The Orientation of the Press

Here it is time to enter into a closer reading of the concept of the orientating function of the press, and how Marx relates it to the purpose of promoting public orientation towards the development of the species, or enlightenment. Kant’s reflection on enlightenment, as Foucault notes, is rather ambiguous; it is at once characterised as an ongoing process, a task, and as an obligation.¹⁶² As such it is both a collective process and a personal responsibility which requires courage. Individuals are, at once, elements and agents of enlightenment. So what is Enlightenment? It is, first of all, use of reason for reasoning’s own sake, its motto being ‘Sapere aude!’, dare to know.¹⁶³ Yet, almost immediately, Kant mentions the monarchical addendum: 'but obey!'. This demand for obedience does not refer to a freedom of private thought as opposed to public submission. On the contrary, Kant defends the free public use of reason, whereas he agrees that its private use must be submissive. This can be taken as a historical sign of the shift from the post-reformation, and late-absolutist forms of power, via the French revolution to bourgeois forms of power and social relations. If the revolution has set free public man, private man is not free, but is an element of the social organism, a member of a class, a worker, a professional, a tax payer, in short a person of private interests and passions, directed and invested by particular rules and ends (Kant would elsewhere devalue these as ‘pathological’ motivations, and subordinate them to autonomous reason, which was negatively defined by its capacity to curb these motivations¹⁶⁴). Public man, on the other hand, is a man of letters, criticising the laws that he, as a private citizen, conscientiously obeys.¹⁶⁵ In Kant, the role of the free press is precisely to function as an 'organ' of the free public use of reason, an organ of the self-enlightenment of the species. Following Kant's lead, Marx defines the press as the exceptional profession, where private man has as his job to further the public use of reason:

If the press itself is regarded merely as a trade, then, as a trade carried on by means of the brain, it deserves greater freedom than a trade carried on by means of arms and legs. The emancipation of arms and legs only becomes humanly significant through the emancipation of the brain, for it is well known

162 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” 35.

163 Kant, “What is Enlightenment?,” 54.

164 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas K. Abbott (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004).

165 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”.

that arms and legs become human arms and legs only because of the head which they serve.¹⁶⁶

Hegel had recognised the importance of the press for orientation within objective morality, Sittlichkeit, but also suggested that the consumption of newspapers is of a somewhat passive and habitual nature:

Reading the newspaper in the early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer. One orients one's attitude against the world and toward God, or toward that which the world is. The former gives the same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.¹⁶⁷

Our attention is here directed to the very quotidian function of the newspaper, which is often overlooked in analyses of its role in spreading the revolutionary enthusiasm of universal and world-historical events, such as the revolutions in France and Haïti.¹⁶⁸ The newspaper helps situate the reader, but in a place quite different than Feuerbach's placing of the singular subject in situ, or his universal orientation to the species. The newspaper, as it were, mainly operates in that problematic middle region of state and nation, between the singular and the universal, a region which to enthusiastic spectators and libertines always seems to fail to live up to the universality of the species or the singularity of embodied experiences.

But whether we speak with Marx the editor, Feuerbach the lover of humanity, Hegel's believer or Kant's moral subject, there is the presupposition of a need for orientation in relation to greater powers. For the Epicurean gardener practicing the autarchy of the swerve there is, ideally, no such need, except, of course, in relation to nature, the weather and the sun. The Epicurean orientation is the negation of the need for orientation in society, an orientation toward ataraxy and self-affirmation, whereby all apparently unitary phenomena can be picked apart into small explanations. The difference between these modern thinkers and Epicurus is perhaps the insistent actuality of a society that imposes itself as a temporality and a rationality that organises us, as an alien power. Marx must therefore go beyond Epicurus and introduce the orientating tool of critique when he starts to think how representations such as money and god are actual, and how they organise the activity of the people who relate through them. In

166 Marx, MECW I, 272.

167 Hegel quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 49.

168 For the influence of the latter on Hegel, see Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.

other words, the need for orientation in social actuality emerges because society cannot be separated into component parts, but imposes itself as an organising principle over and against individuals.

During his time at the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx orientates his discourse and his reader by way of the metaphor of the 'organic' system: 'One form of freedom governs another just as one limb of the body does another. Whenever a particular freedom is put in question, freedom in general is put in question.'¹⁶⁹ The existential orientation of the intellectual, unlike other trades (e.g. crafts which simply mediates as labour between the latent potential of an object and the telos of the plan), is one tasked with mediating between the objective parts of society and its own telos, in order to secure their convergence. The metaphorics of the social body play out the organic stratifications so common to nineteenth-century biology: the sovereign as the will, the press and philosophers as the mind, the people divided into estates as the different limbs. While this organicist argument made the point of the interdependence of freedoms, the metaphor implies, as Kouvelakis notes, a hierarchicisation which is immediately gendered and classed: the self-reflexive masculine brain of the press would enlighten and temper the sensualist feminine heart of the people.¹⁷⁰ It is not enough to simply refer to the gendered and classed character of the metaphor itself. In her book on the matter, Sara Ahmed continually demonstrates that orientation is not only a turning toward, but also a turning away from. Orientation always entails a certain blindness, or wilful abstraction from, or forgetting, and a certain gendering and racialisation.¹⁷¹

While it would appear that it is the model of the social organism that is the problem here – as opposed to the universalistic notion of humanity – perhaps it is in fact the opposite.

What produces the hierarchicisation of the social body and the undervaluing of the passions, and bases labours of care and production, is not necessarily the organic figuration of society, but the reading of the notion of the organism through the definition of the truly human as will and reason (narrowly conceived). This is nothing but the division between the human and the (human) animal, and a valorisation of the former over the latter. At issue is not only the division of the organism, but the idea of the political primacy of reason and will. A broader concept of rationality as self-organisation, as given in the Philosophy of Nature, goes beyond this diremption: in

169 Marx, MECW vol. I, 180.

170 Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution, 273.

171 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology - Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2006). For an example of this in the early Marx, see appendix 1.5.

Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, the rational organisation of the organism in general is essentially that of its self-production and reproduction.¹⁷² Thus, the subordination and devaluing of the labours of production and reproduction are, perhaps surprisingly, not a function of the organic metaphor as such, but rather of the universalism of the conception of freedom, which relies on a diremption within the human body, the state and the species, between reason and passion, will and base needs.¹⁷³ We have here seen how Marx's practice as an editor aimed to help along the actualisation of freedom in the social body, through the enlightenment of the reading populace about the nature of its unfreedom and about its capacity for freedom. But more than that: he presented his very effort itself as a practice of actualisation both through the communication of and production of truths. Finding and fighting for his place in Prussian society, Marx had certainly moved beyond the ethereal foolishness of the philosopher of abstract essences.

He found his very 'organic' role as a passionate functionary of the Prussian soul. In the period of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx's politics were radical, but within, even if sometimes at, the limits of the law; his practice can perhaps best be described as reformism, trying to help along progressive tendencies and spur on any openness for reform within the Prussian territories. However, his defence of the press as the last bulwark against revolution, and the first step towards liberal reforms, soon broke down.

In his seminal reading of the young Marx's trajectory, Stathis Kouvelakis convincingly demonstrates that Marx's theoretical break – Althusser's thesis of Marx's invention of the science of historical materialism – was predicated by a political break, by the leap out of his liberal politics as a journalist. But it is tempting to describe the conditions of the political break with the tools inherited from Marx's historical materialism. We can say, retrospectively, that the arguments for progressive reform did not only fail to convince the authorities, but had done so for reasons that were necessary. Increasing pauperisation and occurrences of civil unrest created an ever greater audience for liberal publications and agitation, and for this very reason the authorities began to suppress liberals and the press. Given the social situation, political debate – even of the reformist character Marx had practised – was becoming subversive. He was eventually forced to resign from the Rheinische Zeitung, which soon after closed.

172 'Hegel refers to organic self-renewal as “reproduction.” He understands reproduction, therefore, to be the process whereby an organism continuously produces and preserves itself as the singular organism it is - the process of “self-producing.”' Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History:

Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991), 163.

173 Of course this diremption is no mere fiction, but a very real division within bodies and between different people.