Gabriel Rockhill is nothing if not sedulous. In Who Paid the Pipers—itself just the first volume of a trilogy titled The Intellectual World War: Marxism versus the Imperial Theory Industry—he excavates, with mind-numbing thoroughness, the institutional networks and money trails channeling capitalism’s stolen plunder from corporate foundations and the US government to the fat pockets and feathered nests of the Frankfurt School’s intellectual grandees. From this he concludes that Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse especially—even if maybe they made a good point now and then—were mere stooges for capitalism and its ideologues, executing a plot, planned at the highest levels, to mislead leftists in the West and the world over, addling their brains with misplaced bourgeois scruples and pieties, seducing them with the plangent, melancholy music of humanism and idealism, teaching them to find subtle pleasures in defeat, and thus pulling them away from the true path to enlightenment and the only right course of action—solidarity with the worldwide struggle against imperialism.
Like many “revisionist” arguments, Rockhill’s functions as an academically credentialed, copiously footnoted conspiracy theory. An avalanche of facts conceals a paucity of good-faith interpretation or, for want of a better word, “common sense.” If his aim were to understand Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse’s subjective motivations, considered beliefs, and sincere intentions, he would have spent more time on their books, essays, and correspondence than on receipts, acknowledgments, and CIA documents. But Rockhill can justify such neglect: to allow that they might have offered nuanced Marxist critiques of actually existing socialism, applying profound erudition to grant greater philosophical depth to Marxist thought, is already to be hornswoggled. And indeed: to think that anyone’s work can be understood in terms of expressly articulated motivations, beliefs, intentions is to remain caught in the idealist mire of bourgeois ideology. Hence he can happily replace sustained reading with the most tendentious characterizations of the works that, one suspects, he might not have really read at all. All good faith, open engagement with the text could only conceal the malevolent intention that the conspiracy theorist, having followed the money, knows must exist.
To give just one example: Herbert Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism, published in 1958—only half a decade after Stalin’s death—offers a coherent, if perhaps one-sided, explanation of how Soviet ideology and practice developed in response to outside military and economic pressures. While critical of many aspects of Stalinism—among them, the mechanical application of dialectic, its repressive and rigid morality, the “magical” use of language and the decay of the traditional logical opposition of truth and falsity—it is hardly a screed against the horrors of his regime, and Marcuse never fails to stress the possibility that, far from representing a historical dead end, Soviet Marxism could evolve toward a “definition of communism in terms of a production and distribution of social wealth according to freely developing individual needs.” [250] For Rockhill, however, “[t]he key takeaway is that, if one aspires to be an authentic Marxist à la Marcuse, it is imperative to reject Soviet Marxism as an aberration and a perversion of Marxism’s fundamental essence.” [299] What Marcuse offers is nothing else than a “puerile celebration of a utopian version of socialism in order to juxtapose it to the horrors of socialism in the real world.” [299-300] This is a flagrant—and utterly puerile—mischaracterization of Marcuse’s book. And it is also strange: Marcuse does not see actually existing socialism as a fixed essence but an evolving historical phenomena, whose future, in which he sees hope, concerns him. For Rockhill, however, it is arrogance, if not social chauvinism, for the Western Marxist to think he can analyze let alone criticize actually existing socialism. His place is not even to cheerlead but just to cheer—led by the vanguard.
Rockhill even admits his mode of argument is conspiratorial. He embraces this: After all: “Labels like ‘conspiratorial thinking’ and ‘conspiracy theory,’ as they are generally used in public discourse, are often mobilized as weapons of class warfare whose principal objective is to peremptorily exclude as beyond the pale certain forms of materialist analysis.” [97] Certainly someconspiracy theories turn out to be justified; the term “conspiracy” refers not to magical causality but a real form of agency and sociality, and Rockhill may well be right that late capitalism increasingly functions through conspiratorial actions on the part of an increasingly rarified, privileged, and socially isolated elite—though one also suspects that the public interest in conspiracies, precisely due to their liminal relation to the public sphere, exceeds their actual causal significance. But while a conspiratorial interpretation of monopoly capitalism may certainly be situated within and supported by a materialist account of capitalism, conspiracies operate at the realm of “spirit,” since they presuppose a shared subjective intention. Conspiracies may be materially motivated, but they cannot be reduced to material causation, and least of all when this involves ignoring whole oeuvres so as to point to a malevolent agency. It is also troublesome that so many of the malevolent conspirators in Rockhill’s account are Jewish. The conspiratorial Jew is indeed one of the most insidious and dangerous antisemitic tropes and certainly played a role in the Soviet Antisemitism of which Rockhill, unsurprisingly, not only has nothing to say, but whose revisionist account of the Holocaust he parrots. [206]
Conspiracy theories become especially problematic when they systematically deny the possibility of their refutation by regarding all critique as evidence for the demonic efficacy of the conspiracy. And precisely this is what Rockhill does: any argument against his interpretation of the Frankfurt School—any argument that doesn’t factually dispute factual evidence but takes aim at the interpretations for which all these facts serve as an explosive propellent—can be immediately dismissed as mere evidence that one is too far immersed in the “imperial core” of knowledge production to see one’s way out. Or in a word: there is no room in Rockhill’s world for a debate about interpretation; one is either friend or foe—on the wrong side or the right side of history. It is perhaps not Karl Marx, but Carl Schmitt, who underwrites Rockhill’s vision. The truth, for Rockhill, is warlike, but not, as in an epigraph from Brecht, because it fights against untruth, but because one can only discovery truth by choosing sides. As Rockhill writes at the end of the thirty-three page “opening salvo”:
Whose ideas do we want to carry forth in the world and embody in material reality through our struggles: those of the liberators who have strived, under dire circumstances and constant onslaught, to make the idea of a better world into a material reality; or those who have sought to stop the socialist project in its tracks by not only killing its leaders, but also attempting to destroy the very ideas they embody? [46]
To this Hollywood vision of an epic battle of good versus evil, a philosopher might answer: neither, if neither is true. I, at least, am convinced that the truth of philosophers—and of artists, scientists, poets—will always be somehow different than the truth of history’s powerful actors, be they liberators or oppressors. Rockhill cannot allow this difference; he cannot allow that philosophy is anything but a means toward, a tool of, politics. Rather, philosophers, before they begin to think, must decide whether to align themselves with the oppressors or the liberators, and if they align themselves with the liberators, they must submit to the doctrine of liberation. This doctrine offers a vision of the world so utterly opposed to the endless perspectives of oppression—their very multiplicity, far from evincing a healthy pluralism, is the very means by which they deflect from truth—that no middle path is possible. All deviation from the true path is also an act of hostility, class warfare.
He finds this liberating doctrine in dialectical and historical materialism. What dialectical and historical materialism—DHM as he styles it—provides is nothing less than an absolute foundation for the humanities and the social sciences; “an analysis of the socio-natural totality and the systemic material relations of socioeconomic production and reproduction, as well as the forces driving them” that is “capable of situating the specific relations of intellectual labor within this totality in order to elucidate the dialectical relationship between objective forces and subjective agency.” [74] Or, in the words of Lenin, cited as if scripture, it is “comprehensive and harmonious.” [74] It is, one suspects, because it must be, and it must be so that it can serve as the basis for the revolutionary praxis of a vanguard party. DHM indeed situates everything within a totality, and this totality, rather than appearing as the result of the dialectic or revealing itself only through the negativity challenging every immanent, actually existing synthesis, must be immanently available as the basis of all interpretation. Such an approach promises the most comprehensive theory of everything that has fallen within the purview of the humanities and social sciences, though, tellingly and inexplicably, and in deviation from DIAMAT, not the natural sciences: the ideologies of the superstructure, “[w]hile arising from class dynamics […] are structured and organized through a powerful institutional system that forges and formats subjects in every aspect of their being, including their consciousness, but also their values, affects, perceptions, practices, desires, and drives.” [83] But lest we suppose that all this forging and forming negates freedom, Rockhill assures us that not everything is “rigidly determined”: “There is instead a dialectical play of forces between the extant system of theoretical production and the agents participating in it.” [78] When push comes to shove, however, this “play” yields to the most crudely reductive materialist arguments, as when he argues that Adorno and Horkheimer’s “bourgeois background and petit-bourgeois class position” drove them to denigrate mass entertainment and exonerate high art and theory. Ultimately, Rockhill’s vision of DHM proves incoherent and self-contradictory in a completely undialectical and sterile way. Or, put simply, he wants to have his cake and eat it too: it conjures an immanent totality and makes clearly unfalsifiable claims, and yet it is nevertheless a science, “in the broad sense of Wissenschaft,” whose broad sense, alas, he narrows to mean “a historical process of collectively developing tools of analysis, testing them in reality, and modifying them based on experience.” [77] But if this version of science sounds quite a bit like a typical neo-positivist account of empirical science as a combination of experimentation and theory building, he denies this. For his “materialism” is neither idealism nor empiricism but “draws on as much concrete data as possible to account for the socio-natural totality, but it concretely abstracts from the minutia of empirical details in order to integrate them into a higher level by establishing the most coherent explanatory framework, which it continues to test and modify based on practical trials.” [77] Are there any empirical scientists that don’t do precisely this, winnowing abstractions from a wealth of evidence and then producing theoretical frameworks and explanatory models. The problem is that no amount of empirical evidence can ever present us with a totality; no claims that take recourse to a totality can ever be falsifiable.
While Rockhill’s book promises its readers materialism at its most dialectical and potent, it cannot do without a curious little confession, an “autobiographical interlude,” told in the first person, which, like Augustine’s and Rousseau’s, tells of his voyage to the imperial core, his studious mastery of imperial knowledge, and his sudden disillusionment. While it is only a few pages, it is worth spending time with it, since Rockhill’s appeal to his readers seems to rest so much on this narrative, which many identify with if only because it reprises the trope of the naïve, brilliant, fatefully chosen hero that, since Virgil, has accompanied narrative visions of epic struggles of Good and Evil.
His confession begins with the crisis that would lead him to rethink everything he thought he knew, and indeed to despair at his miseducation, his false learning. He is in Paris, studying with the “leading luminaries of French theory”—Derrida, Badiou, Balibar, Cixous, Kristeva, Laruelle, Lyotard, Marion, Rancière, Ricœur. He learned all the languages one should learn to appear learned in the imperial core; he not only read the works of his masters but even the texts that they wrote about. He has “passed all the exams with flying colors and received the highest possible academic distinctions”—one almost imagines, though he doesn’t quite say it himself, that he has already been anointed as one of them, that a professorship at the Sorbonne or the Ecole Normal Superior awaits, or maybe even a chair at the College du France. Not bad for someone who “had grown up on a farm in Kansas, working construction.” [49] But then something terrible happens. September 11th: for following the attacks, he is asked to “make sense of the events in a public lecture” at an institution where he was teaching. Yet he has nothing to say. How could this be? He has studied with the masters, has mastered all their jargon. He was fluent not only in French, but in differends, big Others, deterritorialization, deserts of the Real, différance. None of these wonderful concepts made sense of what had happened. None offered what he wanted: perspicacious insight into the real.
As I tried to collect my thoughts and apply them to an actual historical occurrence, I could not help but feel like all of this conceptual gibberish sounded like I was saying we were living in la-la land, an imaginary world of big Others, great mystical divides, shifting sands, and personified landscapes. Why not add cellophane flowers and marmalade skies to this surreal conceptual scenery, which made the world seem like an underly meaningless plaything? I became nauseous thinking about it, and desperately wanted to go back through the looking glass to retrieve some sense of reality, to have something concrete and meaningful to say. But it was too late, and all I could do with my elite education in the imperial core was cobble together an ill-fated attempt to explain reality through the lens of trend-setting critical theory.
This account is very poignant, in its way, and certainly resonates with many. What thoughtful graduate student has not had these doubts? Yet it is also strange: the very modes of thought Rockhill disparages provide a powerful framework for understanding many aspects of the event of 9/11, from the relation of violence to history, to its spectacularity, or the very notion of an event as historical singularity, irreducible to general laws. And it is also strange that being asked to perform an almost impossible—and perhaps rather absurd—task could precipitate such a sudden about-face. How, after all, could Rockhill have studied difficult theoretical ideas for so long without continually at once finding confirmation of their veracity, applicability, and meaningfulness and gaining insight into the limits of their applicability? In my own less illustrious academic path, which never brought me closer to the “imperial core” than Princeton, Freiburg, and Evanston, I have never been able to learn anything without intuitively making sense of it; learning, in this way, is always gradual metabolism, appropriation, digestion. And, moreover, what drew me to critical theorists as well as “Continental” philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida is that, challenging as they were, and despite the mathematical inclination of my own mind, they not only seemed to make sense to me but answered to an elusive dimension of experience that the dominant scientific world view failed to grasp. In the same way, Marx “makes sense” by explaining what bourgeois economists cannot. While my philosophical leanings have changed over time, and I’ve supplemented my diet many times, I have never once felt the need to completely jettison thinkers who were dear to me, regarding them as total gibberish, since this would seem like intellectual self-evisceration. Rather: I feel enriched by a multitude of perspectives. But, granted, this implies a certain subjective attitude toward knowledge, a lack of militancy, that Rockhill would reject out of hand.
Perhaps this rejection of intellectual pleasure is the valiant ethos of a true militant. Perhaps Rockhill, lapping up the words of the great masters whom I mostly know only from books, knew an intellectual pleasure I could never imagine, making his renunciation of such pleasurable gibberish and fashionable nonsense for a cold DHM porridge all the more valiant. But I am left to suspect that Rockhill never really learned to think at all but only to mimic a certain lingo. It is only because he never internalized or appropriated his masters’ doctrines through understanding—only because it remained a thoroughly alien knowledge—that he could turn from it so quickly; it had not laid roots in him. And precisely because his learning remained alien to him, he could not distinguish between his comprehension of theory, the lessons of his intellectual masters, and theory itself. Or, for that matter, between theory and the reality that it strives to understand, interpret, and transform. He speaks of theory as a fait accompli; a master discourse, learned from masters, bestowing mastery—the perfect comprehension of the real—on the apprentice. By inviting him to give a public talk, his masters had acknowledged his own mastery, now to be put on public display—and since he fails to possess the mastery that he should possess, then it must mean that his masters are false masters, frauds, charlatans. Hence he had to reject them tout court, replacing all these false masters with the one true master: not Marx, to be sure, but DHM. I am also left to suspect that, for Rockhill, DHM, just as he understands it, promises mastery only because it is so contradictory in its premises, so preposterous in its ambitions, so magical in its approach that it cannot seduce to philosophy, to thinking and theory in the bourgeois style, but demands obedience—a submission evinced only through sedulous archival research. What Rockhill learned from his masters, whose names he drops and whose prestige he extols even as he derides their thought as “gibberish,” is this alone: the gesture of mastery. The gesture of mastery is the effect that theory produces on those who, lacking intuitive understanding, are entranced by the glamour and seduction of its language. Precisely because Rockhill lacks philosophical understanding, because he sees philosophy as only either a tool of liberation or of cultural prestige, he is even more able to reproduce those traits of theoretical language that most impress those who understand it least. From his opening salvo up to the end, he blitzes the reader with facts, drops names, and strings concepts together, without saying very much, as if he had already mastered every thought… As when he writes: “values, affects, perceptions, practices, desires, and drives”—a world of philosophy compressed into a paratactic chain, promising something he cannot possibly deliver. And he even dissimulates in the name of mastery: he says he grew up on a farm, working construction, as if he were not only working class but a rare prodigy, both gifted and sedulous, who rose from humble roots to glorious heights. He fails to mention that his father, who is a distinguished professor of architecture at the University of Kansas, owned the farm as well as an architecture and construction firm. If he was laboring, it was not for the indeterminate “man” of capital: it was for his father, for the Big Other. In this, perhaps, we find the roots of his paranoic mode of theory.
But his gestures of mastery are also somehow uncouth. He has an impressive vocabulary. He is sedulous even in using the word sedulous, sedulously using it or its adverbial form not once or twice but thrice. “Pelf,” a charming word for “stolen wealth,” appears likewise twice; “jacquerie” three times. Dialectics he does not like are referred, repeatedly, as “doggerel dialectics.” Even his malapropisms—“begging the question” for “raising a question”—are repeated. His bon mots, though,lose their caustic force with repetition: capitalist wealth, and especially the wealth of the Rockefeller’s, is rarely mentioned without the adjective stolen, and yet no attempt is ever made to clarify whether it is stolen in the sense that all profit has been stolen or if has been stolen in a special act of pilfering. One of the rules of good style—or stylistic mastery—is that uncommon words should be used but sparingly. Bound up with this is a subtle economic calculation. One should use rare words—and especially those rare words that are not compelled by technical necessity but, synonyms of more familiar words, involve an assertion of freedom; thus you hintat your lexical wealth, and with this your education, good breeding, cultural capital, even spiritual freedom. But if you use these hundred- and thousand-dollar words too frequently, you not only devalue them, but you give the lie to your pretensions; your hidden vaults of knowledge, vast subterranean catacombs, appear as nothing more than an ostentatious cabinet of petty-bourgeois curios. Yet perhaps this uncouth mastery is itself a masterstroke. Rockhill is nothing if not sedulous, but he is also nothing if not punk: so punk, indeed, that he could sedulously master the instruments of elite theory of the imperial core only to forget his mastery, throw it all away, and write a book that reads like a 400 page long application for a job in the propaganda office of an actual existing socialist state that, in actual fact, exists only in his dreams.
