The Spectre of Europe is Haunting
Incommensurable notes on ‘unbehagen’ *&* ‘der kultur’: the undertow, ghosts, dead, life, acceleration, crash. (In beginning attempting a social explanation of the effects of the past on the present)
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In attempting a social explanation of the effects of the past on the present, we must deal with causality, space-time and sequence, and epistemology. Whether as history, sociology, social theory, critical theory, this grappling with the meta-level issues of how stuff happens, how and why the order of things matters, and how we know the past, has must be – and has been – undertaken by every serious thinker in these fields, from Nietzsche to Foucault, Aron to Koselleck.
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"All periods in which values decline are kitsch periods. The last days of the Roman empire produced kitsch and the present period, which is as it were the last stage of the process of the disintegration of the medieval concept of the world, cannot but be represented by aesthetic 'evil’. Ages which are hallmarked by a definite loss of values are in fact based on 'evil’ and the fear of evil* and any art which is intended to express such an age adequately must also be an expression of the 'evil’ at work in it" (Hermann Broch).
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In a recent discussion with a friend, one of the points that I find myself drawn back to, but that I was unable to nail at the time, is this:
the characters of the present are creatures of the past.
This becomes evermore complicated when characters emerge out of deep, complex political cultures to whose rules they remain inclined toward; yet by their agency, they act upon us all, meaning
the characters of our (political) present are creatures of their (formative) past.
The autocrat partakes of our lives.
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e.g.: Vladimir Putin is utterly a creature of the Dresden Stasi office and KGB work in the 1980s, then; the St Petersberg judo scene, waterfront, and post USSR political ‘fixing’ of the 1990s – and how the KGB became the SVR/FSB but maintained its structure of obshchak, even as its members become avatars of the Putin mafia state. Yet ‘now’ in 2022, he is presiding over a conflict in Ukraine whose global societal-economic effects will most likely hit developing countries hardest over the next two years, by way of increased fuel and USD debt costs, and grain costs and scarcity.
For social explanation: what does laundering weapons and money to ‘procure’ US-made computers and Japanese semiconductors for Robotron in the 80s have to do with Nigerian state’s ability to service its 2020s debts to global finance capital; what does judo have to do with oligarchs? We can run a line through all these ‘points’ via the proper name of Vladimir Putin, but it is difficult to convey Putin as an operator in his mafia state without understanding him as fundamentally a character shaped by his generational-cultural-professional life experiences. This is no less the case for Xi Xinping, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, &c – and ourselves, with less prominence and agency in our political systems. We are, all of us, in differing ways and degrees all creatures of our formative experiences: the games we play, and how we play them, are profoundly of those of decades past.
(It is interesting to me that, with the exception of Hitler, dictators never seem to kill themselves: in fact, what characterised Mugabe and what characterises Murdoch, is that they seem like they will never die)
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Marx gave this thought (of the weight of the past on the present) some beautiful thought. By the time of Capital (1867, 1885, 1984), Marx’ thought is generally regarded as an economism – see note below – but as some of you will know, 1852’s 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte opens with the following very famous consideration of the role of spectres/geist(s) on past-present-future:
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce…*
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language…
…unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk…”.
*Interestingly Paxton (in his good book on fascism) says it’s more the opposite: first farce (Beer Hall Putsch), then tragedy (1933).
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In 1942, Benjamin intensified Marx’ line of thought further:
“…In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”.
Googled (read aloud in blowhard American male voice): “His essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has been read by legions of university students; but the last major work verifiably his, an essay entitled "Theses on the Philosophy of History" written just months before he died, represents something more important: one of the most insightful analyses of the failure of Marxism ever produced. Seen by enthusiasts as a kind of latterday Rimbaud, a genius whose work was submerged amid the noise of his capitalist surroundings, and whose life was cut short, Benjamin today—make no mistake—is a superstar. An Amazon search for his name calls up 304 titles—including a memoir by Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. And central to his cult among leftist academics is his suicide. Benjamin died at a hotel in the Catalan town of Portbou in late September 1940, having just crossed the Pyrenees on foot from France with several companions. A manuscript he reportedly carried with him to the end has disappeared. Thus, his death—in Franco’s Spain, as he fled the Nazi invasion of France—is held to epitomize the destruction of the modern intellect by fascism. Yet a careful analysis of the evidence points toward a different conclusion—that Walter Benjamin was murdered by Soviet agents”.
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Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
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Orthodox Marxist thought* insists on economic determination ‘in the last instance’, wherein the capitalist mode of production ‘sets’ the deep structure or base of all social relations, setting in motion the fundamentally contradictory relation between labour and capital that comprises the dialectic driving history: this ‘means’ that the conflicts of society are behavioural-surface effects of capital and its materialities, unfolding in-and-as a mode of production whose forces and classes confront one another dialectically. So the (capitalist) mode of production (re)produces a (capitalist) mode of existence *and its crisis*, for it is riven with *its* social relations, political conflicts, cultural contradictions, and institutions. All these latter are downstream, epiphenomena of a reality whose fundamental contours and constraints are (to boomerang back to the base) those of an economy derived from the mode of production. For orthodox Marxists, how we live and what we can hope for now, this is fundamentally set by capital; the economy, characterised by the struggle between classes, between labour and capital, comprises the fundamental conflict of society, the real conflict of our life in common.
What this account gives its adherents, above all, is a key to the motor of history, and a meaningful way of explaining modernity in terms of production that redounds to class struggle as a way of countering exploitation, critiquing and understanding the limits of liberalism, and practising an engaged politics oriented toward socialism, as a way of overcoming alienation, achieving progress, and re-aligning ‘man’ with ‘his’ species being; a world beyond scarcity, hierarchy, rentiers, and all the authorities brought in to enforce this state of affairs as real and necessary.
For orthodox Marxists, this perennially relegates other struggles to secondary or tertiary places, whether over race, nation, gender, values, identity, ecology, the state, and institutions.
Normatively, this comes back as a pushback in conversation that ‘means’ that ‘we’ ‘ought’ to regard these societal conflicts – eg those of race, sex-gender-patriarchy, identity politics, human rights, and national belonging – as beside-the-point sideshows or even misleading and mystifying distractions from the ‘real battle’ that a politics cognisant of the logic of history and its conflictual motor should be focusing on and the real enemy we should be overthrowing: capital and its avatars. I hear this play out many times across the 2010s in podcasts between US/North Atlantic democratic socialists, and ‘woke-ish’ left liberals. More broadly, notwithstanding their critical power, one need only look closely at how orthodox Marxist explanations have tried to explain Nazism and Stalinism, apartheid and civil rights, feminism and queer politics, and dealt with later critiques of orthordox Marxism insisting on (variously) the causal-agentic roles of values, culture, institutions and psychosociality, to see the limits here.
And moreover, something is lost in the economism. Orthodox Marxism forever ghosting the humanist Marx of the 1840s and 1850s. I am hardly the first to notice this.
*but who is an orthodox Marxist? I’m not sure. Local Socialist Alliance people seem ‘beneath’ Marxism in their theorerical grasp; no one follows Kautsky and Lenin now, do they (some do, yes); here, it’s more like a gedankenbild (ideal type)
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In the parallel world of Freudian drive theory (or is it an underworld?), culture is downstream of drives: ‘the social’ and its fruits – kultur and civilisation; guilt-ridden, well-organised repressive ‘reality’ – are a sublimation of the ‘antisocial sociability’ of a creature whose fundamental orientation is toward the satisfaction of their libidinal strivings: toward unity-and-release in sex, toward destruction-and-dispersion. Man is a creature seeking to squirt like a flamethrower and burst like fireworks.
It's silly, no?
When a rocket ship explodes and everybody still wants to fly
But some say a man ain't happy unless a man truly dies
Oh why?
In his smooth-as-usual rendition, less allusive than Prince’s just above, Zweig gives his own rendition-defence of Freud’s account.
“I often mentioned the horrors of Hitler’s world and the war in those conversations with Freud. As a humane man, he was deeply distressed by that terrible outbreak of bestiality, but as a thinker he was not at all surprised. He had always been considered a pessimist, he said, because he denied the supremacy of culture over our instinctive drives, and current events confirmed in the most dreadful way – not that he was proud of it – his opinion that it is impossible to root the elemental, barbaric destructive drive out of the human psyche. Perhaps, he said, some means of at least suppressing such instincts in the communal life of nations might be found in centuries yet to come, but they would remain ineradicable forces in daily life and fundamental human nature, and maybe they were necessary to maintain a vital tension” (Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 450).
To this reader, it’s interesting that Zweig, who had been one of Europe’s most popular authors in the 1920s, a man of the world, a committed pacifist and humanist in correspondence with Romain Rolland (like Freud, and see back to this earlier post), and seemed to be a creature of levity (even, at times, a bit of a lightweight) should dive into the dark comfort of destructiveness in the death drive explanation – not long before committing suicide with his wife.
Vexingly, they did this in Brazil, after moving there to start a new life, in the new world, the country of the future.
It's of course impossible to know other minds and really understand what motivated Zweig, although we do have his suicide note. The section translated into English (I might ask a couple of my German-speaking friends if they feel like translating it), condenses to the following:
“the world of my own language sank and was lost to me
and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.
my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless.
I, who am most impatient, go before them.”
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Side by side with this, I return to Marx’ impatience with his century, a century earlier, writing from the land of the past and war (Europe), not the land of the future and plenty (Brazil).
(in contrast to Cromwell, the Jacobins, and 1848)… “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase”.
How can one take one’s poetry from the future?
…and what if one took one’s poetry from the Futurists?
“6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman”.
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I’m back with the creatures of the past in the present.
Loewald:
“The transference neurosis, in the technical sense of the establishment and resolution of it in the analytic process, is due to the blood of recognition which the patient's unconscious is given to taste—so that the old ghosts may reawaken to life. Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost-life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow-life. Transference is pathological in so far as the unconscious is a crowd of ghosts, and this is the beginning of the transference neurosis in analysis: ghosts of the unconscious, imprisoned by defences but haunting the patient in the dark of his defences and symptoms, are allowed to taste blood, are let loose. In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects".
How can we turn ghosts into ancestors?
Only with hope in a process, a rational faith in some future?