It must have been 1971, maybe ‘70, maybe ‘72, I was waiting to cross Broadway at 42nd Street and the woman waiting next to me pointed at the people demonstrating in front of the Army Recruitment Center. Skinny legs, broken teeth, bleached blond hair and a fake white leather miniskirt with a matching top and fringes: if this were a New Yorker piece it would take four paragraphs to get to the point but it’s not, and you got the point already.
“What are these people doing?
— They’re demonstrating against the War.
— Can you do that?
— Sure you can. It’s your right under the Constitution.”
She flashed a crooked smile and flounced off to join them. That’s when I knew we’d won.
Bertolt Brecht had the appropriate concept: plumpes Denken, “Crude Thinking.” Plumpes Denken is the kind of thinking that says you only need to know this much to act: that a 2-foot piece of a two-by-four, cut at a 30% slant, will fix the problem; that this one’s a john and this one, not; that dropping bombs on baby’s wrong, no matter what you call it:
“Crude thoughts definitely belong to the system of dialectical thinking because they address nothing less than the order of Theory and Practice, not orders from Theory to practice.”
„Plumpe Gedanken gehören gerade in den Haushalt des dialektischen Denkens, weil sie gar nichts anderes darstellen als die Anweisung der Theorie auf die Praxis. Auf die Praxis, nicht an sie.“1
Of course in dialectics every praxis begets a counter-practice. Zadie Smith, a minor British literata, has just been handed a runner-up Pulitzer for Critical Loyalty. In this case Loyalty consists of reminding us that talking about the murder—feeling about the murder—of 30,000 and counting is far more, far more worthwhile than actually, ya know, like, addressing the problem.2 Far more profitable for sure. The Pulitzer is handed out by Columbia University. You can’t make these things up.
Paul Nizan wrote about this process, brilliantly. Nizan was a classmate and a friend of Sartre at the prestigious École normale supérieure. Unlike Sartre, he dropped out, spent some time in Aden, came back, rose in the Communist Party, resigned after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. He was killed fighting in 1940.
And he wrote, brilliantly, about the process that produces loyal intellectuals like Zadie. “Watchdogs” he calls them, Chiens de garde, formed in the whory tradition of Kantian thought:
“I obediently believed that the worker in the street, the farmer on his farm, owed me a debt of gratitude, since I was devoting myself in a noble, pure and selfless way to the specialization of the Spirit for the benefit of all mankind, which includes among its species, workers and farmers.”
« Je croyais docilement que l’ouvrier dans la rue, le paysan dans sa ferme me devaient de la reconnaissance puisque je me consacrais d’une manière noble, pure et désintéréssée à la spécialité du spirituel au profit de l’homme en général, qui comprend, parmi ses espèces, des ouvriers et des fermiers. »3
Outwardly, watchdogs are merely charged with thinking for society as a whole; but as the title suggests, their real task is the perpetual postponement of praxis by means of theory:
“It’s time to admit that bourgeois philosophy can only produce verbal declarations, while actually working against the noble ends it claims to pursue.”
« Il est temps de dire que la philosophie bourgeoise peut seulement produire des .déclarations verbales, mais travaille réellement contre les grandes fins qu’elle prétend poursuivre. »4
This is the very same approach deployed by Zadie, the endless questioning of the meaning of words like “genocide,” expressions like “From the River to the Sea:”
“They build up vocabularies because they’ve have discovered an important concept: Problems will no longer exist once the terms have been properly defined.”
« Ils composent des vocabulaires parcequ’ils ont découvert tous ensemble une proposition importante : Les problèmes n’existeront plus quand les termes en seront convenablement définis. »4
Talking about problems is how you make sure the problems are not addressed; when this becomes the whole point of Zadie’s text is when you know you’re winning. Or rather, that they’re losing.
The point, but not the general purpose of her existence. What’s frightening about Zadie is the way she stages, consciously, a new form of the First Amendment: it’s long been a legal truism, that there would be no point in protecting speech if the only speech protected were the speech that doesn’t offend the powers. But that is precisely the thrust of Zadie’s writing, and its explicit content: the privilege to speak is reserved for the privileged, and Zadie’s privileged by her imputed ability to speak finely. As Brecht put it, “A thought must be crude in order to come into its own through action” [„Ein Gedanke muß plump sein, um im Handeln zu seinem Recht zu kommen.“]5 With the likes of Zadie this will never happen. That’s her purpose.
Now, Robert Brasillach. A brilliant stylist of the French language, everyone agreed. Also a Nazi collaborator who used his skills to doxx Jews in hiding. After, when he was brought up on trial, the literati set to work trying to get him pardoned, oblivious to the fact that his imputed brilliance and his reputation weren’t a mitigating factor, they were instrumental to his odious actions. Smith, obviously, is not on Brasillach’s level, either in terms of malice or talent. Still, Brasillach’s “brilliance,” like that of Zadie Smith, consisted of following stylistic orders. And in the end, the proper action, for Brasillach at least, was to line him up against a wall and smoke his Nazi butt.
That is plumpes Denken. That is how we win.
WOID XXIV-03
May 6, 2024
Walter Benjamin, „Brechts Dreigroschenroman,“ in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. III (Frankfurt a.M. : Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 446.
Zadie Smith. “Shibboleth.” The New Yorker (May 5, 2024): https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/shibboleth-the-role-of-words-in-the-campus-protests
Paul Nizan, Les Chiens de garde [1932] (Paris : Maspero, 1965), pp. 10-11.
op. cit., p. 35.
Benjamin, „Brechts Dreigroschenroman,“ ibid.