The C.L.R. James Institute: "C.L.R. James, Intellectuals, Non-Identity, & the Division of Labor" by Ralph Dumain

The C.L.R. James Institute

C.L.R. James, Intellectuals, Non-Identity,
and the Division of Labor

by Ralph Dumain

"Yet how light in the scales is the contemporary mountain of self-examination and self-pity against the warmth, the humor, the sanity, the anonymous but unfailing humanity of the renegades and castaways and savages of the Pequod, rooted in the whole historical past of man, doing what they have to do, facing what they have to face."

-- C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades And Castaways: The Story Of Herman Melville And The World We Live In, Detroit: Bewick/Ed, 1978, p. 136.

With these stirring words James contrasts two worlds of experience symbolized by the officers and crew of Melville's fictional world, symbolizing the vantage point of intellectuals and the anonymous masses, respectively. James himself never was and never could have been one of the crew, for he could not have survived a single day believing such rubbish were his life and his own perspective limited to those available to the crew. James could write as he did precisely because he was an outside observer who never had to take any responsibility for nor be subject to anything the crew might choose to do. James was an intellectual to the marrow of his being, and so we have to take this inspiring scenario in two ways. First, regarding the crew, James's comments are an idealization -- in the strictly scientific rather than moral sense of the word -- that is, an abstraction out of the real world of ordinary individuals in society, to construct a generalization of an overall state of being, which James seeks to rescue from anonymity and defend in defiance of the sort of people who write history and comment on the state of the world. Secondly, James turns his back on the intellectual world in which he naturally finds his home, to take refuge in what he is not, in the world that is other to the world of the articulate and purportedly self-conscious thinker. Now let us take care, for James is not an anti-intellectual intellectual (another manifestation of self-centered despair), nor does he seek self-denial and self-mortification a la the Old Left in order to belong. James's view of the world is the dialectical unity of non-intellectual and intellectual. His identification with his idealization of the crew is an imaginative identification, and that is what makes it profound. For James overthrows the entire past of the intellectual vocation, in which intellectuals have in effect postulated their own self-identity no matter what else they might criticize. For having lived through a century and a half of what one of their own calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion", professional intellectuals have been remarkably un-suspicious of themselves. Whereas Feuerbach, breaking with the philosophy of self-consciousness, told them they were not what they seemed to be, they applied this wisdom only to those who purported to be scientific or rational or otherwise holding on to something affirmative, but they never suspected that the most cynical of people are always the most gullible. Never did the intellectual ever suspect that anyone could know what he himself did not or could be conscious of realities he himself was not, and so for all the endless blather about openness and pluralism and the Other, he could never imagine that the other of what he was could be less blind than he. James's imaginative standpoint includes the other of what the intellectual is, and that is where James parts company with the whole modern history of overblown self-examination. Let us forget how wonderful ordinary folk are supposed to be -- in another context we will see how limited that perspective is -- rather let's see how rotten the intellectuals really are. Let's see what James, imaginatively jumping out of his social role as omniscient observer, could see, that, say Adorno, positing non-identity, could not.

20 April 1997

The Pequod Project

Jim Murray, Director (make inquiries here)
Ralph Dumain, Librarian/Archivist & Webmaster

Uploaded 7 June 2001