Terry Eagleton vs Roger Scruton
This is my intervention from the episode of the Lack on the 2012 debate between Roger Scruton and Terry Eagleton. A link to the debate is at the bottom of the essay.
This was supposed to be an intervention on the well-known debate between Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton. When I wrote this intervention last year, I felt like I was too aligned with TE’s perspective to be able to add anything of interest to the conversation.
There was something in the recording of this debate, though, that captured my attention: the audience’s questions. Particularly the last one and the statements that were exchanged as a result of it.
The debate was recorded in 2012. My memory of culture from that time was different to what I saw in this recording. The last question asked here reveals that the essence of the culture wars we are mired in today was already very much in play ten years ago.
Unfortunately, though perhaps inevitably, the substance of mediatised movements at the time - like Occupy - quickly evaporated, leaving only facile aesthetics, depoliticised of anything that was truly left wing, in their wake.
Deracinated discourse - a right-wing deviation in the left - replaced left wing politics. Contradiction was transformed into opponent making, arresting the productive tarrying, the inherently conflictual nature of actual politics, into cathartic culture wars.
Perhaps this is why there has been so shockingly little political will over the last decade to resolve much of anything. Aesthetically left wing media figures pontificate online and on the news, yet inequality continually gets worse and worse and worse. The world is said to be ending, yet all we can do is name call on twitter, some of us with the smug authority of being on the ‘ethical side of things’, identifying as we do with the aesthetics of the left wing.
Yet it is the ignored economic antagonisms we face that are the very thing sustaining the toxic issues that the veneered dynamic of the ‘left’ claims so staunchly to stand against. It’s depressing.
To be more uplifting, I do think political thinking is still taking place in some areas of society, in surprising places that have yet to be captured by oppositional thought - in art, for example, (often outside the institution), in philosophy (often outside of the university), in collectives of various kinds, in conversation and in basic human connection.
I believe in the power of humanity, in language, in conversation, reason, creativity and thought.
I also think we are all getting pretty fed up with having to tolerate ‘righteous’ purity in the place of messy, complex - and potentially uncomfortable - political action. What is tricky, of course, is that we all need subsistence and we all need recognition. A large part of the social roles for which we are forced to fight it out demand adherence to this nonsensical, particularist ideology. Even if we don’t personally buy into this right-wing particularism masquerading as something aesthetically left, we often have no choice but to adhere to it.
At a personal level, though, we are all surely getting tired of mediatised particularity.
Essentialism is cathartic, but the hangover makes us even sicker than we were before.
Unless it is indeed too late and we have already returned to some kind of corporatist feudal economy (precisely because we convinced ourselves that the chimera of the left counted for something and abandoned actual politics during the last decades), the dialectics of purchasing power mean that the promotion of oppositional thinking by corporations cannot forever be sustained. Whilst opponent making is conducive to the promotion of the unconscious ideology of promise that drives sacrifice, its result is ultimately extremely dissatisfying. Materially, it’s impotent. It’s exhausting. And it precisely makes our predicament even worse.
If audiences are dissatisfied - as I think they are - they will surely eventually tune out. But I do fear that our wrested attention over the last ten years has destroyed a diversified economy that might have been able to offer something different. Perhaps we have already entered a dictatorship of the culture war. I sincerely hope we haven’t.
In any case, contradiction will inevitably bite. Repressed by totalitarian attempts at ‘purity’, it will return. It always does. It already has - multiple times already over the last ten years. But any productive reading of the symptoms in which it manifests (the election of Trump, for example) has been captured by the oppositional panic of purity games. The situation is again made even worse. It’s depressing indeed.
At a certain point, the patient is driven to analysis because he cannot bear the toxic jouissance resulting from the perpetual play of unbearable symptoms, symptoms that once protected him, shielding him from the difficult work of tarrying with contradictory reality as it is.
There comes a point when we have no choice but to face reality, to be let down gently to reality through the generative play of transference and countertransference, to ‘pick the living flower’
We need to psychoanalyse the political!
Anyway, this is the last theory essay I’ll be positing for a while. It’s the last of the interventions I wrote for the Lack. Philosophy really isn’t my medium and I haven’t had much time to create in my own one. I (personally and I could be wrong) think art - or at least a certain form of art - does the work of philosophy better than philosophy. So from now on, I’ll be posting creative writing here. For a while at least.
Here is the essay…
‘I'm not sure how much Hip Hop you would listen to. It sounded like you only listen to music by dead white men.’
‘Yes, that's what you've been taught to say. But that's a total cliché.’
The first statement is indicative of the problem with liberal thinking. It exposes how liberalism precisely fails at being political.
The second statement is ironic, given that the position of its speaker generates the very problems embodied by the speaker of the first.
Liberalism fails to be political because it doesn't take into account the fact that humans experience contradiction at the level of their own subjectivity. Every human interaction, therefore, every human system, every aspect of human life, is marked by it.
Liberalism is a system of thought that shields our gaze from the Contradiction and Lack that underpin our world and make us human.
There would be no world without Contradiction. There would be no human subjectivity without Lack. These two ‘(k)nots’ are the most generative powers in our universe.
Totality, wholeness cannot make. They are done. They are closed. Lack and Contradiction generate everything because they are empty and open.
At first blush, Lack and Contradiction appear to indicate both nothingness and emptiness. This makes them unappetising. Their power and generativity make them traumatic to confront and address. We tend to prefer to think that life is meaningful in its essence, that we derive from some meaningful source, that there are wholenesses that we can fall back on, that someone or something is responsible for us, that there is a divine driving hand guiding the whole.
Contradiction erupts everywhere, and so we cannot avoid it. The more we repress it, the more it returns.
But we convince ourselves that we can avoid it, that we can overcome it, that through mere aesthetic arrangement, we can blot it out forever and for good.
Politically speaking, or rather unpolitically speaking, we shield our gaze from the inevitable pesky eruptions of intractable contradiction within our societal structures by casting them into contingent, corrigible oppositions.
This way of seeing the world, however, is much more toxic than the apparently anxiety-producing alternative.
The demand for oppositional thinking, sustaining - as it does - the belief that a utopia of wholeness exists on the other side of the horizon that the enemy blots out (aka unblemished market capitalism), creates alienation, exploitation, dissatisfaction, desperation. It justifies the worst treatment of one another and ourselves.
On the one hand, it disguises the reality of what we are facing within the systems we create (surplus value, for instance, becomes an issue of racialist essence or a moral failing), sustaining and deepening the problem. On the other, it disguises the only thing that unifies us all: Lack.
Through this way of seeing the world, a chimera of the political is retained within the Imaginary, preventing us from ever confronting, understanding, symbolising, alphabetising, digesting, and better handling the contradictions that underpin our world. This is the character of contemporary ‘identity politics’.
Like in anorexic whose refusal to eat is an attempt to contain the difficult dynamics of an ambivalent and dissatisfying family life at the level of a symptom - rather than doing the much more tragic, upsetting, impossible and therefore productive work of verbalising and symbolising those problems - identity politics - now no longer so much ‘woke’ as a smug, misguided so-called ‘leftism’ - retain our gaze away from the repressed contradictions of our difficult, ambivalent economic system, emerging as it does from a distorted, ambivalent, lacking libido. And it sustains them.
Quantum contradictions mark air and water, rocks and rain. Animals embody the contradictions of evolution. The human second birth creates the lack that generates language, creating the experience of contradiction at the level of our own subjectivity.
Our current capitalistic system takes the shape of our lacking desire. Its contours, repressions and contradictions are therefore difficult to envisage because they are ourselves.
Well-intentioned commentators, unable to read Marx - who himself understood this - repress these contradictions even further by misrecognising or ignoring them, decorating them with a veneer of possible emancipation, of worthiness and dogoodery that is cathartic and satisfying, but really no different than the more visible dynamics of the traditional right.
The identitarian liberal ‘left’ continues to turn contradiction into opposition. ‘You should listen to fewer middle-aged white men!’ ‘We need more women CEOs!’ ‘More diverse actors and singers and sports stars!’ (Whatever ‘diverse’ really means). ‘The problem isn't capitalism born out of our lacking subjectivity, it's the patriarchy, idiot!’ ‘You're a racist!’ ‘You’re a fascist!’ ‘Your carbon footprint is too big!’ ‘She took a first class flight!’ ‘That person liked a tweet by someone who once said something that touched on the real problems of our political economy in a way that made me feel uncomfortable!’
Moral discipline is not politics, identity politics are not universal. They turn the universal of contradiction onto its head, towards the particularity of opponent making.
The only thing we all share is what we don't share: Lack. Politics is the art of the universal and in order to access that universal, we must dwell within a politics of Contradiction and of Lack.
What makes for good art, I argue, isn't necessarily that it is high or low brow, that it took a long time or a lot of specialist training to create - although that is very often the case. Rather, what makes for good art is what also makes for good politics.
Good art embraces, explores and tarries with Contradiction.
When we feel distaste at art that is too ‘political’, what we really feel is a distaste with art that is not political enough. It hasn't done the work of leaning right into Contradiction and Lack. It hovers when within its own imposed borders of particularity of opposition, of moral superiority, of dogmatic castigation.
Good art can come from anyone. From anyone who can speak and who therefore lacks. It can come from a dead white man, it can come from a young woman of colour or a non binary person living here or in any country on this earth.
Material conditions have a profound effect on who gets to make art at a given time or in a given place. But these material conditions can only be understood, addressed and possibly overcome through a reading of them that takes into its consideration Lack and Contradiction.
And material conditions intertwine with certain factors that generate one’s identity and one’s subjectival experience. But this doesn't in any way mean that any human of any kind is incapable of doing good art. Old white men aren't incapable of addressing Universalist topics just as young women of a different ‘race’ aren’t - or rather both are just as incapable as each other.
If the work touches on the universal of Lack, however it does it - whether it is conscious or it is not - it may be a good or great piece of work.
The comment made by the last questioner in this debate is indicative that the contemporary liberal media ‘left’ is no different from Roger Scruton. The reason many of us find them so annoying is that they don't know that they aren’t - or they can't admit that they aren't - any different.
I won’t delineate the dynamics of the conservative right here as I think they are well known, operating as a liberalism at a register the problems of which are more consciously born. But its solutions are similar: disciplining and blaming, rather than understanding the dynamics of the market system it refuses to confront.
Its failure generates its new turn. The liberal ‘left’ is an emergent of the market system that the right aligned itself with years ago. It is not an emergent of Marxism. When Jordan Peterson refers to the ‘Neo-Marxist Post Modernists’, he refers to an anarchistic aspect of his own liberal ideology, a return of its own repressed.
In any case, the Titanic continues to slowly sink and as we sit bewitched, watching the quartet play its merry tune, the traditional conservative wants to arrange the chairs in neat horizontal row rows, whilst the liberal ‘leftist’ wants an apparently freer arrangement with chairs cast here and there in a cosy way, ensuring children and those we consider to be incompetent at the front and those we deem naughty, born under an outmoded star, somewhere at the back.
The problem is whichever way we fiddle with the furniture, we are all going down.
The only solution is redialecticalisation of politics. And to do this, we need to stop aspiring to be so morally pure. Ideology, the basic human need for recognition, the material need for sustenance - all these things force us to adopt this toxic mode of thinking. It’s an entanglement that I think perhaps only a psychoanalytic dynamic of thought can help us resolve.