Myth

from S Goldhill

It could be however, that the citizen who guides us around the Parthenon is one of those young intellectuals who had studied with the new and trendy thinkers of the fifth century called sophists and who knew the latest thinking on religion and its stories. Where a traditional Athenian would happily tell you these stories as the history of the foundation of Athens, this more pushy intellectual guide might adopt a rather self-consciously critical line on these stories and dismiss them as ‘myths’ stories for the populace to follow, but not to be accepted at face value by educated men. 

Once they start to become argued about, once they start not to be taken for granted, myths can become a battleground for how we think about the past. The fifth-century Greeks give us the tools for thinking about what happens when ‘myth’ stops being he stories which everyone knows and agrees to tell. These tool are the very ideas ‘myth’ and ‘history’. 

‘Myth’ is a gift of the Greeks. It was in the classical city of Athens that ‘myth’ was first developed as an idea. The fifth century BC is often described as the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ or, in more Romantic days, as the ‘Greek miracle’. This period is unique because in a very short time, and primarily in a single city, so much of what the West prides itself on came into being. Athens invented a democratic constitution, and with it came the law courts with their juries of ordinary people. The theatre produces the tragic masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the comic genius of Aristophanes. 

But the fifth century is called the ‘Greek Enlightenment’ especially because it was in this period that science, philosophy, history and medicine came into being as disciplines. People have attempted to cure sickness or injury ever since humans have been sick or injured. But for the first time in the fifth century there were recognized experts, trained in a school, who engaged in self-conscious discussion of techniques and principle, and debated the physical causes of disease, and experimented, and tested their results, and published their findings. Some people have been political ever since there was a group to win power over. But for the first time in the fifth century there were political theorists who argued about the theories of different constitutions, and about the abstract nature of power and the city's institutions. This development of self-conscious, theoretical, abstract thought along with new institutions of education and regulation makes medicine and political philosophy disciplines for the first time. These new forms of intellectual activity began as radical innovations, and were immediately seen by more conservative forces as threatening. Each of these new disciplines, as they fought to become established, needed to distinguish their own authonity. One key rhetorical strategy for each discipline was to disparage or diminish its opponents by calling them purveyors of myth. ‘Myth’ becomes the name for what these new disciplines don’t do.  ‘What I offer’, claims one physical scientist, ‘is a true picture of the world scientifically observed and described. I can tell you how the physical world works. Those old stories about how things came to be, they are just myths.’ Myth can no longer mean simply an inherited story of the old days, let alone an authoritative tale. Now ‘myth’ is opposed to true ‘history’. Or it is something to be dispelled by real ‘philosophy’. Or replaced by objective ‘science’. This negative colouring, which develops during the fifth-century Enlightenment, still tinges the concept of ‘myth’ today. We still say ‘mere myth’, ‘just a myth’. With final dismissiveness, myth has come to mean a silly or pernicious tale whose false enticements you should beware. 

The Greek Enlightenment successfully set out to debunk old authorities, and the new discipline of ‘history’ in particular aimed to change how the Past is understood. Herodotus is ‘the father of History'. His great work, circulated in the 430s BC is the first to call Itself ‘history’ historie, or ‘investigation’ in Greek ’ and he has been taken as the founding father of history by ancients and moderns alike.

His topic is the Persian Wars. The Persian Empire was the greatest power in the Mediterranean and it wtwice invaded Greece in the middle of the fifth century in order to conquer it for the Great King's Empire. Twice the far out-numbered Greeks won and pushed back the Persians. It was a stunning and inspirational event for the Greeks. Indeed it was a defining moment for the Greek nation. Before the Persian Wars, there was little awareness of a shared cultural identity of ‘being Greek’. After the War» the Greeks, rather than being just a series of cities which shared the same language, became aware of a national identity. 

Herodotus’ history investigates not just the famous battles by which the Persians were defeated and the invasions turned back Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis and the like. He also travels the whole Mediterranean and beyond exploring the differences between different cultures. Tellingly, Herodotus too tells us about the Amazons, now to be found in Scythia, and discussed from an anthropological perspective as a still-existing tribe of women, who breed with nomads of the Steppes. He explains the defeat of the Persians by showing how the Greek culture of the West is superior to the Persian culture of the East. Xerxes, the Persian king, is forced to learn ‘what true men are’, and one concluding moral of the whole history is that ‘soft countries produce soft men’. Rugged Greece, by contrast, is ‘a fit nurse of men’. Herodotus is the founding father of the West’s view of the Orient as a dangerous, wealthy, degenerate, sly and threatening other which must be defeated. His image of the Orient still fuels modern Western politics. The conflict between West and East is the subject of the Iliad, the first surviving poem of the Western tradition. But it is Herodotus who gives this conflict the rhetorical slant familiar still in contemporary ideology. In its rhetorical opposition to the East, this is truly a history of where the modem West comes from. 

Herodotus writes the history of the victory of Greece and the Victory of Greekness. But he is far more subtle than that gung-ho bias might suggest. Herodotus maps the variables of cultural difference, with a keen critical eye and critical investigation. Herodotus provides a guide which encourages the reader to place himself within a matrix of of social, moral and political markers- a map to find ourselves.

Brecht, Weill, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Adorno

Adorno was attracted to Mahoganny because it displayed society’s contradictions. Art that aspired to cheerful harmony or resurrected the great soul of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture was delusive entertainment that failed to do what art should do: expose the lie at the heart of capitalism, namely that this economic system could deliver freedom and happiness. In "The Social Situation of Music’, an essay he wrote for the Institute‘s journal in 1932, Adorno opposed two contemporary composers. Schoenberg and Stravinsky, taking them as opposite poles of what music should and shouldn't be under monopoly capitalism. His bracing notion was that music, purportedly the most abstract and therefore the least socially grounded, most autonomous art form, actually contained social contradictions in its own structure. Schoenberg, in whose second Vienna school’s ethos Adorno had been trained while working with the great composer’s disciple Alban Berg in the mid 19203, had evolved during the early years of the twentieth century. He moved from being a composer of expressionist music to one who wrote music that eschewed harmonic resolutions, still less offered hummable tunes, but rather involved a musical twelvetone system, whereby the repetition of any note in a twelve-tone row was prohibited until all of them had been sounded. The harmonic resolution of, say, Schoenberg's 1899 string sextet Verkliz'rte Nacht (Transfigured Night), was unthinkable for a composer who, in the early 1930s, was so bewitched by the aesthetic purity and logic of his twelve-tone method that for the title of his uncompleted operatic masterpiece Moses Und Aron of 1932 he dropped one of the As from Aaron’s name so that it would have twelve rather than thirteen letters. 

Stravinsky, for his part, in the ten years between the premiere of one of the founding texts of musical modernism, Le Sucre Du Printemps, to the premiere of his opera Pulcinella, had mutated from musical revolutionary to conservative revivalist of old forms. In the 1920s Stravinsky disinterred old musical forms the concerto grosso, the fugue, the symphony for a new era. Just as Brecht excoriated opera as culinary a mouthwatering diversion from the realities of modern life so Adorno accused Stravinsky of composing music that Offered false reconciliations, redeploying old forms that served to satisfy his audience’s degraded need for escape into a chimerical past. He also detected a connection between Stravinsky’s neo-classicism and fascism: the irrationality of the composer’s system, Adorno argued, was of a piece with the arbitrary control of a Fuhrer. He was stretching the point, perhaps, but then Adorno was apt to see Nazism in nearly everything he disliked -understandable given what it was about to do to him, his colleagues and his family.

At the time Adorno took Schoenberg, a Jew who like Adorno fled Europe with the rise of Hitler, to represent all that was progressive in music. Schoenberg’s music was, he noted not seduction by harmony and melody but ‘the conglomeration of broken shards'. But there was, he realised later, a problem with his idol’s musical system. Its absorbing logic, like that of a game of chess. detached Schoenberg from the social situation for which it provided a fitting soundtrack. Worse, Schoenberg’s twelvetone system became, Adorno later realised, hypostatised- the revolutionary form of composition became the only game m town for avant-garde composers and therefore, paradoxically, conservative. A system that had seemed to promise a breakout from bourgeois music was reified in its turn. 

How did Weill’s music for Mahoganny map on to this musical taxonomy? Weill once said he would be happy if every taxi driver could whistle his melodies. One might have thought Adorno would have damned Weill’s music as part of the culture industry that helped capitalism run more smoothly, but in fact he enjoyed Weill’s music for Mahoganny. He saw in it what Benjamin loved in surrealist art, which often involved creating montages of historical detritus and thereby producing potentially liberating ‘constellations’. Adorno called Mahoganny the first surrealist opera. “This music,’ he wrote of the score, ‘pieced together from triads and off notes with the good beat of old music hall songs which we hardly recognise anymore but are nonetheless remembered as an heirloom, is hammered and glued together with the fetid mucilage of a soggy potpourri of operas. This music, made up of the debris of past music, is completely contemporary.’ 

Brecht’s libretto, too, sought to make it clear that the bourgeois world was absurd and anarchic. ‘In order to represent this convincingly’, wrote Adorno of the dramatisation of the bourgeois world as absurd and anarchic, ‘it is necessary to transcend the closed world of bourgeois consciousness which considers bourgeois social reality to be immutable. Outside of this framework, however, there is no position to take at least for the German consciousness. there is no site which is non-capitalist.’ This was to become one great theme of critical theory: there is no outside, not in today’s utterly rationalised, totally reified, commodity-fetishising world. When Marx wrote Capital in the mid nineteenth century, the more primitive capitalist system he was diagnosing made commodity fetishism merely episodic; now it was everywhere, poisoning everything. ‘Paradoxically, therefore’, Adorno added, ‘transcendence must take place within the framework of that which is.’ Brecht’s assault on capitalist society in Mahoganny was then paradoxically both from within and from without at the same time, both immanent and transcendent. 

In this, it bore similarities to how Adorno conceived of the role of a serious music critic. In his 1929 essay ‘Motifs’, he wrote that in order for criticism not to collapse into a middlebrow alliance between dillettantism and smug, Olympian expertise, it is ‘essential for the critic to extend his immanent listening as far as possible, while at the same time approaching music radically from the outside. To think about twelve-note technique at the same time as of that childhood experience of Madama Butterfly on the gramophone that is the task of every serious attempt to understand music today?  And what Adorno counselled for music criticism was true too of the critical theory that was being born in Frankfurt as Brecht and Weill’s opera was being attacked by Nazis: it was to be practised by those who realised that there was no non-capitalist perspective from which to critique capitalism and that its practitioners were implicated in what they critiqued. 

Brecht and Weill’s opera, similarly. was an inside job, drawing attention to the art form's self-contradictory nature. ‘The opera Mahagonny pays tribute to the senselessness of the operatic form‘. Wrote Brecht. In this, its techniques parallel those deployed by the Frankfurt School during the 19305 as it developed critical theory in response to a clutch of -isms Horkheimer would lump together under the heading of traditional theory positivism, vulgar Marxism, among others. For Horkheimer each of these disciplines was insufficiently dialectical, and their followers made the error of imagining that there was a transcendental position from which they could observe and analyse an objective world of facts. There was no such position. and so in a sense the critical theorist risked the kind of absurdity Brecht happily embraced in writing Mahoganny. ‘It still perches on happily on the same old bough, perhaps’, he wrote in his notes to the opera. ‘but it has started (out of absent mindedness or bad conscience) to saw it through.’ 

You can almost hear Brecht cackling manically as the branch on which he’s sitting plummets to the ground; but there was nothing absent-minded about where he had decided to place his bottom. He Wanted musicians. singers and audience to realise that they were part of the culture industry, that the first two groups were pandering to prevailing economic interests and deluding themselves by thinking they were making art that floated free, unsullied by capitalism’s dictates; they were supplying to the latter group, at a price, opera which obeyed laws of commodity fetishism. He even, incredibly, attacked his musical partner Kurt Weill for posturing as an avantgarde composer who naively thought he was above being in thrall to economic interests. Through attacking the established ‘dramatic’ form of theatre, Brecht hoped to transform its sated spectators into observ~ ers hungering for political and social engagement. 

Adomo, though he never became close to Brecht, was a kindred spin't. an Agent Orange-style critic scorching all and sundry. Sometimes even himself. But the philosopher never shared the dramatist’s agitprop hopes. Brecht hoped that there would be an abrasion between the grandeur of the opera house and the harsh message. Instead, it became another culinary treat in the operatic repertory, abemntly decoded by its audiences and then happily consumed like whiskey. 'Ihus when Mahogarmy was staged in Covent Garden in 2015, the British novelist Will Self wrote: 

This museum piece a sort of diorama of failed utopianism has nothing to teach us. We can enjoy the lushness of Weill’s through composed score; we can thrill to the unvarnished portrayal of human cupidity; we can admire the repurposing of Brecht’s epic theatre as entertainment. But to expect us to be moved to a critical engagement with the fundamental terms of our social being would be frankly and idiomatically a bit much." 

Something similar may be said of the Institute for Social Research as it evolved in the 1930s. It was Brechtian in its inverse relationship between scabrous critique and changing that which it critiqued. Like Brecht’s theatre, critical theory arguably postured otherwise but became another fetishised commodity the philosophical equivalent of a titillatingly ‘shocking’ night at the opera, made all the more exciting by its brush with fascism, a more or less harmless diversion for the chattering classes. Lukécs, in his damning 1962 critique of the German intelligentsia in general and the Frankfurt School in particular, suggested that, like operagoers in the posh seats watching Mahoganny, thinkers like Adorno had taken up comfortable residence in the Grand Hotel Abyss. Brecht even had a name for the residents of the Hotel. He called them Tuis (an acronym deriving from a scrambling of the German word for intellectual, i.e. Tellekt-Ual-ln). The Tuis were partisan but not members of a party, independent of official institutions yet experienced in surviving within institutions. Such Tuis, among whom Brecht included the Frankfurt School, could have helped overthrow capitalism by instructing the masses in Marxist doctn'ne. Instead, by failing to do so they effectively contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. For Brecht, the Frankfurt School were traitors to the revolution they affected to espouse.” Adorno and Horkheimer returned the abuse: they regarded Brecht as a petit-bourgeois poseur and apologist for Stalinism. One might argue there was something of the Tui about Brecht too: his theatre, like the Frankfurt School’s writings, thrived creatively during the escalation of capitalism’s contradictions; instead of destroying the bourgeois art form of opera, he extended its lifespan. 

While Brecht during the 19305 brought together material for a Tui novel that he never completed but which was conceived as a satire on intellectuals in the German Empire and Weimar Republic, it was during his Californian exile that he adopted the term Tuisimus as his name for the Frankfurt School. By then, he regarded the Frankfurt scholars as prostitutes in their quest for foundation support, selling their skills and opinions as commodities in order to support the dominant ideology of oppressive US society.

Ish

Wystan himself is going through a curious phase. He’s as energetic as I‘m idle. He takes Benzedrine regularly, in small doses, followed by Seconal at night. He says that “the chemical life” solves all his problems. He writes a great deal-poems and articles and reviews- makes speeches, goes to tea parties and dinners, is quite brilliantly talkative. It’s a little as if he and I had changed places. Wystan says, however, that he hates all this. But he’s unwilling to return to England, because, there, he’s the center of an even more intensive publicity. 

There is much that is majestic but nothing that is gracious in this city-this huge, raw, functional skeleton, this fortress of capital, this jungle of absolutely free competition. Every street is partly a slum. Where the banks and the brownstone houses end, the slum tenements begin, with their rusty fire escapes and crowds of baseball-playing Dead End Kids. Beyond, on the mainland, is a wilderness of scrapyards and shacks. This country is insanely untidy. 

The Bronx is built almost entirely of billboards and monster advertisements, imploring you to relax. (As if anybody could-when every doorknob gives you an electric shock!) Take the advertisements away, and there would be nothing left; no town at all. At the lower end of the island, and uptown in Harlem, huge tribes of Italians. Negroes and jews have pitched their foul, lively camps-at the feet of the skyscrapers which dominate their heaven like totem poles. Wystan and I call the skyscrapers “the fallen angels.” You imagine them crashing down out of the sky, white-hot as meteors, to bury themselves deep in the Manhattan bedrock and slowly cool, through the ages. But the fallen angels are still angels. They are blasphemously insolvent, and utterly without pity.

and

 When we reached Needles: a patriotic lady passenger began singing “California, here I come!” It seemed little enough to arrive at after such a journey---the furnace-hot, quivering, untidy desert, and then the gigantic truck-garden. Every orange and onion seemed already stamped with the exporter’s trademark. I think one’s disappointment, on first coming to the West, is really due to its size. The European mind cannot grasp such distances, such prodigality, such barrenness, such riches. It grows weary and bored. The eye refuses to look and the ear to listen. 

Toward evening, we came into downtown Los Angeles- perhaps the ugliest city on earth. It was a Saturday night, and the streets were swarming with drunks. We saw three sailors carrying a girl into a house, as though they were going to eat her alive. From the hotel, we telephoned Chris Wood. ‘ ‘How wonderful,” he said, “to hear an effeminate British voice!” 

Next day, we took a taxi into Hollywood. I was amazed at the size of the city, and at its lack of shape. There seemed no reason Why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens crowded with blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy, where neighbors share each other’s lawns and look into each other’s bedrooms. The whole place like a world’s fair, quite new and already partly in ruins. The only permanent buildings are the schools and the churches. On the hill, giant letters spell “Hollywoodland,” but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is “unreal.” But what the arriving traveller first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist. 

and

The first obstacle is self-consciousness. Gerald himself usually meditated sitting in a chair. My own preference was for something more exotic: I wanted to be as oriental as possible. So I squatted cross~legged in a corner of the room. The advantage of this position was that it was an entirely new one: you saw everything-\ the furniture, the ceiling, the view through the window-fromq ditlerent angle, and this in itself was a reminder of what you were doing. But it was also very embarrassing, even when you were alone. Suppose someone should walk in! I told Vernon, ofcourse what I was doing. I wanted him to get used to the idea and not find) it mysterious or funny. 

As soon as I was settled into position, the Ego began, as it were, to dance around the room, screaming: “Look at me! Look at me! Isn’t it funny? Don’t you think it’s funny? Aren’t I extraordinary? What do you think I’ll do next? I bet you can’t guess! Matter offact, I don’t know, myself. I say-look, look-aren’t I a scream?” 

Gradually, the prancing and the antics subsided. They were followed by the fidgets. “What’s that bird outside? Why does it make that noise? Who can that be in the next garden? I can hear the neighbor’s radio. Damn him-What selfishness, making such a racket! How loud the traffic is! That bird. And now there’s a fly buzzing. It’s too much-” Very often, at this point, I’d break off the attempt and get up. But, if the fldgets passed away, the next trouble would be sex. I sat and throbbed dully with lust. Bed. Darkness. Flesh. Arms. Legs. Lips. Sweat. Grunts and groans. Heaving, straining, jerking. Me. You. Yes. Now if I waited long enough, however, the throbbing would subside, also. It was just a matter of time. 

And then, on another level, the wheel would begin to spin--the roulette wheel of worries, fantasies, plans and plots, vanities and resentments, mixed in with scraps of nonsense, lines from poems, all the odds and ends of the mind’s ragbag. Usually, the wheel whizzed on and on, long past the quarter hour I had set myself, and I would rise from it feeling merely dizzy. Very occasionally, whilel still watched it, it slowed and almost stopped. Then I knew something approaching concentration. 

I talk as if meditation (if you can call what I have just described by so grand a name) had become my regular practice. It hadn’t. As a matter of fact, these first attempts were very irregular, and I soon gave them up altogether. The strangest thing about them was that they actually produced some kind of beneficial effect on my behavior.

and

The Goldwyn Studios at this time were like a ghost town. Goldwyn was going into one of his hibernation periods; perhaps he was waiting to see how the war would develop. Soon, I was almost the only writer on the joke-except for a legendary lady named Jan Fortune, who, it was said, never got fired because nobody could find her. She dodged along the corridors from office to office, and always slept in the building. She was supposed to have parties there, at night. 

I saw Goldwyn himself three or four times. The first time, he was friendly and flattering. The second, at his house in Beverly Hills, he was rude and unmanageable. “It’s all nonsense!” he shouted. “It’s stupid. The boy’s a damn fool. I want something clever.” I drank a big glass of whisky and felt superior-for by this time I knew that I had a job at MGM waiting for me after the New Year. Our last interview was a very curious one, because I had apparently succeeded in hurting his feelings, with a mock-polite letter I had written to the story department, outlining the various stages of our plot development, and Goldwyn’s contradictory suggestions and objections. I had tried to make this letter sound as much as possible like a clinical report, merely substituting “Mr. Goldwyn” for “the patient.” 

Goldwyn sent for me in his office and put on an extraordinary act, in front of several subordinates. He asked, did I think him a stupid, obstinate hick who knew nothing about writers and couldn’t appreciate their work? If so, it was just too bad, because, although he was only a plain business man, he knew a good thing when he saw it-he knew I was a swell writer and a swell person, and he thought of me as a friend, etc. etc. I saw through him a yard, but just the same I was embarrassed. I grinned and mumbled protests. When we were through with the playacting, I told him about the Metro job. This didn’t please him at all. Automatically, he began a line about loyalty and checked himself: he knew that I knew he was going out of business. We said goodbye-one of those wordy Hollywood farewells which have no warmth but much superstition. Film people usually fear an unkind parting. It may bring you bad luck-especially if the other guy makes good, later. 

Some months after this, I had a frank talk with Knopf, who had also left the Goldwyn Studio. “You touched Sam on his sore spot,” he told me. “Call him a son of a bitch and he’ll sock you on the jaw. Tell him he hasn’t acted like a gentleman, and he’ll crawl.” 

It was only much later, discussing Goldwyn with John van Druten, that I realized how cleverly Berthold and I had been handled, right from the beginning. The insult technique is designed to put a writer on his mettle, and make him produce the maximum number of ideas in a very short period, Then when the writer has been well milked, he’s fired, and another writer is called in; Berthold had actually been tricked into presenting Goldwyn with three completely different stories. 

Knopf told me of a talk he’d had with Goldwyn, the day i was hired. 

Goldwyn: If we’ve got to use his characters, we must take care he doesn’t use any of ours. Nothing that’s in the original scrlpt--(looking through the outline of our story) What’s this about the Gestapo? He can’t use the Gestapo. 

Knopf But, Sam, the Gestapo isn’t our property. Goldwyn (after deep thought, sadly): No---I guess you’re right, Eddie, It isn’t.

Work

At the time the question of what work was became immensely controversial. 

But at the same time as work under capitalism offered less opportunity for self-fulfilment, a gimcrack alternative -call it consumption of consumer goods, call it shopping was being born. If we couldn’t realise ourselves through the self-actualising process of work, perhaps we could do it through shopping? That was the possibility, as we will see in the next chapter, that Benjamin’s friend Bertolt Brecht explored in his and Kurt Weill’s opera Mahoganny. Capitalist society, then, seemed to be at a pivotal moment during the late 1920s and 1930s in terms of how human beings might fulfil themselves and realise their potentialities. Writers as varied as D. H. Lawrence and Simone Weill meditated on what work could and should mean in an era When it seemed to be, increasingly, a brain-numbing, spirit-crushing, soul-destroying nightmare, and the only alternative to the Marxist cogito (I work therefore I am) was the consumerist one (I shop therefore I am). 

Marx’s concept of work was to prove particularly controversial for the Frankfurt School. His suggestion was that man and woman need to work to flourish and achieve dignity. Even in a communist paradise, we must work. On the face of it, what Benjamin wrote in ‘Hashish in Marseille’ and One-Way Street about work was in line with this Marxist orthodoxy that humans defined themselves through work; the problem was that the increasingly mechanised, routine and exploitative nature of work under capitalism thwarted any possibility of fulfilment. 

But scepticism about humans defining and liberating themselves through work was to become a hallmark of critical theory as it evolved from the 1930s onwards. The Frankfurt School has been called neo-Marxist, but in this area at least it might more accurately be called anti-Marxist. Indeed, the man who would take the Frankfurt School on a new intellectual trajectory in the 19303 baulked at this Marxist perspective. Max Horkheimer wrote in Dammerung, a book of aphorisms published not long after Benjamin’s description of his drug-fuelled ramble around Marseilles: ‘To make labour into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology. . .Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda." For Horkheimer, who when Dammerung was published was the director of the Frankfurt school and its primary intellectual influence, Marx fetishised labour as a category.
If that was true, then Marx was following in a venerable tradition in German thought, As Erich Fromm wrote in his 1961 book Marx’s Concept of Man, Spinoza, Hegel and Goethe all held that, as he put it, 

man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. Inasmuch as man is not productive, inasmuch as he is receptive and passive, he is nothing, he is dead. In this productive process, man realises his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.

Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Spirit that the productive man makes the world his own by grasping it productively, by ‘translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality’. The work of unravelling the thread, similarly, helps lead one from the cave to the daylight to actualise oneself, rather than being like the deluded prisoners in Plato’s cave or the Niebelungen of Wagner’s Ring Cycle mining for gold in an endless subterranean night. Under Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School rebelled against this orthodox German view of the value of work and in particular against the Marxist credo that we fulfil ourselves through labour. For the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno, if not for Fromm who remained more faithful to Marx than his colleagues, labour is not the basic category of human realisation. 

Indeed, when Horkheimer read Marx’s recently published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in the early 1930s, in which this orthodoxy about work is expressed, he detected in it something that made him queasy. Even Benjamin, who eulogised creative productive labour, found a presentiment of the Nazi jackboot in it. The vulgar Marxist conception of labour, he wrote, ‘already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. . .The new conception of labour amounts to the exploitation or nature wmch \n‘th naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat?“ That wasn‘t the kind of creative productive labour that he eulogised in One-Way Street or ‘Hashish in Marseille’; it was just the socialist flip side of the capitalist coin. This queasiness before the ruination of nature in what Benjamin called vulgar Marxist thought was to become an increasing concern of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, as late as 1969, Adorno told an interviewer that Marx wanted to convert the world into a gigantic workhouse. 

Perhaps, though, that’s unfair. Read sympathetically, Marx’s notion of productive humans didn’t entail the ruination of nature, but rather the mastery, through creative work, of oneself. And yet the Frankfurt School repeatedly disavowed this aspect of their Marxist heritage. Two decades after Horkheimer accused Marx of fetishising labour, Herbert Marcuse elaborated the accusation in his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud. Marcuse used the stand-in of Marx’s favourite cultural hero Prometheus for a coded attack: ‘Prometheus is the culture-hero of toil, productivity and progress through repression: he wrote, ‘the trickster and (suffering) rebel against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain. He symbolises productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life . . . Prometheus is the archetypal hero of the performance principle.’

The performance principle was a special version of Freud’s reality principle, whereby one repressed one’s pleasures in order to function better in civilisation. But there were other principles, and other heroes, Marcuse suggested. Against Prometheus, he pitted different Greek heroes Orpheus, Narcissus and Dionysius: ‘they stand for a very different reality . . . Theirs is the image of joy and fulfilment, the voice that does not command but sings, the deed that is peace and that ends the labour of conquest: the liberty from time that unites man with god, man with nature . . . the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death: silence, sleep, night, paradise the Nirvana principle not as death but life.“1 Marcuse’s utopian suggestion contradicted not just the German philosophical tradition that embraced Hegel, Marx and Schopenhauer, but also Freud. It was Freud who posited the Nirvana principle as an innate psychic drive or death instinct that aims to end life’s inevitable tension. We all yearn to leave the treadmill of labour, perhaps, but our fate as humans is to remain on it until we die: Thanatos and Eros are, for Freud, contrary to one another. Marcuse refused to accept that. 

But were Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse right to suggest that Marx fetishised labour? It could be argued that he fetishised not labour but human development, and it is precisely that fetish that Fromm, in Marx’s Concept of Man, shares and that Marcuse seeks to overcome through, somehow, realising the Nirvana principle in life. Indeed, the very idea of a communist society is one that, for Marx, involves the ‘withering away’ of the state since it is no longer necessary; in fact its continued existence would hamper the free development of the productive forces of society. But that society, as Hannah Arendt argued, was one of individuals freely fulfilling themselves: this doesn’t sound like a communist society premised on solidarity and shared activities, but a prelapsarian paradise wherein material needs are satisfied. 

What then is the paradise to which Marx thought proletarian revolution paves the way? The American Marxist critic Marshall Berman argued: ‘Marx wants to embrace Prometheus and Orpheus: he considers communism worth fighting for because for the first time in history it could enable men to have both. He might also argue that it is only against a background of Promethean striving that Orphic rapture gains moral or psychic value: “luxe, calme et volupté” by themselves are merely boring, as Baudelaire knew well.’ And who would want a revolution if it resulted only in an eternity of boredom? But that seems precisely the boring paradise Marcuse invoked in Bros and Civilisation when he suggested that the Nirvana principle can be realised in human lives. More charitably, perhaps, we can interpret Marcuse as arguing for a work-life balance by means of shortening the working day to give opportunity for, if not Orphic rapture, then the redemption of pleasure and the halt of time. 

Marx’s suggestion, nonetheless, was that to be free involves being free to do work that is not alienating, by means of which one becomes what he thought was increasingly unlikely under capitalism. The French philosopher Simone Weil argued that there must be more to human liberation than this in her essay Oppression and Liberty, published the same year Horkheimer published Dammerung in which he attacked Marx's conception of labour.
For Simone Weil, human relations must not be conflated with labour and work: the latter are merely instrumental, since they involve relations of a subject to an object. For her, human interactions need to 
be revolutionised as much as productive forces and productive relations if humans are truly to be free. Weils thoughts were to prove important to one later Frankfurt School thinker, Jurgen Habermas, who wrote: ‘Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction.’ That distinction between work and interaction runs through Habermas’s monumental 1981 book The Theory of Communicative Action, in which he systematically argues for liberation from servitude and degradation not through revolutionising productive labour, but through interaction. 

Axel Honneth, Who was to succeed Habermas as director of the Institute, argued that the degradation of work in Taylorite production processes prompted the Frankfurt School thinkers to abandon the Marxist notion of work as self-fulfllment. But they replaced it with something else: arguably, rather than making a fetish of industrial labour, one might expect the Frankfurt School to fetishise communication which could be construed not as an alternative but as the form of productive labour to which they were temperamentally suited.

Freud and Oedipus

Throughout the 19th century, Greece acted as the ideal model for Germany, with an all-embracing power that is difficult to appreciate today. To long for Greece was a sign of the great German soul. Classical studies and Greek in particular dominated the German curriculum. One fundamental force that forms a bridge between the artistic fervour, the educational reforms and the broader politics of culture is German nationalism. Many of the leading writers, artists, and thinkers of the German-speaking world were explicit that their work is dedicated to the formation of a new nationalism. Greece offered an ideal of a society and a culture which the nascent state could strive for. May arguments were developed to make the geneological case convincing. One particularly significant approach is the invention of the Race, the People or in German, Das Volk.
Johann Gottfried von Herder laid down the criteria by which a race could be defined: they must have a shared body of myths, a shared language, a shared homeland and even a shared body type. The race was the Aryan race, its German branch the Teutons. Sir William Jones, a British linguist proposed an original language that existed in the far distant past which explains some of the apparent linguistic connections between the lauages of Europe and the East. He called this Indo-European. The language offered scientific proof that the Aryan Volk were a dominant power in the past- for it was their language and both Greek and German were descended from Indo-European..
A further argument was put in place by Karl-Otfried Muller who published a book in 1824 called the Dorians. The Dorians were said to have invaded Greece from the North and to have succeeded in colonising it. It was based on mythic stories told by much later Greeks in order to justify their political and territorial conquests. Muller contrasts the Dorians with the Ionians favorably. Strange as it may seem this geneology was widely believed. The tyranny of Greece over the German imagination had its ancestor cult.
Our image of the 19th century culture will be hopelessly inadequate if we do not understand how this nationalist myth was forged out of a longing for Greece.

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At the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, it was perhaps inevitable that Freud should turn to a figure of Greek myth to express his revolutionary comprehension of the psychology of the self, which so changed how the modern world answers the question of where we come from. There’s no escaping Freud today Everyone now lives in a cultural environment deeply influenced by Freudian theory. The subconscious, repression, the Freudian slip, the Freudian symbol are part of what society knows, however scandalous his theories may have seemed to his Victorian audiences and no matter how much modern critics have questioned his propositions. Freud’s Oedipus has become part of how we all understand ourselves. 

Freud made an anxiety of self-knowledge central to his therapeutic principles. The inability to escape what the past does to each of us, and the need to pursue a new knowledge of that past, are founding principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. If you do not know how your childhood development is formative, you are destined to spend your life locked into your unresolved Childhood problems (to rewrite Cicero again). What happens to the child and how the child resolves the tensions of his infant life make the adult what he or she is and the failure to resolve those tensions destines the adult to an infantile state. Knowing Where you come from is the pursuit of analysis. For Freud, Oedipus was the figure who epitomized that anxiety of self-knowledge, and Freud made out of Oedipus a master-narrative for the development of the modern mind and modern sexuality. Through Oedipus, Freud found the nasty secret of a sexual past in everyone’s mind. Without Oedipus, psychoanalysis would look very different indeed. 

So why did Oedipus play such a role for Freud? Two answers immediately suggest themselves.  First, the name of ‘Oedipus’ conveniently summarized the violent, ambivalent emotions of desire between children and parents that Freud saw as the emotional crisis in any child’s early development. Second, he recognized in Greek tragedy the type of exploratory and powerful conversation which psychoanalysis demanded. Freud was explicit about this debt. The action of Oedipus the King. he writes, depicts ‘a process that can be likened to the work of psychoanalysis" Oedipus’ painful, obstinate search for his self, which moves through questioning of the past back towards his engendering, reminds Freud of the work of analysis. The repeated language of ‘solving riddles’, ‘tracking the traces’, ‘hunting the truth’, in which Oedipus’ search is described, was also an obvious attraction. 

But, more oddly still, Freud saw himself as Oedipus. He identified with Oedipus, the solver of riddles and tragic searcher for self-knowledge. The typically opaque words of Nietzsche ‘Who of us is Oedipus? Who is the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks’ -could stand as an epigraph to Freud’s lifelong obsession with Oedipus. 

 In 1873, Freud had made a special study of Oedipus the King, part of which he had to translate in one of his student exams. References to the Sphinx dot his correspondence. He gave one of his patients ‘the present of a picture of Oedipus and a Sphinx’ to thank him for his help in Freud’s self-analysis though we don’t know how the patient interpreted the gift. Around his consulting room as an analyst, he kept statues of ancient figures that he collected avidly.  The Sphinx is clearly placed on top of the cabinet, proudly standing, facing the camel over the bowl. Higher on the shelves were busts of the great Greek tragedians, including Sophocles. Freud also had a whole cabinet dedicated to little terracotta statues of Eros, the Winged boy, god of desire.
All indicate Freud's deep and abiding involvement with the classical past. His engagement with antiquity is made most vividly evident by those ancient statues. Freud was passionate about archaeology. The model of excavation, layer by layer was particularly stimulating- both the technique itself and the authenticity of the discovered truth.
But when Freud says that ‘Oedipus’ fate moves us only because it might have been our own,’ or when other critics in the same tradition make such statements as ‘in some sense Oedipus is every man and every man is potentially Oedipus’, another appeal is being made too and it is deeply connected to the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Writing at the pinnacle 0f the German-speaking world’s love of Greece and its nationalist fervour, Freud is uncovering the dirty secret of desire and violence in the family history of the race. He is exposing a scandallous truth that threatens Germany’s national myth of a pure white origin in Greece. Greece, for Freud, provides the story to explain where we come from but it is not a story of glorious ancestry. Freud’s theories were a deep provocation to a German sense of identity. 

The German context is of fundamental importance to Freud’s Oedipus. When Freud called his discovery ‘the Oedipus complex’, the name has a sort of instant authority from its classical status. Greece was so important to the West’s idea of its own development that a Greek hero was an immediately attractive figure for a new model of human psychological development. And, along with the Unconscious and the Freudian symbol, the Oedipus complex is probably still the most instantly recognizable indicator of a psychoanalytic approach. At the same time, Freud’s theories were really scandalous. He discovered that even children have sexual feelings, and that everyone’s sexual desires were at a deep level transgressive -a position even less popular in nineteenth-century Europe than today. Greece, in his hands, became a more primal, bloody and disturbing place than in most German schoolrooms. The provocation of Freud’s writing also knowingly exploited the lustre of the Greek. 

Tracing Freud’s German Oedipus has overlapped several versions of the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Freud nind, and made Freud’s turn to ancient Greek models 3 way ”f 'ustifying his new method of investigation. 

But when F reud says that ‘Oedipus’ fate moves us only because it might have been orir own,’ or when other critics in the same tradition make such statements as ‘in some sense Oedipus is every man and every man is potentially Oedipus’, another appeal i9 being made too and it is deeply connected to the qUEStiOU ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Writing at the pinnacle 0f the German-speaking world’s love of Greece and its nationalist fervour, Freud is uncovering the dirty secret of desire and V1.04 lence in the family history of the race. He is exposing a scandall ous truth that threatens Germany’s national myth of a pure white origin in Greece. Greece, for F reud, provides the story to explain where we come from but it is not a story of glorious ancestry. Freud’s theories were a deep provocation to a German sense of identity. 

The German context is of fundamental importance to Freud’s Oedipus. When F reud called his discovery ‘the Oedipus complex’, the name has a sort of instant authority from its cla3r sical status. Greece was so important to the West’s idea of its own development that a Greek hero was an immediately attractive figure for a new model of human psychological development. And, along with the Unconscious and the F reudian symbol, the Oedipus complex is probably still the most instantly recognizable indicator of a psychoanalytic approach. At the same time, F reud’s theories were really scandalous. He discovered that even children have sexual feelings, and that everyone’s sexual desires were at a deep level transgressive -a position even less popular in hineteenth-century Europe than today. Greece, in his hands, became a more primal, bloody and disturbing place than in most German schoolrooms. The provocation of F reud’s writing also knowingly exploited the lustre of the Greek. 

Tracing Freud’s German Oedipus has overlapped several versions 0f the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Freud worked to find where the self comes front, and located the point of development in infantile desires. There is in every human a buried history which makes us what we are. He named this model after a Greek hero whose story is the archetypal quest to find where he came from a buried history which also finds its turning point in transgressive sexuality. At the same time, Freud was writing for an audience engaged in a growing nationalism which ensured that the genealogical search for roots became a passion. Blood, the purity of the race, made where you came from a different sort of question. German nationalism, at all levels of culture, found a symbolic home and birthplace in ancient Greece, and put that claim into action in its education system, opera houses, literature its general cultural life. And for the twenty-first century Freud himself is one of the origins of a modern sense of identity we are all Freudians now. Our sense of self is mediated through a century of talk of Freudian slips, the subconscious, repression of sexual desire, psychological health even when Freud’s own writings may not have been studied in themselves. The intricate story of Freud’s German Oedipus reveals how many layers there are to the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Digging down through those layers uncovers just how intimately the history of the modern idea of the self and the political history of Europe are intertwined with the Greece of the Imagination. 

White and Red

From V Finlay
There was a famous case study of a housewife in St. Louis, mentioned in A History of Makeup, who bought several bottles of Bloom of Youth. She applied it diligently and in 1877 she died of lead poisoning. She was by no means the first. Lead white had been used unsparingly in face cream and makeup since Egyptian times: the Roman ladies swore by it; Japanese geishas used it-it contrasted beautifully with their teeth which they had fashionably blackened with oak galls and vinegar.8 But even in the nineteenth century, when the dangers must have been better known, it was common on the dressing tables of women of all complexions. _ 

Today too, women die for beauty: they starve themselves too thin, or employ surgeons to tuck their skin too tightly. Was the white lead death any more monstrous? I wondered. One of the problems was that in the beginning-as with consumption-the damage caused would sometimes even make its victim feel more attractive. Lead exposure made women seem like ethereal spirits, almost like angels-which was part of its fraud. By the time the truth was clear, it was probably already too late. 

I consulted a book on poisons and imagined being one of those nineteenth~century fashion victims. If I had assiduously applied Bloom of Youth every morning, I would first feel a sense of lethargy: I’d probably blame it on those wretched corsets. I would then, perhaps, stop sleeping, which would give a pallid hollow to my cheeks. My Victorian suitors might even find this an attractive look, fitting the idea of what a woman should be like: “dead-pale," but with a lovely face, a Lady of Shalott. And then my legs might begin to feel a bit wobbly, so I might take to my bed, like the consumptive heroine of a Puccini opera. Rather romantic really, I’d joke with my girlfriends. 

At this point I would pull down the sleeves on my dress to hide the little blue marks-tiny plumb lines-that were forming on my wrists. At least no one would notice the ones on my ankles, I’d think. And then-and this would be more of a secret-my need for the chamber pot would change. Constipation would set in early and I would no longer need to urinate much either-but the pot would be useful for containing the vomit, which I would produce biliously and often. That sounds bad, but it would be just the beginning of the discomfort, which could later involve kidney collapse and what are kindly described as “behavioral abnormalities." Not even the champions of the accidental beauty of the consumptive could support such painful final hours as those suffered by a woman who had smoothed a surfeit of white lead into her cheeks. I wonder at what point I would have realized what was wrong. 

The sickness had two names. It was called either “plumbism,” because of the lead content, or “saturnism”-because lead has traditionally been associated with the planet Saturn, which apparently brings gloominess to anyone born under its influence.

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Alan drew pictures of the cochineal bug on a notepad: an oval cartoon insect the size of a little fingernail, with tiny wavy legs and a big body bursting with potential. “Is it cruel?” I asked him about the cochineal industry in general. “Only for the cactuses: the insects eat them alive.” 

Spanish Red, I noted in my diary that night, is usually born between the fog and the frost in places where land is cheap and the prickly pear, on which it is a parasite, ‘grows in abundance on the desert sands. It is a holy blight, a noble rot where the treasure is rubies rather than the gold of dessert wine. It is a deep, intensely colored organic red: but it will never be used for Buddhist robes because there is too much death in it. In the 21st century women around the world coat their lips with insect blood, dab their cheeks with it and it is one of the few permitted red constituents of eye shadow. And finally, Cherry Coke is full of it. It is color additive E120.

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Turner had at least 12 kinds of madder, an extract from the rubia tree, but most madders were as fugitive as cochineal and by 1900, less than 50 years after Turner put down his paintbrush for the last time, there were only two varieties still available to London artists. 
He also had red lead~a color made by heating white lead~which was called minium and was almost orange. It was so popular among Persian and Indian Mughal artists that their work became known as “miniatures": the word is nothing to do with the size of their paintings. 

But one of Turner’s favorite reds may well have been Cinnabar which he used in its manufactured form, vermilion, and which Pliny described as the result of an epic struggle by an elephant and a dragon. These two troublemakers were always fighting, Pliny recounted, and the battle eventually ended with the dragon-evidently a rather snaky one-wrapping its coils around its heavy enemy. But as the elephant fell it crushed the dragon with its weight and they both died. The merging of their blood made Cinnabar. It is a marvellous metaphor for this expensive paint,‘ which is made from the conjunction of heavy mercury and burning sulphur. Its chemical designation is HgS, which indicates that both elements are equally matched. Combined, the silver elephant and the yellow fire-breathing reptile miraculously make something that is blood red. ' 

The Romans loved raw Cinnabar. They painted their gladiatorial heroes with it; rich women sacrificed their health for beauty using a lipstick made of it, and it was used to paint the statues of the gods and the emperors on festival days.