No one has ever managed to make the screaming stop

Agnosticism, Dialectics and Memory

Er trug eine Aufschrift mit sehr kleinen Buchstaben, der Reisende musste, um sie zu lesen, niederknien. Sie lautete: „Hier ruht der alte Kommandant. Seine Anhänger, die jetzt keinen Namen tragen dürfen, haben ihm das Grab gegraben und den Stein gesetzt. Es besteht eine Prophezeiung, dass der Kommandant nach einer bestimmten Anzahl von Jahren auferstehen und aus diesem Hause seine Anhänger zur Wiedereroberung der Kolonie führen wird. Glaubet und wartet!"

There was an inscription on it in very small letters, the explorer had to kneel down to read it. This was what it said: "Here rests the old Commandant. His adherents, who now must be nameless, have dug this grave and set up this stone. There is a prophecy that after a certain number of years the Commandant will rise again and lead his adherents from this house to recover the colony. Have faith and wait!"

Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir

Max Beckmann, Die Nacht

Last week I had some thoughts in response to

Secret Squirrel

. This week I still haven't written up the second half, but have few the miscellaneous thoughts also inspired by the arboreal rodent conversations and some political observations over the last decade or so. I referred to myself as left agnostic last time, which I think is basically correct despite various skepticisms, despite having referred to my position as "post left" at least once. It seems to me that to truly be post-left one has to be totally cynical about the chances of reform or revolution, absolutely convinced that there is at bottom no validity to any such scheme besides the will-to-power of various quasi hereditary metropolitan elites draping themselves in the colors of the oppressed, and I'm just not sure. I certainly have my complaints about the left, but that’s probably a little too cynical for me.

When I talk about the left I have a habit of using religious language, terminology like belief etc that my Marxist friends are always objecting to. They tell me “It’s a science, don’t you see?” Being in the process of finally making my way through the full Das Kapital, I can understand finally what they mean by “scientific.¹” On the other hand after a century and change of what can only be described as disappointment or failure, I think a certain skepticism, and the language of faith or belief seems not unwarranted. Henri Lefebvre has a passage on Marx in a 1975 book I’ve been reading which seems appropriate for this sort of agnosticism, although he was of course a believer throughout his long, long life.

Marx’s thought may today play a similar role as does Newton’s physics in relation to modern physics, the physics of relativity, nuclear energy, atoms and molecules: a staging post for going further, a truth at a certain level, a date -in a word, a moment -which prohibits, on the one hand, dogmatism, ‘Marxist’ rhetoric, and on the other, presumptuous discourse on the death of Marx and Marxism.

I don't know that I have it in me to write the kind of essay on the five year anniversary of the late spring-summer unrest of 2020 that particular moment deserves. it's become one of those points in history where memory Rashomon-like seems to fragment, and truth either eludes or proves itself only to have ever been a convenient fiction, depending on your epistemological tastes. For much of the left that period was one of the great ruptures, like May 68 or the Paris Commune, where for a brief shining moment a gap appears in Capitalist Realism & a better world is visible through a glass darkly. For the right and much of the post-left the comparison is closer to Mao's cultural revolution: a cynical collusion between the urban rabble and the highest elites to terrorize the middle and defeat their political enemies under the auspices of a sham revolution.² The center on the other hand pretends that nothing at all took place between us May 26th 2020 & February or so of 2022.

Somehow everything to do with that summer appears to have been forgotten, regardless of whom it would embarrass, and there was plenty to go around, from the much-romanticized Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle apparently recreating the sort of lethal shooting by security forces which precipitated the nationwide unrest to the frightening use of federal forces in Portland that summer. There has been a wholesale forgetting of just how much we were in the "cool zone" for much of the middle and latter parts of that year. The pandemic is part of this of course, both instigator for the unrest and one suspects partly why it has been forgotten (if I understood Lacan better I’d add some sort of murmuring about the Real here, but I don’t at the moment.)

Addison Del Mastro

had a post last year which argued-I thought convincingly-that part of the omnipresent malaise which characterized the Biden era had to do with the disjunct between this impulse to forget and the sheer social and economic disruption, not to mention the human cost, of the pandemic.

The fact is, while we’re not in a recession or even a particularly weak economy, we really are in a strange and different moment. One million people are dead. Yes, many of them were in nursing homes or hospice and didn’t have all that much time left. Many, however, were frail but basically healthy people. Many still worked, or volunteered, or participated in their local communities in some way. And many were much younger. Many were prime-age workers. Many left behind children. Many prime-age workers lost, or had to care for, a parent. They quit or changed jobs or moved.

As

Benjamin Dueholm

pointed out in a reply to the note which inspired this digression, it certainly doesn’t help that in retrospect all of this was basically spun out of a mix of desperation, cabin fever & mass hysteria. I find it hard to get back to the-yes, arguably somewhat hysterical headspace of 2016-2021- which is frankly odd considering how many of the fears of that moment have been more or less justified in the last few months.

At the same time it is difficult not to find one's positions changed somewhat. For a while after 2021 I was properly disillusioned by the left, in the way so many were. I frankly felt manipulated, hoodwinked etc, all the typical sort of cliches one uses when they are no longer so sure as they had been at one time. The difference was that instead of getting jazzed up about purported disparities in IQ between the races or fantasizing about going Travis Bickle on disruptive vagrants in the subway or on the streets, I simply became very interested by a previous generation of person who had become disillusioned by the left, figures like Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson.³ That carried me through to around the time I started this blog, but still, one's perspectives will be changed. The shift to the right of the American financial elite in and around last year’s election, followed by the attempt to will a general shift to the right in the culture, seemingly motivated in part by anger about the FTC under Lina Kahn’s more aggressive anti-trust policies, changes the calculus a bit, to say the least. Still, I think “agnostic” continues to be the right word.

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Works cited, mentioned etc

Althusser, Louis, Étienne Balibar, and David Fernbach. Reading capital: The Complete Edition. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2016.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York, NY: Free Press, 1992.

Lasch, Christopher. The new radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The intellectual as a social type. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Lefebvre, Henri. Dialectical materialism. Translated by John Sturrock. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Lefebvre, Henri. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or the Realm of Shadows. Translated by David Fernbach. London, EG: Verso, 2020.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1990.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1966.

1. Over the last few months I’ve been making my way through two massive 19th century German philosophical tomes, the other being Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will & Representation. In both cases I was shocked by the legibility and ease with which Marx and Schopenhauer survey the proverbially difficult and sometimes boring terrain of classical German philosophy and economics. I probably got a better sense of Kant reading WAWR than in anything actually by Kant, and I found Kapital a surprisingly breezy read once those difficult early chapters on the commodity form are cleared.

2. I understand why the post-left feels the way it does about 2020, as touched on here. As much as people may frame things differently now, there really was an atmosphere of something inchoately revolutionary-seeming, and the way all that energy culminated in the recrudescence of the pre-2016 status quo in the gerontocratic person of Joe Biden was somewhat disenchanting even if one initially had no particular complaint about the incoming administration. On the other hand- although with the caveat that I am not really qualified to discus postwar European history in anything but very general terms-my understanding is that this is also basically what happened in 1968, with the added insult that the French left proceeded to lose the subsequent elections.

3. Of course the obvious problem with idolizing the New York intellectuals like this is that they were essentially at best a loyal opposition for the American regime at midcentury, and while one could certainly make worse missteps, it nonetheless renders them less than ideal role models for one mostly opposed to foreign policy misadventures and in favor of keeping great power saber-rattling that risks blowing the world up to a minimum.*

*There is a fraught conversation of course to be had about the difference between keeping that risk to a minimum and simply rolling over and acquiescing to the territorial ambitions of this or that revanchist power. One doesn’t want to be too cowed by sympathy or fear of being perceived as weak-remember for instance, that the neocons loved comparing things, sometimes ridiculously minor things, to Neville Chamberlain giving up Czechoslovakia, but at the same time there should probably be a line somewhere.