American Apocalypse: Max Weber
[In the following essay, King discusses Weber's struggle with the alienation and moral stringency of Puritanism as evidenced in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.]
If my own activity does not belong to me, if it is an alien compulsive activity, to whom does it belong? To a being other than myself. Who is this being? The gods?
[Karl Marx, from the "economic-philosophic manuscripts" of 1844, in the translation of Norman O. Brown]
The religious root of modern economic humanity is dead; today the concept of the calling is a caput mortuum in the world.
[Weber, General Economic History (1919-20)]
Puritanism gave expression to a struggle of soul so wide-spread within the writings of even ordinary men and women that by the end of the nineteenth century, historians—focusing like Royce on the development of cultural consciousness—could argue that the seventeenth century had given birth to the self. In Max Weber's argument, Puritanism had created the idea of personality. Radical Protestantism had pulled the self from webs of custom and had broken the bonds of ritual and ceremony, Weber argued, thereby placing the self alone, like Bunyan's Christian, to pursue its course as an individual. To live without even a semblance of works, to stand alone before God in a state of predestination, to forego the intercession of others such as patriarchs and priests, demanded, for Weber, a wholeness of person that other Protestant churches never conceived of requiring. The aloneness also demanded an incredible amount of work. Weber's portrait stands necessarily as an ideal, and his Puritan as an ideal type, but in itself his argument re-created the idea that Puritanism had given birth to a new character—and in capitalism to a new economy. With Freud, Weber created the understanding that a particular type of modern personality had come into being, a personality that defined—most particularly, Weber thought—the ethic of America.
Weber, at the close of The Protestant Ethic, then brought this new personality to its end. The worldly ascetic ethic that he had set upon its course found itself, at the end of its progress, strangled in a cage of its own ironic making. Weber left a nation to wonder at its works:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modem economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
It was Weber who, more than any modem scholar, composed a nation convulsing in its own mechanism. A new nation, having given up all works as a help in its salvation, had created a work before which it finally stood estranged.
Puritanism had in fact given unique expression to the self's individuality when churches enjoined men and women to articulate their lives. Discursively, a revolution had occurred when sectarian groups of English men and women, loosely gathered under the term of Puritan, had separated in various degrees from the Anglican Church and, as sects, now sought a definition for those who had chosen to covenant together. As opposed to the sects of radical Protestantism, it was birth and family, when coupled with certain ceremonial observances and a ritual adherence to creeds, that had defined membership within a church, whether Anglican or Catholic. Puritanism had set itself against this automatism of time and geographic location as fully as it had opposed other apparent "works." Puritanism had placed these spiritual locations within the self, giving to each person the necessity of defining, through a process of articulation, his or her own time and place of membership within the body of Christ.
Puritanism had thus required a voluntary search undertaken across an internal space, the profession of an individual experience of conversion that alone, in the words spoken, defined the fellowship of Christ.
No term defined this character that the Puritan had given expression to until, for the opening of the twentieth century, Weber offered his phrase of "the Protestant ethic." American Victorian intellectuals such as James, Royce, and Putnam, writing within a practice of Puritan confession, and searching for meanings to renew the idea of spiritual conversion, offered perspectives that ranged from neurology to psychoanalysis to speak of their own and their nation's personality. Weber brought this discursive practice to completion by speaking now of an ethic. Writing within a developing European sociology, he turned to a question of religious consciousness and culture. By the end of the 1920s, when his writing began to appear in America, particularly within the guiding hands of Talcott Parsons of Harvard, the son of a Congregational minister, his work came to define the American character. When joined with the writings of Freud, Weber's work also came to define the type of mechanistic psychopathology that such a character was said to possess. By enwrapping a cultural psychology around a people, Weber gave time and space to the internal of Protestant psychomachy. Most particularly, Weber placed an ascetic ethic upon America and then drew the irony of the ethic out. He brought America through the course of a conversion, to its end in a new alienation. The psychological struggle that English Puritans had, upon their first migration, placed upon the New England landscape, giving place to their own psychomachy, Weber gave to the whole of the nation's history.
WORK AND PERSON
Max Weber's biography and scholarship have become woven together in such a way that his life and writing form—as in the context of modernity from the seventeenth century on they only can form—a single plain of text. His character as an author, in other words, is to give meaning or provide significance for his work. His writing stands not as an anonymous text akin to a medieval narrative, or as a text that Michel Foucault views as without authorial intent, but as scholarship with a self—Weber's own Protestant character—as referent. Revealed as nervously exhausted or neurotic in the Victorians' forming word, Weber himself has become an expression of the Protestant ethic. The "rosy blush" of his Enlightenment, his sanguine figure of history, is seen as consumed in the coals of his own particular production, burned in the humor, as it were, of his melancholy. "Weber," then, has become a plain of discourse of self and script working together, himself a piece of Protestant psychopathology. His writing has become expansive enough to include the "fable" of the author, the modern writer, in Roland Barthes's words, who "inscribes himself in his text as one of his characters."
One portion of this writing, recorded by Weber's wife Marianne, exemplifies the destruction that Weber gave to the Protestant ethic: "I am bone-tired.… I accomplish almost nothing aside from my lectures; one to two hours a day, then it doesn't go anymore." Weber was writing from Munich in the summer of 1919, explaining to a friend that he felt exhausted and lay under a terrible strain. "Work," he wrote, "is coming along very modestly—one to two hours a day. I am astonishingly worn out, my head is in bad shape. But it will work out.… I am preparing [a new edition of] the 'Protestant Ethic' for publication, then I shall take up the 'Economic Ethic.' After that the Sociology." The new edition did come out and other work as well, including two lectures that Weber had presented on the sanctity of vocation. If he rested, however, and felt "tolerably well," remaining to walk in a forest at six o'clock in the morning, bathing in a sun-light "so wonderful" and "calm," then his lingering stood as an "escapade" that came only with cost—"the cost of tremendous laziness; the 'Spirit of Capitalism' is hardly making any progress in addition to the lectures!"
The following spring Weber again expressed his "nervous exhaustion." Now he "had to pay," his wife Marianne explained, "for his extraordinary intensity." Some mention was given of a cardiac spasm—"The machine," as Weber told visitors, "wouldn't work anymore"; lying on his sofa "unable to work," he occupied himself with the meaning of death. In these months preceding his death, in other words, Weber is to be seen as completing the dismantling of his own machinelike works.
Marianne Weber's biography (the source of much that scholars repeat of Weber's personality)—the words of Weber chosen, the intermingling of private letters, scholarship, and past remembered phrases spoken only to Marianne and now printed as dialogue—testify to a confessional discourse. These memories, even contemporary letters so often considered directly reflective of an author's personality, work together with the formal texts that Weber wrote to reveal the character or the cultural spirit of Protestantism. The great amount of psychoanalytically informed scholarship given to uncovering the Protestant character—modern scholarship that began in 1932 when Erich Fromm joined The Protestant Ethic with Freud's essay on "Character and Anal Eroticism"—reveals that the pathology of a Protestant or "Puritan ethic" remains significant enough to become rewritten and extended.
A discursive field that had opened in the seventeenth century with the Puritans' disclosure of their own melancholy, has broadened, becoming a whole field of writings on Protestant cultural psychopathology. The presence is this text, however, from which persons can make sense; it is not hidden forces that persons reveal themselves in their writings or a culture that expresses itself in its books, as though writing lies above nature, simply absorbing and marking lower or material forces. This type of cultural discourse, including the fact that an author's life does become interwoven with his own printed words, completes itself in relation to other texts and within a textual region, a "geography"; the discourse remains universal. It remains to be used, however, by persons who have chosen to write about themselves.
It is inappropriate, then, to speak of a new critical approach to writing, including some versions of structuralism, when writing is used to fashion meaning from lives. Clearly, Christian culture—most especially, one might think, Puritanism, in the sense of the broad publication that Puritanism demanded of the Word—has read lives as it has considered lives composed. ("These are the words … which were written in the law … , and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.")
WORK AND TEXT
In employing discourse as an interpretant drawing together oppositions such as personal author and formal text, Michel Foucault seeks the embodied text in a function that as a practice relates author and writing, inserting the one into the other.
It is not possible to reexamine … the privileges of the subject? Clearly, in undertaking an internal and architectonic analysis of a work (whether it be a literary text, a philosophical system, or a scientific work) and in delimiting psychological and biographical references, suspicions arise concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject. But the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies.
Literary critical theory has thus posed the issue to historians as to what constitutes an "author," a "work," and a "text." Turning the question into a matter for the history of ideas, Foucault writes: "The coming into being of the notion of 'author' constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas." "Certainly it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given." Foucault speaks of a "reversal" that "occurred in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Scientific discourses began to be received for themselves.… The author-function faded away.… By the same token, literary discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author-function." Reconstructing Foucault's essay, three points may be said to follow. First, that "it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work in itself." Second, that the "work" remains a "problematic"—what is to be made, for example, of pieces of writing "left behind" or of disjointed markings that a critic collects and claims constitute a significant text? Third, that the authority newly given to literary texts newly creates a critical function, most typically that of psychologism:
Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice. All these operations vary according to periods and types of discourse.
The psychoanalytic interpretation of a text, say, is itself a historical location—not a way that may be universally used to get at a particular text, but a part of the modern text that the analyst reads.
In the arguments of Foucault, pathological revelation emerges within historically delimitable fields, and thus one works not to recover a universal unconsciousness but to understand how traditions of writing and intellectual assemblages of thought make things like an unconsciousness appear sensible. One does not return, therefore, from a reflective reading like the cultural recovery of texts, the American approach of myth and symbol, to the older, more rarefied history of ideas, for such a return would erase whatever discursive practice is present, here one of spiritual confession that holds a work and person together. The practice of writing autobiography is to be broadly defined, then, to include a writing like Marianne Weber's biography of her husband and even bits of private letters. This makes for a "field of the text" in which an author can work. In the pathology that Weber expressed of the Protestant ethic, and which he formed as a cultural character, he was not reflecting but making his nature; he was reworking writings of psychopathology inherent in a practice of religious confession. He was forming a composition of himself that reflects a certain "pretext" and the sense he could produce from that. He was composing his ethic much as the Puritan divines he read had done, placing his melancholy both in his books and in the writing that he was making of his life.
The composition that Marianne Weber offered in her biography continues: Weber's depression momentarily lifted, and writing to Marianne in April of 1920, Weber said that once again he was becoming what she had always feared, "this constantly 'working' grumpy Ehemann [husband]. Otherwise everything is going well.… Except work.… That'll come, too. It has to!" By June, however, Weber became mildly delirious. He was occupied now with "fantasies" or with ideas that he had finally begun working as he thought he should. He remembered an earlier collapse in the last months of 1897, his moment of severest depression when, as Marianne earlier wrote, "he was overloaded with work, [and] an evil thing from the unconscious underground of life stretched out its claws toward him. One evening, after the examination of a student at which he had, as always, worn himself out, he was overcome by total exhaustion, with a feverish head and a strong feeling of tension." It was during that depression that Weber had also lain on the sofa he was resting upon now, examining the same patterns of the paper on the wall, "'but at that time,"' he said, "'I was able to think and I struggled with the good Lord.' … Did he feel remorse or have any feelings of guilt? He thought it over and said first hesitantly and then definitely: No." This time the final diagnosis was pneumonia, and Weber died quietly that spring.
Within Marianne Weber's reconstruction of her husband's death, Weber dies from more than a lung infection. Marianne offers the sense that Weber quite literally labored to death, suffering his final collapse for the same reason that the "breakdown" of twenty-two years earlier was said to have occurred, from a nervous exhaustion deriving from a scholar's vast labors. Weber becomes caught within the "irresistible force" that he had described within the most famous of his passages, in the end of his jeremaid, The Protestant Ethic, as determining "the lives of all … born into this mechanism." "Today the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs." His rational ascetic had built such an incredible machine that it had estranged its own motives. The irony for Marianne Weber was now "this complete halting," as she wrote of her husband, "of the precious machine."
Marianne Weber's published biography mirrors Weber's completion: lines on pages are graphically set and justified in print to describe the mechanics that had failed to justify. Marianne stands as interpreter to Weber as the interpreter stands to Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress: "stay (said the Interpreter,) till I have shewed thee a little more, and after that, thou shalt go on thy way. So he took him by the hand again, and led him into a very dark room, where there sat a Man in an Iron Cage." Marianne offers Biblical meaning for this sight of the cage—the spiritual promise entailed in acknowledging one's bondage and affliction: "For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder."
Marianne's narrative reflects neither a collapse of fin de siècle society nor, in the image of Ferdinand Töennies that Weber himself closely followed, an objective historical alienation, or a transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Her narrative expresses something other than what Weber had sought along with his generation of European scholars, the consciousness of society that H. Stuart Hughes has discussed so well: a Weltanschauung, a Geist, a collective consciousness or unconsciousness that, as a cultural personality, is thought of as either reflecting or informing productive modes and nature. What is evidenced is material, but it is itself a way of writing. What is expressed is discourse, the text of such psychologism itself.
The structure of conversion entails an irony: first, establishing a process of salvation as a path charted to heaven, and then, tearing the process apart. The steps of conversion become, in Stanley E. Fish's phrase, "self-consuming artifacts." The consumption reflects the Calvinist demand that the self and its works be displayed before the works become the waste they are. As Fish culls from a close reading of The Pilgrim's Progress (leaving aside the whole of Bunyan's own self-recorded obsessional life), no progress occurs in the sense that no relation exists for Christian between the geographic distance he covers and linear time. There is no way of saying just where Christian is, no more than there are actual historical locations in Weber's ironic text of Protestantism. In that text, Weber moves his ascetic as he moved himself: first from an obsessively constructed monastery to the world, and then to the ascetic's ending in a "compulsion" of high capitalism. Weber folds his text back upon itself, in other words, back to beginnings in other cells of despair. What has begun in a cage ends there, for in the end, progress is erased in order to create a timeless space for faith.
With Weber, a writing of Puritan conversion has broadened to become a whole cultural narrative. The narrative weaves culture with self to the extent of composing Weber's life just as he had worked to compose himself, writing of himself within the language that Puritanism offered, the measures of conversion against which Weber could "describe" himself, or write from, thereby making his life "work." His writing becomes a testament: the "storie of those things, whereof we are fully persuaded." "And he began … , and interpreted unto them in all the Scriptures the things which were written of him."
This formation of personality argues the use of a typology, for the composing and the reading of a life is accomplished in relation to past texts. A person fulfills "prescriptions" when he discovers his self in writing. Through the words of interpreters, Weber provides a most important example of using writing in just this manner:
During the course of his studies in ancient Judaism, in 1916 and 1917, he was profoundly moved by the analogies he saw between the situation of the ancient Hebrew peoples and modern Germany. It was not only the public and historical situation he saw as parallel; in the personality of many prophets and in their irregular and compulsive psychic states, particularly of Jeremiah, Weber saw features he felt resembled his own. When he read passages of this manuscript to his wife, she was touched in immediately seeing that this reading was an indirect analysis of himself.
What Weber described from Jeremiah were "compulsive acts,". "compulsion," and the possibility "of a specific 'personality type"' involving "emotional depressions and id6es fixes," the last, again, a psychiatric phrase for obsessions. What he valued from Jeremiah concerned "a strong devaluation of all ritual," a reaction against "massive ritualism," above all a "magic" analogous here to a "machine." What he celebrated of the Yahwe prophets stood "superior" to magic and ritual law: the "'call,'" the "berith-conception," "this workaday ethic."
Perhaps it was only in this fashion that Weber, who since childhood was incapable of directly revealing himself, could communicate his own self-image. Thus, what was most personal to him is accessible and at the same time hidden by the objectifications of his work.
Here in texts reflecting themselves—Weber's manuscript, Marianne Weber's biography, a commentary on the biography by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, and then returning to read Weber's Ancient Judaism—sense is made of Weber; and Weber, through the prophetic writings, could make sense of himself. The revelation remains "direct," for rather than hiding himself, Weber was making an understanding of himself, here in past scripts. His "work and person" become related not in an interior boring to explain the production of an author's pen but, again, in an exterior delimitation.
WEBER'S COLLAPSE
Weber completed The Protestant Ethic after he had made a visit to America in 1904. In America, he wrote, one could observe certain matters "in their most massive and original shape." He completed the essay after a tour through Oklahoma and then through Chicago, this last an industrial wilderness ("the whole tremendous … like a man whose skin has been peeled off and whose intestines are seen at work"). And he completed the essay after he had spoken with William James and read James's Varieties of Religious Experience.
In those lectures, again, James had moved his religious genius through a process of conversion. He had taken his saint from once-born innocence through panic fear and crisis, a conviction of sin or melancholy, and then offered a step of wordly ascetic discipline, the building of a personal and social economy of saintliness. James had then ended by crossing work out. Having inserted himself into his own narrative ("William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion [the disbelievers will say]—probably his liver is torpid"), and having described himself as coming out of the "wilderness," by which he meant America, and into the "dreamland" of Edinburgh, James spoke in "Conclusions" of a "kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result." Nature, he finished, "appears to cancel herself," crossing herself out.
Weber re-created this spiritual movement. Among the first writings Weber published following six years of incapacitating depression, his essay on the Protestant ethic was meant to end his own sighting of terror. The essay, which demands the saint's removal from self-imposed seclusion, was begun after Weber's own massive collapse of 1897.
After his father's death in the summer of 1897, Weber had become severely depressed. In Freudian terms, he had begun a long struggle with work inhibition. Unable to teach or to write, he had left his university, gone in and out of asylums, and had attempted long vacations. With the little energy that he said remained, he began to study religious values of rationality. In an early passage of his Protestant Ethic he wrote of a Pietist's "mental concentration," "strict economy," "cool self-control"—attitudes that his depression had seemingly dashed.
During his collapse, Weber pulled within himself. His hands shook, his back ached, his nerves jangled at small noises, his sleep suffered. He spoke of exhaustion, broken nerves, and an inability to speak. "The inability to speak is purely physical, the nerves break down, and when I look at my lecture notes I simply can't make sense of them." "All mental functions and a part of the physical ones fail him," his wife wrote. "If he nonetheless forces them to work, chaos threatens him, a feeling as though he could fall into the vortex of an overexcitement that would throw his mind into darkness." His doctor prescribed hydrotherapy.
Others variously debated the reason for Weber's depression, seeking the natural causes for what was taken as a physical collapse. As Mary James had thought of her son William during his crisis, and as Christiana thinks of her husband prior to Christian's leaving the City of Destruction behind, so Weber's mother considered him quite simply a hypochondriac. Weber and the doctors he consulted attributed the illness to overwork, the alienists' then favored way of making sense of such breakdowns. In 1892 Weber himself had spoken of working too much: "an overestimation of my capacity to work." But now, five years later, with the death of his father having presumably shattered his world, Weber still labored to manage the smallest details of his life. He failed and, in the words of Marianne, interpreted an acute irritability over some minor points of vacation planning "as a sign of nervous exhaustion.… On the return trip the strained organism reacts with an illness. Weber becomes feverish and feels threatened." With a "strong feeling of tension," Weber collapsed at the age of thirty-one. He was one of James's "sporadic adult cases."
This is the age of crisis that Erik Erikson's great men suffer—an experience, it is supposed, that should normally erupt in adolescence. Here the legal fear and conviction of sin of the Puritans is translated into the melancholic crisis of the Victorian intellectual. Weber, given an extended leave of absence from his university, remained nearly incapacitated for almost seven years, until 1904.
It becomes a matter of further interpretation if one moves past the physical explanation of Weber's collapse to seek not structural configurations but genetic causations. One may move, in other words, from the organic (overwork) to the Oedipal. One may place the Oedipal struggle either within the context of Weber's family or, more ambitiously, within the field of a whole European generational battle. Coincidentally and almost wondrously in Freud's own terms, Weber's father had died shortly after a bitter quarrel with his son, a quarrel involving Weber's mother. Weber's own illness followed. Strains do appear to have existed within the Weber household, for the piety and the quiet religiosity of Weber's mother more than once clashed with his father's genteel yet autocratic living. Weber himself spoke of matters that had "completely alienated" him from his father, and spoke too of the guilt that he attributed to a seemingly fatal decision, one that involved a vacation the mother was to spend with her son, that he had finally made to defend his mother before his father's demands.
Contradictions marked the Weber household as well, where, in a post-Freudian interpretation, one may read parental behavior as confusing Weber as much as creating his anger. If the piety of the mother did clash with the anger and moodiness of the father, then the confrontation could only have contributed to Weber's doubts, doubts that come with the inability of any child to take sides easily while parents collide. Within the evidence of parental conflict, Weber found a contradiction in his father's behavior. His father, he wrote, "was always sanguine," and yet his "mood was often subject to sudden change from little external cause." Such whimsical moods could again create doubt and only be feared—here, the capriciousness that left a "painful impression" on the mother that the son had to consider.
The ability to face out uncertainty, which remains at the heart of Weber's celebration of Puritanism, is the ability to engage the image of one's world as a jungle, the tangle created for the child, Andras Angyl argues, by conflicting and seemingly chaotic parental moods and decisions. For Angyl, such an image lies in the eye of a fearful, compulsive person, one who in terror would try to order nature completely. It is an ascetic effort such as Weber tried, one that in American literature (in Walden, for example) eventually suffers its own collapse.
In the years of his breakdown Weber, in his reflection, was indolently living off the resources of his family and university. In his own term he had suffered an "emotional depression," one that he believed, or that his doctors informed him, only time and rest could cure. Weber hoped to regain a discipline through another physic by working his way out from the erratic moods that he said his father and now he himself experienced. "We may tolerate no fantastical surrender to unclear and mystical moods in our souls," Weber later wrote. "For when feeling rises high, you must fetter it, to be able to steer with sobriety." After the worst period of his depression, Weber began to study asceticism as a form "opposite" to "a positively hysterical character." He looked to an ethic of "strict and temperate discipline"—"the systematic life of holiness of the Puritan." He spoke now of those engaged "in the ascetic struggle for certainty."
If overwork is irresponsive to other than a somatic interpretation of a breakdown and appears, especially for the psychoanalytically informed historian, too naive a cause for Weber's melancholic depression, work may nevertheless become as significant as Oedipal drives by becoming itself a full sign. If one abandons the search for the cause of psychopathology and studies instead the formation of a discursive plain of description, then meaning becomes attached to objects rather than revealed by them. Meaning is not simply found, but becomes a historically variable social production. Rather than searching Weber's unconsciousness, one watches as he manipulates his own work, which includes his own writing, within conventions to make a meaningful account of himself. Foucault, in speaking of "commentary"—a process of interpretation that says that something else (a remainder) has yet to be deciphered, that something still lies hidden behind the text—writes: "Is it not possible to make a structural analysis of discurses that would evade the fate of commentary [that of an infinite regression of interpretations, especially a regression of psychological interpretations] by supposing no remainder, nothing in excess of what has been said, but only the fact of its historical appearance." Foucault seeks neither a disembodied history of ideas nor a psychologically revealed reading of history—neither a timeless form nor an as yet unrevealed text, neither a universal aesthetic nor an author's hidden intention—to center a history of thought, but the arrangements that persons make between words and things. The question is how persons make an interpretation that draws together the object and the sign, the signified and the signifier. Foucault watches as interpreters point to what is behind the lines of texts, saying, as if to Christian, what for all time is meant. He watches, then, for the transformations of this interpretation as the relation made between things spoken and things said to have been thought changes:
What counts in the things said by men is not so much what they may have thought or the extent to which these things represent their thoughts, as that which systematizes them from the outset, thus making them thereafter accessible to new discourses and open to the task of transforming them.
Following his depression, Weber used familiar schedules to carve a certain economy out of his bewilderment. He set the significance of his labor against the "chaos" and the "vortex" that his illness had expressed. He structured his life carefully after his visit to America. He worked only six hours a day, while at the same time he refused the emotional entanglements of public lectures and social occasions and minimized his relationships with family and friends. Though he complained of slowness, as James incessantly did, following his depression Weber produced a great volume of his most important writing. The depression, in other words, expressed the end of a cycle through which Weber had moved: an intense grasp for assurance which, when the grasp failed, could bring the sense of impending disaster.
Weber's personal mechanics are to be found within an extended text—a writing that moves from his own reported words to those words as explicated within secondary texts. "If I don't work until one o'clock [in the morning] I can't be a professor," Weber told his wife in 1894. When he was a student in 1884-85, Marianne Weber wrote: "he continues the rigid work discipline, regulates his life by the clock, divides the daily routine into exact sections for the various subjects, saves in his way." Weber described the function his work was to serve during the decade preceding his depression:
When I had finally come to an inner harmony [through marriage] after years of a nasty sort of agony, I feared a deep depression. It has not occurred, to my mind, because, through continual work I did not let my nervous system and brain come to rest. Quite apart from the natural need for work, therefore, I am most unwilling to allow a really marked pause in my work; … I can't risk allowing the present composure … to be transformed into relaxation.
Weber routinized himself, to such an extent that he has become the exemplum of his own ascetic character type. He then probed for the meaning of the magic that he thought his routine contained. He considered, that is, the mechanics of himself, the signification of his own working.
WEBER'S OBSESSIVE ACTIONS
Weber's habits of labor, along with the descriptions that he gave of himself and those provided by others—accounts of his conscience and forceful temperament—re semble the type of character that Freud was calling com pulsive. These stand as the architectonics of a particular self-formation, however—behavior that signaled for Freud a character type, and for Weber an ethic. Neither considered the formation irrational; indeed, Weber viewed the repression required to hold such an ethic in place as a sign of productive activity. For Freud, the significance remained the same, at least as regarded the work that his character type performed. Freud found a crossing stratum running beneath the character, however, the faults of which could erupt and break into the overlying character, cutting his type into a neurosis: an obsessive-compulsive malaise. For the ill-productive labors that distinguish the neurosis, or again the behavior that Freud referred to as "obsessive actions," such as meticulously performed ceremonies, Freud sought unconscious significance. He sought to read the obsessive action by looking for reflective evidence of the unconscious wish that the action represented, symbolized, stood for, or replaced. The ideational manipulations that also distinguished the neurosis—thoughts the neurotic himself gave little significance to, except that he possessed them often in fear—also appeared to Freud to hold hidden meaning: to represent, in fact, an actual reverse of the moralistic character that the obsessive enjoyed. Freud could view the obsessions along with the compulsive acts as distorted signs or re- fractions of the unconscious desire that the neurotic, like a primitive, actually implied. Freud linked the neurotic and the primitive, for whether in the form of compulsions and obsessions or of totem and taboo, the same chains of significance were repressed: the attempt, through such works, to control a deed of primordial violence.
For Freud, repression never expressed the willful endeavor that it did for Weber. Weber is often held apart from Freud, as indeed he held himself, speaking as he did for what he thought of as the efficacy rather than sickness of repression. Weber nevertheless adhered to a similar discursive architecture. He also presented an underlying irrationality—his "other-worldly" ascetic—a psychological formation that gives significance to the reversal of meaning that his wordly ascetic enjoys. Weber defined his Puritan, and his own Protestant temperament, by this otherworldly difference, "psychological peculiarities" that run parallel to his this-worldly ethic. Behind the Protestant and his capitalist material production sits this peculiar psychological cell, its door slammed tight. Within the writing he made of himself, however, these irrationalities were opened, and Weber is revealed in the pathology these otherwordly eruptions entail.
Weber's depressions were unproductive enough, "irrational" within the terms he set for that word. Such depressions for Weber were akin to a mystic's or a hysteric's emotive elations and collapse, or to a Catholic's cycle of sin and expiation. Then, too, the question remained of the irrationality behind his ascetic's life, the pathology of "magic," that is, that his Protestant ascetic so adamantly opposed.
Weber was called neurotic, and his depressions are proof enough of that. As his own writing unfolds, however, it becomes apparent that Weber considered more than de pression and more than the loosely defined "hysteric" moods that he so feared as undercutting his life. The symptoms other than depression that bothered Weber in a clinical sense have remained unknown, though evidence is present—or rather presented—in an extended public text. Weber was using his work to defend himself from depression and perhaps from sex (his closest psychological observer has argued that Weber left his marriage to Marianne unconsummated). Although Marianne Weber destroyed a document in which her husband described his symptoms for a psychiatrist, she did record that Weber likened his troubles to those of Jeremiah. In his study of ancient Judaism, again, Weber found in Jeremiah a mental pathology that he thought resembled his own.
It is more correct to say that Weber produced from his reading in Jeremiah a mental pathology that gave significance to his suffering. Otherwise ill-defined behavior could be focused by becoming historically significant. Jeremiah offered Weber a text that he could read his life into, as the words impressed and made sense to him. One is tempted to say that in piecing together certain works—Marianne's own Max Weber and portions of Weber's Ancient Judaism—one has uncovered a hitherto concealed symptom in Weber. This of course has not occurred; rather one has, in the very assembling of texts—in a reading of Ancient Judaism now in the light of Marianne's biography—read a discursive field. One has redefined what is to be meant by a text, extending the definition from an enclosed book temporally defined by a publishing date (a date hard enough to define in relation to Weber's own rewritings and complex publishing history) to a set of books, one of Weber's self and the other of Weber's scholarship. A new temporal definition now encloses a wider field. This new text, by intermingling self and theology in a confession of a small piece of mental pathology, forms a spiritual autobiography.
For Freud, obsessions and compulsions buried their significance in the unconsciousness, becoming themselves but distorted reflections of the violence such magical acts replaced. For Freud, such acts (like taboos) guarded the consumed father, and defended sons through the sons' use of incredibly precise ritual detail. For Weber, such rituals pointed consciously to ethical questions of law and faith. Rituals of otherwise confusing significance pointed consciously to questions as to whether the self had enwrapped itself in irrationalities, or whether it could emerge from such magic into disinterested vocations, into callings bonded to faith. As Weber wrote in "The Social Psychology of the World Religions":
Things have been quite different where the religiously qualified … have combined into an ascetic sect, striving to mould life in this world according to the will of God. To be sure, two things were necessary before this could happen in a genuine way. First, the supreme and sacred value must not be of a contemplative nature. Second, such a religion must, so far as possible, have given up the purely magical or sacramental character of the means of grace [magical asceticism]. For these means always devalue action in this world … and they link the decision about salvation to the success of processes which are not of a rational everyday nature.… The religious virtuoso can be placed in the world as the instrument of a God and cut off from all magical means of salvation. At the same time, it is imperative for the virtuoso that he "prove" himself before God, as being called solely through the ethical quality of his conduct in this world. This actually means that he "prove" himself to himself as well.
Not "merely ceremonious, ritualist, and conventional particulars," not "senseless brooding and events and long[ing] for the dreamless sleep," but a rational affirmation of the world through work confirms salvation—"methodical and rationalized routine-activities of workaday life in the service of the Lord. Rationally raised into a vocation, everyday conduct becomes the locus for proving one's state of grace."
In his portrayal of the "Psychological Peculiarities of the Prophets," Weber described Jeremiah as a prophet combatting magic, visions, and "dream interpretations," a clear enough reference to Weber's opinion of Freud. Jeremiah lived as a speaker rather than as a passive or emotional seer, a prophet who felt compelled to speak:
One meets with compulsive acts, above all, with compulsive speech. Jeremiah felt split into a dual ego. He implored his God to absolve him from speaking. Though he did not wish to, he had to say what he felt to be inspired words not coming from himself. Indeed his speech was experienced by him as horrible fate.… Unless he spoke he suffered terrible pains, burning heat seized him and he could not stand up under the heavy pressure without relieving himself by speaking. Jeremiah did not consider a man to be a prophet unless he knew this state and spoke from compulsion rather than "from his own heart."
Weber called some of Jeremiah's acts compulsions as well: the wearing of an iron yoke, the smashing of a jug, the burying of a belt, the later digging up the belt's putrid remains—"strange activities thought to be significant as omens." Weber refused interpretation, however; indeed, he refused the "act of interpretation per se," the "obscure and ambiguous" signs that pointed only to the prophet as type, to his mission as an interpreter. The significance of the prophet lay not in the meaning but in the possession of his signs, in his calling which used unfathomable signs to erase magical significance. There existed in the prophet's images of iron—iron pans, iron yokes, iron horns—and the eating of filth, motifs of hardness and decay. Images also formed of bonds and destructions: the wearing of yokes, the smashing of vessels, the decay of belts, the inflicting of bodily wounds—prophetic demands for tearing apart constructions or for tasting decay, for being, as it seemed, within a cage besmeared with dirt, caught in the machinations of a design that barely contained the filth behind.
Whatever one means by "compulsion" or the obverse word "obsession," it becomes clear that Weber considered the prophet as necessarily driven—indeed, as vocationally defined—by these alien drives, himself forced to act like any running machine. Marx gave such alienation to the end of the capitalist consciousness. Weber gave the compulsion to the mouth of anyone crying from such a hell, here from Israel's own "bureaucratic machine." This is not to be considered evidence of a malaise that Weber suffered: "This is not the place," he wrote, "to classify and interpret, as far as that is possible, the various physiological, and possibly pathological states of the prophets. Attempts made thus far … are not convincing. It affords, furthermore, no decisive interest for us." But the compulsion becomes a meaningful text in that for Weber it could make sense by uniting his symptoms with those of the prophet with whom he so identified. In the midst of his own estrangement, Weber stood like Jeremiah, this "prophet of doom," "ridiculed, threatened, spit upon"—an image that Weber at times gave to himself and that his Puritan, standing in the midst of a great American desert, had also given to himself.
Weber continued his analysis. He declared that for a prophet such as Jeremiah there had never existed the wish to lose control or to reside in mystic vision or, for that matter, to dream dreams or hear mysterious voices. Rather, as for Weber's Puritan, a drive had started toward "clarity and assurance." This quest for assurance and the rigidity involved came at the expense of, or held beneath it, behavior that, unlike the vague compulsive acts mentioned above, better delineates in Weber's reading a mental disorder. Like the sociologist just prior to his long depression—when Marianne recorded that every small thing seemed in need of control, and Weber grasped to order the smallest particulars of his world—so the prophet had fretted over the minutiae of life: "The typical prophet apparently found himself in a constant state of tension and of oppressive brooding in which even the most banal things of everyday life could become frightening puzzles, since they might somehow be significant."
Significance becomes attached haphazardly as words and things normally scattered now link themselves in incredible chains of signs. Portents, meanings, omens, all could be located, in Weber's frame of reference, beyond the limits of a normal grammar, within a swirl of colliding sounds and interpretations. Moving now, however, in the sections of his text from "psycho-patholo(gy)" to "prophetic ethic," Weber stressed a way out of endless interpretation. The prophet now refuses to use "magical compulsion" to relieve his confusion, meaningless rituals that for Weber had come in the face of meaningless signs. Weber's prophet turns instead to an early form of occupation that for Weber faithfully replaces the magic: a productive work, calling, or vocation that effaces both magic and depression. For the prophet, the calling—not immaterial ritual—combats sin and, most important, frightening obsessions, compelled ideas that like the acts can pain while they still preoccupy and absurdly cement a mind: "Jeremiah's tender soul suffered grievously from emotional depressions and idées fixes," Weber finally concluded, "but he disciplined himself by force of his calling to a desperate heroism."
Earlier Weber had written of his own work as a defense against depression. Now, in addition, he was writing of work as defending against an idée fixe, one of the less ambiguous phrases in turn-of-the-century psychiatry. It was one of the most common terms for an obsession—the hurtful, criminal, or blasphemous expression that one cannot banish from the mind. Weber had identified himself with an ancient text, if not with his Puritans' conceiving of their own melancholy, then with the malaise of the prophet for whom the Puritans so often spoke. He was reconstructing Jeremiah, and constructing himself, in modern terms within the oldest of prophetic psychomythologies.
Weber's reading, then, is to declare a psychopathology for any religionist who tries to make signs that are not common sense. Weber made Jeremiah's words unreadable, quite the opposite of Freud's approach to such ritual in Totem and Taboo. If words and things, meanings and materials, or sounds and conceptions—even such obvious signs as an iron yoke and putrid remains—fail to hold together through the interpretation of symbolism (what a sign represents), then the interpreter's production of meaning can itself become significant, rather than the interpreter's use of a particular sign. Meanings that become attached to banal everyday accidents, significance that is given to absurd intruding thoughts, worked for Weber as the psychological peculiarities of Old Testament prophets compelled by the Law. The prophet acts only through magical forces playing upon him from without. Weber, of course, attached significance to all this. The unreadable text he made a readable sign. He wrote of the inefficacy of such law itself, the unproductive labors that had been required for the law's interpretation. He wrote of the entangling alliances that persons make between words and things, immaterial productions that enchain persons in ritual circles of magic and superstition. Such expressions, repeated to the self while fixed in the mind, make for senseless acts performed again and again as if holding the self in check. Weber's reading of this text as a pathology, and his making a sign of that, allowed him to create a difference for Jeremiah. The reading allowed Weber to hold work or the calling against irrational compulsion, since the rationality of work, as a vocation, had erased such immaterial production. The psychopathology Weber spoke of—this particular piece of mental pathology of the idee fixe and the compulsive act that otherwise hold little significance—assumed incredible proportions by defining that which the prophet, as later Weber's Puritan, had worked against: the ritual law that precedes the giving up to faith, the prophetic Law of the Old Testament that had to be closed before the opening could be made into callings undertaken only in faith. For a moment in time in the protostruggle of Jeremiah, then in the opening light of the Reformation, rationality held no magic. Work remained unpossessed of the demonology that a later capitalism would, ironically, reembrace, the commodity fetish and estranged labor that Marx, for example, portrayed.
THE WORLDLY ASCETIC ETHIC
Erik Erikson has written of this movement in the life of his great men, extending Weber's text: a movement, again, from "works" to "work" or from "vow" to "vocation." When Erikson writes of man's reliance on magic—meaning, in particular, a neurotic's reliance on superstition—to control his world, he stresses the damage which occurs to one's sense of wholeness and identity:
The dangers to man's identity posed by a confused realism allied with a popular demonology are obvious. The influences from the other world are brought down to us as negotiable matter; man is able to learn to master them by magical thinking and action. But momentary victories of magic over an oppressive superreality do not, in the long run, either develop man's moral sense or fortify a sense of the reality of his identity on this globe.
When Weber wrote of man's use of ritual to atone for sin, he stressed the same point, arguing that the periodic relief of fear which superstition allows opposes the formation of a "total personality pattern":
The vouchsafing of grace always entails the subjective release of the person in need of salvation; it consequently facilitates his capacity to bear guilt and … largely spares him the necessity of developing an individual planned pattern of life based on ethical foundations. The sinner knows that he may always receive absolution by engaging in some occasional religious practice or by performing some religious rite. It is particularly important that sins remain discrete actions against which other discrete deeds may be set up as compensations or penances. Hence, value is attached to concrete individual acts rather than to the total personality pattern which has been produced by asceticism.
Weber returned to Germany from America in 1904 and completed his greatest essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. "Stimulation and activity of the brain without mental strain is the only means of healing," he remarked upon the end of his American travel. He thought his health now good and felt he could, in 1904, complete things that he had formerly thought impossible.
Weber composed the "innerweltliche Askese," the life of monastic virtue to be led beyond one's own self-imposed chamber, by describing an asceticism requiring that one construct some sort of "disenchanted" view. This was to be Weber's scientific ethic in which "no mysterious incalculable forces come into play, but rather … [one in which] one can in principle, master all things by calculation. This means the world is disenchanted"—freed, that is, from magical interpretations. As Weber would use this science to free inquiry, so he felt that his inner-worldly ascetic had freed himself from "spirits," "magical means," "mysterious powers," creating the world view to which, Weber wrote, early radical Protestantism had given completion.
That great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came here to its logical conclusion. The genuine Puritan even rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his nearest and dearest without song or ritual in order that no superstition, no trust in the effects of magical and sacramental forces on salvation, should creep in.
Weber desired to study empirically this new rationality in man, an attempt, as he thought, to hold the demonic by the throat.
Weber gave his most eloquent expression of this consciousness in the years 1904 and 1905, when he published Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus. The essay was an opening expression for a new discipline that Weber called a "Religionssoziologie." The term was his own. Beyond looking at a single religious form in terms of its social and economic behavior (and indeed, though Weber denied it, looking at Protestantism in terms of its "neurology and psychology" as well), Weber's essay provided the image of the "protestantische Ethik" itself, for that phrase was neither current in the vocabulary nor, as yet, was it reified. In a moment of clarity, as Marianne remembered, Weber conflated history and crystalized themes, drawing together already abstracted types (Pietism, Puritanism, asceticism, sect) until, for the opening of this century, his ideal type was made. The sociologist had formed his ethic by offering a whole economy as Geist, arguing the existence of a historically unique spirit of labor and restraint. The Protestant ethic, Weber imagined, existed as a singular quest for "rational" behavior.
Rationality was not a new expression. When sorted out and conceptually seized, however, rationality, as Foucault writes, calls for an other. Rationality requires a reversal of image (as in a camera obscura) or a farther nature or frontier. Like Henry Adams's pile of coal hidden behind the dynamo, rationality demands a difference. If placed in time and given origin (the Reformation), then, whether as a new mechanics, a Protestant ethic, a Cartesian graph, or simply a "machine," rationality requires a parallel, foreign history that offers the other side to the taxonomic sheet and its grid. The irrational too therefore begins, rising with the eruption of the self, both faults of which Weber plotted to the seventeenth century and measured with the new autobiographies upon which he relied. One should not view it as a matter of mere interest, then, that economic rationality received its most thorough sifting by a scholar psychologically revealed.
Weber constructed his essay on the Protestant ethic by equating "capitalism" with "worldly asceticism," choosing the latter term to emphasize the restraint and renunciation that any enormous enterprise requires. The first term, capitalism, remained in one sense merely a device, a convenient expression for the production that such an ascetic discipline had created. Capitalism arose, Weber wrote in the most powerful of his images (other than that of the iron cage itself), when asceticism emerged from its cell, when the Reformation carried the order of the monastery—the first institution that Weber believed man had run according to the dictates of time, efficiency, and ritual perfection—to the marketplace.
Christian asceticism, at first fleeing from the world into solitude, had already ruled the world which it had renounced from the monastery and through the Church.… Now it strode into the market-place of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it, and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness, to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor for this world.
This image commands Weber's essay and draws an irony for his reader: this removal from the chamber (as Emerson had demanded in his Nature) and the slamming of the chamber's door behind, then the entry into a strange arena—most pre-eminently, for Weber, America—which awaits to become a new cage.
Weber's finest psychological interpreter, Arthur Mitzman, has argued that The Protestant Ethic begins "those years when [Weber's] theoretical defense of the ascetic code began to crumble." Mitzman equates Weber's worldly ascetic with the authoritarianism of Weber's father, the iron cage that becomes, in literal translation, the "housing hard as steel." It is the house, that is, of the father. This reading, however, demands that the critic equate two of the three types of capitalism of which Weber wrote—the ascetic Protestant and the high—and ignore Weber's description of the Puritan saint as, most particularly, "anti-authoritarian." The equation—simply saying that Weber was writing about "capitalism"—remains analogous to the reading that Erich Fromm made in 1932 when, in an influential essay, Fromm equated the whole of the "Protestant ethic" with the acquisitive character of Freud's anal compulsive character type. Fromm made the link despite Weber's opening remarks that "the impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism"—that is, with Weber's idea of an ascetic capitalism. Weber's Puritan was not given to "hoarding." Both readings, however, are not simply misreadings; as modem psychological readings, they have informed a good deal of popular discourse on the Protestant ethic—important (and, one should think, almost inevitable) discourse, in that these additions take the Protestant or "Puritan ethic" back to earlier psychological charges, back to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, and to the Puritans' own charges against themselves as the slandered and sick of the world.
In terms of a specific expression of obsessional psychopathology—whether of melancholy in the seventeenth-century understanding or of "Zwangsneurose" in Freud's formulation—the Puritan spiritual autobiography had opened the self to expressions of a ritually encumbered conscience, the Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners that Weber knew to be the pre-eminent example. The "meere excrementall" of the melancholy humor had interworked themes of psychopathology and theology by using obsessional ideation as a sign of the irrational satanic temptation waiting at the edge of spiritual conversion, the temptation Satan used to create false impressions of the conscience of sin which, along with the ritual acts, expressed a merely legal fear and a legal way of getting out of sin. Obsession, again a rare point of psychopathology, had become a way to distinguish such fear from a conscience of sin as sin, or to know of that which was not true sorrow. The attempt ritually to rid the self of its fear defined the kind of estranged works the self undertook prior to accepting the sacrifice of Christ.
Weber drew this writing to completion not by disparaging his Protestant ascetic but by unfolding its irony. His worldly ascetic saint, having rid himself of magic and having combatted doubt as but another form of tempta tion (one works simply for the work there is to do), begins to create wealth, making goods quite against his own intentions. As Weber quoted from John Wesley:
"For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this—this continual decay.…"
Weber's saint creates the machines and thereby the materials of his own destruction, so that in the end he finds himself lost as to the meaning of the ethic that had brought about his labor. The alienation comes as a new temptation: unintended vanity in which, as in Vanity-Fair, there sits a new cage.
The Protestant Ethic, then, becomes expressive not of Weber's turn against his own "work asceticism" of which Marianne wrote, but of a narrative movement of conversion. Weber is to be seen as leaving a certain irrational work behind—his crisis and depression, certainly, and perhaps particular obsessional manipulations. He is to emerge from this enclosed chamber, psychopathologically wrought, to write of the Puritans' calling not as a means but as an expression of their faith. From "the ascetic death-in-life of the cloister," he brings his Puritan out of ill-productive works akin to the works (and ill work) of his own crisis and depression. He brings his Puritan from an asceticism that can strive for such control that men are, in effect, incapacitated—an estrangement against which, in text, both Weber and his Puritan work.
As Weber wrote, such an estrangement is a "magical asceticism" that demands a host of encumbering devices. It requires the otherworldly production of things like fastings, chastisements, mortifications, taboos, petty rituals, precise ceremonies, prayers, chants, sanctioned thoughts—behaviors all of which disallow the production of rational material labor. In an assumption that grounds the whole of Weber's argument as to why the Protestant chose to work ascetically, the guilt of all men must in one way or another be relieved. Guilt must somehow be read or understood. At times Weber looked almost nostalgically to Catholicism and its periodic use of oral confessions and priests (whom he considered magicians) to relieve guilt. He considered Catholicism as organically relieving such pressure by mating the person to the natural rhythms of his environment, matching sin and repentance to the movements of the seasons, making for a cyclical as opposed to a linear (or Puritan) text of salvation. A pragmatic question evolved, however, as to the "productivity" of such cyclical labor. And a psychological question emerged as to the "personality" of the magical worker himself.
Magic, ritual law, and taboo appeared to Weber as a "fear-ridden punctiliousness," "a mental alienation," a "slave-liked dread." Weber wrote of relieving guilt through a "methodical compulsion of the gods," and in words close to Freud's study of compulsion in his anthropology of totem and taboo, he wrote of the ceremonies of eating a sacred totem. Such practices created the "incredible irrationality of … painfully onerous norms," practices, for example, of those in "a fraternal community" who were attempting to placate a god. "Within this complex," Weber concluded, "there is little differentiation between important and unimportant requirements; any infraction of the ethic constitutes sin." Freud deemed such a complex neurotic; Weber considered such labors estranged. Marianne attributed obsessionally careful behavior to her husband, at least as regarded the banalities of Weber's incessant planning prior to his collapse—again, not symptomatic evidence, but a sign of that which Weber had set himself to work against by composing his writing on rationality. It "is perfectly obvious," Weber reiterated, "that economic rationalization would never have arisen originally where taboo had achieved such massive power."
Whenever Weber explained the rise of "rational" work processes, he emphasized this importance of being relieved from magic, however ironic such an emphasis for "high capitalism" and its fetishes would appear. Weber used the idea in a variety of forms. In part, the release from magic allowed for economically rational decisions—such mundane choices as the location of a factory without reference to the place of spirits and demons. More significantly, however, Weber stressed the author and the authority to be given to work, for when he con trasted the Puritan's productivity with what he saw as the Confucian's mere ceremony, he again emphasized the encumbrance that any magic style entailed. Caught in a "magical coercion of spirits and deities"—in a "vestigal ritualism" that Weber's Puritan considered "impudent blasphemy"—buried in observances and in obscure issues of law, the Confucian lives without an "inward core" or an "autonomous value position." He lacks "a 'unified personality,' a striving which we associate with the idea of personality. Life remained a series of occurrences. It did not become a whole placed methodically under a transcendent goal." Weber opposed such piecemeal "ritual" to the "rational-ethical." He opposed this "merely apparent" of magic to the "real." The key becomes the release from "works": for those bound "hand and foot," rational ascetic prophecies could effect freedom by releasing the self from magic.
In The Protestant Ethic, Weber wrote that this "radical release of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of wordly asceticism." The decomposition of magic that the Reformation emphasized removed the types of devices other psychological formations could use to relieve stress. Without priestly intermediaries, for example, or confessions and penances, the Protestant faced his God and his sin directly. He had turned magic, that is, into a transparent sign, providing magic with no significance at all. With the Catholic cycle of sin and expiation removed, the Protestant had no other recourse but to live a linear working life unrelieved of pressure. Though Weber denied that psychology or psychiatry could unravel the Protestant ethic, he nevertheless argued that it was the "psychological sanction" or the "psychological effect" of Calvinism that distinguished the ethic. The doctrine of predestination disallowed works, but work, the hopeful proof of salvation—more properly, the sign—became a labor of grace. Logically, fatalism should have become the only outcome of predestination, but "on account of the idea of proof the psychological result was precisely the opposite." All men required some assurance of salvation, and some way to work out their guilt, and thus one's work represented not the means of grace but the signification, "the technical means, not of purchasing salvation, but of getting rid of the fear of damnation." Work became a whole endeavor singularly written—authored, for the first time in history, by a unified "personality."
Again, the Puritans' signification of grace is expressed not in isolated contents, discrete signs, or "single good works"—not in a work bound like an enclosed book—but in a whole faith running through to infinity. The Calvinist had found himself forced to forego the "planless and unsystematic character" of those who could magically undo whatever transgression they thought they had committed. Thus they had replaced this doing and undoing, or the periodic acts of thought and behavior of undoing violence that Freud placed at the center of his obsessional neurosis, with the constancy of the calling. The Puritans had allowed the self its own writing. The book of God stood absolutely prescribed: its word was made transparent, therefore the book could never be opened to anxious, intermediate, and peculiar interpretations.
If one held grace to be other than plainly read, then one did leave the world open to doubt that only magic could periodically unravel. The ascetic labor Calvinism induced, as Weber wrote after his depression, eradicated doubt along with the magical sign: "it is held to be an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen, and to combat all doubts as temptations of the devil, since lack of self-confidence is the result of insufficient faith, and hence of imperfect grace." Never, for Weber, had the Puritans simply worked their way out, bargaining around unfathomable questions, no more than they had remained in states of abject doubt, anguishing over themselves as psychological peculiarities. The combatting of "temptations" nevertheless demanded that the temptations become fixed or conceptually defined as signs of the "irrational impulses" that the self was working against. The impulses needed to be expressed as the alienation, or the satanically induced other, that the self was holding itself against. Weber argued that asceticism first defined this estrangement by holding the body apart from its Creator. Monastic asceticism combatted depression along with the confusion that Weber's own exhaustion had itself only magnified. But only worldly asceticism provided self-identity, the sense of constancy and worth that Weber himself struggled to attain.
It becomes, then, not merely a psychologism to move between Weber and his texts; such a reading is almost demanded. It is demanded discursively, for even if one seeks an impersonal text, psychologism presents itself from the seventeenth century on as a universal text, giving to narrative literature, for example, an author, while opening up the author psychologically within the newly popular autobiographical literature. Fascinated with types, Weber viewed his sociologies as studying such shifting patterns of consciousness. He was honing his analysis here to this point of the self, his concern being, as he said, with the historical formation of the "psychological sense" of personality that he believed his Puritan had, for the first time in history, achieved.
The achievement came as the Puritan removed himself from singular acts of contrition. Weber pitted the new personality against such "compensations," for personality came only with the ethical wholeness provided by Luther's Beruf or calling. William James argued the same, though never by so precisely locating the movement in history. James pitted the "automatic or semi-automatic composition" of the Hebrew prophets ("We have distinct professions of being under the direction of a foreign power, and serving as its mouthpiece") against "the teachings of the Buddha, of Jesus, of Saint Paul … of Luther, of Wesley." "And it always comes," James had quoted in the Varieties from another source, speaking in the main of Jeremiah, "in the form of an overpowering force from without, against which he struggles, but in vain"—"some strong and irresistible impulse," that is, "coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time." The attitude strikes at the time when the Law appears about to fall, crushing the old toward creating the new. Topologically it becomes the space experienced for passing from Law to faith; typo-logically it becomes the juxtapositions that one makes of the Testaments.
Weber struck out against his own manner of working only when he held that his work had become like a magic or "talisman." One may read Weber, however, as using much of his work as a form of ritual. He undertook incredibly precise studies to organize his world—perhaps to control the unpredictability of his emotions, perhaps to defend against the fact of his father's "killing," or perhaps to combat doubts instilled in childhood as to whether his world was sanguine or punishing. Weber fled not in the first and most readable instance from the sex of marriage or from an Oedipal reaction, but from the self-doubt any emotional entanglement could bring, doubt that work as a carefully performed ceremony could end. When minutely performed, labor could clear one's mind as one might clean a room. Weber worked carefully. He paused, rearranged, digressed, added clauses, reservations, balance, refusing to write freely as if he might let some unpredictable emotion show. Until the defense broke and depression ensued, scientific labors allowed Weber to mechanize his life, which Weber well knew and which he took as a sign.
Clearly, to the end of his life Weber strove to return to the thoroughness of what he called the "malignant growth" of his footnotes. The form of his labor expressed a prolonged quest to grasp and control every facet of his learning. The attempt, of course, gave Weber his genius, but his circumspection could further confusion, for in the multiplicity of sides, a chaos of reflections could blind a reader. Those who have translated Weber's German testify that his writing expresses a need for such mastery that at times his words evolve into a private, almost magical or totemic language, as if Weber were attempting to preserve his knowing through codes of secrecy. He never apologized for this; he simply said that he wished his reader to labor as hard as he, to bring them, as it seemed, through his own travail.
Doubt could also encourage the resolution of the world into predictable patterns, the figurations that Weber applied to history. These are the "ideal types" or structures that could make every block and being of the world fit for Weber and perform as they were supposed to perform. Weber opposed such structures to one such type: patriarchalism's "free arbitrariness." It was asceticism that functioned to order patriarchialism along with other dangerously chaotic expressions. More than any religious form, asceticism strove to "devalue" the world. It banished "the peculiar irrationality of the sexual act," for example, along with the capriciousness of patriarchs, the demonology of magicians and artists, or anyone who worked with uncontrollable powers or emotions. Protestant asceticism, and the scientific devaluation that Weber proposed Protestantism had created along with capitalism, was, again, anti-authoritarian. It opposed monarch and priest, and it opposed the closed texts of a dogma's chambers, the study of life through circular, ratiocinative signs. In all, ascetic prophecies demanded the release from the affections that ended in entanglements: "The sib has had to fear devaluation by the prophecy. Those who cannot be hostile to members of the household, to father and mother, cannot be disciples." The text, of course, is the New Testament.
THE END OF THE WORLDLY ASCETIC IDEAL
For a moment in history, grace was attained. Now, in the larger text that Weber gave to his Protestant ethic, the new work and its rationalism is to end itself in a terror, or more mundanely, in "sport." Ascetic renunciation ends in the mechanization and the fetishism of high capitalism. Adumbrations of Weber's theme appeared in 1904 in letters he wrote to his mother. He gave expression to an America transposing itself from an ascetic community of various sects into a Chicago. Weber's ascetic, in other words, fails to contain the forces within itself—in Oklahoma, for example, the "stench" and "smoke" and "numerous clanging railways," and in the fact of "lawyers" that Weber wrote about in quotes. The "boiling heat of modern capitalistic culture" was transforming America, changing the physiognomy of the nation. Weber stood as a prophet viewing the sins of a newly foreign nation. His European tongue was an appropriate emblem.
When Weber looked to America, he celebrated only remains—the vitality of the Oklahoma town he visited, for example, that was about to decay. "It is a shame," he had written his mother, but "within one year everything will appear here as in Oklahoma City, i.e., as in every other city in America. WITH FURIOUS SPEED EVERYTHING THAT COULD HAMPER CAPITALISTIC CIVILIZATION IS SMASHED." America's high capitalism had thoroughly rationalized itself. It was introducing systems of standardized book-keeping, aptitude testing, and a factory discipline that Weber saw as symbolizing the nation's compulsion for scientific management.
Upon his return to Germany, in completion of his essay, in the final, most famous paragraphs, Weber spoke of the iron closing on the West, particularly on the United States. "The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so"—forced as if by some external power. Of course the exigencies of the machine itself existed, along with the cloak of external goods that fell now as "an iron cage [ein stahlhartes Gehause]." An "economic compulsion" had replaced ascetic labor. Like Marx, Weber destroyed the work of capitalist production through an irony, finding in high capitalism the same magic estrangement of other-worldly ascetic enclosure. Unlike Marx, Weber wrote now in timeless frames. He turned his text, as Freud was turning Totem and Taboo, from a chronicle of history to literature, ending outside of history in myth. He was fastening rebeginnings.
It was as though Weber were drawing for his reader timeless psychological conclusions, offering again Bunyan's portrayal of the iron cage of despair in the midst of the "Profits" of Vanity-Fair:
Chr. For what did you bring yourself into this condition?
Man. For the Lusts, Pleasures, and Profits of this World; in the enjoyment of which, I did promise my self much delight: but now even every one of those things also bite me, and gnaw me like a burning worm.
The Puritan had rejected Vanity Fair, so Weber argued, but in a modern economy the lusts, temptations, and fears reappeared. In an ambiguous statement, Weber appeared to join the entrapment to a new psychology—a secular Pauline psychology expressing the end of the inner calling and the beginning of the external compulsion of work in a high economy. As predestination could slip into mere fatalism, Weber wrote, so "there is a non-religious counterpart … , one based on a mundane determinism":
It is that distinctive type of guilt and, so to speak, godless feeling of sin which characterizes modem man.… It is not that he is guilty of having done any particular act, but that by virtue of his unalterable idiosyncracy he "is" as he is, so that he is compelled to perform the act in spite of himself, as it were—this is the secret anguish that modern man bears.
In an economy without sanctions for work, persons felt inexplicable sin. They felt "inhuman," compelled to act in spite of themselves as if coerced by another. Weber worked the irony of his history by twisting his ethic into a spiritually barren renunciation of the self to specialized, totemic labor, "mechanized petrification." Compulsion, the neurotic possession of but a few, still symbolized an appropriate nature. With the performance of penances seemingly to atone, and a fear of one's eternal damnation, no other neurosis so openly displayed the guilt that presumably underlay other neurotic structures as well. In compulsion the guilt becomes consciously felt, and the form of a strange act can retain its significance. Weber conceived his ascetic ideal out of such agony—too far removed, it seemed, to work any longer as a step in a morphology of national conversion. Ahead nothing awaited except a desiccated bureaucracy, the "Specialists without spirit" coveting the graph.
As Weber witnessed the travail, he did offer the promise—the faith that could begin in such wastes. "… they burn soft coal. When the hot, dry wind from the deserts of the southwest blows through the streets, and especially when the dark yellow sun sets, the city looks fantastic. [He was speaking of Chicago and its "endless filth."] In broad daylight one can see only three blocks ahead—everything is haze and smoke, the whole lake is covered by a huge pall of smoke." "It is an endless human desert." "All hell had broken loose." "On the billboards there was a poster proclaiming CHRIST IN CHICAGO," Marianne remembered. "Was this brazen mockery? No, this eternal spirit dwells there, too." From all this, Marianne concluded, Weber had returned, "conscious [now] of the reserves of energy that had slowly accumulated." For Weber, his genius expressed enough of a testament to the efficacy of such a hell. Weber thus brought America to its end, choked in its new world. In such deserts life began, in the forty years of national exile, or in the forty days of the temptations of Christ.
WORK AND DEATH
In a suspicion too of the completeness of any work at hand, Roland Barthes distinguishes a "work" from a "text." Barthes holds the text as an infinity, almost as an analogue of faith. "In other words, the text is experienced only in an activity, a production. It follows that the Text cannot stop, at the end of a library shelf, for example; the constitutive movement of the Text is a traversal … : it can cut across a work, several works." A text, then can cut across works—this crossing, for Barthes, being the only completion.
As Barthes's translator quotes in other regards, post-structuralism becomes a matter of deconstructing "Law." A critical despair of sterility appears, of order and ritual structures ("It is as if," Weber wrote, "… we were deliberately to become men who need 'order' and nothing but order, who become nervous … if for one moment this order wavers"). A "Protestant ethic" woven in script and in the figure of an author's life demonstrates Barthes's aim, to make of the work, that is, an "imaginary tail."
Edward Said locates this violence within the earliest of structural expressions, works that for him remain totemic rituals for "cutting down" nature to size, carving out in desperation too much rationality in an intensity of structuralist industry. For Said, such writing becomes an "economy of means that renders every detail," closed orders the anxiety of which can be opened only in a dispersion of signs, in a realization of the buried irony, in a "beginning," then, again.
This expresses Weber's text, and Freud's in Totem and Taboo. For the post-structural critic, critical method becomes this text, as critic and subject reflect themselves; for Joseph Riddel, writing of the themes of beginnings in American literature, it is a language that "must build a machine to bridge the abyss its questioning repeatedly opens up, a machine that turns out to be the sign itself of the abyss."
Like Freud, Weber had constructed a mechanics of personality interplaying (or for Freud, masking) the depths of a specific psychopathology. The personality represents the most rigidly structured of the Freudian character types and of David Shapiro's "neurotic styles." Like Said's early structuralist, the neurotic structure possesses its own violent potential, one for cutting at the bars of its mechanical repression. Unlike Freud, Weber offered the personality as a historically unique formation. It is fairly argued that Weber recovered his Protestant ethic from American manuscripts, the archives of which he searched, as well of course from Luther and to a lesser extent from Calvin. In its renewing frontiers enclosed now by mechanism, and in the land provided—blank as it had appeared, and waiting for Puritan inscription—America presented the space for the development of Weber's iron cage. Now, as Weber wrote, his own work was breaking down.
Mechanism fails to work, having first been built before a demonic sight. The end appears when the technologically contrived plays the work out. For Barthes, this becomes the nature of a text, "its motto the words of the man possessed by devils," or "legion," "play," something never compulsively enclosed. The text expresses Thoreau's "deep cut on the railroad" composed as a winter sand and mechanics exploding in an arrival of spring, and of a garden left in decay, the miles, as Thoreau said, of his garden's rows. The text expresses the labor of William James, who for all his will wrote in the end of letting go, of the mind that would "strike work" again in a crossing out. This becomes the narrative movement of psychomachy that Weber recomposed. As Barthes entitles his own essay, the movement becomes one "from work to text."
Within an American literature that holds itself within spiritual narrative forms, such structures, as Leo Marx writes, work as tight buildings that authors leave in depression, factory ships that end in their own destruction, rafts that explode in the middle of their pilgrims' passage, banks of sand that erupt in an explosion from the bowels of the earth in spring. Weber's cage reflects the decomposition Henry Adams made of his own dynamo displayed at a Paris exposition. Within Bunyan's narrative, the waste is displayed when Christian is smeared with dirt and placed within his own cage before he can leave Vanity Fair behind. The narrative begins in the sealing of the self in methodical devices, in the ritual bathings of a Thoreau, in strange ascetic manipulations, in the whole neurotic primitivism that Freud gave to totem and taboo. There follows a wordly ascetic and then an opening to nature, a cutting out there of economical forms, the linear structure enf6lding back with the arrival then of teffor. In a moment of realization of what the self has committed, the structure turns, and in uncovering the trope of its irony, falls apart. Life begins now in the perfectly random dispersion of Adams's en-tropic void.
For the American audience who would receive his writing, Weber's importance lay in recreating this theme of the nation's spiritual journey. America had become an archetypal reference, Weber thought, for all of what he wanted his ethic to say. In the years in which Freud was writing to America, uncovering an "especially revealing" money complex that obsessed the nation, filthy lucre of coin and dirt, Weber was also writing of what Freud called the "transformations" of American values, of turnings or tropes, of which the most significant is irony.
By creating a desert of ritualization, Weber offered a timeless cycle of death and birth. Works vanish at the point of faith, and ritualization is self-destructive, the machine being defined by its waste and insanity, paradigmatic oppositions of metal and dirt, effort and collapse, with America to become this narrative of wilderness turning to iron. "Wilderness" and "iron," as Hayden White points out, possess the same root. The soil of America becomes this site of bewildering rationalizations, the land of the highest capitalism where the demonics of the machine are most visibly displayed. This penetration of nature, this machine in the garden (in Professor Marx's apt phrase), this cutting for Weber of organic forms with the edge tools that Emerson had described, with the calculation or "understanding" that Emerson had then denied, calls for an interpreter. The interpreter points to the lines of iron that have carved a graph from nature, and then to the terror crawling out from behind those lines. He points, as Bunyan or William James did, to the meaning of such "steps" or "progress," to the teffor waiting when one makes such a satanic machine. As Marianne Weber to her husband or as Max Weber to himself, the interpreter points to the fear waiting when one attempts one's own conversion, making the self a progressive machine by writing the lines of the way to God as if the text were not already prescription, that is, preordained. The absolute Calvinist demand of the Protestant sects that Weber studied—beyond the capitalism created or the work performed or the contracts drawn—drew his interest, centered his essay, and in his own declaration of the mechanist's grip, brought him within the demonic of Puritan conversion. The debate enjoined, the "Weber thesis" and the question how a scholar could ever have celebrated—as Weber clearly did—the hoffor of the compulsion his worldly ascetic came to display, resolve before the understanding that Weber was re-writing the most radical of Puritan texts. He looked to the signs of the terrors of America, claiming that birth—for Emerson, "reason"—came at the end of the understanding (Verstehen) within sight of the cage. In alienation came the waters of separation, and the creation then of saints.
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