icarus fallen

6 IX 2008

It is said that we the Chinese have a special affinity with fire, which is responsible for a number of things to our delight, or, our dismay. About its “creation” we have a Prometheus story of sorts, a typical sage king with name directly translating into “fire creator” in mythical times; yet it is in its typical literary reference that fire become something more devastating. “Qin fire”, then, became a taboo in the mouth of the literati, blamed for the loss of texts, orthodoxy, and authenticity, a symbol of “legalist” oppression, indeed, a token of sacrifice for the price of unification and standardization. Of course, sometimes fire becomes a hindrance to just that, as it burned Cao Cao’s armada in a site made famous by rhapsodies of a disappointed Song poet, and now by a recent motion picture cut in two with almost no real connection to its title in the first one and promises of a mediocre sequel. Ah, of course we are forgetting the fireworks, the gunpowder, and a number of things that bursts from one, to two, to three, to myriad things that suit our taste. Never mind that, apparently it is also a carrier between this world and the next, a modern daimonion of sorts, to bring–and may God bring peace to the spirits–fortune and prosperity to our deceased relatives in the other world. “A five billion Yuan underworld bill for Mahjong? Some more yellow paper for the bank?”–No thanks. We won’t even let the deceased rest in peace. Confucius perhaps said something along the lines of treating the deceased as if we are treating the living, hence it seems only nature that fire shall carry so divine a task as bringing money in a time and age when we hosted a bacchanalia to celebrate the number “eight”, a phonetic synonymous to “making money”, and at the same time a frequent appearance on the Mahjong table. Well, mushallah! We might as well let the “Qin fire” burn again.

In his work On Tyranny, Leo Strauss close reads (between the lines) of Xenophon’s Hiero to suggest a divide between the philosophical and the political. Hiero, the tyrant, is provoked by Simonides, the wise man in this conversation on tyranny. At the same time, however, Hiero fears Simonides as the political ruler fears the philosopher. The philosopher, though having no interest in ruling himself, gets his interest crossed through his advisory role in offering a type of improbable utopia to the ruler. Towards the end of Hiero, Simonides, after invoking Hiero to self-denounce all possible pleasures of being a tyrant, offers an alternative of benevolent autocracy that makes everyone the tyrant’s ally, effectively creating a politics of friendship. Strauss uses reads this as a distinction between pleasure and virtue: Simonides, who is no Socrates, is merely a sophist who offers help in getting Hiero what he wants: pleasure.

In attempting to educate a man of this kind, Simonides has no choice but to appeal to his desire for pleasure. In order to advise Hiero to rule as a virtuous tyrant, he has to show him that the tyrant cannot
obtain pleasure, and in particular that kind of pleasure with which Hiero is chiefly concerned, viz., the pleasure deriving from being loved, but by being as virtuous as possible. What he shows Hiero is a way not so much to virtue as to pleasure. Strictly speaking, he does not advise him to become virtuous. He advises him to do the gratifying things himself while entrusting to others the things for which men incur hatred; to encourage certain virtues and pursuits among his subjects by offering prizes; to keep his bodyguard, yet to use it for the benefit of his subjects; and, generally speaking, to be as beneficent to his fellow citizens as possible. Now, the benefactor of his fellow citizen is not necessarily a man of excellence or a virtuous man. Simonides does not advise Hiero to practise any of the things which distinguish the virtuous man from the mere benefactor (93)

Strauss, staying consistent with his claims elsewhere, insists that the work instead points to another, hidden direction not meant for the general public. The esoteric knowledge of the Good is to be read in what is not here.

Kojeve, on the other hand, rejects Strauss’ philosophy-politics divide. Pleasure is to have nothing to do with knowledge or virtue and hence “there is… no knowing whether , in fact, the ‘primary motive’ of conduct is the ‘pure’ joy that comes from Wisdom (knowledge + virtue), or whether it is the sometimes condemned ‘pleasure’ that comes from the wise man’s self-admiration” (160). In this sense, then, a clear distinction between the political and the philosophical is an ancient prejudice that the cloistered men of knowledge self-imposes in an aristocratic spirit. The reality of this matter lies within the Hegelian problem of recognition:

If one accepts (with Goethe and Hegel) that man is loved solely because he is, and independently of what he does, while “admiration” or “recognition” are a function of the actions of the person one ”admires” or “recognizes,” it is clear that the tyrant, and the statesman in general, seeks recognition and not love… Simonides rather would have to be said to seek love, if he truly wanted to have a positive value attributed, not to his actions, but to his (perfect) being. But, in act, it is simply not the case that he does. Simonides wants to be admired for his perfection and not for his being pure and simple… he would like to be recognized for his perfection and therefore desires his perfection. Now, desire is actualized by action. hence it is by virtue of his actions that Simonides in fact is and wants to be recognized, just as Hiero is and wants to be recognized by virtue of his actions (156).

The philosophy-politics divide is thus unified into the singular problem for recognition. But the problem for recognition has no easy answer. Kojeve sees Hiero (and by association Simonides) as a master seeking recognition from others. But another master cannot give him recognition as the recognition requires submission of others through struggle to death. As soon as another submits to this recognition, the other is reduced to a mere slave that is not even human. In this light then, the logic of Xenophon’s work is presented as this: Hiero, in order to seek his recognition as a master/tyrant, seeks help from Simonides who advises him to show benevolence for the sake of this recognition. But he will never acquire this recognition because the subjects of his benevolence are treated as means who submits and hence, inhuman slaves. Simonides, on the other hand, advises Hiero because he too desires recognition as the wise man known for his perfection. But as soon as Hiero falls for his semantic trap and listens to Simonides’ advice, he submits and too becomes a slave. For Kojeve, there can be no recognition, and no friendship.

Yet how do we explain the relationship between Strauss and Kojeve themselves? From the correspondences it is hard to see that Kojeve is attempting to reduce Strauss into a slave; instead, he challenges Strauss in search of a recognition not granted. By not granting this recognition, however, Strauss stays a master, and recognizes the being of Kojeve through friendship. Indeed, perhaps at the end of the master-slave failure for recognition there is true recognition through friendship. Simonides fail to achieve this with Hiero because Hiero submits to his will, and Hiero fails too, even if he follows Simonides’ advice for benevolence because the motivation of his act is selfish search for pleasure. There is no true politics of friendship when inequality is present.

For the sake of friendships, then, it is perhaps important to keep things unresolved, keep things controversial, while at the same time maintain the civility and good conscience for genuine attempts improbable recognition.

1 VI 2008

As I roam through the streets of Beijing I once again recall the scenes from Wim Wenders’s tribute to Yasujiro Ozu’s films, especially Tokyo Story. This 1985 documentary came to me as a bonus disc to Ozu’s great yet subtle Late Spring. Though containing an interview with Chishu Ryu, the film is nothing more than the personal encounters of Wenders in his strange-yet-familiar Tokyo in search of the Ozu’s footage. Wenders comments, Ozu’s films are always about Tokyo and always about change–perhaps generational, perhaps societal–hence many of his films open with the train as its symbolic representation for ambivalence towards progress. If Ozu’s attitude towards his Tokyo is one of ambivalence, then Wenders’ must be one of alienation as a stranger. He shoots different scenes: park with exuberant youth, vast network of trains, skyscrapers under construction, traces of the old, and endless rolls of the pachinko palaces. The film traces through these different scenes but cannot find a place for itself, a narrative that powerfully grasps the present condition like Ozu’s great achievements. Indeed, to the eyes of a foreigner familiar with the scene through pre-established constructions (Ozu’s lenses), this changing Tokyo in 1985 is lost, relentlessly pursuing something without knowing its own directions. Even the interview with Ryu, an actor of a bygone era, only serves as a temporary remedy to the situation. In this sense, then, Wenders is seeking something already lost. Though never able to reappear, at least traces of it can be felt in Wenders search for Ozu. The concrete reality of this search lies within the films of Ozu themselves.

I must consider Wenders a fortunate one; at least he has an Ozu to seek, a legacy to inherent. I, facing the changing streets of Beijing, find such inspirations lacking.

31 V 2008
Aphasia
I lost count the number of times that I visited this ancient capital. No, not so ancient: the ever-polluted air and the smell of dust reminds me–without even seeing those endless streets of neon lights and broad streets filled with endless cars–that this, indeed, is the capital of the postmodern China. Symbols, tags–those wonderful things once again treat me with their wonderful gift. I am in reversed cultural shock again. This city–so Chinese, yet so non-Chinese–is the maze that gives both adventure and despair. I stand facing its wonder only to realize that words left my mouth to become symbols themselves. I am without them.

Airport
Exactly what we need. An “international” airport. A door to the world. But the familiar scene of the customs reminds you that this is no other place. At once a display of affluence, the usual crowed outside of the gate pulls you back from illusions. You have entered, indeed, into your familiar land. The changing shops in its lobby reminds you that this particular gateway, like its host, never stays the same. The other airports are proud to let people go: but this one, indeed, honors itself in luring them in.

“Motel 168″
This is supposed to be a motel, somewhere near the convenient location of Zhongguancun for easy access of PKU and Tsinghua. Indeed, its precision is to be praised for missing its promises only 15 minutes by cab. The suspicious circular bed mark this hotel to be nothing more than a typical Chinese run-down hotel. Message services and whatnots: I care not to continue.

Noodle Shop
The first thing you see is people. Idle people; sitting around 3 tables and watching mindless TV dramas. You feel the heat of late May and realize that the air conditioner, in front of you, offers nothing to ease the pain. For the first time you experience the recent inflation in practice. The old noodle soups are no longer so affordable. Nevertheless you waited, alone, facing outside in a greasy chair. No one pays attention to you–but as a customer paying his dues, you know what to expect.

Wudaokou
Strange mixtures. In one second you hear Beijing-dialect Chinese, in the next, you sense a mixture of Korean and southern dialect. Shops bring color and vitality to the street. In each of them different music plays–all in the same style suitable for banal reproduction. Loud noise. Cars pass and offer no yield to pedestrians. An old man stands near a bank and plays traditional instruments. The rag that he wears is without much color but much textual, quite opposite to the bright dresses of the young women that passes by him without heed. Train approaches: more people join this cacophony while others leave it a it is, in its exact harmonic tranquility. There’s no sign of any symbols; they are within nothingness itself.

30 IV 2008

Thomas Cole’s piece in response to Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic seems to explore human condition beyond Rieff’s characterization of a totalizing psychology. To Cole, Rieff’s statement that “by this time men may have gone too far… to specialize… in techniques that are to be called… ‘therapeutic,’ with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being” too harsh and too over-simplistic(Rieff, in Cole, 267). Cole correctly sees the ironic nature in Rieff’s use of “triumph” in his book, and offers the “therapeutic” to be along the lines of Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man”: he lacks true moral virtue and conforms to corporations, post-industrial society’s mass consumer culture, and opinions of experts (268). Cole further notes that Rieff’s “psychological man” is a continuation of Freud’s theory, as a man who “lives by the ideals of insight—practical, experimental insight leading to the mastery of his own personality” (267). Religious faith seems unnecessary to Rieff’s psychological man; to him a culture shaped by the ideas of dominant elites prevails when it penetrates therapeutic functionary through a social system of institutions, life patterns, and other aspects of everyday life, successfully replacing the old value of Christian culture through “deconversion” (270). But something seems missing from this construction of society. Cole believes that the problem behind Rieff’s mentality is his “attempt to understand human experience by standing entirely apart from it is like trying to jump over our own shadow”—instead, “important truths in life cannot be understood by logical or empirical methods alone; they must be experienced holistically” (273).

Cole’s example against Rieff is his personal encounter with the therapeutic, embodied by Dr Banquer, perfect incarnation of the “analytic attitude”. He then turns to Charles Taylor to suggest that rather than condemning society with personal and cultural loss, the solution should be the pursuit of identity, meaning, and connections (283). The search for these is not an individual process but always within a discursive domain within a “horizon of important questions” beyond the individual self; he has to interact with others rather than merely investigate into himself. Cole’s personal response is religion; faith still has a place even after Rieff’s characterization of society as therapeutic.

I am not convinced, however, that Cole’s essay truly answers Rieff’s point; it seems that whereas Rieff analyzes the therapeutic to offer an explanation of a post-industrial society, Cole address a problem of individual identity (which, inevitably, is beyond the individual in its pursuit). Rieff does describe a “psychological man”; but the psychological man is not an individual problem but the result of certain social institutions and societal practices—it is merely the manifestation of societal structure at an individual level. Cole’s response provides an individual remedy by attempting to create some degree of freedom for the individual to pursue identity and religion beyond the therapeutic, but he fails to recognize that the therapeutic comes from the structure of society rather than individual choices. Even though a possible remedy is offered, it cannot be taken without a connection to the structural transformation that must correspond with this option.

In my reading of Cole, the efforts of Conscious Raising groups described by Herman seems to resemble his attempt; it creates a possible remedy against the male-dominated therapeutic society from individual perspectives, but lacks a true method to change the social institution that shape the individual. The goal of CR groups, according to Herman, was to “communicate the subjective feel of women’s everyday lives” (297). Members of CR groups perceive their projects to be political; it begins with “feeling, but [] was supposed to lead to thinking and acting” (301). Yet the efforts of CR groups were similar to Cole’s response to Rieff. Borrowing from Marxist (more specifically, from Lukacs) concept of “consciousness”, women in CR groups fail to recognize that the original meaning of “class consciousness” contains within itself the momentum for complete reformation of social structure and revolution of mentality. Acting as a part of an already shaped post-industrial society and using its own cultural logic, Cole and CR groups only provide individual deviations that are perhaps already discounted by the social structure.

22 IV 2008
While reading Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, I find his use and reversal of Freudian theory of sublimation on art to be highly intriguing. Rather than Seeing the Freudian sublimation of sexual desires as a negative, repressive trait of preindustrial society, Marcuse sees it as a reservoir of ideas that allows the existence of a second dimension of cultural values especially important to works of art. The preindustrial novel contains within in an “antagonism between culture and social reality”—the culture reality being a collection of “oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements” against the social reality of everyday life (57). Hence, preindustrial art contains a twofold meaning of alienation and transcendence; but this alienation is a “conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a ‘higher level’ or mediated alienation” (60). The transcendental nature of preindustrial art lies in its ability to create an order, a dimension of life that can reject the unbearable social reality—it “contains the rationality of negation… in its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is” (64).
In a Freudian perspective of civilization, Marcuse recognizes that artistic alienation, in fact, is sublimation, as it “creates the images of conditions which are irreconcilable with the established Reality Principle but which, as cultural images, become tolerable, even edifying and useful” (72). The second dimension, then, is erotically charged by libido; even though it is not productive in any sense; the ideal that it creates allows one to find pleasure and joy against the social background of misery, toil, and filth. In this preindustrial world, because Pleasure Principle is separated from Reality Principle, it serves as a remedy and a point of rebellion against the scope of unbearable reality; through its repressed form, it is especially true to works of art. Marcuse observes, in examples such as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, etc—

Sexuality consistently appears in a highly sublimated, ‘mediated,’ reflexive form—[in which] it is absolute, uncompromising, unconditional. The domination of Eros is, from the beginning, also that of Thanatos. Fulfillment is destruction, not in a moral or sociological but in an ontological sense. It is beyond good and evil, beyond social morality, and thus it remains beyond the reaches of the established Reality Principle, which this Eros refuses and explodes (77).

This function, however, ends with the advent of industrial society, in which the original two dimensional society merges to become an one dimensional society. Similar to Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse critiques the technological rationality of industrial society, which, on one hand, through commodity fetishism reduces art to a reified, quantifiable thing. For example, although Plato, Hegel, Marx and Freud are now recognized as “classics”, through such realization they “come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth” (64). On the other hand, through its sexual liberation and “desublimation”, one dimensional society lets the Pleasure Principle absorb the Reality Principle to create a single, de-eroticized dimension (72). Technological reality and affluence ensures revokes the individual’s need to reject reality; but along with this revocation an individual also loses his critical capacity to rebel and to create the sublime through sublimated eroticism. Instead, he is “being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered” (74). The society, then, undergoes an institutionalized desublimation that allows a shallow Happy Consciousness to prevail through technological rationality (79).

However, I am rather skeptical about Marcuse’s particular application of Freud to social criticism. It seems that he forgets an important aspect of technological rationality: even though it might be one dimensional and desublimated, it is acceptable and useful to all organisms of the society. Marcuse praises cultural heroes and their great works of sublimation in preindustrial society; but how many people truly had the ability and capacity to achieve such Great Refusal? Such an act was reserved only for the elite and the privileged, whom, through education or other means, had enough agency to reject the filth of social reality that haunted the lives of the majority of the people. It is true that in a one-dimensional society works of refusal are now reduced to “classics”; but at least “classics” allow access, and access can shape the initial response that may eventually be called critical. Thus, I find, at least the desublimation aspect of Marcuse’s work, too similar to related attempts by Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School. It loses touch with the masses and survives based on an ideal of the few, critically capable elites and trained, disciplined artists. Despite its Marxist origin; it does not appeal to the general public.

15 IV 2008

Howard Brick describes in his chapter on contradictions of the “affluent society” the origin of a new sociopolitical debate in the 1960s: the problem of “affluence”. Brick suggests that the publication of Galbraith’s book the Affluent Society in 1958 steered American politics towards a new direction: based on an observation of economic condition that “the problem of economics []conquered” with a reliable production of good given sufficient demand, Galbraith calls for a closer examination into the composition of the economy in its social components (Brick, 2). In order to sustain the internal wellbeing of the structure, attention is called to distributive justice to push towards the limit of classical bourgeois economics (23). Hence, the implication of Galbraith’s work serves as an ideological foundation and explanation of civil rights, student movement, and social programs against poverty in 1960s. Brick suggests that perhaps this ideology itself was out of tune with “the standard of a capitalist society” through the various social programs that it invoked calling for redistribution of economic resources; however, the result of the decade demonstrate that “in the end, the established forms of wealth and power went largely undisturbed” (23). This contradiction seems to suggest something unique of liberal thought in America. At once it needs to establish a faith “in the gradual victory of social principles over private prerogatives”, but because the tradition is rooted and dependent on a capitalist, “affluent” society, it can never accomplish the faith that it holds. Perhaps this is the very irony of American liberalism itself: its economic foundation is based on a bourgeois society deeply rooted in the capitalist tradition, but its political aspiration calls for it to reach for something that is foreign to its roots. It is stuck in a limbo that can neither venture too far ahead to declare itself communist to abolish its own economic roots nor fall too much behind its ideological faith. To this effect, then, although programs were initiated and understanding expanded with liberal institutions, the actual socioeconomic structure remains the same, while the power-elites, conservative or liberal, still maintain control.

A case study of the liberal aspiration inspired by Galbraith’s work is America’s struggle against poverty in 1960s. Michael Harrington writes in the Other America in 1962 to bring into light the invisible part of America under poverty, supposedly covering 40-50 million people. Following Galbraith’s analysis, Harrington acknowledges that in an affluent society, the problem of production ceases with American life changing along with it: the city is transformed, people’s clothing improved (4-5). Harrington argues, however, that this appearance of affluence is exactly the problem: it hides the poor from been seen—they are now invisible, living in different apartments and with new clothes, but still economically, psychologically, and socially beaten by poverty. However, Harrington argues against Galbraith’s point to characterize those suffering from “insular poverty”: large segment of American population lacking training and unable to receive the benefits of social welfare (12). These people are left behind; while the society they live in transforms, they are left without even the comfort of their old jobs. Harrington sees poverty as a culture that forms a sense of “wholeness” that haunts the psychological wellbeing and social condition of the poor (168). Social welfare system, overlooking this problem as a whole, fails to reach out to the impoverished and becomes, at worst, “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor” (170). Therefore, Harrington believes that the only solution is direct action from the federal government; free from the political peculiarity of local governments, Washington alone can create a program of national scale and centralized planning to abolish poverty as a whole (181). However, the liberal aspiration of Harrington only meets the political reality of Sargent Shriver’s (and LBJ’s) failure in the War on Poverty. Despite initial goodwill and scope of ambition, the program failed because it could not escape the structural foundation of American sociopolitical enterprise. Party politics and emphasis on the Vietnam War for reasons economic or ideological meant that the program on poverty was at best a token gesture of the American liberals. The fundamental characteristics of the American sociopolitical structure—that it was capitalist rather than communist (hence the war on Vietnam for containment), bourgeois-parliamentarian rather than proletariat-authoritarian—suggest that the war on poverty by the federal government could only carry thus far. For better or worse America stayed true to its capitalist basis—and, out of its liberal faith it initiated worthy programs that left the “the established forms of wealth and power [] largely undisturbed”.

9 IV 2008

In Walker Percy’s Moviegoer, the protagonist, Binx Bolling, goes through a process which he calls “the search” as a means out from a state of alienation from his surroundings and the prevalent culture. The content of the “search” has heavy existentialist themes: it is meant to bring a totalizing notion of existence against mere categories that define one to be either religious or irreligious. At one point Bolling protests in annoyance that statistics show 98% of all people in his time and place believe in god while only 2% are atheists or agnostics, leaving no place for those who are “searching”—this is a criticism against the social practice of reducing personal beliefs of great personal significance to a mere quantifiable, “objective” number that bears no connection to the individual (14). The society functions well in its institutions and its norms (i.e. White, elitist southern culture); hence the subject, in order to escape from this indifference, goes through the “search” to find authenticity. In this novel Bolling’s aunt serves as an example of social force that attempts to define and shape Bolling’s character—she wants him to go back to school and become a doctor just like his father, as Bolling is good with reading and analyzing books. But Bolling eventually rebel against this position: he states that he only means to read because his aunt has shaped him to do so rather than from his individual will.

The search, then, is meant for a change—“the search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life” (13). It has a totalizing effect—as Bolling states, “as you get deeper into the search, you unify…you understand more and more specimens by fewer and fewer formulae” (82). But does this search really bring about authenticity? Or does it “end in despair” like the movies which Bolling see as an attempt for such search? It is not convincing that the search can be any successful; instead, it only seems to bring a sense of liberation in close connection to death. Kate is suicidal, and Lonnie, the other person undergoing the search, dies at a mere age of 15. Perhaps the search does not bring a sense of liberation; Bolling states during the occasion of his thirtieth birthday the result of this search:

Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled alike a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire…nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral. My search has been abandoned (228).

In effect, then, Bolling’s search, too, ended in an impasse; facing a fragile Kate and a demanding aunt, he gives in; he ends Kate’s search, too, by bringing her away from constant thoughts of suicide. He stops going to the movie by himself and becomes, so to speak, a normal person that conforms. Yet I must question: does he become better off after such search only to realize the despair of conformity? I am rather doubtful that the search is any more fruitful than other types of contemplation, religious or not. It only reminds one of the malaise, the sickness, and the death-instinct of life—yet one cannot truly face such notions all the time. So with the search, one is forced to face a gloomy reality at once cannot accept so; in the end he is stuck in an impasse of despair—perhaps with more knowledge, but only knowledge of one’s inability and despair.

1 IV 2008

At a first glance, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man reminds me of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, as both depicts characters who see themselves as outcasts —the narrator from the former as an “invisible man” and the underground man from the latter as a superfluous man. Symbolically, narrator of the Invisible Man lives in a basement that he calls the “hole” in Harlem to characterize his submerged existence. Yet at the same time the narrator is different from Dostoevsky’s underground man, who has “submerged” to the existence of an outcast because he refuses to comply with the progressive ideal of his time and voluntarily chooses such a state out of resignation—he is invisible, underground in the hole only because the social structure of his time does not allow visibility, only “because people refuse to see [him]” (3). Hence, while Dostoevsky’s underground man stays underground permanently, Ellison’s invisible man does so only temporarily in anticipation for future change. To this effect, then, the invisible man contemplates on the difference between formlessness and invisibility to strongly esteem the value of the former. The two are not to be confused: to the narrator “form” constitutes his concrete existence, while invisibility describes his social condition. The latter contributes to the narrator’s esteem of his form—that is to say, the social condition which denies the narrator a perceivable and stable social identity forces him to focus on his personal identity, whose darkness urges him to seek more “light” (7). But inversely, this also suggests that the narrator deeply fears formlessness; as a man whose social condition is denied a functional identity, how much can he hope for personal identity?

However, I think it is exactly this separation between form and visibility that denies the narrator a final triumph from his invisibility; he merely comprehends his social status of invisibility and uses it to realize of his personal existence, i.e. form, but cannot transcend beyond this given condition. Because the narrator understands too well others’ inability to truly perceive his identity, he becomes trapped by the very idea of invisibility—he complies with invisibility so that he can affirm his role as an invisible man. Hence, through his experience as a high school graduate, a college student, a worker, a member of the brotherhood, the narrator allows himself to be perceived by others but not in depth to remain invisible. But he realizes the danger of this approach through his encounter with Rinehart. Rinehart is at once a pimp, a bookie, and a preacher who directly approaches the problem of invisibility. Yet the character remains distant and mysterious; he is known only through reputation and does not make an appearance. In this effect Rinehart is not only invisible, but also formless to the narrator. However, the narrator ultimately denies Rinehart’s invisibility because the combination of formlessness and invisibility suggests, in addition to self-understanding and complexity, in-authenticity and manipulation. The narrator chooses a different path to accept invisibility without rejecting form: he values personal complexity without losing his authenticity.

But does this realization truly create an identity for the narrator? Does he not become yet another underground man? Ellison suggests that this stage is only temporary—

In going underground, I whipped it all except the mind, the mind. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge (581).

The solution to the problem is individualistic. The underground only designate the period in which a clear sense of the self is being formed from its self-realization of forms—emancipation from the social visibility that haunts it. Like the French existentialist, Ellison seems to suggest that authenticity defines existence. However, I think that something is missing here: how does the invisible man truly differ from the underground man other than a slightly more positive outlook on life and identity? This compromise of an existence in invisibility only suggests a separation between social reality and individual reality. Or, more abstractly, thought and action. Although form can still be perceived through mind; it is still invisible. I do not think that the narrator can truly achieve a concrete identity as a mere individual. Praxis and social liberation must come as a consequence to unite form and visibility.

18 III 2008

An interesting observation that Louis Hartz in his Liberal Tradition in America that shares with Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” is liberalism’s capacity for absolutism. Hartz notes that the American form of liberal absolutism lies with the mentality of “self-evident truth”, a fundamental basis of the 1776 revolution. Echoing Tocqueville, Hartz points out that American liberalism has never undergone a revolution in the European sense; it does not need to free itself from a preexisting order, manifested economically in feudal structure and politically in authoritarian monarchism (35). Hence, while the Europeans created the enlightenment project out of dialectical necessity against intolerance of its time and have their liberalism always a notion whose every advance is made through antithesis and synthesis from a conservative other, Americans need not face such ghost: its adaptation of enlightenment ideal in the form of the Lokean natural law is wholesale and natural, while the advance of liberalism faces no real conservative forces for its own self-reflection (58). Because America lacks a Hume-like figure to attack on natural law, it becomes indeed “self-evident”, the absolutist language in describing a set of beliefs forced onto an entire people. Hence, as Hartz states the mood of America’s absolutism is “the sober faith that its norms are self-evident”—and, with neither a critical tradition in dialectics and an economic-political need to do so, “the American absolutism, flowing from an honest experience with universality, lacked even the passion that doubt might give… it was so sure of itself that it hardly needed to become articulate, so secure that it could actually support a pragmatism which seemed on the surface to belie it” (58-59). Thus, a set of belief characterized as liberalism, ironically, is itself capable of oppression if it fails to examine the very root of its origins, and impose its ideology as an unconditionally accepted norm for an entire people—as Hartz puts it, “America’s experience of being born equal has put it in a strange relationship to the rest of the world” (66).

The absolutist tendency evident in Hartz’s characterization of American liberal tradition resembles Berlin’s criticism against the notion of positive freedom. Berlin distinguishes positive freedom from negative freedom, “a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated”, to categorize it as something that “derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master” (19, 22). This desire, however, is itself capable of oppression because the metaphor of self-mastery requires the distinction between lower and “real” self (23). Such distinction urges one to realize his own “real” self, and then from there, assign himself the role of a crusader who attempts to “free” others (24). By attributing reality to oneself through positive freedom, one gains a moral advantage even in coercion, for one claims that he knows better than others what others need, and that “they would not resist [him if they were rational and as wise as [he and understood their interests as [he does]” (24). The very liberal task of liberation, then, is itself capable of the worst kind of oppression. Hartz’s description of absolutist element in American liberalism reflects exactly this error of positive freedom: the enlightenment minded liberals, epitomized by well-versed Lokean Jefferson, acts and thinks for the entire American colonies that the freedoms they uphold are “self-evident” by nature. In this process, Locke’s particular endorsement of the natural law becomes a natural ideology beyond criticism; and, as the worst form of absolutism, it dominates man’s thought and welcomes no critique of its fundamental premises.

Although Hartz’s explanation of absolutist tendency in American liberalism describes the condition of American thought in its inception, it can be used to further analyze many distinctive American tendencies to reveal a distinctly American character. The red scare of Senator McCarthy, for example, clearly demonstrates this point: the notion of freedom and democracy should seem so “self-evident” that its opposite should be shunned and condemned as “un-American” betrayal. But perhaps we can find the traces of this absolutism-liberalism dialectics in the most profound American concerns in the period: the notion of autonomy and concerns of humanistic psychology—conformism is clearly a problem against the liberal tradition so that, “self-evidently”, everyone should have a normative autonomy in his mindset, or find a most suitable way to be himself. We must not forget, then, the very root of Berlin’s positive freedom is no different: the desire to be his own master. In each of these tendencies, the absolutist tendency in liberalism is latent, ready to manifest itself unless we always examine liberalism and its origins from a critical, dialectical perspective.