Evacuate the Leftist Bunker

“Robespierre you are disgustingly decent. It would fill me with shame if I’d pranced around the world… with the same self-righteous expression on my face just for the sake of finding others worse than myself”¹

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In issue No.18 of the post-anarchist magazine Here & Now there was an interesting attempt to instigate debate upon the “decline of social struggles”. Across two articles: ‘Assurance of Sleepwalkers’ by Frank Dexter & John Barrett and ‘Critique of Instrumental Emotion’ by Mike Peters, a major attributive cause of this decline was characterised as the “rise of the therapeutic”. Echoing the themes of these two articles the Editorial stated that “the social virtue of expressing ‘emotion’… is an unquestioned tenet of the new orthodoxy” and however much or not this is an accurate summation of these two articles the editorial comment is perhaps prompted by something in these articles that comes across, in the rush to distance itself from the therapeutic, as resistant to emotion or feeling per se. Most would agree that there are increasing levels of social control that have come to settle around the therapeutic. This mania for physical and mental health is as much locked into increasing the productive performance in light of intensified workloads as it is an issue of the provision of disciplining services for those occupying the fringes of work. Where the former relates, complicatedly, to ‘personal fulfilment’ and voluntary servitude, the latter, as highlighted by these two articles, illustrates the functioning of a social control that wields surveillance, monitoring and manipulation. That this takes place in both the health and the culture industries should not go unremarked as it definitely seems to contribute to an evacuation of any notion of ‘freedom’ from the social sphere: experts are always there to guide and devalue us, offering their help in exchange for our dependent compliance.

As such the articles make provocative reading about the machinations of such social control and the concomitant loss of agency, but they perhaps falter in engaging the nitty-gritty which is, however, pointed towards twice: Mike Peters says “the root of the problem might lie in the assertion of the chimera of the ‘real self” and Frank Dexter and John Barrett assert that the fate of “freedom” is tied up with the categories of “subject” or “individual”. Could it not be that the “rise of the therapeutic” is part of a wider socio-historic process that is underpinned by the way that capitalism is engaged in the “production of subjectivity” and that highlighting the “therapy industry” to some extent leaves the door open to an ‘absolution’ of those who participate in an increasingly melancholic and directionless leftist milieu? It is the contention of what follows, initially prompted by a reading of Joel Kovel’s Radical Spirit, that the leftist milieus should at least bear some of the burden of the decline in social struggles because, not surprisingly, it seems to be sharing some of the obfuscations of the society of which it is part. Not least among these is the persistence in the milieus of the same dichotomies that act to bolster capitalism: there is the divide between emotion and rationality (itself one of the main adaptational tenets of psychoanalysis) and the divide between the individual and the collective (the foundation-stone of liberal politics). Both of these ‘sides’ interact with one another around, say, notions of self-expression and it is very difficult to talk about one ‘side’ to the exclusion of another. Such a difficulty is itself indicative of their interrelation.

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A problem for the milieus is that for them ‘emotion’ is automatically equated either with therapy sessions and middle class self-help groups or is deemed not objective’ enough or is seen as ‘wishy-washy’ or… even worse seen as spiritual, mystical or aesthetic². Investigation in this direction would perhaps see emotion, more politically, as a conflict between the historical and the transhistorical and as a raising, thwarting and hence manipulation of desire. Without ‘emotion’ it seems to me that not very much is possible. Any reaction to social injustice and a growing awareness of the need for social change is not something that people can initially arrive at by rational calculation. It’s not a matter of one day deciding that ‘it makes more sense’ to aim towards, or, as is the case today, keep alive the notion of revolution. In instances such as these, as with most others, the emotional and the rational are working together, feeding-off one another. Even then it could be offered that emotion is, for many, a greater spur towards communication than the need to sit down and write a treatise on value, but I feel that there is, in the leftist milieus, a ‘subjective imbalance’ that tends towards the objective and the rational. This is in part caused by these milieus being orientated towards a distant beyond (revolution). Kovel expresses this as the left being “preoccupied with the external object world” and hence failing “to investigate the subjective condition of emancipation and domination’.

Though it seems strange to call this a ‘subjective imbalance’ this is in fact what life in the milieus comes across as being like: there is very little personal engagement, there is an aura of self-estrangement that still seems to censor and forego the practical, compromised and potential of everyday conditions of life; there is understated competition about who is best placed to articulate how to get to the distant beyond of revolution and, following from this, an operation of ideology that is adhered to as if it were almost a religious calling. Life in these milieus has been described to me as being “in the company of people who are no company”. One can know very little about a comrade and this pronounced lack of self-expression translates into an aura of fear cloying to the milieus: do people have something to fear from ‘exposure’? Do they have something to hide? Is itsimply that self-expression is seen as bourgeois, as a tendency towards art and literature that are pigeon-holed as capitalistic forms? This lack of a self-expression that strays from the theoretical or programatical has serious ramifications. Not only does it eviscerate the theory but it is indicative of a pronounced absence of people being ‘straight up’ with one another which can lead to wrangling, ghettoism and polemical warfare. There is a lack of clarity about other people’s motives.

The latter could, perhaps, initially be articulated as a confusion of motive informed by broader contexts and current conditions, but such expressions of confusion and uncertainty are not seen as expressions of a tentative strategic thinking and self-criticism but as weak- nesses of commitment. Fear of articulating weaknesses means that the threat of accusation and denouncement, seen as expressions of intransigent militancy, create that almost unconscious aura of paranoia and estrangement which surrounds the milieus. But, this pronounced lack of articulation, the suppression of  vocalised ‘inner speech’, means, most damagingly, that discussion of subjectivity is off-limits. By choosing to consign such discussion to the category of an already understood ‘bourgeois individuality’ something quite complex occurs: a member of the milieu transcends the current conditions by believing him/herself to be free of being tainted by capitalist society. Being a “non-integrated subject” means that the milieu member fails to adequately engage and hence ‘politicise’ the subjective conditions of domination. A whole welter of investigation into capitalism — its irrationalities, inconsistencies and susceptibilities, its modes of power and class divisions — as well as the necessity of self-criticism is thus written-off and, by not extending production to subjectivity, the distant beyond of revolution recedes even further: “The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations”³.

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For Freud subjectivity is ultimately about a reduction towards biologically determined instincts that includes the social pessimism of human beings being controlled by the tensions between a pleasure principle and a reality principle. However, that these tensions lead to a reduction of the social to the natural and the subduing of historical dynamism should not cover over Freud’s illumination of the unconscious and his dissection of the per- sonality into the “involutions” of ego, super ego and id. Whether we agree with such categories or not it is still possible to appreciate that Freud’s investigations threw a spanner into our later adherence to a human essence and point towards a useful engagement with the slip- streams of psychoanalysis as that which deals with the radically “repudiated underside of bourgeois existence”.

A large portion of this underside is the unconscious and a major reason, it seems to me, for this area not being politicised is the leftist predilection for ‘consciousness’ as expressed in countless formulas not least of which is class consciousness.  So, when Freud states “at first we are inclined greatly to reduce the value of the criterion of being conscious since it has shown itself to be so untrustworthy” the  initial leftist objection would be that this not only negates class consciousness but delimits possible agency and leaves the way open to being determined by a trust in unconscious forces themselves; being trapped in nature, in the life of individual instincts rather than being effected by the “ensemble of social relations”. A great problem for the leftist rejection of the unconscious, which similarly motivates their rejection of discussion around subjectivity, is that it cannot therefore come to grips with lapses and deviations from the expected level of consciousness without falling into judg- mental wrangles that carry all the impatient exasperation of magistrates and educators.But, for Freud it  is such lapses as these that provide the initial, most easily expressible evidence for the existence of the uncon- scious: “the majority of conscious processes are con- scious only for a short period of time; very soon they become latent, but can easily become conscious again”⁴.

We cannot recall everything that we have perceived or learnt, we are never in full possession of knowledge about ourselves and/or of the complex social situations we are constantly embroiled in. Does this mean that everything that is not in our immediate consciousness is lost to us? Without having to identify as a Freudian we can see that the unconscious is a material force that can be as much about latent consciousness, the registering and recollection of perceptions and affects between people and objects, as it is about being in the overdetermined grip of the primitive or the irrational. At the very least the concept of the unconscious seems to be a means of registering the after-effects of our continual involvement in complex social processes and inter-relationships where thought proceeds in a different way from its more accustomed conscious elaboration and expression can take the form of ‘inner speech’. However, for Joel Kovel the unconscious is not “some set of memories, fantasies etc that a person has ‘within him’… but… something that is evoked by and occurs within an inter-subjective field”. This may mean that rather than the unconscious being identified as an effect of ‘introspection’ that requires the guidance of therapeutic and psychiatric specialists, the unconscious is rather what occurs when memories, thoughts and actions are provoked by other people… by certain objects…by places…by situations.

We therefore do not have to adhere to the Freudian trajectory of a reduction of the unconscious “to the life of the instincts, to sexuality” and neither, similarly, do we have to equate it with ‘bourgeois individuality’. Just as Marx, in describing capitalist society as the “sum of relations and conditions”, shows how an ideologically constructed individuality can be removed from a position of centrality, so Freud’s explorations of the unconscious illustrate, further, that what we understand as ‘individuality’ can be decentred: “the unconscious makes the idea of a person problematic — the admission of a depth dimension to subjectivity undermines the construction of the self-representation which enables the ego to say ‘ I am a person of this kind’”. For Kovel a crucial ramification of this, and a measure of Freud’s unbeknownst contribution, is  that a ‘space’ is located “within which the human subject constitutes itself but is not yet itself. A locus of radical becoming”. This decentring of a human essence means that subjectivity does not have to be overdetermined by capitalist social relations desirous of its unquestioning adherence to an ‘individualistic’ self-representation, but rather that subjectivity is processual and, being produced amidst people, it can be produced differently⁵. Such an insertion into a “sum of relations and conditions” means that the ‘nature’ of development itself changes.

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If, then, psychoanalysis is seen as the undialectical domain of individuality what, conversely, takes place in the leftist milieus is an undialectical overvaluation of the notion of collectivity. Belonging to such a collectivity, be it a party or class or a firm, can, in the worst case, become a means of flight from the problems surrounding subjectivity. Belonging becomes sufficient exoneration: there is an excuse to fall back upon, a means of avoiding taking seriously the emotional and unconscious dimension of experience and, not following such experiences through, means that crucial, socially interlinked dimensions are missed. Though this has ramifications for the methods of organisation and practice — nuances, inflections and idioms of resistance can be missed by reliance upon policy-styled edicts or guru pronouncements — the most serious offshoot is that the group can come to function as individualistically as the individuals that both comprise and reputedly transcend it.

What I mean by this is that by enshrining a notion of ‘bourgeois individuality’ as being somehow ‘outside’ the group, and not an active and broachable dimension ‘inside’ it as well, means that the insidious force of individualism is redoubled through repression. Put differently, the operation I am trying to describe is similar to the scenario of ‘queer bashers’ as latent homosexuals where the inability to confront a homosexual or bisexual component to ‘sexuality makes such people wreak violence upon a ‘queer’ who is  a projection of a part of themselves that they feel aggressive towards. Accusations of subjectivism within leftists groups follow a similar, though obviously less psychotic dimension and can, in part, account for many leftists trepidation on encountering art and literature. Here too rather than seeing what Kovel has dramatically described as “the subversive function of its utter truthfulness” many leftists seem intent on refuting and banishing what can be seen as an articulation of the “subjective condition of domination and emancipation” and hence reinforce the ‘individualism’ of their group.

Another good case is that of Guy Debord where, becoming the last situationist, unable to collaborate with any one, his status and renown are tinged, in his last books, with a megalomania indicative of an individualism that increased in proportion to his faith in the working class. Debord falls foul of the way that the working class, in leftist theory, is articulated as possessing all the attributes of an ‘individual’. This class becomes the exponent of an essence, it has a singular purpose, it acts as ‘one’.

Indeed the very term ‘class consciousness’, in light of the refusal to discuss the production of subjectivity, becomes another way of individualising the collectivity whilst making it more malleable. Similarly it becomes a way in which people who are not from working class backgrounds can become experts in what it is to be
working class, they can ‘learn’ class consciousness and, in this individualistic way, become proletarianised. This brief speculation around the area of class highlights another blindspot where collectivities, organised around an assured and almost messianic notion of the working class, forego any discussion of class experience, such as forms of sociality and means of expression, and thereby elide insights into how class, in general, informs the production of subjectivity. Yet again, this is how sub- dued forms of individualism come to play themselves out in the leftist sphere and if we term them ‘subdued’ it is only perhaps because a lack of leftist recognition of this area holds us back from saying they are in fact explicit. We need only think of polemical warfare between factions and cliques that boil down to an exchange of letters between individuals or, with further reference to the Situationists, think of expulsions  and excommunications.

The latter could be a prime example of the way that individuals are blamed for the structural and instituted failings of the collectivity, so that, in order to protect the group an expulsion is often couched in individualistic terms:such and such does not measure up. Furthermore, there is a predominantly biographical celebration of leftist ideas: such and such as an ‘integral’ factor and ‘prime mover’ in such and such a movement, author of such and such a text. Here, with subjectivity being such a taboo  area it often gives rise to the Kafkaesque dimension of a person  being potentially accused of a crime that no one knows how to defend or profess any innocence from. No one knows what the crime is, how to judge it, or indeed, whether they themselves could be accused of it. Such atmospheres have the effect of bringing about an increase in inner speech witnessable, in part, as those awkward silences at meetings where, motives, confidence and self-expression, to quote Voloshinov, begin to fail “to lose their verbal countenance, and little by little, really do turn into a ‘foreign body’ in the psyche. Whole sets of organic manifestations come, in this way, to be excluded from the zone of verbalised behaviour and may become asocial”⁶.

Though the term ‘organic manifestations’ may be a little misleading I interpret it, in this context, as relating to feelings and thoughts that should be expressed. However, the crucial term of this quotation is ‘asocial’ for this hints at the complexity of what I have been trying to express: that the group can become individualised rather than socialised, it is not an engaged part of society but, like the notion of ‘bourgeois individuality’, it is separate, abstract and operating at a distance from others. This can be reflected amongst some members by grudges, cynicism, purity, competitiveness, cliquishness etc and, maybe even worse, in a kind of arrogant self-containment that borders on grandiosity. Just as it may be testament to peoples’ commitment to revolution that they can put up with such an atmosphere, it is not really conducive to any growth or development because other people sense it as “alienated”. In this way, by replicating this idea of individuality and not confronting it through demonstrating that individuality (or subjectivity) is “the ensemble of social relations” the participation, involvement and hence the very structure of leftist groups are badly effected.

A revolutionary group comes to function more like a collection of experts rather than as a facilitating dynamic for learning about capitalism as it is experienced at a practical level. In this way, just as ‘bourgeois individuality’ is seen to be ‘outside’ the group, so too can meaning be seen as that which exists prior to a members participation. In this scenario meaning is not generated between people as an  “inter-orientation” that includes intuition and emotional responses, but is acceded to as a passive understanding of that which has already been completed. This lack of a generative and inclusive component to the creation of meaning reinforces the centrality of certain individuals within the leftist groups as being the bearers of a knowledge. In this way leftist groups mirror rather than combat the incursion of the master/disciple relationship and, as occurs elsewhere, the group is comprised of people caught between rejection and self-subjection.

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Demonstrating  that subjectivity is produced by the ensemble of social relations may appear to be a very hard thing to do.  It is made difficult by the power of the prevailing ideology that capitalism generates and which operates as a primary factor in its production of subjectivity. An individual is produced within parameters that disable it from taking stock of its own experiences or obfuscate that experience by too readily offering interpretations that have the consequence of diminishing the power of these experiences and undermining aware- ness of their own social situatedness. One important yet simple follow through from this centrality of the social, overlooked in the leftist milieus, is that people are in fact subjected to the same conditions that influence self-representation. People share certain processes that produce subjectivity and, returning to Kovel, we can elaborate another dimension of this production. One of the conceptual tools he uses in his examination of subjectivity is that of ‘splitting’ and ‘differentiation’. What Kovel offers up is that our relation to an an ‘external’ object world and our inter-subjective communications are subject to splitting and differentiation. In the parlance of the leftist milieus splitting would relate to exclusion and differentiation to a comrade, but we will see that this is not entirely an accurate analogy.

With splitting, Kovel describes a psychological process that intends to “separate completely” and not “maintain any connection” to an object or person. Kovel frames his discussion in terms of the nature/mankind division and, for exploitation and domination of nature (and wo/man) to persist, then the technique of splitting is introduced: “the dominator must dissociate from and not recognise himself in the dominated”. Splitting is to some degree a defence mechanism: a manager will dissociate himself from the colleague he is striving to sack, filling the gap with some self-justificatory ‘ideology’ such as “working for the greater good of the company’. Here we can see that individualism is in part created by ‘splitting’ and more complicatedly how the ideology of “working for the greater good of the company” in fact covers over the individualistic motives of the manager who is keen to show his worth and value to the company. The notion of ‘collectivity’ is, in this example, invoked as a smoke screen. Uncontested by the leftist milieus it is this sense of ‘individuality’, as an essence “inherent in each individual’, that comes to operate in the very places that should be most wary of it , and, returning to our earlier theme, it infects the very notion of ‘emotion’ and self-expression.

Identifying as ‘revolutionaries’ may mean that members of the leftist milieus cannot afford to “recognise themselves in the dominated” for fear of dis- approbation and exclusion. Though revolutionaries do not see themselves as the dominators (though some of them may wish to be), by avoiding their own subjective dimension of ‘being dominated’ their powers of empathy and ability to communicate in a way more spontaneous and fitting to a variety of contexts is supplanted by propagandist efforts and preaching to the converted. An intense self-focus is maybe rightly condemned as a move towards separation, but it is inaccurate and dam- aging to believe that this is a defining instance of subjectivity. This is borne out when Kovel discusses ‘differentiation’ and he talks of it in terms of an “interdependence”, a sense of there being a difference between people and objects that is taken from the standpoint of their interrelatedness. Rather than see this as a passport to liberal pluralism Kovel inserts this into further insights around Marx’s expressed aim of communism to be “full human capacity”.

An integral component of this capacity is being conscious. Kovel writes: “consciousness is the mark of differentiation – one cannot become conscious of a thing if one is identical to that thing”. What we know as ‘individuality’ can then become self- consciousness through a “twofold motion of hyper-differentiation… This double transformation consists of the emergence of a particular gradation within subjectivity, the self, and in the same moment, indeed, as the condition for the emergence of the self, the projection of the self into the world and the alteration of the world to form objects”. Already we are moving along way from the left’s inherited understanding of individuality which for Kovel contains such dynamical gradations as the previously mentioned unconscious. Crucially though, what Kovel is attempting to demonstrate is that self-consciousness is created through  interaction  with others where differentiations rather than splitting confirm that the division between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, so crucial for a captalistic premising of atomised and isolated individuals, is in fact nothing short of an ideology that manufactures and disseminates ‘splitting’ and severs social and historical connectedness.

This production sees to it that distances are maintained. These points have crucial ramifications for revolutionary practice when Kovel fur- ther asserts that “the self does not arise prior to the transformation of the world, but in the transformation of the world”. Subjectivity is produced as part of a wider lifelong process of transformation and interaction and as such it  is not produced solely in the factory (Marx’s predilection for labour as a determining instance) or in the nether regions of a traumatised childhood (Freud’s predilection for an originary ‘primal scene’) but by unavoidable participation in a socio-historical continuum.⁷

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Kovel expands these points by reference to Freud’s focus on childhood, and, contrasting this to Marx’s adherence to the western tradition that sees “consciousness as emergent fully grown from the nature which is its source”, Kovel enters into a difficult discussion around the “ontogeny of the individual”. This ontogeny, for Kovel, is not a pre-given and applying Marxist categories of thought to the development of consciousness he asserts that a child “engages in an infantile labour whose product, or object, is subjectivity itself”. For Kovel this is a praxis of childhood that depends on many and varied social factors and we must add that it is the beginning of a process that is never ending, for if praxis is understood to be, as Kovel defines it, “labour freely and self-determinatively done” it should never reach a state of completion as such a completion may signal the stagnation into ‘bourgeois individuality’ i.e. prevailing socio-historical factors determine that this be the case such as choosing a career or role. In the case of the child, Kovel asserts that the “infantile labour” is carried out, most noticeably, through interaction with objects and the people around it. The ramifications this has for Kovel are that the objects, be they building blocks or whatever, are, in the process of experimentation, “configurations of the Other”.

Here, a crucial factor of the emergent subject is the role played by the imaginary realm, itself expressed by Kovel as being underpinned by the tension between
‘what is’ and ‘what could be’. This imaginary realm is therefore informed by notions of desire and of praxis: “The mode of relationship between the emergent subject and its other is desire… Desire provides the matrix along which infantile labour directs itself… and as it is before language… its object cannot therefore be named.

At the same time, it is the province of an uncompleted subject, open to fusion with that which it sees beyond itself”, Just as Kovel locates desire as part of the production of subjectivity he also points towards a concomitant social pull, an openness towards the surround- ing world, that may or may not be the subject of closure {the rise of the therapeutic with its creation of fear of an ‘unpoliced’ social realm contributes to such a closure). In many ways this is a further insistence upon a notion of subjectivity as transformabie and not as a pre-given entity. It is a means of avoiding the predominant definitions of self-experience as a ‘bourgeois individuality’ that sees itself as unalterable.

However, the potential for transforming subjectivity is intimately linked to the potentials of transforming the social world and it is here that desire for ‘what could be’, the imaginative potential, is welded to a praxis that, for Kovel, is involved in the gratification of desire. The more radical the practice the more it can be adequate to desire⁸. Moreover this notion of desire which, along with terms like the unconscious, is persistently seen as an asocial expression of ‘individuality’, is,for Kovel, an expression of social production for it is his contention that the economic production of surplus value “allows a passage beyond brute necessity” and gives rise to a sense of contradiction “between what the social order is and what it can be”. So too desire is a sur- plus that propels social and self transformation: “a less internally conflicted, that is more  harmoniously balanced, self would remain articulated with the society from which it arises”⁹.

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Though | have had cause to use the phrase ‘inner speech’ it should now to be discussed as a crucial com- ponent of this piece for it is by looking more closely at ‘inner speech’ that the prevailing dichotomies of individual/collective can be further exposed as not only a debilitating factor of leftist practice but as the way that this milieu can act as a conductor for capitalist social relations. Any insight into inner speech merits being called ‘crucial’ simply because it can be interpreted as the defining instance of ‘individuality’. Being the inner voice that accompanies us at all times it is not surprising that its very presence and insistence seems to bolster the — idea of people as separate from one another. The inner voice is what marks out the terrain of privacy, it seems to make the ideological process of ‘splitting’ seem a ‘natural’ indisputable condition. Furthermore, it is notions of the inner voice that extend even further the vocabulary of ‘individuality’ from terms such as subject, consciousness and self-consciousness towards other, more transhistorical terms, like ‘mind’ and ‘psyche’. These latter two terms are discussed by Joel Kovel in reference to Ancient Greece when he draws attention to how the inner voice was further produced as a “sharply differentiated self-concept” by means of social distinctions, the rise of the state and the growth of the written word: “the individual self is closely linked to the emergence of the state; and that the estrangement of that self, both within itself and between itself and others, is a reflection of the alienation inherent in political processes subsumed by the state” ¹⁰.

Though such mediations can have positive effects, the self-estrangement Kovel mentions comes to be played out as ‘bourgeois individuality’: the estrangement of the individual from society which can reach such a pitch that inner speech becomes totally dissociated from its source in the wider society. By turning to Lev Vygotsky’s text Thought and Language¹¹ we can witness, via his critical engagement with Jean Piaget’s psychological theories of child development, a more accurate summation of inner speech. Though I am incapable of even paraphrasing the wider context of this debate, one area of contention comes fall around an investigation of ‘inner speech’ in children. At first a distinction is made between inner speech as “speech for oneself” and exterior speech as “speech for others”.

One of the differences between the two is their differentiation, and recalling Kovel’s use of this term, we see that Vygotsky similarly sees them as connected and not split away from each other. When he says “inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech” he implies that they have a different function but are both social.

However, for Vygotsky ‘inner speech’ itself is developmentally linked to what is called ‘egocentric speech’. This latter is what we can encounter when we hear a child talking to itself without addressing anybody in particular. This egocentric speech is seen as a crucial phase in the rise of inner speech (and hence for Vygotsky, the rise of thought). Whereas Piaget, believing the child to be essentially egocentric or autistic, would have it that undergoing a process of socialisation causes egocentric speech to disappear and be overcome by inner speech, Vygotsky counters with the contention that egocentric speech “does not simply atrophy but ‘goes underground”. For Vygotsky it remains but its “decreasing vocalisation… denotes a developing abstraction from sound… the child’s new faculty to ‘think words’ instead of pronouncing them”. Just as this implies the continuation of ego-centric speech into adult life and is developed into Vygotsky’s thesis about the “interfunctional relations” of thought and speech the point that is crucial to the prevalent dichotomy of individual and collective can now be come apparent. Working from Piaget’s view of the child as inadequately socialised, Vygotsky contends that if this were the case it would be expected that ego- centric speech would increase if the collective were less present.

Through a series of experiments Vygotsky concluded that “the exclusion of the collective factor, instead of giving full vent to egocentric speech, depressed it”. Because children, who were placed in amongst others who spoke a different language, felt that they could not be understood there was a decrease in factors said to be characteristic of egocentric speech: a marked lack both of vocalisation and of “demonstrations of an illusion of understanding”. For Vygotsky this was proof of his rever- sal of Piaget’s thesis as he concluded that egocentric speech “cannot live and function in isolation from social speech’. This leads Vygotsky to contend that the “primary function of speech is communication, social contact” and in relation to his overriding thesis about thought and language he contends that “the true direction of development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual”. The social creates the individual.

Whilst Vygotsky thus provides further fuel for ideas around the social production of ‘individuality’ and revokes further the prevailing sense of this individuality as inherently ‘egotistic’ several other points can arise from this aspect of Vygotsky’s text. Just as he has dissolved the split between the individual and collective and demonstrated the mutual interactiveness of these facets he also draws attention to the divide between rationality and emotion: “the relation between intellect and affect, their separation as subjects of study is a major weakness of traditional psychology since it makes thought processes appear as an autonomous flow of ‘thoughts thinking themselves’ segregated from the fullness of life, from the personal needs and interests, the inclinations and impulses of the thinker’.

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By moving our focus to language itself we can, by again consulting Voloshinov, show that language, far from being an expression of some unadulterated individual essence that exists in a vacuum, is just as inflected with the social as inner speech: “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private
property of the speaker’s intention; it is populated — overpopulated — with the intentions of others”¹². Following on from this we can see that Bakhtin’s foregrounding of dialogue is an indication of meaning being generated between people. When a text is written or a phrase is uttered it is composed in anticipation of a response and in this way it carries other people within it.

Voloshinov extends this backwards and forwards in time to suggest that an utterance carries within it the history of other utterances as well as, through anticipating response, it is directed towards a future. Whatsmore such a dialogue takes place in a context and is informed and amplified by what Voloshinov calls an “extra verbal reality”. The dialogue is informed by a sensitivity to vary- ing behavioural situations which reflect a discontinuity of social relations: dialogue is different in an office than it is in a pub. So just as situation and audience come to inform our use of language Voloshinov extends these ramifications towards the production of subjectivity. Just as Kovel offers that the unconscious exists between people, so too does Voloshinov contend that subjectivity is produced on the “borderline where inner experience and the social world meet, and they meet in signs — in words”¹³.

This borderline is demarcated by Voloshinov as being the zone of language, the place where consciousnesses meet and are produced through mutually interactive dialogue. However, Voloshinov mentions in the above quote that language is not neutral and that a person’s use of language can become “overpopulated’ with other intentionsTh.is “overpopulation” could be seen to relate to the way that the social constructedness of individuality is disguised by ideological pressures that outweigh the common experiences of dialogue and work to cover over the lessons of social experience: “ the very same thing that makes the ideological sign vital and mutable is also, however, that which makes it a refract- ing and distorting medium. The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgements which occurs inside it, to make the sign uniaccentual”¹⁴. lf meaning can be pinned down and lack resonance and movement then, Voloshinov seems to imply, this reification of language leads on to the instilling of an idea of the social as non- dynamic and innately resistant to being transformed. If one of the main mediums of communication can come to be a carrier of “ruling class” meaning, if it can be uni- accentual, then the danger occurs that these meanings are “driven inwards” to define say, self-experience as ‘bourgeois individuality’. The danger with this is that a similar operation occurs within leftist milieus that ascribe uniaccentual meaning to words and categories like ‘individual’ and ‘collective’ and, failing to examine and consider their practical interrelatedness, we see how the leftist milieus are themselves “overpopulated” or overinscribed with the dominant meanings that effect their practice and efficacy as an opposition to capitalism¹⁵.

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This inability of the leftist milieus to let go of inherited meanings has the effect of hardening their beliefs into ideology and blinding them to the ways that capitalism has changed. The rise of the cultural sector as an increasingly profitable sphere and one in which all the paraphernalia of exploitation and command takes place means that social struggles can come to be enacted out- side of their traditional sites and can proceed to some extent invisibly. That culture can contain “the subjective condition of emancipation” as part of a process of “subverting the forms of the imaginary” is lost on the leftist milieus who uphold the traditional divisions that capital- ism is in the process of breaching. For leftists, culture and politics remain separated and cultural expression remains the domain of ‘bourgeois individuality’¹⁶.

What may be holding the leftist milieus back is the absence of a practicing ‘self-criticism’ which seems to have become stigmatised as a solely introspective and guilt-wielding process. However, that self-criticism does reach such parodic heights in counselling and in the navel-gazing of the pro situ texts of the 70s should not mean that self-criticism cannot be re-elucidated especially in relation to literature and music¹⁷. However, bearing in mind what has preceded, it is surely the function of self-criticism to examine the ways in which capitalism influences the production of subjectivity and following  on  from this it is self-criticism, by actualising potential and foregrounding process, that acts as a foil to ideological certainties and dogmas. Cornelius Castoriadis has raised and developed such notions:

“The point is not to inculcate perfect ideas, it is to make people become self-critical, reflexive, critical of others — though not in an irritating sort of way — to open their eyes, especially about their own motives, and to encourage them to be autonomous. | think this is both the main aim of analysis and the prerequisite for social change”¹⁸.

The leftist milieus, as we have seen, are content with uncritically repeating such “perfect ideas” which become a means of stability and reassurance that reach as far as determining self-representation and protect the latter from being affected and transformed by the collective societal dimension. New members of the milieus undergo subtle forms of education within the confines of the milieu and this establishes a crucial ‘division of labour’ in the construction of meaning which is individualistically transmitted in the form of the master/disciple relationship. Autonomy is thereby sacrificed on the alter of .coherencies like ‘Party lines’ and ‘what we stand for’ type manifestos. Such ‘formalised knowledge’ automatically suppresses the possible incidence of a creative clashing of differences. Indeed differences, with all their potential for imaginative emergences, are what is expressly not required by the leftist milieus. Thus they uphold their dogmas as a series of truths to be learnt and their practice becomes what Castoriadis has called a “process of mutually identificatory reassurance”¹⁹. There is no space for conjecture, experiment and there- fore mistakes need not even be prohibited. And so, participation, always tentative at first, is muted and silenced:

“How ambiguous and threatening everything must appear to him when he won’t even risk opening his mouth to put an innocent question”²⁰.

This is what results when the production of subjectivity is not an item up for debate or even one that can be considered ‘privately’. There is, when people want to belong and fear rejection, a definite quietening of unconscious activity; a fear of not matching up. How often is it that we are wit- ness to misunderstandings of communication and expression being blown up into fully-fledged polemical disputes where the differing parties are unable to state simply that they may have ill-expressed a point? Furthermore how many times do we suspect that behind polemical disputes lies a psychological need to defend a position that has been identified with to such a large extent that the admission of fault or error would be tantamount to denying years worth of investment and activity? How often does the sense of one party being ‘victorious’ over another diminish the importance of the debates content? And finally, for the time being, how often is an engagement or a text mulled over and dissected as if it were the finalised product of a just-ceased activity?

Self-criticism, being in constant interaction with differing positions and being able to see individuality as a social construct, cannot invest in its own self-representation to the degree that it would become finalised enough to enter into such a competitive form of politick- ing. This pathway to autonomy is one that seeks neither self-subjection nor fears rejection. It is not concerned with being a master or a disciple. It cannot invest an action or a text with the air of reified and ‘perfect’ product that can never again be worked upon.In short, autonomy, informed by self criticism, does not accept a ‘knowledge’ that is handed down like an object that can be worn, polished and shown; a knowledge that places meaning in brackets to become dogma and credo. We strive not to remain something we have become…

AFTERWORD

“The name of a thing might be something in itself if it could come to be real enough but just as a name it was not enough something”²¹

To be named is not to exist as autonomous. To name. I am an anarchist. Is to partake in a pre-given knowledge rather than to create meaning for yourself. I am a socialist. You accrue a past meaning to yourself and inhabit it without understanding what it was and now is. The name is passed on. A nostalgic heir loom without re-vision. A tradition with which you align yourself.

But the meaning of words is in their difference. Their practical difference. Anarchist. Socialist. Communist. Means something sanctioned and safe. By not exploring words. Participating in their meaning. We remain self-identified. Conversation is stillborn. I am a psychoanalyst. Make the object speak in person. No inner or outer. We. Though. By naming. Deny that the thing to which the word refers is shifting. We protect ourselves from such contradictions. From moving realities. We inhibit an awareness of enigmas and limit an understanding that knowledge is not all. We inhibit history. Instead. Our naming leads us back to the finality of an exemplary containment. I am a communist. I am complaisant. I want to partake in active complacency. Slavery. But we think that by naming we are thus transparent. We name and we know and we know others. Mastery. But the group in which we are embroiled casts back a reflection of what we want to see. Naming is narcissism. We see ourselves. We see surety. I am a poet. Adhering to techniques. Experimenting in closed relation to a consensus. I name. I noun. I am restricted. Naming is a ghetto. Keeps us in one place. Working an ever depleting seam. One day our nam- ing will make us experts in prevailing meaning. Sufficient unto ourselves. Skilled in monosyllables and predictable rage.

Sophists and Eleatics. We want closure. We name. To have done with aporias. With lacunae. With dehiscence. We become premature. Determinate. Visible. Slickly communicative. Our acceptability allows of no exceptions. No routes away from the name we have become. I am an anarchist. A communist. A psychoanalyst. Inconsistent. I have not begun. I am unacceptable to myself. Between master and slave. Between true and false. Between poetry and prose. | am a solidus marking out other relationships between terms. In defiance of isolatable meaning. Resisting the logic of sects. Cliques. Rackets. We should peel a word instead. Become unconvinced. Find mean- ing in participation. In doing to discover. In the receding block- age of knowledge. Name becomes Nameless becomes Namely. In other words. Always in other words. A combination that elicits. Not the new but a “difference that is spreading”.

From ‘originary’ see ‘exemplary’. From ‘force’ see ‘alteration’. From ‘thought see ‘elucidation’. | am no longer an anarchist. No longer a socialist. No longer a communist. No longer a poet. Autonomy is to dispense with names. To give. Instead. The sensation of meaning. Autonomy is not what is. It emplaces the deliberately extraneous. It is between what is and hopes to make it what was. Liminal manoeuvres to make naming null. Void of certainty. Self incriminating motives. I a misnomer. Is a nameless you.

Howard Slater

1. Georg Büchner: Danton’s Death in Complete Plays, Lenz And Other Writings, p23 [Penguin Classics 1996]. A Break/Flow essay entitled ‘Death To Them That Can Read And Write’ is available as a photocopy. ↩︎
2. Perhaps Vaneigem’s Movement Of The Free Spirit [Zone Books 1994} takes a sidelong glance at the mystical aspects of an emotional expression of social injustice. As for the aesthet- ic… isn’t there the writing of the first phase of the Situationists which must include Asger Jorn’s Open Creation [Unpopular Books]. In another not disconnected direction there is Walter Benjamin’s work on various writers collected in Illuminations and Bakhtin’s work on Dostoyevsky. ↩︎
3. Karl Marx: Theses On Feuerbach in Early Writings, p423 [Pelican 1975]. Though this quote is illustrative of the theme
   of this piece it is something of a paradox. If subjectivity is “the ensemble of social relations” then how can it be an essence? ↩︎
4. Sigmund Freud:  Dissection Of The Personality in New Introductory Lectures p102 [Pelican 1983]. ↩︎
5. Joel Kovel: Radical Spirit, p91-93 [Free Association Books 1988]. I am grateful to Melancholic Troglodyte for introducing me to Joel Kovel’s work. ↩︎
6. V.N.Voloshinov: Freudianism -— A Critical Sketch in The Bakhtin Reader ed. Pam Morris [Arnold 1997]. ↩︎
7. Joel Kovel, ibid, p294. ↩︎
8. Joel Kovel, ibid, p319. ↩︎
9. Joel Kovel, ibid, p212. ↩︎
10. Joel Kovel, ibid, p213. ↩︎
11. What follows is built up from notes/quotes from Lev Vygotsky’s Thought And Language [MIT Press 1962] and references to Fred Newman and Lois Holzman’s Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist [Routledge 1993]. ↩︎
12. Voloshinov/Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Reader, ibid, p77. ↩︎
13. Pam Morris: Introduction to The Bakhtin Reader, ibid, p12. ↩︎
14. Voloshinov/Bakhtin: ibid, p55. ↩︎
15. The leftist milieus hold onto a notion of the working class that has become historically static, they refuse to see that a main condition of work today is a flexibility of contract, a form of generic working and a collapsing of the division between intellectual and manual labour. A decline in social struggles mirrors the decline of the workplace as the rooted-site where a working class identity, with its ‘shared assumptions’, was enabled to come into being. This decline in workplace struggles and the redefinition of the ‘factory’ may also be indicative of the ‘disaggregation’ of the working class, its being broken into components and work teams of a much smaller scale. It could be said that the dichotomy between individual and collective is being played out in just such a zone where working class people are experiencing themselves as ‘working class individuals’ severed from a wider class belonging. When this is coupled to the ways in which the content of work is changing — “the transformation of working class labour into a labour of control, of. handling information, into a decision-making capacity” — we see that what is being demanded from employees is an “investment of subjectivity’, the willingness to enter into a ‘vocational’ relationship to working. A crucial component of working class experience today is just this conflict around the production of subjectivity: “if production today is directly the
    production of social relations, then the ‘raw material’ of imma- terial labour is subjectivity and the ‘ideological’ environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces”. See Maurizio Lazzarato’s essay Immaterial Labour in Radical Thought In Italy (University of Minnesota 1996]. ↩︎
16. That this is patently not the case is demonstrated by the pioneering work of Bakhtin which shows that literature can carry ‘communist presuppositions’. His work on Dostoyevsky shows how the novelist carries out a process whereby there is an inter-orientation of the author’s and another person’s speech. Such interaction creates the conditions where the author is “relativised by the existence of other views” and is thereby able, through characterisation, to objectify subjectivity, to present parts of himself as something distinct from himself.
    A process he calls “outsideness”. From literature as well Bakhtin shows how “self consciousness is arrived at dialogically by an inner polemic with social voices which first structure our inner being”. Self-criticism is to some degree akin to this process of inner polemic but the persistence of other social voices enables what we consider as our individuality to be experienced outside itself in relation to other individualities. It allows for a greater experience of being socially situated and induces proclivities to act in consort with others and to cooperate through empathy and with respect. Being aware of others to the degree of reflecting their possible input and influence has the ramification of prohibiting the rise of that authoritarian characteristic of giving primacy to the self: “the most individual enunciation is a particular case of collective enunciation’. ↩︎
17. For information on this aspect of the pro situ movement of the 70s see lan Trowell’s “Real Life Is Elsewhere” in Autotoxicity – Assault 5. [ATX PO Box 298, Sheffield, S10 1YU]. Ken Knabb is quoted here as saying “… an assault on one’s own character is socially strategic”. ↩︎
18. Interview with Cornelius Castoriadis in Variant No.13. Castoriadis’s engagement with psychoanalysis is, along with that of other former Socialisme ou Barbarie members likebLyotard and Laplanche, one that can’t be dealt with here. That Castoriadis perseveres with psychoanalysis, working its shadows and aporias, is a source of inspiration, especially when his explorations persist in spite of his isolating two essential points which remain peripheral for Freud, Lacan et al: “the psyche as radical imagination, and the social-historical as institut- ing rather than as instituted once and for all.” ↩︎
19. See Crossroads In The Labyrinth, p68 [Harvester 1984]. ↩︎
20. Franz Kafka: The Castle, p173 [Penguin 1972]. ↩︎
21. Gertrude Stein: Look At Me Now And Here I Am, p145 [Penguin 1971]. ↩︎

LINKS

• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1
• All articles from Break/Flow 1

Article history

• This article was originally published in print in Break/Flow (2) in April 1999
• First uploaded to our site on February 26, 2025

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