Kasama

The following interview with Bill Martin was conducted for the journal of contemporary culture, Reconstruction 8.1, over email from Dec. 2007 through Feb. 2008. It took place before Bill’s break with the RCP. 

“The role of the engaged intellectual (whatever model one wants to pursue), and for that matter of the protestor and the activist has been increasingly neutralized, in ways that most of these folks have not taken much account of – quite possibly in most cases for the reason that the whole thing is incredibly frustrating.”

“What is the opposite of bullshit?”
Possibilities of intellectual engagement, since Sartre:
An interview with Bill Martin / by J. G. Ramsey

<1> J. Ramsey: What do you see as the role and responsibilities of left public intellectuals today?

<2> Bill Martin: First, let’s try to understand the question and the fields that need to be defined. The things we have attempted to do before, as engaged intellectuals, are to speak out where and when that is possible, to express solidarity, to sign our names when that seems as if it would be helpful, to give money when we can and because those of us with university positions are relatively privileged, and perhaps at times to place ourselves in harm’s way, because this is sometimes the right thing to do and because some of us might have a certain status in society that might make other people notice the cause we are supporting and that might make us less vulnerable to attacks that people who do not have this status might not be able to endure. I would say two things about all of the foregoing. First, it seems that we do not have a lot of choice but to continue doing these sorts of things. Second, all the same, I think these sorts of things have less and less meaning and force as we go ever more deeply into this time of postmodern imperialism. The role of the engaged intellectual (whatever model one wants to pursue), and for that matter of the protestor and the activist has been increasingly neutralized, in ways that most of these folks have not taken much account of – quite possibly in most cases for the reason that the whole thing is incredibly frustrating.

<3> Let us add to this that, for much of the left, a good deal of which might be called the “so-called left,” and even for many of those who are truly radical or revolutionary, the “intellectual” only has to do with the “standing” or status or cache of the person, and not with the actual intellectual work. Much the same could be said about the engaged artist, where the actual art is not understood to be any kind of contribution – it is not a matter for understanding in the first place. Obviously I am expressing a certain frustration here, but it is rooted in the reality that, if the only thing the left cares about with the intellectual is her or his standing, then this is easily undercut in a society in which intellectuals have no standing, at least not as such – as opposed to someone who might get a decent paycheck. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about my paycheck, I feel quite privileged (especially as someone who didn’t really have a paycheck until I was almost thirty-five years old, which was also when I first had medical insurance as an adult), but most of our paychecks aren’t that impressive to people, and there are many truck drivers and plumbers and whatnot who make just as much as professors do.

<4> In the Marxist tradition specifically, or at least Marxism that is connected to the attempt to “make revolution” (as we used to say and that I still like to say), there is very little respect for the fact that, to really be an intellectual, you have to “do your homework.” This should seem bizarre in the midst of a tradition (or set of traditions) that had as its founder someone who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, who read and spoke many languages, who brought both a tremendous depth and a tremendous breadth of learning to his masterwork, Capital, and who even set out, in later life, to understand and explain the supposed mysteries of the mathematical calculus. Unfortunately, Lenin’s distinction between the philosophical revolutionary (himself) and the revolutionary philosopher (Marx and Engels), along with relatively crude designations of certain schemes of thought as “materialist” and others as “idealist” (and ignoring the spirit of Lenin’s own remark that it is better to have a good idealism than a bad materialism), has been used to set aside the sense that we need any of the latter, revolutionary philosophy (or even any philosophy where we do not see the immediate and direct “application to practice”), at least not since Marx. For these folks, Marx helpfully ended philosophy, when of course it is also the case, for these folks, that philosophy never started. Can one end what one never started? Can one set aside what one never took up in the first place? So, again, I am expressing some deep frustrations, made even deeper by the fact that these questions have been around so long now that they have been rendered moot.

<5> Two quick side notes here. First, despite what I just said, it would still be worthwhile to revisit some of the key moments in this basic denigration of “revolutionary philosophy” that doesn’t appear immediately useful – and is therefore useless and worse – to the increasingly non-philosophical revolutionaries (or “supposed revolutionaries,” I think it becomes at some point). Lukács wrote History and Class Consciousness in order to capture, philosophically, the meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution. Apart from whether he adequately achieved his aim, or whether his understanding veered off at some points into “idealism” (for my part, for what it’s worth, I’ll state the opposite perspective, that this was a brilliant work, and that the kind of talk concerning “idealism” heard from some Bolshevik commentators was just bullshit), why was the first reaction from certain leading Bolsheviks to simply immediately throw this book into the trash and be done with it forever? It would have been one thing if some of these leaders, many of whom were highly educated, had said, “thank you, comrade Gyorgy, we look forward to studying your book when things settle down a little bit.” Instead, they couldn’t get the book into the wastebin quickly enough, and they couldn’t whip out the standard epithets quickly enough. What is interesting is that, after Lenin’s passing, the top leaders found the time to engage in a battle of interpretations over the meaning of the October Revolution, but who needs the work of some philosopher at this point? I think it would be worth risking the opposite perspective, that history might have gone quite differently if these leaders in 1924 were the sort of people who would have grappled with History and Class Consciousness – which is not to say agreed with it at every point or even in its basic orientation, but instead the sort of people who would have wanted to engage with the book. Perhaps it is worth adding that this group included not only those one might expect it to, such as Stalin and Zinoviev (as I understand it, it was the latter who directly told Lukács that his philosophical efforts were not needed, and I don’t know how far the discussion went beyond that) but also Trotsky. To pose the question sharply, we should wonder if the needs of revolutionary leadership and even day-to-day administration, and struggle under very difficult circumstances, also require outright philistinism as regards intellectual work.

<6> If the pattern had not been set already, it was certainly set then, that there was no further need for philosophy, even Marxist or even “dialectical materialist” philosophy. We want your money, your “support,” sometimes even your activism, but as for your work we hate it and hope to burn it at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps existing revolutionary movements could learn something by going back into this history, though frankly I’m not hopeful.

<7> Second, certain cases in the last few years where intellectuals have touched a nerve and sparked strong opposition and repression from the powers-that-be are also worth studying – perhaps my claim that, for the most part, the question of the engaged intellectual has been rendered moot goes much too far. Certainly these cases are in the shadow of 9/11 and its aftermath, including the elements of fascism that have modified postmodern capitalism somewhat, and where there are new declarations that some ideas are dangerous and need to be actively suppressed. Now, I would say that these modifications themselves proceed in a postmodern way, the most salient feature of which is that they for the most part do not play the role of politicizing the broad masses. So, for example, one of the headings under which Ward Churchill is attacked at the University of Colorado is that the taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay the salary of someone who is challenging the official line on 9/11 or even simply raising questions about this line. This is in the context of the supposed question, “Why do they hate us?”, where this is not really a “question,” because there is no interest in the answers, which are abundantly clear and available to anyone who actually cared to be awake to the world just a little bit. This, too, is more than obvious to anyone who is reading this interview, but it helps to set the context in which it has become somewhat dangerous, and therefore once again somewhat meaningful, for intellectuals to raise certain questions and issues. Again, my point is that even this context is shaped by postmodernism, so that what comes of the “controversy” isn’t a more developed discussion of “chickens that come home to roost” and the sorts of complicities that American imperialism creates in its citizens, but instead, “why are we paying this guy?” and “why do these people have jobs for life, anyway” and “why am I paying good money to send my kid to college to hear this stuff?” And not, of course, “why am I paying good money to help this university run farm systems for the NFL and NBA?” No, it would be unpatriotic to ask this question, which goes to the problem of what “citizenship” means in a postmodern society – the point being that it doesn’t mean much of anything.

<8> But I also wanted to look at the case of Norman G. Finkelstein at DePaul University, which happens to be my own university. Professor Finkelstein was certainly in the public view, as much as any intellectual in the last little while, and he touched a nerve and his activity was suppressed. What are the lessons of this case concerning public intellectual activity? Without wanting to make this “about me,” I have had occasion to think that it would seem that I have said and done things at least as radical as what Norman Finkelstein has said and done, and yet I am a tenured, full professor. There were a few attacks on me, and certainly I had a period of about three years, before I had tenure, where things were very difficult, but this did not seem, in the end, to really go beyond me and the department chair at the time, and the other attacks were rebuffed in a fairly easy way. I truly was miserable and even despondent, at times even suicidal, during those three years (to put it simply, I felt that I was spending all of my time fending off stupid bullshit that was rendering my life meaningless), but in the end it turned out that my tenure was never seriously in doubt. This fact probably influenced me too much in the lead-up to the Finkelstein tenure decision; I thought that, in the end, the administration would recognize that there was no way they could deny tenure to Finkelstein, that his academic record was too strong and it would be overwhelmingly clear that, if he was fired, this was for purely political reasons.

<9> So, what are the differences, why was Finkelstein fired, while I am a tenured professor at the highest academic rank? After all, before I had tenure, when I was only in my second and third years at DePaul, I had taken public stands in support of the Communist Party of Peru and its insurgency against the Peruvian government and the foreign imperialists that exploit that country. In the fall of 1992 I had even gone to Lima to try to help with the effort to prevent the Peruvian government from being able to summarily execute the captured leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzman. Along with my five companions from various parts of the world, I was arrested, detained, and deported. I might add that, in joining with this mission to Lima, the question “What would Sartre have done?” was certainly on my mind, and I would even say that my Sartrean sensibility was strong in me to the point where it was not a difficult decision to make, to volunteer for this mission.

<10> Now, this touched some nerves, but never anything on the scale as with Norman Finkelstein. The fact that I had been tenured and promoted on the usual schedule confirmed to me that DePaul was a remarkable place – I was fully aware that things would not have gone the same at most other colleges or universities, and that at many of them I would have been ridden out of town on a rail. Furthermore, some of the very same administrators who had been supportive of me in the period after I came back from Peru and when I went up for tenure three years later, were central to the decision against Finkelstein. There are two differences in our cases. The first of these I would put forward more as a hypothesis, namely that people are hesitant to deal with questions of overall, systemic change, especially if it gets into the R-word (revolution) and perhaps even more the O-word (overthrow). And one can understand this hesitation on many levels, and I am not saying that it is simply or only cowardice to avoid these terms or this perspective. Furthermore, the media quite studiously avoids giving any publicity to the idea that anyone is thinking about these things or, especially, trying to do anything about them in a way that is connected to forms of organization that others might think about supporting or joining. So, while there was a good article about my whole sojourn in a local, free newspaper (The Chicago Reader), the only coverage in the rest of the Chicago or other media just focused on the fact that a professor was arrested in a foreign country.

<11> But I would say this was a secondary difference with Finkelstein, and that the key difference, the real reason why our cases worked out so differently can be summed up in one word, namely “Israel”. Israel is the difference, though we then have to look at related factors that did more of the actual dirty work, namely the Israel lobby in the United States, the pact between the U.S. Government and the government of Israel, and specific nefarious actors such as Alan Dershowitz and David Horowitz. Although I am sure that some of the key actors against Finkelstein at DePaul are ideologically opposed to Finkelstein, and that whatever else they said about his record was in that context, in the end I have come to the conclusion that the forces arrayed against Finkelstein while he was at DePaul, and therefore I would say the forces arrayed against DePaul itself, are bigger and more powerful than the institution itself.

<12> There was a big conference (or forum) held at the University of Chicago back in November [2007], on the subject of “academic freedom at DePaul,” about which I feel very ambivalent. This was held at the Rockefeller Chapel, a setting that has its own set of strange resonances, and there were perhaps 1800 people there at some points during the day. Undoubtedly many attended as much for the speakers, who included Noam Chomsky, as for the subject discussed. I found it difficult to bear, the large screen behind the speaker’s table, with the large words “Academic Freedom at DePaul University” on it (though I should mention that the conference itself was set up by DePaul undergraduate students, and they did a brilliant job) – this at a school, the University of Chicago, that otherwise is completely unaware of other universities in the city of Chicago, including DePaul, so that it seems they have only taken momentary notice of DePaul to tell us how insignificant we are. The fact that this was a lively intellectual scene, with a point of real concern, and with excellent speakers who made excellent arguments, was counterbalanced by the fact that none of this was going to have any effect on the Finkelstein decision at DePaul, and probably not on the related decision concerning Mehrene Larudee, either. Two of the speakers, one from the University of Chicago, the other from Columbia, referred, though perhaps in an oblique way, to the forces arrayed against Finkelstein and the inability of DePaul to stand up to these forces. Perhaps, they both said, this was because DePaul is a “small” school. What they could have said instead, and should have said, is that DePaul is not a rich school, like theirs. Because, of course, DePaul is not “small,” it is the largest Catholic university in the United States, and I assume it has far more students than either the U. of C. or Columbia. The speakers claimed, and they might be right in a certain sense, that nothing like the repression of Norman Finkelstein has occurred at their schools. But I’m not sure about this, because in fact these schools never hired Norman Finkelstein in the first place, nor have they hired him now that he has been fired from DePaul. When John Mearsheimer from the U. of C. said that Norman Finkelstein had, in his view, certainly done enough scholarly work to receive tenure at DePaul, again, he was saying something that is completely true and yet it also made me wince and think, “okay, here we go …”

<13> There’s a lot more to be said about this case and the particular scene of this conference, perhaps especially as concerns the role of the Catholic Church in all of this, but let’s get back to the main point. In some sense, the Israel lobby and Alan Dershowitz made Norman Finkelstein into more of a public intellectual, at least for a period, than he might have been otherwise. You could see this as a boneheaded strategy on their part, in that they violated the usual rule about intellectuals who are making deep criticisms and presenting alternatives, by giving so much publicity to Finkelstein. On the other hand, you could interpret this case as having to do with the only possibility for being a public intellectual in this society any more, namely in the case that a nerve is touched. In the Ward Churchill case, the “nerve” is very specific to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. In the Norman Finkelstein case the nerve again has its specificity, namely that singular phenomenon, the State of Israel. This is not my assertion; the State of Israel regards itself as singular, as having a sovereignty unlike that of any other nation state. What bears further analysis is the violent and yet also “theoretical” assertion (in theory and practice through a practical alliance of fascistic Christian fundamentalist forces and neo-conservatives) of the unconditional sovereignty of the United States in the post-September 11 period, and the way this is intermingled with the longstanding mythology of the unconditional sovereignty of the State of Israel. But what I am saying as regards the specific question of the public intellectual is that these are very particular conditions in which a nerve is touched and a set of intellectual questions (including academic freedom and the freedom of inquiry more generally) comes more into the public view – only for the purpose, however, of allowing powerful forces to exert themselves, forces quite a bit more powerful than DePaul University itself. In fact, I would even go so far as to ask if the viability of the University itself was on the line in this case, and in any case I can imagine that the pressures on the University, especially on its president, were enormous, including financial pressures having to do with tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps the University of Chicago and Columbia University can sneeze at this sort of pressure (though, again, how many “Finkelsteins” do they have?), but DePaul certainly cannot.

<14> Speaking of comparative pressures, I am still thinking about the fact that DePaul was the first Catholic university in the United States (and at this stage I assume it is still the only one) to have a Queer Studies program. This, I am sure, was not the most pleasing thing for many Catholics and for many in the Church hierarchy both nationally and internationally. I have no idea of what the discussions were in terms of the hierarchy, and perhaps there weren’t any, I really don’t know. Obviously, Queer Studies is a perfectly legitimate field of inquiry, but still it is interesting that no nerve was touched in the formation of this program (it was a news story nationally in some venues, and Jay Leno had a joke about it in his monologue) at the largest Catholic University in the U.S. (so that, in this at least, we are not “small”), or at least it can be said that this was nothing like the uproar, mainly initiated from outside of the university, around the Finkelstein case. So, again, I would say this instance of touching a nerve occurred in circumstances that can be defined narrowly.

<15> Even so, who has heard of Finkelstein? Perhaps more have heard of Chomsky, but what do they know about what he is saying, other than that he is someone out there saying something, perhaps something controversial? This hasn’t come up before now, but this might be the place to mention that I divide my time between Chicago, where I live when school is in session, and a town of about fifty-thousand people in the middle of Kansas. Although I sometimes wish for more intellectual stimulation in our small city, I also feel privileged to be around many people here who do not have the class background or pretensions or sense of entitlement one often finds in academia. In particular I have a group of friends I ride bikes with and play chess with (they are different groups, actually), and I do often depend on them for a sense of perspectives outside of the intellectual and academic worlds. Now, one of my bike buddies is somewhat connected to the intellectual world – he’s a journalist who edits the Land Report, which is the quarterly journal of the Land Institute. So he had a heard a little bit about the Finkelstein case, and has some sense of the context – of course he hears a lot more about it from me, as we ride fifty or sixty miles around the Kansas countryside. As for most of my other friends in Salina, Kansas (my non-Land Institute friends, I guess I should say), they aren’t aware of this stuff at all, and this even includes a couple of my chess buddies who seem to get a lot of their information from the Fox News Channel. All I am getting at is that I don’t know what it means to be a “public intellectual” if there is no larger public for intellectuals, and if the term “intellectual” has either been given an overwhelmingly negative resonance, or if the term has been rendered fundamentally meaningless as far as most people are concerned.

<16> We need to investigate further the idea that there is no real “public” in our society because there is no sense of “citizenship” or of being a “citizen” that has much meaning in our society. This was already true in our pre-September 11 society, it was already the case that the category of citizen had largely been replaced by that of “consumer” (as Fredric Jameson argued in Postmodernism), but it bears examination that, if anything, this notion that has been even further deepened (again an example of the paradoxical deepening of superficiality) in the post-September 11 world, where we have a seemingly unending war in motion and yet the highest patriotic duty is to consume, and Americans are barely aware that there is a war, other than that, more recently, they are “tired of it.” Their tiredness is not very political (if at all), it’s more like that of a kid who is tired of one video game and wants to try another.
<17> Was there a movie back in the day called, Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? There’s something there that is expressive of an idea such as Marcuse’s “great refusal.” Although I think that many of Marcuse’s ideas remain quite relevant (and again speaking of engaged intellectuals who might be compared with Sartre), this is a good example of where we see the effectiveness of the strategies of an imperialism gone postmodern. I would also go back once again to Mark Crispin Miller’s superb book, Boxed-In, which is about the “culture of television,” which is to say what increasingly counts for culture and what happens to culture in the age of pervasive television. This has even gone through several leaps since the publication of the book in 1988, with not only the development of “ambient TV” (where everywhere you go there is TV, like in the student center of a university or the mall-style food courts that are now in some high schools, or in the dentist’s office while you get your teeth cleaned, or in the check-out line in the grocery store, or increasingly in motor vehicles), but also of course the little one and a half inch squares upon which young people spend most of their time fixated (which drives me crazy in general and which makes life as a cyclist very dangerous in particular). One would think that, to be a public intellectual in this “culture,” one would need to get in there and be one of the talking heads, but I don’t think this works very well.

<18> In addition to asking ourselves what it means when the “public square” has become the rectangular screen, there is also the fact that the content of most television is not conducive to intellectual reflection or critical thinking. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not simply against television. But the main places where something “intellectual” might happen are with the dramatic series and some of the comedy series (especially the animated ones) that either do a good job of encouraging critical reflection or of providing sometimes very insightful and incisive satire. I am thinking of shows such as the X-Files, In the Heat of the Night (which is an interesting one because it was probably overlooked by most intellectuals, even those who would consider television in this critical way in the first place, because it had police officers and detectives as its main characters, and perhaps even more because it was set in the Deep South – but this show dealt with questions of race and class in a very sophisticated way, and the performances by Carroll O’Connor and Howard Rollins were often brilliant), and The West Wing, and of course The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Now, I do wonder how much of the subtlety in these programs is understood (on any level) by the “average viewer,” but I tend to think there is at least something there that is transmitted, and maybe one of the best things an engaged intellectual can do these days is to formalize some of the insights of these programs, in a “mass line” kind of way: in other words, “from the masses and back to the masses in a way such that theory could become a material force.” Doing this sort of thing is fun, of course, and I can discuss programs such as these endlessly (though I wish I had more people to discuss them with), but in the face of the overwhelmingly mind-numbing and –destroying character of much television, and of the passivity-encouraging character of the medium itself, one has to honestly wonder if one is simply spitting into the wind, or at best taking a pleasurable intellectual holiday. Still, I think this is worth trying, simply because it seems like at best we have a few vaguely-tenable strategies for intellectual work.

<19> But as for the talking head circuit, it’s hard to see anything good coming out of that, even if one manages to get onto one of these programs with Bill O’Reilly and the like. Perhaps it would be better if we just devoted ourselves to asking, in a loud and obnoxious tone, “Who the hell are these people?” I mean O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and similar characters – and that is what they are, characters, playing roles in a parody of a morality play. I suppose what I am saying is that we have to start challenging people to use their heads a bit more, to wake up and smell the bullshit. But then I suppose that does take us back to the more “classical” role of the engaged intellectual. I’ve been working some on dealing with “bullshit” as a technical term, as set out in Harry Frankfurt’s famous essay. I would add to this that perhaps one of the things that is needed to break through is something of a repeat of the Free Speech Movement, since certain vulgar terms seem irreplaceable when describing certain persons and situations – at least these terms might get someone’s attention and also then raise the point that there are deeper realities to struggle with than the fact that someone used a curse word. But then, unfortunately, it is also incumbent upon us to take political stock of something that Frankfurt says right at the beginning of his essay (and that he doesn’t really explore in a political or systemic way), namely that bullshit is pervasive. That by itself could be taken as emblematic of postmodern capitalism, at least if we explore the forms this pervasiveness takes, and the sources of this pervasiveness. So then, as a matter of grappling with the truth (and the theory of truth, which is part of what I am attempting to do in this recent work I’m doing), which might be called the “intellectual” part, and then “getting it out there” (which is the “engaged” part), we might ask a perfectly sound theoretical question, namely, what is the opposite of bullshit? How do we negate bullshit, in theory and practice? As for the models that we have for doing this, I don’t see that we have to decide on any one of them, it’s just better if all kinds of intellectuals are trying to do this from all kinds of perspectives and with all kinds of strategies.

<20> However, the “pervasiveness” problem extends beyond just the fact that there is no shortage of elements in the current system to attempt to negate (and neither should we hesitate to say loudly and repeatedly that the whole thing is bullshit). A threshold is crossed at some point where bullshit is so much the medium of anything that might be a more “public” form of expression that there is no longer any place from which to try to speak truth to power. That’s a dismal situation, not unrelated to Adorno’s “fully-administered society,” and also to what he called the “spell” that we are under in the age of the culture industry, except, if anything, this has gone even farther than Adorno anticipated. But, as they say, there it is, and we won’t get anywhere by ignoring it.

<21> Okay, I should get on to the next question, but there always seems to be something else to be said, and perhaps what I am doing with this idea of a negation of bullshit, which in this recent work I am calling by the name of “home truth,” is to some extent engaging in a strategic ignorance of the pervasiveness of bullshit, even a strategic naïveté, where I would still like to engage people as if we could discuss the state of the res publica, the public matters. Perhaps there is a strategic role for pretending that there is some sort of civic space out there, even if we know there isn’t, and perhaps the strategies of this pretending are what is left to us of intellectual engagement today.

<22> JR: You identify yourself in various writings as a radical philosopher, a Marxist, a Satrean, a Maoist – among several other things! Could you talk a little bit about your own intellectual and political development? What events, figures, or intellectual and cultural currents were formative for you critically and politically?

<23> BM: Yes, well, I probably have way too many “identifications,” but I can’t help it, perhaps it is a strategy for coping with the bad things in the world that I also allow myself to be fascinated by all of the many and varied interesting and beautiful and ethically and politically powerful phenomena out there. There’s so much going on, and I generally let myself experience as much of it as I can, even though I also recognize that there are limitations to this approach, one is continually in danger of being spread too thin. I do accept, even if not in an absolute way, the “scholar/theorist distinction,” and I am certainly on the side of theorist, even though I try to ground the more specific things I am saying in scholarship and I appreciate what the scholars do. (In fact, in general I think the theorists appreciate the scholars far more than the scholars appreciate the theorists, and this is a problem.) But, just to shift frames a little, I think King Crimson is great, I think the Kronos Quartet and the Arditti Quartet are great, I think the John Coltrane Quartet is great, and I don’t see why I wouldn’t listen to and learn from all of them. If anything it seems like this is a time where such a thing is not only possible but necessary – even if there are also moments where one might immerse oneself in just one thing and try to get the sense of that thing that a “proper scholar” would have. But for me – and I am not saying that everyone else should or could do it this way – there will always be that point where I back up and relate that more specific thing to the larger questions, meaning the traditional questions of the Western philosophical tradition (the true, the good, the beautiful, the human condition and the meaning of life – if there is any), and, even more (and what is for me the framework for continuing to develop these traditional questions), the project of understanding the world in order to change it, and even then that even deeper level of engagement where one joins in with efforts to indeed change the world.

<24> In Marxism, we need the sort of thing Paul de Man did with the critique of organicism, showing that a romantic sense of wholeness is achieved, at least in some significant part, through tropological strategies that operate on the level of rhetoric. At the same time, we need to grapple with the sense of ecological and social interconnectedness that we find in the work of figures such as Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. It may even be that the latter is the far more pressing task of the moment, even while I think it could also be disastrous if we rush headlong, in the name of practical exigencies, into a “new wholeness” while forgetting the work of deconstruction. Now, it may be that Derrida and Berry have little, if anything, to say to each other, indeed that’s almost certainly the case, but I think any Marxism or any radical social theory that will be worth a flip these days had better find a way to converse with and learn from both, and many others as well. So, perhaps my “eclectic” identifications are in part a matter of temperament, but there is some basis for opening theory to the world in this way as well, I hope. If one goes to the common etymological root of both theory and theater it could be said that there may be characters or events that are relatively minor, but that still play a crucial and ineliminable role in the unfolding of the drama.

<25> As for my own philosophical and political development, perhaps I’ve told a certain story to myself and about myself so often that now it has to be true, but the things that seem as if they were especially formative for me were a certain sense of Christianity that I received and even immersed myself in when I was quite young, really from at least the age of six and up through my high school years and beyond, and then of course “the sixties,” which I did not participate in directly, but which somehow touched me on some level, I don’t want to say “near the core,” but more in a way that was formative of the core. Looking back, perhaps I saw the figures and events that, for example went from civil rights and Martin Luther King, Jr., through Malcolm X, to Black Power, the Black Panther Party, and figures who were in the news such as Stokely Carmichael or Eldridge Cleaver in terms of Biblical prophets or the early Christian apostles, and the events themselves as being not only of “Biblical proportions” (when in fact some of the events were of far greater proportion than some Biblical events) but of having that Biblical sense of a drama unfolding, a struggle that may “win through,” and a struggle where, if it does not win through, the consequences will be truly and deeply tragic. I think there is a little bit of existentialist sense in the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, and that we can say that, in fact, since these Biblical times of the sixties we have indeed been living with the tragedy of the failed struggle to create meaning out of the meaninglessness that a capitalist world system gives us.

<26> All of that remains in some weird way both very much present to me and yet also in a sense irretrievably lost. I have said that, for some of us, the sixties (or even 1968, specifically, or even one month in 1968) seem like yesterday and yet also a million years ago. Unfortunately, and I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in saying this, I think we will be in a lot of trouble if we only remember 1968 “as if it were yesterday.” If we absolutely have to choose, it would probably be better if we just see the sixties as a “closed chapter,” even if a great one. The same dynamic is in play for Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution and Mao and the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution, though, for myself, I only learned more about these things later into the 1970s. Of course, for me, and perhaps this speaks to being a very young observer of the sixties (I turned fourteen in May 1970) rather than a participant (though some of this goes to periodization, and by 1972 or so I was actively attempting to add my voice to those who were trying to stop the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and Southeast Asia, as well as to other causes), it was just as much the music as anything, and especially everything that went from earlier Motown to the more “mature” work of Stevie Wonder (Talking Book, Innervisions, etc.), for instance, and from the early Beatles to the late Beatles, and those extraordinary bands of the late sixties, from the Jefferson Airplane to King Crimson. An appreciation of Bob Dylan came later for me, in the mid-seventies – I was aware of him, of course, but I didn’t really appreciate him, I was too caught up in the idea that he was a “good songwriter (but I was less interested in “song form” at that point) but a bad singer.” In connection with Blood on the Tracks and an essay by Allen Ginsberg, I came by about 1975 to think that Dylan was not only not a bad singer, but indeed one of the greatest singers, or at least at times he could be. But, again to go to the problem of periodization (in other words, when did “the sixties” really begin and end?), by 1972 I was also listening to John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and Beethoven and Stockhausen for that matter, influenced in this direction by the broad-minded rock musicians of the time who were also listening to them and trying to reflect that listening in their own music. And clearly that sort of dynamic influenced greatly the way I try to approach the world and theorizing about life, the universe, and everything. I would just call it by simple terms such as openness and connectivity – qualities in music, for example, that I came by the late seventies to associate with figures such as John Cage (discovering Cage when I was in college was a very important thing for me, and I still love Cage and will always love him) and Cecil Taylor, and, more recently, with figures such as Bjork and Jim O’Rourke. To be sure, this sense of openness and connectivity was also mixed up with and increasingly motivated by a sense of injustice and the world and the idea that something else is possible.

<27> Let me just say a little more about Christianity in concluding my response to this question – and I know that I have a bad habit of giving very long answers to short questions, this is probably an occupational hazard of being a philosopher, or perhaps it’s because I’m from South Carolina, and the expression “mouth of the South” does not exist without justification.

<28> First, for what reason I do not know, my sense of Christianity when I was growing up was in some sense heavily “Jewish.” I liked Moses and the prophets, and I saw Jesus and the early Christians in the context of their struggles. I was always repulsed, almost instinctively, though I’m sure in reality the Civil Rights Movement somehow influenced me on this, by the aryanization of Jesus, and the bizarre attempts to separate him from the Jewish people of his day. Of course I understand all of this in a more systematic and historically-informed way now, but even when I was seven or eight years old I knew there was something screwy about the people who would say that Jesus was not really Jewish or that “the Jews” had killed Jesus.

<29> Second, my relationship to Christianity was affected by some sense of social class, and undoubtedly this also relates to my rejection of the “cleaned-up,” respectable, white, upper middle-class Jesus. Now, I did in fact grow up in the middle class (more specifically, the “middle middle” class), and I grew up with many material advantages and opportunities and to some extent with a middle-class sense of entitlement. However, my parents were both from the working class, and indeed the lower working class (my paternal grandparents had been millworkers in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and my paternal step-grandfather in fact died of brown lung disease, while my “real” grandfather had died of tuberculosis when my own father was eight-years old). My father was the first person from either side of my family to go to college, and, even then, when he did go to college, it was to the Citadel, the military college of the South (in Charleston), and he majored in business, instead of history, which might have been his preference if he could have just gone on what was intellectually appealing to him. I guess I would say that I grew up in a middle-class milieu, but it was not the “solid” middle class, and my parents, for all that they might even have been almost desperate at times to really be in the middle class, did not have a background in middle-class culture to transmit to me or my siblings. I am very thankful for that, even if it also means that I never feel entirely comfortable in many academic settings (and quite uncomfortable in some of them – though in fact there are many who experience a similar anxiety or alienation or at least the sense that they will never really fit in). Growing up in Miami, Florida, especially with the sixties unfolding all around, I felt increasingly uncomfortable in the more solidly middle-class and upper-middle class Presbyterian churches my family belonged to. I still remember, from almost forty years ago, Sunday School lessons on how terrible were the Black militants and the student protestors and the women who would no longer accept their properly subordinate roles, how this was the decline of Western civilization, and I still remember thinking that the crew Jesus ran with looked a lot more like the rebels in the streets than like my very establishment-looking and Cadillac-driving Sunday School teacher. I also remember lessons the main point of which seemed to be that the most sacred things are private property and a supposedly natural hierarchical social order. My big “mistake” at this stage of things was actually reading the Bible, and taking it seriously, and what I read in the Acts of the Apostles didn’t square with these complacent (but also defensive) teachings from the establishment. I wonder if my understanding would have been different if I had come from a more solidly middle-class background, though clearly the generally rebellious atmosphere of the sixties probably played the larger role.

<30> Finally, my teenage years in Christianity came to a kind of abrupt conclusion, though I don’t know that this chapter in my life is entirely closed or if it will ever be. Clearly I still think about it a good deal, and none of my experience or rumination upon my experience has ever made me envy friends or acquaintances of mine who say things like “I never grew up with any of that stuff.” Perhaps, if nothing else, growing up with that stuff, at least in the way that I did (and, I’m sure, in different ways that others grew up with this religious stuff as well), gave me a sense of cosmic questions of life and death, and that the question of justice is this really deep and world-historical thing, and that the change that needs to come in this world involves in some sense the redemption of humankind. From the time I was about fourteen until I was a little more than seventeen (in fact I can say that it was until I was seventeen and about four months), I had hoped to become a minister. However, when I was sixteen I finally left the Presbyterian church that I found so “establishment” and smug, and also bland, and joined a Methodist church I had heard about, where the preachers were influenced by liberation theology, were militant opponents of the Vietnam War, were attempting to build a more racially-diverse congregation in what had been just another white, middle-class church, and who were just plain cool people. (The assistant pastor also had long hair, which thrilled me, in part because the length of my hair was always a heavy point of contention with my father, even until I was thirty-five years old, if you can imagine that.) Unfortunately, that church came apart over the anti-war activism of the pastors, and the pastors themselves were reassigned, somewhat put out to pasture – I guess there’s an irony there.

<31> It all happened one very hot morning at the end of the summer of 1973, when the ministers had been in Washington D.C. the week before, at a large anti-war march. They both preached against the war that morning, and the assistant pastor gave an especially fiery sermon where, at one point, he slammed his fist on the pulpit and said, “And goddamnit, they have to end that war!” You could have heard a pin drop, it was unreal. Within a few weeks of this everything at the church changed, and everything had changed for me, too, and I left the church. I still sort of believed in God for a little while after that, but that was it between me and organized religion. For a few months I went through some of the usual “Nietzschean” anti-religion stuff, the sort of thing that inspired a few Jethro Tull albums where one feels betrayed by God or the church or religion, that they didn’t deliver on their promises. But I was inspired by liberation theology in the eighties and I have come to think that there are certain epistemological questions, mainly the role of commitment in belief and the idea of believing in an undetermined and uncertain and even quite unlikely future, that are captured by at least some sense of a religious perspective. So, I keep grappling with Judaism and Christianity, and also I find some aspects of Buddhism intellectually interesting, even if I share Slavoj Zizek’s skepticism of (what he calls) “Western Buddhism.” And, to conclude this long answer, there is still a sense in which the dynamics of my work are governed by a complex multiplication of Christianity and the sixties, even if this is also filled out and made even more complicated by Kant, Marx, Sartre, Derrida, and many others.

<32> JR: In considering the topic of contemporary “public intellectuals” in relationship to your own work, what lessons do you think Sartre offers us today? (I’d like to come back to your views on Zizek later, a figure you have referred to as reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre in some respects.)

<33> BM: There is still a great deal to be understood from Sartre, I think, even if sometimes “with” him in a way that cuts “against” him, so to speak. Sartre’s model of the engaged intellectual evolved, for one thing, so there is no single model, there is just this very interesting philosopher who tried to lend his voice to the voices of oppressed peoples and to those who were taking on the imperialist social system. As his many detractors never fail to point out, he made many mistakes (though apparently in France there has grown up, around the so-called “New Philosophers” – most of whom weren’t any great shakes as intellectuals doing actual philosophical work – and figures such as Bernard Henri-Levy, the idea of “the thousand mistakes of Sartre,” and I think it is not nearly so many), but, on the other hand, we might wonder if there could even be a revolution if there were not revolutionaries who are willing to go out and “boldly screw up” from time to time. Obviously, there’s a point beyond which simply screwing up turns into something else, though unfortunately it is often not obvious where that point is, exactly.

<34> But in a way Sartre’s model was just that he put himself out there, as did Simone de Beauvoir and others of their circle. I suppose the real difficulty is that, in France in Sartre’s time, there seemed to be an “out there” in which to put oneself, and so we might not get as far in developing a model of the “public intellectual” that would work for the U.S. today by simply asking “What would Sartre do?” – even though I’m all for still asking this question. But, frankly, I do not really know what the alternative is, I think the system has done a good job of especially rendering the idea of a philosopher into something beyond meaningless – every person in this society who works in philosophy has the experience on a regular basis, sometimes every day, of answering the question, “What do you teach?”, only to simply have the word repeated back, in a way that seems just clueless. “Philosophy” – as if this is just a collection of simple sounds, some random syllables. It doesn’t help that there is a culture of know-nothingism that really doesn’t want to know what philosophy is, or what a philosopher does. It’s a dismal situation that I also associate with a certain “postmodern” turn in society, and it is interesting to reflect on a certain confluence here of right-wing fundamentalist Christian know-nothingism with a more hedonistic postmodern “there is nothing worth knowing” (except perhaps some things on the purely instrumental plane, directed toward having more fun) attitude. In either perspective there is nothing important about the world, and both expressions are fundamentally cynical.

<35> Just as I think that protests have largely been rendered ineffective (except perhaps when they really overflow the accepted bounds, as with Seattle in 1999), and yet I support the protestors and sometimes manage to get out on the street myself, I also still think radical intellectuals should “put themselves out there” as best we can. But clearly we are going to have to find another way, or perhaps another way will find us – though it helps to have intellectuals who are open to being found.

<36> On a somewhat different plane, there is still plenty of theoretical work to be done in Sartre’s philosophy, and in his more journalistic and polemical texts, and in his literary works (though I haven’t done anything with the latter, lacking sufficient proficiency with the French language and seeing others who are vastly more qualified on this score). Perhaps the biggest project that remains to be done in Sartre’s later philosophy is to bring together the framework of the Critique of Dialectical Reason with the writings and activism against colonialism. I’ve tried to contribute to this project a little bit, but it really needs to be the subject of a big, comprehensive book – I am encouraged that some of the students of Thomas Flynn (Emory) and Robert Bernasconi (Memphis) are taking up this question, and I wish them well in their endeavors. It still remains, even, to get a complete picture of the whole of Sartre’s project with the Critique, with an integration of the two volumes and the book-length “introduction” to the “Critique proper,” Search for a Method. The debate still continues, of course, over whether the second volume by itself is capable of integration. In addition, I would love to see an English translation of the series of dialogues that Sartre had with “Pierre Victor” (Benny Levy) and Philipe Gavi–named for Mao’s famous slogan of the Cultural Revolution, “It is right to rebel.” At least in the English-speaking world there has yet to be an extended discussion around this work. (As I understand it, there are some legal questions concerning the possibility of a translation, having to do with Sartre’s adopted daughter and literary executor, Arlette Elkaim. I wish these barriers could be surmounted.) [Editor's note: portions of these dialogues are now available in English and online at www.marxists.org, having been translated by Mitch Abidor in 2007.] Then, speaking of categorical imperatives such as Mao’s, I find it fascinating that there is not a big book on Kant and Sartre (at least in English). It seems to me that what Sartre said about the categorical imperative in “Existentialism is a humanism” can still function within the parameters of a broadly Kantian perspective – the fact that there is ambiguity and difficulty in weighing obligations that seem to have equal claims upon us does not cancel the fact that there are obligations. Furthermore, it seems to me that Sartre’s whole perspective on “ontological freedom,” and the idea that “in choosing myself I choose the world, and then I am responsible for this world, all of it and without end” exists fundamentally in the Kantian universe of discourse (as does Derrida’s quite similar sense of responsibility) – and that is a good thing. Lastly (but as you see, I have no trouble enumerating some rather large Sartrean projects, and I’m sure there are many others), it would be useful to have more engagement between Sartre and the ideas of structuralism, especially the ideas of Althusser and Levi-Strauss. There is more here than just some supposedly cut-and-dried “humanism/anti-humanism” debate, though I am of a mind to speak up a bit for humanism. It would also be good if the more recent debates in continental philosophy around Althusser, Deleuze, and Badiou were encouraged (I was going to say “forced”!) to recognize more the role of Sartre in setting certain problematics and continuing to contribute to their development.

<37> Could work on these themes in Sartre also reinvigorate a sense of engagement? I don’t know, but it couldn’t hurt. It couldn’t hurt to have more discussion of whether a Kantian term such as responsibility still has a meaning in the world today, and, if it does have any meaning, surely this is a matter of the effectivity of the term – or, as Derrida put it, “responsibility to responsibility,” and “a promise has to promise to be kept” – “through new, effective means of organization.”

<38> JR: How does a “Sartrean radical intellectual” differ from say, Foucault’s “specific intellectual” or other currently popular notions of “public intellectuals” in and around the U.S. academy?

<39> BM: The problem now, and you could say this is an unfortunate thing – I think it is, at any rate – is that the debate about the models of engaged intellectual activity, whether of Sartre or Foucault or Noam Chomsky or possibly even Slavoj Zizek (we can return to this last example) are surpassed by the question of what it means to be an intellectual in this society anymore. What’s interesting is that you get about as much respect from the “average person on the street” for being a writer and a thinker (in other words, next to none) as you do from ostensibly left or progressive movements (again, next to none). Now, there are exceptions, but it is also the case that, in the latter milieu, whatever respect one receives has more to do with whatever position one might have in this society, in terms of some sort of standing, than with the actual intellectual contributions one might be trying to make. Against the background of a society with a very low level of what deserves the name of “culture,” I don’t know that it matters that much which model for being a radical intellectual one follows – and at the same time I would add that I don’t know that it ever had to matter as much as some people might think it should. Why does there have to be just one model to follow in this any more than in most everything else? This kind of goes back to the days of the sort of orthodox Marxism that needs to decide on the one, true “proletarian style” in music or painting, whether that be folk music or cubism or “boy meets tractor” social realism. I’m more inclined toward letting a hundred flowers bloom, and not only because that is the way to find the “one, true” path, but because there are different things that need to be done and different things that are interesting, and maybe even just different things that different people have become good at doing. I doubt that Pete Townshend could play guitar the way John McLaughlin does, but that doesn’t mean that McLaughlin could have made the sorts of musical contributions that Townshend has, either.

<40> In that light, it is interesting to examine the model of Chomsky, whose is certainly engaged and certainly an intellectual, but who, in a way, is not an engaged intellectual – even while also being the most famous and influential “engaged intellectual” at work today, and I am certainly appreciative of all that he does. But what he mainly does is expose the machinations of U.S. imperialism – which is a very important thing to do – but under an Enlightenment model where “the truth will set you free.” Well, alright, that is one model, and it’s not that I want people who are following that model to give it up, and certainly it would seem silly in a time when everything is so wrapped in lies to be critical of those who are trying to get some truth out there.

<41> When I refer to a society with a low level of culture, I don’t mean this in a way that attempts to reinstate some “high/low” distinction. Just because perhaps as much as ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of rock music is crap (or at least not very good) doesn’t mean there isn’t some of it that is very good and even truly great and deserving of attention from anyone who cares about good music. What I am worried about at root is a society that is so infused with instrumental reason and is so bombarded with various elements of stupidification that there is no cultural curiosity. It’s one thing if young people don’t know yet about Beethoven or Coltrane or King Crimson, it’s another thing if people are brought up to not want to know. The same thing goes for philosophy, and indeed it is part of the same non-culture – in other words, a non-culture that beats down or never ignites curiosity and critical thinking, critical listening, critical appreciation for the creativity of others, and the desire to be creative oneself. What Adorno said about the culture industry and what Arendt said about banality may have been something of a strategic exaggeration in their day, but are very close to being truths with deep roots today – the irony being the idea of a structured superficiality with deep roots.

<42> Not to simply engage in an ad hominem attack, but it is interesting to consider that in the United States there is now a ruling class that is willing to put stupidity and vapidity out there as its cultural emblem. The ruling classes of Western Europe may not have liked the fact that Beethoven was writing anthems to universal humanity that threatened to burst beyond the narrow horizons of bourgeois right, but it would not have occurred to them (I don’t think, maybe I’m wrong – at least let’s put this out as a hypothesis, we can “workshop” it a bit) to simply undermine the very idea of having a culture if that culture seems to be a threat to them. But with someone such as George W. Bush you have an excellent emblem of someone with no culture, and who is proud of having no culture, and who helps tremendously to bolster the idea that it is fine to just be some stupid jerk. Of course this gets aligned with the “working man,” instead of being seen as a tremendous insult to working people, especially as Bush became president without having ever done an honest day’s work in his whole privileged and wasted life.

<43> Then the problem of the model (or models) for radical intellectuals becomes part of the larger question of how there can be a counter-culture when there is no culture to counter. Against such a background, we might think that Sartre and Foucault were closer in their engagements than at least Foucault would have thought back in the day. It would be worthwhile to revisit this question in terms of the relationship between their respective works in theory and their “practical engagements.” Again, I don’t know that I see such a big difference, at least in 20/20 hindsight. Sartre aimed to take on the “big questions,” to have big works on ontology, epistemology, and society, but then he never finished any of the big works. Being and Nothingness was to have a second volume on ethics and politics, which we have as Cahiers pour une moral, while the Critique never came completely together, either. Foucault at least finished his major works (or, in the case of History of Sexuality, he went a long way into the project), and while they might be understood as more “specific” than Sartre’s, the questions they deal with are certainly big enough. Maybe the difference was more that, when they took it to the streets, so to speak, Sartre was more of a big talker. Again, maybe it’s being from South Carolina that gives me more of an affinity for Sartre, who also was not from the center of French intellectual life. But Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, none of them were Parisians to begin with, either. (And we can add Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous to this list, for that matter.) More substantively, at least as far as intellectual matters go, the contrast might more properly be made with Chomsky. Sartre and Foucault, despite their large differences, perhaps captured well enough by saying that one was more Hegelian and the other more Nietzschean, were engaged in developing theories of society, and then in acting publicly on the basis of their understanding, which in both cases brought them up against the structures of existing society. Chomsky, on the other hand, does not really think we need social theory, but instead simply the exposure of the evils of the existing society, which then will help inspire people to go into motion against – again – the structures of the existing society. In terms of a model, the only reason I am more inclined toward Sartre is that I also like the big questions, and my sense of these questions is more influenced by German Idealism (though more Kant than Hegel) than by the Nietzschean form of the deconstruction of German Idealism (as opposed to the Marxist or Derridean forms, which I think still owe a larger debt to Kant), and then I want to connect the analysis of big questions to practice and activism. However, to conclude, on the one hand, I would be happy to have many more Sartres, Foucaults, and Chomskys in the world, I think they are all needed, and yet, on the other hand, I don’t really see any model that is adequate to what we are facing in the world today, which is a world where real intellectual work, at least in philosophy, social theory, or the humanities, has little standing.

<44> This avoids, for the moment, the question of organization and the role of political leaders who are also doing intellectual work (to some extent), and perhaps we can come back to this.

<45> JR: Some of this reminds me of Zizek’s comment (repeated in several places) that the dominant –and very troubling – sensibility among the U.S. public today is not so much ignorance as cynicism. As he puts it, paraphrasing and revising Marx, “They know what they are doing, and they are doing it!” What do you make of this position? As someone whose research is devoted to recovering the–suppressed, repressed – literary and political legacies of previous radical movements and moments, such as U.S. Communists during the 1930s – I often wonder about the degree to which anti-Communism and anti-radical discourse (over and above the general postmodern sapping of historical consciousness mapped by somebody like Jameson) is something like the linchpin of this cynicism. So that even those “radical liberals” who see the deep structural problems with capitalism and can sit through a Chomsky lecture nodding “yes, yes” still often hold this deep underlying suspicion of on the ground radical agitation and political organizing, a resistance to any sort of identification with the idea of a bold and positive revolutionary project as such. And of course there is the question of how people like Chomsky (and even another emerging figure like Naomi Klein) and even many other socialist groups relate to this, with frequent, and virtually uncontextualized references to the Gulag or the famine of the Great Leap Forward…

<46> BM: You’ve put a good deal on the table just now, and I think I’ll momentarily show you the flipside of my usual procedure of giving very long answers to short questions and instead move through the foregoing rather quickly – or I’ll try to do this, at any rate.

<47> Of course I agree completely with Zizek on this point. This isn’t a competition, but I might point out that I was already developing in my first book this argument about cynicism, rather than the standard jingoism, as the ideology embraced and promoted by postmodern capitalism. One important result of this is that, when there has been a certain return to outright jingoism in the wake of September 11, 2001, it is a markedly cynical jingoism. We can go one step further, too, and develop the questions of not only cynicism but also a kind of cynical, willful stupidity, in the post-9/11 context. There are new forms of this, which need to be understood, but there is also the rootedness of what I call “brain damage” especially in the Reagan period, which was really set up to be a negation of the sixties. In the book of discussions I did with Bob Avakian, he balked at the term “stupidity,” with very good reason I think, and instead offered the term “ignorance.” This is indeed dangerous territory, but, unfortunately, we are up against the problem that, if people have so internalized the injunction to not think about things that are going on in the world, and to especially not to try to grasp the interconnections, after awhile they just won’t even have the mental ability to do this even if they at some moment might have otherwise felt motivated to go into this direction. I realize this is very harsh, but I often have the feeling that there is a good deal of early-onset Alzheimer’s in this society. But one does have to wonder if the “brain damage” goes even beyond a kind of ideological training in being sure to never think, down even into the biology of the brain. I’m thinking of a study that was done a few years ago by the National Institutes of Health, and which was mentioned in all of the chess magazines (such as Chess Life and New in Chess), that showed that there has never known to have been a case of Alzheimer’s among grandmasters.

<48> This also takes us back into Mao’s amusing statement that the brain is a “muscle” for thinking, and that it has to be exercised. This is a pitiful state of affairs, for sure, and yet we also need to deal with it in an analytical way, and I don’t think it quite cuts it anymore to simply fall back on injunctions about how, yes, in their everyday lives, people are too busy or tired or whatever to think, but then, when the everyday routine breaks down, they will very quickly bust through all of that. Of course I don’t want to say that such breakthroughs are no longer possible, or that nothing can break through the culture of “affirmation” (in Marcuse’s sense) and “false negativity” (an essentially Adornian thesis, forwarded by Paul Piccone), but I don’t think we’ll get anywhere by ignoring these problems and trying to bluff our way past them with pure hype, either.

<49> In all honesty, it has to be added that there has been no shortage of chess masters who have gone nuts or who were (or are) otherwise quite dysfunctional as human beings. On the other hand, even these aren’t any more crazy or dysfunctional (lacking basic social skills) as plenty of other people who have no skill for chess or much of anything else – and, again, it is a sad and pitiful state of affairs, and I realize it is difficult because we find ourselves in something too close to “blaming the people, blaming the masses” territory.

<50> Just to get away from this territory for a moment (I don’t like being in it any more than anyone else), I was thinking of a good example of the sort of “bullshit” that concerns me. I put the term in scare-quotes because the point is to develop a more technical definition, with the hope that we can deploy this term in a helpful, critical, and critically-negative way. At this moment in early 2008 when it is beginning to dawn on people that the U.S. economy, contrary to what G. W. Bush is saying about “short-term difficulties,” is more than likely beset by very deep problems, one supposed bright spot is that there is job growth in the health care fields. Just in the last week I have seen various news stories about this, about the sorts of jobs that are resistant to downsizing and outsourcing, and also for programs that will train people to go into these fields. This is all presented as if it is a great thing – oh, we’ve found something people can do, even in these times of economic decline. This is not only bullshit in and of itself, in the sense that there is the other side of this coin that is not happy at all, that the one thing that is not declining is the number of sick people. It is also bullshit in that it is training in not ever backing up and asking about the big picture and the deeper, systemic questions. Clearly, too, we see the connection between truth and power here, in a fairly crude form even, because people only want to go so far in asking big questions for which no practical answers are forthcoming. Better to numb the mind to this kind of stuff, and, gee, it turns out the very same bullshit system that is the source of the problems is happy to dispense the drugs (the usual ones as well as the other sorts of distracting pabulum that is very close to being the totality of “culture” these days) that will help a person not only swallow the bullshit but also to structure one’s mind and whole life-energy according to it.

<51> A lot could be done with your allusion to “nodding to Chomsky”! Just to move past that part of your question very quickly, let me say that I am more and more convinced that we need something like two models of truth, or a model of two “orders” of truth, where the relationship between the orders is highly uncertain. I can fully understand the hesitation and exhaustion that people might feel regarding the “bold revolutionary programs” that are still, at this moment, mostly re-castings of the past – leaving aside for the moment some of these “militant” expressions that were just wrong-headed to begin with. But part of what I am saying is that Badiou’s theory of the situation and the event is something that needs to be studied to people who hope to contribute to radical change. I think we’ll have the opportunity to develop these themes more as we move along.

<52> JR: We can come back to Badiou later too. But first, what concepts and categories of Sartre do you find particularly resonant and important today?

<53> BM: I don’t hesitate to say that I am Sartrean in two senses. First, that it still seems to me there are plenty of projects to work on that are either in Sartre’s own oeuvre or that come out of it, and I have been actively attempting to contribute to some of these projects. Second, I think the framework of Sartre’s version of Marxism, with the terms developed not only in the Critique (though I want to underline again the point that it is still a big project to try to unify the that project, in all three volumes, to the extent that is possible), but more or less from “Materialism and Revolution,” from right after the way, up through even Hope Now and certainly through the essays and interviews of the 1970s, all of this forms a language that I still think has much to give us in understanding the world. This is the case even if, for example, seriality has more recently become something like “hyperseriality.” Perhaps there is also a third thing with Sartre that will always inspire me, namely that, on any given question, he always aimed to mark out the most radical position, and he was often critical of himself for not being sufficiently radical. It might be said that he was always asking himself what sort of philosophy would allow for this radicality. Put another way, if our philosophy does not have room for us to do the things that need to be done to create a just and sustainable society, then we had better look again at our philosophy, and I think this is the approach Sartre took. Not only Sartre, by any means, but, let’s face it, he did it in a way that made people take notice, and I think it is still worth taking both the political and philosophical measure of this fact.

<54> JR: Towards the end of your book The Radical Project you pose the question – after contemplating Jameson’s analysis of postmodern capitalism – as to what can help us to “break through” the current “impasse” and how Sartre can be of value in this project. What, as you see it, is the nature of the present “impasse”? You ask at one point towards the end of that chapter: ‘What “third” and what “oath” can bridge this gap and allow humanity to transcend its present state?” (102). What is your answer to this pressing question? I take it that you think Sartre helps us to envision the conditions of emergence for a politically conscious collectivity that could challenge capitalist hegemony. Along these lines, many seem to be wondering – I am tempted to say grasping – at the notion that global warming and the imminence of catastrophic global climate change may provide something like Sartre’s threatening “Third.”

<55> BM: Let me begin where you stopped. The threat of global ecological catastrophe is in fact the sort of thing Sartre had in mind as a “third,” the thing that stands beyond you and me and that brings us together. In his day, Sartre was probably more concerned with the solidarity that is possible in Third World countries, countries dominated by colonialism and imperialism, where the imperialist power plays the role of the “third.” Here, significantly, it seems easier to “unite all who can be united against a common enemy,” and that is not a bad thing, but it seems harder for people to really unite at the level of an internationalism that has the fate and future of all humankind as its largest horizon.

<56> Of the revolutionary leaders of the twentieth century from the Third World, Mao gave expression to this internationalism more than any of the others, even apart from discussing fundamental dividing lines concerning who was really developing the legacy of Marx and Lenin and the idea of a proletarian revolution. It could even be said that a big part of what made the Chinese revolution a “proletarian” revolution, given that this revolution took place in an overwhelmingly peasant and agriculturally-based country, was the internationalist vision of the leadership, and first of all Chairman Mao. Even so, there were serious shortcomings in this internationalism, it tended to remain abstract, while the level of unity required for the national liberation struggle (and the land reform, and the struggle against patriarchy, and the struggle against the feudal landlord and warlord systems, and, at the deepest levels, the struggle to simply have something to eat) was much more concrete. Furthermore, the legacy of Stalin was to berate internationalism as an abstract “cosmopolitanism” (and there was no shortage of anti-Semitism behind this critique and that was quite ready to latch on to this line of thought; this reminds me that I should have said earlier that one somewhat smaller but important project that should be carried forward from Sartre’s work would be to bring together the part of Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, on Stalin and the “detour” of Marxism, with the chapter that was placed at the end of the book on Stalin and anti-Semitism and what Sartre calls “an objective drift”). If anything, one can see in Sartre’s judgment that there was a moment when Stalin was in fact right about this (not in the anti-Semitism, of course, but in holding in abeyance abstract cosmopolitanism for the concrete gains of the revolution), a narrowness to this notion of the “third” that needs to be transcended.

<57> I would propose, and now to bring the notion of “oath” (or “pledge”) into the picture, that one venue for tackling this question might be the different interpretations of the oath and solidarity in Sartre’s Critique on the one hand, and Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, on the other. To put it very simply, there is too much in the politics of Sartre and Mao that depends on not only knowing friends from enemies, but in defining the friend as simply someone who, for a while, is a fellow traveler in a common struggle – in other words, there is no positive meaning to friendship, it is simply the temporary and conditional and situational negation of enmity. One might say that, in the comparison, the Hobbesian side of Sartre comes out in a way that I find troubling and that I fundamentally reject, and I would instead want to find a more Kantian side (which I think is exemplified more in Derrida). One might even read this back into Sartre’s relations with his own former friends, especially Camus and Merleau-Ponty. On the one hand, I appreciate the circumstances in which these breaks occurred, and how charged they were. And I essentially agree with Sartre on the issues that were at stake. On the other hand, it is hard to see what good came of the level of enmity that Sartre especially displayed. Or perhaps it is just that I don’t know that I have the stomach for this sort of thing anymore – though, again, I just don’t see what good comes of it. Perhaps if we just made a distinction between “comrade” and “friend” it would help. I have been through a number of intense political-intellectual conflicts and a couple of them came close to killing me (I’m not exaggerating) and, who knows, a couple of the ones that are seemingly in the past may kill me yet.

<58> Still, the most difficult thing thus far is where a very large mass of humanity finds the wherewithal to “back up” enough to see the larger picture and that the larger picture has to be addressed. Sartre, along with many others, mainly understood this scenario in terms of a nuclear war, though I have to wonder if it was because of Sartre’s affinity for Maoism and for Tiers Mondialism (and anti-colonial struggle in general) that he did not mainly thematize the third in terms of inter-imperialist nuclear conflict. Thinking about this, I was reminded of the song by Lynton Kwesi Johnson, “The Eagle and the Bear” – “the eagle and the bear are people living in fear of impending nuclear warfare” [sometime in the early 1980s, maybe around 1983 or so] Johnson goes on to say that the people of the Third World couldn’t care less if the United States and the Soviet Union blow each other to smithereens, and in fact that would probably be a good thing for the rest of the people in the world. But it was soon after that that we learned there weren’t going to be any people in the rest of the world in the wake of an all-out nuclear war. Still, I think that Sartre, like Johnson (Sartre was gone by then, of course), would have thought it first-worldist to focus on nuclear war as the “third.” As someone who retains quite a bit of Third-Worldism, I find it difficult to not have sympathy for this position, even if, unfortunately, it is both ethically and strategically wrong. It shouldn’t be hard to have this sympathy when, for example, in the present election cycle in the U.S., the new main concern among potential voters is once again the economy and not Iraq. I know there are disputes over how many people in Iraq may be left dead by the U.S. invasion and occupation, but it is not inconceivable that the number will be in the hundreds of thousands. But, never mind, we’ve got to keep the caravan of consumption rolling along.

<59> So, to return to your original suggestion, certainly the environmental issues that face humanity and indeed all of life on our planet should constitute a “third,” and it should be more than obvious that only certain kinds of solidarities and collectivities can resolve this difficulty – if anything can at this stage of things. In other words, not to beat around the bush, but continuing down the path of capitalism and imperialism will spell doom for humanity, and we have to have a socialism that incorporates the ecological and bio-regional vision if there is going to any kind of human future at all, but of course there are two impediments to this happening. The first is of course the existing system and first of all within this its power and institutional embodiment and weight, which keeps going even if most people know it is ultimately unworkable and that we are coming up against this unworkability. Second, but also crucial and indispensable, is the breakthrough to consciousness and commitment. This again is where postmodern capitalism comes in, a form of capitalism that is well-programmed to undercut in advance the possibilities for solidarity. Even so, the very same dynamic also creates a heightened role for the “vision thing.” I wonder, though, if, given the preponderance of distractions and even “partial utopias” (fantasy worlds that individuals can slip into for some period of time), if everything we say now has to at least be prefaced by some very directs and either harshly negative or demandingly affirmative and even prophetic words.

<60> The term that is missing from all of this is “crisis,” and it seems we need some new thinking on how crisis works in the world today. Clearly the changes in the global ecology already constitute a crisis that is deepening daily (and the idea that we need to wait a lot longer and get more “studies” from scientists who work for the petroleum industry is ridiculous; even if it could turn out that we have more time than some of the more dire predictions are telling us, why would we fool around with a question of this immensity?), and yet the effects at present are for the most part gradual and not clearly or deeply perceived. In the early decades of the American Revolution, Hegel said that people wouldn’t know what America really is until it is filled up, so to speak. Clearly this kind of thinking influenced Marx. In some sense, we won’t know what this Earth will be until it is filled up, except that, when it is filled up, it will no longer be a place for habitation by humans. Perhaps this is an opening for the line of thought that runs from Kant through Sartre and Derrida, that we should change society not only because we have to, but also because we have an ethical obligation to the future possibilities of humankind. We – intellectuals – need to use the tools that we have, in diverse ways, to put it right in front of people that we live in a certain social system today, at root capitalism, that cannot even muster any sense of ongoingness into the future. (“Ongoingness” is a theme I develop in Ethical Marxism.) To return to the notion of “the opposite of bullshit,” why is there even any question that a social form that is predicated on using the world up and throwing it away will after awhile throw away the world altogether? This is why, not incidentally, there is the vigorous promotion of the related phenomenon of fundamentalist religion and postmodern jadedness in which the future of our planet, at least as a human concern or anything that people can do anything about, is reduced to insignificance.

* * * * * *

Bill Martin is Professor of Philosophy, at DePaul University in Chicago. There, he has been an active supporter of Norman Finkelstein in his widely publicized tenure fight. Martin’s work encompasses a wide range of topics from ethics, imperialism, and animal rights, to actually existing revolutionary movements, to philosophies of science and secularism. He engages seriously with figures from Sartre, Lenin, Marx, and Mao, to Plato, Aristotle, Derrida, Kant, Marcuse, Habermas, and Jameson in books including: Matrix and Line: Derrida and the possibilities of postmodern social theory (1992), Politics and the Impasse: Explorations in postsecular social theory (1996), andHumanism and Its Aftermath: the Fate of Politics and Deconstruction (1995), and The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations (1999). He has also published several books and articles dealing with creative and avant-garde music, from classical, to jazz, to contemporary rock. His forthcoming book, Ethical Marxism, argues for the necessity of an ethical supplement to Marxism, while tracing out what he sees as the persistent if fraught ethical presence at work in actually existing historical revolutionary projects. His own sustained radical project insists that in a contemporary capitalist world – that has been rendered internationally lop-sided by imperialism and cynical by postmodernist “hyper-capitalism” – the need for a Marxism rooted in ethics, and in a commitment to post-secular socialism, is greater than ever. He is editor of the series Creative Marxism, in which Ethical Marxism is the second volume, the first being Marxism and the Call of the Future, a volume of extended dialogues between Bill Martin and Bob Avakian.

J. G. Ramsey is co-editor of reconstruction 8.1.