Ethics & Freedom: What Does It Mean to Implicate the Self? What Does It Mean to Break the Binary?

Half of this is from this morning, and the other half I situated with it. I wonder if it works.

After re-reading Jameson’s essay, Deleuze and Dualism, I’m thinking this morning about ethics. Yesterday I wrote about ethics as a core orientation, and I wrote about it in the context of Jameson’s “metacommentary,” to say that Jameson’s project amount to among other things an ethics. In looking at the Deleuze essay, Jameson does not have kind words for ethics and he laments its resurgence. 

“In passing, one can even more strenuously deplore the revival of disciplines such as ethics today, after the ebbing of that modern period in which such disciplines had proved utterly contradictory and sterile, academic in the bad sense."

What Jameson describes here is in fact, I think, an ethics that lacks metacommentary, that lacks self-awareness, and my account takes us even deeper into the personal. Metacommentary is not just to comment on the conditions of the problem, to assess the given problematics and questions--why ask the question at all--but to implicate the self doing the thinking in the writing. In poetry, this self-implication is a core part of the work, especially when working with historical events outside our experience, experiencing trauma we did not experience. Self-implication acknowledges the location of the writer. To think of Deleuze’s reading of Paul Klee, self-implication renders visible–the subject is not able to make without rendering visible their existence as the writer, that the piece did not ex nihilo enter the world. Perhaps this is a “revenge” of the author, long dead? There has been a danger when looking at individual pieces to not think of historicizing the author themselves, as if the text alone could be analyzed in a vacuum, as if it should.

What do I mean by “ethics?” I mean simply the conscious pursuit of a good life based on a relationship between belief and action. Of course, “good” is based on the subjectivity of the person doing the figuring, but the point is that ethics is concerned with the problem of how to live a human life, that there are choices which face us and some kind of agency emerges to make the world and our life otherwise, different, changeable. This change could be for one’s selfish, narrow interest at the expense of others. Ethics is value-neutral. A “bad” person has an ethics just like a “good” person. But I want to move away from this essentialization altogether. A key part of my own ethics is that we are in movement with the world, all is in flux, but there is contiguity like my body, like the unity of a human life. Is this a contradiction like the sort Jameson references? Or was he making a critique of critique, a critique of the distance between the ethical and the practical, the cold hypocrisy of practicing ethics as if it is only theoretical?

For me, Jameson’s metacommentary is about self-implication in a broad and narrow sense. In a broad sense, I mean it in terms of the world and taking cue from the conditions of the world which not only are suppressed by human beings to repress other human beings but are in their very nature suppressed by our faculty of thought. Inside this problem, I can’t help but move toward implicit biases and contemporary accounts of human judgment which act as though there are only natural consequences playing out in biases, as if there is no major environmental investment in producing people that think channeled narrow thoughts. Jameson’s metacommentary can be seen here as a widening of scope that brings the close and far into focus based on the idea we can only raise ourselves to the concrete by moving through the local.

Serendipitously, I picked up a book face down on my bedroom floor, and it was exactly what needed to come next here: Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject. The implicated subject breaks the binary oppressor oppressed and in fact, the binary at large which is only reachable through local, actual binaries e.g. male/female, Black/white. The implicated subject posits an always already liminal location which can reached through, I believe, an ethics that is in fact a metacommentary on itself. The bare requirement for an ethics should be at least the self-awareness to feel the incontince of life at the limits but falling back into the common sense, binary opposition where there are only oppressors or oppressed. Functionally what this vacillation means is that we move back into harming without accountability. Coming to terms with the oppressor and oppressed simultaneously inside of us is the beginning of accountability to the self and to others.

Confronting the harm we do to ourselves and each other puts face to face with the way our behavior enacts ruling class ruling ideas of the day, and this opens up more air: the relationship between politics and metaphysics. When I say metaphysics, I could also be saying metacommentary, or dialectics, or just thinking and thought itself, but it's important to say metaphysics here to begin to flesh out this uncanniness vis a vis our expectation. I don't mean metaphysics in a supraphysical sense, but in a 'beyond' or better 'on', i.e. On the Physical. If it is beyond it is because it is surpassing the existing limits of the possible into a connection that puts us in ecology with the rest of the world, to enter the beginning always already in progress, as Fred Moten has said so beautifully.

Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Gilles Deleuze, Audre Lorde, and Paolo Freire all write on the circulation of

the ruling class's ideas as an embodied, mental distribution. It is in this embodied mental distribution

where our oppressor/oppressed social relationships circulate as the production of the world. Marx most

famously was the first to clearly mark out the ruling class in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material

force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material

production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby,

generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The rulingideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas;hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think.

 

Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers ofideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling  ideas of the epoch.

However, Spinoza said it more subtly 200 years before Marx. The subtlety is in fact why Marx needed to

speak what he heard in the silence. In the Ethics, Spinoza wrote

Men believe that they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they do not think, not even dream about, because they are ignorant of them.

Spinoza was perhaps the first to connect faulty perceptions to desire and want to make a political point.

In this way, we can see him as another first, to see the power relations in both the production of perceptions

and desire and that this produced a false consciousness as to the actual causal relations of the world. This

is the microcosm of the situation we deal with today, tangled knots of causes, perfectly tied to go unnoticed.

We notice the knot and fill in the experience of tying it.

In Marx, it is the ideal expression of material situation. We are alienated from the production of capitalism

as part of the totality which is the most powerful expression of the ruling class ideas ruling the day: their

blockage of the political horizons such that an absence is not noticed, such that we don’t see what we can’t

see. 

The ruling ideas thus present themselves as a great mystery or indisputable common sense. On both accounts,

taking a form predetermined to redirect or otherwise block interventions and attempts to change. What is

being altered? The concrete ideas play themselves out in abstract spaces. Intervening against the ideas of

the ruling class is on the level of the individual a problem of judgment, of ethics: what is to be done is first

and foremost a question of politics and ethics.

Lorde's ruling class ideas rule the day rule inside our bodies and minds as oppression and exploitation. 

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seekto escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which  knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.

Lorde asks us to seek out that part of the oppressor in us as us and make our interventions there. Who lead

in these situations but that part of the oppressed in us, however small in quantity it is that part of us through

which we can connect with others. It is this intrapersonal leadership that we might look to see how a local

vanguard functions. However, there is of course more to do deal with the oppressor in us. We must become

accountable for ourselves which we can only do for ourselves when we are in political belonging with

others, comradeship. Groups can’t hold individuals accountable in the sense of deliberating and choosing,

only individuals can do that. With the support of a collective this accountability becomes a process we

are always engaged rather than always attending retrospectively to harm. To get at the relations of

production of human on human suffering, of trauma, we must enter relationships of accountability so that

we are in the best position possible to intervene 

Primo Levi may seem to be the odd thinker in this group but his inclusion deepens the conversation’s level of

questioning for it is in his abolition of the binary where we see the greatest challenge to the binary

reproductive structure itself, the logic of our habit we must intervene on so that we stop blocking ourselves

from the constant question to commit our lives agains our role in the reproductive structure. It is perhaps

the most profound lifestyle politics possible because one’s whole life is changed so starkly by decision and

choices made over and over in Auschwitz by members of the sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners forced to

help in the burning of . They operate at the limits: what is permissible? Are these sonderkommandos victims

or perpetrators? The consequences of Jews aiding in the burning of dead Jews who will in turn become the

burned, the dead. There's no real resolve in the grey zone. It's bleak, absolute limit and perhaps the abolition

of ethics as a project.

Paolo Freire offers more to work with: ruling class ideas’s rule can be subverted via pedagogy’s internal

dialectic of learning and teaching – where pedagogy is necessarily a social relationship between individuals

and a collective. This movement of commitment from individuals toward or in the poeisis, the making of a

collective is simultaneously a movement by this inchoate collective against the existence of the individual.

As we commit ourselves to collective forms, we continue the self-dissolution whose momentum sent us

moving, looking to make new commitments. Self-dissolution makes forms like leaks where pressure takes

the space it needs and produces a new possibility of form in the excess of the new commitments into an old

life of habits.

I will close with Deleuze as I think his account of "freedom" or "agency" or "thinking" is emancipatory

by removing us from a captivity of the common sense, and opening up the possibility of ethics, of accountable

relationships with one another that redefine the very nature of how we conceive and imagine a "relationship."

In Difference and Repetition, at the very end, we get a riff on the classic Marxist formulation of the ruling class problems ruling problems of the day when Deleuze uses it in a series of assertions about affirmation. The power of the negative is the power of the quietest urge to do nothing, to let the contradictions, for example, heighten on their own and for us to respond to them accordingly. The power of the negative is the power that says we can wait, we don’t need to find a way to act right now, to immediately begin to act. In the face of this fatalism, Deleuze says we cannot take the ruling classes’ problems for our own. This is not to say it doesn’t matter how the ruling class ideas act in and through us, but that their problems are not ours, for example, contradiction, which is the "shadow" of the proletariat's problem, the bourgeoisies' questions.

For Deleuze, our problem is to take the given problem and transform it, by pulling on the threads of utopian horizon that have become frayed on the common sense, that small but disproportionally dense and powerful line that knows where it is inside a totalized, closed world with no alternatives to capitalism and the state. It is here in this moving utopia that our subjectivity becomes implicated in the world, where we can live ethically and in tension but with warmth and creativity, not cold calculation.