i'm working up a book proposal for the tragedy of the left, which is about how apparently good-hearted intellectuals have spent a century and a half endorsing authoritarianism and how apparent egalitarians have spent a century and a half endorsing extreme hierarchy. at the moment i am reading althusser's for marx and sartre's critique of dialectical reason (which, as madden would say, is an all-day sucker), and i'm having another crack at horkheimer and adorno's dialectic of enlightenment. obviously, these are all different marxisms. but i believe that these thinkers and many others were fundamentally and arbitrarily distorted by marxism; even intellectuals at this level are claiming orthodoxy and condemning their opponents within marxist theory as apostates, and so on. surely this thing will be over at some point, and then this material will have that flavor of exoticism and rational arbitrariness of medieval theology, warped into a labyrinthine fictional world by social pressures and powers.
be this as it may, one thing is conspicuous about this world above all; one thing marks its prose in all its permutations and lends the whole thing a definite identity: the use of the word bourgeois. it's like a drumbeat or a wine-dark sea, except that homer didn't use 'wine-dark sea' in every single sentence. let's say that this usage shows the extreme remarkable theoretical primitivism of the whole thing, the blunt running-together of everything. so, right, the idea is that ideas reflect underlying conditions of production, and various sorts of apparently abstract concepts and so forth are deployed for 'ideological' reasons. so, the doctrine of natural rights, for example, seems like some kind of theoretical construct but the concept emerges with capitalist economy, frees the worker precisely to sell his labor to the capitalist, etc. this makes concepts historical, which is an important insight marx gets from hegel.
individual rights are 'bourgeois' in this sense. but now this just becomes - quite as it was in the hands of marx himself - a mere term of abuse that you hurl at your opponents and your opponents' concepts. in real life, millions of people were executed for being 'bourgeois'; in intellectual life millions of concepts and assertions and theories were. it's really pretty hilarious: you're sitting in a seminar room at johns hopkins with your fellow children of privilege, and we spend all day accusing each others' theoretical constructs of being bourgeois.
anyway, i'm happy if my theory is bourgeois as long as it's true. it's quite like hurling a racial slur at an idea or something: that's a chick idea! but whatever: all these professors and aesthetes and stuff are bourgeois. get over it. but the idea of the intelligentsia, the bit of the bourgeoisie that suddenly comes to consciousness of history and breaks off and cures the proletariat of its false consciousness is fundamental, if nothing else, to the self-image of high-end marxist theorists. the idea that they themselves can escape their own epoch or their own class origins or affiliations is nonsense according to their own theories.
i had forgotten that horkheimer and adorno spend a good chunk of the book describing homer's odysseus as bourgeois, lord knows how or why or to what effect. but really: here's what we want out of this: a condemnation of all individualism. that's one of the central dimensions of the multifarious meaning of 'bourgeois', and a characteristic of capitalism is 'the invention of the individual.' i'm going to say that here is the thought that perhaps accounts for the real power of marxism: we used to all be one thing, non-distinct from one another! we used to be collective consciousnesses! then capitalism split us up into our bodies or whatever. i just want to say that this is about your loneliness and your yearnings, not about the human condition. we are both non-identical with one another and mutually connected. sorry! and then: you are going to recreate our alleged primordial non-distinctness from one another through extreme repression and coercion, yes? because that is how collective consciousnesses are actually produced, or simulated. suddenly your constant utterance of 'bourgeois' becomes a drumbeat for forced labor.
anyway, reading althusser or adorno, they seem like pretty smart people. but using 'bourgeois' as a bludgeon on every page for decades on end: almost anyone under any circumstances can think more clearly and creatively than that. it is a sort of epistemic slavery and stupidity that really ought to see them deleted from all canons. i think they will be, actually; any minute this sort of discourse has got to become an historical curiosity rather than any sort of going concern. it's not viable.
