Creating absurdity

Gramsci, in an offhand comment in Americanism and Fordism (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 279), speaks of modern society creating “absurd positions”.

The idea that society can create an “absurd position” is an interesting one, with some (to me) less-than-obvious philosophical implications.  The concept of absurdity represents a disjunction between an observed condition and reason.  Can non-social reality, for instance “create” an absurd condition?  If it does, the presumption is that the flaw is in the reasoning, not in the underlying reality, since the purpose of reason is to understand reality, and the presence of a disjunction indicates that reason has failed, in some way, to do so.

With social reality, however, the situation is different.  This is because social reality itself involves an element of reason.  Social reality is the result of the individual and collective strivings of men and women (as well as their interactions with, and constraints on them from, the non-social world).  Their strivings reflect their goals, aspirations and beliefs, and their (individual and collective) reasoning with respect to these.  These goals and beliefs and this reasoning can include contradictions both within an individual element, and between elements of the aggregate.  The aggregate, or more properly Gestalt, is “modern society”.  When looking at the Gestalt as if from outside (really, of course, from one particular “inside” vantage point), some of these contradictions become manifest, resulting in the perception of an “absurd position”.

Of course, this perception of absurdity is itself relative to a particular analysis, involving a particular set of goals, beliefs and reasoning, which may contain its own errors and contradictions.  Locating the source of an apparent absurdity, therefore, whether in the “social position” or in the observer’s reasoning, is a non-trivial problem.  I do not wish to introduce the kind of relativism that says there can be no truth to the matter – that all is just a “matter of opinion”.  But developing a definitive, irrefutable argument in support of one’s interpretation – an argument that can successfully “take on all comers” – is probably impossible.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, of course.  Striving to develop such arguments, and convincing as broad a swathe of society as possible, is part of one of the fundamental problems of politics, the struggle for hegemony.