trembath.191

[AN...@uaa.alaska.edu]

SARTRE AND LOCAL AESTHETICS: RETHINKING

SARTRE AS AN OPPOSITIONAL PRAGMATIST

by

PAUL TREMBATH

Colorado State University
Copyright (c) 1991 by Paul Trembath, all rights reserved
_Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.2 (January, 1991)

And that lie that success was a moving _upward_. What
a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could
you travel upward toward success but you could travel
downward as well; up _and_ down, in retreat as well as
in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a
circle, meeting your own selves coming and going and
perhaps all at the same time. --Ralph Ellison,
_Invisible Man_

[1] The tension between art and politics looms large in the
life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre. The child-aesthete
depicted in _The Words_, the celebrity of Post-World War II
Existentialism, the Marxist revisionist of _The Critique of
Dialectical Reason_ and, arguably, the uneasy Freudian of
_The Idiot of the Family_--all of these and more seem like a
family of conflicting self-representations. Contemporary
interpreters of Sartre find themselves addressing several
related dilemmas. First, was Sartre a philosopher, an
artist, or a political theorist? Second, to what extent did
Sartre's literary writings contribute productively to an
effective oppositional politics? Finally, given the early
Sartre's modernist use of phenomenological metaphors (as an
apolitical philosopher) and the later Marxist Sartre's
interest in political "totalization," how can Sartre survive
familiar postmodern and poststructural criticisms of
phenomenology, ontology, and Marxist theories of totality?
I think that the later Sartre understood the hermetic
redundancies produced by such questions and--having lost
interest in art, philosophy, and totalizing social theory--
strove to manipulate his multivalent historical reception in
the service of specific political projects. These projects
were invariably oppositional. In retrospect, they
illustrate how Sartre moved away from professional
philosophy, literature, and totalizing social theory toward
a commitment to specific political protests calculated to
reinvent the social world and our experience of it. I
propose that the later militant Sartre makes possible a new
understanding of aesthetics itself, one that anticipates
John Rajchman's discussion of Michel Foucault's "politics of
revolt."^1^
[2] In his biographical narrative on Sartre, Ronald Hayman
writes that Sartre "used his life to test ways of facing up
to the evils of contemporary history. If he was not always
honest, it was partly because honesty was a luxury he could
not afford."^2^ Hayman's suggestion that Sartre "used his
life" to affect what he considered the "evils" of
contemporary history--racism, dictatorship, colonialism,
multinational capitalism, the serial family, and so forth--
requires us to consider how Sartre's "life" was largely made
up of the literary, philosophical, and political-theoretical
representations that people had come to associate with his
name and public reputation. These representations were what
Sartre "used" or manipulated to give voice to different
political positions and programs. Hayman is unclear about
what the word "honesty" implies in this passage, but the
word is provocative. Hayman's use of "honesty" suggests
something like an unprofitable lack of social versatility;
in a world as diverse in knowledges, truths, economies, and
political interests as Sartre's in the 60s and 70s,
unilateral moral concepts like "honesty" serve only to bury
any versatile engagement of seemingly contradictory
political commitments beneath an ultimately reactionary--and
apologist-- language of hypocrisy. If Sartre allowed
himself to be described variously as an Existentialist, a
Marxist, or a Maoist (to name only a few of his provisional
"identities"), his lack of representational stability--his
_inconsistency_ in Kantian moral terms--made his larger
objectives seem dubious to a public trained to recognize in
Sartre's political versatility only his inability to take a
definitive political stance of his own.
[3] Clearly such a stance--when compared to the complex,
changing, and situation-specific political commitments of
Sartre--would have limited Sartre's concrete ability to
contribute to political change. In fact, the "luxury" of
political "honesty," in Hayman's supramoral sense, would
have ultimately re-empowered the problematic concept of
historical totality that the activist Sartre arguably left
behind with his "theoretical" Marxism, or the luxurious
assumption of representational accuracy he had once assumed
for himself as the phenomenological ontologist of French
Existentialism.^3^ For the militant Sartre, "honesty"
became the political, theoretical, and philosophical luxury
of stepping outside one's specific historical situation, of
stressing Truth to disguise the workings of power, of
theorizing Totality at the expense of advocating difference,
and of describing Consciousness and Authenticity
authoritatively instead of letting languages speak uniquely
for themselves. Such "luxuries," I shall argue, became
untenable for Sartre toward the end of his productive life,
when he was not only post-aesthetic (at least in traditional
terms), but post-philosophical and post-theoretical as well.
[4] The working distinction I want to draw between Sartrean
philosophy and Sartrean critical theory is roughly the
distinction between Sartrean Existentialism and Sartrean
Marxism. Sartre became dissatisfied with the former because
of its ahistoricism and naive faith in the representational
function of phenomenological metaphors. He became
dissatisfied with the latter because it attempted to
describe authoritatively and comprehensively the social
freedom of others. Sartre's rejection of Existentialism,
and his reasons for it, are today commonly recognized and
understood in intellectual circles. However, the
differences between the theoretical Sartre of _The Critique
of Dialectical Reason_ and the militant Sartre of the later
demonstrations and interviews remain to be elucidated.
[5] The theoretical Sartre and the militant Sartre are not
consistently the same Sartre. Both are Marxist. But the
theoretical Sartre of the _Critique_ is a Marxist
_revolutionary_--that is, someone with a total political
program in mind that will definitively transform society.
The militant Sartre, in contrast, is one who rejects any
such authoritative program and, in part, the goal of
revolution with it. This Sartre sees "revolution" as the
ongoing business of revolt, not as the political end of a
long history of class struggles. The militant Sartre
emphasizes the historical materialism of Marxism but de-
emphasizes the totalizing objectives of Marxist theory;
where he once stressed the importance of global revolution,
Sartre now stresses the importance of strategic local
rebellions. Neither does he do this in particular texts,
something of a first for the endlessly writing Sartre; he
does it in his acts. His attempts to get arrested in
political demonstrations, his participation in explicitly
political debates and discussions, his visit to a well-known
Western "terrorist," his endorsement of oppositional
political regimes around the world, and his publicized
travels to diverse third world countries struggling for
political autonomy^4^--these and additional activities
demonstrate how Sartre used his global fame to lend credence
and voice to marginal or oppressed political causes
worldwide. (I will demonstrate this at some length later
on.) In each instance, we see a Sartre who, dissatisfied
with his professional reputation as a novelist, playwright,
philosopher, comprehensive social theorist, and so forth,
strategically uses his Euro-American cultural reception to
draw public attention to marginal politics and
underprivileged peoples throughout the world.
[6] This shift in emphasis from globalizing social theory,
philosophy, and literature to militant local practice is not
the only change we can recognize in the activist Sartre.
Sartre also undertook an implicit revaluation of the
aesthetic. In a historicist or even pragmatist way that
anticipates Michel Foucault's discussion of an "aesthetics
of existence,"^5^ Sartre came to demonstrate that the whole
notion of private creativity--so much a reified part of our
collective Western culture--needed to be reinvested with a
sense of public effectiveness. That is, Sartre strove to
reinvent the concept of the aesthetic not merely in commonly
expected terms of private expression and production, but in
terms of public and historical effectivity. For the later
Sartre, "artwork" was no longer something one did in
quietistic solitude, only to emerge publically with the
hermetic results of one's private labor (a painting, a play,
an opera, a new theory of art, and so forth). The aesthetic
became the entire realm of social invention--a realm utterly
mediated by our continuous responsibility for the freedom
and power of self-determination of other social "selves."
This, I think, is Sartre's most neglected contribution to
contemporary arts, to philosophy and literary theory and,
perhaps most important of all, to social criticism.
[7] In _Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy_, John
Rajchman describes the writings of Foucault in a way that
makes possible a post-voluntaristic discussion of freedom.
The later, activist Sartre both enacted and anticipated this
conception of freedom. In his chapter entitled "The
Politics of Revolt," Rajchman explains that "[l]ike Sartre,
Foucault was an 'intellectual' with public positions, and as
such, he had to worry about the political aims and
consequences of both his histories and their methods" (43).
Consequently, Rajchman is willing to discuss similarities
between Sartre and Foucault that have gone unexamined
largely because of the success of poststructuralist rhetoric
and its critique of voluntarism or, of late, what has been
described as "philosophy of mind."^6^ In response to the
way Sartre has been received recently (he has been ignored),
Rajchman acknowledges that:
Foucault has often been seen as Sartre's philosophical
rival. Yet as an intellectual he shares with Sartre an
inclination to present his work as nonacademic and
nonspecialized, and as addressed in a nontechnocratic
way to basic issues in the lives of all of us. And
like Sartre, as Foucault assumes this intellectual
role, he moves from primarily epistemological to
primarily political concerns, identified with an
oppositional Left, though not with a party, or with any
claim to bureaucratic or charismatic authority.
(_Michel Foucault_, 43.)
[8] What Rajchman describes as the central difference
between Sartre and Foucault is their different approaches to
freedom. Sartre, who Rajchman asserts "attempted to make
freedom into _the_ philosophical problem" (_Michel
Foucault_, p.44), conceptualized freedom in a way that gave
the phenomenological subject priority over the contingencies
of history, whereas "Foucault's commitment [is] to a
nonvoluntaristic, nonhumanistic freedom within history"
(45). Rajchman describes the difference between Sartre's
voluntaristic idea of freedom and Foucault's historical idea
of freedom as the difference between "anthropological" and
"nominalist" ideas of freedom. Sartre's anthropological
idea of freedom, according to Rajchman, remains tied to a
politics of revolution which has the final liberation of Man
as its objective, whereas Foucault's nominalist/historicist
conception of freedom manifests itself in the world as a
continuous politics of revolt--a politics that attempts "to
occasion new ways of thinking . . . and sees freedom not as
the end of domination or as our removal from history, but
rather as the revolt through which history may constantly be
changed" (_Michel Foucault_, p.123). As Rajchman explains:
[a]nthropology entails that we are free because we have
a nature that is real or one we must realize;
nominalist history assumes that our "nature" in fact
consists of those features of ourselves by reference to
which we are sorted into polities and groups. Our real
freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities
that embody our nature, and as such it is asocial and
anarchical. No society or polity _could_ be based on
it, since it lies precisely in the possibility of
constant change. Our real freedom is thus political,
though it is never finalizable, legislatable, or rooted
in our nature. (123)
[9] I quote Rajchman at some length because his emphasis on
a certain tacit idea of "freedom" in the texts of Foucault
makes it possible to recast Sartre as a nonvoluntaristic
local aesthetician. I suggested earlier that Sartre's
activism might encourage us to re-evaluate aesthetics, not
in terms of the beautiful, the sublime, the innovative, the
problematic, and so forth, but instead in terms of social
efficacy. And because Sartre's activism is _oppositional_,
because it always takes on explicitly political and counter-
hegemonic emphases, critics who wish to aestheticize
Sartre's political activities need to remind themselves that
Sartre's effective/aesthetic practices are always activities
of protest against specific configurations of political
authority. Thus Rajchman's Foucauldian conception of a
post-revolutionary _politics_ of revolt, as it empowers my
reinvention of Sartre, might usefully be redescribed as an
_aesthetics_ of revolt.
[10] This use of "aesthetics" may pose problems for many
contemporary readers, and with good reason. In "The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin
warns us brilliantly and convincingly that the
"aestheticization of politics" can coincide historically
with the emergence of political fascism.^7^ Benjamin argues
that critics and artists who wish in some way to associate
artwork with political power must do so in projects that
politicize artwork, not in projects that aestheticize
politics. The politicization of artwork, Benjamin argues,
helps break down political hegemony in a way that encourages
Marxist participatory democracy. The aestheticization of
politics, in contrast, elevates political regimes and their
leading representatives to an almost mythic status of
unquestionable authority, thus obscuring the real concrete
workings of power and exploitation by drawing attention
instead to transcendental narratives about national destiny,
the greatness of the people, spirit of place, racial purity,
and so on.
[11] Benjamin's useful distinction between politicized
aesthetics and aestheticized politics has become too general
and constraining in discussions of aesthetics and politics.
Moreover, its unquestioned heuristic authority might make it
possible for critics to interpret Sartre's pragmatist
aesthetics of revolt, prematurely and too simplistically, as
an instance of aestheticized politics. Benjamin's
distinction, in short, has taken on a kind of automatic
legitimacy in critical discussions; it divides political
artists up all too neatly between the good guys and the bad
guys, between desirable Marxist artists who shake up the
artworld by exposing its complicity with forms of political
power and domination, and undesirable fascistic mystifiers
who, instead of demonstrating critically how art is a form
of historical power, legitimate political power by giving it
an aesthetic and mythical identity. The lauding of Hans
Haacke in recent art criticism, for instance, and the
complementary castigating of Joseph Beuys--the former for
his "politicized art" and the latter for his "aestheticized
politics"--demonstrate quite clearly just how automatic
Benjamin's overly polaric distinction has become.^8^
[12] Writing critically of Joseph Beuys in his essay
"Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys," Stefan Germer claims that
"Beuys . . . made all historical reality disappear behind a
self-created myth of the artist-hero,"^9^ and that Beuys's
theory of social sculpture presented "creativity . . . as
the means to shape and change society" (_OCTOBER_ 68). In a
discussion that defers constantly, if implicitly, to the
authority of Benjamin's metaphors and the critical positions
they shape, Germer writes:
[b]y identifying political and artistic practice with
one another, Beuys avoids the relevance of his
activity, since he borrows for it the aura of the
political. The necessary precondition of this is the
aestheticization of the political. Abstracting from
actual conditions, Beuys in effect invents state and
society, thus making both into artistic creation.
(_OCTOBER_ 68.)
[13] Germer's critique of Beuys allows me to demonstrate how
Benjamin's critique of aestheticized politics, although
important and necessary, should not automatically discredit
my Foucauldian revision of Sartre as a local aesthetician.
Germer's Benjaminian critique of Beuys is based largely on
Beuys's belief "that, by _inventing_ rather than _analyzing_
social conditions, he could actually contribute to their
change" (italics mine; _OCTOBER_, p.66). Germer's use of
"invention" invokes a whole tradition of thinking in which
voluntaristic subjects supposedly create the world in which
they live, unconstrained by their historical conditions. In
such a view politicians are indeed "artists" whose "wills"
create the social world--privileged subjects who manipulate
social individuals, with truly epic panache, as the medium
of their heroic self-expression. But after Rajchman on
Foucault, the word "invention" can take on an entirely
different sense--one that has nothing to do with the "out-
moded concept of creativity," or of the equally out-moded
concept of the voluntaristic hero-artist who invents our
political reality in the manner of a high Modernist "genius"
creating an innovative painting or poem. It is this more
recent view of "invention"--as it implies a _nominalist_
aesthetics of historical effects rather than an
_anthropological_ aesthetics of self-expression--that
Sartre's activism and Rajchman's work on Foucault prepare us
to consider.
[14] Clearly Sartre's "aesthetics of revolt" is as
intolerant of aestheticized politics--and certainly of
fascism--as is the politicized art Benjamin advocates. Any
aestheticization of politics, in Benjamin's sense as well as
Germer's, coincides with the valorization of a _regime_,
that is, with the legitimation of some form of political
authority or domination--precisely what Sartre's aesthetics
of revolt seeks constantly to challenge. In fact, if we
were to understand Sartre's aesthetics of revolt as a
_politics_ we would need first to redefine politics as the
counter-hegemonic practice of local resistance rather than
as the structured and hegemonic practice of political
domination. In short, Sartre aestheticizes continual
_resistance_ to political power, not political regimes
themselves.
[15] I say that Sartre's practices of resistance are
_inventive_ because, in Rajchman's Foucauldian sense, they
freely contribute to the social transformation of polities
and groups and, in effect, reinvent the world (and our
potential experience of it) by so doing. In no way does
this sense of "invention," as it pertains to a nominalist
aesthetics of revolt, reproduce the
modernist/anthropological vocabulary of "creativity,"
"genius," the "hero-artist," and so forth that is so central
to Benjamin's description, and condemnation, of
aestheticized politics. Germer, for example, criticizes
Beuys's work by suggesting that Beuys's privileging of
"invention" over "analysis" in discussions of how best to
describe and initiate social change--as well as his
corresponding belief that people "invent state and society,
thus making both into artistic creation"--relies upon an
inevitable anthropological conception of invention. But
such a (modernist) conception of invention is _not_ the only
one at our critical disposal, and Germer writes as if it is.
The fact is that after Foucault's dicussions of ethics and
aesthetics in _The Use of Pleasure_, and after Rajchman's
redescription of Foucault's aesthetics as a free politics of
resistance, Benjamin's unequivocal identification of
"invention" with a mythology of "creativity," as it
sometimes appears in art criticism of a materialist
persuasion, has become as out-moded as the very concepts it
set out to criticize.
[16] My discussions of Rajchman on Foucault and of the
Benjaminian Germer on Beuys put us in position to revaluate
Sartre as a kind of oppositional pragmatist or local
aesthetician. In contrast with Germer, Sartre realizes that
analysis is simply one pragmatic tool that enables the
reinvention of society by producing effects within and upon
it, but that it is not the _only_ tool at our disposal. In
fact, analysis is only one kind of effective/inventive
practice; there are numerous others, and no single one is
unilaterally the most conducive to participatory democracy.
Instead, the context and the desired objective of any
political project must determine the tools and practices
that, in a given situation, contribute most effectively to
social change. Sartre also realizes that abstractions,
ideologies, religions and so forth produce specific effects
on simultaneously collective and local individuals. Such a
critical position makes it possible for Sartre to
acknowledge how his public reception as something as general
and hopelessly over-determined as an "Existentialist" can
nonetheless empower the specific effects his thought and
practice have upon concrete social individuals.
[17] The major difference between Sartre's aesthetics of
revolt and Beuys's social sculpture--at least as Benjamin
inspires automatic criticism of the latter--is that Sartre's
work pursues _political_ ends whereas Beuys's work pursues
predominantly _aesthetic_ ends. That is, Beuys's theory of
social sculpture is designed to give us new ideas about art,
whereas Sartre's aesthetics of revolt strives primarily to
bring about political change. This suggests enormous
dissimilarities between Sartre, as I see him, and Beuys, at
least as _Germer_ sees him. Germer seems to believe that
Beuys's social sculpture, as it strives to produce further
mythologies for an already ahistorical theory of art,
engenders historical confusion in the service of Beuys's
"artistic" reception, and does so at the expense of specific
examinations of political praxis.
[18] Sartre's aesthetics of revolt, however, does just the
opposite. At the point in Sartre's life where his
activities take on a local aesthetic emphasis, Sartre
already _has_ the received and overly-general identity of an
Artist and all the charismatic authority that goes with it;
in fact, he is often openly ambivalent about his mythic
identity.^10^ Thus where Beuys's theorization of social
sculpture can be understood, perhaps too one-sidedly, as an
attempt to obtain a mythic identity, Sartre's aesthetics of
revolt can be understood as an attempt to _use_ such a
troublesome identity in the service of counter-mythic and
oppositional practices. Indeed, Sartre has considerably
more by way of "myth" at his pragmatist/historicist disposal
than the aesthetic Beuys: not only is he a canonical
literary writer of mythic proportions (_Nausea_, _Roads to
Freedom_, _The Flies_, _The Words_, etc.); he is also famous
as a philosopher who tells us something dramatic about a
"human condition" (_Being and Nothingness_), a political
theorist who describes for us our social present and its
histories (_The Critique of Dialectical Reason_), and a
social critic who addresses current events in oppositional
terms ("The Maoists in France," "Elections: A Trap for
Fools," "Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide," etc.).^11^
Sartre thus achieves dubious charismatic status, in
Benjamin's propagandistic sense, as a cultural "celebrity."
And despite Rajchman's claim to the contrary, Sartre _does_
have "charismatic authority," or at least more than
Foucault, even if like Foucault he makes no _claims_ to
having such authority.^12^
[19] Enter Sartre the pragmatist. Now Sartre knows that he
has indeed obtained celebrity status as a writer and a
philosopher. For example, _The Words_ is in some sense an
attempt to come to terms with, and criticize, the socially
acquired motivations that encouraged him to pursue such a
status.^13^ But Sartre also knows that, given the levels of
fame he achieved as the 20th Century "Voltaire" of Post-WW
II France^14^--and arguably of the North Atlantic area in
general--that he can never simply _erase_ his fame. He can,
however, put it to some productive counter-hegemonic use,
which he proceeds to do.
[20] As a major cultural celebrity of most of the capitalist
First World, Sartre realizes that his cultural fame covertly
legitimates the political status quo of the Western world at
large--with its political and economic interests in the
exploitation of Third World countries--despite the fact that
he overtly condemns those interests. So Sartre brings his
fame to bear upon the very world from which he derives his
cultural authority by reproducing it supportively in places
where it is not expected to be. Algeria, the Soviet Union
(which he later repudiated for its Stalinism), Israel _and_
Palestine, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Brazil, and others all
acquire some potentially sympathetic attention from
Europeans and Americans when they see the "great" Sartre,
keeper of the flame of Western culture, clearly advocating
the political programs and interests of oppressed peoples
_contra_ the imperialist West's negative representations of
their interests and programs. Sartre thus becomes the enemy
within, and the unforeseen statesman from without. But it
is a curious sort of "statesman" that Sartre becomes for,
unlike the comprehensive "theorist" we expect him to be,
Sartre refuses to speak for others, to "lead" them on their
behalf, or to presume to understand their historical needs
and desires (unlike the authoritative West he supposedly
represents) better than they do themselves. Instead he gets
the West looking at him and listening to him, and then
leaves the stage to its proper organic narrators, in
Gramsci's sense, for whom he or any other representative of
the First World has nothing to say.^15^
[21] Sartre's use of his public identity demonstrates
several related things pertinent to my reinvention of him.
First, the revolutionary and theoretical Marxist of _The
Critique of Dialectical Reason_ has become unexpectedly a
pragmatist of revolt. No longer making authoritative or
transcendental claims for his pro-revolutionary "theories,"
Sartre now uses the over-determined notoriety he has
acquired for having "created" such theories to draw
attention to specific problems in social polities.^16^
Sartre thus turns Western expectations inside out by
allowing us to decide for ourselves that, politically and
morally, we are not always what we proclaim ourselves to be.
[22] Second, Sartre's oppositional pragmatism coincides with
his rejection of celebrity status as a hermetic cultural end
in itself. Sartre at once demonstrates his critical
dissatisfaction with concepts such as the "artist-hero,"
"creativity," "genius," "eternal value," "mystery"--
precisely those concepts rejected by Benjamin and Germer in
his criticism of Beuys--by moving toward oppositional
nominalism while distancing himself, as much as his
historical moment will allow, from any aesthetics or
politics of creativity. Arguably, this distancing coincides
with Sartre's activist rejection of the voluntarism with
which he is still too automatically associated, as well as
with his rejection of the anthropology that Rajchman
rightfully reinvokes where he distinguishes Sartre's
totalizing theoretical work from the nominalism we find,
more profitably, in Foucault's histories.
[23] I call Sartre's nominalist activism _local aesthetic
practice_ since it is at once _inventive_ in a post-
anthropological sense, and _micro-political_ in its
pragmatist suggestion that we resist authoritarianism, in
Malcolm X's words, by any means necessary. This last phrase
has been popularly interpreted as an advocacy of militant
violence; yet it is quite clear that "any means" can and
should suggest a great deal more than simply "violent
means." Occasionally Sartre does speak out in support of
"revolutionary" violence, as in his strategic 1961 preface
to Frantz Fanon's _The Wretched of the Earth_--a book which,
in its theories and objectives, does anticipate the thought
of the mature Malcolm X.^17^ Other times, however, Sartre
refuses to support the violent practices of militant
revolutionaries, although he periodically idealizes what he
refers to in one interview as the "militant
intellectual."^18^ For instance, we know that in 1974
Sartre visits the incarcerated Andreas Baader in a West
German prison, that he goes to express solidarity with the
oppositional militant and to protest the treatment of
political prisoners worldwide, but that he refuses to
condone the terrorist tactics of the Baader-Meinhof
group.^19^
[24] What accounts for Sartre's willingness to support
counter-authoritative violence in one instance and his
unwillingness to do so in another? I would argue that
Sartre chooses to _represent_ himself as a "violent
revolutionary" when he thinks it will serve the interests of
oppressed peoples whose organic situations clearly _demand_
such a representation, and that in other kinds of
specifically oppressive circumstances he sees fit to
represent himself in other ways entirely--but always in
pursuit of the same political revisionism. I say
"revisionism" because the pragmatist Sartre, if we think of
him as a local aesthetician, no longer believes in a final
revolutionized state, but instead in the ongoing need to
invent provisional democratic situations which, because they
risk becoming hegemonic in their own right, constantly
require revision and modification.
[25] One of Fanon's critical distinctions can help us see
why Sartre's direct public response to Fanon is necessarily
different from his ambiguous public response to Baader. On
the one hand, Fanon suggests that capitalist societies rely
largely on their infrastructures to keep things in
order.^20^ Such infrastructures are maintained by
"bewilderers"--teachers, lawyers, doctors, priests, clerics,
and so on--who, themselves unconscious victims of power,
mediate the hard realities of power by training citizens to
believe that their governments work to protect their
interests rather than those of the rich and powerful. On
the other hand, Fanon suggests that colonized countries like
Algeria require the immediate violent policing of occupied
"natives" to protect the interests of the political powers
that be. In the cases of both West Germany and Algeria,
those who have power are those who either have or manage
money. However, the actual tactics of oppression and
exploitation in an infrastructural state such as West
Germany in the 1970s--although arguably "occupied" by our
even more infrastructural United States--are not as
obviously violent to oppressed but serialized West Germans
as are the visible guns and clubs of French militia to
collectively oppressed Algerians.
[26] Unlike the Fanon of French-occupied Algeria, Baader can
thus be made to look like the only militant thing that
exists in an otherwise peaceful West Germany. And because
this is precisely what happens, it is not Baader's
illegality or militantism with which Sartre feels an urgent
need to take issue--despite his disapproval of it--but
rather with the way that Baader's identity has been over-
totalized by the First World press. Sartre understands that
the French-occupied Algerians with whom Fanon is directly
familiar, and whose plight encourages Fanon's militant
advocacy of a full-scale African revolution, collectively
recognize an oppressive enemy in the French, and that the
Algerian revolutionaries have organic narratives that can
justify and explain their organic rebellion to counter-
revolutionary Europeans. Europeans might not sympathize
with the "self-descriptions" of oppressed Algerians, but
these self-descriptions nonetheless exist, are collective,
and make a certain sense; consequently, colonial countries
will have to come to terms with them. This makes it
productive for Sartre to support violence openly, for such
violence, or its threat, will clearly yield counter-
authoritative results by making negotiation necessary.
[27] Baader, however, represents no full-scale revolutionary
program and, as such, is easily "psychologized" and
represented for public consumption _only_ as a sociopath
engaging in random acts of terrorism, when in fact other
interpretations of militant protest merit public
consideration. Sartre thus finds himself in the following
dilemma. He must not allow the state to use Baader to
condemn militancy in general on a _symbolic_ level. But
neither can he simply support Baader's militancy on a
_specific_ level, for he risks enabling the state's public
representation of Baader as the _Zeitgeist_ of terrorism,
irrationality, anti-civilization, and so forth. Sartre is
thus concerned that any blanket endorsement of militantism
in a passive infrastructural state might affront uncritical
citizens and opportunist state management enough for them to
suppress those legal outlets for oppositional practice that
already exist, and which already produce valuable counter-
hegemonic effects. Yet arguably Sartre's decision to
_visit_ the symbolic Baader in prison--an event which he
knows will generate some attention--is an attempt to keep
Europe's interpretation of militancy open so people can
question the state's suggestion that _all_ militant behavior
is _a priori_ pathological behavior.
[28] Sartre's strategic support of the student Maoists in
France, to give another example, often takes the micro-
political form of dialogues and open forums which are in
turn publicized--dialogues and forums which then impart all
the cultural credibility that a collaboration with Sartre
carries in the Western world.^21^ (This is a specific
strategy of Foucault's as well, who more obviously than
Sartre was no Maoist.^22^) Once again Sartre chooses the
means which most effectively empower oppositional
representations. Thus his commitment to the contextual
specificity of inventive resistances resembles Jonathan
Swift's as Edward Said describes it in "Swift as
Intellectual." Sartre's aesthetics of revolt is always
_reactive_ in Said's sense^23^ (or "specific" in
Foucault's^24^); that is, it always responds to a concrete
political situation and shapes the form of its resistance
accordingly, despite the fact that Sartre's aesthetics,
unlike Swift's, is activist to the point of abandoning
traditional category of "art" entirely. And the nominalist
quality of Sartre's later oppositional practices
demonstrates how Sartre's aesthetics becomes a politics, and
not an anthropology, of freedom; Sartre strives to invent
political room for organic speech-acts, protests, and
rebellions, and demonstrates that reform is never final in a
manner that emancipates people from an oppressive Past, but
that reforms are instead ongoing, specific, and endlessly
provisional.
[29] Sartre's oppositional activism also suggests that the
"success" of any aesthetics of revolt can never be gauged,
as has the success of all aesthetic enterprise in the past,
by the degree of fame or recognition it obtains, for local
aesthetic practice never conceives of success simply as
originality, wealth, cultural canonization, and so forth--
all of those representations of success which quickly become
commodities within the authoritative market systems they
covertly legitimate. Instead Sartre, like Ellison's
invisible man in the epigraph that begins this paper,
understands success purely in terms of efficacious
resistance. The question is no longer "Am I well-known,
rich?" and so on, but instead "Have I released any of the
counter-hegemonic potential that is stored up in the current
regime? That is, have I affected the world in ways which
unleash the possibility of endless resistance to authority?"
Sartre, of course, is not the unknown protagonist of
Ellison's novel; in fact, the circumstances of Sartre's
life, existence, and influence are obviously different from
those of an impoverished member of a social minority.
Nonetheless what goes for Sartre goes for others as well;
everyone in their specific and local situations can resist
authority in local aesthetic ways and can do so, in part, by
manipulating their various socially assigned "selves" in the
service of inventive microphysical revolts. Moreover, the
story I tell here of Sartre might usefully empower our
unique resistances by lending them some (provisional)
authority for which they are in dire need.
[30] One inconsistency remains, but it is one that enables
Sartre's aesthetics of revolt _in practice_ as much as it
might seem to disable it _in theory_. If the reactive
quality of Sartre's aesthetics of revolt makes his activism
"microphysical" in Foucault's well-known sense of the word,
a large portion of Sartre's _specific_ power--that is, the
power he derives from his fame--is unavoidably drawn from
the "mythologies" of creativity criticized by Benjamin and
Germer. I think it is unproductive, however, simply to
berate mythology for its "ideological" status, for such
berating implies that we can "expose" mythology as pure
false-consciousness, when in fact no such form of mythology
exists. Rather mythology must be understood for what it is:
a concrete force of history which can be used inventively
and oppositionally against exploitive powers, or which will
be used instead, almost invariably, to conserve those
powers. In fact, we have no humane choice at present but to
follow Sartre's example and to redirect authoritative
mythologies against themselves. Our failure to do so
automatically leaves mythologies in the hands of those
exploitive powers who, pragmatists already, use mythologies
to legitimate their authoritarian politics. Just as honesty
is a luxury that Sartre cannot afford, neither can we afford
the _a priori_ anti-mythologism of Benjamin's automatic
following. Such a rejection of the historically-constituted
_currency_ of struggle is the strategic equivalent of
putting down guns in the thick of battle, of refusing to
tell Attila a lie, as the famous illustration of Kant's
imperative goes, though it mean the death of an entire
population.
[31] Let us then reconsider Benjamin's distinction between
politicized art and aestheticized politics. If there are
good reasons to avoid theoretical syntheses of aesthetics
and politics (and there certainly are), Sartre's local
aesthetics cautions us against taking these "good reasons"
too far, because they risk disempowering us entirely. If we
should _never_ equate power, in some mythic and glorious
sense, with art, neither should we allow cultural
materialism, since it is often our area of critical
commitment, to become passive, commodifiable, and
politically unengaged. This latter possibility is a far
greater threat to critical activism than the social
sculpture of Joseph Beuys, for it discourages many of the
keenest critical minds in cultural studies, simply for fear
of reprisal, from directing their inventive powers
explicitly toward political issues. Sartre, for his part,
refuses to practice an aesthetics which is not at once an
effective historicism, and strives, in keeping with his
larger democratic objectives, to affect social polities in
ways that encourage us to criticize authority, to
conceptualize political alternatives, and to empathize with
the plights of suffering social selves. His nominalist
aesthetics, which considers invention from a viewpoint
radically different from that of Benjamin's followers,
neither simply aestheticizes politics nor politicizes art
but, ceasing to privilege artwork altogether, politicizes
the potential of our ongoing nominalist freedom.

-------------------------------------------------------

Notes

^1^ John Rajchman, _Michel Foucault: The Freedom of
Philosophy_ (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). I am indebted to
Rajchman's superb reading of Foucault in this paper.

^2^ Ronald Hayman, _Sartre: A Life_ (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1987), 13.

^3^ See Simone de Beauvoir, "Conversations with Jean-
Paul Sartre," _Adieux_, trans. Patrick O'Brian (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984), 165. The later activist Sartre
questions the impossibly broad scope of his theoretical
_Critique of Dialectical Reason_ when he suggests to de
Beauvoir in an interview that he finds it too "idealistic."
And in an attempt to provide the phenomenological vocabulary
of Existentialism with something of a historicist emphasis
Sartre claims that Existentialism is autonomous with
Marxism. See Jean-Paul Sartre, "Self-Portrait at Seventy,"
_Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken_, trans. Paul
Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 60.

^4^ See Annie Cohen-Solal, _Sartre_, ed. Norman
Macafee, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books,
1987). Cohen-Solal gives examples of Sartre's political
protests (e.g, 141-22), his numerous travels as an "anti-
ambassador" (391-414), his brief arrest in 1970 for
distributing _La Cause du peuple_ (479-480), his visit to
the imprisoned Andreas Baader (507), and suggests that these
and other of his activities are instances of Sartrean
engagement. See also Keith A. Reader, _Intellectuals and
the French Left since 1968_ (New York: St. Martins Press,
1987), 31. Reader mentions Sartre's "involvement with the
banned Maoist newspaper _La Cause du Peuple_, and
subsequently with _Liberation_, participation in
demonstrations, and attempts to get himself arrested" which
are "shrewdly rebutted by the regime."

^5^ For Foucault on his treatment of an "aesthetics of
existence" see Michel Foucault, "Introduction," _The Use of
Pleasure_, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books,
1985), especially 11-12.

^6^ See Richard Rorty, "Epistemology and 'the
Philosophy of Mind,'" _Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature_
(New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1979), 125-27.

^7^ See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," _Illuminations_, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schoken Books, 1969), 241-242.

^8^ See Thierry de Duve, "Joseph Beuys, or the Last of
the Proletarians"; Stefen Germer, "Haacke, Broodthaers,
Beuys"; and Eric Michaud, "The Ends of Art according to
Beuys" in _OCTOBER_, eds. Joan Copjec, Douglas Crimp,
Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson (Cambridge: MIT Press),
Number 45, Summer 88.

^9^ Germer, _OCTOBER_, 71.

^10^ Sartre indeed has mixed feelings about the fame he
has acquired as a cultural figure. He sometimes discusses
his fame openly, his early reasons for desiring it, and
speculates about his relation to "posterity" in a matter-of-
fact manner. See de Beauvoir, _Adieux_, 162-64. Other
times, however, he is defensive about his fame, and attempts
to deny that it empowers him since he associates celebrity
status very unfavorably with "bourgeois" society. See
Sartre, "Self-Portrait at Seventy," 25-31. Nonetheless, the
later politicized Sartre capitalizes on his fame (or his
"mythic identity") to draw attention to political
alternatives. Moreover, in reference to Sartre's 1968
interview of the less famous Daniel Cohn-Bendit--in which
Sartre was provided with the opportunity to use his fame
while playing it down--Reader writes in _Intellectuals_ that
"[f]rom being famous for being Sartre, the curse that had
dogged him for years, it was as though he were moving toward
'un-being' Sartre," 32.

^11^ See Sartre, "Elections: A Trap for Fools," and
"The Maoists in France," _Life/Situations_; and Jean-Paul
Sartre, "Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide," _Between
Existentialism and Marxism_, trans. John Mathews (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1974).

^12^ See Rajchman, 43.

^13^ Jean-Paul Sartre, _The Words_, trans. Bernard
Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964).

^14^ See Cohen-Solal, 415. Cohen-Solal writes that de
Gaulle's response to continued French disapproval of
Sartre's political views and activities in 1960 was the
famous "You do not imprison Voltaire."

^15^ For an excellent summary of Antonio Gramsci's
distinction between the organic intellectual and the
traditional intellectual see Edward Said, "Swift as
Intellectual," _The World, the Text, and the Critic_
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), 82.

^16^ For a similar view of how Sartre uses his cultural
recognition to enable projects of resistance which are not
necessarily his own, see Reader, 32. Regarding Sartre's
close relation with the French student Maoists in the late
1960s and early 70s, Reader writes that "Sartre subordinates
himself to the Maoists, using his prestige to amplify and
propogate their ideas rather than ideas he has himself
developed."

^17^ See Jean-Paul Sartre's "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's
_The Wretched of the Earth_, trans. Constance Farrington
(New York: Grove Press, 1966); and for an interpretation of
how the thought of the later Malcolm X resembled the
"revolutionary socialism" of a "Third World political
perspective" (237) see Ruby M. and E.U. Essien-Udom,
"Malcolm X: An International Man" in _Malcolm X: The Man and
his Times_, ed. John Henrik Clarke (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), 235-267.

^18^ See Sartre, "Self-Portrait at Seventy," 61. In
this interview Sartre characterizes the Maoist Pierre Victor
as a "militant intellectual" and expresses hope that Victor
"will carry out both the intellectual work and the militant
work he wants to."

^19^ Sartre discusses his reasons for visiting Baader,
the public's reaction to his visit, and his judgment of the
visit itself in "Self-Portrait at Seventy," 27, 31. Despite
all the attention his visit drew, Sartre claims: "I think it
was a failure, which is not to say that if I had to do it
over again I would not do it." Sartre acknowledges that,
although many people _did_ interpret his visit as an
expression of approval for Baader specifically or, even
worse, exploited it as a political opportunity to question
the aging Sartre's lucidity through the press, the fact that
some attention was drawn to the merits of oppositional
militancy more than justified Sartre's visit, and would have
justified it _again_. I think Sartre used Baader as an
available representation of militant activism simply to keep
the possibility of such activism alive in the European
imagination. For even if Baader's practices were
specifically unproductive and even questionable as
activities of "resistance," Sartre knew that the state would
manipulate Baader's reception on a _symbolic_ level to
condemn militancy in general, when militancy might in some
cases be necessary, effective, and absolutely desirable.
Sartre thus strove to respond to the state's symbolic over-
totalization of oppositional militancy by producing
alternative symbolics. See also Cohen-Solal, 507, and
Hayman, 462, 465, 467.

^20^ For Fanon's characterization of the difference
between capitalist and colonized countries and the role that
"bewilderers" play in the former see _The Wretched of the
Earth_, 38. Fanon does not use the word "infrastructure" to
characterize institutional activities of "bewilderment;
however, I think the word "infrastructure," with some
qualification, communicates the sense of his argument well.
I am not using "infrastructure" to imply the base (or
substructure) of a society, but instead to suggest the more
microphysical practices of subjectivization that take place
in complex societies which cannot be explained simply in
terms of base or superstructure.

^21^ See Sartre, "The Maoists in France,"
_Life/Situations_, 162-171. This article first appeared as
the introduction to Michele Manceaux's _Maos en France_
(Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972). Manceaux's book is a
collection of interviews with Maoists, and Sartre was eager
to endorse the Maoists' moral commitment to illegal action.
Sartre did so, I think, both to provoke France to consider
the merits of illegal action, and to provide a moral
discourse that could justify the necessity of such action to
uncritical citizens who were otherwise trained to understand
illegal action as _a priori_ illegitimate action. See also
Cohen-Solal on Sartre and the Maoists, 474-88, 494.

^22^ Michel Foucault, "On Popular Justice: A Discussion
with Maoists," _Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972-1977_, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo
Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books,
1977), 1-36. This interview is largely a conversation with
Sartre's close associate toward the end of his life, the
Maoist Pierre Victor.

^23^ For Said on the "reactive" intellectual see "Swift
as Intellectual," 78. Elsewhere in this essay Said
describes Swift as a "local activist" (77) and characterizes
Swift's writings and practices as "local performances" (79).
These distinctions are all pertinent to my reinvention of
Sartre.

^24^ For Foucault on the "specific" intellectual see
"Truth and Power," _Power/Knowledge_, 126.

[MMedi13720]

In article <837368343$18...@atype.com>, <AN...@UAA.ALASKA.EDU> writes:

>
> SARTRE AND LOCAL AESTHETICS: RETHINKING
> SARTRE AS AN OPPOSITIONAL PRAGMATIST

How existentially Gothic! I'm-a gonna get my black turtleneck and crank up
the Cure!

"Hell is other people" -J-P Sartre.

With Simone de Bouvier gadding about the house all day, I can see why.

Mike S. Medintz