Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Recovery of the Public World

CLINGING TO THE SIDES OF ONE’S CHAIR in dread anticipation of a discussion of ethics, aesthetics, and the public world is not needed. There is no intention here to launch into these matters with any pretense that they are genuinely alive to us, however much discussion they receive. Readers will not once again be summoned to prop forward as if the various debates implicit in the topic are just waiting for troops to join battle. Though not so long ago people did vigorously discuss these issues without too terrible a sense of putting themselves on, the concepts themselves and their nexus now have a stale, remote, archaic quality. A team of archaeologists sent out on their behalf that somehow turned up their mummified remains in a cache of steel-gray army trunks and unraveled the shrouds would—under their very eyes—see these concepts change to dust. Such an expedition turns out to be neither fantastic nor rare: the contemporary glut of discussions of these concepts comes repeatedly to this very result, though they rarely admit it. Even the distinguished, sometimes heroic, work of Juergen Habermas has the feel of speculations on a phantom limb. To gain some perspective on the possible recovery of the public world it is necessary from the outset to consider these concepts’ hollow resonance.¹

I

As regards ethics, the whole cast of characters is missing: the generous, the dutiful, the beneficent, the noble and their dark counterimages, the miserly, the wicked, the unprincipled—all those figures who staffed bourgeois literature from Molière through Dickens and Balzac have vanished. Even if we sometimes seek to catch glimpses of them in occasional faces, we don’t actually encounter them. Any one of them would now be an eccentric and, though there is currently no end to blasted and anomalous people, the figure of the eccentric shared their fate. From a contemporary vantage point, the tribe as a whole, frocked in what now seems medieval costume, is flickering out.

Why these figures and the ethical reflection that was their substance have become archaic is known to everyone in some fashion, and, because it touches a common nerve, one might just as well not hear about it. But, then again, whatever the reluctance to think about it, it cannot be passed up either. For ethics poses the question of individual universality; it seeks to define and test the necessity of the person in the relation of the one and the many. If ethical questions have been infiltrated by a pervasive sense of arbitrariness, then no less pervasive is the sense of having given up on what might make any person other than one too many.²

As a drama of the self-evident, what everyone knows of the reason for the passing of compelling ethical reflection will for now be left unstated. And there are precedents for hesitating on these matters. Reluctance on the topic burrows through the culture on many levels. This can be seen, for instance, in the fact that all Western languages freely assert the entwinement of morals and economy in a single word. That word is the good, which pedantically comprises both the good and the goods. Wealth has been the standard of goodness in all times and in every domain of thought, from the Greek Kalokagathia to the praise of a poem’s rich textures.³ But however pedantically the identity of wealth and goodness is insisted upon, this identity—such as the identity of the good and goods—is remarked upon with surprised obliviousness. The speaker of the poem’s praise would feel antagonistically misunderstood if it were met by an irate “Are you saying that the rich are right?” Similarly, the revivalist minister can be expected to drive by the local Coca-Cola bottling plant’s “redemption center” without a twinge of recognition. Though economics and ethics completely overlap and speak the same phrases about free lunches and fair share, though the languages of economic debt, culpability, and guilt are completely homologous, in spite of this, the surprise, incomprehension, and anger that often greets reference to this commonality signal that a boundary exists between these spheres that is no less real than their identity. This boundary line can be described, for it was carved historically. It did not exist, for example, among the ancient Greeks, for whom virtue (and that could only have been a manly virtue) was identical with wealth and property and entirely defined public status, a status that could only have been public since characteristically opposed to any kind of social standing was the idiotes—not an individual of limited mental dexterity, but the epitome of the private sphere itself, a person with no interest in public life and as such an exile from it, the basest form of life and of no conceivable utility.⁴ By utter contrast, Christianity for the first time in Western thought set goodness at odds with utility. Christians resolved to store up goods in heaven, at a cost to themselves, on the same model that the mundane store up goods in warehouses at a cost to everyone else. But this goodness was spiritualized as a private quality opposed to public values. This boundary is necessarily a complex, layered, and hardly schematizable one that more struck a fissure through every social element than it established a simple dividing line. But in all instances of this division the private aspect was deemed the more real and the public aspect was conceived as secondary and a facade for the private. Modern ethics thus emerged as the internalization of exchange relations that became spiritualized through the power of opposition to, and in alliance with, the same relations external to itself.

II

Yet this inner calculus is decreasingly relevant and to get at why this is the case, and present it in a way that is more illuminating than the banal reasons generally familiar, is difficult not least of all because there is no part of this event that is not genuinely banal. The topic here is in fact the powers of the banal. In order to avoid being swamped by these powers, some of their energy must be siphoned off. A test might, then, be recommended that will touch the competitive nerve. If this test is being announced suddenly, that is just how tests are. This quiz is of the “What is wrong with the following?” variety and requires some concentration. The question is, What is wrong with the following sentence? “You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.”⁵

The sentence is from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written in Jacksonian times, the 1830s, when America emerged as an entrepreneurial power of international importance. Tocqueville, in the sentence quoted, speaks for this entrepreneurial world; he gives it his voice to pronounce its judgment on each and every person. In the form of all ethics, Tocqueville absorbs an economic principle and heightens it to the point that it becomes a potential source of criticism. And there is no doubt that even today this maxim of universal banishment packs something of a wallop. But this critical force could hardly be what it once was. And skilled linguistic sensoriums will immediately perceive what goes wrong with the phrase; they will sense where the maxim becomes a logical conundrum, falters, and its critical force expires.

For those however who sense nothing of this, what those sharper sensoriums are compelled to wonder is, Who is this us in the latter part of the phrase “from this day on you are a stranger among us”? If, as Tocqueville insists, each person is free to think and live as each cares to think or live—if the maxim states that each has become a stranger to the other—who is the us? Either the us exists and the criticism is false—because then Tocqueville is hiding that each is not a stranger—or the us is an illusion and there are no conceivable grounds for the complaint since strangers can only be strangers with reference to some us. Thus, carefully regarded, Tocqueville’s sentence is faulty. Even if its criticism is recognized as true and one wants its toxin to take hold and administer its sting subcutaneously, the sentence itself dilutes the sting. It is worth noticing, incidentally, that for Tocqueville this us was not ironic or a placeholder. The fact of the sentence, that it was coherent for him, makes evident that in its own time it drew on a content that has now become illusory and threatens the critical content of his thought altogether.

What was tested, then, in this brief quiz, was a power that few may realize they possess: a historical sensorium that has the ability to perceive an emergently illusory aspect in the construction of a sentence. And this example is useful for understanding the dynamic of the decay of ethics in its relation to economics. For the ability to sense how this sentence tends toward disintegration—for it is the sentence itself that has aged and been transformed and even gained a new expressive force in the yawning abyss it now pronounces at the same time that it is washed over by its potential neutralization—is itself an act of the market. Those acute sensoriums that spontaneously picked out the problem in Tocqueville’s maxim, who were not fooled for a second, owe the cultivation of their involuntary historical perspicacity to the market.

However condensed, some explanation of this capacity is needed. The market on which society as a whole began to admit its complete dependency in the seventeenth century was the first social order not predicated on any authority external to itself.⁶ Indeed, it criticized and absorbed these transcendent powers. The exchange relation, as it becomes an all pervasive market, insists that it and all it touches is completely self-indwelling. At least momentarily it is worth being astonished by the thought: the market is the power of immanence. Whatever goes beyond this order, whatever lays claim to rising above the exchange relation or being more than that relation is progressively perceived as an illegitimate universal. It was, for instance, the increasingly total market of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that made monism the requisite ideal of modern philosophy in Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel. And the market has philosophical implications beyond its assignments to one branch of knowledge. For the market also prescribes nominalism as the logic of common sense: the real particular is asserted as the exclusive standard of reality and universals are rejected as unjust and ultimately illusory forces of domination. It is thus the market that has trained the spontaneous edginess to Tocqueville’s us.

Much would be required to substantiate all of this. But beyond the sensed fate of Tocqueville’s us, further confirmation is available, even to those who did poorly on the Tocqueville quiz, if just the mention above of the concept of the universal prompts outrage—a “What’s that?!”—in the inner ear of the historical sensorium. And further proof of the relation between the market as the force of immanence and a nominalism that refuses whatever asserts itself as a universal that goes beyond this order is evident in virtually anything else that can be thought of on the contemporary landscape: the “he or she,” for instance, that replaced “he” did so on the basis of the criticism of a false, dominating universal. With striking rapidity the emerging illusoriness and unpalatability of its claim brought broad swaths of even recent texts to the verge of unreadability. And, at the same time, it is now almost impossible to posit a third person who stands for each and every person in that, by the logic of the new pronoun, he and she are strictly he or she, that is, mutually exclusive. The literalism of the critique of “he”—like the critique of Tocqueville’s us—is itself a market force that defines the standard of reality as relentlessly singular. It should be noted that this critique of a universal, of “he,” was an act in which another fraction of society found freedom by being swallowed whole into the immanence of the market.

Though the criticism rejects a false universal and lodges the power of domination in particular private interest, this act of empowerment of the particular has been partial at best. As in every other instance of this dialectic, the emancipation gained in the rise of some women to positions of power has been matched by their total subordination to the market and impoverishment as a group. Here nominalism reveals itself as a power of the dominating whole. In labor law, similarly, recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have progressively limited the range in which individual rights can be asserted collectively. The reality of the worker as an individual is thus heightened as he or she becomes more helpless by being deprived of union recourse when resisting the demands of production. And again: right-wing Republicans have perfectly caught the historical drift in their sails with their insistence that any defense of substantive rights and efforts to ameliorate historical inequalities are based on illusory interpolations foisted on the American Constitution. If the right wing succeeds at destroying these ameliorative efforts, it will reveal the most brutal economic polarization in U.S. history.

Historically the self became powerful by developing the ability to mediate in itself its relation to the world. By confronting the world, the self became a microcosm of the tensions of the whole on which the self could then reflect and conceivably find resources within itself for asserting its own necessity. This tense relation in which the bourgeois self once stood to the universal, to the social whole, can be overheard and witnessed in every Mozart piano concerto. The sea change of the past two to three decades, now coming starkly into focus, is that the totality no longer permits any relation to it. The entrepreneurial powers that have amassed the largest fortunes they have ever controlled in proportion to the rest of the country now pursue this wealth by means of techniques of accumulation that increasingly presuppose the circumvention of the self. The telephone and the mails, which up until recently preserved elements of intimacy, have become marketing vehicles that no individual can skirt or block. The emergence of wholly owned public realms such as malls and gated communities are prototypical of the destruction of privacy in its own name in that their representatives have argued in court that within their confines basic constitutional rights including free speech are consensually abrogated. The perceptual world itself threatens to become a wholly owned subsidiary, as testified by the recent Supreme Court decision to permit the patenting and copyright registration of colors. What Herbert Marcuse described thirty years ago as “repressive desublimation,” while thinking perhaps of the workings of Elvis’s hips, is shy politesse compared to the libidinal spread eagle in film, music, and newspapers that no longer tolerates sublimation in the reader or viewer. Contemporary slash and gouge techniques are therefore hard to characterize as repressive because they do not in any way supplement forms of individual defense but burst through the defenses altogether. Likewise, in the case of labor, negotiation has become increasingly scarce. Conflicts, instead, are resolved by overwhelming the workers with the nonchoice between capitulation and self-impoverishment.

III

Margaret Thatcher, our contemporary, provides evidence of ears expertly trained to historical nuance. She would have no trouble pointing up where Tocqueville’s maxim goes wrong. And, though she was not specifically concerned to debunk his illusions, she might as well have been when she flatly denied the existence of society: “There is no such thing as society. There are only families and individuals.” Invoking the nominalist dynamic as her own power, however, does not grant her the ability to call its limits. Indeed, many readers of her renowned bon mot will find themselves involuntarily scrutinizing her assertion of the fundamental reality of the family. But neither does the individual—in whom all else is supposed to find its only possible justification—enjoy special dispensation. The emergence of a social totality that no longer permits any relation to it has drained the self of its substance and transformed it fundamentally. The 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of psychiatric illness has concluded that trauma is now so common that it can no longer be defined as an event “outside the range of normal human experience.”⁷ And whereas anxiety was not long ago the focus of distress, categories of panic attacks have moved to the forefront. Social phobia—the incapacitating fear of humiliation or embarrassment in social events, often combined with agoraphobia and panic anxiety—has become the single most frequent psychiatric problem. Some proportion of people with social phobia are—as a proportion of the readers of this essay are aware—housebound; others are unable to stand in a line or go to a store. Whatever reasons people give for not appearing at the polls, voting itself is clearly beyond the power of many. This is evidence that the public world has become so antipathetic to those who in some sense constitute it that it can no longer be approached, but this fact of social phobia is also evidence that, for many, the self is prohibited from rudimentary development so that even common events threaten regression and the eruption of needs and fears associated with intense vulnerability and shame.⁸ Unable to engage a force that is both remote and overwhelming, prevented from developing the capacity inwardly to mediate the experience of this antagonism, the self is threatened with disintegration in the experience of panic.

IV

The need for the recovery of the public world is in a sense obvious. But if such a recovery means reaching back to what was lost, it is credulously retrospective. The public world has always served as a facade for economic manipulation. Ever since the French Revolution institutionally established the division of the individual into citoyen and bourgeois, the former’s ostensibly equal political rights have served to justify the latter’s right to unequal economic prerogative. Even in those exceptional periods—well documented by Habermas—in which a public world did flourish, when a degree of tact did exist between private interest and the plausible role of the citizen, this has cloaked the fact that equal exchange has always been a violent act of unequal accumulation. And, even when it is not invoked by name, the idea of the public readily functions to mask actual tensions. No better example is more commonly familiar than the program of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”⁹ Most everyone knows the ropes and pulleys of this essay: in it Benjamin argues that the invention of film created a new, socially critical public sphere. By its power of reproduction, film destroyed the auratic singularity of art works and thus their cult value. In the public world of the movie house, there on the screen, the world fell critically open to all in the triumph of exhibition value.¹⁰ If this argument is almost universally familiar, it has only rarely been noticed that the thesis fully disregards the inextricability of exhibition value and exchange value. It ignores the predominance of the market over art against which all critical artists of this century have chafed as the greatest hazard to their efforts. It was, for instance, just this inextricability of exchange value and exhibition value that compelled Clyfford Still to withdraw his works from public display for decades at a time and caused Ad Reinhardt to spend the last part of his life painting works of such cunningly nuanced darkness that they would be beyond photographic reproduction. If it is striking that Benjamin’s ostensibly Marxist thesis ignores the economic reality of exhibition value, it is more than startling that this has hardly ever been recognized. Though Still and Reinhardt would be dubbed hidebound from the perspective of Benjamin’s essay, it is his essay that has made, and continues to make, the real contribution to socially necessary semblance. It provides resources to deny that film is a commodity and to believe, rather, that the audience is an alliance of spontaneous subjectivities finally having the chance to see the world for what it is. Once again, the ideal of the public serves as a mask, this time of the private perceptions of the film viewers who know perfectly well that ticket stubs are in their pockets and that something different from collective, critical, freedom transpires in those darkened halls.

V

The idea of the recovery of the public world tends toward rationalization of the same sort, as if in reaching back to better days we could pretend that the conflicts that in any case developed into the present situation were unreal. Yet the idea of the public is not simply ideological. And the project of the recovery of the public world is not ideological insofar as it implies the need for a process of criticism that wants to make good on what the concept of the public has to date deceptively promised. As ever, the only possibilities that are genuinely compelling are those that take illusory promises at their word and drive them to the limit. Thus, if formal rights have functioned to mask inequality, they are also the grounds on which the inequality of the market can be demonstrated; driven to their extreme, they no longer function as a facade but become a demand for substantive rights. Indeed, if equal exchange were truly equal it would no longer be exchange but the real freedom and bindingness of the particular that capitalism prevaricates.¹¹

Yet these are dialectical thoughts, and they have necessarily shared the fate of ethical reflection. Just as it has been made obsolete by the ineluctable experience of the arbitrariness of each in an economy to which no one is necessary—and this is to bring this essay’s drama of the obvious to a close—so dialectical thinking, whose only source is the relentless self-immersion of thought in the dynamic of the one and the many, has become archaic. Thus contemporary critical theory has in a sense rightly discarded dialectics. Yet the jettisoning of dialectics has not been followed by more binding critical formulations of experience. Much contemporary critical theory seeks to escape the threat of a looming nonintegration by affirming disintegration in stylized, finicky, implausible evocations of ruins, melancholy, and fragmentation. “Difference,” apart from its philosophical reasoning—as a popular ideal that capitalizes on the rejection of all universals as illusory—permits ignoring the idea of the whole and suppresses dynamic, complex concepts of relationship. If it has not been noticed, the concepts of antagonism, conflict, anxiety, contrast, alienation, and opposition have disappeared from much critical discussion. The slack ideal of cultural multiplicity hovers gingerly above the guilt context of the whole, preferring the neutralization of thought to any insight into that guilt context, not least because insight implies a need for change that is sensed as beyond anyone’s power. The aesthetics of this cultural moment is a postmodernism that shuns the forming of a critical microcosm by preference for a form of montage that never gets beyond juxtaposition. Especially in the arbitrarily dispersed typographical page of much—not all—contemporary poetry, this is an aesthetics that settles opportunistically for a fragile slackness where maker and reader build their secret alliance on the promise not to reveal that neither has the strength of the spontaneity that finding what is alive would require.