Mussolini's rhetoric, Trump's threat

 

In 1963, Jean-Pierre Faye (who latter became known for his reading of the fascist unconscious in Heidegger), published an article that extended the front, so to speak, of Cold War politics. Entitled Totalitarian Language, Fascist and Nazi, Faye tried to turn the discourse of totalitarianism, heavily influenced in that period by Arendt, in a historicist direction.

The assumption, in 1963, was that “totalitarian” was always a denigrating term. It came, so to speak, outside of totalitarian ensembles, and illuminated them critically. This was the liberal dogma.

But Faye found this move historically false. As he shows, the term did not originate outside of fascism as a term of critique, but rather inside it.

In fact, in Italy, as he puts it in a sidenote, totalitaria originated in commerce as a term to describe representatives of stockholders at business meetings. The 100 percent of stockholders were the totalitaria represented. In the political context, however, it appears first in a speech Mussolini gave at the Theater of Augustus in Rome on June 22, 1925, addressing the delegates of the Partito Nazionale Fascist. In Faye’s account, the discourse, as reported in the papers (with some variants) contained a key phrase: “what is called our ferocious totalitarian Will will be pursued with ever more ferocity!”

I should point out that, in what I call fascitude, the appropriation of fascist rhetoric and gestures, Mussolini’s speeches have definitely been culled by the speechwriters and consultants around Trump and Vance.  Trump has gone from the Vegas ratpack rhetoric of his campaign in 2016 to the dull thump thump thump that propels his aging masculinist oratory of today. His speeches now combine program and threat, in which the program exists, ultimately, only to carry out the threat: it is the death-drive as political legitimation, and it goes down like honey in the era best represented by a thousand zombie apocalypse films.

But I digress.

Faye points to the reception of the speech. Le Popolo d’Italia of June 23 explained to its readers that “fascism will take up once again the march of Revolution, deciding upon the full, totalitarian and inexhorable conquest of all the powers and organs of the State.” In the even more fascist Idea nazionale, a phrase is used that Faye underlines: “la stressa affirmazine totalitarian” – which is “an affirmation that is a passion and faith before it is a political proposition.” The IN goes on to explain why this is incomprehensible to the centrists even more than it is to the socialists or people on the left: “because our adversaries – not the socialists, but the demo-liberals – are, as a result of their whole mentality, disposed not to be [in] themselves, but to welcome the words of the other, even if the word is destruction, as it is with the socialists.”

The question that keeps being asked today is whether Trump is a fascist. I don’t know – but I do know the centrist response to Trump is classically  ineffectual centrism, a legalistic mindset that can’t comprehend that a whole policy can be animated simply in order to carry out a threat. The threat, in other words, is the social psychological motive – the program is the afterthought. By this logic, ferocious totalitarianism, or Trump’s “swift and unrelenting” approach amount to the same kind of political formation.

TBC

Notes of an old cis- white man on identity and projection

 

                         

                                                       1

Benjamin, during the period in which he was working on Baroque Drama, jotted down some observations about identity and philosophy. “The principle of identity is expressed “a is a”, not “a remains a”. It does not express the equality of two spatially or temporally different stages of a. But also, it cannot express the identity in general of a spatial or temporal thing, then every such identification would presuppose identity. The ‘a’ whose identity is expressed in the relation of identity is thus something beyond space and time.” (GW VI 28)

Locke tried to make the transition from “is” to “remains” without an appeal to substance. In doing so, he released the power of identification – and the enigma of the process of identification. In a sense, Locke not only provides us with a code to the ideology of early capitalism, but also, unwittingly, with the dialectic that undermines it.

As Pierre Force has noted, Rousseau, in The Second Discourse, devises a new use for the term, identity – he makes it into a process of projection, and thus is the first to use  “identification” in the psychological sense that became part of the ordinary language of the second half of the twentieth century.

 

“Even should it be true that commiseration is only a feeling that puts us in the

position of him who suffers – a feeling that is obscure and lively in Savage man,

developed but weak in Civilized man – what would this idea matter to the truth

of what I say, except to give it more force? In fact, commiseration will be all the

more energetic as the Observing animal identifies himself more intimately with

the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this identification must have been

infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning.”

 

The issue of personal identity travels to France by way of Locke’s translators and readers – such as Condillac. But Rousseau’s idea of an identifying self is a definite marker, an intersigne on the way to understanding character under capitalism. That is, to understanding how character can unfold itself in seemingly disparate semantic segments to occupy a certain space of symbols and capacities in those societies that we name by using a temporal adjective as a noun for a condition – modern – as if the modern had been hived off a world clock and existed in a new framework altogether. Personal identity is not only consistent with the Lockian principles of property and self-interest, but also with the kind of identification that, as Rousseau saw, makes the discourse of self-interest, in a sense, impossible. Rousseau’s discovery is made in spite of Locke, but we can see it working its way through that English plain prose as he comes to terms with the seemingly esoteric problems posed by imagining metempsychosis.  Just as selfishness can become an acid that so dissolves the self that one is left with an absolute Berkeleyian idealism, personal identity inevitably begins to pose the problem of the maker of persons, the cause, the projector. When the critics of modernity, operating under the unconscious conviction that they live in the modern, face this bifurcation, they tend to make a temporal move – to place those schemas of identification under the rubric of the pre-modern, as though the pre-modern was some head on, self evident phase before the modern – rather than the product of the later. But I propose that viewing the pre-modern as something generated within modernity, and not as a byproduct but as a shadow and double, an emergent and undeniable force in the matrix. 

2.

"Art of Projection (Projektionskunst) – the exhibition of a proportional extended visible image, which with the help of a magic lantern or of recent projection instruments is thrown as the magnification of certain objects on a white surface" - Meyer’s Conversation Lexicon of 1908

“We get behind the demons, as it were, when we recognize them as projections of hostile feelings, which the survivors cherish against the dead.”

“The process completes itself rather through a particular psychic mechanism, that we are used to calling “projection” in psychoanalysis. The hostility, of which one knows nothing and wants to know nothing, has been thrown out of the inner sphere of perceptions [inneren Wharnehmung] into the outer world, by which one releases its from one’s own person and shoves it off on another person. Not we, the survivors, are glad that we are free of the dead one; no, we mourn him, but he has, curiously enough, become an evil demon, to whom our bad luck is pleasing, and who seeks to bring us into the realm of death. The survivors must now defend themselves against the evil fiend…” – Freud (my translation)

Oh the monsters! Under the opera. Under the pornographic novel. Under the constitutions. And under the monsters, the great grind of life in the old order, on the great estates – taxes and labor duties without end in Hungary, Moldavia, Wallachia, Poland… Slavery in Santo Domingo., famine in Bengal…

Freud takes the term from Bleuler, seizes it in a leonine pounce. For here, on the surface, in the shimmer of everyday life of verbal slips, infantile dirty jokes, the herky jerky motion of trams, office politics and thick, thick drapes, here it is that you find the denials, the “I hate to say this”, the “I don’t mean to criticize” – the I don’t mean in general. The demiurge unconscious stirs. Is it awake or asleep?

For Freud, the demons are a projection-creation, and projection itself is the expression of ambivalence. Here, of course, everything seems clear. Locke’s blank sheet of the mind – that white surface - has now been extruded – a screen - as part of a technical process in which images are thrown against it and exaggerated in size. And if we were living in a world that was simply determined, this would suffice. But we are, always, living in a world that has been overdetermined.

For in that world (and aren’t we working in Nemesis’ wake?) the living live with each other in a whisper of suppressed desires, hostilities, purposes, and purposive inattentions – knowing or suspecting what we claim we never knew or suspected, each about each. While one aspect of projection involves transmuting the satisfaction that one has survived the dead and their hostility, another aspect involves the denial that the formerly living loved one had definite moments of hostility, or definite moments of the wrong kind of love. Those evil eye fugues.

And what do we know about other people anyway? Freud notes that projection, in the narrow psychoanalytic sense, is part of a greater system of projection.

“The Projection of unconscious hostility by the tabu of the dead on the demons is only a single example out of a series of processes, to which must be attributed the greatest influence on the shaping of primitive spiritual life. In the above mentioned cases, projection serves to close a conflict of feelings; it finds a natural application in a number of psychological situations that lead to neurosis. But projection is not created as an instrument of defence, it also comes into play, where there is no conflict. The projection of inner perceptions (Wahrnehmungen) to the outside is a primitive mechanism that, for instance, also underlies our sense perceptions – and that thus, in the normal course of things, has the greates part in the shaping of our outer world. Under not yet satisfactorily fixed conditions, our inner perceptions of feeling and thought processes become sense perceptions projected outside, applied to the shaping of the outer world, while supposedly remaining in the inner world. This may hang together, genetically, with the fact that the function of attention originally was not turned to the inner world, but instead to the stream of stimuli from the outer world, and of endopsychic processes received only reports about the developments of pleasure and pain. Only with the development (Ausbildung) of an abstract thought language, through the tying together of the sense remnants of word ideas with inner processes, did these themselves become perceptible.”

The trope of the abstract being taken from, projecting, the material – that place where we begin the white mythology – is transformed, here, into a relation of the outer and the inner. Although the inner, Freud carefully notes, isn’t some counterprojection of the outer. If it becomes perceptible, it was operating before the moment of perceptibility.

3.

I was first made aware of my identity as a cis white man at some point in my fifties. Cis-, that transforming prefix, was, until this point, not something I had been called, or had called another.

The cis identity is a curious one. It is late to the identity table – identity by assignment of sex at birth was never a part of the identikit when I was born in 1957. And yet, isn’t the cis identity – the white male cis identity – the blank against which all identities define themselves in the present moment? The white  male cis has played a fundamental historical role: enslaver, colonizer, oppressor, capitalist roader. You don’t have to look back too far – in fact, you don’t have to look back at all. The men’s room that runs the U.S. at the moment, in all its shitty ignobility, is a caricature of the type.

And so: is this my identity? Or is this projection?

When I look at this as the identity that I can’t escape – when I look at it historically, not existentially  – I see a type that, at one time, was defined by two utopias – the one, an international of labor solidarity, and the other, an avant garde that dreamed of abolishing the dominant identities and identity itself, using as its tools critique and transgression. Those utopias are in bad shape today – the former the victim of neoliberalism and the latter ossified, by academia’s absorption of the avant-garde, into routines of griping.

Yet I don’t feel, somehow, existentially burdened by all this. I’m still the happy go lucky, Casper-the-ghost colored graphomaniac buzzing my way deathward and singing a happy song.

Identity? Projection? Identity as projection, projection from an identity, exteriority as a plot of interiority: anxieties that dog us on the path to the good, the true, and the beautiful. But I’m still of the opinion that this is the Dao, the path of all cis- trans- and bird and beast and flower, in spite of present circs.

Old Possum's idea of Order in London, 1919

 

In the positive sciences, the natural order (of chemicals, of physics, of life) is coordinate with and dependent upon certain principles or laws. The periodic table is a good example of something that might seem, at first, arbitrary – the existence of certain elements – but that can be arranged by reference to their increasing atomic number. Thus, one can find, looking at the atomic numbers, a gap, and that gap can actually be filled in.

But how is order, in this sense, to be transposed to literature?

T.S. Eliot, in a very famous passage from his essay, Tradition and the individual talent, imposed an order that lacks this underlying principle:

“The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much tradition and the individual talent as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”

His search for the underlying principle led him, perhaps, to Anglican Christianity, or more broadly, to reverence. I might even agree with reverence and literature being connected by a sort of capillary network, but I am not reverent enough, perhaps, to see how this works.

I cannot put poems or fiction or essays together and see a gap and predict the way it will be filled – as the chemist can do with the periodic table. This is the positivist image that is affirmed, ever so gently, in finding the new work “supervening” on the persisting order.

One might say, then: the natural order is not the only viable example of “order”. One might also ask: what kind of order do the “monuments” of literature form? Does it look like a library? Is the order of literature no more than the LOC numbering system? Or are we simply dissolving the term ”order” into the concept of “system”?

I think Eliot is clearly not doing this. I think he would like the order to display literary value; to be, in fact, a kind of hierarchical social order. Yet such orders are imperfect models for literature – precisely because the literary text is “new”, and comes from an uncertain “family”.

In an essay on Curtius (who translated the Wasteland into German) and Eliot, Claus Uhlig speaks of Eliot’s “theoretical belief in the simultaneous interpenetration of times”, which is expressed not only in his 1919 essay but in the Four Quartets, where beginnings and ends are simultaneous – from a point of view that takes resurrection to be central to our temporal orientation to eternity.

“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

The idea of the “simultaneous order” – an order charged by the consciousness of order – is very much of the age of newspaper, radio and the movies. I do not think Eliot referred to Gabriel Tarde in his prose – but Tarde, in the 1890s, was very interested, from a philosophical/sociological point of view, in how simultaneities are formed. In Opinion and Crowds, which was published in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1901, Tarde wrote:

“When we submit, all unawares, to that invisible contagion of the public of which we form a part, we tend to explain it by the simple prestige of actuality. If today’s newspaper interests us to this point, it is because it only tells us the latest facts, and it would be the proximity of those facts, and not at all the simultaneity of their knowledge by us and others that impassions us by the report. But analyse this sensation of actuality that is so strange, the growing passion for which is one of the refined circumstances of civilized life. What is reputed to be the “news”: is it only what is taking place? No, it is everything that inspires a general interest in current events, even if it is an old fact. Everything about Napoleon has been in the news these last few years; everything fashionable is news.”

Eliot would probably have recoiled at the word fashionable; still, this idea of the simultaneous order seems cousin to what Tarde calls “public opinion” – a nineteenth century phrase, much as literature became, after de Stael’s essay, a way of talking about a vast collection of texts.

Tarde’s notion of a faculty of imitation at the heart of sociability – at the heart of all sociability, whether human or animal, whether of Greeks or of Honeybees – makes a move that is rather hidden in Eliot’s notion of order – that is, it describes the dynamic axis of order. One notices that order in Eliot’s early criticism is both the object of the critic’s work and is immanent in any literary product. These are otherwise two different domains. As an observation about culture, this confusion of domains creates large contradictions, but as a program for work, it creates a certain spirit in which the most radical work can go on.

This was a very fruitful idea for Eliot the poet – out of this idea, he derived the courage to write The Waste Land. And though, of course, the Waste Land quotes the great works, it weaves into those great works a cinematic montage technique, borrowing effects and rhythms from vaudeville, popular music, and nonsense poetry that makes the approach to the Waste Land from the “great works” a dead end – which, in one of the Possum’s more po-faced moves, he then blessed by giving us all a crossword puzzle of footnotes.

“How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot/ with his clothes of clerical cut”- in the guise of Dr. Jekyll. Meanwhile, his Mr. Hyde side was busy writing Sweeney Agonistes.

An important use of Eliot’s notion of order as a program, a method of working, crops up at about the same time as the essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent in Eliot’s essay, Ulysses, Order and Myth.

Someday I need to do a brief piece about the way in which Joyce was received by a number of writers – Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, for instance, both thumbs down, Djuna Barnes, thumbs up, Eliot and Pound and Lewis, etc. Joyce’s work as allergen/Gift.

Eliot states his case right away: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although I’m not a great fan of something as ambiguous as “the present age” being given an action to perform, I am all for Eliot’s sense. I too think Ulysses is inescapable. It is the minor, the incorrigibly philistine element in contemporary English writers like Martin Amis that bridles at Ulysses still. Sad for them.

Eliot’s essay, which appeared in the Dial, was, in part, a response to Richard Aldington’s dissing of Ulysses. Eliot is struck by Joyce’s taking up of the Odyssey as a sort of platform for his work, which seems entirely to skip over the very title of Balzac’s Human Comedy (hint hint). So much is in the Dr. Jekyll vein. But the Mr Hyde comes out at the end of this brief note on order as a method of organizing perception:

"It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires.""

Here we have the knot that ties together the clerical cut of the critic’s use of the term “order” (which Eliot pursued, followed by other pursuers, into the institutionalization of English in the academia) and the artist, that representative of the present age, that Mr. Hyde, also used (even in the lines of the Four Quartets and especially in Eliot’s drama). The Dr. Jekyll mode is aristocratic, but Hyde is demotic, newspaper driven and democratic to the end of his fingertips.

Guillevic: Cats

 Guillevic is rarely if ever compared to Marianne Moore. Moore collages, she is fascinated with the vast world of print, and thus her observations have that referential echo, always. Guillevic seems, on the contrary, to want his poem to be the first ever appearance of these words in this order on the page. Yet both look at objects and especially at animals and see a certain objective self-referentiality, that supposedly only human trait. The pathetic fallacy depends, of course, on picking on homo sapiens as the only thing with an organ that works out the wonder of the self, and thus the self’s reflection of the self, infinite vanity and embarrassment. But what if the pathetic fallacy is just this anthropo gigantism?

Guillevic has been translated into English by giants – Denise Levertov, Donald Justice, Seamus Heany. But if a wee little Facebook citizen is going to be scared of giants, he might as well just post cat pics and be done with it, infinitely. So, I’m thinking I’ll translate Guillevic’s Cats, which comes from the Mammifere collection from 1981. There is also Rats.

The cat looks

Blinded by its look.

*

Lights

Don’t wet

The cat.

He splashes enough

On himself.

*

The cat secretes silence,

Rejects those who soil

This netting

into their charivari

*

The trainer

Of oceans

According to his stare.

*

The cat is not

Without a semaphore.

He has his tail.

*

The cat

Rarely weeps.

He tries on a smile

From time to time.

*

This shusher

One could say

Sometimes

Likes to hear a conversation.

*

For certain people

The cat

Is sent against them

By the shadow.

*

Almost all cats

Seem satisfied

By their heritage.

*

The cat

Sits on the table

As if he had

Won for all times.

*

Only he is literate

In the quartz watch.

*

The cat

Doesn’t hurl himself against the laws

But gets around them.

*

The cat is not among those

Who like to be petted.

It pleases him

That you want to.

*

As if there were nothing

And suddenly a great flame

The explosion.

*

The universe

Of the cat.

The other universe.

*

The cat doesn’t care

To show his math

Save

To those who proclaim

The depths

Of his look.

*

The cat knows nothing

Of all the stuff

In the dictionaries.

But knows something

About what they are missing.

*

From what prehistoric era

Does the cat get his taste

For fish?

And what is the story

Of his need

For mice?

*

The glory

Of trapping a bird

In the city

Without leaving the apartment.

*

The cat

Traps the mice

To make himself a game

Of prolonged torture.

*

This cat

Does not bow

Except before the meals

Of an oriental prince.

*

The cat

Can’t be put to guard or spy

For others.

*

One does what one can

Says the popular wisdom.

Him, he can’t do much.

He reigns.

*

He is like that

Because he is

A cat.

Completely cat.

*

Go away my cat!

This possessive

Only engages me.

*

Funny how mystery

Is calming

When it presents

Day after day

By silence.

*

Escaped

From the cosmic shipwreck,

The cat

Licks itself.

Tomorrow the struggle! Notes on Rome

 

« Ther mafia is an invention of the communists » - Marcello Dell’Utri, senior advisor to Sergio Berlusconi. From Wikipedia: “Formerly a member of the Italian Parliament from 1996 to 2013 and of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004, Dell'Utri was found guilty of tax fraud, false accounting, and complicity in conspiracy with the Sicilian Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra; the conviction for the last charge was upheld on 9 May 2014 by the Supreme Court of Cassation, the highest judicial court in Italy, which sentenced Dell'Utri to seven years in prison.”

Going to an Italy ruled by the fascist party seems timely. The last time I was in Rome (oh, I think I am so cooool to write “the last time I was in Rome”, like I’m a cosmopolitan diva) was in the buttend of the Berlusconi era, 2011. At that time, the air of neglect was over everything. I was shocked – Paris, whatever its vices, has been a well governed city in terms of the basics. Berlusconi’s associates notoriously pocketed public money, and the far right schtick, then as now, was to “cut” government entitlements – which is another term for rerouted state money to the wealthiest.

Berlusconi deserves a look now, especially, since the form of far-right policies and far-reaching corruption seems to have glommed onto Uncle Sam like some horrible poisonous squid. Berlusconi’s money, which channeled Mafia money, was the result of plummy real estate deals, sports and entertainment. Media – tv being freed from State constraint, which had forced a sad population to watch Soviet art cinema before, now could show an abundance of tits. But this turned out not to be the utopia that the wankers had been looking forward to, as the financial system in the EU imploded.

Italy was a lab for cold war malfeasance and neo-lib corruption after the fall of the Wall. Italy is our Id – and where the Id goes, the US follows.

Rome, it must be said, is full of projects. Our friends said the Catholic church had ponied up for some road repair. The shops and restaurants seemed to be booming. Neglect had been left behind, or at least a bit behind. Two weeks before we came to Rome, on the street where we were staying, a landslide had tossed a dozen apartment buildings in the street.

Same as it ever was, I suppose you could say. The residences in this part of Trastevere are, by the look of them, the products of the seventies and eighties – a time when cutting corners and constructing in areas that have been approved of by thoroughly bribed officials was the rule. Corruption haunts the homeowner, even if he has long forgotten his unfortunate coup de coeur for this or that fascist politico.

For our jaunt – five days – I took along Simonetta Greggio’s book Les Nouveaux monstres, which is the successor of Dolce Vita – both of them novels that combine telenovela plots (aristocratic decadents, mysterious priests) with an encyclopedia of Italian scandals. What better way to learn history than to peak at it between orgies and the impossibly beautiful romances of impossibly beautiful heiresses? Greggio was born in Padua, but writes in French. I am surprised that no enterprising editor has not had her books translated – this is beach lit with footnotes, and I’m here to say: what better thing to read on a train or airplane?

 

The New Monsters takes the story out of the heady years of lead into the dissolution of the Communist party and the triumph of anti-communism – which is, and was always going to be, the triumph of the most anti-communist, ie the fascists and the ultra-right. The Italian part of that history is a gaudy preview of coming attractions.

But I am not one who thinks the preview means that the coming attractions will actually arrive. I’m more optimistic than that. Rome, with its weather, food, and ordinary life, made me feel renewed. En avant!

Nearer my God to thee - Karen Chamisso

 Nearer my God to thee

„An Bord der »Titanic« befanden sich fünfundzwanzig Millionäre, die zusammen mehr als 100 Millionen Pfund repräsentieren.“

I liked to look and not look

in Dad’s book at the picture

Of the iceberg that rammed the Titanic

A telltale smear of paint on its flank

- I had nightmares about that ship going down

My birthday cake with the candles lit

Enormously drowning In the dark North Atlantic

A liner’s hold scrawled over the blood freezing tide.

My friend John recently took me

To Rue des Ecoles to point out the crossing

Where the absent minded mythographer

was run down by a laundry truck

Nearer my God to me I sang out

Mixing up the chords and dischords of time

Born for collision and some final knackery

Iceberg, laundry truck or drowning colder

(“Le Cœur est un organe femelle » )

than the North Atlantic’s spasms

stripping away

our itty monkey manners.

The indefinitely postponed real, or how the monkey came to the jungle gym

 the indefinitely postponed real

I wrote this in 2010. This was long before I or anyone else could see that the monkey was coming to the jungle gym – the monkey being Trump, of course.
But we could see decline and fall everywhere, if we had the eyes for it.
“In the history of the professionalization of philosophy in the Anglo-sphere since the beginning of the Cold War, one notices that there are periodic crises of realism, in which its enemies are warded off in one way or another. In the division of intellectual labor that organizes the universities, the philosophers have taken up the vocation of defending the real. Still, there is the problem of what the real is and how it can be attacked in the first place. On the one hand, there is the inclination to make the real synonymous with what there is – the universe, say. And yet, few realists would say, I think, that the real began with the big bang. If the real is the universe, why not dispense with the term real as a superfluous and confusing lable? Yet one feels that the realists are uncomfortable thinking of the real as having a beginning or end, or having dark matter in it, or black holes. These things are real, but they aren’t in the real. Then there is the tendency to make the real the objective, as opposed to the subjective – thus a black hole is real and a thought is not. But again, this seems an oddly bent way to talk – how could a thought not be real? Is there a domain of irreality? And can I have a ticket to it, please? One way – cause I’m not coming back.
No doubt, the real – reality – is an odd term.
There is an excellent riff on the philosophical use of the real in Engel’s small book on Feuerbach.
Poor Engel’s suffers from the self-inflicted wound of never quite being real himself – his commentators will forever compare him to Marx, and take Engel’s writings to be either a translation or a distortion of Marx. This is, however, what Engels wanted to be seen as. Inevitably, if one member of a dyad is to play the role of the sage, the other must be the fool. If one is the knight, the other is Sancho Panza. If one is Bruno, the other must be Bruno’s ass. And, indeed, Engels is the sensual man compared to the ever harassed Marx. Marx, at one point in his desperate attempt to change the world and not simply understand it, applied for and was refused a humble job as a railroad station accountant; Engels, on the other hand, was apparently a successful manager of a branch of his family’s business in Manchester. It was Engels who turned Marx on to the political economy, not vice versa. It is as if Sancho Panza loaned the romances of chivalry to Don Quixote. Otherwise, Engels seemed to see himself in this dyad.
Engels, who attended lectures at the University of Berlin as a soldier but never took a degree as a student, never fully imbibed that obsessive stylistic tic of Marx’s that Benjamin (in a different context) calls la culte de la blague. Often, in Marx’s writing, when the reader feels the roof being lifted off the house, we know we are in the presence of that tremendous, even prophetic sarcasm which makes Marx so pre-eminently a writer, a man of textual strategies. Engels likes a little Hegelian word play as much as the other guy, but when he tells a joke he is sure to label it a joke – not for him Marx’s habit of throwing all his genius into a joke, so that it becomes Satanically, sublimely … not funny.
Engels begins his book on Feuerbach by discussing a well known maxim of Hegel’s: all that is real, is rational, and all that is rational, is real. He notes that his has been seen as Hegel’s blessing of Prussian despotism. But Engel’s disagrees. Those who quickly rush to make Hegel a bootlicker of the Prussian court forget that for Hegel, the real is the necessary. And this is key.
“But what is necessary, shows itself as rational in the last instance, which, applied to the Prussian state at that time, means, according to the Hegelian proposition, only: this state is rational, that is, corresponds to reason, only in so far as it is necessary; and if it appears terrible to us, and yet, in spite of its badness, continues to exist, the badness of the government finds its justification and explanation in the badness of its subjects [Untertanen]. The Prussian of that time had the government they deserved.
“Now, reality – according to Hegel – is not an attribute that a given social or political arrangement retains under all circumstances and times. On the contrary. The Roman republic was real, but so was the Roman empire that crushed it. The French monarchy of 1789 had become so unreal, that is, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed through the great Revolution, that Hegel always spoke of with the highest enthusiasm. Here, the Monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. And so it goes that in the course of development, all that was earlier real loses its necessity, its right to existence, its rationality; a new, lively reality steps into the place of the dying real – peacefully, when the old state of affairs is rational enough, without striving to be carried off by death, and violently, when it holds out against this necessity. And so the Hegelian proposition is inverted through Hegelian dialectic into its opposite: everything which is real in the domain of human history will become unreasonable with time, and thus is already according to its pre-determination irrational, is qualified by the irrational from then on; and everything, which is rational in the heads of men, is predetermined, to be real, may it contradict existing reality in ever so many ways. The proposition of the rationality of all the real is dissolved according to the rules of Hegel’s conceptual method into its other; the value of everything that exists is the fact that it dies. [Alles was besteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht]"
I interpret this wonderfully uplifting, almost surrealist credo in terms of our sense of reality, which is our sense of how everything, as it were, works.
Any newspaper reader of the past ten years must have noticed the loss of this sense of reality in the Americanized part of the world. This loss comes through in two ways: a deep failure of the mechanisms of social cause and effect, and a profusion of symbols that become issues. The three most recent events in which one feels the deep mechanism, the machine, has jumped the track were the invasion of Iraq, the Great Slump, and the earthquake in Haiti, where we witnessed obsessive acts that seemed to respond not to cause and effect on the ground, but to a whole other set of status making motives that failed to recognize or in any way integrate what was happening on the ground. As for the politics of symbols – the real for Engels certainly generates symbols; but the unreal, mesa mis, ah, the unreal can only and always deal with symbols. Symbols define the politically possible, which nobody even pretends is a response to or solution for the politically impossible, that is, real social problems. The left and right still debate, for instance, the invasion of Iraq without any sense at all that the invasion had to do with a whole broken structure, going back to the double sanction policy against Iran and Iraq, that had everything to do with navigating the great problem of maintaining a feudal oil supplier, Saudi Arabia, and an irredentist state that is way too small for its irredentism, Israel. Iran is still unrecognized, Osama bin Laden and the magic pygmy pony by which he escaped Tora Bora is still at large, Israel is still irredentist, and D.C. will spend 800 billion plus on war this year with no questions asked. These are the lineaments of dysfunction. They go deep. They sap the real.
The earthquake is coming. How long will it tarry?"
It tarried for 15 years. And not the best years of the Republic.