Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture / Edition 1

by Dominic Boyer

Overview

Combining ethnography, history, and social theory, Dominic Boyer's Spirit and System exposes how the shifting fortunes and social perceptions of German intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries influenced Germans' conceptions of modernity and national culture.

Boyer analyzes the creation and mediation of the social knowledge of "German-ness" from nineteenth-century university culture and its philosophies of history, to the media systems and redemptive public cultures of the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic, to the present-day experiences of former East German journalists seeking to explain life in post-unification Germany. Throughout this study, Boyer reveals how dialectical knowledge of "German-ness"—that is, knowledge that emphasizes a cultural tension between an inner "spirit" and an external "system" of social life —is modeled unconsciously upon intellectuals' self-knowledge as it tracks their fluctuation between alienation and utopianism in their interpretations of nation and modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226068916
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/01/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dominic Boyer is assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell University.

Read an Excerpt

SPIRIT AND SYSTEM
Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture

By DOMINIC BOYER THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2005
The University of Chicago
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-06890-9


Chapter One Conceptualizing the Formation of Dialectical Social Knowledge

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings.-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

Dialectical Social Knowledge in Theory

In this chapter, I ask how we might fruitfully conceptualize dialectical social knowledge in the language of social theory. I have three objectives: to situate this project within the anthropology and sociology of knowledge, to offer a limber set of conceptual devices for apprehending dialectical social knowledge as a social phenomenon in its own right, and to work toward a theoretical schematization of the activity of intellectuals in the social formation of knowledge.

I first revisit Marx and Engels's analogy of the inverting camera obscura of ideology in order to illuminate the link between dialectical social knowledge and the division and specialization of labor in society. From Marx and Engels through Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim, and the more recent works of Pierre Bourdieu and Bernhard Giesen on intellectuals and social knowledge, I trace the Marxian sociology of knowledge from its profound insights into the specific links between social-structural forces and relations and the content of knowledge produced by situated social actors to the serious functionalist limitations that recur in its various models of knowledge formation.

To circumvent this functionalist impasse, I then turn to semiologically and performatively inspired trope theory in the anthropology of knowledge (particularly the work of James W. Fernandez, Paul Friedrich, and Michael Herzfeld), which forefronts the creative, poetic (and also, in a less abstract manner, the political) dimensions of knowledge making. I focus especially on the capacity of the theory of tropes to account for the work of terms like "Geist" and "System" in discourse, as semiotic and epistemic means of "filling the frames" of social life with meaning (Fernandez 1986: 45, 62) and for figuring the self meaningfully and indexically in context with respect to other selves. While the broader historical and social-structural conditions surrounding the formation of knowledge remain, at times, obscure in tropological models of knowledge making, the shift of emphasis to the social actor as poetic subject brings the phenomenological and communicative dimensions of social knowledge into high relief.

Through the juxtaposition of these two strains of social theory, with their respective strengths in ideological and poetic analysis, I argue that conceptualizing dialectical social knowledge in its experiential and social totality requires, if not a synthesis, then at least a recognition that they offer parallel, complementary, and equivalently important insights into the problem at hand.

In conclusion, I outline the conceptual problem of the intellectual as social actor and explain why I have chosen to make intellectuals (primarily journalists and to a lesser extent scholars, academics, bureaucrats, and philosophers) the subjects of my historical and ethnographic studies. My focus on intellectuals does not mean that I believe that dialectical social knowledge is somehow their special capacity. Rather, I argue that intellectuals are simply especially prone to dialectical social knowledge given their specialized, intensive, intimate engagement with "knowledge" itself. Moreover, it is intellectuals who have helped to objectify the phenomenological tension between creative (inner) self and compromising (external) forms and relations discussed in the introduction as dialecticism. Studying intellectuals allows us to scope the full range of dialectical social knowledge from its more reflexive, informal, intuitive dimensions to its more codified, formal, and analytical dimensions. Intellectuals may have no special claim to dialectical social knowledge but they exercise it across a wide range of registers and thus provide particularly apt subjects for research.

Revisiting Marx's Critique of Ideology

It is sometimes difficult to separate Marx's own critique of ideology entirely from the work of some of his more recent and influential interpreters, especially Louis Althusser. For Althusser, "ideology" described the system of knowledge that favored the reproduction of class domination and that manifested itself, for example, in the "know-how" taught by institutional apparatuses like schools, the church, and the army that always encouraged "subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its 'practice'" (1971: 133). In general, Althusser's understanding of ideology elaborates the well-known paragraph in The German Ideology where Marx, writing with Engels, argues that the dominant ideas of a given epoch are the ideas of the dominant class (1978: 172-73). Althusser's whole paradigm of Ideological State Apparatuses (1971: 127-86), for all its brilliance in analyzing and specifying means of domination (cf. Foucault 1979), is built around this definition of ideology as a particular scheme of ideas functionally related to a particular class and then elaborated through institutional hegemony. One certainly should not dismiss Althusser's reading of ideology, since it indeed extends a pivotal point in Marx's theory of class domination. Yet I would argue that it recognizes only one dimension of Marx's critique of ideology. I will show that Marx's theory of ideology is not limited to the naturalization of class domination but that it also articulates Marx's sense of a more fundamental social and historical relationality of human knowledge that is due principally to the division and specialization of labor in society.

For Marx, the problem of knowledge is foremost a problem of human consciousness, consciousness that was "from the very beginning a social product" (Marx and Engels 1978: 158) and that evolved historically under different stages of material social organization. Beginning with the homogeneous "conscious instinct" of tribal humanity, social organization shapes human consciousness through the division of mental and material labor. As the division of mental labor expands, Marx argues, human consciousness becomes divorced from its immediate sensuous relationship to nature and eventually able to objectify itself as something transcendent of its material environs: "From this moment onwards consciousness can flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of 'pure' theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc." (159). Yet, despite its appearance of emancipation from the world, Marx continues, mental labor actually always remains interdependent upon the practices of material labor from which it has been divided. "Pure" thinkers need to eat and to be clothed and housed, and so others positioned elsewhere in the social division of labor must offer these services on their behalf. Marx's primary criticism of the Young Hegelians, for example, was that these bourgeois philosophers had generalized the ideational privileges that their social position in capitalist society afforded them to humanity and history as a whole. They believed, like Hegel, that social evolution operated principally through ideational forces and conflicts because they themselves lived in a kind of floating world of the intellect made doubly possible by the social specialization of mental labor and by their status as members of the dominant bourgeois class.

Despite his polemics, Marx did not identify the elision of their own materiality as a matter of some shortfall of intelligence on the part of the Hegelians. Rather, he viewed their inability to recognize their "true" materiality and the true materiality of social relations in general as a phenomenon of "ideology" produced by the division of labor. For Marx, consciousness always seeks universality in the particular, and so dominant systems of ideas naturalize historical conditions through a process of inversion and representation: "If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process" (Marx and Engels 1978: 154).

The tendency of human beings to project their immediate circumstantial relations as universal relations and circumstances is, I would argue, the basic phenomenological insight at the heart of Marx's theory of "ideology." Ideology is the form of consciousness that begins with the relational consciousness of parallel independent worlds of the mind and body yet is further elaborated, specialized, and transformed by the class relations of various historical eras. The common feature of every ideology that develops past the stage of "conscious instinct" is that, in each historical era, a dominant class arrogates to itself the right to articulate the ideas of the entire society. In a second section later in The German Ideology, Marx argues that the mental laborers of the ruling class, "its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood" (Marx and Engels 1978: 173), articulate and project key concepts that legitimate the material social order of a particular historical stage as an ordained-from-above natural reality: "we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honor, loyalty, etc., were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class as a whole imagines this to be so" (173).

Inside the dominant ideology, as Marx expresses most fully in the section of the Grundrisse titled "The Method of Political Economy," conceptual convention (including theoretical and analytical conventions) expressed in the sphere of intellectual activity mirrors the evolution of the division and objectification of labor more generally. For example, only in a society where wealth-creating activity has been abstractly universalized by wage labor does a universal category named "wealth" come into conceptual being in the minds of intellectuals like Adam Smith (Marx and Engels 1978: 240). Critical knowledge meanwhile appears only along the tension lines of class conflict itself-Marx might have justified his own critical theory of bourgeois society as evidence of the growing contradictions caused by the political repression of the revolutionary class and the bourgeois hegemony over the true economic power in capitalist society, the proletariat (173).

Already in The German Ideology emerge the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of subsequent Marxian sociology of knowledge for conceptualizing dialectical social knowledge. On the one hand, Marx's critique of the ideational dialecticism of the Young Hegelians suggests an intriguing link between ideationalism more generally and the division and specialization of mental activity in society. Moreover, especially in his critique of political economy, Marx is able to correlate the manifest content of social theory both with the exigencies of social organization in particular times and places and with the social positionality of the intellectual (for Marx, "ideologist") as a specialized mental laborer. In chapter 2, I develop these insights into an analysis of the relationship of the social phenomenology of the German Bildungsbürgertum (the educated bourgeoisie, or cultured middle classes) to dialectical social knowledge throughout the nineteenth century. Specifically, I ask why positive dialectical knowledge of the nation became conceptually dominant in the centers of German intellectual culture in the first decades of the nineteenth century and why negative dialectical knowledge of modernity had spread throughout these same centers by the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the dialecticism that became emblematic of languages of German national being and national history in the nineteenth century was ideological in Marx's sense in that it reflected intellectuals' transposition of their relational social knowledge into languages of cultural ontology and historical teleology.

Yet, on the other hand, the place of the individual intellectual as social and historical actor remains fully obscure in Marx's analysis. Marx incorporated enough Hegelian teleology into his own dialectical paradigm of world-historical evolution to make his theory of stages of consciousness both functionalistic and reductive in its outlines. Although I share Marx's sense of urgency to bring philosophy "down to earth" by emphasizing its social and historical character, I think that it matters how one emphasizes this social and historical character. The reduction of idiosyncratic, "sensuous" (in Marx's sense) labors of intellection to a generic postulate of ideology does not produce a particularly illuminating or delicate sociology of knowledge in this respect. Dialectical social knowledge could, under these theoretical premises, belong to the ideational armature of only one class or another, a position that the fact of Marx's own dialectical critique of Hegelian dialecticism apparently undermines. To unravel this dilemma, I turn to later generations of Marxian theorists of knowledge and intellectual practices for inspiration as to how to make individual subjects "count," as it were, within a Marxian sociology of knowledge.

From the Critique of Ideology to the Sociology of Knowledge

Other theorists working within the outlines of Marx's critique have helped to develop and refine analytical and representational tools that I find vital for conceptualizing the social formation of knowledge. The works of Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács on hegemony and class consciousness, for example, serve to elaborate Marx's analysis of "mental laborers" (intellectuals) and his portrait of intellectual culture in significant ways. Gramsci introduces the variable of the intellectual as a social actor into the framework of Marx's sociology of knowledge and further distinguishes between "organic" and "traditional" intellectuals, a move that helps to account for the diverse modes of social knowledge in intellectual culture that do not conform to an orthodox class-based theory of ideology. In Gramsci's terms, Marx's class "ideologist" is a kind of "organic intellectual" whose social role in a stratum of specialized and legitimated knowledge workers is to give every group arising in the world of economic production a sense of its own "homogeneity and an awareness of its function" (1971: 5). "The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc." (5). Gramsci's "organic intellectuals" are often not recognizable as "intellectuals" in the traditional (Dreyfusard) sense at all: journalists, managers, technocrats, and politicians populate their ranks alongside professors and public intellectuals.

Gramsci envisages intellectual culture as a complexly articulated struggle between the organic intellectuals of any given era, who monopolize the dominant institutions of "superstructural" (e.g., cultural) production, and various factions of urban and rural "traditional intellectuals," who although once occupying the structural position of organic intellectuals themselves (like the ecclesiastics under feudal aristocracy) have corporately outlived the hegemony of the class that brought them into being and legitimated them (1971: 6-8). The social marginality of traditional intellectuals, Gramsci notes, helps to provide them with a sense of autonomous social solidarity from the dominant order and thus cultivates a sense of critical distance with regard to dominant hegemonic trends. Contra Marx, for example, Gramsci describes German idealist philosophy's social utopianism not as an organic intellectual phenomenon but rather as a traditionalist phenomenon, an "expression of that social utopia by which the intellectuals think of themselves as 'independent,' autonomous, endowed with a character of their own, etc." (8). The advantage of Gramsci's analysis is that he is able to discuss dominant institutional centers of cultural production that articulate, systematize, and reproduce the ideology of a politically dominant class at the same time that his acknowledgment of parallel traditional intellectual networks and centers helps to account for the overall heterogeneity of intellectual activity within society.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Conceptualizing the Formation of Dialectical Social Knowledge
2. The Bildungsbürgertum and the Dialectics of Germanness in the Long Nineteenth Century
3. Dialectical Politics of Cultural Redemption in the Third Reich and the GDR
4. Self, System, and Other in Eastern Germany after 1989
5. Dialectical Knowledges of the Contemporary: Formal and Informal
Conclusion
Key Terms
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Over two hundred years of German history Dominic Boyer follows the contrasting experiences of being free and being determined as well as their symbolization in mundane, journalistic and theoretical languages. Thus he penetrates deeply into the core of both social theory and everyday life. More, by focusing on journalists he can show how experiences and languages shape each other. Spirit and System is empirically ambitious, methodologically innovative and theoretically acute, a splendid performance in the sociology of knowledge.

Andreas Glaeser

"Anyone interested in the transition to a reunified Germany, as well as in the broader questions of intellectuals and their relationship to media systems, will find rich material to engage with in this volume."

AJS - Arvind Rajagopal

"What emerges is indeed an analysis of  'media, intellectuals, and the dialectic,' yet it is also an insightful and at times moving study of encounters between insiders and outsiders, the dynamics of belonging and loss, and processes of identity formation and reformation."

German Quarterly Book Review - Eric Jarosinski

"A fascinating voyage into the (East) German state of mind."

German Studies Review - Marcus M. Payk

"Spirit and System is a brilliant book. It is nothing short of an ethnographic examination both of German post-reunification society and anthropological theory. Dominic Boyer poses the tension between 'system' and 'spirit' as exemplified in the German self-stereotype, which is in turn worked through numerous philosophical convulsions of an epistemological and ideological character as well as through the equally philosophical contents of daily conversations among modern Germans. This is not only an methodological tour de force, it is also ethnographically sensitive and an original and experientially grounded introduction to one of the central problems of German and, indeed, European ethnology. As such, it constitutes a serious provocation to reflect on the cultural politics of anthropological theory at large."

Michael Herzfeld

"[The book] is well worthwhile, on methodological as well as substantive grounds, and it is full of interesting—and occasionally brilliant—insights. . . . The book of a promising, ambitious, young scholar in short, and an addition that should be welcomed by both sociologists and anthropologists working on problems of social knowledge."

Canadian Journal of Sociology - David Kettler

"An ambitious and creative contribution to the anthropology of knowledge."

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - JoAnn Martin

An ambitious and creative contribution to the anthropology of knowledge.

— JoAnn Martin

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

What emerges is indeed an analysis of  'media, intellectuals, and the dialectic,' yet it is also an insightful and at times moving study of encounters between insiders and outsiders, the dynamics of belonging and loss, and processes of identity formation and reformation.

— Eric Jarosinski

German Quarterly Book Review

Anyone interested in the transition to a reunified Germany, as well as in the broader questions of intellectuals and their relationship to media systems, will find rich material to engage with in this volume.

— Arvind Rajagopal

AJS

[The book] is well worthwhile, on methodological as well as substantive grounds, and it is full of interesting—and occasionally brilliant—insights. . . . The book of a promising, ambitious, young scholar in short, and an addition that should be welcomed by both sociologists and anthropologists working on problems of social knowledge.

— David Kettler

Canadian Journal of Sociology

A fascinating voyage into the (East) German state of mind.

— Marcus M. Payk

German Studies Review