I remember years ago I was watching the scene from Sophia Cappola’s Marie Antoinette in which the protagonist and some other aristocrats were sitting in a garden reading Rousseau. At the time this confused me — I couldn’t help but notice a certain contradiction here. Were they unaware that these ideas would be wielded by the great masses of people who would overthrow them? Looking back, it is clear how much more suitable this depiction is for the present day intellectual left than the 18th-century French aristocracy.
It is the basic contradiction of our times — and it isn’t just that those who have the time and energy to read are in privileged social positions. It is that there is a consistent cultural association with reading this or that text or caring about philosophy which few are really able to escape. Many of those who experience injections from the outside, from the periphery, do so only to ultimately appear more interesting to their peers within their insulated cultures.
A proper exposure to the world outside such intellectual bubbles, however, can bear no resemblance to the condescending, Mark Zuckerberg style of traveling and meeting ordinary people around the world — a definite bourgeois pastime, if there ever was one, unique to the last few decades. it is rather by way of the inside that one reaches the outside. This proper exposure consists in enacting a cold, modernist distance toward this culture and those within it. The attempt at domesticating the spirit of criticism into a pathetic self-flagellation that only lends itself to reproducing this insulation is successful only insofar as intellectuals still care about, on a personal level, what those similar to them think. Genuine criticism refuses to comfortably situate itself within the confines of any cultural or social space, but synchronizes itself with the temporarily of society as a whole, with the becoming of the class struggle itself — even if that means being ostracized by those within one’s own intellectual or activist gemeinschaft. To repeat this modernist gesture is the only real solidarity with those outside one’s bubbles.
The founders of the tradition of Marxism were met with the same problem. Marx and Engels lost their young Hegelian friends and were for a period foreigners to all radical intellectuals, and rifts in the intelligentsia were as common as anything among the Russian revolutionaries of the early 20th century. Few networks, friendships or communities were preserved for the sake of preserving this intelligentsia, but many were broken for the sake of reaching the actual broad masses. Further, those who are the most immersed within the insulated culture of the left are the first to criticize its ‘elitism’. But the actual elitism of this culture has nothing to do with any guiltless elitism (which is far more honest), but a condescending ‘compassion’ towards those outside of it.
Watching the recent season of American Horror Story, with its stereotypical depiction of upper middle-class left-liberals, one has to think: “What basic view of the world could this group of people have to reconcile their views with the obvious violence necessary to sustain their social position? Is it with the radical difference between everything they love and hold dear, and life in communities mere miles away? (the show takes place in Michigan).” It reminded me of the same question I asked watching the Marie Antoinette years ago.
The metropolitan petty bourgeois and the urban educated middle class are unique in their illusion that they have achieved the ultimate, pure and just kind of life, and that the poor and downtrodden, as unfortunate as their predicament is, are only kept from this kind of life by external factors and ignorance. Thus the great majority of humanity are like animals, abused, neglected and mistreated, unable to partake in this pure and just kind of life, much like the stray or shelter dog compared to their little poodles. The more they see their complicity in this obvious disparity of living, the more they are inclined to either charity or attempting to pretend to an alternatively virtuous life within.
They see the disparity as a humanitarian problem — and that the resolution of this problem would be if everyone to be like they are. What they do not see is how their complicity is absolute — they are not pure or just, even within the scheme of their insulated cultures — the basic violence of this disparity is constitutive of their own culture. So, back to the beginning, it is not like Marie Antoinette and her friends live a beautiful and just life — one can see the rot, the filth even within it.
There is an obsession with buttressing and homemaking the spatialities within the insulated culture of the educated middle class, in lieu of the postmodern obsession of space over the modernist time. The pervading mentality is that the forms of relationships, interactions, customs and rules that woke people create are a model for the rest of humanity. They are wrong — they are no more a model for everyone else in the world than the gardens of Versailles are for the Parisian masses. True cultural revolutions do not happen by way of the gossip-ridden, resent filled fashions of an acute minority, but through the will and participation of the broad masses. The mutual solidarity of what is only a specific, close-knit culture is not a model for a universal solidarity of humanity. It is a model for the solidarity of just that — a specific, close-knit culture of an acute minority.
It is an illusion to think that a revolution consists merely in making such a culture accessible to everyone — It is not by accident that, whether accurately or not, Marie Antoinette was known for the saying “let them eat cake.” She did not say “Let us hog all of the cake and disallow them to have any.” She said “let them eat cake.” Let them live the beautiful and splendorous life like we do, that they are prevented from. This is like us saying, let them learn intersectionalism and all of our other virtues.
The French revolutionaries who, following the great masses of people, compared themselves to the ancient Spartans, were proud to forsake and destroy it. They, like all revolutionaries, aspired to build a completely new world. Destroying inequality does not mean making the oppressed the same as the oppressors, the exploited the same as the exploiters. It doesn’t mean those in abandoned communities joining the culture of the hipsters who gentrify them.
Revolutionaries neither celebrate the spontaneous culture of the downtrodden, nor attempt to virtuously mimic a better culture among themselves and without their participation. They attempt to, alongside and with the full participation of the broad masses, build an entirely new society synchronized with the temporarily of a new and emancipated humanity — the movement of the masses themselves — as much as it is organized by new spatio-cultural arrangements.
The first step to leaving one’s bubble consists in the subjugation of its spatial arrangements to the temporarily of real philosophic and intellectual criticism. Abandoning difficult and arduous theoretical work thus has nothing to do with leaving one’s bubble, but is a testament to the lethargy of those it consists of, justified under the virtuous guise of solidarity with the masses. Without sharp, cold intellectual criticism, no matter how many times, like Zuckerberg, they attempt to reach out to the masses by way of cautious physical proximity, it is inevitable that they will be dumbfounded in their failures, in the fact that their bubble remains intact.
And after all is said and done, they will ask: “Why do they not yet eat cake?” — they will meet the same fate as the late French aristocracy. Hopefully, hundreds of years later, someone will ask: How were they able to for so long entertain the same ideas which would be the weapons of their demise?