The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight

The owl drawing above was my submission for the STPEC program sweatshirt when I was in college at UMass-Amherst. It's a dadaist Hegel joke. Get it? Owl of Minerva? Duck? Quack? I still think it's pretty damn funny, even if no one else does.

Social Thought and Political Economy was an interdisciplinary major designed to teach critical thinking and offer a well-rounded progressive education. We got red stars pinned on us during our graduation picnic. Seriously.

We were obnoxious little lefty know it alls who were drunk on political theory that often verged on the incomprehensible. Ever try reading Habermas? Can't say I recommend it.

I understood just enough Hegel to be dangerous, although one of my better papers was on the usage of dialectic by Simone deBeauvoir and Franz Fanon. Then as now, I was a bit of a contrarian. I alienated one of my more doctrinaire Marxist professors my arguing that the seeds of Stalinism were there with Lenin, and that the Kronstadt Massacre signaled the end of the true revolution. I also outraged my anarchist professors by arguing that the ends of the revolution in Spain were corrupted by the means of violence.

I've since come to understand that this was a ridiculous argument, even though at some level it might be true. They were leftists up against fascists before fascism was even a dirty word, and most of the western world would have happily seen them annihilated without a fight.

Still, it wasn't like I really knew anything. I recall being halfway through a course on the Spanish Civil War before realizing that the Republicans were the good guys. Similarly, I was well into a critical theory survey course — struggling through Marcuse, Lukacs, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno — before I got the difference between "form" and "content." But I knew how to pronounce Loo-kotch and Ben-ya-meen, and that, apparently, was enough.

While I'm sure all of this shaped my thinking more than I know, the stuff that made me who I am happened mostly outside of class. As a student activist I learned all about pulling off "actions," and discovered I could be a leader. I found my voice as a writer through a weekly column in the Daily Collegian, which was one of the better student newspapers in the country. I got the publishing bug when, in my junior year, I used the access to equipment at my typesetting job to start critical times, a collectively edited leftist monthly newspaper.

Weirdly, I got A's in most of my theory courses. I credit grade inflation with getting me through college with undiagnosed ADHD. My final critical theory project was a Brechtian theater piece that I don't remember much about. Yet, I clearly recall another student's project. It was a piece on racism performed with potatoes. The hero was named Masha, and the central conflict came when her kid wanted to go to summer camp with his friend Jimmy, the peach.

Speaking of incomprehensible, the owl cartoon comes from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. "The owl of Minerva flies only at midnight" means something to the effect of "Wisdom is inspired by crisis." So ... Duck!

Maybe it loses something in the explanation.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

This Is Not Repressive Desublimation

For the last month or so, I've been a little bit obsessed with thinking about the federal goverment's insistence that they are out to end homelessness by encouraging municipalities to adopt Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness. This while they systematically create poverty and increased inequality in all other arenas. This obsession has recently shaded into an obsession with capitalism itself, and how it works as an organized system of power and control.

When I was in college, I read Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man about five times. This was a text that describes capitalism is Freudian-Marxist terms as a system of social control, and sees America as the highest expression of that system. Being a Social Thought and Political Economy major who gravitated to the most radical professors I could find, I had numerous instructors who apparently felt this was an essential text to master. It occurs to me that the Ten Year Plan could be understood in Marcusian terms. A summary of One Dimensional Man I found online contained the following:

"Language, Marcuse thought, was becoming one-dimensional and was contrived to manipulate thinking, indeed, to limit thinking. Questions are posed only in ways that permit specific ways of searching for answers; political choices are constrained to arenas in which no really thoughtful choice is empowered; and standard vocabularies (in the military, for instance) are designed to inhibit any thought about value or morality.

The second means of insidious domination was what Marcuse called "repressive desublimation," again an amalgamation of Freud and Marx. Sublimation, recall, is where instinctual energy gets deflected from its natural expression and appears, instead, in some other form of expression or satisfaction. "Desublimation," then, is a system that permits some degree of natural expression or satisfaction of instinctual energy. Desublimation is obviously so powerful that even a small dose can succeed in capturing us. We will return repetitively to satisfy ourselves even in small ways. As an example, something like Playboy magazine could be allowed to feed men a measure of unusual --- that is, formerly tabooed --- sexual satisfaction, but this would happen only by becoming a regular buying customer. When one turned to look at American society of the 60s, it was clear that sexuality was being desublimated in a variety of ways so long as people were ready to consume the right things. Thus, people were actually being repressed anew to the specific advantages of capitalist producers."

I've always thought of repressive desublimation in broader terms than this. It's not just the commodification of desire. It is also the commodification of dissent.

This is why everyone in the New York Times fashion section manages to look like some version of a revolutionary or a junky while they wear clothing ensembles that cost more than my car. Every cultural form of rebellion is eventually co-opted and commodified. Form trumps content pretty much every time. Repressive desublimation, then, acts as a safety valve of sorts by providing the form of taking political action without offering the content. One campaign, for example, asks people to wear a wristband to end global poverty.

Yeah. That'll work.