surplus – GV Loewen

Holy Spirit, Wholly Spirit?

Holy Spirit, Wholly Spirit? (Wraith no more)

Embodiment is a phenomenological term referring to a form of sensate. We said to be consciousness ‘embodied’. Yet in this, there is no immediate additional sense that this kind of being is temporary or may be contrasted with any other, previous or yet to come. I embody myself, in another, related sense, as well as embodying a certain set of cultural norms and suasions, individuated impulses and impetuses, and the ‘spirit of the age’, more or less. It is first to Durkheim that we might appeal for an explication of what is served by the idea that I am ‘made up’ of two things, the two-in-one, with a third having fallen out of discursive fashion, becoming recently and at best become an addendum to the body-mind amalgam. Even here, however, the problem of the concept of mind, let alone that of ‘other minds’ – one of the basic puzzles of phenomenology proper – resonates with the older concept, that of spirit. Surely if I embody my consciousness, I may also be said to not be possessed of a bias that centers the spirit somehow ‘inside’ the mind alone. Yet if not, the whole idea becomes rapidly outlandish; where then sits the spirit, if it exists at all?

In social organizations exhibiting mechanical solidarity, the spirit is embodied by the group. One is thus never ‘alone’ in any contemporary sense; one has not only one’s kindred and community within one, one also likely has some other kind of force semi-present – not residing continuously but there when called upon; the clan membership of an animal spirit, one’s non-human but just as intimate kin – which indeed, when the need arises or the occasion befits, embodies itself in a variety of ways. The metaphysics of transformation is the home to such beings, who are not only shape-shifters in the phantasmagorical sense – this modernist formula ignores the fact that for authentic transformer beings, their recurring but differentiated presence occurs by crossing over ontological barriers and not merely by changing their appearance – but as well, embodiments of a specific sensibility and idea. And while the people may regard these visitations as somehow sacred and their denizens holy, the spirit materializing before them is not entirely made up of the spiritual. For within the transformer resides the hallmark of humanity: we became aware, within the primordial dawn of our species tenure, that only through adaptation and generalization would we at all survive.

It is this leitmotif, this element of character, that pushes human consciousness away from the sense that the cosmos is simply an anonymous space within which happenstance humanity has taken fragile hold. In this sense, we might hazard it a projection alone, if a necessary one, but equally so, we are also driven back from the opposing sensitivity which demands that we kneel before nature as a wholly alien power with no human interest. It remains fascinating that the career of the concept of spirit not only traverses mode of production boundaries but as well, is itself a model of adaptation and generalism. For Durkheim, spirit is itself embodied in the notion of the sacred, his benchmark concept for speaking about symbolic forms which have a seemingly uncanny ability to preserve their identity across otherwise utterly different societal modes. One might also suggest that the presence of such an idea in vastly different cultures and apparently universally so, has given rise to a great deal of historical conflict. It is not so much that the other does not believe in the gods at all but rather that his gods are different than mine. This was never considered a puzzle on the ground, because of all of the other empirical differences amongst human cultures, but it was, with narrower eyes, perceived as a threat simply due to the knowledge that my own gods hung in the balance of their believers; and just here, numbers then mattered. We are well aware that specific embodiments of the spiritual come and go, so it is well not to get too hung up on any particular one. In response to this, the concept of spirit itself underwent a redesign: first communal and shared by animals and sometimes by other natural forces as well – recall Jung’s list of archetypes includes narrative leitmotifs such as ‘the flood’ – but in the light of the passing of entire civilizations, it becomes something which can be embodied but is in essence ethereal.

This newer sense of how the spirit functions allows it a much greater liberation not only of movement but also of presence. It can appeal to this one or that, pending one’s credo and moral druthers, accepting and indeed embodying the customary before demonstrating an overturning of it – Jesus was Jewish but set the tone for a wider covenant and thus elect – or it can revive a faded or fading sensibility by appearing as a remanant – a reminder of the past and not simply a haunting, for instance – or yet again by eschewing material form in a wholly irruptive event, leaving the witnesses or perhaps even the visionary in wonderment but also with a renewed sense of perspective. In this, it matters not just what kind of vision is appresented and thence phenomenologically apprehended by our own embodiments, only that the experience is perceived as extramundane. Even the source is, finally, unimportant, not only due to the Thomas principle but equally to the simple fact that visions are, by themselves, incommunicable. To assuage this problem, the concept of spirit gradually becomes hyper-individuated. Protestantism likely has its own roots along the road to Damascus, where a specific individual, Saul, is accosted by a specific version of the holy spirit. It interrogative, ‘why do you persecute me?’ is sounded in highly personalized terms. Saul himself cannot ignore it, since it is literally pointing a finger. It is of interest that as Paul, his mission takes up that personalized sensibility, which is really more of a sensitivity made sensible only through epistle and sermon, for no one else was truly present for Saul’s decisive transformation.

This too is of interest: human beings as well now have the transformational ability whilst yet alive; the difference is that I must be transformed, and for that there must be present an external impetus, which within social contract style cultures is unnecessary. There, transformer beings exhibited rather inherited traits which were shared by members of the same clan. In agrarianism, one can accrue to oneself such abilities, which is both astonishing and yet perhaps expected in the sense that it mirrors the change in the concept of spirit already underway. This idea of gaining something, however wondrous or even unexpected for the specific character involved, is almost certainly related to the continuously developed presence of material surplus in the new mode of production. Even in sophisticated transformational cosmologies, the kind we see in well-developed subsistence societies such as those along the Northwest Coast of North America, surplus and gift, however ostentatiously ritualized such as through the potlatch system, is, by the end of winter, almost completely used up. Only in the agrarian mode do we see large-scale surpluses which must not only be catalogued – the very first contents of writing known – but also possessed, and possessed by someone or some group. It is not a great leap for the human imagination to take upon itself the idea that the spirit is itself something which one not only can embody, but also develop, just as one develops the land or yet the imperial territory and its resources, and that what aids in such a growth can hail from diverse sources, just as material resources are diverse. Now, all this is not to say that changes in material subsistence directly drive all other forms of change. No, there is a rapidly-adopted symbiosis between symbolic forms and material manifestations, and this too is fitting, perhaps even inevitable, because the entire idea of embodiment does itself center around a syncretism of a symbolic form – the ethereal Being – being ‘materialized’ in that normative and to a great extent, even worldly.

So, gained possession and development, though in mighty contrast to mere inheritance and stasis, reflect, and perhaps as well refract, the material conditions of life at hand. The spirit also transforms the closeness of ‘what is nearest to us’ by moving our perception away from the distanciated ‘at-handedness’ of having to interact with the world or with nature as imposing something upon it, making it work for us in return, to that of the ‘in-handedness’ of something which, like my own spiritual being, can be disclosed to me. There is thus a profound phenomenological shift expressed between the metaphysics of transformation – wherein it is my kinship within a communal spirit that allows me to experience the spiritual and envision the apical being which animates the mechanical whole; there is no Gestalt in transformational metaphysics – and that of transcendence: here, the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts but is so by virtue of the spirit being precisely disembodied in its very essence, rather than existing by represencing itself on down the cultural line as limen. We should never put on airs about one world system being somehow ‘superior’ to another in any of these senses, rather only that we can now recognize the pedigree of the concept in question.

The culture hero, in his cross-cultural diversity, too must exhibit only the traits which are befitting to the cultural imagination itself at hand. Raven has transformational powers but is not himself the transformer being, who is rather Kanekelak or the like. Paul has been transformed but thence does seek transfiguration. Beethoven transforms the world through his art but has neither the power of self-transformation nor is he transfigured, unless dully and figuratively by the discourse of art history. The three forms of metaphysics known to the human imagination are themselves embodied, respectively, by such brief but contrasting catalogues of figures. One can iterate such a trinitial list, but no specific figure, whether mythical or historical or both, may be said to be itself an archetype, only, once again, an embodiment of a conceptual event. I can experience the figure ‘herself’ but only as an expression of the spirit. And this concept is both and at once the spiritual being as itself a representation of something ultimate and even infinite, while also becoming spirit as an abstraction of our existential consciousness, faced as it is with the problem of mortality cast as finitudinal being. For our embodiment, while divorced from the spirit ‘holy’ whilst in itself, is experienced as oddly something which is itself not wholly bodily borne.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Not So Sweet Buy and Buy

The Not So Sweet Buy and Buy (can a consumer culture consume a culture?)

This is a different question than ‘can a consumer culture consume itself’? We have seen quite evidently, especially in popular media, that this is in fact not merely an outcome thereof but a way of maintaining its dominance upon consumption in general. One views a situation comedy, especially an animated one, and if one has not viewed many years of similar programming as well as following the popular culture news, one is immediately lost. Such media constitute one long in-joke, and their satire is disingenuous at best, since it serves also as an ongoing advertisement for everyone else in the same game. Humor is itself tied to the consumption of a specific kind of media, and this also has the convenience of saving the hack writer’s time imagining innovative scripts and characters. Similarly, retreads of film and television, upshifts to streaming etc. from video games and comic books, exhibit the same symptomatology, and one might even wish to cast the older but continuing sourcing from the novel as the beginning of this self-absorbed and auto-absorbing manner of production.

But for all this, has our contemporary consumer industry been able to reach its wider goal; that of the consumption of the entirety of the culture in which it is ensconced? This is a more difficult query and the response appears at once more nuanced. In order to take it up, we must begin with the most perceptive analyses of consumption, those of Marx and Durkheim. For the former, the well-known understanding of commodity as fetish may serve, for a moment, as a starting point. We have seen elsewhere how the religious overtones of the original fetish item, a vehicle for, and representation of, Mana, which is otherwise quite an abstract power, turns what is mere force into a usable forcefulness. It is a more focused legerdemain that can also be associated with the difference between magic and sorcery. In the most value-neutral sense, sorcery is simply magic in use. The fetish quality of a commodity turns it from a mere use object into a representation of power redefined by capital, but the much older aura of status retains its hold over the consumer, even if the source of such status has shifted from heaven to earth, as it were. Marx’s own example is pedestrian, likely purposely; a table. Unlike Heidegger, who later uses the same item to illustrate the phenomenological intimacy of dialogue amongst other such aspects of ‘closeness’ and ‘alongsideness’, Marx offers us not a whiff of old-world paternalism. Instead, he is didactic in the extreme. And a piece of furniture is not a terrible example given that such a genre of commodity had been coopted by industrial production in a manner that accosted the senses used to cottage-style craftsmanship. Furniture could well have been called ‘fine’ or even ‘beautiful’, and we pay a homage both archival and ironically fetishistic, genuflecting perhaps somewhat ludicrously, to handcrafted antique furniture in art galleries and museums. I have seen such objects placed adjacent to paintings and sculptures, as if we were to place ourselves, in our mind’s eye at least, in some Mannerist domestic scene, replete with paternalism aplenty and this time with no Heideggerean insight in sight.

So for Marx, the table was a good mark. Now mass-produced, what could the buyer expect regarding possession and status, which prior to industry could be borrowed from the artisan, just as one would borrow status from having a Gainsborough paint one’s wife’s portrait: ‘Hmm, she’s hotter than ever I thought. Now that’s artistic genius!’ For more plebeian items, Marx desired to show that the same fetishistic display of status markers remained available. In our age, however, it was not to be associated with the ability to command ethereal forces, but rather quite material ones, and those through wealth. In pre-modern modes of production, from horticulture through the late-stages of agrarian organizations, one’s own status was linked to the procurement of status items or services. For capital, the accumulation of wealth shifted from an ‘in-itself’, or a ‘for its own sake’, as if it were either a kind of aesthetic endeavor, or indeed an esthetic one, associated with some lineage hagiography. From this the Protestants developed the idea of assignation through worldly success; wealth was a sign of soteriological favor. Especially well-evidenced in the Netherlands, this idea spread forth through Puritanist longings and Anabaptist communitarianism. A Spartan lifestyle belied a very productive lifeway, and it was not long in generational span before considerable accumulations of wealth were built up. To this day, such ethnic enclaves that remain, including those Mennonite and Hutterian, display such in-typical advantages.

But all of this has been analyzed in detail by Weber, who is our usual third wheel in thinking aloud about modernity and capital. For Marx, wealth was to be displayed by and through the purchase of commodities, which for him, meant any object that could contain a value surplus to its own autochthonous use-value. This constitutes an extension of ipssissimosity, and such a sleight of hand can only be maintained, he felt, through consumption itself. In this, Marx’s sense of things proved incomplete, for we now understand modern advertising to be the chief vehicle of the production, not of the object or commodity, but rather of the fetish surrounding it. Its advent in 1925, the year of John Watson’s Theory of Modern Advertising, occurred almost simultaneously with the first overproduction, wherein the means of production outstripped the actual material needs of consumers. For almost a century then have we lived in this odd situation; we make more than we use, so we must make mere needs into desires. This, in a word, is the meaning of marketing.

In the decades just prior to this seismic shift in the definition of value in capital, it was Durkheim who detailed and augmented Marx’s analytic to include the sensual and sensitive aspects of fetish in general. For Durkheim, the aura of the commodity had less to do with a borrowed status hung up upon material outlay and rather more about the character of awe. Just as the collective conscience could be offended by a perceived injustice, so too could it recognize itself in a culture’s higher self-expressions. Beauty, in this view, still made sense as a representation of its traditional siblings; truth, the good, and the spirit. Marketing would soon learn how to exploit this sensitivity by engineering quite artificial outbursts of the ‘collective effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s phrase. In one of his most famous epigrams, if ‘religion is society worshipping itself’, then one immediately can understand the wider scope of what is at stake in modern mass media. The commodity fetish in our day must transcend the object in order to take into itself the whole of culture.

What then would it mean to worship ourselves in this more material manner? Certainly there are collateral clues – signage, rather than truer signs, perhaps – in the cult of celebrity, the esteem of marque and logo, the esthetic purity of fashion and modeling, or yet the mystique surrounding the founder or CEO of this or that ‘revolutionary’ enterprise. All these and others no doubt foster a sense that not only is our culture a visionary one, holding in its own breast the heated breath of distant stars and with its eyes reflecting their eternal light – all the while whilst bathing in a bathos of self-stultification, mind you – but that it is also of the value that we may indeed sincerely worship it and not feel anything of either the larger narcissism which must be involved, or, more damning, of the anxiety which must drive such collective preening. Here, we must allow Durkheim to take us back to Marx in order to read again, with a fresh set of frames, the critique of capital itself. Now the rhetorical term ‘bathos’ traditionally suggests a lack of intent, and while it may not be central to the goals of advertising and marketing to create this slide from what we take to be the historically sublime to what can be taken as trivial – almost everything within the ambit of popular media is at least this, if not actually ridiculous or yet absurd – in any calculated manner, the mere fact that it has the power to manifest the nothing much as something and even something great suggests to its latter-day sorcerers that magic, at least of a sort, is yet extant in our otherwise disenchanted world.

Yet this cannot be a conclusion, for it begs the implication that our culture is, as a whole, trivial. I would like to think that this is not the case, even if we are often turned in the direction of the valueless by the fetish of status-value and that of the marque. One might go so far, without being overly vain, and suggest that for some of the legendary marques, whose brand-value has distinguished itself consistently over many decades, that the actual quality of the products in question do merit some respect, if perhaps not outright adoration or yet worship. Ferrari, the brand with the most current admiration of this sort, could serve as an example of a product which actually is what it claims to be, at least in its actual use. Whether or not its aura is transcendental is not really at issue; all it needs to do is transcend its general genre of commodity. In this, a keenly-crafted and daringly-designed machine can carry a near-primordial torch; the shaman accomplished his tricks ad hoc. Sorcery, unlike magic, is always directed to some specific purpose.

Yes, but in capital we also have magic itself as a commodity of sorts, for a Ferrari accomplishes its specific engineering purpose in it remaining an automobile, and nothing else. But if it were perceived in capital as only a car it would lose most of its value all along the line. So, marketing has, in addition to point-of-sale, the deeper and more sophisticated task of maintaining aura ‘after-market’, so to speak. The fact that a new auto loses about a quarter of its ticket value when driven off the lot – it is now a ‘used car’ or, in a marketing lingo perishingly close to that Orwellian, ‘pre-owned’ – must not impinge upon its value as a status item, a commodity in the Marxian sense. And indeed, the exotic car’s new owner cares not a jot that they have been stiffed however much cash on the barrel upon getting behind the wheel of such a vehicle. Even my relatively quite staid and stoic Lexus sports sedan was able to overcome any such hint of regret on my part when I purchased it new many years ago. But less mystically, its truer value has manifest itself in the fact that though now 16 years old, it still drives like a new car. Surely such testimonials from the ‘consumer’s themselves’ would be of the greatest value to any marketer. But even here, the suasion of worship is present; a testimonial is suggestive of a testament; but then again we are today not recording the irruptive Mana of a messiah, but rather the manufactured mimesis of the forces of nature and cosmos, ever aloof to the Babel of humanity’s vainer desires.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Can Communism Contribute to Culture?

Can Communism Contribute to Culture? (after giving birth to it)

The question of culture within a communist mode of production is a highly speculative one. Not least due to the historical facts; there has never been an authentically communist society. Engels sought to close the circle on history itself, by reprising ‘primitive communism’ writ large and sourced in the largesse of rationalized industrial production. Social contract societies are the original human cultures, so in one sense, culture is itself a child of communism, or perhaps less ideologically, communalism. These types of social organization, referred to as having ‘mechanical solidarity’ by Durkheim and being pre-political in Pierre Clastres’ sensibility – here, only the presence of surplus generates social hierarchy and all that this radically novel form of social relations entails and has, in the interim, entailed – seem taken quite unawares by Engels’ appropriation of them as a test model for the future of humanity. This moment represents best the 18^th century Rousseauist sense that Marx and Engels brought to 19^th century social thought. And there is a dose of early romanticism, healthy or no, in all such utopian imaginings, from Plato’s ideal state to the relatively stateless vision of Ayn Rand. Such a moment is reiterative when examined through the lens of the arts, the chief contributor to culture in its narrower sense.

For fraudulent communism, the cases are mostly negative. From Shostakovich’s serial house arrests, to Brecht’s remorseful disillusionment, to the official non-personhood of Nicolae Bretan and many others, the arts tend to suffer, often ignominiously, under pseudo-communist regimes of all stripes and hues. Just as does fraudulent religion contribute nothing to the value and history of belief, a fraudulent politics can offer nothing to the culture and dynamic of ‘political man’. But Marx singles out the artist, among all other possible social roles, in his early examination of the merits of industrial or technocratic communism. One of the arguments he makes is both rational and ethical; give everyone the opportunity to evidence whether or not they have the artistic genius. In China, there is a piano school wherein thousands of pre-selected students study. In the closing scenes of the wincingly intimate documentary of Yo Yo Ma, he is shown speechless and with eyes glinting, standing in a studio listening to a ten-year-old Chinese girl play Chopin. The legendary cellist, one of the greatest artists of our time, is in awe. For the young lady is not merely reproducing Chopin with utter perfection, and doing so sporting an oversize pink plastic watch on her wrist to boot, she is Chopin. Aside from such extramundane factors such as speculative reincarnation, her very being speaks volumes regarding Marx’s suggestion. For him, it was simply a question of available numbers. Only by extending the opportunity stream and structure of universal education can we identify such talents.

China too is hardly communist in Marx and Engels’ sense, but unlike other social experiments of similar type, it has realized that its apical intellectual ancestors – both very much Western of course, in direct contradiction to all the nonsense emanating from Beijing about China being non-Western or even anti-Western in some whole-souled fashion – were correct; one had to have consistent and highly rationalized industrial means of production before any communist relations of production could take hold. And the only manner of reaching the former status is through capitalism, not communism, as Marx himself clearly stated. China backed into Engels’ historical curve, as it were, with the seeming inevitability that a controlled economy is either a dead-end regarding the dialectical fulfillment of history through the demise of class conflict – and ultimately the ‘withering away’ of the state itself – or that what we are witnessing, with dubious privilege, is just another transition point along the way to authentic communist relations. This latter claim seems to me to be fraught with potential rationalization, even abuse. For primitive communism, the first society, was also the most radically democratic, and this without surplus of any kind, which is probably the more germane aspect of any of this. The hypothetical communism of Marx and Engels presumes upon variables that on the ground feel almost as extramundane as does reincarnation: one, that an entire large-scale populace would have an equal and representative say in the doings of a skeleton government; two, that such leaders as they may be would themselves be Platonic ideals, ‘philosopher-kings’ politburo style; and three, that politics would continue to be of interest at all, in a society that on the one hand cannot imagine even the question of God, as Marx once again states, and on the other, accepts and endorses the sensibility that politics should wholly replace religion with regard to human passion and interest, as well as ‘belief’.

But there is no need to believe in something which is factual, in the world as it is, and without the credulous. We may not know all there is to potentially know about our own political doings, but there is never a true mystery in the sense that some part of politics has itself departed from the quotidian in some irruptive manner. Even hypothetical communism appears otherworldly given that its goal is to eliminate itself, end history, vanquish ideology, transform individual will into that collective, and install a world ‘government’ that governs without itself being a state! All of this together does indeed require a leap of faith, enormous and enchanted at once. But the question of political alternatives, no matter how stylized and romantic, is yet quite salient to our time, when democracies, partial as they may be, seem disenchanted with themselves, and many appear to long for authoritarian practices in power as well as in personal relations. The tired adage ’be careful what you wish for’ seems to make no impression on such persons. Far from the mostly long mute ideologues of post-war versions of Neo-Marxism, it is rather the unstudied and uncultured franchises who desire to be dominated and told what to do – in spite of their rhetoric of freedom and individual responsibility; the only consistency here is the truer call to ‘let me be responsible for dominating and dictating to my own children et al’ – that present to contemporary historical relations its gravest threat.

For history too does end within any authoritarian circle. The opposite of that sidereal, this enclosure pens its own history, ‘rewrites’ itself, as we saw in the Reich then and in Florida now, and thus pens itself inside it. That said, reactionary pseudo-history is likely no less a fraud than much of the ‘politically correct’ rewrites that equally scan the career of human endeavor for examples and exemplars favorable only to their narrowed and ideologically inclined druthers. PragerU has its corresponding entity in the DEI sensitivity; one might well say that they deserve one another, just as did, at least at the level of statehood, the Soviet Union deserve the Third Reich and vice-versa, however awful this may be to contemplate. Do then the actual Taliban deserve the self-proclaimed ‘American Taliban’? Does the Third-Wave ‘Feminist’ deserve the neo-liberal economist? One could go on of course, but the point here is that it is commonplace for the political pendulum, to borrow another cliché, once pulled back in one direction, to entail an equal and opposite swing. The oscillation thence initiated cannot be halted in any rapid manner, and we find ourselves swinging to and fro along with everything else. The pendulum is its own metronome, setting the pace of public discourse and the level of political interest. Dialogue is absent, as well as is historical consciousness. One does not understand history, or the history of thought, on purpose. In this, we also may say that we deserve our own shared ignorance.

For Marx, the question of culture was, as ever, a dialectical one. It is just that, as perceptive as he was of the reality of the social conditions in which he found himself alive, he yet seems unable to extend this same profundity within his own analytic. If he had, he would have noted its inconsistencies, which in turn have allowed, and perhaps even prevaricated, the light readings both Lenin and Mao brought to their early studies, not to mention their personal vendettas projected onto a mostly unknowing social world. It is always possible, of course, that both Marx and Engels knew full well of the challenges to their own logic inherent in their claims, and simply ignored them in order to further revolutionary ambitions. I would like to doubt this was truly the case, as in any major thinker, there can be found lapses of both reason and imagination alike. That it would take such a lapse, perhaps calculated and controlled, in order for communism to recreate culture anew, as in the Chopin example – and is this an authentic contribution to culture? – and especially so, to actually give birth to a new culture entirely, suggests that any future attempt approaching the vision of Marx and Engels should hope that it never achieves its political goals.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 book in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.