Nostalgia and Desolation

A Left Without Progress

It must be admitted that the real developments of the Revolution did not in any way resemble the enchanting pictures which created the enthusiasm at its first adepts; but without those pictures would the Revolution have been victorious?

Georges Sorel

Our ancestors are more alive than us.

Brother Ali, Never Learn

The ideology of progress seeks to make our fractured (ir)reality unceasing. Both the rebel Georges Sorel and the mystic Walter Benjamin became preoccupied with what they saw as the Left’s existential hurdle. In Sorel’s case progressivism was a propaganda coup. “You must have trust,” it allowed the rulers to say, “for under our benevolent tutelage Line Went Up!” Suddenly the Left are framed not as people seeking to improve a society, but as boat-rockers, threatening to spoil the party.

Regarding progressive parties themselves, Benjamin believed they had conceded so much they were in danger of desaparecidos themselves. Firmly embedded (read: utterly compromised), these misguided radicals saw their purpose as carrying the torch rather than wielding it. Their hopes, mere projections of the ever-present, signalled their abandonment of history in the name of capital-h History.

Every successful revolutionary plumbed the compost, seeking from the vanquished obligation as much as guidance. Because understood dialectically, revolution is the attempt to salvage dawn from yesterday’s wreckage. To honour memory and seek justice for ancestors hard done by. How different all this is P’s devotees, casting their eyes upon the rubble only to mutter, “Look how better off we have it.”

This system, with its relentless logic of profit, is escaping all human control. It is time to slow the locomotive down, an out-of-control locomotive hurtling towards the abyss.

Pope Francis

Sustenance and purpose can be found in tradition, the very reason Benjamin considered it so subversive. It is also why progressive ideology, supercharged in its capitalist mode, wages a war on it and all other “irrationalities”.

The idea that capitalist imperialism is about building something — anything at all — where before ignorance and desert reigned is a self-serving fantasy. It destroys worlds (as it will the…), leaving blood, plaster and a contrived silence in its wake.

Surrealism, Dada, Cubism. Peculiarly, the crisis found an enemy worthy of it in the Modernists. Having witnessed the globe-stomping march of Empire, these misfits cut themselves on broken glass and aloft, angling it just so, announced: Brothers, ruin is not limited to the underbelly. Despite all those unifying concepts — God, Civilisation and the Absolute — they knew the modern world to be anything but unified. Those old world certainties were little but remnants, and beyond all one could perceive were fractures (becoming fractious). Each appeared to be retreating into his own world.

Benjamin’s colleague Max Horkheimer came to describe modern rationality itself as subjective. Contrasted with the objective, cohesive and multi-layered reason of other periods — be it theological, scholastic, or otherwise whole and purposeful — this subjective rationality is one dimensional. There is no impersonal criteria here, for each comes to determine his moral ends. It is a conceptual hammer, and Horkheimer admits it is sometimes necessary. But taken to an extreme, it fails to see beyond the destructive act. Meaning that as God, Culture and any workable alternative went tumbling, so too did potential. What is Good? resulting in, What is good for me?

There is an assumption deep at the heart of the Enlightenment project, most explicit in the populariser Tom Paine, that if everyone submitted themselves to their own capacity to reason an organic “common sense” would emerge. Once liberated from the fetters of Church, State and philosopher-king, each and everyone would find their own way to the truth: free speech, free trade, secularism and unbridled individualism? But of course. From bloody discord, Reason would compose the Brotherhood of Man; all freed to think alike.

Collapse. With the disappearance of buttressing ethical frameworks, that warning against treating men as means was truly void (a frankly lame “imperative” cast amongst the torrents of a broken dam). Alongside Adorno, Horkheimer explained that this purely instrumental rationality constitutes “the court of judgement of calculation, which adjusts the world for the ends of self-preservation and recognises no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation.”

In the enlightened schema, Man — or in any case other men — had gone the way of Nature. Millions of free-thinkers, often in opposition to crusty old men of the cloth, struggled by reason alone to explain why inconvenient people were different from the soulless husks which daily end up on our dinner plates.

The Marquis De Sade spoke for the spirit of the age, confessing from the very heights of Enlightenment, “it seemed to me that the whole world should give way to my caprices and that it was only necessary to form them for them to be satisfied.” Sade’s ejaculations, on page and elsewhere, led Christopher Lasch to brand the French deviant our moment’s prophet.

[He] defended unlimited self-indulgence as the logical culmination of the revolution in property relations — the only way to attain revolutionary brotherhood in its purest form. By regressing in his writings to the most primitive level of fantasy, Sade uncannily glimpsed the whole subsequent development of personal life under capitalism, ending not in revolutionary brotherhood but in a society of siblings that had outlived and repudiated its revolutionary origins.

Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, became absolutely anonymous and interchangeable.

All this resulted in “the glorification of the individual, in his annihilation.” Every stricture and tradition fell under the penetrating gaze of subjective reason, including the ground from which it emerged. This annihilation was not confined to the metaphorical, as Lasch was acutely aware: what is debased by mind will suffer the extremities.

Modern civilisation remains, above all, an excellent knackery for the two-legged beast.

— Not so! retorts the Progressive and his hard-nosed ally, the Liberal. For them, this civilisation is a miracle, an unreserved triumph that has abolished want to such an extent it has to be constantly manufactured. More importantly, through its appendages of steel and flesh, Civilisation allows them to vicariously “do good” in the face of an abhorrent universe. Just look at the inner city, or sub-Saharan Africa! …Afghanistan? (There are, too, those on the Left who live according to the delusion that this locomotive — this fabrication of Mammon, this bloated megamachine — if allowed to keep chugging, will hand them the wheel.) They do not see, and even pessimistic thinkers have been known to fall short. While critiquing the recruitment of Conrad by the Dark Mountain Project, a group of radical environmentalists, John Gray writes:

But even though civilisation is indelibly flawed, that does not mean it deserves to be destroyed; on the contrary, Conrad was convinced civilisation must be defended with unyielding determination. In reality, the alternative — a raw version of which he witnessed in King Leopold’s private fiefdom in the Belgian Congo — is madness and unrestrained violence, a state that can reasonably be described as barbarism.

Elsewhere the Establishment’s favourite anti-establishmentarian extrapolates. In keeping with the ancient view, he describes the relation between civilisation and barbarism as cyclical — and inescapable. Civilisation has a life cycle and, once the senators and merchants bow out, barbarism dominates.

But this is simple-minded. Modern civilisation brought us unprecedented levels of barbarity, making neat divisions illusory. Leopold’s government deployed the same rhetoric and methods which characterised every other European pursuit of uplift, whether the subjectified were Apache or Zulu.

From the missionary’s viewpoint, dismembering a child’s arm without anaesthetic was an education in civilisation. How else would the young rubber planter have the intricacies of the natural order so convincingly — and efficiently — imprinted? (Top-dog position belonging to tomato-faced lowlanders.) How else could the difficult task of Inevitably be achieved? In a few short years civilisation claimed ten million Congolese lives, and for some reason we all stopped counting.

None other than John Gray presented this counter interpretation. Reflecting once more on Conrad’s broadside, in The Silence of Animals,

When Conrad used his experiences of the Congo in Heart of Darkness (1899), he was not telling a story of barbarism in faraway places. The narrator tells the tale on a yacht moored in the Thames estuary: barbarism is not a primitive form of life, Conrad is intimating, but a pathological development of civilisation.

The Enlightenment did away with the frontier, and not just physically. All of its defining concepts hint at eternity, a progress without end. With such limits (or scruples) swept away, it was only a matter of time that what was wrought abroad would make its way home: Barbarism begins, as it must end, here.

As such Fascism may be read, at least partly, as the means and logic of imperialism applied to the “core” nations themselves (“Previously only the poor and savages had been exposed to the untrammelled force of the capitalist elements”). The methods developed ravaging the Orient, Indian Country and the Dark Continent redeployed, with the added vigour of men privy to ideal’s unveiled form. The legions of the Free could only stand by as their “modest hunting ground shrunk down to the unified cosmos, [where] nothing exists but prey” (also Adorkheimer). Because in this unbounded universe worlds are lost. Where interdependence: shared enmity. Where once shelter: universal storm. In this bitter mass, every interaction is tinged by fear; the figurative stranger being just another sop about to enter your cone of fire.

The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community.

Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against The Human Race

The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression. Once this, the central claim of Dialectic of Enlightenment has been imbibed, it becomes all too apparent why Humanity’s inauguration coincided with the phenomenon of “rootless men”. Labelled such by Arendt, this cobbling together of the chronically unemployed, listless and ill-educated became totalitarianism’s machinery. From Iberia to the heart of the Reich and Romania further east, millions pledged themselves to a mad dictator, working spittle into Law. And for their endless debasement, they were told they belong.

In his book about Marxism’s response to the Holocaust, Enzo Traverso re-emphasizes the relative newness of Fascism. Rather than being an aberration, “a regression” into feudal depravity, or even pre-civilised savagery, it was a distinctly modern horror. Beside the psychological factors, the institutions which made the Shoah possible — the “barracks, penitentiary, slaughterhouse, factory and bureaucratically rational administration” — were all prefigured by capitalism. And eugenics, far from being a Nazi peculiarity, was argued for by a number of progressives. In the pre-war period one could turn to not Beveridge, Shaw or the Huxleys for dissent, but to old sticks-in-the-mud like Chesterton. (Fabian’s ghouls and the dunderheads over at the New Statesman have yet to come to terms with this episode, likely possessing similar policy papers just weeks away from the printers.)

The technological aspect returns us to the unsettling questions raised by Marx himself, in Fragment on Machines. Are humans truly the masters of their machines? Or are we becoming determined by them?

History, so full of life that progress was too mechanistic for it…

Adorno

Following Napoleon’s defeat, a rule was honoured among Europe’s wartime leaders: civilian populations are to be kept off-limits. (The Parisians of 1871 notably exempted.) With the Second World War and the mass production of bomber aircraft, any such “law” had been quickly dissolved. Europe’s Civil War resulted in over 20 million civilian deaths, many in cities. It was suggested by Benjamin’s cousin Günther Anders (coincidentally Arendt’s first husband), that as urban bombardment became technically possible, it was only a matter of time before it became politically feasible. Much like how the invention of the atom bomb triggered rational, intelligent and oh-so-civil discussions about the obliteration of entire hemispheres. The social realm was playing catch-up with the increasingly apocalyptic advancements in technics. To such extremes Anders argued that, rather than any category of person, technology has become the subject of history. Products of our creation proving both better at accumulating information and projecting discipline, with an ever expanding capability to overcome the preferences of meat.

It is in Anders that we can also find an alternative interpretation of the modern world to that of the great sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman. For the latter modernity’s horizon was Utopia. In his telling, this encouraged groups, possessed by ideas of perfection, to become murderous “gardeners”, who went about pruning the less than ideal. But Anders knew modern progressivism strove further, toward the Infinite: eternal progression with a direction, but without an aim. This is exactly what makes the permanent revolution of the bourgeoisie — or we should say, of their tools — so perilous. Progress can never be sated; not, it turns out, even theoretically.

The perpetuation of history as such is nothing more than the perpetuation of a particular historical situation, namely that of capitalism, which has no desire to reach its end. It stabilises itself as movement to prevent movement toward true stabilisation. It adorns itself with the curve of the asymptote, because it is only ever here inasmuch as it does not arrive. Arrive, that is, at the reconciliation of the contradictions it itself created.

Anders

For many however, Utopia might break this deadlock. To extrapolate: for the utopians of the Left, and all sides have some version, our demand is at once simple and presently impossible. It is a desire for a collectivity which can determine itself, beyond the pitiless logos of machinery and established prejudice. Above all we seek an order where spontaneity might flourish, both rightly and wrongly interpreted as a contradiction in the here and now. Somewhere where potentiality need not compel. (Machinic guidelines would be both ineffectual and, conceptually, no different to what we endure. Nothing salts the earth quite like specificity.)

Regardless, we are told, “don’t those alternatives belong to the lost and damned? Surely that is the lesson of the 20th century?” Reflecting on this, the art and social critic TJ Clark poured scorn on the idea that a Left hogtied to the present could be anything but reformist (although distancing himself from the word):

…Because there will be no future; only a present in which the left (always embattled and marginalised, 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.

I agree with much Clark has to say, but his counsel — in practical terms, a resignation to capitalism’s death drive — will not do. As he readily admits, this locomotive’s trajectory will only bring more “war, poverty, Malthusian panic, tyranny, cruelty, classes,” and “dead time.” An overly honest evaluation must also say: ecological devastation, species death, overflowing seas, genocide and, more than likely, nuclear holocaust. The human species (let alone the others subject to the geological epoch to which it lends its name) can not afford to keep on keeping on.

Oddly for a Left-Nietzschean, Clark does not seem to realise where the master’s contemptible nihilism resides today: in incrementalism — this progressivism, which is truly presentism.

So perhaps in response the Left should strive, if not to be God-Builders in the vein of Bogdanov or Lunacharsky, then to be Romantics of the head. To accept that above all people are moved by sentiment, and it is therefore necessary to tell stories which might reconnect shattered lives with existences lost. “You are Diggers, free Catalonia, Red Vienna. Will and have been better. Spartacus. Foco. Cheyenne.” And at the precise moment the Sun becomes visible through the edifice, the hopes of the long-gone must reply.

The genuine picture may be old, but the genuine thought is new. It is of the present. This present may be meagre, granted. But no matter what it is like, one must firmly take it by the horns to be able to consult the past. It is the bull whose blood must fill the pit if the shades of the departed are to appear at its edge.

Benjamin

We are the ones who haunt.