On “Science as a Vocation”

I read this lecture delivered by Max Weber last night, which was delivered on November 7, 1917. There is so much that I want to say, but do not pretend to know, to understand, to have thought through thoroughly enough. Today, I will limit myself to a few elements of his lecture that were most striking and which are outlines for another project.

As I had written in an earlier entry, I am also reading my way through Capital, a task entirely different and even subsuming Weber’s lecture. In chapter one, section two of Capital, Marx goes in depth about the division of labor in capitalist society. In some modes of production, the weaver is also the tailor, but in capitalism, they are different. These distinctions are not naturally made, since even the tailor must vary and distinguish various types of labor that he is to undertake from day to day, hour to hour. Weber’s lecture outlines two component parts of “Science” (also understood as Knowledge”) as a vocation, proper: scholarship and teaching. He offers no illusions about the coincidence these strengths have in determining what kind of teacher and scholar one might make. Neither does he offer any justification of the university as something other than an aristocratic regime. At the same time that he invokes this strange division of one’s intellectual labor, he also compares the German and the American academy. In this way, Weber points out the obvious capitalization of the university. But aside from talking about apprenticeships and positions as a professor, he largely turns away from the question of the actual state of affairs in order to talk about another vision of the vocation.

Before I continue on to those points, I imagine that Weber’s own conception is a bit blind as to the motor of history (he says that we live in an age of intellectualization and of science, but he does not tie the withering away of the vocation as such with any historical development. Indeed, I found myself thinking that the division of the scientist-professor is sort of an arbitrary relic. For today, at least in the state-run universities that I have studied a little, I don’t know that teaching and scholarship are necessarily as bound into professorship or the university as they once appeared to be. I imagine that the changing environment of the university yields a sous-assistant who is not even able to research, who cannot even teach because he has not the time to be a scholar in search of income. It seems to me that this underclass of graduate and adjunct labor proves that the vocation as it is interconnected and dependent on the university is outdated and only feebly survives in its institutionalized form for older professors because of the exploited intellects a generation below them. I am not sure whether one might say that this is a bona fide division between the categories that Weber himself insists on, but rather that such categories are mistakenly bound up in the university institution as a permanent, or at least self-replicating, structure.

Anyhow, I will continue, assuming for a moment that such a thing as a vocation still exists when it comes to Knowledge. I was struck by the resistance of Weber’s thoughts to his own actions. It seems that only placing them side-by-side offers a complete reading. It seems that teaching is done for its own sake, and it cannot be confused with all of the other work and research carried out as a scholar. I think then, about the teacher who I have had. Weber inconveniently mentions that teachers are often viewed by young people as a sort of host-savior in the modern age. While I cannot understand much of Weber’s framework, I do think that this element of teaching and apprenticeship is valid, for it is not contingent on the university, while I must admit that I was taught in the university and had my most profound learning experiences there.

Weber differentiates between a teacher and a leader. How many times had I wanted a supernatural leader to confirm knowledge to me! It is the most childish of all the steps in education. The great teachers always insist on the incompleteness of their knowledge and of their capability to answer or effect the implications of their questions. It is unfortunate and even embarrassing that it had to be said. This is at the heart of what I took from Weber as a lesson. Teachers consciously operate in a realm that is neither knowledge nor failure when they are teaching. It is so hard for fledgling students not to think that our teachers are not goading us on to definite truth. Very often, teachers push us further than we’d like to go ourselves, knowing that they cannot save us, that it was never in their power to save us.

And I, who do believe in knowledge, not for choices to be made between a multitude of choices, but in that unfashionable word “truth,” thank my teachers who taught me early that a broken spirit is an illusion. That I have already been carried out far beyond their reach, that I must work for a lifetime to understand their questions in response to my own, and even more alarmingly, what forces droves us to speak.

Understanding Jameson’s Preface to “Marxism and Form”

The preface begins with a note on the status of the changing historical importance/perspective of history. This note is not the simple kind of “well, not then, but now” approach to writing or thinking about Marxism. In fact, it doesn’t even degrade the European Marxist milieu of the 30s. What it does do is lay out the relationship between history and the context of history, and those two things with this current moment…

But that’s not really all there is to it, either, because if all Jameson really meant to do was “bring it up to speed” with his moment, he would essentially degrade his own moment; he would essentially also degrade (in his words, relegate) history to the barracks of the night-school. (But with the uncertain status of grad-school education, this should be understood as a memory of factoids.) This factoid-like conceptualization is also something that we come in contact with frequently in today’s (anti) liberal arts rhetoric “what does this [english department] mean?” is the essentially vacant (not-wanting-to-be-answered) question in non-Marxist learning traditions…

What Jameson prefaces this book with is an example of the late/post 60s mis-remembrance of history (especially Marxist history) as a linear graph into the “present.” Jameson shows that the present, without some sort of ontological (i.e. form) the whole praxis of Marxism will fall flat in the next moment of the present, like chivalry or faith have through the eyes of 20th century capital. What this starts is something that Jameson argues all along: that Marxism is not one deciphering code among many inter-changeable and comparable with all of the others, but that Marxism can only be viewed as such from within capital’s already-formulated idea that appears to be invisible in factoid-history.

This form is the historical dialectic; the mode of social discernment through the rigorous use of a Marxist approach to history that stops and rests nowhere, not even in the “present.”

And so, Jameson’s book title really denotes that Marxism can only be used as a mode of social and historical understanding without falling into a linear time-trap like the bourgeois mode of analysis, through its form, which is the process of dialectical re-appraisal that never ceases. Jameson proceeds to put this concept into effect with a “relatively modest and straightforward” task of accounting for six of the 20th century’s greatest thinker for their contributions to literary criticism.

Each one of the chapters (so far; I haven’t finished the chapter on Sartre) is more than a Jamesonian re conception of the original thinker’s work, but a historical unfolding and explanation of their work that even their works did not realize fully because they were in some ways blinded by the moment in which they were written. Jameson seems committed to the notion to write historically and not according to ‘his own’ standards for another reason: it seems that so far in the book he has conceded and included the necessity for an eventual re-reading and historical adjustment to his own writing. [At this point, I don't want to do much more than pose this to myself.]

Jameson is also clear to note in the preface that this is not an exercise in philosophy, but a preparation for literary criticism. This is a tricky kind of claim, for if we follow it through his already stated necessity towards the idea of contemplating literature as well as previous Marxist theorists in a properly dialectic way, that demands the intensive task of philosophically rigorous writing.

In order to reach literary criticism, one must first reach through the past, reach through the theorist’s contemporary ideological blockages (not to mention the original author’s, either) and confront the text without snapping one’s hand through the sharded glass window of “present” ideology. That is to say, the project of Jameson’s book may well be understood as a work against the factoid/linear conception of philosophy and writing and time and criticism (i.e. everything) in an attempt to access truth (i.e. to fulfill the otherwise rhetorical void of meaning) which can

a. only occur in the Marxist Historical context that

b. is not a specific application (or a transitory ‘best-of’ application like in bourgeois analysis) but that elevates the otherwise factoid-like content of history into a Marxist [dare I say Utopian?] possibility.

Some Saturday- excuse my inadequate formatting…

I felt like making something today. (We were having meetings on layout and it got me all figety.)

This was part of a box that some of my books came in.

(from bottom left clockwise): beer neck, reverse silhouette film, f.a. snippet, dime glued over word confetti, mixed papers

from single essay in september 2009 issue of foreign affairs, reconstituted: Hegel the world's owl come as the impractical history of future. Or is it the flight path, to Minerva, encountering either optical illusions or 'world court,'

Continuation: we might be its current ally across structural problems, including Francis Fukuyama

(from bottom left clockwise): illumination on film, print, reverse silhouette framing forgotten street in Savannah, GA, f.a. tidbit, rainbow bright socks and rock style guide from rolling stones feb. 2008

beer, India's Fortune, Domino's doorknob insert.

Marx through Zizek tibit-

“In his Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that bourgeois ideology loves to historicize: every social, religious, and cultural form is historical, contingent, relative–every form except its own. There was history once, but now there is no longer any history:

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations–the relations of bourgeois production–are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity  with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institution of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

1st leg of midterm (following-up last entry);

A responsible contemplation on Marx’s 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach, in a time of crisis, does little more than pave the way to more Marx. An illusory call for the end of the public university does little more than prove a serious lack of such contemplation. The first page of “Communiqué from an Absent Future” laments at the loss of “the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry” (1). But this lamentation forgets itself in history; it assumes that the state university was once an institution created for something more than the nominal gentrification of that region’s middle-class. In the sixties, the student body brushed mightily against the implications of the state-funded university and any “cultured” citizenry produced from those interactions was based in the conflict itself, and never the pedagogy of the institution itself. No, the terms of public education are only more apparent to today’s student body and its faculty. In Marx’s critique of political economy, those relationships explicated in Capital seem to unfold themselves and become more correct as that mode of production expands, itself. In reality, his explication has always been correct; the degree to which others understand it is the degree to which capitalism has made its nature more and more apparent. Such is the relationship between the public university and its student body over the last forty years. Indeed, ten pages later, the author(s) revoke their own sentiments on the public university of yester-year in saying “the university has always been to reproduce the working class by training future workers according to the future needs of capital.” This fundamental misrecognition (although it is a recognition) marks the lack of philosophical rigor behind a general call for anarchism. But CAF does not see this; and in its assumptions it spirals down into the deepest, most cynical and immature anarchism: “At best, we learn the phoenix-like skill of coming to the very limits of critique and perishing there, only to begin again at the seemingly ineradicable root” (5). A responsible reading of Marx’s 11^th Thesis on Feuerbach might interpret this phrase more productively: at best, in employing Marx in the most superficial way, one might come to the very outer-limits of change in the abstract before handing in adolescent rhetoric for more a coherent analysis of political economy. Turning to “The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune,” Marx makes his sentiments clear against anarchism. After the fall of the Paris Commune, Marx addresses the thirty-three Blanquists scattered across Europe and renounces their approach:

The German Communists are communists, because they clearly see the final goal and work towards it through all intermediate stations and compromises, which are created, not by them, but by historical development. And their goal is the abolition of classes, the inauguration of a society, in which no private property in land and means of production shall exist any longer. The thirty-three, on the other hand, are communists, because they imagine that they can skip intermediate stations and compromises at their sweet will, and if only the trouble begins, as it will soon according to them, and they get a hold of affairs, then Communism will be introduced the day after tomorrow. If this is not immediately possible, then they are not communists. What a simple hearted childishness, which quotes impatience as a convincing argument in support of a theory! (6).

If the author(s) of “Communiqué from an Absent Future” had read more into Marx than the broadest insinuation of upheaval, the call for anarchism as a means to overthrow Capitalism would have indeed appeared as an absurd one to them. Their folly transcends that of the Blanquists, for even they shared a goal for some specific end, whereas the CAF’s approach to the communist state is as philosophically bankrupt as the state university system is charges. Their pamphlet attempts to bypass all reformist movements in the public university system without ever referring to the desired goal: there are no desired goals, and without specific goals, there is only anarchism. Marx clearly states that communism might not always be achieved spontaneously, immediately; he infers that “compromise” through reform is largely necessary. And if reform was necessary in Marx’s era, before capitalism was fully developed, how could it possibly stand to reason that such spontaneous revolution might occur today? Student riots and revolution cannot act towards “communization” if it merely acts towards interruption. Marx did not specify the terms of the revolution versus reformism: but we do not need another would-be Marx with all the rhetoric of revolution without any philosophical content. As Marx aptly states in “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “The fact that Greece had a Scythian among its philosophers did not help the Scythians to make a single step towards Greek culture” (5). The American public university system has reached a specific juncture in capitalism that demands an equally specific treatment of the situation, and blanketed cries for petulant student anarchism will not fill the bill.

Huh, interesting thoughts…

Media as an extension of our economic status. Very exciting.