FOR A LEFT WITH NO FUTURE
by T. J. CLARK
http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future
[…]
Left intellectuals, like most intellectuals, are not good at
politics; especially if we mean by the latter, as I shall be arguing we should,
the everyday detail, drudgery and charm of performance. Intellectuals get the
fingering wrong. Up on stage they play too many wrong notes. But one thing they
may be good for: sticking to the concert-hall analogy, they are sometimes the
bassists in the back row whose groaning establishes the key of politics for a
moment, and even points to a possible new one. And it can happen, though
occasionally, that the survival of a tradition of thought and action depends on
this—on politics being transposed to a new key. This seems to me true of the
left in our time.
These notes are addressed essentially (regrettably) to the
left in the old capitalist heartland—the left in Europe.
[3] Perhaps
they will resonate elsewhere. They have nothing to say about capitalism’s
long-term invulnerability, and pass no judgement—what fool would try to in
present circumstances?—on the sureness of its management of its global
dependencies, or the effectiveness of its military humanism. The only verdict
presupposed in what follows is a negative one on the capacity of the left—the
actually existing left, as we used to say—to offer a perspective in which
capitalism’s failures, and its own, might make sense. By ‘perspective’ I mean a
rhetoric, a tonality, an imagery, an argument, and a temporality.
By ‘left’ I mean a root-and-branch opposition to capitalism.
But such an opposition has nothing to gain, I shall argue, from a series of
overweening and fantastical predictions about capitalism’s coming to an end.
Roots and branches are things in the present. The deeper a political movement’s
spadework, the more complete its focus on the here and now. No doubt there is
an alternative to the present order of things. Yet nothing follows from
this—nothing deserving the name political. Left politics is immobilized, it
seems to me, at the level of theory and therefore of practice, by the idea that
it should spend its time turning over the entrails of the present for signs of
catastrophe and salvation. Better an infinite irony at prescrai and maruflicchio—a
peasant irony, with an earned contempt for futurity—than a politics premised,
yet again, on some terracotta multitude waiting to march out of the emperor’s
tomb.
♦
Is this pessimism? Well, yes. But what other tonality seems
possible in the face of the past ten years? How are we meant to understand the
arrival of real ruination in the order of global finance (‘This sucker could go
down’, as George Bush told his cabinet in September 2008) and the almost
complete failure of left responses to it to resonate beyond the ranks of the
faithful? Or to put the question another way: if the past decade is not proof
that there are no circumstances capable of reviving the left in its
nineteenth and twentieth-century form, then what would proof be like?
It is a bitter moment. Politics, in much of the old
previously immovable centre, seems to be taking on a more and more ‘total’
form—an all-or-nothing character for those living through it—with each
successive month. And in reality (as opposed to the fantasy world of Marxist
conferences) this is as unnerving for left politics as for any other kind. The
left is just as unprepared for it. The silence of the left in Greece, for
example—its inability to present a programme outlining an actual, persuasive
default economic policy, a year-by-year vision of what would be involved in
taking ‘the Argentine road’—is indicative. And in no way is this meant as a
sneer. When and if a national economy enters into crisis in the present
interlocking global order, what has anyone to say—in any
non-laughable detail—about ‘socialism in one country’ or even ‘partly detached
pseudo-nation-state non-finance-capital-driven capitalism’? (Is the left going
to join the Eurosceptics on their long march? Or put its faith in the
proletariat of Guangdong?)
The question of capitalism—precisely because the system
itself is once again posing (agonizing over) the question, and therefore its
true enormity emerges from behind the shadow play of parties—has to be
bracketed. It cannot be made political. The left should turn its attention to
what can.
♦
It is difficult to think historically about the present
crisis, even in general terms—comparisons with 1929 seem not to help—and therefore
to get the measure of its mixture of chaos and rappel à l’ordre. Tear gas
refreshes the army of bondholders; the Greek for General Strike is on
everyone’s lips; Goldman Sachs rules the world. Maybe the years since 1989
could be likened to the moment after Waterloo in Europe—the moment of
Restoration and Holy Alliance, of apparent world-historical immobility (though
vigorous reconstellation of the productive forces) in the interim between 1815
and 1848. In terms of a thinking of the project of Enlightenment—my subject
remains the response of political thought to wholesale change in
circumstances—this was a moment between paradigms. The long arc of rational and
philosophical critique—the arc from Hobbes to Descartes to Diderot to Jefferson
to Kant—had ended. Looking with hindsight, we can see that beneath the polished
surface of Restoration the elements of a new vision of history were assembling:
peculiar mutations of utilitarianism and political economy, the speculations of
Saint-Simon, Fourier’s counterfactuals, the intellectual energies of the Young
Hegelians. But it was, at the time (in the shadow of Metternich, Ingres, the
later Coleridge), extremely difficult to see these elements for what they were,
let alone as capable of coalescing into a form of opposition—a fresh conception
of what it was that had to be opposed, and an intuition of a new standpoint
from which opposition might go forward. This is the way Castlereagh’s Europe
resembles our own: in its sense that a previous language and set of presuppositions
for emancipation have run into the sand, and its realistic uncertainty as to
whether the elements of a different language are to be found at all in the
general spectacle of frozen politics, ruthless economy and enthusiasm (as
always) for the latest dim gadget.
♦
The question for the left at present, in other words, is how deep does
its reconstruction of the project of Enlightenment have to go? ‘How far down?’
Some of us think, ‘Seven levels of the world’. The book we need to be
reading—in preference to The Coming Insurrection, I feel—is Christopher
Hill’s The Experience of Defeat. That is: the various unlikely and no
doubt dangerous voices I find myself drawing on in these notes—Nietzsche in
spite of everything, Bradley on tragedy, Burkert’s terrifying Homo Necans,
Hazlitt and Bruegel at their most implacable, Moses Wall in the darkness of
1659, Benjamin in 1940—come up as resources for the left only at a moment of
true historical failure. We read them only when events oblige us to ask
ourselves what it was, in our previous stagings of transfiguration, that led to
the present debacle.
The word ‘left’ in my usage refers, of course, to a
tradition of politics hardly represented any longer in the governments and
oppositions we have. (It seems quaint now to dwell on the kinds of difference
within that tradition once pointed to by the prefix ‘ultra’. After sundown all
cats look grey.) Left, then, is a term denoting an absence; and this near non-existence
ought to be explicit in a new thinking of politics. But it does not follow that
the left should go on exalting its marginality, in the way it is
constantly tempted to—exulting in the glamour of the great refusal, and
consigning to outer darkness the rest of an unregenerate world. That way
literariness lies. The only left politics worth the name is, as always, the one
that looks its insignificance in the face, but whose whole interest is in what
it might be that could turn the vestige, slowly or suddenly, into the beginning
of a ‘movement’. Many and bitter will be the things sacrificed—the big ideas,
the revolutionary stylistics—in the process.
♦
This leads me to two kinds of question, which structure the
rest of these notes. First, what would it be like for left politics not to look
forward—to be truly present-centred, non-prophetic, disenchanted, continually
‘mocking its own presage’? Leaving behind, that is, in the whole grain and
frame of its self-conception, the last afterthoughts and images of the
avant-garde. And a second, connected question: could left politics be
transposed into a tragic key? Is a tragic sense of life possible for the left—for
a politics that remains recognizably in touch with the tradition of Marx,
Raspail, Morris, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Platonov, Sorel, Pasolini? Isn’t that
tradition rightly—indelibly—unwilling to dwell on the experience of defeat?
♦
What do I mean, then, by tragedy, or the tragic conception
of life? The idea applied to politics is strange, maybe unwelcome, and
therefore my treatment of it will be plain; which need not, in this instance,
mean banal. Bradley is a tremendous late-Victorian guide; better, I think,
because more political, than all the great theorists and classicists who
followed; and I choose him partly because he is such a good example of the kind
of middle wisdom—the rejected high style—that the left will have to rediscover
in its bourgeois past. He addresses his students (colonial servants in the
making) mainly about Shakespeare, but almost everything in his general
presentation of the subject resonates with politics more widely.
Tragedy, we know, is pessimistic about the human condition.
Its subject is suffering and calamity, the constant presence of violence in
human affairs, the extraordinary difficulty of reconciling that violence with a
rule of law or a pattern of agreed social sanction. It turns on failure and
self-misunderstanding, and above all on a fall from a great height—a fall that
frightens and awes those who witness it because it seems to speak to a
powerlessness in man, and a general subjection to a Force or Totality derived
from the very character of things. Tragedy is about greatness come to nothing.
But that is why it is not depressing. ‘[Man] may be wretched and he may be
awful’, says Bradley, ‘but he is not small. His lot may be heart-rending and
mysterious, but it is not contemptible’. ‘It is necessary that [the tragic
project] should have so much of greatness that in its error and fall we may be
vividly conscious of the possibilities of human nature’.
[4] Those
last two words have traditionally made the left wince, and I understand why.
But they may be reclaimable: notice that for Bradley nature and possibility go
together.
♦
Bradley has a great passage on ‘what [he] ventures to
describe as the centre of the tragic impression’. I quote it in full:
This central feeling is the impression of waste. With
Shakespeare, at any rate, the pity and fear which are stirred by the tragic
story seem to unite with, and even merge in, a profound sense of sadness and
mystery, which is due to this impression of waste . . . We seem to have before
us a type of the mystery of the whole world, the tragic fact which extends far
beyond the limits of tragedy. Everywhere, from the crushed rocks beneath our
feet to the soul of man, we see power, intelligence, life and glory, which
astound us and seem to call for our worship. And everywhere we see them
perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, often with dreadful
pain, as though they came into being for no other end. Tragedy is the typical
form of this mystery, because that greatness of soul which it exhibits
oppressed, conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It
forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realize so vividly the worth of
that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reflection
that all is vanity.
[5]
One thing to be said in passing about this paragraph—but I
mean it as more than an aside—is that it can serve as a model of the tone of
politics in a tragic key. The tone is grown up. And maybe that is why it
inevitably will register as remote, even a trifle outlandish, in a political
culture as devoted as ours to a ventriloquism of ‘youth’. The present language
of politics, left and right, participates fully in the general infantilization
of human needs and purposes that has proved integral to consumer capitalism.
(There is a wonderful counter-factual desperation to the phenomenon. For
consumer society is, by nature—by reason of its real improvement in ‘living
standards’—grey-haired. The older the average age of its population, we might
say, the more slavishly is its cultural apparatus geared to the wishes of
sixteen-year-olds.) And this too the left must escape from. Gone are the days
when ‘infantile disorder’ was a slur—an insult from Lenin, no less—that one
part of the left could hope to reclaim and transfigure. A tragic voice is
obliged to put adolescence behind it. No more Rimbaud, in other words—no more
apodictic inside-out, no more elated denunciation.
♦
Here again is Bradley. ‘The tragic world is a world of
action’, he tells us,
and action is the translation of thought into reality. We
see men and women confidently attempting it. They strike into the existing
order of things in pursuance of their ideas. But what they achieve is not what
they intended; it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to
ourselves, of the world on which they operate. They fight blindly in the dark,
and the power that works through them makes them the instrument of a design
that is not theirs. They act freely, and yet their action binds them hand and
foot. And it makes no difference whether they meant well or ill.
[6]
Politics in a tragic key, then, will operate always with a
sense of the horror and danger built into human affairs. ‘And everywhere we see
them perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves’. This is a
mystery. But (again quoting Bradley, this time pushing him specifically in our
direction) ‘tragedy is the . . . form of this mystery [that best allows us to
think politically], because the greatness of soul which it exhibits oppressed,
conflicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It forces the
mystery upon us’. And it localizes the mystery, it stops it from
being an immobilizing phantom—it has any one politics (for instance, our own)
be carried on in the shadow of a specific political catastrophe.
♦
Our catastrophe—our Thebes—is the seventy years from 1914 to
1989. And of course to say that the central decades of the twentieth century,
at least as lived out in Europe and its empires, were a kind of charnel house
is to do no more than repeat common wisdom. Anyone casting an eye over a
serious historical treatment of the period—the one I never seem to recover from
is Mark Mazower’s terrible conspectus, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth
Century (1998)—is likely to settle for much the same terms. ‘The Century
of Violence’, I remember an old textbook calling it.
[7] The
time of human smoke.
The political question is this, however. Did the century’s
horrors have a shape? Did they obey a logic or follow from a central
determination—however much the contingencies of history (Hitler’s charisma,
Lenin’s surviving the anarchist’s bullet, the psychology of Bomber Harris)
intervened? Here is where the tragic perspective helps. It allows us not
to see a shape or logic—a development from past to future—to the last
hundred years. It opens us, I think rightly, to a vision of the period as
catastrophe in the strict sense: unfolding pell-mell from Sarajevo on,
certainly until the 1950s (and if we widen our focus to Mao’s appalling
‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’—in a sense the last paroxysm of a European
fantasy of politics—well on into the 1970s): a false future entwined with a
past, both come suddenly from nowhere, overtaking the certainties of Edwardian
London and Vienna; a chaos formed from an unstoppable, unmappable criss-cross
of forces: the imagined communities of nationalism, the pseudo-religions of
class and race, the dream of an ultimate subject of History, the new
technologies of mass destruction, the death-throes of the ‘white man’s burden’,
the dismal realities of inflation and unemployment, the haphazard (but then
accelerating) construction of mass parties, mass entertainments, mass gadgets
and accessories, standardized everyday life. The list is familiar. And I
suppose that anyone trying to write the history that goes with it is bound to
opt, consciously or by default, for one among the various forces at work as
predominant. There must be a heart of the matter.
♦
Which leads to the question of Marxism. Marxism, it now
comes clear, was most productively a theory—a set of descriptions—of bourgeois
society and the way it would come to grief. It had many other aspects and
ambitions, but this was the one that ended up least vitiated by chiliasm or
scientism, the diseases of the cultural formation Marxism came out of. At its
best (in Marx himself, in Lukács during the 1920s, in Gramsci, in Benjamin and
Adorno, in Brecht, in Bakhtin, in Attila József, in the Sartre of ‘La
conscience de classe chez Flaubert’) Marxism went deeper into the texture of
bourgeois beliefs and practices than any other description save the novel. But
about bourgeois society’s ending it was notoriously wrong. It believed that the
great positivity of the nineteenth-century order would end in
revolution—meaning a final acceleration (but also disintegration) of
capitalism’s productive powers, the recalibration of economics and politics,
and breakthrough to an achieved modernity. This was not to be. Certainly
bourgeois society—the cultural world that Malevich and Gramsci took for
granted—fell into dissolution. But it was destroyed, so it transpired, not by a
fusion and fission of the long-assembled potentials of capitalist industry and
the emergence of a transfigured class community, but by the vilest imaginable
parody of both. Socialism became National Socialism, Communism became
Stalinism, modernity morphed into crisis and crash, new religions of Volk and Gemeinschaft took
advantage of the technics of mass slaughter. Franco, Dzerzhinsky, Earl Haig,
Eichmann, Von Braun, Mussolini, Teller and Oppenheimer, Jiang Qing, Kissinger,
Pinochet, Pol Pot, Ayman al-Zawahiri. This is the past that our politics has as
its matrix. It is our Thebes.
But again, be careful. Tragedy is a mystery not a chamber of
horrors. It is ordinary and endemic. Thebes is not something we can put behind
us. No one looking in the eyes of the poor peasants in the 1930 photograph,
lined up with their rakes and Stalinist catch-phrases, off to bludgeon a few
kulaks down by the railway station—looking in the eyes of these dupes and
murderers, dogs fighting over a bone, and remembering, perhaps with Platonov’s
help, the long desperation the camera does not see—no one who takes a look at
the real history of the twentieth century, in other words, can fail to
experience the ‘sense of sadness and mystery’ Bradley points to, ‘which is due
to the impression of waste . . . And everywhere we see them perishing,
devouring one another and destroying themselves . . . as though they came into
being for no other end’.
♦
However we may disagree about the detail of the history the
kolkhozniks in the photo are living, at least let us do them the justice not to
pretend it was epic. ‘Historical materialism must renounce the epic
element in history. It blasts the epoch [it studies] out of the reified
“movement of history”. But it also explodes the epoch’s homogeneity, and
intersperses it with ruins—that is, with the present’.
[8] The
shed on the right in the photo might as well be a Lager, and the banner
read Arbeit macht frei.
♦
‘The world is now very dark and barren; and if a little
light should break forth, it would mightily refresh it. But alas: man would be
lifted up above himself and distempered by it at present, and afterwards he
would die again and become more miserable’: this is the Puritan revolutionary
Isaac Penington in 1654, confronting the decline of the Kingdom of Saints.
[9] Penington
thinks of the situation in terms of the Fall, naturally, but his attitude to
humanity can be sustained, and I think ought to be, without the theological
background. His speaking to the future remains relevant. And it can coexist
fully with the most modest, most moderate, of materialisms—the kind we need.
Here for example is Moses Wall, writing to John Milton in 1659—when the days of
the English republic were numbered:
You complain of the Non-progressency of the Nation, and of
its retrograde motion of late, in liberty and spiritual truths. It is much to
be bewailed; but yet let us pity human frailty. When those who made deep
protestations of their zeal for our Liberty, being instated in power, shall
betray the good thing committed to them, and lead us back to Egypt, and by that
force which we gave them to win us Liberty, hold us fast in chains; what can
poor people do? You know who they were that watched our Saviour’s Sepulchre to
keep him from rising.
(Wall means soldiers. He knows about standing armies.)
Besides, whilst people are not free but straitened in
accommodations for life, their Spirits will be dejected and servile: and
conducing to [reverse this], there should be an improving of our native
commodities, as our Manufactures, our Fishery, our Fens, Forests, and Commons,
and our Trade at Sea, &c. which would give the body of the nation a
comfortable Subsistence . . .
[10]
Still a maximalist programme.
♦
A tragic perspective on politics is inevitably linked, as
Wall’s letter suggests, to the question of war and its place in the history of
the species. Or perhaps we should say: to the interleaved questions of armed
conflict, organized annihilation, human psychology and sociality, the city- and
then the nation-state, and the particular form in which that something we call
‘the economy’ came into being. I take seriously the idea of the ancient
historians that the key element in the transition to a monetized economy may
not have been so much the generalization of trade between cultures (where kinds
of barter went on functioning adequately) as the spread of endemic warfare, the
rise of large professional armies, and the need for transportable, believable,
on-the-spot payment for same.
[11] And
with money and mass killing came a social imaginary—a picture of human
nature—to match.
‘When, in a battle between cities’, says Nietzsche,
the victor, according to the rights of war, puts
the whole male population to the sword and sells all the women and children
into slavery, we see, in the sanctioning of such a right, that the Greek
regarded a full release of his hatred as a serious necessity; at such moments
pent-up, swollen sensation found relief: the tiger charged out, wanton cruelty
flickering in its terrible eyes. Why did the Greek sculptor again and again
have to represent war and battles, endlessly repeated, human bodies stretched
out, their sinews taut with hatred or the arrogance of triumph, the wounded
doubled up in pain, the dying in agony? Why did the whole Greek world exult in
the pictures of fighting in the Iliad? I fear we do not understand these
things in enough of a Greek fashion . . . and we would shudder if we did . . .
[12]
Nietzsche is vehement; some would say exultant. But much the
same point can be made with proper ethnological drabness.
Many prehistoric bone fractures resulted from violence; many
forearms appear to have been broken deflecting blows from clubs. Most parrying
fractures are on the left forearm held up to block blows to the left side of
the body from a right-hander. Parrying fractures were detected on 10 per cent
of desert men and 19 per cent of east-coast women; for both groups they were
the most common type of upper-limb fractures . . . Fractured skulls were twice
to four times as common among women as men. The fractures are typically oval,
thumb-sized depressions caused by blows with a blunt instrument. Most are on
the left side of the head, suggesting frontal attack by a right-hander. Most
head injuries are thus the result of interpersonal violence, probably inflicted
by men on women.
[13]
♦
Do not think, by the way, that dwelling in this way on man’s
ferocity leads necessarily in a Nietzschean direction. Listen to Hazlitt,
speaking from the ironic heart of the English radical tradition:
Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies:
without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and
action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring
interests, the unruly passions of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is
brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as
possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it
envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that
there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind
. . . Protestants and Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we
subscribe to new editions of Fox’s Book of Martyrs [a contemporary
equivalent might be The Gulag Archipelago]; and the secret of the success
of theScotch Novels is much the same—they carry us back to the feuds, the
heart-burnings, the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and the revenge of a
barbarous age and people—to the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities of
sects and parties in politics and religion, and of contending chiefs and clans
in war and intrigue. We feel the full force of the spirit of hatred with all of
them in turn . . . The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like
hunting-animals, and as the hound starts in its sleep and rushes on the chase
in fancy, the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of
joy . . .
[14]
This has more to say about Homs and Abbottabad, or Anders
Breivik and Geert Wilders, than most things written since.
♦
It is a logical error of the left, this is the point, to
assume that a full recognition of the human propensity to violence—to
blood-soaked conformity—closes off the idea of a radical reworking of politics.
The question is: what root is it we need to get down to? And even a
Hazlitt-type honesty about ‘a hankering after evil in the human mind’
can perfectly well coexist (as it did in Hazlitt’s post-Augustan generation)
with a ‘By our own spirits are we deified’. Human capacities may well be
infinite; they have certainly been hardly explored, hardly been given their
chance of flowering; but the tragic sense starts from an acknowledgment that
the infinity (the unplumbable) is for bad as much as good.
It likewise is wrong to assume that moderacy in politics, if
we mean by this a politics of small steps, bleak wisdom, concrete proposals,
disdain for grand promises, a sense of the hardness of even the least
‘improvement’, is not revolutionary—assuming this last word has any descriptive
force left. It depends on what the small steps are aimed at changing. It
depends on the picture of human possibility in the case. A politics actually
directed, step by step, failure by failure, to preventing the tiger from
charging out would be the most moderate and revolutionary there has ever been.
Nietzsche again is our (Janus-faced) guide, in a famous
glimpse of the future in The Will to Power. As a view of what the politics
of catastrophe might actually be like it remains unique. He begins with an
overall diagnosis that will be familiar to anyone who has read him; but then,
less typically, he moves on. The diagnosis first:
To put it briefly . . . What will never again be built any
more, cannot be built any more, is—a society, in the old sense of
that word; to build such, everything is lacking, above all the material. All
of us[Nietzsche means us ‘moderns’] are no longer material for a society;
this is a truth for which the time has come!
[15]
We moderns no longer provide the stuff from which a society
might be constructed; and in the sense that Enlightenment was premised on,
perhaps we never did. The political unfolding of this reversal of the ‘social’
will be long and horrific, Nietzsche believes, and his vision of the century to
come is characteristically venomous (which does not mean inaccurate): the
passage just quoted devolves into a sneer at ‘good socialists’ and their dream
of a free society built from wooden iron—or maybe, Nietzsche prophesies, from
just iron on its own. After ‘socialism’ of this sort will come chaos, necessarily,
but out of the chaos a new form of politics may still emerge. ‘A crisis that .
. . purifies, that . . . pushes together related elements to perish of each
other, that . . . assigns common tasks to men who have opposite ways of
thinking . . . Of course, outside every existing social order’. And the upshot
is as follows:
Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this?
The most moderate; those who do not requireany extreme articles of faith;
those who not only concede but actually love a fair amount of contingency and
nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value
without becoming small and weak themselves on that account . . . human beings
who are sure of their power and who represent, with conscious pride, the
strength that humanity has [actually] achieved.
[16]
Of course I am not inviting assent to the detail (such as it
is) of Nietzsche’s post-socialism. His thought on the subject is entangled with
a series of naive, not to say nauseating, remarks on ‘rank order’ as the most
precious fruit of the new movement. But as a sketch of what moderation might
mean to revolutionaries, his note goes on resonating.
♦
Utopianism, on the other hand—that invention of early modern
civil servants—is what the landlords have time for. It is everything Carlo
Levi’s peasants have learnt to distrust. Bruegel spells this out. His Cockaigne is
above all a de-sublimation of the idea of Heaven—an un-Divine Comedy, which
only fully makes sense in relation to all the other offers of otherworldliness
(ordinary and fabulous, instituted and heretical) circulating as Christendom
fell apart. What the painting most deeply makes fun of is the religious
impulse, or one main form that impulse takes (all the more strongly once the
hold of religion on the detail of life is lost): the wish for escape from
mortal existence, the dream of immortality, the idea of Time to Come. ‘And God
shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the
former things are passed away’. What Bruegel says back to the Book of
Revelation—and surely his voice was that of peasant culture itself, in one of
its ineradicable modes—is that all visions of escape and perfectibility are
haunted by the worldly realities they pretend to transfigure. Every Eden is the
here and now intensified; immortality is mortality continuing; every vision of
bliss is bodily and appetitive, heavy and ordinary and present-centred. The man
emerging from the mountain of gruel in the background is the ‘modern’
personified. He has eaten his way through to the community of saints.
The young man on the ground at right, with the pens at his
belt and the bible by his side, we might see as none other than St Thomas More,
awake but comatose in his creation. And the lad gone to sleep on top of his
flail? Who but Ned Ludd himself?
♦
Utopias reassure modernity as to its infinite potential. But
why? It should learn—be taught—to look failure in the face.
♦
About modernity in general—about what it is that has made us
moderns no longer stuff for the social—I doubt there is anything new to say.
The topic, like the thing itself, is exhausted: not over (never over), just
tired to death. All that needs restating here—and Baldwin Spencer’s great
photos of the longest continuing human culture are the proper accompaniment—is
that the arrival of societies oriented toward the future, as opposed to a past
of origins, heroisms, established ways, is a fact of history not nature,
happening in one place and time, with complex, contingent causes. Personal
religion (that strange mutation) and double-entry book-keeping being two of
them. And by modernity is meant very much more than a set of techniques or a
pattern of residence and consumption: the word intends an ethos, a habitus, a
way of being a human subject. I go back to the sketch I gave in a previous
book:
‘Modernity’ means contingency. It points to a social order
which has turned from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the
pursuit of a projected future—of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control
over nature, new worlds of information. The process was accompanied by a
terrible emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. For without the anchorage
of tradition, without the imagined and vivid intricacies of kinship, without
the past living on (most often monstrously) in the detail of everyday life,
meaning became a scarce social commodity—if by ‘meaning’ we have in mind
agreed-on and instituted forms of value and understanding, orders implicit in
things, stories and images in which a culture is able to crystallize its sense
of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the realities of pain and
death. The phrase Max Weber borrowed from Schiller, ‘the disenchantment of the
world’—gloomy yet in my view exultant, with its promise of a disabused dwelling
in the world as it is—still sums up this side of modernity best . . .
‘Secularization’ is a nice technical word for this
blankness. It means specialization and abstraction, as part of the texture of
ordinary doings; social life driven by a calculus of large-scale statistical
chances, with everyone accepting or resenting a high level of risk; time and
space turned into variables in that same calculus, both of them saturated by
‘information’ and played with endlessly, monotonously, on nets and screens; the
de-skilling of everyday life (deference to experts and technicians in more and
more of the microstructure of the self); available, invasive, haunting
expertise; the chronic revision of everything in the light of ‘studies’.
[17]
This does no more than block in the outlines: descriptively,
there would be many things to add. But from the present point of view only two
motifs need developing. First, that the essence of modernity, from the
scripture-reading spice-merchant to the Harvard iPod banker sweating in the
gym, is a new kind of isolate obedient ‘individual’ with technical support to
match. The printed book, the spiritual exercise, coffee and Le Figaro, Time
Out, Twitter, tobacco (or its renunciation), the heaven of infinite apps.
Second, that all this apparatus is a kind or extension ofclockwork.
Individuality is held together by a fiction of full existence to come. Time Out
is always just round the corner. And while the deepest function of this new
chronology is to do work on what used to be called ‘subject positions’—keeping
the citizen-subject in a state of perpetual anticipation (and thus accepting
the pittance of subjectivity actually on offer)—it is at the level of politics
that the Great Look Forward is most a given.
♦
What, in the trajectory of Enlightenment—from Hobbes to
Nietzsche, say, or De Maistre to Kojève—were the distinctive strengths of the
right? A disabused view of human potential—no doubt always on the verge of
tipping over into a rehearsal of original sin. And (deriving from the first) an
abstention from futurity. Nietzsche as usual is the possible exception here,
but the interest of his occasional glimpses of a politics to come is, as I have
said, precisely their ironic moderacy.
Does the right still possess these strengths? I think not.
It dare not propose a view of human nature any longer (or if it does, it is
merely Augustinian, betraying the legacy of Hume, Vico, even Freud and
Heidegger); and slowly, inexorably, it too has given in to the great modern instruction
not to be backward-looking. The right has vacated the places, or tonalities,
that previously allowed it—to the left’s shame—to monopolize the real
description and critique of modernity, and find language for the proximity of
nothing. The left has no option but to try to take the empty seats.
♦
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will? Not any
more: because optimism is now a political tonality indissociable from the
promises of consumption. ‘Future’ exists only in the stock-exchange plural. Hope
is no longer given us for the sake of the hopeless: it has mutated into an
endless political and economic Micawberism.
♦
The tragic key makes many things possible and impossible.
But perhaps what is central for the left is that tragedy does not expect
something—something transfiguring—to turn up. The modern infantilization of
politics goes along with, and perhaps depends on, a constant orientation of
politics towards the future. Of course the orientation has become weak and
formulaic, and the patter of programmers and gene-splicers more inane. Walter
Benjamin would recoil in horror at the form his ‘weak messianism’ actually took
once the strong messiahs of the twentieth century went away. The Twitter utopia
joins hands with the Tea Party. But the direction of politics resists
anything the reality of economics—even outright immiseration making a
comeback—can throw at it. Politics, in the form we have it, is nothing without
a modernity constantly in the offing, at last about to realize itself: it has
no other telos, no other way to imagine things otherwise. The task of the
left is to provide one.
‘Presence of mind as a political category’, says Benjamin,
comes magnificently to life in these words of Turgot:
‘Before we have learned to deal with things in a given state, they have already
changed several times. Thus, we always find out too late about what has
happened. And therefore it can be said that politics is obliged to foresee the
present’.
[18]
♦
You may ask me, finally, what is the difference between the
kind of anti-utopian politics I am advocating and ‘reformism’ pure and simple.
The label does not scare me. The trouble with the great reformists within the
Internationals was that they shared with the revolutionaries a belief in the
essentially progressive, purgative, reconstructive destiny of the forces of
production. They thought the economy had it in it to remake the phenotype.
Therefore they thought ‘reform’ was a modest proposal, a pragmatic one. They
were wrong. (The essential and noblest form of socialist reformism—Bernstein’s—came
juddering to a halt in 1914, as the cycle of twentieth-century atavisms began.
As a socialist project, it proved unrevivable.) Reform, it transpires, is a
revolutionary demand. To move even the least distance out of the cycle of
horror and failure—to leave the kolkhozniks and water-boarders just a little
way behind—will entail a piece-by-piece, assumption-by-assumption dismantling
of the politics we have.
♦
To end by rephrasing the question posed earlier: the left in
the capitalist heartland has still to confront the fact that the
astonishing—statistically unprecedented, mind-boggling—great leap forward in
all measures of raw social and economic inequality over the past forty years
has led most polities, especially lately, to the right. The present form of the
politics of ressentiment—the egalitarianism of our time—is the Tea Party.
In what framework, then, could inequality and injustice be made again
the object of a politics? This is a question that, seriously posed, brings on
vertigo.
Maybe the beginning of an answer is to think of inequality
and injustice, as Moses Wall seemed to, as epiphenomena above all of permanent
warfare—of the permanent warfare state. And to frame a politics that says,
unequivocally: ‘Peace will never happen’. It is not in the nature of (human)
things that it should. But that recognition, for the left, only makes it the
more essential—the more revolutionary a programme—that the focal point, the
always recurring centre of politics, should be to contain the effects and extent
of warfare, and to try (the deepest revolutionary demand) to prize aggressivity
and territoriality apart from their nation-state form. Piece by piece; against
the tide; interminably. In the same spirit as a left which might focus again on
the problem of poverty—for of course there is no left without such a
prime commitment—all the more fiercely for having Jesus’s words about its
permanence ringing in their ears.
♦
The question of reformism versus revolution, to take that up
again, seems to me to have died the death as a genuine political question, as
opposed to a rhetorical flourish. To adapt Randolph Bourne’s great dictum,
extremisms—the extremisms we have—are now the health of the state.
The important fact in the core territories of capitalism at
present (and this at least applies to Asia and Latin America just as much as
Europe) is that no established political party or movement any longer even
pretends to offer a programme of ‘reform’. Reforming capitalism is tacitly
assumed to be impossible; what politicians agree on instead is revival,
resuscitation. Re-regulating the banks, in other words—returning, if we are
lucky, to the age of Nixon and Jean Monnet.
It surely goes without saying that a movement of opposition
of the kind I have been advocating, the moment it began to register even
limited successes, would call down the full crude fury of the state on its
head. The boundaries between political organizing and armed resistance would
dissolve—not of the left’s choosing, but as a simple matter of self-defence.
Imagine if a movement really began to put the question of permanent war economy
back on the table—in however limited a way, with however symbolic a set of
victories. Be assured that the brutality of the ‘kettle’ would be generalized.
The public-order helicopters would be on their way back from Bahrain. Jean
Charles de Menezes would have many brothers. But the question that follows
seems to me this: what are the circumstances in which the predictable
to-and-fro of state repression and left response could begin, however
tentatively, to de-legitimize the state’s preponderance of armed force? Not,
for sure, when the state can show itself collecting severed and shattered body
parts from the wreckage of Tube trains. Extremism, to repeat, is the state’s
ticket to ride.
♦
There will be no future, I am saying finally, without war,
poverty, Malthusian panic, tyranny, cruelty, classes, dead time, and all the
ills the flesh is heir to, because there will be no future; only a present
in which the left (always embattled and marginalized, always—proudly—a thing of
the past) struggles to assemble the ‘material for a society’ Nietzsche thought
had vanished from the earth. And this is a recipe for politics, not quietism—a
left that can look the world in the face.
[1] Carlo Levi, Christ
Stopped at Eboli [1945], London 1982, pp. 200, 178.
[2] Letter from
December 1895, quoted in William Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: A History
of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, Oxford 1991, p. 252.
[3] My thanks to
Iain Boal, who asked me for a first version of this essay for his conference,
‘The Luddites, without Condescension’ at Birkbeck, May 2011; and to audiences
there and at subsequent readings of this paper. I draw occasionally on material
used previously, and apologize to readers who come across things they already
know.
[4] A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean
Tragedy [1904], New York 1968, pp. 28–9.
[5] Bradley, Shakespearean
Tragedy, p. 29.
[6] Bradley, Shakespearean
Tragedy, p. 32.
[7] The actual
title is David Thomson, ed., The Era of Violence 1898–1945, Cambridge
1960. The overall editors of The New Cambridge Modern History, in which
Thomson’s volume appeared, quickly ordered a revised edition called The
Shifting Balance of World Forces.
[8] Benjamin, The
Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA 1999, p. 474, Convolute N9a, 6.
[9] Isaac
Penington, Divine Essays, London 1654, quoted in Christopher Hill, The
Experience of Defeat, New York 1984, p. 120.
[10] Moses Wall,
letter to Milton, 25 May 1659, quoted in David Masson, Life of Milton,
London 1858–80, vol. 5, pp. 602–3; quoted in part and discussed in Hill, Experience
of Defeat, pp. 53, 280–1, 327–8. Masson’s great Life is a good
companion to Bradley.
[11] On a deeper
level, Jean-Pierre Vernant’s argument for a connection between the rise of
‘de-individualized’ hoplite warfare, the generalizing of a culture of
competitiveness (agon), the move towards a conception of social ‘equality’ or isonomia (for
the citizen few), and the drive towards a numerical valuation of more and more
aspects of social life, remains fundamental. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, The
Origins of Greek Thought [1962], Ithaca 1982.
[12] Friedrich
Nietzsche, ‘Homer’s Contest’ (unpublished fragment from circa 1872), in
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge
2007, pp. 174–5.
[13] Josephine
Flood, The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People, Crows
Nest NSW 2007, pp. 122–3, following Stephen Webb, Palaeopathology
of Aboriginal Australians: Health and Disease across a Hunter-Gatherer
Continent, Cambridge 1995, pp. 188–216.
[14] William
Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ (1823), in Hazlitt, Selected Writings,
Harmondsworth 1970, pp. 397–8.
[15] Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882], trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York
1974, p. 304 (trans. slightly modified). I opt for the Gay Science‘s
formulation of a thought repeated constantly, but never so economically, in The
Will to Power.
[16] Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Will To Power [1901], trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale, New York 1967, section 55, pp. 38–9 (trans. slightly modified).
[17] Clark, Farewell
to an Idea, New Haven and London 1999, p. 7 (changed slightly).
[18] Benjamin, Arcades
Project, pp. 477–8, Convolute N12a, 1.
