too
unwell to be anywhere else). Balibar, Ranciere, and Macherey
"superceded" their Maoist leanings without becoming part of the
nouveaux
philosophes, and in the 90s their works began to become available in
translation in the US - without anyone but Slavoj Zizek paying
attention,
and thusly without any attention to the persistence of such motifs
into
a post-Eurocommunist era.
But two concepts, Balibar's *egaliberte* ("equaliberty") and
Ranciere's
"ultrapolitics", deserve such consideration. Egaliberte, "the
principled equality of all men qua speaking beings" according to
Zizek.
Balibar's own conception is quite a bit more Spinozistic, we might
well say; the universal right to the conative -- to want something you
can't have, or can only have a part of, or a certain version of,
'cause that's part of living; something like a "donnee immediate de la
politique". What is factored out is *fraternite*, the question of the
political organization a la Gramsci's Modern Prince; this is simply a
"politcs of the rights of man". Or is it? What is clearly excluded
by this last join is unpolitical individual rights deriving from some
source other than a polity, although the polity here is considered in
full generality; but what this not-so-clearly excludes, or
problematizes, is a Kantian account of practical rationality based on
a "demand" for the universal with respect to conduct, rather than
discerning a fractured universal in the particular.
Ranciere's "ultrapolitics" tackles the problem from the other end.
The idea is simply that the vilest fraction of society
(the "demos") is covered by the universal, and in full generality;
that everything they do is an expression of political rights,
including ones which may not have heretofore been acknowledged.
If these approaches seem "idealistic" compared to Lenin's,
they are: but there is a hidden element which justifies a shift
in approach. As I mentioned above, the Bolsheviki did not originally
control the representation of their state by artists: they
manufactured
understanding, but they did not yet "manufacture consent". This had
to
wait for the 1930s, and its most exemplary case then occured not in
the Soviet Union nor in Nazi Germany, but in the United States --
Upton Sinclair's 1936 campaign for the governorship of California,
derailed by the first "total" public-relations campaign (which
featured
the slogan "Stamp Out Sinclairism" as a "reference" back to the
initially-popular Sinclair's past in the Socialist Party).
But by the flush of the postwar era, such techniques were in full
effect in every North American and European nation, and there is the
difference between the Althusser School and the Leninists of the Third
International. Lenin and Lukacs were both, to use the Gramscian
designation,
"official" intellectuals "gone organic" as a result of state targeting
(Gramsci simply lacked money to continue his education and became
active
in politics later); but the Althusserians could never be "organic" or
humanist in the same way, because they were products of a Taylorist
era through and through. So what we see with them is a sublimation of
the
Leninist problematic into something which truly deserves to be called
"anti-politics", and the offensiveness of this deserves some
explanation
(although more may be called for to bring liberal democracy into line
with
its ideals).
LEAPS!
-- Lenin, *Philosophical Notebooks*, 1915
A field of much contemporary interest is computational linguistics --
studying how computational dynamics in the human "mind/brain" enable
the language faculty and make possible effective computer mimicry of
it. On a "traditional" understanding, this subdiscipline is supposed
to have originated with the "Hard AI" efforts of the 50s and 60s; but
in this essay, I will suggest that the divining of properly
computational dynamics in language in its largest compass began with
none other than Vladimir Illyich Lenin, and that in terms of this
project the school of French political philosophers centered around
Althusser are both Lenin's authentic disciples and the best source of
intuitions about questions of "computational semantics" - the extent
to which meaning can be computationally comprehended, and the uses to
which this might legitimately be put.
I will also suggest that the intellectual project of Gramsci, often
considered a standard-setter for respectable "Marxism-Leninism", is
in fact motivated by theoretically opposite (and "practically
orthogonal") motives, and that of Lukacs "prior in order of thought"
to both -- i.e., a justification of the aims of the Bolsheviks in
terms of the worldview of the "long 19th Century"; such that
consideration of this "troika" as joined only by "cohesive" political
forces is necessary to determine whether anything of value remains
in the project of Soviet Communism (as well as the extent to which
highly touted "anti-Leninist" leftism compromises itself
intellectually or practically by leaving such problematics behind).
To begin the technical portion, in the last essay I spoke of the
work of the Moscow-Tartu semioticians in a critical manner; and at
times I have had occasion to speak critically of a somewhat similar
intellectual style in the American formal sciences, "Eastern model
theory". Model theory is the study of the relationships between
words and their designata in the most general compass, and
traditionally model-theoretic research has broken into two "styles",
"Western" and "Eastern". The distinction roughly parallels that
between type theory and set theory; "Western" model theorists study
very general features of an already general field, whereas "Eastern"
model theorists study particular mathematical problems using
model-theoretic means.
This distinction has fallen out of favor, as nearly all work conducted
in model theory at present would be designated as "Eastern", but it is
not obsolete; the concepts of Western model theory continue to inform
extra-logical disciplines -- philosophers have never been able to get
away from "The Concept Of Truth In Formalized Languages" by Tarski,
the standard-setter for the genre. If you are saying "Tarski?
Western?" you are poorly informed; there was in fact Tarski in
Berkeley, and Abraham Robinson in New Haven. Thusly was the world
divided in those days; but even then, the distinction was a little
misleading, as Robinson's own work (though more technical) is
genuinely careful in its formulation, a point we will return to later.
What is required right now is that we give a very general account of a
very Western definition of computability, namely the Church-Turing
thesis. Alonzo Church was Turing's instructor, and an important mind
in his own right (his magisterial *Introduction to Mathematical Logic*
is still a definitive account of the topics it covers); and in fact
the idea of computability, as it applies to computing machinery, grew
out of his attempt to provide an alternative foundation for
mathematics -- the "lambda calculus" (David Berlinski's account is
wrong on this original purpose for the lambda calculus). The lambda
calulus reverses the order of explanation set by Dirichlet and defines
mathematical objects in terms of functions, rather than functions in
terms of objects.
Church's proof of the undecidability of the predicate calculus
derives from this, rather than the separate work of Turing. The
famous "Turing machine" was not yet quite a computer -- that had
to wait for von Neumann's invention of memory -- but Turing took
the definition of computability down a notch in terms of abstraction.
The Turing machine is an ordered 5-tuple (that is to say, a set
consisting of elements from five sets in one-to-one-to-one-to-one
correspondence), <S,s,H,sigma,delta>. The famous "tape" analogy is
exactly that; S is a set of "states" which can be envisioned as
positions on the tape, s the initial position on the tape, H the
"halting" states (where no more movement occurs), sigma the set
of symbols that can be written on the tape, and delta the function
(graph) of the possible movements to the left or to the right on the
machine given certain inputs.
And the proof of the analogic character of this is that "Turing
machines" come in many different flavors, all of which are
computationally equivalent. But pace Blackburn, de Rijke and Venema
(whom we shall return to, as will become more common soon) Church's
thesis does not quite say that Turing machines define a robust
conception of computability, because Church did not work with Turing
machines (Church and Turing did their definitive work in the 1930s,
but the equivalence of their definitions of computability was proved
much later). And Church for once was being careful (having been
burned by the first true computer scientist, Stephen Kleene, who
precipitated the whole affair by demonstrating a paradox in the lambda
calculus), because deterministic Turing machines do not define a
robust conception of computability, just robust computability, and
even relative exotica like non-deterministic automatons (where delta
is a probabilistic function) do not capture everything we might like
to include under the ambit of computability (i.e., formal systems
which are used to compute, such as the simple theory of types Church
added to the lambda calculus to right it).
So, whatever the widespread use of digital computers tells us,
computer science is founded on a limitative result and truly can only
provide us more of the same; what Turing in effect says, in his famous
article on whether a computer could think, is that we have a choice as
to what we take as limited (either computers don't think, or thinking
is
something rather less romantic and more rote in all cases -- no
"observer outs" for scientists -- than we have previously thought).
Such thoughts are a traditional staple of Marxist thought about
concrete situations, going back to Marx's *Critique of the Gotha
Program* where Marx suggested to the nascent SPD that they not aim for
the
creation of a "free state" without clarifying exactly who was to be
free; and although we will return to technical issues later, I will
now begin my discussion of Lenin in this spirit.
Why Lenin? Why Now?
Today Lenin is widely reviled as the "architect" of the Bolshevik
Revolution, and thusly largely responsible for the widespread death
and terror of Soviet Russia following his death. Right off the bat it
is possible for the informed radical to say: neither is quite correct,
but perhaps we need to define terms before we can say what is truly
objectionable with each statement. Lenin was the spirit of the
"Bolshevik" (written in his hand with quotes) version of the Russian
Social-Democratic Party, and remains a much-admired figure in Russia
up to this day, but he was not properly speaking responsible for the
success of the October Revolution; that accolade goes to Trotsky, who
organized the Petrograd Soviet into a organization capable of
challenging the government's legitimacy and winning popular approval
for it, and the Red Army into a fighting force capable of defending
the Revolution against all comers (who were "Legion").
Lenin was not a practical man. What Lenin was responsible for was the
glowing image of Bolshevism among members of the worldwide socialist
movement, and this had been in the works for decades by 1917. And in
fact, this was worked by the fact that a great number of socialist
tendencies in other countries (ones not explicitly identifying
themselves as "Leninist") bore the stamp of his prerevolutionary
thought, concerned with the problems of radical democracy in an age of
empire and the limitation of the "covenant of labor" from whence
socialist parties derive their legitimacy to the proletariat proper.
With respect to revolutionism, Lenin was no shirker, but he was also
not a putschist; during the 1905 Revolution he posed a question (in
German), "Dare we win?", and tacitly answered it in the negative;
furthermore, the question of October is falsified if it is not
understood that a number of prominent Bolsheviks were opposed to the
Revolution and that the other Russian socialist parties held a
majority in the Constituent Assembly for some years following the
revolution.
"One Step Back, Two Steps Forward"
What, then, was October? Most accurately, it was a bureaucratic
reform along the lines of the American Constitution sans the Bill of
Rights (although it itself had a "Bill of Social Rights" regarding the
treatment of workers and liberalization of civil law, many provisions
of which were implemented immediately and have also been implemented
in other countries at later dates, individual rights such as we
understand them in the United States were never honored in the Soviet
Union), without constitutional legitimacy but with the tacit support
of the majority of the Russians and other peoples of the Empire. But
most pregnantly for contemporary life, it continued the Bolshevik
tradition of being something like a "quality control program" for
Russian socialism; Aleksandr Kerensky and the other
Socialist-Revolutionaries were nominally left-wing in orientation, but
simply had the goal of ending Tsarism and no particular scruples about
what came afterwards. (Furthermore, Leninists were aware of the work
of Frederick Winslow Taylor and by no means disturbed by it, owing to
the heavy emphasis on the discipline of the proletariat inculcated by
their workplace in Marxist thought).
For the part of the famed "Mensheviks", that majority of the RSDLP
which hewed much more closely to the Second-International line until
it dissolved in the "union sacrees" of World War I, even they had no
particular scruples about universal enfranchisement; and for Lenin's
part, his treatment of kulaks, smallholding peasants - that is,
execution of a small number - does not read as monstrous in the
context of Russian history henceforward *or* previous. The change of
the Bolsheviks' name to the "Communist Party" during the February
period was motivated by such concerns of scruple; Lenin advocated that
the party make it clear what they were about, rather than who they
were for. The sharper-eyed among us -- perhaps motivated by the
(ever-so-slightly fanciful) title of this section -- may have already
seen an interesting pattern here, namely the choice of *qualities*
(properties, singulary relations, to use Quine's elegant phrase) over
binary or worse relations in the public-relations methods of the
Bolsheviks.
This is immediately interesting because it is the singulary predicate
calculus (the logic of properties, rather than full first-order logic)
which is the maximally decidable (computable) logic; add intensional
operators and it becomes undecidable. So there is clearly something
of the computational in what is readily "understandable" by a wide
audience; attributions of properties, rather than complex "positional"
analyses of various figures in a situation (such as are readily
available in the correspondence of Lenin). This much is old hat
(although perhaps still new to some, and certainly still true), but
there is more to say on the topic of the computability of the
predicate calculus which has been obscured by the exiguous character
of computer science in recent years. But first, an "unpolitical"
comment on Lenin as philosopher, in the spirit of Pannekoek.
The question of considering the philosophy of Lenin is a frankly
tortured one, owing both to the extremely conjunctural character of
his
entire corpus and to the idea of the "international Communist
movement" as formulated after his death. His "major" work of
philosophy, *Materialism and Empirio-Criticism*, is a stream of
invective aimed at positivists naive and refined; and by philosophical
standards he was quite clearly the inferior of his political enemy
George Plekhanov, who is today unknown but was perhaps the first
person to pose the question of "non-reductive materialism" in full
generality, i.e. in its relation to the theory of history. Another
"work", the *Philosophical Notebooks*, is acclaimed by Lenin
enthusiasts; and in my opinion rightly so, but for the most part for
the wrong reasons.
The *Philosophical Notebooks* is a slim collection of comments on
Hegel's *Science of Logic*, written in stolen moments during Lenin's
exile from Mother Russia. As Hegel exegesis it is terrible, but it
is a very candid (and by no means disgraceful) picture of Lenin's
mind;
and furthermore, these notes (which were circulated rather widely
beginning in 1929) perhaps deserve the accolade of first having
posed Hegelian questions in a spirit apposite to late capitalism,
where premodern institutions have become merely symbolic in power. To
begin
with Lenin takes a rather Crocean line regarding the question of
"tarrying with the negative", Hegel as a "critical" idealist -
"What is necessary is not dead bones, but living life"; and a
frankly scientistic view of the Hegelian enterprise, quoting with
admiration Hegel's commentary on calculus ("All this is comprehensible
only to people with training in higher mathematics. Suggested title:
'Carnot - Metaphysics of the Infinitesimal Calculus'").
However, the crucial sections of the Philosophical Notebooks are
Lenin's commentaries on the sections "Measure", "Quality" and
"Relation". With respect to measure (and one would not be amiss
in considering this section of Hegel a preliminary consideration of
such concerns as appear in the mature theory of integration) Lenin
takes a near-idealistic line: "none of this is comprehensible without
leaps". But with respect to quality and relation Lenin's views are
"pragmatic" in the extreme: "semblance - the negative nature of
essence".
And here we come back to contemporary formal issues. As I said
before, Leninist doctrine is very "tractable" owing to the primacy of
qualities over relations, and in fact deserves to be understood as
something like "manufacturing understanding". Does this have
contemporary model-theoretic equivalents? No, a point we will return
to later, but there is a model-theoretic equivalent and that is the
theory of metamathematical ideals as expounded by Robinson.
For any consistent set of sentences K and J in a first-order language,
if J is consistent there exists another set of sentences J0 such that
all sentences which are provable from the "union" (disjunctive
collection - that is, permitting the selection of items from either of
two sets) of K and J and the "intersection" (conjunctive collection,
requiring the consideration of the totality of items present with each
subset) of that union with J0. Robinson calls this set of sentences
an
"ideal in J0 over K', and uses it as a test for consistency (not
completeness) for a first-order theory (K) including nonlogical
axioms applicable to observation sentences (J). The concept of the
model-theoretic ideal *simpliciter* is none too fascinating, but it
permits a great many rigorous operations relating theories with
non-logical axioms to be performed. As I said before, some of the
none-too-definite pronouncements of Bolshevism ought to be understood
as pragmatic moves, but as the *Philosophical Notebooks* show Lenin
was also concerned with problems of relation and in many respects the
"relational" goals of the Bolsheviks should be understood in
this spirit of "idealism" - perhaps "All Power to the Soviets",
famously never more realized than before it was promulgated,
should be understood as a "homomorphism" between ideals.
Furthermore, it is really quite clear that the Third International, a
demand for which was formulated by Lenin after the Zimmerwald
conference (when the "Zimmerwald Left" a working group of
anti-imperialist Marxists with both parliamentary strength and
obvious legitimacy owing to their incredible persecution was already
in existence) but before the October Revolution, was intended to be
"third" in the sense of Hegel's "third attitude to objectivity" (in
the shorter *Encyclopedia* Logic). Under this heading Hegel speaks of
the concern with "intuitive knowledge" possessed by many of his
contemporaries, and quite critically; but it is clear that Lenin's
researches on imperialism motivated him to consider the problems of
the workingmen's movement not only internationally but *globally*, and
that (with reference to Hegel or not) he realized that intuitive
concerns would be the only common denominator in such a wide scope.
So the problematic of "socialist humanism" was present for the Third
International from the start, and its subsequent renaming as the
"Comintern" and then disbanding in 1934 at the behest of Stalin cannot
but bespeak some kind of betrayal. And in this vein, it is clear that
the aesthetic problem of "socialist realism" was not present for
Russian artists and writers at the outset, and even for many years
during the 20s. But Lukacs did not write to no point, so perhaps the
realists were for all that unavoidable, and here we come to what I
believe to be the chief theoretical problem of Soviet Communism, that
it did not think the question of sovereignty and the "iconic" through.
The work of Russian futurists during the early years is justly famous
for its artistic quality, and the enthusiasm of artists such as
Mayakovsky, Malevich, El Lissitzky and Eisenstein for the Revolution
was in no way faked; during this early period artists and
intellectuals
were often not even Party members, much less apparatchiks.
But Eisenstein's *October*, a great work of art prepared in accordance
to a code much stricter than Hays, is not truly the "diegetic reality"
of the Bolshevik Revolution. Revolutions must be judged by their
tyrannicides -- and it is here that the libertarian communist and
thorough Hegelian exegete Bataille is nearer to the mark than than
Lenin. The concept of metamathematical ideal is not typically known
to contemporary mathematicians by that name; it is rather called a
"scapegoat theory", as this is the name given it in Elliot Mendelson's
*Introduction to Mathematical Logic* (a thorough and detailed
treatment, but difficult and in logical respects frankly outdated
as Church's never will be). As a "Western" ability to think of
the possible irrelevance of particular features of a theory
seems to be slipping among today's empirically-oriented
mathematicians,
the mathematical irrelevance of calling them "ideals" or "scapegoats"
will not sink in (this is almost guaranteed, as Robinson's book is
just out-of-print and from North-Holland, not Springer).
But another lack, the analytic philosopher's inability to see details
as
anything other than extraneous, complicates matters further: Lenin's
ideal is Bataille's scapegoat, the victim of the impossibly cruel
Chinese
"torture of a hundred cuts" (and this too can be formally understood,
as witnessed by the Derrida quotation in the second essay), but the
latter is for it all the same. Generally speaking, enthusiasm for
the French Revolution was strong enough to withstand the Terror
(details of which were well-known) and will be strong enough to
withstand an indefinite period of global Thatcherism, because the
French monarchy was so capricious and terroristic itself. By
contrast,
the murder of the deposed Romanovs (including their children) has
given rise to Disney-quality treacle, which will always have a
significant popular appeal.
Outside of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviki were admired almost
exclusively by artists and intellectuals; but the today-frequent
maligning of comments along the lines of Lincoln Steffens'
"I have seen the future and it works" betrays a malign partisanship,
as in truth such comments indicated nothing more than an awareness
of "exigency" such as conservatives have occasionally possessed
and an openness to "noble experiments". Far more significant
was the defusing of tepid-but-thorough support from radical
unionists in Europe and America, who were initially enthused by
what they took to be the syndicalist premises of the Soviets but
quickly disabused of an enthusiasm for anything but the Stakhanovite
masses. The story of Communists in American labor unions
(a happy story with a sad ending) is one for another time, as many
fine historical studies already exist; but a story which deserves to
be told much more than the Reds-under-the-beds paranoia promulgated by
the authors of *The Soviet World Of American Communism*, with just
enough justification (it is true that the CPUSA has historically been
in large part a front for Soviet espionage), is the story of John
Reed's Communist Labor Party (the reason why that's true).
The Communist Labor Party was formed before the inauguration of the
Third International, as a competitor to the Worker's Party founded by
immgrants and people with direct connections to the Bolsheviks; it was
the original attempt at "Communism, American style" and was quickly
folded into the Worker's Party (at the behest of the Soviet Union) to
create the CPUSA at the behest of the Soviet Union. Both parties
split off from the Socialist Party, then hugely popular in the
American Midwest; furthermore, many members of the Industrial Workers
of the World (though not members of the "Yellow IWW", an organization
founded by Daniel DeLeon in 1908 and promoting political action by
syndicalist unions) joined the Communists. Furthermore, something
which it has not been safe to say (for political and "practical"
reasons) is that the Communist Party was very popular with Northern
blacks due to its extremely principled anti-racism, and many
famed black Democratic politicians of an earlier era got their start
by
being involved with the CP, CP-controlled unions or "fronts". (I
personally have never supported the CPUSA, but it is an established
American political tradition and if they are "confused"
that's just tough.)
Excursus: The Althusserians and "Ordinary Stalinism"
The Truth About "Democratization"
If paranoia is starting again: well, if Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were
ever
national treasures in your book this is what me and a million
Paul Robeson fans were not-too-tacitly buying into -- but the question
why it should start at all, the CPUSA clearly never having had
insurrectionary intent in the US, is worth thinking on. To be fair,
the flip side of the idea of a "Red Scare" (the first of which
occurred before any Communist party was established in the United
States) is that "The Reds" were scary, and even for socialists;
furthermore, although Communism was genuinely popular in several
southern-European nations (only one of which ever got around to having
its own distinctive version), the Warsaw Pact clearly involved the
subjugation of most of Eastern Europe to the diktat of the Soviet
Union; Uncle Joe's affection was very much unwanted, as several
incidents "perpetrated" by rock-ribbed democratic socialists
indicated.
However, if life under Stalinist rule (which can be considered to have
ended, and not very cleanly, with Gorbachev) was not fun in the sun,
the recent vogue for studies of "ordinary Stalinism" as a progressive
variant is not unmerited. The cover of the Rowohlt paperback edition
of Brecht's Stalinist *Lehrstuecke* features a relatively natty Brecht
standing over an oafish man at a drawing-table, and in the context of
Brecht's first play *Mann ist Mann* the subtext is obvious; that is,
you have to think about it a little bit. The Stalinist "New Man" is
no prize pig, but he is neither a peacock nor particularly
uncomfortable; his ever-so-drab jib has an extremely generous cut.
(Compare with the Nudie suit, perhaps the ultimate expression of
bourgeois individualism; it is fitted to and decorated for a single
person, unsuitable for everyday wear; and costs tens of thousands of
dollars, such that only the most famous country musicians have ever
owned one and others rent them).
And this (the cultural life Francois Furet appreciatively calls
"para-political" in *The Future Of An Illusion*) is the appropriate
context for assessing the work of the Althusser school, not the
grotesque tragedy of Helene Althusser's slaughter by Althusser
in their conjugal bed. The question of Mme. Althusser (Althusser's
petite, slim, plain, Communist "answer" to Simone de Beauvoir) and her
murder invites some kind of detailed commentary, but that which has
appeared to date is of a piece with the Anglophone "interpellation" of
Althusser in general: garish and one-sided, pro or con. But perhaps
the
assessment of Althusser, who employed technical concepts in his
analyses of Marx which were beyond the means of his age, awaited a
renegade Bourbakist; and in this excursus I will try to do my bit to
"deface" the Althusserian corpus (and which the knowledgeable already
understand is appropriate, as the Althusserians recto verso were a
band, not Blondin and his lovely assistant).
Elsewhere I have dealt with Althusser's employment of the concept of
"global consequence" in his interpretation of Marx, and this is not
nothing; however, for the purposes of this essay the "scientific
interprettion of Marx" is not quite to the point, seeing as how a
revolt against scientistic readings of *Capital* was one of the few
theoretical issues the early European Communists could all agree on
(reports of Althusser's anti-Hegelianism are exaggerated to the
point of falsification, possibly by him as well). Rather, I will
suggest that Althusser's "Lenin And Philosophy" and Etienne
Balibar's "Elements for a Theory of Transition" provide genuinely
solid intellectual tools for the comprehension of Lenin; well-known
tropes from the former have already been alluded to in this essay,
but the latter is no joke.
The analysis of Marx presented in *For Marx* is tendentious and
"one-dimensional", and this not in a good way (save for the
extraordinarily perceptive chapter on Brecht and Bertolazzi), and it
is unfortunate that this is Althusser's best-known book because
Althusser's later work (some of it in fact composed post-homicide;
I do not refer to *L'Avenir Dure Longtemps*, although both
mid-Atlantic translators of which could have easily stretched out
a little bit and accurately rendered the title as *Tomorrow Is A
Long Time*) questions many of the "super-political" assumptions
of his earlier work. Furthermore, even the fragment of *Reading
Capital* available in English (excluding Ranciere and Macherey) is one
of the great scientific studies of the Twentieth Century, and that it
does not rate as a work of "analytic Marxism" tells you something
about the genuine political contours of analytic philosophy.
In this chapter Balibar examines the question of "primitive
accumulation" (Marx's economic analysis of Hobbes' supposed
"state of nature" for man) in light of Althusser's analysis
of the supposed "tendency of the rate of profit to fall",
that at that time open "cost-cutting measures" such as
flourished during the Victorian age were offloaded onto
structural features of employment, such that an auto worker
who "voluntarily" worked 100 hours a week, week in and week
out, for a good wage deserved to not be counted as an example
of economic progress, and the question of "diachronic" analysis
as [bracketed] by Saussure in favor of "synchronic" analysis,
systematic analysis of a "snapshot" of language. Balibar places
his considerations within Marx's problematic ("which was not
peculiarly his") of *periodization*.
Balibar's empirically-supported hypothesis is the liberal "myth"
of a period of primitive accumulation (belied by *careful* study
of pre-agricultural societies), which underpins certain crucial
axioms of (classical) economics, would not withstand a *retrait* in
the sense discussed in Essay #3, as his "disjunctive" rendering of
Marx's theory of reproduction - "either it is a matter of the
production of things, or it is a matter of the reproduction of the
(re)production of the social relations of production" makes it clear
that a "dynamic" is present in all economic activity which tends
toward consideration of social factors, rather than individual
welfare.
Upon this he bases a theory of transitions which is defined without
reference to state power. What more could Gerry Cohen ask for?
Furthermore, although many of its premises are outdated in a sense
perhaps it, like the rest of Leninism, was waiting for an opportunity
to be "realized in thought" (e.g., the theory of models is not in
essentials empiricist in orientation, although positivist
encrustations
made this difficult to see for decades; the weaknesses of
model-theoretic approaches in fact lie elsewhere, a current blindspot
among the cognoscenti); and the current more-than-resonances of
the title of Balibar's chapter should indicate this. Recent
theoretical work (~20 years) in computer science has included efforts
to develop a semantics for imperative programming languages (against
the wishes of partisans of "Gegenstaendlich" and recursive languages
based on the lambda calculus, these are far-and-away still the
programmer's bread and butter).
Broadly speaking, two approaches have developed: the denotational
semantics favored by Dana Scott (who has also developed the
realizability semantics for intuitionism), and the Propositional
Dynamic Logic developed by Vaughan Pratt. Roughly speaking, PDL is a
modal model of a Turing Machine which allows one to assign semantic
content to machine states based on the transitions they allow; and we
will have occasion to consider PDL in another essay, but right now
I will use it as a launch-pad for talking about the computational
character of frames for modal propositional logic (following
Blackburn, de Rijke, and Venema). Modal logics are evaluated on
structures <W,R,V>, a set of "points" or possible worlds (sets of
sentences), a binary "accessibility" relation between points, and
valuations (which of the sentences are true and which false in a
possible world).
Although people in analytic philosophy are typically used to thinking
of modal reasoning as simple matters of possibility and necessity,
Michael Dummett pointed out in "Could There Be Unicorns?" that the
multiplicity of modal logics currently studied (100+ different
systems) could be significant for philosophical argumentation
involving
"counterfactuality". I will now give an example. One "irregular"
modal
logic is called MK. MK is valid on what is called a "recession"
frame,
where you can only go one step back but you can go all the way
forward,
but this frame does not itself characterize the logic: the logic is
rather that from wherever you are in the system of "possible worlds"
you can access ("see") some world where that world can only access in
two steps what the world you're in can access another one.
If that seems a little "dry" to you, it is; but I swear this can get
pretty interesting, especially when one begins to compare
accessibility
relations with an eye towards their complexity and in terms of general
discussions of "counterfactuality". Now, talk about counterfactuals
in
analytic philosophy is common enough, but what philosophers typically
don't
understand is that modal logic doesn't underwrite just one
understanding
of "what could be, what could have been", different modal logics
underwrite different understandings. Should we choose one? There's
nothing in modal logic itself to suggest that's necessary, and
furthermore
plenty to suggest that different logics may be appropriate for
understanding different areas of discourse about possibilities. And I
think the easiest way to understand this is by thinking about musical
groups (although then again, I probably would).
Egaliberte and Reverence For The Concrete:
Freedom From Choice Is What You Want, Right?
Musical groups illustrate counterfactuality very well, because they
can
maintain a "domain" in the sonic panorama and "image" across albums
and
line-up changes, but there can also be changes, such that one can
wonder
whether the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra would be "the same" without
Mariss Jansons (such as AC/DC really is almost exactly the same
without
Bon Scott, much to everyone's amazement and edification). But the
kinds of continuity which are possible vary with the type of group
in question; it's a lot easier to keep a symphony orchestra together
than a four-piece rock band, for example, because none of the members
are particularly essential to the orchestra's mission; and so this
can give you a feeling for why different modal logics might be
necessary. And to give a more concrete example, the "duo" - the
smallest musical group possible - has a "logic" not unlike the modal
system D.
One of the most basic modal axioms, included in S5, is T: if
something is necessarily true, it is true in the actual world. But in
deontic logic, the study of obligatory and permissible actions, T
cannot be used: not everything which it is "obligatory"; for people to
do gets done, after all. Instead, an axiom called D is used: if an
action is obligatory, it is permissible -- you can't be forbidden to
do what you are morally obligated to do. The condition on frames that
defines the modal logic D is the idea of "dead end worlds", possible
ways the world can be such that *no* world, including that world
itself, can be accessed (the metaphor which is used by Hughes and
Cresswell for the accessibility relation is "seen") from said world.
If no world is accessible, then it is not possible for the statement
Mp (meaning "it is possible" or "it is permissible" depending on
whether you are speaking of alethic modalities, which pertain to
truth,
or deontic modalities, which pertain to obligation) to be true, since
this requires that the statement p betrue in some accessible world
and
in frames with dead-end worlds Lp ("it is necessary" or "it is
obligatory")
is true, since the statement is not false in any accessible worlds
(there are none), but Mp is false and D is invalid. As I said,
D-valid
formulas are not valid on "dead-end" frames (they only work for the
simplest modal logic, K); the simplest frame on which D-formulae are
valid is a serial frame, where there is always a continual path from
one world to another. And this makes sense in terms of the dynamics
of
dyads, because the only characteristic they need retain is continuity:
a duo *could* completely change their routine, move to another city,
play different instruments, whatever.
But there are "facts" about what the duo would be like if one member
was replaced, that'd be another duo; and at present we have an n-tet,
the
Althusser school (including figures other than the four already
mentioned),
to consider. The aesthetic of Althusserian work is often considered
rather
brutalist, but it is important to remember the cultural milieu from
whence
it came - the sub-society created by the PCF and its trade unions,
from
whence French Maoism sprang, and to remember (such as Furet does) that
there might actually be some genuinely nice parts of this; and in
fact,
this "microtransitions" of this world have already in part been
theorized. Althusser, like Derrida was a *pied-noir* from Algeria,
although such people are not all alike (those two were on different
sides of the "Ultrabolshevism" question, for example); the rest of the
60s/70s "social-theory" contingent of French poststructuralism, save
Foucault, were from a class of young French men more-or-less akin to
the
American type designated as "spud".
The Bearnaise Pierre Bourdieu was distinctively rural, and wrote about
the
restricted lives of the people in that region with great feeling and
sociological acuity ("I am qualified to speak on France not because I
live there, but because I study it" - Bourdieu), but that is only a
special case of this; and from the "Humanist Controvery" on, the
Althusser
group which Bourdieu, like Derrida, was not a part of spoke on the
concerns of this milieu rather than exclusively the life of the ENS
(although during his heyday the manic-depressive Althusser was too
unwell to be anywhere else). Balibar, Ranciere, and Macherey
"superceded" their Maoist leanings without becoming part of the
nouveaux
philosophes, and in the 90s their works began to become available in
translation in the US - without anyone but Slavoj Zizek paying
attention,
and thusly without any attention to the persistence of such motifs
into
a post-Eurocommunist era.
But two concepts, Balibar's *egaliberte* ("equaliberty") and
Ranciere's
"ultrapolitics", deserve such consideration. Egaliberte, "the
principled equality of all men qua speaking beings" according to
Zizek.
Balibar's own conception is quite a bit more Spinozistic, we might
well say; the universal right to the conative -- to want something you
can't have, or can only have a part of, or a certain version of,
'cause that's part of living; something like a "donnee immediate de la
politique". What is factored out is *fraternite*, the question of the
political organization a la Gramsci's Modern Prince; this is simply a
"politcs of the rights of man". Or is it? What is clearly excluded
by this last join is unpolitical individual rights deriving from some
source other than a polity, although the polity here is considered in
full generality; but what this not-so-clearly excludes, or
problematizes, is a Kantian account of practical rationality based on
a "demand" for the universal with respect to conduct, rather than
discerning a fractured universal in the particular.
Ranciere's "ultrapolitics" tackles the problem from the other end.
The idea is simply that the vilest fraction of society
(the "demos") is covered by the universal, and in full generality;
that everything they do is an expression of political rights,
including ones which may not have heretofore been acknowledged.
If these approaches seem "idealistic" compared to Lenin's,
they are: but there is a hidden element which justifies a shift
in approach. As I mentioned above, the Bolsheviki did not originally
control the representation of their state by artists: they
manufactured
understanding, but they did not yet "manufacture consent". This had
to
wait for the 1930s, and its most exemplary case then occured not in
the Soviet Union nor in Nazi Germany, but in the United States --
Upton Sinclair's 1936 campaign for the governorship of California,
derailed by the first "total" public-relations campaign (which
featured
the slogan "Stamp Out Sinclairism" as a "reference" back to the
initially-popular Sinclair's past in the Socialist Party).
But by the flush of the postwar era, such techniques were in full
effect in every North American and European nation, and there is the
difference between the Althusser School and the Leninists of the Third
International. Lenin and Lukacs were both, to use the Gramscian
designation,
"official" intellectuals "gone organic" as a result of state targeting
(Gramsci simply lacked money to continue his education and became
active
in politics later); but the Althusserians could never be "organic" or
humanist in the same way, because they were products of a Taylorist
era through and through. So what we see with them is a sublimation of
the
Leninist problematic into something which truly deserves to be called
"anti-politics", and the offensiveness of this deserves some
explanation
(although more may be called for to bring liberal democracy into line
with
its ideals).