Recovering the Self

Morality and Social Theory

Victor Jeleniewski Seidler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135095673
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

This important book seeks to place questions of morality and justice at the heart of social theory.  By exploring the works of Marx, Durkheim and Weber it shows the hidden complexities of a modernity too often identified with a unified vision of the rational self later to fall apart into fragments within postmodernity.  Reinstating the body and emotional life, Seidler sets new terms for respect and equality showing ways the self is undermined in its sense of self-worth and adequacy through the workings of relationships of power and subordination. Drawing upon feminism and Critical Theory to question the allegedly straightforward opposition between "essentialism" and "social constructionism" Seidler places the issues of morality right into the centre of "the self problem". Through reinstating connections between the self and the historical adventures of socialism, feminism, masculinity, ethnicity, and - autobiographically - Jewish identity, he shows the intimate affinity between these different categories of experience.  Identities are not "freely chosen" but involve a coming to terms with histories of class, race and gender.  Critical of postmodern theories in which anyhting goes and in which everything you see is relative, this book is concerned with the reassertion of value and recovering a viable tradition in which we can again explore issues of freedom and social justice. Our discussions have turned increasingly esoteric as they have sheltered in an intellectual cage which has been difficult to enter.  This book seeks to open-up the cage and re-establish the suspended conversation between social theory and the concerns of everyday life.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

Modernity, Morality and Politics

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POLITICS AND THEORY

In the 1990s there has evolved a sense of moral crisis and unease about the breakdown of traditional forms of authority and it has become relevant again to listen to Antonio Gramsci's assertion that ‘It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists’ (1971: 323)¹ The influence of the writings of Louis Althusser on the Left has established a particular tone and expectation of the character of theoretical work which has continued long after the demise of Althusserian influence itself in the post-structuralisms of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Despite crucial differences much theoretical work shares a critique of ‘essentialism’ and ‘humanism’, often without being clear about the different ways these terms are invoked. The disdain for ethics and values which until very recently characterised post-structuralist work marks a pervasive difficulty in being able to think about the relationship between morality, truth and politics. If many people have found these writings often unnecessarily difficult and abstract, it has only confirmed their expectation that theory has to be ‘strange and difficult’.

It is important to challenge this ‘widespread prejudice’ if a more meaningful conception of theoretical work is to be developed. Althusser has helped many people challenge economistic traditions within Marxism and many people have learnt from his writings.² But at another level this tradition still sets the terms for thinking about the relationship of morality to social theory. It has made it much harder to develop a more fundamental questioning of reductionist traditions for post-structuralism has in large part remained loyal to certain oppositions initially developed by Althusser. Even if it does not remain trapped within a particular self-conception of scientific Marxism it often prevents us from learning from other important traditions of thought and feeling, too easily dismissed as ‘humanist’.

How did this objectivist and scientistic conception of Marxist theory come, until quite recently, to have such a dominant position? At one level its emergence in Europe in the mid-1970s seemed to be related to the disappointments of many hopes raised by the politics of the late 1960s. There was a real feeling in the late 1960s that the world was going to change quickly and profoundly. There was an important and widespread experience on the Left of community and industrial politics, as well as of people changing the ways they lived their everyday lives. There is still relatively little theoretical work that shares this history with new generations and that has learnt from the experience, joys and frustrations of those now increasingly distant years. Rather, in the mid-1970s there developed a widespread tendency to dismiss much of this experience as ‘naïve’ and to look towards an independent realm of theoretical work for political clarity and understanding.

This coincided with the sharpening of the economic crisis in the West in the mid-1970s. For many people there was a withdrawal from active political engagement. The theoretical developments of Althusser, Levi-Strauss and Lacan dazzled a generation but did not offer much understanding of the changing conditions of life in late twentiethcentury capitalist societies and the struggles against the new forms of dominance and control. But if this tradition of work has now exhausted itself, it has left marks upon our sense of theoretical writing and reading, even in the terms that have been set in the late 1980s for the widespread discussion about modernity and post-modernity. Theoretical credentials are still often set against a supposed ‘essentialism’ that was primarily a structuralist construction. E. P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory (1979) was extremely important in combating an Althusserian dominance and getting people to think for themselves again. At the same time, it was written out of a particular generational experience that tended to minimise the importance of the politics and theory of the late 1960s.

At another level the women's movement and sexual politics more generally have been strongest when they have not been integrated into a structuralist tradition, which draws a sharp rationalist distinction between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’. Post-structuralist work continues to discount experience, so making it difficult to recover a very different feminist relationship between ‘theory’ and ‘experience’. Feminism has helped to resist the reductionism so often implied in Marxism and to reclaim the complexity of lived experience. Sexual politics has helped develop and validate a practice of consciousness-raising which has made people more aware of their subjective experience of sexual oppression and hurt. This has also helped foster a sense of shared experience as well as reinstate an active subject, which was too often reduced to an effect of ideology or discourse within structuralism.

Sexual politics has promised a much deeper and embodied understanding of our subjective experience of social relations of class, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation while resisting a reductionism of the individuality of our lived experience. Consciousness-raising has sometimes helped to create its own atmosphere of trust and vulnerability, one that is far removed from the rationalistic forms of intellectualism which have so long dominated theoretical work, especially for men. I want to appeal to this vulnerability which does not automatically split thought from emotion and experience, while at the same time giving some account of what makes it so hard for us to develop this kind of understanding within a dominant moral culture. This is to rethink the rationalist terms of an Enlightenment vision of modernity which treats reason alone as a source of knowledge.

Identifying a relationship between modernity and a dominant form of masculinity involves coming to terms with a rationalist tradition of moral and political theory which, echoing Kant, would identify our ‘humanity’ with an independent faculty of reason. It fails to recognise the dignity of our emotional lives and so fails to reinstate the subject in her or his fullness as an embodied mental, emotional and spiritual being. This involves the systematic subordination of our emotions, feelings, desires and wants as genuine sources of knowledge. This is not to argue against reason, as I have made clear in Kant, Respect and Injustice (Seidler 1986), but only against its categorical opposition to nature and so its modernist separation from other aspects of our human experience. It means recognising that Kant and the rationalist tradition he has inspired have left us with a thin and attenuated masculinist conception of the person as a ‘rational self’.

Recognising a break with traditions of Marxist work which have fallen into crisis in the West following the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the break-up of the Soviet Union we have to ask new questions, we have to acknowledge that we cannot any longer separate our investigations of what a socialist society would be like from our understanding of the needs, wants, desires and emotions of individuals. This involves reworking the historical relationship of Marxism to morality, otherwise socialism threatens to become, as it did for Althusser, simply a more ‘advanced mode of production’ to which we have to sacrifice and subordinate ourselves. Rethinking the relationship between socialism and democracy we cannot forgo the freedoms which a liberal culture seeks to protect. Languages of socialism have become discredited as socialism becomes a goal that involves subordinating individualities rather than enriching different aspects of ourselves.

I want to explore some of these tensions in Marx's own relationship with morality for this casts significant light upon the relationship between modernity and morality. It is not simply a question of offering a systematic reinterpretation of Marx, but of showing the enduring historical influence of some of these tensions. This calls for a different kind of critical engagement with Marx's writings.

In the process I have wanted to appeal to common insecurities, not simply refer to them abstractly, because it is in the working of emotional insecurities and inadequacy, and not just in the workings of surplus value and exploitation, that the individualistic and competetive institutions so central to capitalist relations work. This is to show how ideology as a material force works on our very sense of self and so to help us to a rethinking of the contradictory moral relations of capitalist societies.

I have drawn from examples of schooling experience because this is an experience most of us have shared, even though we rarely allow ourselves to reflect upon it as a crucial learning of fear and inadequacy. It is also because the kind of schooling that we have experienced reflects the social relations of the larger society, whether it be supposedly capitalist or socialist. It is also to show, in contrast to Althusser, that the recognition of ideology as a material force cannot be secured if we isolate ideological issues into an autonomous and independent realm of their own.³ I have tried to show more concretely how ideas and values which have become almost invisible to us because we take them very much for granted have been embodied in the social relations of power and dominance in the everyday organisation of schooling.

I have also invoked examples to help clarify the meaning of some of the more theoretical concepts I refer to. This allows concepts to be meaningfully grasped rather than simply given formal definitions. This is something we can constantly learn from the later Wittgenstein.⁴ I think his writing on grounding language in experience is central to developing a more qualitative research methodology. It stands in direct opposition to the prevailing Saussurian emphasis on semiology and a general theory of signs which still remains a source of the formalism we discover in so much post-structuralist work. This is not a form of ‘conceptual softness’ because it does not offer ostensive definitions; rather it relies upon the complex processes of concepts being gradually grasped as we discover what meaning they have in different contexts. This is fundamentally to question rationalistic forms of theory which assume that language alone is the source of our modes of classification and representation.

Wittgenstein's work in the Philosophical Investigations (1958) breaks with his earlier work to show the inadequacies of rationalist discourse conceptions, though this has rarely been appreciated within social and political theory. I am not simply appealing to authorities to think of language in terms of Wittgenstein rather than Saussure so we can sustain experience as a source of knowledge, but hope to show what I mean through sharing my own explorations. If this creates a different, more tentative and exploratory sense of theory, this is something I am only glad of. It is a time, with the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, for a more fundamental questioning about the very meaning of ‘socialism’ in our time. If it means repeating at certain moments, coming back to themes people feel I should already have settled with, then I hope this reveals a different connection that might not otherwise have come to light. Possibly it also shows the difficulty of gaining clarity when you are working against the grain of current intellectualist traditions in philosophy and social theory.

With the revolution in Eastern Europe and the changes in the former Soviet Union we are still trying to find our bearings within a post-Communist world. If we are to learn from history, I think the early questioning of Rudolf Bahro, a refugee from East German communist politics who wrote so significantly about the East German system in The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978) before engaging with liberal capitalism in the West,⁵ can still help connect a political generation with the historical experience of Eastern Europe.

E. P. Thompson has also reminded us of how much was lost when the New Left turned away from learning from the struggles in Eastern Europe after the 1956 uprising in Hungary. The earlier generation of the New Left was ready to learn more easily from the historical experience of socialism than the later generation, who had grown up to accept a divided Europe as given:

Whether consciously or unconsciously, we were expectant of exactly what occurred in 1956. These ‘revelations‘represented less a rupture in our understanding than a fulfilment of our half-conscious hopes. From that preposterous military orthodoxy we had hoped for controversy, acknowledgement of human frailty, a moral vocabulary ‘We had seen, not the potential (for this was soon crushed) but the living, indomitable agents of that potential at work within these societies. Behind the posters, novels and films of Stakhanovites we saw (to our relief) workers who were absentees, pilferers, time-servers, as well as workers who were learning to defend themselves, organize, and take common cause with intellectuals.

(Thompson, E. P. 1979: 94)

Thompson is recognising the importance of recovering a ‘moral vocabulary’ which the revolutionary events in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the example of Havel, Michnik and others have reawakened, as we are forced to think again what it might mean to live in truth. It is too easy to be continually, if unknowingly, compromising our inner truth and integrity.

This would also help us recognise the neglected notion that if we can still talk meaningfully about ‘socialism’ we are talking about freedom, equality and justice in the social lives and lived experience of people. Stalinism had produced in Eastern Europe its own objectivist language which treated the truth as if it were the exclusive property of the party. Truth was to be manipulated to serve its own interests since it saw people as functional to the larger structures.

MORALITY AND POLITICS

I have tried to reconsider traditions and assumptions we inherit about the meaning and significance of moral theory and understanding, particularly within Marxist writing, to help rethink the relationship of morality and politics. This involves questioning the totalistic ways in which Marxists often conceive of ‘bourgeois morality’, too often conceding important ground to prevailing liberal conceptions of freedom, rights, equality, justice and dignity.

Sometimes these notions have been too easily dismissed as simply the legitimation of class relations of power and dominance. This allowed the Libertarian Right to claim the moral ground in the 1980s. If moral and political theories are understood simply as the cover for underlying class, gender or ethnic interests there is limited space for moral concerns. It becomes difficult to show the inadequacies and limitations of prevailing moral and political conceptions of both Left and Right within a liberal moral culture.

Often socialist discussion disarms itself as it refuses to enter the arena, too secure in its conviction of the nature of morality and justice. With the Eastern European revolutions questions of freedom and democracy in relation to different forms of market capitalism have become vital in the restructuring of relations between state and civil socety. Experience of authoritarian state regimes has proved the priority for freedom as a moral concern and the dangers of reducing morality to a form of politics. Nor can economics and material interests alone be recognised as the only things that matter, for this is to fail to engage with a diversity of meanings and values within civil societies and the West. Thus too often happens with the utilitarianism that underpins so much social democratic politics. It has been a significant strength of right-wing politics in the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and America that it has taken the initiative in moral and political discussion.

Politics has to be able to engage critically with the moral culture of liberalism, showing the ways it serves to legitimate a particular form of class rule. This is more complex, as is its relationship to structures of race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ which traditional politics of Left and Right promise have to be shown as existing, if at all, within the public realm alone. But the challenges of feminism and ecology must also involve a fundamental investigation of the meaning of socialism and its different Enlightenment sources. If we are to challenge the ways traditional forms of politics sustain a particular distinction between public and private spheres, we need to explore how they serve to marginalise and diminish concerns with identity and experiences of sexuality, emotional life and love.

Fulfilment and self-realisation supposedly take place only within the public realm of work and citizenship, whatever lip service we learn to pay towards relationships and children. It has often been this very framework which defines politics as a matter of the public realm alone which explains the lack of critical moral and political discussion. This has meant we have too often unwittingly reproduced some of the assumptions of a bourgeois society we wish to contest in our conception of the struggle for a more democratic socialist society.

This is something Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School warned about in their discussions of the ideology of work, when they argued that socialism reproduced central elements of a Protestant work ethic.⁶ Individual achievement and self-denial within the Protestant ethic have been embedded within a taken-for-granted conception of work. Ideologies of work have become particularly relevant since the 1920s with the dominance of assembly-line production and changes in the labour process of capitalist production. Relationships to work have more recently taken on fundamentally new forms with the advent of computerisation and new technology.

We have to investigate people's changing experiences of work, whether work can be emancipator...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Modernity, morality and politics
• 2 Morality
• 3 Modernity
• 4 Authority
• 5 Needs and desires
• 6 Ideology
• 7 Identities
• 8 Contradictions
• 9 Empowerment
• 10 Conclusion: Modernity, morality and social theory
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index