This essay is the final in a thought provoking and handsome series by David Meagher:

“It has been a great experience for me, and I thank you for the honour and the opportunity to contribute to the site month after month.  The site is looking amazing and you have been great to work for.  This has not been an easy decision for me, and I sincerely hope that if the time and inclination return in the future to resume activities at PeacockPoverty in some capacity the door will be open to me.” David Meagher

The door remains open David, and we thank you for your rich contribution to this project.

“Streams of Consciousness” is a series of articles written by David Meagher. In March’s essay, Dave reflects back upon his essays for PeacockPoverty over the past several months. Not surprisingly, he finds several themes and common positions, including reinterpreting texts of well known authors based on their having had an intimate knowledge of poverty; revaluing the political economy of poverty and wealth; and refocusing class-based analysis of the poor.

March 2010 Regular Feature

Räsoniert, soviel ihr wollt und worüber ihr wollt; nur gehorcht!

(Kant)

L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

(Rousseau)

Last month, I presented Sartre’s auto-critique of the revolutionary intellectual, always in the position of speaking for, in favour of, or in the name of, some less privileged class, except in the moment of its inception, when the real revolutionary class was the intellectual class itself.  Sartre was in the precarious position of needing to give an account of the failure of the intellectual to serve power in the post-war period, since the intellectual spirit was always most comfortable in opposing power.  Foucault’s challenge to Sartre’s position was that the revolutionary class was fully capable of realizing its own destiny and developing its own ends independently of the guidance which the intellectual always seemed to assume it to need.  The distinction here might have been familiar to loyal readers of this column, if I can assume there to be any such readers, as a variant of the distinction between a bias of distance and a bias of proximity.  The attempt to show how the latter is to be distinguished from the organic intellectual might have been related to the distinction in yet another essay, between the Lumpenproletariat and the working class.  Also, the debate between Foucault and Sartre regarding the role of the intellectual may have seemed reminiscent of the question of the necessity of a Tribunal to try the crimes of the 1968 revolution in France.  One cannot ignore the Oedipal themes in this debate, with Sartre in the role of the super-ego, the sovereign legislator (of the state), and the angry Oedipus, Foucault, the ego in pursuit of a more just treatment of the unconscious elements of the state or psyche (a metonymical relation), while popular justice may itself be metonymically represented in the acts of another type of conscience, not the super-ego, but the censorship of the preconscious system.  Metonymy is one of the most prevalent forms of hermeneutic used in the period engaged in the re-reading of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.  It is one of the most effective literary techniques designed to obviate the tyranny of the censors – but a code so secret that it has no key is only useful to the one who develops it.  The freedom of thought and expression, like all freedom, is the negotiation of the limits of responsible speech.  We may not simply say and do as we please.  There is much more to freedom than the unbridled expression of desire; desire must always be tempered with intellect and spirit.  But I digress.  And I have begun to muddle together a number of thoughts which I would like to try to explicate in what is to follow.

In this month’s essay, I would like to begin with an attempt to take stock of some of the theoretical capital I have accumulated over the last several months, in order to attempt to see whether some supplementary notions might emerge, or whether, at the very least, in their re-working, some context of generation or some account of the interrelations of these concepts might emerge in their repetition.  I will make no conscious attempt to address new texts or authors, but will simply attempt to shed new light on what has already been treated, hopefully for the enjoyment of the reader.  It has been quite some time already since I spoke of this column and this site as a gift in the context of the Widerholungszwang (compulsion to repeat), and I cannot help but notice how much repetition seems to have already, almost inevitably, forced itself on these monthly contributions.  So I would like to get some sense of where I have arrived in this journey, so I can have some points of reference for the months to come.

As they say: when wondering where to begin, simply begin at the beginning.  So let me try to begin somewhere near the beginning, but not before (and this might mean the same or something similar) not before thanking Cheryl once again for the honour and the opportunity to contribute once again to this site.  In ancient times, and especially in epic works, the poet always begins by calling on the muses for inspiration.  Being somewhat less confident of the utility of appealing to such spiritual forces, I prefer to extend my call for inspiration to a being of flesh and blood.  I am aware that the act of thanking someone is sometimes misinterpreted as an erasure of the good which has been granted, since in acknowledging an act of kindness, one might overshadow the act itself.  I do not mean, by the acknowledgement of the debt I owe to Cheryl for this space for my monthly musings, to be able to honour the debt or redeem myself.  The debt of gratitude can never be paid simply by acknowledgement of the debt.  The debt remains, and the gratitude continues to be expressed.  So do I thank Cheryl once again, and so do I acknowledge not only the debt of gratitude, but also the quasi-mystical inspiration gained in the ritual act of such thanks, a very personal kind of incantation, calling on Cheryl as the epics poets called on the muses, for my inspiration, for the good of the site, and for the enjoyment of the reader.

One might find here the beginning of an account of why not all repetition is to be avoided.  This is not to say that it may not have some neurotic features.  One may repeat certain patterns of behaviour or speech, especially when they have brought about a felicitous consequence.  The problem with repetition compulsion is, in the first place, that it is the repetition of words or actions which bring about painful consequences.  But there is also an additional feature to the compulsion to repeat which cannot go unnoticed.  The practice of ritual acts serves to distract individuals from the business of life. Of course, life itself is comprised of a series of repetitive occurrences – day and night, the annual seasons, etc.  And society and culture repeat certain festivals and celebrations on an annual basis to celebrate the repetitions of nature.  So the total disengagement from repetition would be even more alienating than the participation in certain socially-instituted repetitive practices.  Still, it cannot be forgotten that such repetitions are to be seen as supplementary to the business of life, and thus as society’s great neurotic symptoms, especially to the extent that they fail to escape an economy, or instrumental calculation, of painful effects.

So in the first place and above all, I would say that when we repeat certain behaviours or practices on a regular basis, such as when I present a regular feature on this site, it is not the act of repetition itself that is in question.  The question is rather one of the novelty which has been accomplished in the process.  One might want to say that repetition is not the unhealthy pattern that we fall into, but the natural drudgery that we attempt to overcome.  It is from within the context of an inevitable repetition that we forge the possibilities of novelty or discontinuity.  It must be remembered that this site will never be new again.  Like birth and death, the loss of virginity only occurs once.  All else is but resemblance.  And so like death, which only really happens once, or like the loss of virginity, this will never be a new site again.  The moment of rupture caused by its emergence, by this moment of discontinuity, remains a sign that the innocence and ignorance which was lost will never be regained.  So are we thrown into an economy of repetitions.  And this is where it becomes our task to create novelty from within the familiar, discontinuity from within the continuous.  The challenge of this column, and of this website, was to speak of poverty month after month, but without being repetitive.  In other words, from within certain repetitive structures, an attempt would be made to let certain features stand out as original or unique, different than what had been said already, distinct from what preceded.  For my own contributions, I was willing to try to keep to a very similar format and method each month, confident that by changing the texts being subjected to the same kind of treatment, different results would emerge.  My impression, at this point, is that I may have produced more that is similar than what is different.  So my task this month is to distinguish the real differences from their most similar appearances.  And in order to do so, I cannot help some repetition or reminiscence of the forms these differences have taken.

One recurrent theme of this column is what might be called the ‘outing’ of poor thinkers.  This was especially exemplified in the essay on Socrates’ defence speech as a ‘lived experience’ testimony of poverty.  Here was a warning that not all forms of testimonial would produce beneficial results.  A case was made that Socrates’ poverty was one of the weakest features of his defence, and that his forthright testimony actually led to his conviction.  As Rousseau says in a footnote to his Du contrat social, the courts always favour wealth over poverty.  My treatment of Rousseau, Nietzsche, even Bataille and Freud, was always operating within an understanding of their intimate knowledge of poverty.  Of course, not all the thinkers I have treated so far in this monthly column can be considered poor, or to have experienced poverty; Foucault and Sartre are not to be considered rich by any standard, though they both sacrificed some of the luxuries of the medical profession which their pedigrees would have expected of them to maintain the bourgeois existence of the university professor.  But most of the authors I have chosen did live in relative impoverishment, and can be said to know something of what it means to be a starving artist.  They are remembered first of all as thinkers, however.  And some of them found themselves rubbing elbows with some quite powerful and influential people.  Only a site on poverty, it might be said, would consider them in terms of their poverty.  And it must be remembered, in this regard, that the phenomenon of poverty is scarcely treated per se in the history of philosophy.  My treatment of the subject has always needed to dig into some neglected corner of a text to find poverty at all.  And even where I did find it, it was hardly given due consideration.  Still, the selection process has not been as easy as to write about the first mention of poverty I might fall upon.  And many interesting examples remain concealed in the pages of these great writers.

Next, a theme which has begun to develop in some of the more recent essays, is the development of alternative theories of political economy.  This was seen in the idea of a barter economy, and in the notion of unproductive expenditure.  In both cases, the theory of profit which underlies the current monetary system was called into question through a consideration of what is called ‘pre-capitalist forms of exchange’.  What is most salient about such models is that they involve direct relationships between individuals and groups, without the abstraction needed to manufacture profit.  Barter economies are premised on the notion of fairness, unproductive expenditure on the notions of pride and shame.  It is safe to say that these are basic human motivations and that they continue to be exploited in the current economic system; but the ends towards which these motivations are directed have been completely perverted.  What distinguishes these motives in pre-capitalist economies is the absence of the notion of greed.  Greed is a complicated motive, which is premised on selfishness and competition.  It is unfair, shameless, and ignoble – arguably a total corruption of human nature.  The more society rewards greed, the more the natural instinct of fairness is perverted, the more social inequality develops, and the more a small group of individuals profits at the expense of the greater whole.  In capitalist economies, pride and shame come to take on the exact opposite meaning they had in unproductive economies with their dépenses sans reserve, so that one’s pride is no longer a sign of one’s self-reinforcing generosity, but a symptom of all one has accumulated, and one is not shamed into giving, but ashamed of one’s relative inability to provide for oneself.  As to fairness, the tendency in the last ten years towards deregulation would be evidence enough of the low estimation held for this value, were it not buttressed with the many cases of those caught breaking the few laws and regulations remaining in the economic system.  With the virtual collapse of this system, a reflection on its pre-history may be less anachronistic than it has ever been.  The responsible and equitable use of the world’s resources must be in the forefront of any consideration of the causes of poverty, or the project of poverty reduction.  And it is shameful that we continue to make excuses to preserve an unsustainable economic system, especially the excuse that it is unprofitable not to, rather than implementing policies designed for a more just distribution of means, and developing an economic system which rewards the higher morality of the species rather than its perverted forms.

Another recurrent feature of the analyses I have offered thus far is the reliance on a class-based analysis of the problem of poverty.  This has taken two main forms.  In the first place, I have found it to be important to supplement the traditional distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie with a consideration of non-labour forces in society, those which escape capitalist exploitation only to be subjected to another total form of social control.  Thus, mental patients, addicts, and criminals, not distinct but overlapping groups in society, have been considered in terms of our struggles with internment and other forms of surveillance.  These mechanisms of power have been considered especially in terms of a second feature of a class-based analysis – what I have called the sinecurist argument.  This phenomenon can be characterized in two main ways.  In the first place, it must be recognized that the poor and those who monitor us on a daily basis rely on each other for our existence.  The eradication of poverty would mean the unemployment of all these sinecures of poverty, meaning at least double the surplus labour that currently exists.  Also, I have emphasized the fact that, no matter how oppressive these dynamics may sometimes appear, the sinecures of poverty are not the real enemies of the poor, even if they enjoy considerably better standards of living than we do.  The envy in these dynamics is built into the system.  But the real opponents of the poor (and here I usually tend to include the sinecures with the poor in their opposition to the real enemy) are the social engineers who maintain the conditions of oppression.  According to Foucault, bourgeois ideology believes that the working poor and the abject poor are together and collectively the strongest revolutionary force in modern society.  As we find poor individuals included in the decision-making process of a government committed by its own law to set targets and report on the progress of poverty reduction, the logic of that very government sees revolution as the one means we always hold in reserve in case our interests are not served.  What distinguishes the master from the slave, says Hegel, is his willingness to risk his life in a bloody battle for prestige.  But what distinguishes the sane man from the fool is that only the latter would wage sticks and stones against bullets and tanks.  So the real revolutionary threat of the oppressed groups of modern society remains negligible in the overall dynamics of power unless, as has been achieved at some key moments in history, the police and the army can join us in overtaking the ruling class.

I noted earlier, in a kind of digression, the importance of knowing the limits of free speech.  And I cannot forget the danger sedition poses to bourgeois ideology.  So I must emphasize here, in spite of the seeming bravado of some of these statements, that I do not mean to incite revolution, and that I do not consider the present historical conditions even close to ripe for such forms of collective action.  I do not think it likely that the government will fail the poor so miserably as to provoke that kind of political response.  And I don’t think we would get the firepower on our side to make it a viable option in any case.  I believe this government has a good sense of what level of subsistence will keep us from such recklessness.  It is in everyone’s interest to maintain those conditions.  But just as we may fantasize of a world of income equality, so may we lay bare the historical conditions of a revolutionary class, in which disparities of wealth become insufferable, and angry masses turn to armed resistance.

Another familiar theme, or leitmotif, has been the question of the role of the poor in the strategy of poverty reduction.  As we know, the Poverty Act, introduced into law by the government of Ontario in May, 2009, included a specific role for the poor to this end.  And as we have seen, the review of social assistance has involved not only the participation of poor individuals in executive positions, but an emphasis on ‘lived experience’ accounts in the determination of its recommendations as well as in the public campaign to bring attention to the need for income adequacy and a fairer social assistance system.  Income adequacy, and a framework for a system in which the poor can live healthy and dignified lives, has not been as easy to achieve as one would have hoped, relying on the promises of politicians and the pace of the political process.  Very early in this campaign, my input on the question of ‘lived experience’ and its political utility was cautious and optimistic.  I warned against public displays of our misery, and emphasized the need for intelligent, honest, and creative expressions of the talents and abilities we possess and enjoy.  I warned of being used and victimized by a system designed to keep us poor and subservient, and I emphasized the need to take control of the media as well as the message of our emancipation.  This site has been among the most effective vehicles of this process, and has grown organically into a medium of information, organization, and political and artistic expression.  In my own way, I have been continuing to make my modest contribution, bringing to light the hidden assumptions of mainstream philosophy and political theory which reflect the bias of history in favour of maintaining existing power relations, so that those who are poor remain the raw data of social engineers and social scientists who remain safely ignorant of the lives of those they quantify and manipulate.  The strategy of using ‘lived experience’ accounts is all too welcome to these power brokers, who see suffering masses as a sign of increased power, wealth, and pleasure for themselves.  The creation of a poverty industry is the new frontier of these power brokers.  And the more misery they can produce and disseminate in the media, the more they can justify their existence, giving reasonable excuses why the goals of poverty reduction cannot be met, blaming mysterious forces like the economy or the recession, unfriendly governments or unfavourable public opinion, while hypocritically maintaining their own role as advocates and allies of the poor.  It is important not to be defeated by such tactics, and to maintain the dignity which cannot be outstripped.  We may share the goal of income adequacy, and we may continue the maintenance of the sinecures who owe their existence to our poverty.  But at the same time, our own existence, our art and our meaningful engagement in the world, continues to invest the world with value.  The rich man may never know what makes the poor man a happy man, because he thinks of his own happiness in terms of what he owns.  The wisdom of the poor is found in the ability to see through this limited measure of happiness.  The artist creates, not because it will make him wealthy, but because it will make him free.  And the rich man, who measures everything in terms of its price, has no way to measure this freedom.  So do we continue to create.  But if our creations seem conspicuously like ‘lived experience’ accounts of our poverty, and if the market for such accounts is the hottest trend, the most authentic among us will not be sold, and will have lost nothing when this bubble bursts.

I would like to conclude by returning to the sketchy topographical analysis I tried to present at the beginning of this essay, and to repeat what may be the most common facts known of psychoanalysis.  As we know, the earliest topography of the mind presented by Freud had three parts – a conscious part, an unconscious part, and between them, a preconscious censor which permitted unconscious thoughts to become conscious.  This was already somewhat reminiscent of Plato, who also saw three parts to the soul – a desiring part (like Freud’s unconscious), a ruling part (somewhat like the conscious part), and a spirited part, encharged with the protection of the soul (like the preconscious system).  There is already a great deal of metonymy in this simplest sketch, since for Plato, the soul was the lesser representation of the greater society as a whole.  Freud seems not to have made the analogy, but if he were to have attempted it, he would have found the conscious mind to reign sovereign over an unconscious, desiring part of the state/soul, of which it has no knowledge, except by way of the guardianship of the censors who transmit messages to the reigning conscious mind.  In a later variant, the conscious mind, what we call in English the ego, is no longer the sovereign, but is under the authority of the super-ego.  This higher authority dethrones not only the conscious ego, but takes control of the preconscious system as well, and becomes the new authority in the management of unconscious impulses and desires, which in English we call the id, or at least, the authority over all conscious ego instincts, which continues to manage unconscious id impulses in the same or a similar way.  Once again, it cannot be forgotten that the tripartite mind can be represented as the three parts of the state, so that the super-ego becomes the new sovereign, the ego becomes a warrior or guardian, and the id becomes the desire-afflicted people, still mysteriously invisible, for the most part, from the other parts of the soul or state, unless or except through its effects, which need to be interpreted to approach knowledge of its mysteries.

When I characterized Foucault as Oedipus, I meant it in the sense that he was destined to dethrone Sartre, whom I depicted as Laius, the super-ego.  This would make Foucault the new sovereign of French intellectual life, a role he faithfully upheld until his death in 1984, and even beyond, if only in spirit.  Sartre and Foucault continue to hold a mythical existence in our intellectual history, and each of them, like all absolute monarchs, held the interests of the least among us to heart.  But such bold and simplistic analyses hardly deserve to be taken seriously, which is why we continue to read the many and various thinkers who provided context for such mythologies.  Still, it remains worthwhile to keep in mind the intricacies of the two topologies in Freud, and its metonymical relation to Plato’s tripartite soul, itself a representation of the tripartite state.  When we think of class struggle, or social inequality, it is always helpful to think of the Platonic model.  Plato saw the tyranny of the philosopher-king as the most just form of social organization and as Foucault says, notably in the English edition of a book by Deleuze and Guattari, the people are fascists; they want an absolute ruler, a father-figure.  He was not, of course, saying that fascism was a good, or even an acceptable, model of society.  To the extent that it is true that we prefer to alienate our power to govern and make decisions, to control our lives, we must be constantly vigilant of this tendency; it is lazy, and it is dangerous.  We must each take responsibility for ourselves and our decisions.  And we must be respectful and tolerant of others, especially when they disagree.  But while I characterized Foucault in the role of the ego, fated to dethrone Sartre as the super-ego, I also saw him legitimating the other Freudian typology, where the preconscious system was seen as the popular justice carried out by the people.  The position held by Foucault at the time, that popular justice should not be tried by any court, suggests that his sympathy with the destructive elements of the soul was unmitigated by any concern for bourgeois notions of justice, in any form.  The society was a unified whole, the people subject to their own conscience, their own laws, and subservient to no reigning authority.  This was perhaps the most radical position one could take, in the interests of natural law and popular justice, and opposed to all institutional notions.  Occurring in the year of the first French edition of the earlier-mentioned L’anti-Oedipe, by Deleuze and Guattari, this position represents the condition of a reluctant heir, and an advocate for the individual sovereignty of all.  Meanwhile, Sartre was concerned to clarify the contradictions of the notion of an organic intellectual of the working class, which he continued to dogmatically consider the revolutionary class, while lamenting the failure of bourgeois intellectuals to provide the ideological foundations of existing state power after the war.  These two failures represent a stagnant and impotent society, neither progressing nor regressing, neither repressive nor free.  However calculated such a state of affairs may have been in its effects, and however paradoxical in its results, it created the conditions of the possibility of the mostly peaceful social and political upheavals of May 1968 in France, and the mostly peaceful restructuring which followed.  So Sartre himself may be seen as a reluctant leader in his own right, equally concerned with the will and autonomy of the people.

Last month’s edition of Streams of Consciousness: For Our specific Intellectuals

David Meagher was born in Montreal in 1966. He studied philosophy at Champlain College; McGill University; and Lonergan College, Concordia University.  Receiving his BA in philosophy from McGill University in 1991, he has been living in poverty for twenty years, pursuing independent studies in political science, philosophy, psychiatry, and criminology.  Dave’s articles have been published in a variety of minor newspapers and magazines.  His current interests include contemporary thought, the sources of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and re-reading Derrida, and he is currently working on a three-volume study entitled Schizophrenia.  Dave is a contributing editor at Neighbours and a regular contributor to PeacockPoverty. He has been living in Toronto since 2006.

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