The Trainor Diary: Feb 17 to Feb 21

“The reason why Popper gets Marx so wrong is that he tries something similar to attacking Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on the grounds that it is not scientifically accurate. Dialectical Materialism in Marx is like the Alchemy in Frankenstein: it’s simply the premise on which an important fiction is posited. & for Singh the fact of fiction & the encouragement of fiction as a way of thinking are more important than the content of any one fiction. Singh believes...”

I paused. I pretended to need a sip of brandy. I noticed that I’d somehow switched to calling Amrit by his surname: ‘Singh’. The trouble was, I thought, if I switched back again I think I’d have to start using the past tense. That’d be even trickier. Anyway, Hannah seemed fine with it. As far as I was concerned, though, I may as well have been providing her with a sophisticated display of tonal flatulence.

“... he believes that post-protestant, capitalist individualism is the real barrier to Socialism, that we need to create ‘dividuals’ capable of ‘contrapuntal’, ‘dramatic’ modes of thinking as opposed to surrendering to the capitalist idea of the ‘unit’ & the dead hand of the balance-sheet equation. He sees Enlightenment rationalism, if we are to understand it as being entirely free of irony, as the work of men who thought like cartographers & accountants: men who wanted (& still want) to see everything at a single glance & are prepared to kill all that is lively & in flux in order to tame into comprehension a fertile & multifarious world that continues to resist their efforts to understand it.”

“Which makes him sound like a typical Nietszchean Post-Structuralist, but he isn’t that at all. He has particular affinities with a lot of German theorists: Ernst Bloch & the Frankfurt School. He even supports Habermas’s call for a return to the Enlightenment project & the idea of an ‘ideal speech situation.’ it’s just that where Habermas insists, in a rather Blochian way, on talking up the possibility of a utopian ultra-rationalism of discourse, Singh insists that the ‘ideal speech situation’ must be dramatic, or (more to the point) ‘musical’. Not irrational but superrational. He says that the contrapuntal sophistications of fiction (by which he also means poetry & drama) are the only linguistic mode that can allow people to be genuinely, psychologically plural & therefore to achieve consensus without compromise.”

“That’s all Bakhtin, really: the dialogic imagination & all that. & it also reveals just how anti-Marxist Bakhtin really is; or, at least, how deconstructive of any surface-level interpretation of Marx. At core, what we’re talking about is using the superstructure to alter the base, rather than the other way around: it’s carnival, not the shop-floor or the battlefield that is the real revolutionary forum. This is because Singh & Bakhtin are both much more like followers of Bakunin than of Marx. They’re both First Internationalists at heart: ‘no socialism without freedom & no freedom without socialism’. But what Singh is capable of making explicit, something that Bakhtin (because of his precarious position in the Soviet Union) can only hint at, is that Marx actually thought pretty much exactly the same way: you have to change minds before you can change society; there is no external socialism (of culture) without internal socialism (of the mind); or, putting it another way, you can’t break the grip of capital on society until you break its grip on our imaginations.”

“That’s what brings him closer to the Frankfurt stuff, & even the Birmingham School, I suppose.”

I looked to her for confirmation. She nodded wearily, drunkenly.

“That’s why Lukács talks about the novel rather than the factory; that’s why Benjamin champions mimesis rather than armed struggle: not because they’re middle-class dilettantes (thought they are, of course, but then so was pretty much every other major thinker in the history of Communism) but because they believe these things will turn out to be more effective in the long-run. They just don’t think the dictatorship of the proletariat will work because it won’t change minds the way capitalist individualism has. & they’re dead right.”

“But it’s probably Bloch & Bakhtin who are the most important. They offer a sense of hope & of direction. Most of the others are pretty dismal, only really capable of saying what’s wrong with our culture: with its commercialised artefacts & its modes of imaginative circumscription. Most of the French post-structuralists & their followers are the same, as far as Singh’s concerned: cynical & defeatist, for all their sly wit.”

Fart, fart, fart, fa-fart, fa-fart. This was a Souza marching band of le petomaine clones playing variations on a meaningless soundbite about political literary theory with their arses... but I needed to keep the hot air coming to keep Hannah drinking. I drank too: a lot.

“So what Singh does, basically, is to say that fiction is the answer: fiction is a kind of philosophical practice that is the path towards the contrapuntal psychology necessary to dramatise a socialist utopia. As far as Singh is concerned, the material dramatisation of a Socialist utopia is the ultimate goal of both fiction & communism. Hence his approach. What is crucial to remember, is that Singh doesn’t mean just ‘novels & short stories’ when he says fiction. It wouldn’t make any sense if he did. He doesn’t even mean ‘all imaginative literature & drama’. His fiction is something with a much wider philosophical remit. He takes Roy Bhaskar’s four-stage rejigging of Adorno’s negative dialectic (with its final phase of residual, continually energised, non-synthesis) & fuses it with (amongst other things) Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, Bergson’s durée, Benjamin’s mimesis, Derrida’s différance, Habermas’s ideal speech situation & John Austin’s performativity to create something he calls fiction. This he sees as a ‘musical’ form of linguistic mental activity which is capable of ‘performing’ psychological revolutions on its performers following its own dialectic pattern: i.e. not thesis — antithesis — synthesis (which he calls ‘Hegel’s balance-sheet equation’: something of a misattribution) but thesis — antithesis — fission — polyphony. Fiction is therefore a contrapuntal process rather than a homogenous product, a process which (unlike both ‘cultural criticism’ & ‘deconstruction’) is capable not just of revealing & undermining a perceived ‘false consciousness’ but also of providing a positive ‘alternative consciousness’. It’s this switch from product to process which is at the heart of fiction’s role in moving the defining interactions of a culture from the (unethical) product-focused capitalist transaction to the (ethical) process-focused co-operative transaction.”

“The payback for those involved is the inherent pleasure of fiction: not Barthes’ plaisir, not even his jouissance, but something more akin to the pleasure of musical participation. He calls this ‘the pleasure of becoming human’. When it boils down to it, Singh’s vision is sentimental socialism of the most benign sort. He basically thinks that people become increasingly unhappy the more they are scared by the results of inequality into hoarding, fighting & barricading themselves off; when they would actually be much happier sharing, co-operating & pulling down the barricades. He thinks this needs to happen in the head & in the heart before it can survive in society, & that the type of discourse he calls fiction is the way to do it. He literally believes that constative social-scientific & historical discourses are just another form of ideological self-expression on the parts of the bourgeois capitalist societies that produce them; that the sheer attempt to ‘sum up’ any set of human interactions (even in a communist analysis) is a way of trying to profit (to ‘maximise knowledge-capital’) by forcing naturally plural processes to become singular products (of research): ones that can then be hoarded, defended & fenced off. That’s why he calls it unfencing theory: not just ‘taking down the fences of theory’ (like the Berlin Wall) but also ‘the theory of unfencing’ — collapsing barriers & calling off the fighting.”

“So then comes the tramp. Like Ernst Bloch, Singh wants to see things that most left-wing critics portray as the worst symptoms of failure & ugliness in a capitalist society & reveal how they can also contain utopian visions of hope. This tramp, who entirely neglects society & its laws, who treats everybody else around him as if they were not there, who never speaks until he’s drunk & then sings & chatters incomprehensibly with the voices in his head, seems at first to be the ‘Zomby’ of the piece — the human being without consciousness. He seems a hollow shell of a defeated man: the remnant of some broken marriage or closed factory discarded like a husk. But you soon realise that Singh intends him to stand as a beacon of hope: not just a symbol of the arbitrary exercise of social control over those considered to be psychologically deviant, as Foucault might have it, but a figure of revolutionary anarchy, symbolic of society’s complete failure to do what Foucault says it must. This tramp lives in a happier world than everybody else: one in which all efforts of material sequestration fail to deny his ability to conceive of a utopia.”

“But he’s not an angel, or even some sort of mystic ascetic, instead he’s just a natural man living as a natural man should in his situation. He is more like a permanent Lord of Misrule, a Shakespearean Fool whose foil isn’t an old, mad, blind, despised & dying king but the kind of bourgeois individualism Harold Bloom claims Shakespeare virtually invented. It is those who are not capable of imagining what he imagines who are the real zombies. For Singh, the tramp is both the Gespenst & the Gespinst of a utopian future that haunts the wasteland of the capitalist past.”

“Yes,” Hannah finally butted in, putting me out of my misery, “& that’s deliberately just like Derrida saying Marx haunts the Elsinore of his philosophy as the ghost of Hamlet Senior. Which is precisely why the whole thing’s obviously just about Amrit looking for his dad.”