IN DEFENSE OF CRUDE THINKING
Alexei Penzin
1. The concept of vulgarity and crudity
in Marxist analysis of culture and art,
recapitulated and sharpened as a polemical
argument in the contemporary “discursive
struggle” for legitimization or delegitimization
of various theories, may push aside sophis-
ticated seekers of elevated meanings and
brand new approaches. The question here is
not even that theory submits to such strange
evaluation by means of aesthetic criteria that
are heterogeneous to it. This is a symptom
of the aestheticization of most contemporary
theory, linked with the increasing complexity
of means of reflection, stylistics, the role
of “writing,” virtuosity, proximity to literary
practices, and so on. It is also necessary
to understand what exactly is this crudity
and vulgarity, which so persistently provokes
such idiosyncrasies. Is this force of “rejec-
tion” a sign of the displacement of something
truly important?
All this is strikingly revealed in our local
situation, in which we bear the burden of the
recent past and accusations of crudity and
vulgarity are customary. “Vulgarity” usually
means simple mechanical determinism
(such as explanations from the point of view
of “class interests”), an inclination towards
simplified interpretations, a poverty and
“primitiveness” of theoretical language, and
so forth. Retroactive accusations of a similar
Chto Delat’, Angry Sandwich people or in Praise of Dialectics (2006)
nature are occasionally directed against
Courtesy of the artists Marx himself.
248
There is no Virgil to guide us through this hell
Graffiti on the wall of a house in Venice
The typical response to such an accusation
is a defensive reaction, pointing out the
complexity and ambiguous nature of the
thought of both the founder of Marxism and
the majority of his most prominent followers.
Another reaction is a heightened interest
in contemporary academic jargon from
other theoretical schools. This can be seen
in many representatives of contemporary
Anglo-American “leftist academia,” who
experiment with the hybridization of various
theoretical languages (Marx, Foucault, and
Lacan in a single “package,” say), which eas-
ily and rapidly lends an absolutely “non-vul-
gar” character to their texts and utterances.
2. In order to answer the question as to
whether some other strategy is possible in
contemporary “discursive struggle,” we shall
make a brief genealogical digression. Even the
most complex and refined thinkers and artists
of the Marxist tradition recognized the problem
of “vulgarity”. The most radical response to it
was that of Bertolt Brecht, who spoke of the
necessity of “crude thinking” (plumpes Den-
ken). Brecht, of course, was arguing through
the lens of his artistic aims. In particular, he
was interested in the “crude truth” of popular
sayings and proverbs.
Brecht’s apology for crude thinking (or “crude
thought”) remains a true puzzle to this day.
At first glance it appears to be a simple
affirmation of simplistic thinking, which seems
249
 a provocation in the mouth of a sophisticated
avant-gardist. The two words brought together
in this phrase seem almost incompatible.
Crude thinking is immature, rough and ready
thought and, perhaps, should not be given
voice to. Unreflexive and direct people are
considered “vulgar” (or “crude”), those who
flat out reject “high theory.” They “think
in concrete terms.” But is this the case?
Is this the definition of “crude thinking”?
3. We recall Hegel’s renowned short text
“Who Thinks Abstractly?,” written with
inimitable humour. In it, Hegel mocks the
stereotypes of his time, ascribing exclusively
abstract thought to philosophy and metaphys-
ics. Was not this witty text—and we will speak
further of the meaning of wit—by Hegel the
inaugural act of “crude thinking” in the his-
tory of modern thought?
For Hegel, the “tradeswoman” at the market
embodies a certain kind of “lower thought”.
We will not forego the pleasure of including
a small excerpt:
“What? she replies, my eggs rotten? You
may be rotten! You say that about my
eggs? You? Did not lice eat your father on
the highways? Didn’t your mother run away
with the French, and didn’t your grand-
mother die in a public hospital? Let her get
a whole shirt instead of that flimsy scarf; we
know well where she got that scarf and her
hats: if it were not for those officers, many
wouldn’t be decked out like that these
days, and if their ladyships paid more atten-
tion to their households, many would be in
jail right now. Let her mend the holes in her
stockings!—In brief, she does not leave one
whole thread on her. She thinks abstractly
and subsumes the other woman—scarf,
hat, shirt, etc., as well as her fingers and
other parts of her, and her father and whole
family, too—solely under the crime that she
has found the eggs rotten.”1
“Who thinks abstractly? The uneducated,
not the educated,” as Hegel expresses his
paradox. Hegel counterposes his market
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trader or small urban burgher to the “good
society” of the aristocrats. Within it, con-
versely, thought that is too abstract (and thus
without content) is not valued. The Philoso-
pher (Hegel himself) remains outside the
brackets of this scene. He stands outside
the relationship of the “abstract-thinking
commoner”/“concrete-thinking nobleman.”
He “sublates” this opposition, constantly bring-
ing together the concrete and the abstract
in dialectic operation, never permitting himself
to be one-sided. Each genuine philosophical
utterance must aim for concrete fullness,
a totality of predicates, otherwise it would be
mere “empty abstraction” and not the living
experience of thought. The visible specificity
of thought of the “uneducated person” para-
doxically turns out to be quite abstract.
4. What exactly is crude thought, then?
We return to Brecht. Roland Barthes noted
that Brecht’s creative output often departed
from his “ideology” (i.e. his aesthetic program).
And indeed, we know that his work was
based on constant ambiguities, witticisms,
cynicism, mockery, and on a certain “base”
element which is difficult to codify even in
terms of an “aesthetics of alienation effect.”
It is possible that all its power is based
on the latent action of crude thought.
We begin to appreciate that crude thought
is something distinct from primitive, vulgar,
and grounded thought or, indeed, from
the abstract and empty. It is not for noth-
ing that Brecht’s audacious motto has
taken on the wider meaning of a certain
intellectual and even political imperative,
and exerted no small degree of influence
on his contemporaries.
5. It is symptomatic that Walter Benjamin—­
perhaps one of the most subtle and erudite
writers of the twentieth century—constantly
referred to this motto. Hannah Arendt
wrote beautifully of Benjamin’s attitude to
crude thought:
“In Brecht he found a poet of rare intellectual
powers and, almost as important for him at
the time, someone on the Left who, despite
all talk about dialectics, was no more of
a dialectical thinker than he was, but whose
intelligence was uncommonly close to reality.
With Brecht he could practice what Brecht
himself called “crude thinking:” ‘The main
thing is to learn how to think crudely. Crude
thinking, that is the thinking of the great,’
said Brecht, and Benjamin added by way of
elucidation: ‘There are many people whose
idea of a dialectician is a lover of subtleties...
Crude thoughts, on the contrary, should
be part and parcel of dialectical thinking,
because they are nothing but the referral of
theory to practice... a thought must be crude
to come into its own in action.’”2
“Close to reality”—there we have a decent
definition of crude thinking. Benjamin did not
speak in vain of crude thinking being “the
thinking of the great (der Grossen).” In this
instance, the sense is precisely that of “con-
crete” thought, but already in the Hegelian
sense of maximum fullness of predicates,
thinking that is almost mystically close to “the
great” Real, the totality of which is, for one
wonderful fleeting moment, almost grasped
at by the thinking subject, whose finiteness
is incommensurable with it.
6. It is quite remarkable that the contem-
porary Marxist interpreter of culture Fredric
Jameson also turns to the problem of crude
thinking. Jameson, with his ultra-complex
style of exposition, constantly, if not sys-
tematically, addresses the Brechtian motto
in many of his texts. He gives perhaps the
most exact localization of the place of crude
thinking in the Marxist tradition. Jameson
notes that only a small number of “wise”
Marxists included the exorcism of “vulgar
Marxism” in the structure of their thought.
Even the hyper-intellectualized Marxism
of the Frankfurt School had to absorb an
element of crude thinking in order to be
an authentic part of the theoretical tradi-
tion. “Brecht’s notion of plumpes Denken
(‘crude thinking,’ the vulgar approach) which
suggests that even the most subtle and
abstruse forms of neo-Marxism must adhere
to some hard core of ‘vulgar’ or ‘orthodox’
Marxism to remain Marxist at all.”3
Jameson’s thought, we repeat, cannot
be termed “crude” at all. But nor could one
label it excessively “sophisticated” (a kind
of “anti-crude”) in the negative sense of the
term, as an unconscious compensation for
the critics of “vulgarity” in the late, “wise,”
reflexive Marxism of our time, which Jame-
son’s work represents so well. Rather, the
epithet “un-crude” would best characterize
this thought as an ambivalent inclusion of the
exorcism of plumpes Denken in its own
structure while simultaneously insisting on
Marxism’s “vulgar core.”
7. Plumpes Denken is not only “concrete”
thought (in the Hegelian sense), tightly tailored
to fit reality, but already politically loaded with
the fact of its “crude” form. It often breaks the
unspoken prohibitions of “good society” that
Hegel wrote of with such irony.
It is profanatory thinking, if by profanation we
understand not vulgarization, but the critical
operation that brings back to human reality
those things which have been “confiscated”
by the sacral authorities, which have passed
them off as “higher” or “untouchable” for
the majority and accessible only to a narrow
group of “priests.”4
It is performative thinking, which is capable of
easy transition into action (as when, according
to legend, the cynic Diogenes showed Plato
a plucked chicken in response to his notorious
definition of man as a “featherless biped”).
8. Politically, this element of Marxism
could be connected with the tradition of
parrhesia, as researched in the later works
of Michel Foucault.5
Parrhesia (Greek παρρησία–“speaking
of everything,” i.e. “of all truth”) is the tradition
of fearless public speech, addressed “from
below” to the superior instances of authority.
Speech that is supposed to be devoid of rhe-
torical qualities. It expresses truth, conditioned
251

Chto Delat, Angry Sandwich People or, In Praise of Dialectics (2006)
Courtesy of the artists
by critical circumstances and sincerity, and
the risk connected with this, which demands
courage from the subject of expression.
This phenomenon was well known in the
democracy of the Ancient Greek polis.
The parrhesiast “speaks the truth” that has
been repudiated by the majority. If they are
successful, political change is based entirely
on the action of truthful speech. Although
a colossal historical distance divides modern
European culture and antiquity, an eruption
of parrhesiastic speech can be observed
in many situations in European politics. These
outbreaks often come at times of revolution:
the political role of the orator from below
is well known, from the epoch of bourgeois
revolutions onwards.
Crude thinking as an element of Marxism in
its performative and political aspect is heir to
the speech of the classical parrhesiast or his
incarnation in the figure of the revolutionary
orator of the modern era. Here are politics and
252
thought at their utmost distance from narrow
aesthetic criteria, and any of their assessments
of it as “vulgar” are simply out of place.6
9. It is thus vital to distinguish two senses
of crude thinking, the “bad” and the “good”.
And must we not harken to the old Brechtian
motto, interpreting it after our own fashion?
What might crude thinking mean now, in our
conditions of subtle intellectual consumption
of the “brands” of contemporary theory
(which few here have, admittedly, dedicated
themselves to) and the non-transferable,
misshapen forms of social and political life
of the age of ubiquitous “positivity,” which
has become part of the everyday jargon
of recent years?
The former exultation in the ironic and
“subversive” acceptance of a one-dimensional
society,7 has long been crumbling away with
the last laughs in the most distant corners
of our intellectual and political space. The
old strategies of refined critical negativity
may no longer be quite so effective. The
transition to a “multi-layered defence” of the
values of critical theory is fraught with the risk
of impeding any living development with the
black magic of protective gestures.
The imperative of plumpes Denken, with
all the mystique of the utterances of some
ancient oracle, seems to proceed diagonally
in relation to the positions of the critical “aris-
tocracy” and the populism of those searching
for golden grains of utopia and opposition
in the middens of mass culture. Of course,
crude thinking gives us no “methodology”
in the here and now that would lead us onto
the right path, like the spirit of Dante’s Virgil.
It only insists upon openness of thought,
not in the sense of superficial pluralism but
as a constant possibility for unexpected
paradoxical decisions, or the invention
of a “way out” that is not yet in existence.
10. What, then, is plumpes Denken in its
extreme meaning, in addition to those traits
which we have already attempted to reveal?
It might be recognized as the principle of
innovation, which does not allow thoughts
to withdraw into the autism of their own
enterprise, in their “pure” and “higher” forms,
constantly undermining its boundaries and
opening up encounters with the external,
“profane,” and (political and social) empirical
elements.
Crude thinking has none of the surliness
of the primitive. In this sense, the cynic
Diogenes’ joke in showing the plucked
chicken to Plato is paradigmatic. We find the
reinforcement of our argumentation in the
Italian philosopher Paolo Virno’s essay “Wit
and Innovative Action.”8 Virno is guided by
the material in Freud’s classic work Wit and
its Relation to the Unconscious, but reads it
strictly outside the framework of psychoanaly-
sis. He considers wit to be a true “diagram of
innovation,” its general model. Jokes and wit-
ticisms are, in this conceptualization, a public
performative act, blending the “logical” and
“empirical,” the rule and the specific instance
in an exceptional situation (stato di eccezi-
one), which opens the possibility for other
uses of words and gestures. Such a com-
mingling disrupts the routine circulation of
language in everyday life. Considered in a
broader perspective, this diagram outlines
the conditions for the appearance of hitherto
unseen experiments of thought and political
action.9
It was not mere chance that the inventor
of our motto was Bertolt Brecht. In two words
he expresses the logic of the revolutionary
artistic, philosophical, and political avant-
garde—an explosively dangerous mixture
of the forms of life, art, and thought.
Endnotes:
1  Kaufmann, Walter, Hegel: Texts and Commentary
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966), 113–118.
2  Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 168.
3  Fredric Jameson, “Shifting Contexts of Science
Fiction Theory,” Science Fiction Studies, 42, July 1987,
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/james42.htm
4  See Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (New York:
Zone Books, 2007). Marxist historical practice as a
whole (the Soviet Union and other experiences of the
building of socialism) can be understood as just such
a mass “profanation” of theories that were previously
the preserve of a narrow circle of intellectuals.
5  See Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Prob-
lematization of Parrhesia, https://foucault.info/system/
files/pdf/DiscourseAndTruth_MichelFoucault_1983_0.pdf
6  This does not exclude the interaction of political and
aesthetic form in the fundamental perspective, as is
addressed, for example, by the French philosopher
Jacques Rancière.
7  Herbert Marcuse’s “ancient” manifesto One-
Dimensional Man (1964) is surprisingly applicable to
the current situation within our society.
8  Paolo Virno, Motto di spirito e azione innovativa. Per
una logica del cambiamento (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri,
2005).
9  One might recall the “silent philosophical laugh”
“shaking all the habits of our thought,” about which
Foucault wrote so expressively in his Order of Things.
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