from WIKI.  The inside of what is thought to be the lodge New Crowned Hope (Zur Neugekrönten Hoffnung) in Vienna. It is believed that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is depicted at the extreme right, sitting next to his close friend Emanuel Schikaneder. Oil painting, on display in the Vienna Museum Karlsplatz.  

Emanuel Schikaneder (1 September 1751 – 21 September 1812), born Johann Joseph Schickeneder, was a German impresario, dramatist, actor, singer and composer. He was the librettist of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Magic Flute and the builder of the Theater an der Wien. Branscombe called him "one of the most talented theatre men of his era".

Let your reason furnish the answer . . . ," the second priest in Mozart's The Magic Flute advises the questioning birdman, Papageno.  The philosophe believed that through rational analysis the world could be understood, explained, and regulated.  Its good was to be cherished, its evil conquered.  European thought became permeated with the idea that society had the means to construct a better civilization, that through the exercise of reason, the human lot might be enobled. (pp. 20-21)

Progressive minds assigned the Bible's revelations and miracles as well as the Church's sacraments to superstition and looked upon ideas like God and the soul at best as ideals, at worst as illusions.  The three boy messengers in The Magic Flute would assuredly proclaim: "Soon superstition will die, soon the wise will prevail. . . .  Then the earth will be a paradise, and men will be like gods. (p. 21)

Science, though in its infancy, particularly threatened the credibility of the Bible.  As early as 1712, the Marquise de Lambert observed that in the salon the Christian Mysteries had become a laughingstock: "Anyone but venturing a belief in God was thought to belong to the lower orders."  Cardinal de Bernis remarked in his Mémoires that by 1720 people of quality for the most part ignored the Gospels. (p. 25).

Bildung: Sources (comments)

It is a basic tenet of my work that societies are not systems.  There is no ultimately determining structure to human existence--at least none that social actors or sociological observers, situated in its midst, can discern.  What we call societies are only loose aggregates of diverse, overlapping, intersecting power networks.  506

America has not so much been exceptional as it has gradually come to represent one extreme on a continuum of class relations.  America has never differed qualitatively from other national cases.  Differences have been of degree, not kind. . . .  Explanations asserting an original and enduring American exceptionalism . . . have only a very limited truth.  638

Interview # 1: the Wellman Interview (add Joe Adams re trimmers and 44 strike)

Wellman: Flint is what I consider to be the asshole of the world; it's the roughest place to be.  Now we recruited dozens of people to the Party in Flint, and they came out of indigenous folk.  And those are the best ones.  But we couldn't keep them in Flint very long, once they joined the Party.  Because once they came to the Party a whole new world opened up.  New cultural concepts, new people, new ideas.  And they were like a sponge, you know.  And Flint couldn't give it to them.  The only thing that Flint could give you was whorehouses and bowling alleys, you see.  So they would sneak down here to Detroit on weekends--Saturday and Sunday--where they might see a Russian film or they might . . .  hear their first opera in their lives or a symphony or talk to people that they never met with in their lives.

P. Friedlander:  to me that's one of the most significant processes of people becoming radicals, is this . . .

SW: but you lose them in their area . . .

PF: right.  You lose them, but I think something is going on there that I think radicals have not understood about their own movement . . .

SW: right . . .

PF: something about the urge toward self improvement . . .

SW: right . . .

and cultural advancement . . .

SW: right, right . . .

PF: and not to remain an unskilled worker in the asshole of the world . . .

SW: right, right.  But there are two things going on at the same time.  The movement is losing something when a native indigenous force leaves his community.  On the other hand the reality of joining a movement of this type is that the guy who is in the indigenous area looks around and says this is idiocy, I can't survive here.

This chapter goes on to examine that minority of workers who, having come into contact with western-infuenced ideas of the self via the intelligentsia, strove to educate themselves and to acquire 'consciousness', a term that carries the idea of reworking oneself morally and intellectually in order to assert oneself against the world. p. 70

The 'conscious' worker who emerged in the last quarter of the ninetenth century were hardly typical of the majority of migrants who came to St Petersburg.  They identified with the working class, at least in an idealized sense, yet often expressed a'burning, pungent loathing of the utter self-devouring ignorance and incomprehension' of the ordinary worker.  'Conscious' workers sought to distance themelves from the latter, seeking to reconstruct their lives around the ideal of 'personality', struggling to develop as knowledgeable, autonomous individuals.  The worker memoirist Shapovalov recaled that as an apprentice fitter, he 'felt like a bird in a cage.  Life seemed like a prison, vague desires stirring in my soul--desires for space and air.'  For such workers, 'spiritual and intellectual dervelopment' was the means to achieve 'personality' and they responded warmly to the efforts of the intelligentsia to raise their level of 'culturedness' by teaching them the rudiments of high literacy and scientific culture.  Although most had a basic education in the village, such workers grabbed the opportunities on offer in the Sunday schools and evening classes of the capital.  'Why', asked a young fitter in a factory in the Nevskaia Zastava district, 'are our teachers such good people?  They are paid nothing and they lose their own time . . .  These are people wo do not boast about their learning . . . but seek to share it with those who have no knowledge.'  pp. 76-7

Becoming conscious entailed not only sloughing off the corrupt habits of the 'dark masses'--drinking, fighting, gambling and so forth--but also the religious 'superstition' and political conservatism that befogged their minds.  In their struggle to forge a 'personality', conscious workers typically embraced the platonic ideal of self-mastery through reason, convinced that reason could liberate the people from the shackles of religion and monarchism.  Science magazine and brochures for the mass reader, dealing with topics such as astronomy, evolutionary theory and geography and new technologies, such as radio and powered aviation, were immensely popular.  p. 78

Bildung: Plane of Immanence

. . . continued

The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples.  This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable. 29

What follows is my version of the cognitive history of the twentieth century. . .  Science altered our lives and then liberated our minds from the concrete.  This history has not been written because, as children of our own time, we do not perceive the gulf that separates us from our distant ancestors: the difference between their world and the world seen through scientific spectacles. . . .  As use of logic and the hypothetical moved beyond the concrete, people developed new habits of mind.  They became practiced at solving problems with abstract or visual content and more innovative at administative tasks." 172-174

Deborah L. Pearl, "Narodnaia Volia and the Worker"

As propagandists saw it, their task was not simply to expose workers to new ideas about revolution and socialism, but also to help them to arrive at a wholly new way of looking at the world.  Circle studies, in which many workers were passionately involved, often had this effect, sometimes in ways even the propagandists themselves did not fully understand.  Mikhail Drei, a young law student and narodovolets in Odessa in 1880-81, was puzzled at the interest his circle of carpenters showed in discussions of science and the natural world.  "[T]hey became especially animated when our conversations turned to the topics of the origin of species, the phases of the moon, eclipses of the sun, the origin of the world, etc."  p. 59

S. A. Smith, "Workers, the Intelligentsia, and Social Democracy in St. Petersburg, 1895-1917"

For their part, the workers who joined the party were just as prone to idealize the intelligentsia, and just as prone to disenchantment if they discovered their idols had feet of clay.  For the "conscious" workers, the intelligent represented a world of culture and freedom to which they were eager to gain admission.  For Bolshevik workers more particularly, the Marxist intelligentsia represented a realm of science, access to which was vital if revolution were to succeed. p. 200

For young, urbanized workers, the process of their development and self-definition as conscious workers consisted in the construction of a new, "scientific," "modern" world view, one that would replace the traditional convictions and values of peasant culture held by most of their parents.  The formation of such a world view entailed not only the construction of a notion of historical progress, based on the experience of the more civilized countries of the West and the history of their labor movements; it also entailed the construction of a new, "scientific" understanding of the laws that govern socety, the world of nature, and the universe as a whole.

In their propaganda work, the intelligenty of social democratic orientation also trid to transmit to the workers a feeling of solidarity with the international proletariat.  That feeling was based for the most part on the image that the propagandists formed of the working class and the workers' movement in the more developed countries of the West.  In part because of this, many young metalworkers found it difficult to experience a sense of solidrity with the "gray" workers of St. Petersburg's textile mills and even with those workers of their own enterprises whom they viewed as less developed.

One might even conclude that the experence of participating in propaganda circles and Sunday schools increased the estrangement of the young metalworkers (and printers as well) from other strata of the St. Petersburg working class.  The Social Democrats in the capital learnd this harsh lesson in 1896-97 when, to their surprise, a "spontaneous" wave of economic strikes flared up and spread among the "gray" men and women of the city's textile and tobacco factories.  Despite the urgent calls of leaders of the Petersburg Unin of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Woring Class, the young metalworkers and printers, including participants in the work of Marxist propaganda circles, displayed few significant signs of solidarity with the striking workers.  

The conduct of the metalworkers and printers encouraged the leaders of the Union of Struggle, who were trying to influence the development of the Petersburg labor movement, to shift from so-called "propaganda" to the tactic of "economic agitation."  This sharp change in the tactics of the Petersburg SDs was taken by many of the workers who attended the Marxist propaganda circles as a betrayal of their interests by the inteligentsia.  pp. 152-3

We have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual.  By contrast, the relation of the newly literate and semi-literate readers of the lower urban classes to new forms of commercially produced mass literature, produced with an eye to entertainment rather than education, was far less earnest. . . . p. 100

   The caesura in Marx's work was not the result of an epistemological revolution in 1845, but of his disappointment with the failure of the workers' revolution three years later.  The break was marked by repression of the knowledge that artisinal workers opposed to the spread of large industry had formulated the idea of workers' emancipation.  Marx (and Engels) came instead to place their hopes for a new revolutionary order in the factory proletariat to come, which would be molded by the discipline of large industry.  With this development, the proletariat left the real of social experience to become a normative category consecrated by a certain Marxist "science." (pp. xxi-xxii)

Mark D. Steinberg, "The Injured and Insurgent Self: The Moral Imagination of Russia's Lower-Class Writers"

Proletarian imagination : self, modernity, and the sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 / Mark D. Steinberg.
Author    Steinberg, Mark D., 1953-
Published     Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2002.

add: Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Indiana U pr, 1989)

 The democratic idiosyncracy which opposes [the will to power] has permeated the realm of the spirit and disguised itself in the most spiritual forms to such a degree that today it has forced its way, has acquired the right to force its way into the strictest, apparently most objective sciences;  indeed, it  . . . has robbed life of a fundamental concept, that of activity.  Under the influence of the above metioned idosyncracy, one places instead "adaptation" in the foreground, that is to say,  an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity; indeed, life itself has been defined as a more and more efficient inner adaptation to external conditons (Herbert Spencer).  Thus, the essence of life, its will to power, is ignored; one overlooks the essential priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions, although 'adaptation' follows only after this; the dominant role of the highest functionaries within the organism iself in which the will to life appears active and form-giving is denied.

Compare this with Cassirer, Alcorn, and Moretti

The inner life of the membership/milieu of the Communist Party of the United States was not ideological, in the simplistic sense that one, in the search for the motives of individuals that led to association and participation in those things called Communist, would look for the ideas that somehow caused individuals to make their choices.  All the terms italicized are more than suspect (see philosophy and history): they are the fundamental elements of the mythic structure of modern society, and as such are useless for purposes of analysis.  

The inner life of the CP milieu was at the same time a moment in the unfolding of the historical dynamic of cognitive development.  What some saw as an obsession with theory as mere ideology was in fact the passion of the discovery of the power of formal operational thought.  The inner life of the CP is continuous with the development not merely of reason grasped as mere ideology; it was the very expression of the passion of the mind as a force unto itself.  This is something that in retrospect is perfectly clear to anyone who has grown up in that milieu and reflects upon it in the light of current scholarship. (see Vivian Gornick, The romance of American Communism (Basic Books, 1977.)  This an existential reality, not a superficial (merely ideological) committment.

The excerpt in the right panel, from Mozart, a Cultural Biography, could just as well describe the mentalité of the Communists I have known, of the milieu in which I grew up.  This was the intellectual dimension of the Left.  One has only to add to this Enlightenment mentalité some form of solidarity and one gets modern communism.

The Enlightenment understood as an inflection point in cognitive development as historical process; cognitive development as central to Bildung: this what must be taken into account when attempting to understand the modern.  Thus, the Enlightenment not merely as ideology, but, more fundamentally, as cognitive development.

What follows is my version of the cognitive history of the twentieth century. . .  Science altered our lives and then liberated our minds from the concrete.  This history has not been written because, as children of our own time, we do not perceive the gulf that separates us from our distant ancestors: the difference between their world and the world seen through scientific spectacles. . . . More and more people began to put on scientific spectacles.  As use of logic and the hypothetical moved beyond the concrete, people developed new habits of mind.  They became practiced at solving problems with abstract or visual content and more innovative at administative tasks." 172-174

The socialist idea (and ideology) was obviously about more than just overcoming the effects of a form of property; it was also about eliminating the effects of deeply embedded and oppressive structures, including punitive and militaristic states, as well as a constraining class system--the proletariat, even if called "working class," being one of them.  The latter is often forgotten: The proletariat is, in itself, not anything ideal; it is a sever impediment to overcome.  And in Marx's conception, socialism would lead to the disappearance of the proletariat and its transformation into an educated middle class of the future, though the term middle class ws not used in this way by socialists.  After all, not just a ruling class but economic classes in general, as they were historically known, were constraining--if not directly oppressive--structures. (p. 150)

Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 49-50; 269-275; 369-370; 486-487

Shlomo Avineri, Hegel's Theory of the Modern State (Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 77-78; 132-139; 144-147; 166)

Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (Verso, 2000)

Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Narcissism and the Literary Libido: Rhetoric, Text, and Subjectivity (New York University Press, 1994)

Anti-racism and Bildung

Anti-racism is often misundertood as sympathy.  In some cases this is true, but in the case of the Communist subculture of which I was a part, and in terms as well of my own personal experience, anti-racism is a critical moment in the unfolding of Bildung. To put it most bluntly, anti-racism is fundamentally about one's own development as a thinking Being.  Anti-racism is about self-development through confrontation with and overcoming the culture of ressentiment.  Anti-racism is not only emotional and cultural.  It is a critical aspect of cognitive development, a testing ground where formal operational competence (which is also a form of inner discipline) grows in combat with the culture of ressentiment, and deconstructs the shibboleths of a pathological society dominated by the mechanisms of defense (the paranoid-schizoid position).

I doubt if any at that time (1930s to 1950s) understood their anti-racism in this way.

If twentieth-century heroes are as a rule younger than their predecessors, this is so because, historically, the relevant symbolic process is no longer growth but regression.  The adult world refuses to be a hospitable home for the subject?  Then let childhood be it--the Lost Kingdom, the 'Domaine mystérieux' of Alain-Fournier's Meaulnes.  Hence Malte's longing for his mother, or Jakob's anguished final cry ('Ah, to be a small child--to be that only, and forever!'); or, in a more militant vein, Törless's devstatiing sense of omnipotence: the most regressive of features, out of which will arise--through Le grand Meaulnes (1913), Le Diable au corps (1923), and Lord of the Flies (1954)--a veritable tradition of counter-Bildungsroman.  'What is the matter,' asks the hero of Meaulnes, 'are the children in charge here?'  They are, and readers of Golding know the end of this story, where childhood may well be the biological trope for the new phenomenon of mass behaviour.  The regression from youth to adolescence and childhood would thus be the narrative form for what liberal Europe saw as an anthropological reversal from the individual as an autonomous entity to the individual as the mere member of a mass.  Given this framework, the postwar political scenario could hardly encourage a rebirth of the Bildungsroman: that mass movements may be constitutive of individual identity*--and not just destructive of it--was to remain an unexplored possibility of Western narrative.

Homeless, narcissistic, regressive**: the metamorphosis of the image of youth in our century is by now a famiiar fact.  p. 231-2

Finally, the work [A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: the Autobiography of Sëmen Ivanovich Kanatchikov] has a definite artistic structure.  It is a chronological account of the author's adventures--he is too straightforward for us to be able to use the modifier "picaresque"--in a wide variety of settings and situations, and of his encoungters with diverse characters, each of whom participates in his education, enlightenment, and moral development, whether by negative or positive example.  It is, in a sense, a Bildungsroman . . .  (p. xxix)

Isomorphism (Lewin and Levien)

Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?

Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.

Bildung

Progressivism to New Deal
The Communist Party of the United States
The Keynesian Elite in the New Deal State