This week we began Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in my intro philosophy courses. I am extremely excited to teach this text. Not only is it beautifully written, but Lucretius’ brilliance glows on every page in both the ethical concerns that animate the text and his precise and careful observations of various natural phenomena to support his arguments. In my view, a good philosophical thesis problematizes the world and creates research projects. Where before certain things seemed to be obvious features of the world, these hitherto familiar things now become bathed in the light of problems, demanding explanation in terms of the overarching thesis. Thus, for example, Lucretius’ atomism now turns the growth of a tree or water oozing from cave walls into problems or questions to be explained in terms of atoms. Stunning philosophical claims suddenly burst forth like lightening, such as the the claim that “all things are porous”.
Increasingly it looks like Lucretius was mistaken in his conception of atoms as the smallest units of indestructable matter– quantum mechanics seems to suggest that there are no smallest units of matter, only various rhythms and intensities of energy defined more as relations or fields that perpetually reconstitute themselves as dynamic processes in relation to other point-fields, than individual points –but nonetheless Lucretius’ thesis remains one that bathed the world in clarity, making possible questions and explanations that were not otherwise possible. This, too, is a virtue of a good thesis: It becomes lively towards its own material, such that the conditions are created where it can encounter the limits of what it is able to explain, allowing new theses to emerge. When thought is a patchwork quilt with no convictions, such liveliness does not occur as the most heterogeneous elements sit side by side in the patchwork making no claim on the matter.
Read on
The first thing that strikes the reader of Lucretius is the form of De Rerum Natura. Why is it written as a poem? After all, Lucretius could have presented his claims as a series of numbered points. Were he alive today he could have presented it as a Powerpoint presentation. Why, then, the poetic form? Lucretius writes:
I teach great things,
I try to loose men’s spirit from the ties,
Tight-knotted, which religion binds around them.
The Muses’ grace is on me, as I write
Clear verse about dark matters. This is not
A senseless affectation; there’s reason to it.
Just as when doctors try to give to children
A bitter medicine, they rim the cup
With honey’s sweetness, honey’s golden flavor,
To fool the silly little things, as far
As the lips at least, so that they’ll take the bitter
Dosage, and swallow it down, fooled, but not swindled,
But brought to health again through double-dealing,
So now do I, because this doctrine seems
Too grim for those who never yet have tried it,
So grim that people shrink from it, I’ve meant
To explain the system in a sweeter music,
To rim the lesson, as it were, with honey,
Hoping, this way, to hold your mind with verses
While you are learning all that form, that patter
Of the way things are.(Humphries trans, The Way Things Are, 46-47)
I was delighted to come across this passage as it not only provides the students, frustrated by the poetic form, with a rationale for this form, but also gave me the opportunity to sing the praises of rhetoric. Lucretius’ text functions on two planes of composition, the one composed of strict arguments of an inductive and deductive sort, along with the production of concepts (the astonishing concept of the porous, the invention of the void, the distinction between attributes and by-products, etc), the other being the rhetorical dimension. Recognizing that often the spirit is not persuaded by clear and rigorous arguments despite their soundness, Lucretius hopes to provoke aesthetic pleasure in his readers so as to disarm them and make them sympathetic to his austure metaphysics that otherwise flies in the face of our superstitious yearnings and beliefs. Thus, Lucretius’ arguments and concepts are a bitter medicine that would bring us to health by freeing us of the terror and anxiety– terror and anxiety caused by superstitious beliefs such as those that the Gods judge us and exert their wraith through natural disasters, or that we will be punished for all eternity for not living a particular way –while his rhetoric, his poetics, are sweet honey that allows this medicine to go down more easily as we work our way towards intellectual maturity and acquire the capacity to explain the world in terms of natural causes.
In my tireless quest to promote the humanities to my students, I seized this opportunity to speak more extensively about rhetoric and the importance of rhetoric, so that I might seduce them to take a greater interest in philosophy, literature, english, history, and the social sciences. This time around I chose to appeal to their avarice, their desire to be successful and fabulously wealthy, rather than the high ideals surrounding the tradition of the liberal arts. This is, after all, the wealthiest county in the state, and my students seem profoundly cynical of high falutin ethical ideals, seeing the world itself as a dark and cynical place, a battleground of competing interests, where they have to fight for their own advantage and piece of the pie, rather than advance idealistic causes. Moreover, I consistently get the impression that my students resent being in classes such as mine (though they generally seem to enjoy the class), seeing classes such as philosophy and english as bullshit requirements they have to fill to get their degrees, and outside their real classes pertaining to business or whatever profession they will enter.
Thus, in a move that was not without guilt, I declared that the most lucrative jobs in the world are jobs in rhetoric. I say I adopted this rhetorical strategy with a certain amount of guilt and hesitation, for in arguing in this way I was giving credence to a set of values central to capitalism and treating those values as the telos defining the value of all other things. Yet when speaking before an audience, it is necessary to work with the ethos of that audience and work with the potentials that ethos renders available. As Rumsfeld would say, “you go to speak with the ethos you’re given, not the ethos you would like.” In appealing to avarice and a particular set of values common to this cultural milieu, the hope is then that something very different might occur, and that the student that begins to pursue the study of the various humanities, hoping to gain the rhetorical skills to become fabulously wealthy will, in measures, be seduced to a very different set of values no longer shackled to the telos of capital as the measure of all things. That is, perhaps, in the becoming-capital of the humanities, a becoming-humanities of capital might also take place, allowing a line of flight from a particular system of values. Or this, at least, is how I attempt to mitigate my shame.
Drawing a distinction between the world of Survivorman and our world, I proceeded to distinguish between those tools and weapons (again the value system of capital) that are useful in particular jungle and those that are useful in Survivorman’s jungle. For those who haven’t seen it, Survivorman is a reality survival show where the host, Les Stroud, is dropped for a week in exotic and remote places such as the Amazon rain forests, remote regions of Alaska, the Antarctic, etc., and has to make his own way with a very limited repitoire of odd tools (they’re different every time), as if he had fallen into these situations as a result of an emergency without preparing for them. He does all of his own filming without the benefit of a crew, and spends the week trying to find food, build shelter, etc. Often things do not go very well, and he ends up very hungry, without sufficient water or shelter. Over the last couple of seasons he seems to have aged from these experiences.
The skills Stroud possesses are largely useless in our world. For the most part, many of us have our basic needs met– even if not exactly in the way we would like –and are not faced with serious questions of how to make fire, find food and water, build shelter, etc. Ours is a world of communications, images, symbols, sound-bites, speech. Regardless of what one pursues later in life, these are the tools with which one will be working. If rhetoric is desirable as a skill, then this is because you can use it to get people to do shit and because you can critically unpack those rhetorical strategies that are attempting to get you to do shit (often against your own self-interest or aims). If this were not the case, lawyers, advertisers, marketing men, televangelists, political consultants, and so on would not be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, collectively billions of dollars, for their skills. If rhetoric did not work– whether visual or in speech –it wouldn’t be such a sought after skill in employees by those who wish to advance their ambitions. Just think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars Frank Luntz has been paid for his political consulting… For simply coming up with a few well turned phrases. And which disciplines will best serve students in developing these skills, if not the humanities and the social sciences, where one works intensively for years, learning how to read, write, and think creatively. Certainly this isn’t the case with business degrees, which arguably shouldn’t be offered by universities at all. Again, I hate myself for this line of argument.
This discussion of rhetoric bled into an analysis of rhetoric as it is deployed in various television commercials such as the Geico caveman commercials, commercials for various erectile disfunction pills such as Cialis (gotta wake the students up), car commericals, the swiffer sweeper, and the iPhone. The interesting feature of most commercials is that the techniques used to advertise them seldom has much, if anything, to do with the product at all. Rather, commercials instead sell fantasies… Usually fantasies that either appeal to our narcissism or self-love (the caveman commercials that implicitly appeal to our superiority to neanderthals), sexual desires (the swiffer sweeper where the women are always breaking up with someone for someone else who fulfills them more completely), desires for mastery and control, where we’re freed from the ordinary constraints of our bodies and lives (the Hummer commercials where we are able to conquer the world and go anywhere), or our desires for a better world where we’re freed from the drudgery of work and human ugliness (many car commercials that take place on an empty, scenic road– implicitly referring to the irritations caused by other human beings –and the whimsical, annoying, iPhone commercials that evoke a whole counter-cultural politics where technology doesn’t dominate us, but rather improves our lives, and where we get the sense of people who are kind and nice to one another, without any of the ordinary ugliness that characterizes so many anonymous interpersonal relations).
In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek argues that ideology should not be sought in the conscious thoughts and intentions of a person, but rather ideology is to be found in the objects themselves. It is not persons who have ideological beliefs, but rather objects behave in our stead. Zizek is, of course, being cute and dramatic in this claim; however, his point is that the ordinary bourgeois knows very well that, for instance, there is nothing magical about money, that it is simply a sign representing a value, and that it has no worth. However, despite the bourgeois’ sound, nominalistic reasoning, the bourgeois nonetheless behaves towards money as if it were something magical, as if it contained value in and of itself. Zizek provides a number of examples to illustrate this point. Thus, for example, the Tibetan prayer wheel prays on our behalf, relieving us of the need to pray for ourselves. We simply attach our prayer to the wheel, and the wheel does the work for us, leaving us free to go about our business. The television laugh track experiences the show for us, relieving us of the exhausting activity of having to laugh while watching the show or feel sorrow when witnessing certain terrible events. When I watch a comedy with a friend I might very well laugh out loud, but when alone the show does the work for me. Nonetheless, I speak of the show the following day to my colleagues, talking about how amusing I found it. According to Zizek there are even people who hire professional grievers to wail at funerals of loved ones. A friend and I used to joke that online dating follows this model. You place your romantic ad on a website and it is the ad itself that enjoys in your place by virtue of the number of views it gets. In this way you’re relieved of the irritation of dating and can go about your ordinary business.
In citing these examples Zizek is, of course, expanding Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism. According to Marx, commodity fetishism is that feature of capitalism such that social relations come to appear not as relations among people, but rather as relations among things. Our social relations, as it were, come to be embodied in things rather than as relations between people.
All of this begs the question of what it is that we’re really consuming when we’re consuming commodities. Take the Hummer. The reality of the Hummer is certainly very different than what I see advertised on television. I cannot drive my Hummer off a cliff into the ocean and drive under water like a submarine, nor do I generally conquer the world and nature with my muscular vehicle. Rather, it is likely that I use this massive truck to drive back and forth between the office and home. I remain locked in traffic just as I was before. Indeed, far from decreasing my level of stress, it is likely that the Hummer increases my stress as it is a large car that takes up most of the lane, thereby perpetually generating the worry that someone else will run into me.
The case is similar with the iPhone. The iPhone commercials present a world where technology finally overcomes all its limitations, becomes rational, and where the various functions of technology are localized in one convenient, aesthetically appealing device. The well manicured hand that touches the buttons in the commercial, coupled with the timber of the man’s voice, evoke images of hip regions of the country such as San Francisco, Seattle, or Greenwich Village, where people wear corduroy pants and J. Crew sweaters, have leftist political orientations, are interested in interesting things, and are kind to one another. The whimsical music in the background evokes images of a sunny day in a happy world, where everything is amusing and everything is done for the sake of amusement. In short, the commercials evoke a world that is entertaining and characterized by rich friendships, not a world of labor or work. Yet it is likely that the reality of the iPhone is a reality where the phone is used for work and labor, where most of the functions are never used, and where the phone is an integral part of the daily drudgery that characterizes life.
It would seem that what we are consuming when we consume the commodity, is not so much the commodity itself, it’s “use-value”, but rather its symbolic-value. Part of this symbolic-value is, of course, the prestige that it confers. But another part of this symbolic-value is not the commodity as a sign of status, but rather the commodity as a proxy for utopia. It is sometimes suggested that images of the future, images of utopia, have disappeared from the world. We are said to live in an age that is pervaded by cynicism, where the great political imaginaries of the 19th century and early 20th century, have departed from the world such that they are obtrusive in their absence.
However, precisely the opposite is true. The world in which we live is a world pervaded by utopian imaginaries. In and through advertising– and examples from other areas could be evoked –we live in a world that is literally saturated by utopian imaginaries and visions: Utopian images of sexual and romantic relations that surmount the impossibility of the sexual relation, where an Herbal Essence shampoo or Axe body spray can prove more satisfying than the most intense amorous encounter; imaginaries of technological utopia where the frustrations that characterize our current techno-sphere are surmounted and all the irritations that populate are mundane dailiness are solved; social utopias where people are kind to one another and needs and desires are filled, and where we have winding empty, scenic, roads where we can drive for hours (perhaps utopia in this imaginary shouldn’t be thought as “nowhere”, but rather as noone… But of course, me).
In consuming the product we also give voice to our utopian yearnings by proxy, in absentia, as a supplement or remainder… But in such a way as to not change this present, this world, but in the fullest sense of a supplement: as something that intervenes in this world to render it tolerable without risking the disappointed of failed attempts to change this world. Perhaps when Zizek or Jodi Dean evokes the values of sacrifice to revolutionary politics, this sacrifice should not be thought as a necessary sacrifice to throw a wrench into the mechanisms of capitalist production, but rather the sacrifice of a desire based on supplementarity, where the future is always deferred, and desire desires through the surrogate.
September 26, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Thank you so much, Levi, for this absolutely wonderful quote from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.
As you know Lucretius is paraphrasing the philosophy of Epicurus from about 300 years earlier. I have always found the opening of Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus just as compelling.
As for your creative way of selling Lucretius to 21st century hedonistic students I think you are right on target.
Forget all the guilt.
Orla
September 26, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Orla, I teach Epicurus nearly every semester in my intro to ethics courses, and have a tremendous fondness for him. The great thing about Lucretius in comparison is that De Rerum Natura is primarily focused on the metaphysical doctrine underpinning this ethical system. If you haven’t read this text, it’s a real treat. The text is filled with all sorts of very nuanced and marvellous observations of nature to support its claims, and the argumentation is clever and razor sharp. What I find most impressive is how Lucretius is able to make inferences to the unobserved– the atoms, which are below the threshold of consciousness –based on these observations, simply through thought alone (without the assistance of electron microscopes, etc). A few of my students have exclaimed “how did he manage to come up with this stuff!” Of course, there was an entire tradition of atomist thinkers from which he was drawing, but all the same…
September 26, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Yes, of course, Levi, I knew you would touch upon Epicurus as well.
I was just carried away by the sheer beauty of your Lucretius’ quote and associating it with Epicurus. I’m always (as your students) awed by the power of the minds of Antiquity.
September 26, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Wouldn’t it be pertinent to remember Baudrillard too while on the subject of “objects?”
September 26, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Tusarnmohapatra, absolutely. As it stands– I’m embarrassed to say –I have only limited familiarity with Baudrillard, so I’m unable to say a good deal about his works. As I understand it, The System of Objects makes a number of claims about “symbolic-value” with regard to desire under capitalism. I tried to be postmodern once, but it felt funny and not at all natural, so there are a lot of these canonical figures that I’m just not that familiar with. This has made it difficult for me to situate myself vis a vis academia as (and perhaps I’m just being narcissistic) I just don’t fit into some of these categories very well. I was attracted to Deleuze not as a postmodern skeptic, but as a first rate metaphysician who thinks the world in terms of process and development. I fell into Lacan by chance, but stuck with his thought because of its ability to thematize both things in my own life and the social world about me. Generally I haven’t found much in Lyotard, Baudrillard, or Derrida (though I wrote a thesis on the last of these three, situating him in terms of Husserl and, of all thinkers, C.S. Peirce), because it seems that these thinkers simply end up endlessly saying how such and such is impossible or falls apart, which I find uninteresting (of course all projects ultimately fail, but their few successes are grand). Perhaps, however, at a future point I’ll find myself encountering a set of problems that suddenly makes these thinkers significant for my own questions.
In my quest to think about futurity as opposed to endless historical analysis, I started reading Jameson’s Archeologies of the Future this afternoon and discovered, much to my dismay and delight, that Ernst Bloch gives a similar analysis of utopian imaginaries embodied in commodities in the second volume of The Principle of Hope (at least if I’ve understood Jameson’s descriptions correctly). Has anyone out there read The Principle of Hope. Given that it’s three volumes, is it worth the time and effort? I have similar questions about Lefebvre’s massive Critique of Everyday Life. I get nervous whenever I start making forays into humanistic Marxism.
September 27, 2007 at 1:10 am
I’ve read most of The Principle of Hope — I have almost, but not quite, finished it. (I put it aside a while ago, with just 200 or so pages left to go. When I am less busy, I hope to return to it and finish it). Reading it is one of those experiences, like reading Proust (though it isn’t as good as Proust) where getting immersed in it, because of its length, is part of the point, and a big part of the effect it has. But this is a matter of panorama, not just of length. Reading The Principle of Hope is like having a whole country to explore, rather than a difficult thesis to work through and work out — in that way, reading Bloch is very different from reading, say, Kant or Adorno or Derrida. Much of the considerable delight I get from Bloch comes from his digressions, his encyclopedic wanderings, the sheer breadth of the area he covers.
That said, the book is definitely (and inevitably?) uneven. Some passages are dazzlingly brilliant, others tedious in the way they trudge through their dialectical turns and reversals (tedious because it seems to recapitulate an all-too-familiar and played-out tradition of “dialectics,” as it was endlessly restated through much of the 20th century, without the insight of its original formulations in Hegel and Marx).
I do think The Principle of Hope gives an impassioned demonstration of how utopia and utopian hopes can be meaningful, in opposition to the postmodern fashion of rejecting the very category as merely a totalitarian dream of static perfection. In that sense, I have found it conceptually useful. Though, for me, Bloch is ultimately not anywhere near as richly suggestive as, say, Adorno, let alone Deleuze or Whitehead.
September 28, 2007 at 1:12 am
[…] on Marxian things, I should also mention Sinthome’s interesting post and discussion on “The Utopia of the Commodity– Revolution by Proxy”, and the discussion at Nate’s what in the hell… of a troublesome passage from the […]
September 28, 2007 at 2:15 am
You’re adding to my guilt about not having yet written on the commodity fetishism section of Capital. :-) A few scattered points. On this:
cf. the beginning of Capital:
The category of use-value, for Marx, doesn’t attempt to pick out a distinction between “real” (material) needs and “fantastical” needs: instead, the category is intended to set up for a distinction between things that we intuitive recognise as relating to human actions and human interests, versus other consequences of human action that take on an impersonal character and are therefore not as intuitively recognised as “social”, “cultural”, relating to “interest”, etc. This becomes important for understanding what Marx is after with the concept of the fetish – which might not quite be what Zizek is after through the appropriation of this concept, although of course I don’t know Zizek well enough to speak to his work.
This point reminds me a great deal of Benjamin:
I don’t have a copy of The Arcades Project handy, but this is a dimension of Benjamin’s argument, and is one of the reasons he expresses such an interest in kitsch. You’re picking up here on the negative side of this kind of saturation – which of course is definitely there; Benjamin is more ambivalent toward these sorts of materialised collective imaginings and temptations, searching out what they might teach us about what could be possible, as well as how they might deflect us from the attempt to achieve available potentials.
Sorry for the scattered observations – I realise these comments don’t hit on your main points, and I don’t want to deflect the conversation. Just associating out loud…
September 28, 2007 at 5:54 pm
[…] wrote an interesting post today on The Utopia of the Commodityâ Revolution by ProxyHere’s a quick […]
September 28, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Excellent, excellent post. Just got a quick question. You say: “Perhaps, in the becoming-capital of the humanities, a becoming-humanities of capital might also take place.” I feel skeptical about thia strategy. Doesn’t that presuppose a compromise, as you put it: speaking the ethos of your audience (rather than the ethos you would like to suggest), such that what you’re trying to convince the audience of, gets so diluted that it ends up being no longer what you intended to suggest, what you intended to effect–that it, in other words, becomes appropriated by the capitalist system (and the dominant interests that it serves) just like everything else? Like making a Che Guevara shirt and wearing it as a fashionable statement? Does the message or (revolutionary) content get retained then, despite the method? As revolutionaries, can we really compromise like that–or is what we need perhaps a shocking, total, violent rupture?
September 28, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Steven, thanks for the observations! It was your review of Jameson’s book on science fiction that led me to seek it out.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=25666
September 28, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Ryan, I think this is going to be an issue in any Deleuzian or relational ontology, as the central axiom as that no things are in isolation. I share your same concerns with certain things getting appropriated. As you know, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming and becoming-animal signifies a snatch of code that leads to a deterritorialization. As Althusser argued, the schools and universities are machines that function to reproduce the conditions of production through the production of ideological subjects that can enter the labor force. That is, they take something that is largely like an unformed matter and turn it into a substance (as per Deleuze and Guattari’s Hjelmslevian content/expression machines). In this respect, they are reterritorializing machines. The question, then, is how deterritorializations might be produced within such a system. If the strategy can’t communicate with its milieu at all, if it doesn’t retain some minimal communication with the strata, then such deterritorializations cannot take place. It’s always important, I think, to avoid angelic or oppositional thinking, which romantically yearns for a position so pure that it shares no relation whatsoever to its milieu.
October 1, 2007 at 11:04 am
Have you ever read Michel Serres?
October 1, 2007 at 11:50 am
I’ve read a bit of Serres, why?
October 1, 2007 at 7:48 pm
He has a book on Lucretius which is very interesting (don’t know if it was translated though Lucretius comes up in a lot of his translated works as well, Genesis, The Parasite, Troubadour of knowledge etc.) Also, judging by your tendencies, I thought perhaps, if you hadn’t delved into him at all, he might inspire…
October 1, 2007 at 8:35 pm
It was translated into English a couple years back as The Birth of Physics. I’ve been slowly working my way through it, but had to put it down a couple months back because other things arose. I really should return to it as Serres is working hard to make sense of the “clinamen” or “swerve” as central to the project of physics. Honestly, while I find the concept of the clinamen as a little bit of chaos that gives birth to a world very appealing, I have a great deal of difficulty reconciling it with the first principle of Lucretius’ philosophy: nothing can come from nothing. It seems that Lucretius wants to have his cake and eat it too. On the one hand, Lucretius wishes to reject superstition or any claims that assert something coming from nothing. Yet, on the other hand, he wishes (and needs to) posit something emerging from nothing in the case of the clinamen. It is difficult to see what entitles him to assert an uncaused bit of chaos in the case of the clinamen while rejecting something uncaused in the case of religion or superstition.
I’d be very interested in hearing from others that know some way of resolving this difficulty.
January 21, 2008 at 5:27 pm
What do Liberties exposed breasts represent?
January 21, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Good question. I have no idea. Any thoughts?
January 31, 2008 at 2:33 pm
[…] poses challenges for certain materialisms of a more recent vintage, a thinker who dramatically problematises a new world through his philosophy, and a symbol, in the very story of the transmission and […]
February 16, 2008 at 5:44 pm
[…] the thing-in-itself is impossible and that the world that we know is all appearances. In a recent Larval Subjects post, Levi suggests that owning things in a capitalist society provides a way of deferring utopia. […]