Society of the Snob-tacle: On Animality and Snobbery without Hegel

Alexandre Kojève, pictured here looking like an Agent if they made The Matrix in 1955.

For the past several months, I’ve been turning over the dichotomy between “snobbery” and “animality” that I encountered in Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals. Given the fact that I’m an American, perhaps I should characterize it as something like a dog worrying at a shoe. This dichotomy, originating in a footnote from the work of Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, which I found referenced in a blog post by American Sinologist Victor H. Mair, of U. Penn. The actual writing on the subject appears to have been done by Nathan Hopson, an associate professor at the University of Bergen, in the Foreign Languages Department.

The Kojève quote, in full is as follows:

One can . . . say that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist “communism,” seeing that, practically, all the members of a “classless society” can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates.

Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the U.S.S.R. gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of being rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was able to conclude from this that the “American way of life” was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the “eternal present” future of all humanity. Thus, Man’s return to animality appeared no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as a certainty that was already present.

It was following a recent voyage to Japan (1959) that I had a radical change of opinion on this point. There I was able to observe a Society that is one of a kind, because it alone has for almost three centuries experienced life at the “end of History”—that is, in the absence of all civil or external war (following the liquidation of feudalism by the roturier Hideyoshi and the artificial isolation of the country conceived and realized by his noble successor Yiyeasu). Now the existence of the Japanese nobles, who ceased to risk their lives (even in duel) and yet did not for that begin to work, was anything but animal.

“Posthistorical” Japanese civilization undertook ways diametrically opposed to the “American way.” No doubt, there were no longer in Japan any Religion, Morals, or Politics in the “European” or “historical” sense of these words. But Snobbery in its pure form created disciplines negating the “natural” or “animal. . . . [I]n spite of persistent economic and political inequalities, all Japanese without exception are currently in a position to live according to totally formalized values— that is values empty of all “human content” in the “historical” sense.

And Hopson’s interpretation is as follows:

By this reckoning, (Japanese) snobbery is an almost Platonic pure form of postmodernism — and importantly Kojève prefigures postmodernists on the one hand and the rush to define Japan as always-already postmodern on the other — and will eventually become the dominant ethos for humankind.

This man here, with his gigantic wet eyes, thought the end of history was nigh.

This is, of course, based on the peculiarly Hegelian idea of history, and the conception that Hegel had that history was ending around the time of his writing, at least in Europe. Given that Hegel passed away in 1831 – before the Springtime of the Peoples (1848), the Paris Commune and the Unification of Germany (1871), either World War, or the Cold War – this idea seems laughable. However, Hegel defined history in a fairly peculiar fashion: according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it’s defined as “an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom . . . [He] constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state.”

In short, what he means by “history” is a development towards a particular teleological state of perfect freedom. Clearly, this is not what the rest of us tend to mean by what he says – though it is fairly similar to what people tend to mean by “progress”. For Hegel, the “end of history” is the completion of the process described by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s pat truism “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” (As an aside, I like Dr. King very much, it would be great if people actually learned about him.)

For the Hegelian, one can only be truly human within history. After history is ended, the vast majority are reduced to a state of animality – there is no desire, only need. As Azuma writes on pg. 86 of Otaku, “the word need indicates a simple craving or thirst that is satisfied through its relationship with a specific object . . . Different from need, desire does not disappear when the object of desire is obtained and the lack satisfied.” Humans experience desire and need, Animals only have the latter.

The other option, though is to become a snob. If the Animal condition is to be in concert with one’s environment and for one’s needs to self-annihilate upon contact with it due to their fulfillment, the snob adopts the position of denying the environment and striving purposelessly against it. Azuma writes on page 68 that

“Even if there is no chance whatsover for denial, snobs presume to deny, to manufacture formal opposition, and to love the thrill of opposing nature. The example Kojève gives is ritual suicide (seppuku). In ritual suicide, in spite of having no reason to die, suicide is committed in essence because of the formal values of honor and order. This is the ultimate snobbery. This way of life is not “animalistic” in that there are moments of negation. However, this also differs from the human way of life in the “historical” age. For the nature of snobs and their oppositional stance (for instance, the opposition to instinct at the time of ritual suicide) would no longer move history in any sense. No matter how many sacrificial corpses are piled up, ritual suicide, which is purely and courteously executed, certainly would not be a motivating force for revolution.”

Thinking on this issue, I think that there are some useful aspects to the snobbery/animality dichotomy. However, I don’t subscribe to the Hegelian concept of history: there are useful parts, and perhaps I’m misunderstanding it, given that I’m receiving it third hand, but it seems that history should not be viewed as simply a ratchet moving in the direction of greater human freedom – it should be, but it isn’t. In this way, Hegel fell victim to an is/ought problem: he confused what should be for what is.

My own ideas about history are messy and full of mixed metaphors. I won’t subject you to them here and now. Let’s take a de-historicized version of these terms, and replacing nature with something else – to live animalistically is to live within one’s context; to live snobbishly is to live against one’s context.

I would say that it is possible to be a snob in some areas, and animalistic in others, though I would also say that this tends to lead to contradictory positions (of course, remember, as Deleuze and Guattari said, nothing ever died from contradiction).

However, one thing that I think bears examination is the fact that groups can exhibit snobbery and animality, and that these can be nested inside of each other. Azuma suggests that while Japan as a whole might qualify as snobbish, having practices and institutions that run counter to their context, Otaku, the subculture that he’s examining, exhibit animality, having adapted to the media-saturated environment that they find themselves in.

I’m currently reading a book of criticism on Murakami, so he’s near the front of my mind. Consider this speech that he gave in Jerusalem on the topic of Palestine.

Contrast them with Haruki Murakami, the author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and 1Q84. Murakami is, in many ways, a snob among snobs – and that’s what makes him such a fascinating and enjoyable writer. Murakami pointedly eschews most of the traditions of Japan’s own guild-like literary industry, and has found success and resonance. He is notable for writing in a fashion radically different from other Japanese writers, using the language differently – his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, was in fact begun in English and then he translated it back into Japanese, and he doesn’t give interviews to Japanese media outlets.

Likewise, the subject matters that he deals with are largely connected more to American literature than to those of his homeland – with the potential exception of Underground, his nonfiction book composed of a series of interviews about the Tokyo Gas Attacks of 1995. However, if you were to scoop him up and place him in an American context, he would be most assuredly not an American – not due to heritage or language, but because his own snobbery prevents him from adopting the American animality that he takes pains to imitate in some places. Moreover, despite his differences from other Japanese novelists, there are still some elements of the deep grammar – what I’ve called the “paradigm” in the past – of literature that are more clearly Japanese than American. His ethical outlook is very clearly Japanese. And there is something I want to make clear, within the context of this discussion, when I identify him as a snob in relation to snobbery, I think that is not simply fascinating but evidently good.

Perhaps if you were to place him not in an American context, but a French one, he might adapt to it and remain something like it is. In this dichotomy I’ve laid out, one could easily identify the French as being as snobbish as the Japanese.

In this context, I feel it necessary to ask: if one is a snob among snobs, has one happened upon something like Hegel’s dialectic – negating the negation? Perhaps, but I’m not a Hegelian, and I don’t pretend to be. I’m a rank amateur and pseudo-intellectual who needs to go back and read foundational texts, but can’t because I’m too damned tired and busy.

I think it’s possible that what’s going on here is more likely akin to what Davids Graeber and Wengrow called “schismogenesis” in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (reviewed here), originally derived from the work of Gregory Bateson back in the 1930s. On page 57 of that book, they describe this process as “Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide – even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavours; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman.”

To the anthropologists, this is most interesting on a cultural level: American anti-communism, for example, generated the contemporary capitalist hellscape we find ourselves in, for example, because anything slightly to the left of telling the homeless man embedded in your windshield that you can’t call an ambulance because he needs to take personal responsibility for his situation is socialism, which is the same thing as Anarchism, Stalinism, Maoism, and whatever it is that Joe Biden is. This sharp, unthinking opposition leads to a great deal of thought after the fact to explain, justify, and cement the current position.

Can you believe that this was done by the owner of the garage? Can you believe that someone in 2020 doesn’t know how to draw an anarchy sign?

Of course, this isn’t always necessarily bad: I would say that the north taking a schismogenic approach to Southern Slavery was the right thing in the middle of the 19th century, and the only reason that things went as poorly as they did later is that they abandoned their ideals and ended reconstruction too early.

However, looking at this, I believe we can alter the above dichotomy: snobbery is the posture of being schismogenic, animality is the posture of resisting schismogenesis. Both have things that suggest them – I would argue that good art (or at least innovative art) tends to come from a place of snobbery, for example. I would also argue that this tends to make one lonely and unhappy unless they learn to turn it off.

To be a snob among (and against) the snobs is to look at their refusal of the original position or postulate and refuse both that and the original. Perhaps this means landing between the two, perhaps it means stepping off the chessboard and picking up a deck of playing cards. Snobbery, by this definition, is a position of intentional alienation, and possibly one that increases and intensifies by degrees – I’m not sure it’s necessarily possible for the reverse to be true, to embrace a deeper animality than the animal.

What then of the human in this construction? Have I left it aside by abandoning Hegel? Does it even rate on this new scale of the Animal Zero and ever-intensifying levels of snobbery? Have I finally managed to find a way to be more insufferable than I already am?

I think that the conception of the human in Hegel is limited by it being entwined with his concept of History, and I also think that putting a fence around and a gate on the definition of “human” makes my skin crawl. Truthfully, the word used to simply mean “an educated person”, but it has evolved these days to simply mean “a person” and I’m not interested in shifting away from that, nor am I interested in putting degrees on it, making there gradations of human in opposition to those of snobbery and animality (you might notice my reluctance to refer to anyone as an “animal” here, except in the most abstracted sense, preferring the adjectival form with “animal” and the substantive with “snob”).

So let’s put something else branching off from these poles of snobbery and animality, a third option to make our dichotomy into a multipolar spectrum. So, what option diverges from these two, and what term can we use for that option other than human? Removing the idea of progress as a keystone from history – should this arrangement remain within the context of history – suggests to me that, far from normalizing this position, marking it sharply is desirable. So to animality and snobbery, I would propose adding the radical.

The radical would be superficially similar to the snob, as both require a principled refusal for one reason or another. But the nature of that principled refusal, perhaps the nature of the principles themselves, are different. The difference, in Kojève and Hegel, is that the Human pushes history – the process of increasing human freedom – forward and the snob doesn’t, meaning that there is a formal similarity between the two, but the ends are different. My intuition is that, in our new construction, the snob refuses in a procedural fashion – because that is what you do – and the radical refuses in a teleological fashion – because it is the right thing to do.

Both, I would argue, experience desire as described above: for if the snob experienced their principles as needs, then the principle would disappear upon its fulfillment. However, it seems to me that, if there is an overriding principle for the snob, it is not one anchored to the material world. For the radical, an overriding principle attached to the world around them exists, pulling at the principles guiding their behavior as a magnet arranges iron filings on a sheet into a diagram of its magnetic field, describing otherwise invisible lines of force.

Following my prior thoughts about nested snobbery, one could imagine a snobbish group that contains radicals within it, fighting to reorganize the abstracted principles of the group into a different approach: of course, this doesn’t mean that they are seeking to make the subculture in question into a radical subculture. The values of the subculture or group become a background field, a sub-world in which these people operate.

I will not be engaging in conversations about what is or is not punk, despite what this paragraph says. Thank you very much for understanding.

Pulling from my own background, I spent a great deal of time orbiting on the edge of punk circles when I was young (not just cyberpunk and steampunk, real punk-punk). In many ways, the punk subculture can among the most snobbish, though the formal values they adopt are antithetical to those of the world around them and make them appear animalistic. There is, in my opinion, a floor of snobbishness required: of course, they don’t speak of gauche or ugly or anything like that – things in line with the aesthetic are punk, those not in line with the aesthetic are not punk, and arguments about what is or is not punk is a favorite pastime of high school aged punks. The animalistic position is to accept these as the rules of the game, agree that people who are there should be there, and enjoy the music. The default snobbish position is to insist on policing the borders of the clique and establishing ground rules. The snob-among-snobs approach is to point out that it’s stupid to worry about being punk and that, for a bunch of non-conformists, you all sure do dress the same. The radical position is to make claims about what “punk” means and insist on altering group behavior, or potentially to start playing ska music. That last one was the radical shift that we saw in the KC punk community about twenty years ago.

One could, of course, imagine a whole sequence of nested positions, the radical-among-animals, the animal-among-snobs, the animal-among-radicals-among-snobs, and so on and so forth. I don’t think enumerating these is particularly useful.

However, I do want to bring up another example, just to illustrate a fine point. Let’s talk, briefly, about Gamergate. The best writing I have read on this subject, I must acknowledge, is “the Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” which is contained in Neoreaction a Basilisk, a book we have referenced several times. My analysis will not really intersect with the analysis that Sandifer performs there, but hers is much deeper and more well-thought out. I’m just dashing this off in my bathrobe, right now.

There’s no good visual representation of Gamergate. I mean, I could reach back to things I wrote around my review/retrospective of Night in the Woods, but I still have very complicated feelings around that.

I would argue that engaging with the hobby of playing video games is often characterized by animality. This isn’t to say “those who play video games are sheep” or anything like that, but a lot of people who engage with the hobby feel a Hegelian need to complete a game, they satisfy that need, they move on; largely, it’s satisfied fairly quickly. Among some (often the ones who self-identify as “gamers” as a means of marking their devotion as serious), this turns into a Hegelian desire – something that can’t be satisfied by acquiring and exhausting the object of the desire. These are people who engage, repeatedly or deeply with the same object, or who are constantly seeking out more and more examples of a class of object to satisfy their desire. Oftentimes this concretizes into a community: they begin engaging with other gamers to swap intelligence and analysis. Here, we have made the jump from animality to snobbery (or, in my construction above, snobbery-among-animality).

Gamergate, to continue my earlier metaphor about the magnet, was applying a particular kind of social pressure to radicalize this community. All of a sudden, all of the principles and ideas and hangups that these people were guided by were organized along particular lines of force, and in a large group, those lines were all pointed in the same direction.

This process is called radicalization — and it’s important to remember that it tends to strike communities, not individuals. It is the shift to the community that makes this possible, but it is the attitudes of the individuals within that community that makes it possible.

As an aside, this is why I needed a second example: I wanted to demonstrate that being a radical is no more a good thing than being a snob or exhibiting animality are bad things. All of these are value-neutral, none of them are permanent, and the important thing is that they are different postures that a person can take in regard to the world.

This, it seems to me, is an important thing to think about and analyze. Because, as has been acknowledged many times in the past, this was the core of what would become the alt-right, and many of them have aged up and decayed into Q believers.

Now, I’m going to put a pin in this here, because I’ve reached the end of my brainpower for this week, but I know what the next stage of thinking on this has to concern: I’ve got a half-dozen different definitions of desire, and about as many ideas that really hinge on those definitions, so I’m going to give some thought to unifying the definition of desire and putting it forward as a particular thing.

Until then, though, I guess I’ll have to leave you with that.