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Dystopia To Walk Away From and Utopia To Walk Towards
Utopia is an idea to keep striving towards, Utopia is the fight for a better world. To deconstruct ideas about the ways we live, to consider how we can improve to make this society a place where everyone can thrive. Where we can thrive. Needs met, not at the expense of others. Neither hyper-individualism nor carelessness for one but An ever-progressing stride towards Care for all.
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I don’t dream of cyber-punk bars, of a silver planet, or a home on Mars. I don’t dream of a castle in the sky, I dream of my hands in the dirt and that glint in your eyes. I don’t dream of a sea full of ships, But I do in some ways and that’s the Problem with it. With what? With what we’ve got here, with the path we’re on track for The rules we adhere To the nonsense and some sense and a little of both. It’s so confusing, so much, So overwhelming for most.
And I fall into the sugary traps, The little white lies and the salty sweet snacks. The lies that, to be more myself I must Buy it, Buy me, Throw me in a landfill Once I’m done being it. And when I want another me I’ll order it, delivered to my house.
I’m usually a sugar-coater Hidden metaphor kind of poet not Outright saying anything but hoping that you’ll get it. And maybe that’s all that makes a poet, someone with some rhythm That moves ideas, streamlined from the ocean Into an order that feels sort of divine, Where maybe something someone somewhere saw will come into your mind.
Because right now, we are Dividing the people, Multiplying the fear. Me. I. Am. Different, separate, special, Shutting away into solitary instead of solidarity. Always needing more, Never, ever enough.
And I think I Take issue with that, Take issue maybe with distraction. Immense, mass distraction. Hyper-individualized distraction, Consumer-friendly distraction, Add to cart, confirm credit card distraction. “Buy you to be you” taken to dystopian extremes. Absolutely, we create our own avatar but That’s not the point of the game.
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And maybe somewhere along the line something changes, Maybe people see each other more, Maybe people see we’re not so different And want equity for all, in order to reflect that. Maybe people see where their food and plastic and plastic food comes from And want better, demand better, for everyone. Maybe it all crumbles. Maybe there is no choice but change. Maybe it happens very slowly, Maybe suddenly it rains And pours and next thing we know-
Up and out and onto the next. Slower now, more mindful Faster now, more opportunist.
The need for techno-escapism dissolves as technology becomes tools for the world, not the world itself. As this web of humanity becomes a more welcoming, helpful, human place. As Earth becomes greener, not grayer, A better field for every player. As self detaches from material, As hands meet hands meet Earth.
A sprout of this into a bloom of that. Growth over greed, Love over fear, Connection over consumption, And One over one. Roots over leaves, but Tenderness for the whole tree.
#poetry#poem#wrote this for a class about utopian literature#its a bit rough and I'll probably work it more but yeah#utopia#dystopia#work in progress
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Timid and melancholic argot transforms into something shameless and jovial in the eighteenth century. There’s more imagery related to mines and miners here, with processes happening underground, imperceptible on the surface, Restif de La Bretonne, who “excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery” and so on. After the significant effort put into rehabilitating argot in the previous chapters, Hugo now condemns “the laughing argot,” presenting it as something potentially dangerous.
Oh, I like how he interprets what was going on in the eighteenth century. Of course, it was not the Enlightenment itself or the philosophes to blame for the transformation of argot. They were all about light and progress. The blame lies with some sophists. Hugo unintentionally touches on a valid point: the philosophes were too elitist to care about reaching the masses. They were more interested in educating the public which is not synonymous with the common people or the masses. In fact, they often disdained the masses. Oh, the things they wrote about the people, presenting them as conservative, most loyal subjects of the monarch! Hugo laments that their writings were banned or even burned, but the public was not particularly interested in them (except for Rousseau, this guy was a real bestselling star), they wanted to read trashy fiction which is now really forgotten. They did not want to be educated, instead they developed “low taste” in literature: pornography, soapy romances, and scandalous revelations. And Restif de La Bretonne was on a high end of this literature. (Robert Darnton has much to say about the forbidden bestsellers of the Ancien Régime.) Some of these texts incited “the hatred of the unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.” This hatred and fear can lead to what Hugo calls “jacqueries.”
And then Hugo shifts attention to Revolutions vs. jacqueries. Chapters about the June revolt are coming soon, and it’s time to remind readers why revolutions are inherently honourable and good. Hugo suggests that the eighteenth century could have ended with a jacquerie if not for the French Revolution. A jacquerie embodies chaos, unchecked violence, revenge, and destruction. In contrast, the revolution, according to Hugo, is moral and lawful, albeit cruel. While this idea might sound good in theory, Hugo may be idealizing the impact of the revolution on the nineteenth century a bit too much! The closing image of barefooted rag-pickers guarding the treasure is quite utopian. I suppose that the conclusion might be that argot cannot have the same destructive impact of inciting people to jacqueries anymore. Or maybe I got it wrong.
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By: Jason L. Riley
Published: Oct 6, 2023
Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (1999).
In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men—but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.”
The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”
Mr. Sowell has been a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution since 1980. In a phone interview, he describes the central fallacy of social-justice advocacy as “the assumption that disparities are strange, and that in the normal course of events we would expect people to be pretty much randomly distributed in various occupations, income levels, institutions and so forth.”
He says that’s an assumption based on hope rather than experience or hard evidence. “We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition—in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history,” he writes in the book’s opening chapter on “equal chances fallacies.” He acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination exist and contributed to disparate outcomes. But he notes that “these vices are in fact among many influences that prevent different groups of people—whether classes, races or nations—from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms or other terms.”
For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. “There’s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone’s done something wrong” to a lagging group, Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision “starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.”
To illustrate the point, the book’s chapter on racial fallacies cites recent census data on poverty. “Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race—either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination,” Mr. Sowell writes. Liberals argue that higher black poverty rates are mainly a product of slavery, Jim Crow and of lingering “systemic racism.” Yet there are pockets of the U.S. populated almost exclusively by white people who experience no racism and who nevertheless earn significantly less than blacks.
The book cites Clay and Owsley counties in Appalachian Kentucky, places “that are more than 90 percent white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole.”
It’s been true for some time, Mr. Sowell says, that black behavioral patterns play a bigger role in racial disparities than racism does. Black married couples have had poverty rates in the single digits for more than a quarter-century. And black married couples “in which both husband and wife were college-educated earned slightly more than white married couples where both husband and wife were college-educated.” He adds that in a landmark 1899 study of blacks in Philadelphia, the race scholar W.E.B. Du Bois “said that if white people were to lose their prejudices overnight, it would make very little difference to most black people. He said some few would get better positions than they have right now, but for the mass it would be pretty much the same.”
Noting today’s black-white wealth disparities, authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi have advocated reparations in the name of social justice. So have such prominent organizations as the NAACP and Black Lives Matter. Mr. Sowell can’t take their arguments seriously. “The situation of slavery in some ways is much like the situation of conquered people,” he says. “There’s no question whatsoever that conquered people have been treated in a terrible way. Being conquered by the Romans was not a fate you would wish on anyone. But the fact is that the net result has been that those parts of Europe conquered by the Romans have been the most advanced parts of Europe for centuries.
“Similarly, when someone black says . . . ‘I’m worse off because of slavery,’ there’s no way in hell you can say that with a straight face. If you’re going to base reparations on the difference between where blacks today would be if it were not for slavery, then blacks would have to pay reparations to white people.”
Mr. Sowell is no stranger to poverty, prejudice or discrimination. He was born in segregated North Carolina in 1930, orphaned as a toddler and raised in Harlem from age 9. He never finished high school and earned his GED after serving a stint in the Marines during the Korean War. The GI bill enabled him to enroll in college, first at historically black Howard University, before moving on to Harvard, Columbia and finally the University of Chicago.
He says that whether social-justice proponents are pushing for slavery reparations or higher taxes on the rich, their real agenda is the confiscation and redistribution of wealth. Enthralled by what he calls the “chess-pieces fallacy,” progressives treat individuals like inert objects. “I got that from Adam Smith, who had a very low opinion of abstract theorists who feel they can move around people much as one moves around chess pieces,” he says.
“That fallacy takes many forms, and taxation is a classic example.” The fallacy is assuming that “tax hikes and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction, when often they move in the opposite direction.” Liberals say, “ ‘We need more money, so we’ll make the wealthy pay their fair share,’ which is never defined, of course. But the wealthy are not just going to sit there and do nothing.”
A historical example is when “the British decided they would put a new tax on the American colonies. It turns out they not only didn’t get any more revenue, but they lost the tax revenue they had been getting.” In modern times, Mr. Sowell says, studies have shown repeatedly that people and businesses move their money to avoid high tax rates, and that includes migrating from states with higher levies to states with lower levies.
Although the social-justice vision isn’t new, Mr. Sowell observes that these ideas didn’t have much currency before the 20th century, in an era when intellectual elites mostly talked among themselves and reached a far smaller segment of the population. Mass communication changed that by greatly expanding their ability to shape public opinion and, by extension, government decisions: “One example was the period between the two world wars, when intellectuals managed to convince a lot of people that the way to avoid war was to avoid an arms race, and therefore that disarmament was the key to preserving peace.”
The growing influence and arrogance of the social-justice crowd bothers Mr. Sowell, which is one of the reasons he wrote the book. “Someone once said that people on the political left think that they would do what God would do if he were as well-informed as they are,” he says. He’s especially vexed by the quashing of dissent. “The fatal danger of our times today is a growing intolerance and suppression of opinions and evidence that differ from the prevailing ideologies that dominate institutions, ranging from the academic world to the corporate world, the media and government institutions,” he writes. “Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notions about a broad swath of issues ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments.”
Mr. Sowell’s own accomplishments cover a broad swath. He’s published more than 40 books, and “Social Justice Fallacies” is his sixth since he turned 80 in 2010. What recommends it is what recommends so many of the others: clear thinking, a straightforward prose style that combines wide learning with common sense, and an uncanny ability to take our preening elites down a notch.
Mr. Riley writes the Journal’s Upward Mobility column and is author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell.”
[ Via: https://archive.md/onp5S ]
#Thomas Sowell#Social Justice Fallacies#Jason L. Riley#social justice#critical social justice#reparations#systemic racism#argument from ignorance#god of the gaps#racism of the gaps#woke#wokeness#wokeism#cult of woke#wokeness as religion#religion is a mental illness
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Someone who follows my Facebook page recently reacted to my posting of a Trump for Leavenworth meme and advised me that writers should stay out of politics. I am sorry, but I thoroughly disagreed. My two novels, Hunting the Devil and A Different Kind of Fire (soon to be renamed Passion & Paint) while not overtly political, look at women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, human rights, world politics, and genocide.
Off the top of my head, I can think twenty-one authors (listed below) who took it upon themselves to comment on politics and seek reform. I don’t claim to be in the same league as these men and women, I just want to go on record as saying that writers and other artists have a duty to record abuses, comment on atrocities, delve into politics, advocate for the oppressed, and share those views and their individual beliefs with the world.
Annie Besant: She advocated for a free and independent India, writing about the oppressive, regressive policies Britain maintained toward their colonies in the name of acquiring wealth. Her goal was to produce employment, provide better living conditions, and education for the poor. She fought for the freedom of thought, secularism, women’s rights, birth control, and workers’ rights in the late 19th century.
Amartya Kumar Sen: He is an Indian philosopher, political author and economist who has written about social choice theory, economics, and economic and social justice. In addition, he has written about public health, decision theory, and measures of the well-being of countries. He won the Noble Prize for Economics.
John Steinbeck: An American author and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, John Steinbeck is known his social perception. His works explore the concepts of fate and injustice, especially of the downtrodden and the poor. His book, The Grapes of Wrath, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. It looks at the Great Depression and the millions of people who poured out of the Dust Bowl looking for a better life and documents the horrific conditions the migrant workers endured.
Plato: He innovated the dialectic forms and written dialogue in philosophy, raising questions that later gave rise to practical and theoretical philosophy. The Republic, his most famous work, outlines his political thinking and looks at the meaning of justice and wonders whether a just man could be happier than an unjust man. Existing regimes are discussed at length as well as proposing a utopian city-state.
Charles Dickens: His book, Oliver Twist, narrates the life of a mistreated child who joins a gang of thieves. The British upper classes had no idea of the living conditions of London’s poor, and Dicken slams them in the face with reality. He looks at the victimization of children, the poor law system, and Victorian workhouse, which operated with a system of prolonged hunger, physical torture, humiliation and hypocrisy. Dickens’s works brought out much-needed change in society.
George Orwell: Like Annie Besant, Orwell wrote about British policies in their colonies, particularly India, which exploited the people and natural resources of those countries. His books, 1984 and Animal Farm were written in response to the USSR and its draconian policies. These dystopic novels envision a future with no freedoms or rights and serve as reminders of the importance of freedom of speech and thought.
Adam Smith: He is “The Father of Economics.” His book, The Wealth of Nations, is the first modern book of economics. In it he looks at topics such as the role of the free market and the laissez-faire structures though a mix of disciplines: philosophy, politics, history, anthropology, economics, and sociology. He redefined the role of the government, saying that the government was responsible for its people.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: He was a philosopher, writer, political author, and composer whose political philosophy influenced some aspects of the French Revolution. The development of modern political, educational and economic thought can be credited to him. The Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality are most well-known works. Social contract theory suggests that people live together in society and follow certain moral and political rules. He believed that if society lived by a social contract, it can be moral by choice and not because a superior being requires it. His Discourse on Inequality may be the best critique of modernity and traces the psychological effects of society on human nature.
John Locke: He was a physician, philosopher, and political author and considered the “Father of Liberalism”. His works influenced the development of political philosophy and epistemology. His contributions to republicanism and liberal theory are seen in the United States Declaration of Independence. He argues that if a government fails to protect the rights of its people, such as life, liberty and property, it can be lawfully overthrown.
Henry David Thoreau: He was a staunch abolitionist. His philosophy, as explained in Civil Disobedience, influenced the political thoughts and actions of many. In Walden, he reflects on simple living in natural surroundings with an emphasis on self-reliance. He argues that people should not permit governments to become agents of injustice and suggests individuals listen to their conscience. He proposed disobedience to an unjust state.
Thomas Paine: He wrote Rights of Man in 1791. It rules as one of the finest statements to come out of the 18th century. His ideas were revolutionary and inspired people to move toward democracy and gave birth first to the American Revolution and, later, the French Revolution.
Upton Sinclair: He provided accurate journalistic details of the corruption and social hardships caused by big business in the United States. His book The Jungle was an exposé of the meatpacking industry, sparking a public uproar about the hygienic conditions in food processing industry. The American government couldn’t ignore the outcry. As a result , the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act came into effect.
Charles Darwin: He was a naturalist, geologist, political author, and biologist, best known for his work and contributions to evolutionary biology. His book, On the Origin of Species, changed the political, cultural, and religious views of society. His theory of evolution caused an academic revolution but is now widely accepted.
Betty Friedan: She is credited with using in the second wave of feminism in America. She sought to bring women into equal partnership with men. Her book, The Feminine Mystique, shattered the image of the perfect woman, in particular the housewife, urged women to become educated, and to use their talents to do more with their lives.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: When Abraham Lincoln first met Harriet Beecher in 1862, he said, “So you are the woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” So her mighty words in Uncle Tom’s Cabin were part of the movement that freed American slaves.
Noam Chomsky: He is the founder of modern linguistics and one of the world’s best intellectuals and has influenced a vast array of academic fields. He is famous for his staunch anti-war position and is critical of the U.S.’s foreign policy, capitalism, involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. His book, Deterring Democracy, is about the United States playing the role of global police after World War II and its desire to remain a dominant world power more than promulgating democracy.
Elie Weisel: He is a Holocaust survivor who spent much of his life speaking on the Holocaust and human rights. He advocated for victims of oppression in places like the Soviet Union, Sudan, the Kurds, the Armenian Genocide. He won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Roméo Dallaire: He was the commander of the United Nations forces in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. Since then he has lived with PTSD while advocating against genocide, for human rights, for children’s rights, and for the abolishment of child soldiers. His book, Shake Hands with the Devil, documents his struggles and the nation of Rwanda’s struggles during the genocide.
Thomas Hobbes: He was a 16th century English philosopher whose book, Leviathan, looks at social contract theory and societal breakdown. A polymath, he wrote on history, law, geometry, ethics, theology, the state of nature and the laws of nature.
Aldous Huxley: He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. A pacifist, he wrote Ends and Means which looks at war, inequality, religion, and ethics. He was a Hollywood screenwriter who spent much of his income bringing Jewish and left-wing writers from Hitler’s Germany to the U.S. His books, Brave New World and Island, look at dystopia and utopia respectively.
Mary Wollstonecraft: She was an 18th century writer and philosopher who advocated strongly for women’s rights. Her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, argued that women were not inherently inferior to men but appeared to be solely because of their lack of education. She felt men and women should be treated as rational beings and envisioned a social order founded on reason.
#PoliticalWriters#PoliticsAndWriters#2024Elections#freedom of speech#feminism#freedom of mind#freedom of expression
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hi! i was just wondering if you have any tips/advice on writing dystopian stories? i get stuck on worldbuilding and coming up with the history of the land. i also struggle with making it different from popular dystopian literature such as the hunger games or divergent. any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks so much!
I just so happen to have recently purchased Flame Tree Publishing’s Dark Fantasy: Dystopia/ Utopia Short Stories Anthology so thanks for helping me retroactively justify spending that dosh!
To understand the Dystopian genre, we’ve got to understand where it’s come from in both literary precedent and in social and political history. The Dystopian genre is a branch of the Utopian genre, and both are made up of stories that explore social critiques through the development of fictional societies that mirror elements of our own.
The foreword of the Dystopia/ Utopia Anthology traces this all the way back to Plato’s The Republic, in which Plato describes the way that an ‘ideal’ society would be organised and how it would function. A later writer, Thomas More, wrote a book called Utopia, which coined the name for the genre. “Utopia” comes from the Greek for ‘not’ and ‘place’ and the definition is “an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect.”
Dystopian fiction explores what happens when a Utopia is based upon a flawed or rotten foundation, the prefix ‘dys-’ meaning ‘bad’ added onto ‘utopia’, thus a dystopia is “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.”
So most dystopian stories take a thread of something that is damaging or potentially damaging in our society, and carry it through to a logical extreme:
George Orwell’s 1984 is about the danger of fascism: the state rules over the people with surveillance and terror, and keeps the public in line by manufacturing constant war, and by coercing people into turning on one another to serve the state.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a critique of capitalist consumerism, among other things, set in a future where the state religion is based around the factory production line, and humans are produced through an automated system which fills designated roles and castes.
Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange centres around the question of free will verses the good of society, exploring both the danger of unchecked individualism, and the horror of state violence, as well as the channels in which those two converge.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale takes patriarchal and theocratic politics to the logical extreme, with heteropatriarchal society stratified into castes, and ‘undesirables’ gotten rid of.
And of course, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series is concerned mostly with the commodification and sensationalisation of state violence, and the exploitation of minority groups for profit and entertainment.
Of course there are many many more dystopian stories out there, but we can see from this small selection that they all have at heart a political and social critique, which is explored through the actions and reactions of the characters, and through the development of the society that they live in.
So when you’re developing your own dystopian story, the place to start is the critique: what thing about society are you questioning? What is it about the world today that makes you say ‘hang on a minute, now, that just isn’t right!’? And when you’ve got that thing, imagine what the world would be like if that thing were pulled into the centre, and it touched every part of society.
In your story, the ways that characters live and function within that society is shaped by the Problem at its heart, and so that will influence the ways that they behave, dress, communicate, and everything else!
So you can think of it this way: when you choose the Problem that your Dystopian society is built upon, you are going to develop a world which reflects that problem, and which will be distinct from other dystopian stories. As well, even if you pick a problem which has been “done before”, your personal interpretation of the issue will change the way that it is explored on the page.
I think that a big struggle for beginner writers trying to produce dystopian fiction is getting caught up on the aesthetic elements of the story, and forgetting that the aesthetic of a story is a product of the Problem of the story.
Brave New World is about a capitalist society which pacifies the masses through overconsumption and overstimulation, the aesthetic is one of extreme luxury to the point of nausea.
A Clockwork Orange is based in a grungy, gang-riddled London, and the main cast are largely part of the criminal underclass, the aesthetic, and even the language of the story are informed by this.
In the same way, The Hunger Games has different regions with differing ‘aesthetics’ because of how the system that was established in “Panem” (post apocalyptic North America) is stratified as an obvious and object lesson to those who would oppose the state. The districts are numbered, and those closer to the capital have proportionally more comfort and wealth, but the capital itself is signified by obscene and excessive consumption of material goods. Whereas district 12, where the protagonist is from, is a mining town with the associated grime and poverty. Katniss’s skills and strengths come out of her life of hardship, she is a direct, though unintended, product of the system.
The bleak aesthetics of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale both reflect the enforced uniformity of their societies, with clothing and personal appearance, and even the body itself policed in order to ensure obedience to the state.
In terms of an order in which to develop your dystopian fiction, I would suggest thinking about:
The Problem: the central ‘wrongness’ of the story
Society: what does a society built around the Problem look like?
History: how did the society come to this point? At what point did it diverge from our society? How much of this are the people living in this society aware of?
Caste/ Stratum/ Class: what position in the society does your protagonist(s) occupy?
Individual: who are your protagonist(s) and why are they the focus of the story?What is your protagonist(s) relationship to society?What is your protagonist(s) relationship to the Problem?
Working through these steps, you should begin to form a working understanding of the fictional world you are building, and the elements within it that will contribute to the way that the characters understand the world, their place within it, and how they will deal with being in that world and circumstances.
I hope this helps!
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William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital:
When Marx’s relationship to utopian socialism is discussed, the triptych of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen are usually treated as a unit. In this, the secondary literature simply follows Marx’s precedent. Upon closer inspection, however, Marx did not treat these three “patriarchs of socialism” with equal regard, and his divergent opinions of them does much to reveal the outlines of Marx’s assumptions about how an emancipated laboring class would associate for the purposes of preserving and enjoying their freedom. To put it baldly, Marx had a much higher esteem for Owen than he did for either Saint-Simon or Fourier. He thought the least of Saint-Simon, who generally wrote “mere encomiums of modern bourgeois society.” After the 1840s, Fourier receives almost no attention from Marx, who tended to find the Frenchman either “humorous” or “childishly naïve,” but in neither case worth discussing. Fourier’s “great merit” was “to have stated that the ultimate object is the raising of the mode of production itself, not [that] of distribution, to a higher form.” And Marx uses some of Fourier’s criticisms of contemporary labor as points of reference. But none of this has much relevance for Marx’s vision of free association. It is otherwise with his borrowings from and appreciation of Owen.
In Owen, Marx perceived an early and consistent advocacy on behalf of the emancipation of the proletariat. Hence, when he dismisses Saint-Simon for his allegiance to the bourgeoisie, Marx underscores the judgment with the exclamation, “What a difference compared with the contemporaneous writings of Owen!”* But it is a matter not only of the what but of the how. Owen understood that the emancipation of the proletariat would require large-scale cooperative production and the dissolution of the division between mental and manual labor. Thus, Marx appeals to Owen to support his own views twice in chapter fifteen of Capital, regarding “the education of the future” and the theoretical importance of the factory system. He also refers to Owen favorably, as the father of cooperative production, in his inaugural address to the IWMA.
* By way of contrast, Engels is occasionally quite disparaging of Owen, and generally leans more in the direction of Saint-Simon.
That Marx would pay homage to Owen in the context of his activities with the IWMA is not surprising, given the stature of Owen within British working-class activist circles. More remarkably, Marx has nary a bad word for Owen in any of his published works, or even in his letters. Even when he is criticizing Owenites for their monetary schemes, their fatalism about subsistence wages, and their opposition to the Chartist movement, he does not besmirch Owen in any way. In his attacks on the advocates of labor money, to take a crucial instance, Marx makes sure to exempt Owen from his criticisms. The ground of this exemption is, as Marx puts it, that “Owen presupposes directly socialized labor, a form of production diametrically opposed to the production of commodities.” In Marx’s mind...directly socialized labor is just as diametrically opposed to collective labor under the command of the capitalist as it is to commodity production. Fleshing out Marx’s appreciation for cooperative labor on a large scale and for Owen as a representative of this possibility makes visible the way in which Marx hopes to reappropriate the results of the capitalist mode of production, and the extent to which his vision of a communist mode of production is actually quite determinate.
In particular, it demonstrates that Marx’s understanding of communism is opposed to both market socialism and the bureaucratic central planning of state socialism. Market socialism attempts to do away with the despotism of the capitalist in the workshop while leaving in place production for the market. State socialism attempts to eliminate the impersonal domination of the market while retaining “the a priori and planned regulation observed by the division of labor in the workshop.” For Marx, however, the despotism of the capitalist is a consequence of the fact that the capitalist stands under the impersonal domination of the market. Trying to get rid of the despotism of the factory while retaining the impersonal domination of the market could only ever succeed in turning workers into their own capitalists, laboring under the same objective domination as they do now. Trying to get rid of impersonal domination while retaining the form of the capitalist factory, on the other hand, would only subject the workers to the despotism of the central planning board. Both the social division of labor and the division of labor within the workshop have to be subjected to the deliberate control of the workers themselves. This is what “directly associated labor” means for Marx—production is coordinated beforehand by discussion and deliberation—and this is why Marx’s republicanism found support in Owen’s appeals for cooperative communities regulating all production.
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Teaching Global Science Fiction in Tokyo: An Interview with Dr. Pau Pitarch Fernandez (part 2)
3. Global SF class at Waseda University
PPF My first year teaching at Waseda University, I offered this class, calling it just "Japanese SF". And nobody signed up. Can you believe that!?
ーーNO I CAN'T.
ーーCongrats!
PPF I was thinking about how to set up the course. My training is always to look at the history. In my other literature classes, like I had a Mystery Fiction class that I also taught last year. In that one, I started with Edogawa Rampo and the last reading is Confessions by Minato Kanae. We had some Edogawa Rampo, we had some Tani Jouji, we had “Fingerprints” by Satou Haruo. They read “The Devil's Disciple” by Hamao Shiro. I wanted to have them read Points and Lines by Matsumoto Seicho too, but it was too long.
That class, I had conceptualized through a historical narrative from the genre’s origins, the Golden Age, Henkaku (*2 It means unorthodox, alternative, more innovative mystery. 変格), Shakai-ha (*3 Social, political mystery. 社会派), Iya-Misu (*4 Disturbing mystery. イヤミス = 嫌なミステリの略). But I thought that would not work for Science Fiction. The genre is so vast and so rich, it is impossible to do something like that in 15 sessions. It is impossible to give them a full history. Maybe if I chose only classic, English-language, male authors' SF, I could put together something that could pass for that. But that is boring, and I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to put as much East Asian SF as possible. I also wanted to have a sense of this wide feel. So I chose to go with a thematic sequence, rather than a historical one.
We started for instance with Utopia and there we read Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and "Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick. Then for Dystopia, we read “A Record of Nonchalant” by Satou Haruo. You know that one?
ーーI know the name but only the name.
PPF Oh, you should read it. It is a short story from 1929. And it is basically cyberpunk without information technology.
It is a world where the social class is represented through depth. If you are very poor, you live very far down. If you are rich, you live high up. It is a story of a character who wakes up at the bottom of society and slowly starts climbing up.
I think he wrote it as a kind of satire. If you read reviews from the time, people were comparing it to Kappa by Akutagawa. So I think people read it as Aestheticism, or a kind of Swiftian satire. There are some ironic references to proletarian literature or the Shin-Kankakuha (*5 新感覚派 is a literary group means “new impressions”). The social criticism is very clear. But at a certain point in the story, the main character is given the option of turning into a plant, a human-vegetable hybrid.
ーーWhat.
PPF That seems to allow him to access the higher classes. "Thanks to having me turned into a plant!" Then he ends up living at the top. When I was reading, I was like, "this is cyberpunk." He doesn't know IT and he could not think of computer networks. But this idea of hybridizing the human and something else in order to advance, and sacrificing the human side... All that reflection about what it means to be human, when does one stop being human, etc. I think it is a fascinating story. He never wrote anything like it again. I think it was like a test, some kind of experiment he was not really happy with. But it is really interesting considering it is from 1929. It is very nice and crazy.
Together with “A Record of Nonchalant,” they read "Folding Beijing" by Hao JingFang. In the class I tried to help them think of genre and abstract terms like Utopia. All these connections to like religious ideas, or political ideas in utopian socialism. Once I got them thinking in those terms then they started seeing a lot in these texts. Especially the utopias. I think, at first reading, they may seem boring. But then every utopia has its dark side and once they started thinking about that, arguing, analyzing it... It was great to see how their image of the text was really changing. They saw a lot of depth and complexity there.
I think once we moved to Dystopia, it was easy to relate because it is such a common genre in YA fiction. Everybody has read The Hunger Games. So they could definitely relate to that part. But I don't think they had stopped to think about all the moral complexity behind it, and it was really interesting to see them go through those texts thematically. If I had done the historical thing, we would have read Satou Haruo at the beginning and “Folding Beijing” at the end. It would have taken a long time to connect them. But bringing them together with the utopian texts was very interesting. I think it works better for science fiction if I had them thematically. Because students are already familiar with the main patterns.
Another unit that I had was on Exploration and there they read "The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree Jr. And they also read a story by Nnedi Okorafor's "From the Lost Diary of TreeFrong7". That one appeared on Clarkesworld Magazine. What I did before we started talking about Tiptree's was have them think about fiction they knew about exploration. Indiana Jones or all those classics from the colonial 19th century. A white hero going into the unknown and discovering the natives and fighting the bad ones, converting the good ones, you know, that kind of very paternalistic approach.
ーーLike Avatar?
PPF That's a good example.
So once they were thinking in those terms and then they went back to really thinking about what they had read. They started seeing how Tiptree is writing on top of this tradition of the white male explorer hero. And she is totally subverting it with the narrator at that point. "That's why we get this narrator". Everybody hated him, and they said "I hate this story, I do not like this guy." That is the point! You are not supposed to like this guy. Because this guy, he thinks that he is that kind of hero, and you want to look for a hero in that mold in the story, but there isn’t one. All you have is these women who just want to get out of here.
I think it worked really well to activate that kind of imagery that the students already have in their heads. Then they could understand why Tiptree (who also had that imagery) was writing on top of or against it. She knew that you would activate those images, and she prepared her twist accordingly. You get all the shocking moments.
Do you remember the end of the story? These aliens appear and the woman who is the main female character asks the aliens to take them away from Earth. “I can't stand it anymore. I’ll just live anywhere else but here. I hate this place.”
At the beginning, one of the students said "Well, I did not get why we need the aliens. Oppression, sexism is bad. You can tell that story without the aliens.” But then we were reading through it and thinking about how the aliens worked in the text, how would the story change without them. Then I think the students realized SF allows you to move the stakes to this cosmic level, huge scale. You are not talking only about the woman having had a terrible life. You are not only talking about all women of her generation having a terrible life even. You are talking about womankind in the cosmic sense.
This is not a problem of now, or the next ten years, or the last 100 years. It is so entrenched in this male/female oppressive relation, that this character has no other option but to leave the planet. In any other genre, you would need a hugely dramatic speech about why this is so transcendental. In SF, you just need aliens. When the aliens are there, she just needs to say "I don't care where you take me, I just want to be out of the planet. Just take me, take me please."
You already get that cosmic sense. "Wow. This woman is ready to leave the planet. This is really bad and entrenched. There is no easy solution. Because if there were, she would try it. But she could not. It is too big for this woman to deal with. So she has to leave the planet.”
SF is not just about "Okay, Let's put robots here and let's put a spaceship there.” What I like about it (and this is something that you cannot find in any other genre) is that it opens up this space for its themes to have this huge impact because you are talking about whole planets, talking about whole species, and talking about the universe. This cosmic scale that makes it really powerful.
Another text I really liked to teach was "Final Exam" by Megan Arkenberg. It is basically an apocalyptic story but told through multiple choice questions. That one was really refreshing for the students, because they had never seen a story told in that fashion. Again, it activated all these images that they already know, like all the apocalyptic Armageddon stories. It is a good sample for the wide variety of SF. I would love to have time to watch Gojira, and read I am Legend with them, but we don't have that kind of time. But thanks to a story like this you can bring it all into class discussion.
I want the students to ask themselves: “What do I know about this already?” Once they have activated that knowledge, if they come back to think about the story they can see that double layering. I tried to find texts for the syllabus that would allow us to have this multi-layered reading. I think that is very unique to SF. I mean, maybe every genre has it. Maybe I should not say unique. But I think it is very striking and very rich, how every science fictional text shares in all this repertoire of images.
On the other hand, that can make stories very formulaic. One of the criticisms that I you often hear is “science fiction is formulaic, always repeating the same patterns.” I’ll concede that is a possibility, if you don't do it right. But if you do it right, the fact that you have this repertoire gives you this richness, that's amazing.
Every time I start a science fiction book I am thinking of all my science fiction knowledge and activating it. Okay, this is a galactic empire. Maybe it’s an evil empire and there’s a rebellion, but sometimes it's subverted and the story brings you to think "Oh, wait! Maybe the rebellion is not that nice. Why was I thinking..."
So how the genre has this potential to always keep you on your toes, while going back to this shared knowledge. I think that's fascinating about science fiction. It makes it very rich and stunning. I'm definitely not buying this criticism of genre fiction as very repetitive. If you read bad examples, it can be repetitive. But people who are good like Megan Arkenberg...she does such an amazing job, using all these references and then making something so fresh. I think it definitely opened my students’ eyes to the possibilities of SF.
ーーThank you very much.
*Dr Pitarch-Fernandez has never attended to any Japanese SF events. He has been busy for taking care of his children now. But he said that he would like to attend one day in the future.
He told that “We can’t meet Greg Egan in any conventions in the US or even in Australia. But in the case of Tobi Hirotaka, we can meet him. So why not try a chance?” (Tobi regularly attends Un-Con, a local SF con in Shimane prefecture and occasionally attends other conventions in Japan.)
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The Victorian era is infamous, rightly or wrongly, for its repression of sexuality. But its temporal and philosophical heir definitely did repress the possibility of the homoromantic relationships between women and between men that had been normal, if not the norm, for centuries and centuries. This process was rooted in one of society's most fundamental adopted divisions, gender, so you can imagine that there are a whole lot of factors implicated in the shift that are all tangled around each other and mutually reinforcing. Some of the key ones include: industrialization and urbanization, women's colleges, class concerns, a crisis in masculinity (masculinity is always in crisis), and most importantly, the invention of "sexology" as a field of science at a time that science played a central role in cataloguing and normatively ordering society.
Anthony Rotundo, primarily studying men, argues that "romantic friendships" in America start to become visible in the Revolutionary War era and flourish in the mid-19th century. The 18th century is kind of a black hole for me so I'll take his word for when the concept of romantic friendships was jump-started, but it was by no means new. In the Middle Ages, Christians and Muslims alike wrote poetry and composed letters depicting homoromantic and even homoerotic relationships. I'm going back this far not for the heck of it, but because medieval society helps clarify key qualities of male and female "romantic friendships" that contributed to their eventual demise: a societal value on men expressing emotion (knightly tears; religious devotions) and the very, very limited possibilities for unmarried women to rise above the poorest classes. Romantic friendships did not threaten men's sense of themselves as men, patriarchal control of women, or marriage.
Socio-economic changes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries knocked all of that askew.
The 1870s-1920s saw a massive influx of young women and men into U.S. cities. On one hand, this was an age-old process that, for centuries, was basically the season cities could exist (they were population sinks--on their own, city residents could not reproduce enough to replace themselves given mortality rates). On the other, the type of work they found and the pathways for success in that work were much more recent. The old system of apprenticeships and family connections for men, and almost exclusively domestic servant work for women, absolutely persisted but were swamped by the numbers of factory workers and non-domestic service workers. To support the population boom, cities constructed residential hotels/dormitories/apartments that were often designated single-sex.
That situation made both male and female romantic friendships a threat to the gendered prescriptions of society. For men, it diminished the utility of romantic friendships as potential economic and social connections, meaning they wouldn't be stepping stones towards supporting their eventual family. For women, it opened a much more achievable possibility of financial stability outside marriage.
The blossoming of women's colleges at this time made that problem even clearer to the sexuality reformers and sexologists we'll meet in a little--because "these women" were most assuredly middle and upper-middle class. In short: the ideal marriage partners for men...in an environment where romantic friendships could permit them both prestigious social roles (scholars, administrators, politicians, professional artists, etc) and economic success without men. This was true, even long-term, for both students and teachers. About 10% of American women at the end of the 19th century never married; the figure was around 50% for graduates of women's colleges. So when men observed, as in this letter to the Yale student newspaper:
There is a term in general use at Vassar, truly calculated to awaken within the ima penetralia of our souls all that love for the noble and the aesthetic of which our natures are capable, The term in question is "smashing."
When a Vassar girl takes a shine to another, she straightway enters upon a regular course of bouquet sendings, interspersed with tinted notes, mysterious packages of ‘Ridley’s Mixed Candies,’ locks of hair perhaps, and many other tender tokens, until at last the object of her attentions is captured, the two women become inseparable, and the aggressor is considered by her circle of acquaintances as "smashed."
they might not have seen sexual competition, but the possibility of a lifestyle threat was lurking.
Men's romantic friendships were also under fire with respect to their emotionality. The gradual militarization of western culture over the 19th century (think the Salvation Army or the military trappings of the Boy Scouts) drove/was driven by a narrowing definition of masculinity on "muscles"--vigor, strength, athleticism, the Teddy Roosevelt stereotype. Whereas emotions had once been the healthy counterpart, gradually the internal dimensions of character and a value on openness and gentleness became a liability. (Marriage was still okay, because the idealized marriage was the husband/father rising up to 'be a man' and take care of his family).
Steeped in all these burgeoning developments and their implications came the sexologists, with an agenda not just to categorize society but to evangelize their "discoveries."
A lot of us are at least in passing familiar with the "homosexuality didn't exist as 'homosexuality', an identity, before 1900" trope. This can be taken too far (and often is), but it is nevertheless true that the later decades of the 19th century and early 20th century saw professional, middle-class scientists coalescing ideas of same-sex sexual relations according to Science rather than morality. Instead of a wrong step by step choice, it was an abnormal physical, inherited trait.
This idea got mixed up in Progressive Era utopian visions of societal improvement that, among other things, tagged "deviants" and lower-class people as hindering forward progress--just as same-sex sex, now identified with the people who practiced it, prevented heterosexual, reproductive sex.
And scientists like Bernard Talmey exhibited one of my favorite characteristics of historical men writing about women: in his 1904 book on, well, women, he announced his deep concern that the American public "does not even surmise of the existence" of sex between women. It was a scientific version of what I see in my medieval (male) clerics skating gingerly around actually mentioning lesbian activity because they don't want to put the idea in women's minds.
But this view of American sexologists, lagging somewhat behind their European counterparts, was crucial to the decline of romantic friendships among men and women. First, because it started off with a condemnation of these friendships that took away from social order regardless of whether there was sexual activity involved.
Second, because of the label first stacked onto the participants: inverts. That is, the inversion of proper sex/sexual order. Here we meet up with the rise of muscular masculinity against emotionality and gentleness, as well women's political activity and independent economic power against the norm of a separate women's/domestic sphere.
And so romantic friendships, instead of a natural part of growing up for men and women, became an aberration--not in the sense of "rare", but in the sense of "wrong."
...Unbeknownst to the sexologists, however, their codification of language and an identity for homosexual men and women gave people who did experience same-sex attraction a mutual self-understanding--a certain legitimacy. It's seen as the beginning of an LGBTQ+ movement (if not yet a civil rights one). So there is a lot to mourn about the loss of romantic friendships and what it signified. But this is one story about the past that also has a future.
Further Reading:
This is actually a topic where there are some books that hit the triumvirate of happiness: generally good historically, interesting to read, and affordable on Amazon. I'd recommend:
Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States
Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th Century America (this is older, now, and I have some problems with how it handles race and class, but it's well grounded in its sources, and both educational and entertaining)
Scott Herring, Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Gay and Lesbian History
So that's where I'd start. :)
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Punk Genres and Potential Problems
This post is inspired by this very long reblog chain about punk genres, definitions, and issues. It's one of those 'my buddy is confused but he's got the spirit' posts, i.e. not completely wrong, some things right, excellent points, and some flaws stemming from inaccuracies and...whatnot. Instead of piling onto that post I'm writing up a brand new post for people to reblog and disagree with. This is based 98% on my own academic research into these genres. The remaining 2% is Opinions. (That's a lie. Academic Research to Opinion ratio is more like 60/40.)
There are even sources! Because sources are GREAT. They are under the cut.
SCIENCE FICTION
The -punk genres are subgenres of science fiction, science fiction being…well, as hard to define as its subgenres. This in no way makes it difficult to write academic papers about this shit.
One of the earlier definitions put science fiction (from now on, SF) as a didactic and progressive literature with emphasis on science; a literature about science for science, with scientific methodology (Stableford:2015). As the discussion for SF definitions has progressed, so has discussion about what the correct term should be; speculative fiction (Merril:1971:60) and structural fabulation (Scholes:1975:29) have been contenders. Today science fiction and speculative fiction are used interchangeably.
There's no consensus on how to define SF (Westfahl:1998, Stableford et al:2015), though a bunch of people have tried, such as Damon Knight, who famously said: "Science fiction is what we point to when we say it." (Clute:1995:314), and Gary Westfahl, who proposed that "A work labelled science fiction has these three features: it is a prose narrative with scientific language and non-realistic subject matter – or any two of these three features." (Westfahl:1998:299).
The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction defines SF like this:
"A genre (of literature, film, etc.) in which the setting differs from our own world (e.g. by the invention of new technology, through contact with aliens, by having a different history, etc.), and in which the difference is based on extrapolations made from one or more changes or suppositions; hence, such a genre in which the difference is explained (explicitly or implicitly) in scientific or rational, as opposed to supernatural, terms." (Prucher:2009:171.)
In the words of Tom Shippey, however, SF "is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it." (Jakubowski & Edwards:1983).
WELL ISN'T THAT NEAT? :D SF is what we point to when we say it, as changeable as the weather, and most probably, is about science or a setting different from ours through science.
So, on to the -punk genres. I'm listing them below in a somewhat chronological order of invention. First a brief overview, and then I'll do in-depth bullets about cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, and solarpunk, as those are the -punk genres I'm most familiar with.
Cyberpunk, which concerns itself mostly with a dystopian society in which humans access cyberspace by way of cybernetics.
Biopunk, a close cousin of cyberpunk that deals with consequences of human and genetic experimentation and biotechnology (Michaud:2008:53). The main difference between biopunk and cyberpunk is that biopunk modifications have nothing to do with cyberware and cyberspace, but only genetic and biological manipulation.
Steampunk, which is retro-futuristic alternative history fiction that reimagines history and science based on an alternative universe in which the industrial revolution did not happen (or happened differently), and in which steam based science evolved. Steampunk is rooted in the politics of the Victorian era as well as aesthetic - fashion, architecture, etc.. Steampunk rarely extends beyond the Victorian era. (Guffey & Lemay:2014, Booker:2015:290.)
Dieselpunk, a close cousin of steampunk in that it is also retro-futuristic alternative history fiction, but unlike steampunk, dieselpunk accepts the industrial revolution and focuses on dieselpowered technology. (Guffey & Lemay:2014.)
Solarpunk, a new eco-futuristic political movement that has produced little literature so far. In literature it is SF that is either retro-futuristic fiction that reimagines an alternative history in which the industrial revolution did not happen, or evolved into a different direction, or futuristic fiction in which the current environmental issues have been solved. In a solarpunk universe, the world has become solar- or windpowered, ecological and sustainable. (Lodi-Ribeiro:2014.)
Many more, such as decopunk, clockpunk, atomicpunk, and so on. All the -punk subgenres are typically considered cyberpunk derivatives, in that they are either inspired by elements of cyberpunk or have borrowed the -punk suffix to allow twisting and mixing. They focus on a certain aspect of technological advancement and its consequences, whereas SF as an overarching genre is free to do whatever it wants within the realm of a) prose narrative, b) technological advancement ("scientific language") and c) non-realistic subject matter, if going by Westfahl's definition of SF.
CYBERPUNK
In cyberpunk, the advanced technology is very often biotechnology; technology that alters the human body or mind, for example brain implants that allow the human mind access to the internet, or cyberspace. In addition to this, the life quality of the characters in a cyberpunk story tends to be very low. Cyberpunk represents a future in which humans are subject to ruthless digital and technical communications networks and have lost the human connection to each other (Cavallaro:2000:xv). Cyberpunk is by nature a dystopian genre by virtue of its themes and discussions, which often revolve around the potential downfalls of technological advancement. Important to note here is that cyberpunk as a genre was born in the early eighties, at the beginning of the technological boom. Internet, cell phones, microchips and bionic prosthetics were all new things under development, and so it would be very easy to conclude that the genre was also in part born out of fear of the unknown. The - punk part of the term was taken directly from 1970s rock'n'roll terminology, punk in this context meaning young, aggressive, streetwise, and alienated, and offensive to the Establishment. In the early 1980s the term cyberpunk was coined by writer Bruce Bethke, and the term came into common use via William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). (Nicholls:2015a.)
Non-exhaustive list of themes:
Punk disillusionment, sometimes with layers of illusions being peeled away as the story progresses
The loss of human connection and/or the decline of the human condition
Media overload, massive data networks and density of information
Destructive sex, often in connection with the lack of ability to form human connections
Bodily metamorphosis and/or body modifications that lead to transhuman and posthuman themes.
A dark, gritty and post-industrial global setting, often megacities, that further overshadow the protagonist and emphasise their position in society
Heavy substance use & addiction
Hopelessness – the protagonists nurture no hope of getting out of their predicament and/or do not succeed
Disregard for human life
(Burrows & Featherstone:1996; Elias:2009:3; Shiner:1991; Hollinger:1990; McHale:1992; Murphy & Vint:2010; Shiner:1992; Slusser:1992; Cavallaro:2000, Lavigne:2013:11-16.)
In addition to these, cyberpunk themes very often also overlap with postmodernist themes such as:
"lost in the city" themes of lack of identity
An increasingly fractured and globalised society
The loss of meaning or a higher order, religion is non-existent and there is no god or other higher authority to whom one can turn for answers
Deconstruction. It can be argued that cyberpunk in itself is a deconstruction of utopian SF narratives – the utopia of SF is often the dystopia of cyberpunk.
(McCaffery:1991: 315-316; McHale:1991; Heuser:2003; Woods:1999:65-66.)
Now, cyberpunk was coined by a bunch of cishet white dudes in a single writer's circle, who just wanted to look really cool. (See the Mirrorshades anthology and it's editor, who was the one who most wanted to be cool.) The same dudes have now declared this genre dead and that it is no longer active as a productive genre, albeit having been a refreshing spark and fresh point of view within SF history and SF literature (Nicholls:2015a). To that I say: bullshit! Genres don't just 'die', and don't just 'stop being productive' - let me refer you back to the definition of SF as a something that changes as you try to define it.
Consider this: in the 80s a bunch of dudebros wrote stories about the danger of technology and the internet while also writing about anti-heroes fighting the establishment (none of these dudebros were actual punks, they were decidedly middle-class to upper middle-class who circle-jerked each other in their writing workshops on the regular and wore sunglasses with mirror-finish). In the 90s the new technology wave didn't really seem all that dangerous anymore, and wasn't the internet and the cellphones awfully convenient? And who cares about Monsanto and Nestlé when we can get cheap flour and coca-cola whenever we want it? And by the 21st century, well, these dudebros are old, likely haven't kept up with their own genre because they're stuck with whatever they thought was genius in the 80s, and technology is everywhere. Also, Japan did not become the technological mega-corporate superpower that they thought it would be in the 80s, and we don't live in a Judge Dredd society, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ , basically.
Here's some examples of cyberpunk works: Mirrorshades anthology (1986) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrorshades) Neuromancer, Gibson (1984)
Blade Runner (1982) Ghost in the Shell (1995) The Matrix (1999) Surrogates (2009) Dredd (2012) Elysium (2013) Lucy (2014)
Hey look at that, four movies on this list from the 21st century, but I guess cyberpunk is really dead, guys? How sad Alexa play despacito
Potential problems
There's always a risk that in creating a cyberpunk story that one accidentally ends up writing about sentient fedoras instead of actual anti-heroes fighting against real injustice. If your story is about incels, you're doing cyberpunk wrong.
No really, that's it.
STEAMPUNK
I have no sources for this section because I've not covered steampunk in my own academic research, it's just one of those genres I really like to read recreationally. I have read academic articles about steampunk, but do I have them saved? No, absolutely not. That would be rational, useful, and effective, and that's not how we do things in this household.
That said.
Steampunk is a subgenre of SF that falls under ALTERNATIVE HISTORY rather than COOL FUTURE STUFF. It's retro-futuristic type of science fiction inspired by the likes of Jules Verne, who wrote science fiction in the 19th century. What's characteristic for Jules Verne and other SF writers of the same era, is that they imagined technological development based on the science they had at the time, which is why so many of their inventions are steam powered (coal). They had all these grand ideas (and big imaginations) for what humanity could achieve, but didn't have anything more advanced than coal, steam, and electricity. They didn't know that there was an entire digital revolution waiting to happen in the 20th century, so everything was analogue.
In addition to that, the 19th century still had like, this ginormous British Empire. There were colonies everywhere, French, British, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish--Europeans were stealing lands and killing people (and enslaving them, still). Imperialism was in vogue and the tea, sugar, and opium trade was the highlight of capitalism at the expense of the entire rest of the world.
The modern steampunk genre as it's written today is...based on all that. So you have a genre that's aesthetic as fuck (cogwheels everywhere, amiright?), in a sort of nostalgic way where everyone has on pretty dresses, the technology is adorably analogue, there's steam! Steam is pretty! Science as we know it is disregarded for the Rule of Cool, and some writers even throw in supernatural elements because why the fuck not, and the Victorians were into it anyway.
The steampunk genre was not created to be -punk. It is not inherently rebellious, it doesn't feature a fight against the establishment, it doesn't have anti-heroes, it doesn't really have anything about it that pokes at the status quo of its time (the Victorian era). It was dubbed steampunk because cyberpunk was a term that existed, and it looked cool to model the name of a new subgenre after another one, that clearly set it apart from 'traditional' SF, but also made it clear it was different from cyberpunk.
Potential problems:
The genre as a whole.
I'm not joking.
So, how do you avoid the problem that is steampunk?
De-colonise the narrative* (er, probably don't do this if you're white.)
Whatever you do, make sure you're not accidentally glorifying imperialism and colonialism.
Write stories that subvert the steampunk genre as it's popularly known--go beyond the Victorian era - what does a steampunk world look like that prevailed until 2018? What happened to the British empire in that world? Is it still around? Did it collapse? What role did tech play in it? *who* has the tech - the British empire, or the nations it colonised? What does that mean for history? Who's the hero and who's the establishment? Where is the injustice and who is fighting it?
Steampunk is often known as a fluff genre, where the characters just get to go on adventures and have fun. Drink a lot of tea, eat a lot of food, etc. (Hello, Gail Carriger) There's nothing wrong with fluff, but consider: at whose expense do we get the fluff? Just to take Gail Carriger's steampunk books as an example, her characters frequently exhibit a privilege that only comes with the fact they are British citizens in a British empire.
Examples of steampunk works:
Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne (1870) (you didn't think I was going to forget Jules Verne, did you? The Time Machine, Wells (1895) (most people would say it's SF, but I'm adding it here because of when it was written and the faux science) Infernal Devices, Jeter (1987) The Difference Engine, Sterling & Gibson (1991) The Golden Compass, Pullmann (1995) Steampunk and Steampunk Reloaded anthology (2008) edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer The Boneshaker, Priest (2009) The Revolutions, Gilman (2014) Gail Carriger's Parasolverse (on-going)
The City of Lost Children (1995) Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) Treasure Planet (2002) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) Van Helsing (2004) SteamBoy (2004) Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
*this, I'd argue, is how we get e.g. afropunk and silkpunk. :D :D :D i don't mean that afropunk and silkpunk are steampunk under a different name, i mean that those genres are about de-colonising the narrative; alternative history free of western intervention. It's SUPER COOL STUFF, and you should all read it. (As should I.) Ken Liu and JY Yang do silkpunk. Unfortunately I don't know much afropunk, though I do know Black Panther (2018) is an example of afropunk.
DIESELPUNK
Oh man am I READY for this hot mess.
Dieselpunk is another ALTERNATIVE HISTORY subgenre, characterised by being set between WW1 and WW2, when dieselpowered technology was the main technological focus. Dieselpunk fiction sometimes extends into the 1950s and early 1960s, and in those cases often discusses alternative histories in which the Nazis won the war or the post-apocalyptic reality following a nuclear war or other major human-made disastrous event. The term dieselpunk was coined in 2001 by Lewis Pollak and Dan Ross, when they needed to describe the aesthetic of their new game which was steampunk-esque, but darker and grittier than steampunk. Dieselpunk was a world of grit, oil, dust and mud, but also borrowed elements from Art Deco, Dadaism, Cubism, and Futurism, amongst others. (Ottens & Piecraft:2008.)
I have a love-hate relationship with this genre, because there are TWO strands of dieselpunk, and, if you've spotted it already, one of them is about nazis winning and the other is about nazis losing. Guess which one I like? If your answer is 'the one where nazis lose' you are right, gold star for you. I'll be citing a lot from Ottens and Piecraft in this section because there is shockingly little academic research done on dieselpunk. Nick Ottens and Mr. Piecraft are two dudes who like dieselpunk who sat together ten years ago to talk about a definition, and published it in a webzine. It's important to note that Mr. Piecraft is a screenname, and that Piecraft himself is a nazi-sympathiser if not an outright nazi (honestly, what's the difference between nazi-sympathiser and nazi? none). Ottens, on the other hand, uses his own name because he's not a fricking nazi.
So, about those two strands. Let's deal with the nazi first so we can proceed to ignore it for the rest of this post.
Themes of the Piecraftian strand:
Continual dystopian view
The aesthetic of world wars
World War 2 is either being fought as a prolonged cold war or has been won by the Axis powers
Often suggests Nazi-Germany has advanced rocketry and aeroplane programs
Eugenics
The lack of development of human culture due to widespread warfare
In the case of a post-apocalyptical event, survival being largely dependent on diesel power
The occult or supernatural
Often no hope for recovery, survival or a better future
(Ottens & Piecraft:2008)
Y I K E S. just. YIKES.
Themes of the Ottensian strand:
Settings in which the decadent aesthetics and utopian philosophies of the Roaring Twenties continued unhindered by economic collapse or war
The Great Depression did not happen, sometimes World War 1 didn't either
Enthusiasm for the predictions about the future produced throughout the 1930s and 1950s
Positive visions of dieselpowered technology, often realising utopian ideals of technology fairs at the time
Unstoppable technological progress; however the technology almost never crosses the boundary between dieselpowered machines and sophisticated computer technology
Nuclear weapons only an experimental technology
Firmly set in the interwar era and does not incorporate World War 2
Pulp-inspired adventure
Always carries a glimmer of hope
(Ottens & Piecraft:2008)
Dieselpunk is sometimes considered a post-cyberpunk genre within the "Ottensian" tradition, as it may offer a utopian view of the progression stated in a pre-WW2 environment as a counterpoint to the dystopian world views of cyberpunk; dieselpunk as a genre is not just newer than cyberpunk, it showed up right on the heels of cyberpunk. Dieselpunk is also sometimes considered a post-steampunk and pre-cyberpunk genre timeline-wise, as the universe of the "Piecraftian" dieselpunk tradition may eventually turn into a cyberpunk universe with the progress of time and technological advancement, and was in fact considered a continuum between steampunk and cyberpunk by game designers Pollak and Ross. Another view is that dieselpunk fiction can be likened to cyberpunk stories set in the Roaring Twenties instead of in the near future as both cyberpunk and dieselpunk take inspiration from film noir in their storytelling and aesthetic look. (Ottens & Piecraft:2008; Buckell:2015; Feinstein:2014; Wilson:2013.)
I personally think that dieselpunk has a lot more in common with cyberpunk than with steampunk, even though dieselpunk and steampunk are often lumped together. It's easy to see why they are, as both steampunk and dieselpunk are highly aesthetic genres, they're both alternative history, they both have nostalgic elements (e.g. victorian fashion, 20s-40s fashion), and they both lack the true -punk aspect of the genre: the fight against the establishment. At least where the Piecraftian strand is concerned, as that isn't so much about fighting the establishment as it is about glorifying fascism. The Ottensian strand, while 'fluffier', and pulp-ier, definitely has a clear anti-nazi thread--the heroes in pre-WW2 or WW2 stories are explicitly fighting the nazis, not aiding them.
Examples of dieselpunk works:
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (Bet you didn't see that one coming) The Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) Captain America: the First Avenger (2011) (YES, REALLY. IT IS DIESELPUNK.) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Potential problems:
THE ENTIRE PIECRAFTIAN STRAND OF DIESELPUNK, HONESTLY
DON'T BE A PIECRAFT
BE CAPTAIN AMERICA
PUNCH A NAZI
SOLARPUNK
Hey look, it's my favourite -punk genre! It's my favourite because it's so new and undefined and malleable and we can make it ANYTHING WE WANT, without old dudebros breathing down our necks. (No doubt they will still be breathing down our necks, but fuck them. FUCK THE ESTABLISHMENT.)
Solarpunk is a new eco-futuristic political movement that has produced little literature so far. It's usually characterised by either retro-futuristic fiction that reimagines an alternative history in which the industrial revolution did not happen, or evolved into a different direction, or futuristic fiction in which the current environmental issues have been solved. In a solarpunk universe, the world has become solar- or windpowered, ecological and sustainable. (Lodi-Ribeiro:2014.)
Some credit the solarpunk movement to this post on tumblr from 2014, but the term and the concept had been around for at least two years by then. The post can however be given some credit regarding spreading the concept and spotlighting it in a visually appealing way. Because of this post, many define solarpunk as art noveau + plants, which, to be fair, is a very aesthetic rendition of the concept, but like I said: this is a brand new genre, it's malleable, we are still in the process of defining it. And we likely never will be 'finished' defining it, as I remind you yet again that science fiction is the literature of change, and it changes while you define it.
I imagine that the -punk part of solarpunk isn't solely because all those other established genres use that naming model, but because we live in a society that still relies heavily on fossil fuels, and we are living a global climate crisis that will only be worse if we don't take action. Solarpunk takes that and goes 'what if we didn't have that problem in the first place?' and imagines a world where we didn't become reliant on fossil fuels, where we as a species invented and used sustainable sources of power (wind, solar, water) from the get-go. Or it imagines a world where we averted the crisis, where fossil fuels were replaced by renewable energy. I like this genre because it speaks to the part of me that is passionate about the environment and sustainable energy (like, come on, I live in Denmark, the land of wind power), and because parts of our society are, in fact, solarpunk. So one could say the genre is fighting against the establishment we live in (the governments that don't sign environmental treaties, governments that keep digging for oil instead of investing in sustainable research, governments that approve fracking, governments that roll back laws that protect the environment) by presenting an alternative, but I'd like to think that in fiction we'll also eventually have heroes fighting for the environment.
Examples of solarpunk works:
Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World Anthology (2012, translated into English in 2018) Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation Anthology (2017) Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers Anthology (2018) The Broken Earth Trilogy, Jemisin (I have yet to read it, but others have described it as having solarpunk elements)
Potential problems:
I don't? know? yet?
??
SOURCES:
BOOKER, M. Keith. Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction in Literature. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
BUCKELL, Tobias S.. Introduction. The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk. Ed. Sean Wallace. Hachette UK, 2015.
BURROWS, Roger & Mike FEATHERSTONE. Cultures of Technological Embodiment: An Introduction. Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk. Sage Publications, 1996.
CAVALLARO, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the work of William Gibson. The Athlone Press, 2000.
CLUTE, John & Peter NICHOLLS. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 2nd edition. St. Martin's Griffin, 1995.
ELIAS, Herlander. Cyberpunk 2.0: Fiction and Contemporary. LabCom Books, Portugal. 2009.
FEINSTEIN, Katriona. Dieselpunk: Retro Futures of the All-American Art Deco Years. Graffito Books Limited, 2014
GUFFEY, Elizabeth and Kate C. LEMAY. Retrofuturism and Steampunk. The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford University Press, 2014.
HOLLINGER, Veronica. Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.
Mosaic 23, January 1990.
JAKUBOWSKI, Maxim & Malcolm EDWARDS (ed.). The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists. HarperCollins, 1983.
LAVIGNE, Carlen. Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study. McFarland, 2013.
LODI-RIBEIRO, Gerson. Prefácio. Solarpunk. Editora Draco, 2014.
MCCAFFERY, Larry. Cutting Up. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Duke University Press, 1991.
MCHALE, Brian. POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Duke University Press, 1991.
MCHALE, Brian. Towards a poetics of cyberpunk. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge, 1992.
MERRIL, Judith. What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction? SF: The Other Side of Realism. Editor Thomas D. Clareson. Popular Press, 1971.
MICHAUD, Thomas. Science Fiction and Innovation. Marsisme.com, 2008.
MILBURN, Colin. Posthumanism. The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction. Ed. Rob Latham. Oxford University Press, 2014.
MURPHY, Graham J. and Sherryl VINT. Introduction: The Sea Change(s) of Cyberpunk. Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives. Routledge, 2010.
NICHOLLS, Peter. Cyberpunk. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 10 Apr. 2015. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. a
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cyberpunk.
NICHOLLS, Peter. Cybernetics. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 10 Apr. 2015. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. b
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cybernetics.
NICHOLLS, Peter, and John CLUTE. Genre SF. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 2 Apr. 2015. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/genre_sf.
OTTENS, Nick & Mr PIECRAFT: Discovering Dieselpunk. The Gatehouse Gazette, July 2008. Web. 31 March 2016.
http://www.ottens.co.uk/gatehouse/Gazette%20-%201.pdf
PRUCHER, Jeff (editor). Brave New Words. The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.
Oxford University Press, 2009.
SCHOLES, Robert E. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.
SHINER, Lewis. Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk. New York Times Op-Ed page, Jan. 7, 1991.
SHINER, Lewis. Inside the Movement: Past, Present and Future. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the future of narrative. Eds. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. University of Georgia Press, 1992.
SLUSSER, George. Introduction: Fiction as Information. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the future of narrative. Eds. George Slusser and Tom Shippey. University of Georgia Press, 1992.
STABLEFORD, Brian M; John CLUTE & Peter NICHOLLS. Definitions of SF. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 2 Apr. 2015. Web. 14 Sept. 2015. http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/definitions_of_sf.
WILSON, Tome. Welcome to the retro future. Dieselpunk Epulp showcase. John Pica, 2013. WOODS, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester University Press, 1999.
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“Communism was no longer a doctrine but a movement. It no longer proceeded from principles, from the humanism of the Young Hegelians or of Feuerbach, but from facts. In so far as it was theoretical, it was the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in the class-struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie and the theoretical comprehension of the conditions for attaining the freedom of the proletariat.
Marx and Engels had established their views scientifically on the basis of German philosophical theory. It was now equally essential for them to win over the European, and first of all the German, working class to their point of view. 'We set about the task as soon as we had reached clarification,' Engels relates. The overthrowing of primitive Communism was the first and most urgent aim.
Wilhelm Weitling came to London in September, 1844. The sufferings and persecution he had undergone for his Communist ideals had increased his already considerable renown. He had been arrested by the Swiss authorities in the summer of 1843 and indicted for blasphemy, making attacks on the rights of property and forming a secret society for the spreading of Communism. He was imprisoned for four months on remand, condemned to a further six months in gaol by the Zurich court and, at the conclusion of his sentence, was delivered over the Prussian frontier in chains. His trial and still more the official report on ‘The Communists in Switzerland according to the papers found in Weitling's possession' attracted attention far beyond the borders of Switzerland. The wide publicity given to his case caused many people to hear of the Communist movement and of Communism for the first time. Where the distribution of Communist literature was impossible the official report, which everybody could buy, with its copious extracts from Weitling's writings, was not a bad substitute.
This gifted young writer--at once a poet and a philosophising tailor's assistant--received universal sympathy. He wrote his Gaol Poems in prison. Even the Prussian Government was aware of the prevailing mood, and although the Swiss authorities delivered him up to them as a fugitive from military service, when he was found unfit they let him go free. But after a few months he had once more made himself so unpopular with the police that he was arrested again and sent off to Hamburg, where Heine saw him. 'My legs have no aptitude to carry iron rings like those Weitling bore,' he wrote. 'He showed me the marks.'
From Hamburg Weitling went on to London, where his German comrades enthusiastically received him. A big celebration was held in his honour on September 22, in co-operation with the Chartists and the refugees from France. But the jubilation and the tumult died away, and before six months had passed the contradictions that had long been forming within the movement led to an open rupture.
During the years in which Weitling wrote his Mankind as it is and as it ought to be and was developing the ideas he expressed in his most mature work, Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom, all the leaders of the League of the Just had been living in Paris. After the rising of May 12, 1839, they scattered. Weitling went to Switzerland, Schapper, Heinrich Bauer and Moll found refuge in England. The small Communist groups in Switzerland lost themselves more and more in sentimental Primitive Christian Communism and romantic plotting. Weitling, separated from his old friends, surrounded by backward artisans in a backward country, soon abandoned himself entirely to primitive Utopianism and highly irrational flights of fancy. It was different with those members of the League who went westwards. They came under the influence of Chartism, at the time the most advanced workers' movement in the world. They established friendly relations with the Chartist leaders, read the Chartist Press, and contributed to it themselves. The longer they lived in England the more they shook themselves free from their primitive equalitarian Communism. In 1843, when Weitling started talking of the communalisation of women and concocted a hare-brained scheme for forming an army of forty thousand thieves and robbers who were to bring the exploiters to their knees by means of a pitiless guerilla warfare, they firmly protested against such folly.
Imprisonment had disordered Weitling's mind more than ever. After the Zurich trial he completely lost all sense of proportion. His outward fame seemed to confirm his own conviction that he had been chosen as the teacher, leader and saviour of mankind, to free it from all its misery and suffering. The 'Londoners' and Weitling had to part.
The dispute flared up over the London German Workers' Union. The Union had been founded in February, 1840, by Schapper and six other members of the League of the Just as a legal organisation to serve as a screen for the League. The League made use of this kind of organisation everywhere. The statutes of the London German Workers' Union, printed as a special pamphlet, became the pattern for all organisations of the same kind founded by members of the League everywhere where German workers lived and legal organisations of this or a similar kind were possible. The chief purpose of these Unions was propaganda, and in addition they provided benefits for sick comrades. It did not take long for the Union to become the centre of the German workers' colony in London. In addition to Germans it had among its members Scandinavians, Dutch, Hungarians, Czechs, southern Slavs and Russians, nationalities which were of admirable service to the Germans in their contacts with other countries. In 1847 an English Grenadier Guardsman in uniform was a regular visitor. At the time the Union reached its zenith, on the eve of the revolution of 1848, it had between four and five hundred members, a more than respectable total for the time. The life of the Union was described in a letter by Hugo Hildebrand, the political economist, who visited it in April, 1846.
'About half-past eight we went to the Union premises in a spirit of considerable expectancy,' he wrote. 'On the ground-floor there was an ordinary shop, in which porter and other beers were sold. I did not notice any special place reserved for visitors. We went through the shop and upstairs into a hall-like room, capable of seating about two hundred men at the tables and benches distributed about the floor. About twenty men were sitting about in groups, eating a simple supper or smoking one of the pipes of honour (which lay on all the tables) with a beer-mug in front of them. Others were standing about. Every moment the door opened to admit newcomers, so that it was clear that the meeting was only due to begin later. One saw from their faces that most of the men belonged to the working class, although all were thoroughly decently clothed and an easy and unaffected but thoroughly decorous tone prevailed. The language was predominantly German, but French and English were also to be heard. At one end of the hall there was a grand-piano, with music, which in unmusical London was the best proof that we had found the right room. As we knew no one present we sat down at a table near the door. Very little notice was taken of us. We ordered a glass of porter and the usual penny packet of tobacco and awaited our host and acquaintance, Schapper. It was not long before a big, strong, healthy-looking man of about thirty-six, with a black moustache and a commanding manner, came up to Diefenbach (Hildebrand's companion). He was promptly introduced to me as Schapper, the former Frankfurt demagogue, who later took part in campaigns, or rather revolutions, in Switzerland and Spain. He was very serious on the occasion of my meeting him, but friendly, and I could feel that he looked down at my professional status with a certain inner pride.'
What Engels, looking back at the early years of the movement forty years later, said about Schapper, Heinrich Bauer and Moll, the three men who took such an important part in the birth of the Communist League, may be stated with advantage here. Engels remembered Schapper as a giant in stature, resolute and energetic, always ready to risk his life and bourgeois well-being, an ideal professional revolutionary of the type characteristic of the thirties. In spite of a certain ponderousness of thought, he was by no means inaccessible to better theoretical understanding than his own, to compensate for which he only held on the more grimly to what he had once grasped. Hence his intelligence was sometimes carried away by his revolutionary zeal. But he always saw his mistakes afterwards and candidly admitted them. Heinrich Bauer came from Franconia and was a bootmaker. He was a lively, spritely, witty little man, concealing a great deal of shrewdness and determination in his small frame. Finally Joseph Moll, a Cologne watchmaker, a middle-sized Hercules, was at least the equal of his comrades in energy and determination and was superior to them in intelligence. He was a born diplomat, besides being more accessible to theoretical understanding.
Hildebrand continues:
'Schapper invited us to sit down with him at one end of the hall and showed me a notice-board on which the Union regulations were displayed. They were under the heading of "German Workers' Educational Union." Anyone who earned his living honestly and had nothing dishonourable against him was eligible for membership, but every application for membership had to be proposed and seconded by a member. The Union officials were a president, a secretary, a librarian and a treasurer. Members were divided into two classes: (1) those who constituted a Communist club of their own, conditions for membership of which were as described and (2) other members who took part in the educational activities of the Union only. Only the first category could take part in meetings at which voting took place, elect officers and vote on the admission of new members. The others only took a passive part in the Union activities, took part in none of the Communist meetings proper and only paid contributions, and fines if they missed any of the educational meetings. The basic idea of the Union was that man could only attain liberty and self-knowledge by the cultivation of his mind. For this reason every evening was devoted to instruction of one kind or another. The first evening was devoted to study of the English language, the second to geography, the third to history, the fourth to drawing and physics, the fifth to singing, the sixth to dancing and the seventh to Communist policy. The subjects of instruction were changed every half-year. ...
'We took our seats at the indicated place. In the meantime the hall had become crowded, and the president, of whom all I know is that he was described to me as a doctor, opened the meeting. After a solemn silence had been obtained and everyone had taken his pipe out of his mouth, the secretary, a tailor's assistant, whose descriptive powers were really enviable, read out a notice to the effect that Citizen Hildebrand and Citizen Diefenbach had been introduced as guests by Citizen Schapper and asked whether any citizen had any objection. After that attention was turned to current events and Citizen Schapper made a report on the events of the week. His report was very eloquent, thorough and informative. It was evident that he and the club conducted a very widespread correspondence; for he reported the contents of a letter from Madrid which contained news of the fall of the military despotism, due to Christina's hierarchist tendencies, at greater length and in far greater detail than had yet appeared in any newspaper. A strong Communist colouring was naturally evident throughout, and the theme of the proletariat ran like a red thread through the entire discourse. I candidly admit that I can stand a good dose of Liberalism, but in some places my hair stood on end. ...
'The whole speech made a great impression on the audience and was followed by general and continuous applause. Next the minutes of the last Communist meeting, at which the objectionableness of the Christian religion was dealt with, were read by the secretary.
'After this a fresh subject came up for discussion, namely the question of what arrangements were to be made for the education of children in the Communist State. During the course of the discussion I discovered to my amazement that at least half of those present were married men. Unfortunately the debate did not get much beyond the initial stages; consequently all I found out to satisfy my curiosity was that they repudiated alike the communalisation of wives and the emancipation of women, and considered woman as the mental complement of man and marriage as a moral institution, in which both parties enjoyed equal rights, although the capacities, disposition and sphere of activity of man and woman were completely different. Education must be mental and physical, private and political and must actually begin before birth.
'As it was past midnight by this time, further consideration of these matters was postponed to the following week. Next I had a very serious private discussion with Schapper about his hostility to Liberalism, spoke to a few other members, including a Silesian joiner, inspected the Union library and bought some Communist pamphlets. ... The meeting dispersed in a very friendly and good-tempered spirit, so that the prevalent use of the second person singular did seem not just to spring from the club rules but to be rooted in the members' hearts.'
These German workers attentively followed political events not only in England where they lived and in Germany which was their home; their view took in the whole of Europe. Weitling's realm was not of this world. The only distinction that he recognised was that between the present, which he utterly rejected, and a glittering future. All else was evil. Schapper and his friends were patiently seeking a way for themselves along the thorny path of conflicting parties and systems. Their guide was reason. Weitling followed his feelings only. He took his stand on the Bible, on Love, the Noble and the Good. In his opinion the people were long since ripe for the new social order, and the only remaining task was to free them from their oppressors, for which all that was required was the determined initiative of a revolutionary organisation, a small band of resolute brothers. The obsolete old world must be crushed at a blow by the dictatorship of a revolutionary minority who would act in the interests of the latently revolutionary masses and shrink at nothing to attain their ends. One almost seems to hear the voice of Bakunin, with whom Marx was forced to repeat the same struggle twenty years later, in the following phrases of Weitling, which date from 1845: 'In my opinion,' Weitling said, 'everybody is ripe for Communism, even the criminals. Criminals are a product of the present order of society and under Communism they would cease to be criminals. Humanity is of necessity always ripe for revolution, or it never will be. The latter is nothing but the phraseology of our opponents. If we follow them we shall have no choice but to lay our hands on our knees and wait till roasted pigeons fly into our mouths.'
These words of Weitling's were spoken at a meeting at the German Workers' Union at the end of June, 1845. Since the beginning of the year regular weekly meetings had been held at which the fundamental questions of Communism were discussed. The extent of the breach between their old comrade-in-arms and themselves had gradually become clear to the members of the Union. They found it far from easy to break with their own past. Personally attached to their leader as they were, they went on trying to reconcile the incompatible, to find a middle way. They almost apologised for their secession, but the parting could no longer be postponed. Schapper, their spokesman, said in his reply to Weitling that he himself had spoken in just the same way eight, even six years ago. But now, tempered as he was by so much bitter experience, he was compelled to express agreement with the reactionary phrase; the people were not yet ripe; for if they were ripe, such a phrase would no longer be possible. He ended his speech by saying that truth could not be knocked into people's heads with rifle-butts.
The London German workers all honoured Weitling and his candid opinions, but they decided for Schapper by an overwhelming majority. Weitling could not get over his defeat. He was unable to follow Schapper's reasoning even a little way. He left London, angered and embittered, suspecting intrigue and treachery.
....
Weitling refused to have anything to do with this 'new system of propaganda.' With growing embitterment he watched the dwindling of his prestige from day to day. The free, loose form of this new organisation, which aimed at attaining the co-operation of all Communists upon a basis of scientific Communism, ran counter to all his fundamental preconceptions, which refused to countenance anything but sentimental millenarianism and the tactics of the conspiratorial secret society. His stay in England brought him not only disappointment in the political field, but one personal failure after another. He tried a number of schemes, not one of which succeeded. His grandiose ideas, such as that for revolutionising science by means of 'a general logical study of thought and speech,' and for founding an artificial universal language, roused no interest. Obviously intriguing intellectuals were to blame. They barred his way to the publishers and to their secret 'sources of money.' Weitling had risen to fame in the rôle of an accuser. His first writings had been the mighty cry of resentment of the oppressed class from which he sprang, but half-educated as he was and full of mistrust for the science of 'this world,' as a discoverer of systems he descended into the absurd. He was forced to look on while the London Communists increasingly turned from him to follow Marx. He had had a short meeting with Marx in London in the summer of 1845, and on his way back to the Continent at the beginning of 1846 he stopped in Brussels. The Brussels correspondence committee had just been founded, and in view of the prestige Weitling still enjoyed an invitation to collaborate with the committee could not be avoided. Marx invited him.
Two accounts are extant concerning the confrontation of Marx and Weitling on March 30, 1846. One is a letter Weitling wrote to Moses Hess and the other a detailed account of the affair by the Russian writer, Annenkov, who was very close to Marx at the time and was introduced by him to the Communists of Brussels. Annenkov gives the only living description of Marx dating from those years, and it reproduces incomparably the atmosphere of the movement at the time. Thirty years later Annenkov could still call up a vivid picture of what young Marx was like on that spring evening in Brussels in 1846.
'Marx was a type of man formed all of energy, force of will and unshakable conviction, a type highly remarkable in outward appearance as well. In spite of his thick, black mane of hair, his hairy hands, and his coat buttoned up all awry, he had the appearance of a man who has the right and the power to demand respect, although his looks and his manners might appear peculiar sometimes. His movements were angular, but bold and confident, his manners were contrary to all social practice. But they were proud, with a touch of disdain, and his sharp voice, which rang like metal, sounded remarkably in accordance with the radical judgments on men and things which he let fall. He spoke only in the imperative, brooking no contradiction, and this was intensified by the tone, which to me was almost painfully jarring, in which he spoke. This tone expressed the firm conviction of his mission to reign over men's minds and dictate their laws. Before my eyes stood the personification of a democratic dictator such as might appear before one in moments of fantasy.'
In comparison with him Weitling appeared almost spruce--'a handsome, fair young man in a somewhat foppishly cut coat, with a foppishly trimmed beard.' He looked more like a commercial traveller than the gloomy, embittered worker, oppressed by the burden of work and thought, whom Annenkov had imagined.
Those present at the meeting were Engels, the Belgian, Gigot, Edgar von Westphalen, Marx's brother-in-law, Weydemeyer, Seiler, a German registrar who had fled from Germany, and the journalist, Heilberg. These took their seats at a small green table with Marx at the head of it, 'pencil in hand, his lion's head bent over a sheet of paper.' The question for discussion was what form propaganda should take in Germany. Engels, 'tall, straight, grave and looking like a distinguished Englishman,' rose and said how necessary it was to clarify opposing views and settle on a general programme, but before he had finished Marx, impatient and thirsting for battle, cut him short with a direct question to Weitling. 'But tell us, Weitling,' he said, 'what are the arguments with which you defend your social-revolutionary agitation and on what do you intend to base it in the future?' Annenkov stresses his remembrance of the exact form of this blunt question, which opened a heated discussion in the little group round the green table.
Before this unaccustomed audience Weitling lost his usual confidence and command of speech. He spoke indistinctly and confusedly, kept on repeating himself, continually corrected what he said and only made his points with difficulty. His speeches consisted of 'commonplaces of Liberal rhetoric.' He declined to create new economic theories, in his opinion the doctrines of the French were ample and sufficient. The workers must open their eyes, put faith in no promises and rest their hopes upon themselves alone.
He would probably have gone on speaking a long time yet if Marx, with angrily contracted brows, had not interrupted him and started a sarcastic reply, the essence of which was that to stir up the people without giving them firm foundations on which to base their actions was a simple act of treachery. The awakening of fantastic hopes led not to the saving of suffering people but to their downfall. Trying to influence the workers, in Germany especially, without a concrete teaching and strong, scientific ideas was hollow, unscrupulous playing with propaganda, like an enthusiastic apostle addressing a lot of open-mouthed donkeys. '"Here," he added, pointing suddenly to me with a powerful gesture, "here is a Russian among us. In his country, Weitling, perhaps there would be a place for your rôle, in Russia alone, perhaps, can successful unions be arranged between absurd apostles and absurd young men!"' But in a civilised country like Germany, Marx continued, nothing could be achieved without a settled, concrete teaching, and nothing had been achieved so far but noise, harmful excitement and destruction of the very cause that had been undertaken.
In a letter Weitling wrote next day he summed up Marx's speech by saying that unsuitable people must at once be parted from the 'sources of money.' It was his old illusion of an intellectual coalition that caused him so thoroughly to misunderstand Marx's demand for a 'sifting' of the party. He listened to Marx without understanding him. There could be no talk of the immediate realisation of Communism, Marx had said. The bourgeoisie must come to the helm first. How could Weitling possibly understand that, Weitling who believed that he could destroy the old form of society with forty thousand bandits and build up a new society on the basis of Christian Virtue? An unbridgeable abyss separated him from the Marxist interpretation of historical development. Marx said on this occasion for the first time what he had to repeat again and again in the next three years to those impatient souls who believed that only will was needed to leap a whole economic and therefore political epoch. Marx declared that the next revolution in Europe would have to destroy the remnants of feudalism, bring the Liberal and radical bourgeoisie into the saddle and thus for the first time create the political conditions for proletarian action. It was for this reason that Marx demanded the sifting of the party, the struggle against 'philosophical' Communism and the Communism of the artisans. Weitling understood that sentiment must be hooted from the stage. He did not understand that Marx replaced crude sentiment by scientific understanding. When Marx demanded that an end be put to 'secret propaganda,' that meant for Weitling the end of the movement itself. He recognised only one form of propaganda, that of the conspiratorial secret society. Because he believed the masses to be unripe and incapable of becoming ripe, he wanted and could want no mass movement.
Marx's criticism had struck Weitling in his weakest spot. With the mistrust of the self-educated, he felt once more the feared and hated pride of the intellectual. He replied that analysis in the study and criticism carried out far from the suffering world and the afflictions of the people accomplished nothing. 'At these words Marx struck the table angrily with his fist, so powerfully that the lamp shook. He jumped to his feet and exclaimed:
"'Ignorance had never yet helped anybody!"
'We followed his example and got up too. The conference was over. While Marx was striding up and down the room in unusually angry excitement I quickly said good-bye to him and the others and went home, greatly surprised by what I had seen and heard.'
The definite breach between Marx and Weitling did not come till May, 1848. Weitling even sent Marx an article for the paper he was going to start at the time, and he had no objection to accepting the help which the 'chief of the intellectuals,' whom he alleged to be 'sitting on the funds' though he was in fact short of them, continued to give him.”
- Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter. 1936. Chapter 10: Face to Face with Primitive Communism.
#karl marx#wilhelm weitling#communists#communism#primitive communism#communist league#propaganda#organizing#working class history#working class politics
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hybrid warfare and leftist alliances
this was originally written as a goodreads reflection on Masha Gessen’s book “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”, but turned into a sprawling mess.
I breezed through all six seasons of The Americans not long ago — another product of my podcast listening habits involving the Magnificast, hosted by two Christian communists. The Americans certainly stoked a smouldering interest in Soviet history for me. I only recently found out that Gessen did the Russian translations for many of the seasons.
This book was recommended to me by a pen pal who did her Master’s thesis on Soviet hockey propaganda, and will soon be starting a PhD on Russian democratic activism (and lesbians). So she certainly knows her stuff, and am glad I took the time to read this.
As a qualifier, before I begin this review, I have seen Gessen use she/her pronouns and other places that say Gessen uses they/them. I will use she/her because that is the most recent source I have found. And also the pronouns Gessen uses in reference to herself in the book. I will correct this review if I find my use of pronouns incorrect. With that out of the way, I’ll proceed onto the book.
I thought it was an absorbing read, well-structured, entertaining, and full of stuff I was completely ignorant of. There was a fascinating section on the practice of sociology under the Soviet Union, a really interesting section on Freudo-Marxism and its interaction with the Soviet state, and this later comes up in Gessen’s use of Erich Fromm for her stuff on totalitarianism. I think Fromm has helped me a lot better understand the dynamics of fascism. Gessen’s meeting with Putin was very fun to read. The difficulties I had (at times) keeping up with the history, dates, names, etc were some indication that I likely need to brush up on my Russian history. Once in a while I would recognize something, like when Gessen mentions Gorky in her typically humorous style:
“The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant “bitter.” When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna’s birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country’s best-known dissident.”
I encountered Gorky a couple years ago by way of the Indonesian anti-colonial writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (a political prisoner in Indonesia for decades, wasting away in various penal colonies, perpetually accused of being a communist, though always denying that label) who was an enthusiastic translator of Gorky’s writing. Translating Gorky’s novel “Mother” into Indonesian was one of Pram’s first sources of income after his wedding, as I read in his memoir “The Mute’s Soliloquy”. He did the Indonesian translation working off from an English translation, and later found out sections were missing after going through a Dutch translation. He humorously wrote that he had to put up with pointed and critical queries about his translation when visiting the University of Leningrad.
I think my affinity for anti-colonial politics and its attendant resistance and revolutionary movements have created a certain (though limited) sympathy for the Soviet Union at times, although I know that when people like Pram were invited to the Soviet Union or Mao’s PRC — or for that matter when African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois, various members of the Black Panthers (like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton), or Paul Robeson were also — they were shown a very curated view of those countries (as any diplomatic visitor to the West would be shown also), and these were concerted initiatives to project particular images of Communism into the so-called Third World (and Fourth World as ghettoized areas of the ‘First World’ are sometimes called). These are basic tactics to be expected of modern statecraft. My dad’s friend is Nigerian, and while politically and socially conservative (e.g. homophobic), he has a very high view of the Soviet Union as his father was invited to tour Soviet Russia and was very impressed with the place. This positive view of Russia has extended into the post-Soviet Putin years, and this is a theme in Gessen’s book. I will get into these issues a bit later, but first a word about Arendt.
I think the book’s main thesis and orientation draws substantially on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism. Arendt is a figure I have been meaning to read for a while. Her work was very important for leftist philosophers engaged in theology like Giorgio Agamben who elaborated on the notion of ‘bare life’ from Arendt’s writing on Aristotelian distinctions of ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’. I do believe in the value of political life and political engagement, and I think those notions come through in Gessen’s focus on how Soviet repression of political engagement carried on into post-Soviet years. Arendt is not a leftist though (in my view), and while I haven’t read much of her work, I get the sense she would not have identified herself as such (nor would have even accepted the political spectrum birthed forth from the French Revolution). And so I think where I depart from agreement with Gessen’s work is where Arendt’s work on totalitarianism comes into view, and I think part of it also involves disagreements I have with Arendt’s views on Marx and leftist politics more broadly that she elaborates on in “On Revolution”. First I will make some remarks on Arendt’s book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.
So I think the ‘milieu’ (lol) of literature and essays I spend most of my time thumbing through makes certain distinctions between authoritarian fascism and authoritarian communism. Many anarchists will emphasize similarities, yet I don’t think they would consider Hitler and Stalin as equivalents. Even libertarian communists who are against authoritarian tactics of communist ends, still generally hold similar goals as Marxist-Leninists, e.g. the abolition of class, but differ on how to get there. Now of course there are some Leninists who still use the word ‘liquidation’ and are vague about what they mean — likely some variation ranging from ‘the wall’ to ‘re-education camps’. The problem of realizing a classless society without violent coercion and force is an issue, I’d admit, but there are other mechanisms that disincentive acts of domination without the need for terror. The question of their efficacy is another matter. That being said, even though I think Nazism/fascism did have certain overlaps with Stalinism, I don’t think fascism and communism (even Soviet communism) are inherently two manifestations of the same underlying essence. This is Gessen’s summary of Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism:
“Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The “laws of history” justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. ”
In my mind, I don’t see eliminating a race and class as the same thing, although I do agree that many authoritarian communist regimes ended up empowering people who treated ‘ruling classes’ as almost metaphysical entities and one’s ‘class’ could almost be inherited genetically, e.g. if one’s ancestors were landowners, one could some how be held accountable for that (Gessen brings this up). I think many people who identified as communists in those regimes didn’t think that way, but it only takes a portion of people (who do) to cause irreparable trauma and terror, especially when they have power. I of course find that very troubling, but if one treats classes as relationally constituted, which is exactly the whole point of Marx’s body of work, then abolishing class might involve expropriating already expropriated wealth to return it to the people who produced it and need it more, trying to better distribute all the things produced by society such that no one is lacking hygienic housing, proper health care, healthy food, leisure time to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour etc… and fostering a world where people don’t feel superior to other people and have their identity based around having inordinately more than other human beings. I mean that is another way of abolishing class, and I see no problem with ‘eliminating’ class by such means. It’s an ‘elimination’ of a relation not a person. That is, working towards removing relations of domination between people. How that happens in practice is a whole other issue, if it’s at all possible. Authoritarian impulses not only go back to Marx and Engels, but back to utopian socialists, and even show up in Thomas More’s Utopia. So Arendt’s accusations cannot be so easily dismissed.
So this issue of violence is important to Arendt, and she will work though how Marx is connecting it with issues of scarcity and necessity. Arendt accuses Marx of turning issues of scarcity into accusations of exploitation, saying:
“Marx's transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term 'exploitation', that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a 'ruling class' which is in the possession of the means of violence… If Marx helped in liberating the poor, then it was not by telling them that they were the living embodiments of some historical or other necessity, but by persuading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.”
Arendt said something similar, but more forthcoming, in a footnote contained in her 1972 book “Crises of the Republic”:
"Behind it, however, stands the illusion of Marx's society of free producers, the liberation of the productive forces of society, which in fact has been accomplished not by the revolution but by science and technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not accelerated, but seriously retarded, in all countries that have gone through a revolution. In other words, behind their denunciation of consumption stands the idealization of production, and with it the old idolization of productivity and creativity"
This is an argument that Jordan Peterson perpetually peddles. I actually agree that capitalism is a far more productive and dynamic economic system than communism in most situations. I think Marx saw that too, and that’s why he believed capitalism was the stage that must precede socialism and then communism. Now you can debate the morality of whether we should accept such terms, but it’s merely a practical assertion on Marx’s part. That’s the grounds on which China’s liberalization occurred, and I think Soviet industrialization found similar justifications under Marx. I haven’t read enough Arendt, but from what I’ve read, I think Arendt’s focus on technology (especially in the American development case) as the answer to scarcity fails to recognize how organizations engaged in technological development under capitalism are in fact very political. Chomsky has called corporations some of the most totalitarian institutions on the face of the planet. I can say that engineering firms are even worse than other corporations. They are often very toxic work environments, deeply connected to the military industrial complex and resource extraction industries. The fact that military-fuelled corporations are behind so much of the innovation and increased productivity that exists today raises questions if it’s worth it. With all the technology that exists in 2020, how much more innovation is worth the continued exploitation and highly authoritarian working conditions that such increased productivity demands. The ‘falling rate of profit’ as the Marxian economists call it is some indication that ‘value-adding’ innovation can only increase by so much more. We have garnered enough productive capacity to meet all basic human needs. Is it time for something new?
Of course Arendt recognizes Marx’s typically Hegelian reversal from [violent expropriation causes poverty] to [scarcity and poverty necessarily causes revolutionary violence] which she strongly finds objectionable throughout the European tradition, including in Robespierre and Hegel. But in this Hegelian move, Marx is suggesting that only by assuring abundance and meeting material needs can one avoid violence. I agree with Marx in his assertion that poverty produces violence, because poverty is a form of structural violence which poor people are reacting too. Arendt later jokes even Lenin saw the technical basis of abundance as true, though I don’t think it’s that far off Marxist dogma as she asserts:
“…when asked to state in one sentence the essence and the aims of the October Revolution, [Lenin] gave the curious and long-forgotten formula: 'Electrification plus soviets.' This answer is remarkable first for what it omits: the role of the party, on one side, the building socialism on the other. In their stead, we are given an entirely un-Marxist separation of economics and politics, a differentiation between electrification as the solution of Russia's social question, and the soviet system as her new body politic that had emerged during the revolution outside all parties. What is perhaps even more surprising in a Marxist is the suggestion that the problem of poverty is not to be solved through socialization and socialism, but through technical means; for technology, in contrast to socialization, is of course politically neutral; it neither prescribes nor precludes any specific form of government.”
Arendt’s characterization of technology as neutral is maybe somewhat similar to the Saint Simonian vision of the neutral ‘administration of things’ reiterated by Engels.
I think maybe a few decades ago, the problem of productivity and scarcity were still central issues, or as Deng Xiaoping put it: the ‘principal contradiction’. But the so-called ‘principal contradiction’ today for China under Xi Jinping is ‘uneven development’. Haha, I’m quoting CCP Central Committee brass now, and I’m not even a Marxist, lol. So this issue is most often rendered as ’inequality’, but I think ‘uneven development’ is actually a good way of putting it. It’s an inequality of both (1) consumption: the distribution of all that we produce collectively as a species within a larger ecosystem of species, and (2) production: the focusing of labour onto producing things primarily for the interests of richest 10% of the global population (although the rationale here is that this stuff eventually trickles down — now 60% of the global population have access to the internet and 20% have been able to enjoy a plane ride).
Now to take a few steps back again, the question of how much violence is acceptable and justified to pursue a particular iteration of a ‘just society’ does pose a problem, which might be glossed over by simply stating violence is inevitable. This is what Arendt writes about in her work “On Revolution”, where she thinks ‘pity’, which undergirds revolutionary politics, quickly turns to cruelty and justifies almost any degree of violence or vice. In this sense I can see how Aristotle’s virtue ethics has really laid claim to Arendt’s arguments here. She has a certain disdain for the ‘by any means necessary’ folks. I never take that phrase literally. I think it is meant to be an assertion of political force more than anything. I don’t know any radical who uses the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ to literally mean that. They would never justify racial genocide if it led to a classless society. Their values are informed by their goals, and ultimately do constrain their means, but maybe less so than Aristoteleans like Arendt who writes:
“Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery to the foundation,of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it. was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by -the limitless immensity of both the people's misery and the pity this misery inspired. The boundlessness of the 'all is permitted' sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”
This is why Arendt prefers the American Revolution to the French Revolution, because it was not concerned with ‘compassion’ or ‘pity’ for the poor, but because it was solely about freedom, yet she recognizes the glaring problem of her example, which is American slavery:
“Yet we deal here with men of the eighteenth century, when this age-old indifference was about to disappear, and when, in the words of Rousseau, an 'innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer' had become common in certain strata of European society and precisely among those who made the French Revolution. Since then, the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution. If it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the American scene, one would be tempted to explain this striking aspect exclusively by American prosperity,'by Jefferson's 'lovely equality', or by the fact that America was indeed, in William Penn's words, 'a good poor Man's country'. As it is, we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labour and black misery - there lived roughly 400,000 Negroes along with approximately 1,850,000 white men in America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of reliable statistical" data we may be sure that the percentage of complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the countries of the Old World. From this, we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty;”
Often historians will call the American Civil War America’s real revolution. The French Revolution brought about movements to liberate slaves in the colonies (though slaves themselves of course were the initiators, by way of revolts and uprisings), even if not well sustained. The political impetus behind the American Revolution differed from the French Revolution in that its disregard for liberation by ‘political means’ and its disregard for the suffering of slaves cannot be divorced from this exact ideology enabling slavery. (A particularly scathing critique of the American Revolution is given in J. Sakai’s “Settlers”, which criticizes white communists who lionize the American Revolution.) I think Arendt’s whole view on the matter is succinctly summarized in these couple sentences:
“All rulership has its original and its most legItimate source in man's wish to emancipate himself from life's necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous.”
I have been thoroughly propagandized by theorists of the left (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser) to see things somewhat differently than Arendt, though I still have a lot to think through and I think Arendt’s critiques of the left and revolutionary politics more broadly must be taken seriously. They are carefully thought out and worth sitting with. But I think one should be cautious about how Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism are weaponized by certain centrist interests. This critique Gessen made of Bernie Sanders with respect to Cuba and Chomsky’s discussion with Arendt maybe reflects this divergence of opinion (although I agree with her critique of Castro’s homophobic purges must always be foregrounded). This is an excerpt from an article in Monthly Review by Reuven Kaminer on ‘totalitarianism’:
“The concept serves as the basis for a specific historical narrative built around the struggle of good (liberal democracy) against evil (totalitarian) dictatorship. According to this narrative, we are at the present enjoying the fruits of great victories in the battle against totalitarianism which stem directly from the comparatively recent demise of the Soviet Union. This, of course, makes it all the more easier to promote the concept of totalitarianism.
One of the ‘magical’ aspects of the concept of totalitarianism is that it appears to be “fair,” “even-handed,” and really above day to day politics. It seems completely objective because it warns that the dangers to freedom emanate from both the Right and the Left. Thus, the concept of totalitarianism is (almost) universally accepted and admired at all levels of political and intellectual life. All participants in current prevailing ideological and political discourse are assumed to be opponents of totalitarianism. The hegemonic rules of discourse are such that dissenting views may be disqualified if their proponents exhibit any lack of militancy against totalitarianism in thought and in practice. The final Part Three, on Totalitarianism, is devoted to the presentation of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as a new and unique form of government. The point of the author’s argument is clear and direct. Arendt sees a common basis to the two regimes in that they both are embodiments of radical, absolute evil. The content is clear, and so is the context. Never, for a moment, can the reader escape the clear and insistent message that Arendt is writing on behalf of the “Free World” against the looming evil of Soviet Russia.”
He goes on to do a sort of guilt by association thing with Arendt and various neocons. I will get into this a little later (especially how different leftists do this to each other) when discussing so-called red-brown alliances, which is somewhat similar to Arendt’s totalitarian thesis, and which I think is a threat the left should take very seriously. Anyway, Kaminer writes about a similar dynamic of a Trotskyist to neo-conservative pipeline (though I would argue this is not exclusive to Trotskyists: Bayard Rustin was a democratic socialist, Eugene Genovese an orthodox ML in the CPUSA):
“The fact that former leftists, and especially “graduates” of the revolutionary Marxist anti-Stalinist (Trotskyist) movement during the thirties and the forties, became leading ideologues of US reaction from the fifties onwards is well documented. The path of development among this particular section of US intellectuals would have been impossible without the Trotskyist stage. The “family,” as they were known by many, moved step by step from revolutionary, communist, Marxist anti-Stalinism during the thirties to just plain anti-Stalinism. From there the path was short to fervent, militant anti-Communism (minus Trotsky, minus revolution) and on to passionate support of the United States as the bastion of the Free World during the Cold War. Those who began their political life as convinced revolutionary Marxists moved via their core position of “anti-Stalinism” to condemnation of the Soviet dictatorship and on to identification with official US policies, as the only reliable bulwark against the tide of Bolshevik aggression. Current experience with the neo-conservative movement in the United States will help the reader to understand how a relatively small intellectual group can indeed become a vital factor in the ruling circles. It is not pure chance that one can even trace personal and family connections of the present influential grouping back to the anti-Stalinist Left.
This fascinating collection of intellectuals, which attracted Arendt and Bluecher, has been dubbed the New York intellectuals in a book with the same title. Even a partial list of some of the main representatives of the group is studded with highly influential and even famous names such as, inter alia, Irving Kristol, Sydney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer. In New York, Arendt and her husband became a prestigious social, cultural, and political addition to the New Yorkers. During the war, she had already made a name for herself with articles in various magazines, including Partisan Review and Commentary. She certainly made a strong impression on the local colleagues as someone who spoke on the basis of intimate acquaintance with the broader horizons of European culture. It soon became clear that Arendt knew everything that her new colleagues knew and more.”
I find this very interesting, but it’s worth pointing out that Arendt was very critical of neo-Conservativism. I think Corey Robin, who is in fact a great admirer of Arendt’s work, makes a more compelling case that her writings on totalitarianism, though popular in western discourse, are in fact not the most important parts of her oeuvre. Robin writes, in the London Review of Books:
“This last section [on the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’] is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention. Young-Bruehl claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal importance’ to the one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven scattered paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last section to examine recent genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that totalitarianism seeks not the elimination of a people but the liquidation of the person. And when Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also looks to the last section, even though Arendt’s analysis of imperialism would seem more pertinent…
If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time. The latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’”
The issue of imperialism is one of the most pressing matters in global politics and I think it’s one of the pivotal factors behind these red-brown alliances that Gessen mentions. Gessen’s elaborations on the National Bolshevik Party and Aleksandr Dugin were likely some of the most important aspects of the book for me. They helped me understand a whole dimension of leftist infighting that I had previously not fully grasped. This is Gessen’s explanation of the red-brown alliances that her grandfather was very taken with:
“He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red-brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor. Boris Mikhailovich took to reading antisemitic passages out loud. Tatiana diagnosed this as senility and told her daughter that such was the tragedy of old age: Boris Mikhailovich, who had been an articulate, if generally quiet, opponent of the Communists his entire life, was now aligning himself with people who were not only brown but also red. More to the point, after his brief love affair with politics, Boris Mikhailovich was angry and disillusioned, and the “red-brown” press was the vehicle most immediately available for the expression of his disgust with politics.”
One of Russia’s most prominent figures fusing far-right fascism with certain communist ideas was Aleksander Dugin, one of the pioneers of National Bolshevism which combines Soviet nostalgia with ethno-nationalist and fascist ideas. Gessen actually spends a lot of time sketching out Dugin’s intellectual formation during Soviet years and his emergence into popular Russian attention, and he is mentioned throughout the book. This is one of the places she describes his fascination with fascism:
“Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers… He… suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno-nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house… If Evgenia and Boris Mikhailovich were merely listening to people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler’s philosophy and system of governance.”
The extent to which Dugin has had an influence on Putin has been debated. Gessen seems to think Dugin had Putin’s ear. Whatever is the case people saw strong parallels between Dugin’s ideas and Putin’s geopolitics. This is where the red-brown issues come into focus. Putin is not a communist, and most western communists do not like Putin as far as I know. He is a conservative and reactionary, who has actively stifled celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin within Russia, because he is ultimately an anti-revolutionary. Yet he has remained somewhat esteemed among Latin American leftists, especially within the domain of the Pink Tide, like Castro and Chavez, and even to an extent Lula and Morales. In part, this is part of Putin’s geopolitics which favours the weakening of American hegemony for Russian advantage; Latin American countries despise American hegemony for slightly different reasons. But also these countries, especially Venezuela, are often great sources of market demand for Russian military goods, which is good for the Russian economy. And ceaseless American intervention in the region, which Washington continually refers to as America’s ‘backyard’, is the principle driver (in my view) of their demand for military technology.
So I first encountered Max Blumenthal by way of a video on the Palestine-Israel conflict shared with me by a Libyan friend who is very into Palestinian politics. I have followed the work of Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton over the past while, their podcast Moderate Rebels and their website The Grayzone. I find their analysis of Latin American politics and parts of the Middle East the most useful, but I’m a little more skeptical about their coverage on China and Ukraine, and a lot more skeptical about their coverage on Syria.
They are Marxist-Leninists involved with the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) — a communist party in the U.S., whose members are often accused of being ‘tankies’, although interestingly enough PSL has its origins in the American Trotskyist movement lead by Sam Marcy. As commented on libcom.org this Trotskyist connection is often carefully written out of their history. Norton has connections with the Communist Party of Canada (speaking at one of their events for a candidate in the Danforth riding) and PSL (like the CPC) is very supportive of ‘really-existing’ Socialist countries, especially in Latin America, so I can see how that might colour their views on Russia. But Ben Norton has very clearly stated he thinks Putin is a “right-wing nationalist” and “anti-communist”.
Norton’s and Blumenthal’s news platform ‘Grayzone’ is (I believe) a reference to what is called ‘hybrid warfare’ in U.S. military discourse. Francis G. Hoffman offered this definition of the ‘gray zone’ in a paper published in PRISM (a journal of the U.S. National Defense University) called “Examining Complex Forms of Conflict Gray Zone and Hybrid Challenges”:
“A formal definition of gray zone tactics is offered: Those covert or illegal activities of nontraditional statecraft that are below the threshold of armed organized violence; including disruption of order, political subversion of government or non-governmental organizations, psychological operations, abuse of legal processes, and financial corruption as part of an integrated design to achieve strategic advantage. This definition emphasizes the actual activities over intent. Placing this to the far left of the proposed continuum of conflict, short of violent military force or war, represented by the thick red line, positions it clearly along the continuum of challenges that our security policy must address.”
Hoffman later writes:
“Numerous foreign sources describe President Vladimir Putin’s preferred method as “hybrid warfare,” a blend of hard and soft power. A combination of instruments, some military and some non-military, choreographed to surprise, confuse and wear down an opponent, hybrid warfare is ambiguous in both source and intent, making it hard for multinational bodies such as NATO and the EU to craft a response.”
I think titling their platform The Grayzone, Blumenthal, Norton, and company are making a self-conscious admission, or maybe a sarcastic non-concession, that the journalistic work they do is inevitably caught up in the complex web of hybrid warfare between superpowers. They primarily see themselves as anti-imperialists, and Empire for them is American Empire. So anti-American sentiment is their common terrain with Russian nationalists. Numerous PSL members like Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear host podcasts/radio shows on Sputnik Radio, and many leftists internationally have RT shows. This acceptance of support of the Russian state by leftists has often generated accusations of red-brown alliances. Numerous articles on libcom and IWW sites go into this phenomenon, often using guilt-by-association tactics, but I don’t mean to say that pejoratively. One example I recently saw on The Grayzone itself was an interview Anya Parampil did with Mark Sleboda who is a Eurasionist (Gessen discusses this movement) who was one of Dugin’s main translators, though he’s since distanced himself from Dugin. But I wonder why even give Third Positionists like him a platform? This is more so the case with other PSL-affiliated media on Sputnik like Brian Becker’s show “Loud & Clear”.
The Grayzone itself is independently funded (at least it claims to be), but some of its PSL comrades in journalism are not. They have support of Russian state-media. I don’t want to be too judgemental here, but I think it’s fascinating when The Grayzone starts harping on anarchists in Rojava accepting indirect American military aid or Hong Kong protestors accepting funding from US state-funded ‘democracy’ NGOs. The issue is about agency, alliances of convenience, and I think it is a complex matter, yet I think the polemical nature of the Grayzone yields to a double standard they feel no shame about asserting. Even anti-colonial leftists like Wilfred Chan (who founded Lausan) have been continually criticized by Grayzone journalists like Ajit Singh. I read Singh’s work, appreciate it, and I think it’s important, but I really don’t get why he spends so much time criticizing leftists in the Hong Kong protest movement. I am personally critical of many dimensions of the Hong Kong protests, but I think it’s absurd for Singh to smear leftist HK protestors by showing how “Ukrainian neo-Nazis and US white nationalists” support the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Hong Kong, especially in light of the support PSL receives from Russian state-media. I think it is worth contemplating why so many American conservatives and reactionaries support the Hong Kong protests, but it’s also worth considering why reactionary right-wing forces in Russian state-media support communist journalists in the U.S.. It is part of the “hybrid warfare” that the people at the Grayzone know perfectly well about, as it’s enshrined in their platform’s name. U.S. conservatives don’t care about Hong Kong citizens themselves or the actual socio-economic demands of protestors, as long as it destabilizes China and poses new legitimacy problems to the Communist government there. It’s a geopolitical game for them. “Democracy” has always been cover for US intervention that is primarily about economic market interests. The US is one of the most flawed democracies of the West so of course it’s absurd. In a leaked US Army publication, Field Manual 3-05.130 “Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare”, US interests and its military goals are made perfectly clear:
“If the United States is to ensure that countries are set on a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy, it needs new, institutionalized foreign-policy tools—tools that can influence the choices countries and people make about the nature of their economies, their political systems, their security, and in some cases, the very social fabric of a nation. In July 2004, Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). The mission of the S/CRS is to integrate military expertise and best practices into the civilian world…”
One of the approaches they state is to: “Work with international and multilateral organizations, individual states, and NGOs…”
U.S. Unconventional Warfare (UW) tactics involving the support of ‘resistance movements’ are plainly stated in the document (and this is not actually surprising at all, nor even really controversial, I think):
“Operations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations.
This definition reflects two essential criteria: UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces. Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.”
And again, often times ARSOF (Army Special Operations Forces) is seeking out what it considers as “democratic” elements to achieve these objectives:
“Perseverance in pursuit of U.S. objectives is fundamental to the conduct of ARSOF UW. If the seeking out and support of democratic elements in every nation and culture as outlined in the NSS is “the work of generations” and ARSOF UW is a central tool to achieve this policy, ARSOF UW requires a persistence of USG effort far beyond most other enterprises of government.”
So I understand anti-imperialist critiques of Hong Kong protests in light of all the meddling the U.S. is involved in, but again this is a question of agency. Does communist journalism funded by Russian state-media affect its legitimacy also? Granted Joshua Wong wishing Marco Rubio happy birthday and photo-ops with Tom Cotton are all bad form. I can’t imagine PSL cadre wishing Putin a happy birthday. But leftists Wilfred Chan and Lausan have been actively trying to convince fellow protestors to stop accepting funding from State Department-backed groups like the National Endowment for Democracy because it is delegitimizing their cause. But he is perpetually criticized for giving left cover for Hong Kong protests by MLs. I think the Chinese Communist government has accomplished a number of positive things, but that’s no reason to remain in denial about the terrifying way it’s treating Uyghurs, or the fact that many billionaires are members of the Chinese Communist Party but no one who publicly practices a religious faith can join. I recognize a new cold war with Russia, but especially China is at stake. Biden mentions Uyghar concentration camps in the same breath as moving 60% of American sea power to China. By ‘sea power’ I presume he means naval ships or submarines, some of which I imagine must be armed with nuclear weapons. Can you imagine China doing that to the US over the concentration camps it has for undocumented migrants?
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And yes, it is extremely ironic that NATO makes YouTube videos about Russian information warfare, when the US is one of the world’s greatest meddlers. All this being said, I don’t automatically think anything the U.S. supports is wrong. Chomsky always brings up the example of Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin was agreement with fascists but that didn’t automatically make Trotsky wrong about Stalin. This is also the case with the U.S.. Even still, I’m almost certain what the U.S. does is for U.S. interests alone and it would stop as soon as it no longer benefitted U.S. interests enough.
Gessen goes into a section on the severe crackdowns on Russian NGOs receiving foreign funding, legislation requiring labels like “foreign agent” for such organizations, the removal of USAID from Russia, and mentions Kremlin attempts to shift blame on protests to US intervention:
““They are just doing their jobs,” said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.”
Now of course the U.S. State Department is constantly meddling in Russia and many other countries. In my view the U.S. was also responsible for Putin’s crackdown. They provide easy justification for gangsters like Putin to crush dissent. Yet the anti-semitism and terrifying homophobia that undergirds so many aspects of the Russian state, including many of its media platforms on RT and Sputnik raises deep concerns about leftist alliances with them, especially when it comes to how dissident journalists sometimes cover terrifying Russian intervention in places like Syria.
In a few episodes of Moderate Rebels, Blumenthal and Norton go off on the anarchist writer Alexander Reid Ross, his ‘red-brown smears’ of them, and his book Against the Fascist Creep. The book is an exhaustive look at red-brown alliances. I’ve actually listened to a talk he gave on it and found it fairly useful for understanding how individuals can cross into radically diametrically opposed poles of the political spectrum. A few months ago I discovered Mussolini was actually a socialist, before eventually becoming a fascist. Ross remarks that Lenin actually liked Mussolini. I looked it up and what Lenin said was: "What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy." Yet these red-brown alliances are not restricted to MLs, but actually came to Ross’s attention when he saw reactionary ideology entering the ecological green and anarchist movements he was a part of. I haven’t read Ross’s book and I’m not sure if he mentions this, but that fascism, communism and anarchism have common roots in Romanticism is likely part of why people can cross extremes of the spectrum so easily, or at least find common cause. As Cornel West points out that Romanticism was a secularization of the Christian gospel, it’s unsurprising that, almost all leftists are pretty good at calling other people either fascists (at the other end of the spectrum) or liberals (the common enemy of the center):
One of the most important aspects of Gessen’s book was her elaboration on LGBTQ activism in Russia. Definitely the parts on Pussy Riot were very interesting. But the vigilante violence against gay people in Russia is at an unimaginable level. Many have basically been lynched for lack of a better word. They are frequently beat up. Some murdered. It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia as it is in authoritarian countries like Singapore, but in places like Chechnya the vigilante violence is extreme. I really think it’s at the detriment of the left to ignore this. If one uses Russian state media as a platform, one has a responsibility to denounce violence against LGBTQ communities in Russia. Leftists often shrug off the horrible homophobia that has latently possessed so many of their movements. Clara Sorrenti, a trans-woman who ran for the Communist Party of Canada in London, Ontario left the party over the Central Committee’s refusal to adapt notions of indigenous sovereignty. In her reflections after leaving, she points out that communist refusals to accept the violence revolutionaries like Che Guevara enacted on gay people was especially wounding to her. The left cannot remain in denial about the homophobia of people like Castro and Chavez. Ignatz, the pen name of an orthodox christian, trans lesbian, communist wrote a piece called “Communism, Catholicism, and Sexuality” in response to an article Dean Dettloff wrote in the Jesuit journal America (Dettloff is one of the hosts of the Magnificast, the podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection). In this piece she writes:
“If the relationship between Catholics and communists has sometimes been more positive than some might assume, we should also address those places where this positive relationship is objectively a form of reaction and a failure of compassion that ought to be inimical to communists, Catholics, and any combination thereof. The Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid tells the story of how when the Argentine Junta cracked down on homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’, a letter was written to a number of major Latin American Catholic liberation theologians asking them to sign a statement of solidarity. All refused, claiming sexual issues were not their concern.
Yet, as Althaus-Reid argues, this is to neglect the role of Christianity in creating the political system of heterosexuality that now dominates the globe. Christians created heterosexuality; it is now Christians’ responsibility to help overthrow it… whilst there are severe problems with homophobia and transphobia in both the Catholic Church and the secular left, there are people in both or either movement who are committed to resisting that and finding new ways of practicing these traditions.”
While I might disagree with some aspects of Gessen’s book, I think she offers very important critiques of the left, especially where they have made common cause with right-wing forces. I believe the left must take seriously these issues of violence, terror, and neglect of social issues, especially where racial, religious and LGBTQ persecution are concerned. I did not even go into the anti-Semitism that Gessen takes time to explore in the book. So much to think about; I think it’s a book worth reading.
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Death, Disbelief and Doctorates
That secular modernity has not come to South Asia has been a source of embarrassment for Western academics and our local intelligentsia, influenced by the former. This should not have come as a surprise if we consider the literature of the region in modern times, especially in its treatment of death. Death is not a problem in South Asia, as it became a problem in Western society. Consider Shakespeare’s reassuring view of death:
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.
And Edmund Spenser happily urged:
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The poetry produced had a cheerful aspect, which is not to say that dark themes were not discussed. Thus, Hamlet reflects on death, and its afterwards:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause
Here, we see every man and woman’s anxiety regarding the posthumous life, if any.
With the Romantics, things appear darker: Death is now a problem. “It is at these extremes of human nature which they know so well how to explore, where horror and delight, love and hate, cruelty and tenderness are indistinguishable, that the Romantics sought a heightened, transformed, superhuman existence which might abolish life as it is actually lived; nationalism is the political expression of this quest....Nationalism looks inwardly, away from and beyond the imperfect world. And this contempt of things as they are, of the world as it is, ultimately becomes a rejection of life, and a love of death (Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd, 1969), p 87).”
But I would add that the loss of religious faith beginning to be felt led to a meaninglessness regarding death, and nationalism as a new secular religion would eventually command men’s allegiance as religion had done.
As Benedict Andersen observes: “...in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With an ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation (Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006) pp 10-11.)” The great religions provide the existential answers to immemorial questions: “Why was I born blind? Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter retarded?”
In addition, language confers a sort of vicarious immortality - the syllables survive as soul. As Andersen quotes: “Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal (p 12).”
Peter Berger put his finger on it when he wrote that religion - the “sacred canopy” - protects the believer, and his or her community, from the possibility that life has neither meaning nor purpose (Grace Davie, The Sociology of Religion (New Delhi, SAGE: 2008), p 53). “What happens to us when we die?”, according to Davie (p 19), has become a pivotal social and sociological question today.
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
Thus begins Shelley’s utopian poem, Queen Mab. But he went on to be more personal than that: in Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, he contemplates his death as a release from despair. Like a tired child, he would lie down and weep away a life of care
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
The atheist, evicted from Oxford for his polemic The Necessity of Atheism, still yearned for immortality which he found in scenes of desolation:
I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be
Byron’s perfervid regret at being alive echoes even today with lyrical pathos:
Count o’er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o’er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
’Tis something better not to be.
And every schoolchild knows Keats’s famous death-wish:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
These dark themes fructify, if that’s the word, into “the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live”, as the advanced doctor informs Jude in the novel by Thomas Hardy, inspired, again, if that’s the word, by the dour philosophy of Schopenhauer.
Modern Bengali literature dates, somewhat inauspiciously, from the founding of Fort William College in 1800. Education was soon to be Anglicised - and occidentalised. Lord William Bentinck put an end to the employment of the vernacular. From 1830, public instruction was to be in English.
The era of Rabindranath Tagore (1890-1930) witnessed the poet’s prolific output. Translations can ill convey the lyrical beauty of his poetry. He was heavily influenced by the Romantics, not only in the form of his poetry, but also in his love of nature. However, he - and his successors - showed little preoccupation with life’s absurdity and hardly shared the former’s obsession with death. Death is not a problem in South Asia. Indeed, it seems difficult for the South Asian mind to think beyond religion. The other function of religion - to promote social bonding, as Davie observes (p 19) - seems eminently fulfilled in these parts: the group encapsulates one throughout one’s entire lifetime. A poet may die so young, as Auden put it, but here he or she will scarcely ever live for years alone. Although the Hofstede individualism index must be treated with caution, a low score for Bangladesh rather adequately describes the “embeddedness” of the individual in society. “Bangladesh, with a score of 20 is considered a collectivistic society. This is manifest in a close long-term commitment to the member ‘group’, be that a family, extended family, or extended relationships. Loyalty in a collectivist culture is paramount, and over-rides most other societal rules and regulations. The society fosters strong relationships where everyone takes responsibility for fellow members of their group.”
The expectation that religion will, or should disappear, is a Western expectation. And when it doesn’t, the outcome is considered illegitimate. That would not have mattered had the disappointment been restricted to Western scholars and academics. Our academics, heavily influenced, share the expectation, turning the universities into citadels of alienation (as Hugh Tinker observed with regard to communism). The international “faculty club” observed by Peter Berger, the globalisation of academia, shares a subculture of animosity towards religion, just as it shared animosity towards capitalism at one time during the Cold War. Scholars bring back more than PhDs from the London School of Economics.
“If Europe is not the global prototype,” intones Grace Davie in defence of her book, “both Europe and European scholars have everything to learn from cases other than their own. Not least among such lessons is the importance of taking the religious factor seriously, and in public as well as private life. Taking religion seriously, moreover, is greatly facilitated by the assumption that you expect it to be there, as an integral, normal part of modern as well as modernising societies. That is the assumption embedded in the argument of this book (p 109).”
The 2001 British Census threw up a surprise. Those with “no religion” did not happen to be clustered in the large conurbations of the industrial North of Britain, but in “a markedly different group of cities in the South, very often those where a university and its employees form a sizeable section of the population (p 92).”
Analytic thinking predisposes people to religious scepticism, argues Ara Norenzayan. As an example, he picks a puzzle from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The intuitive answer - 10 cents - is wrong. The correct answer is 5 cents. “Participants who were more likely to overrule the intuitive answer were also less likely to believe in God (Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p 182).” Slow thinking, rather than fast thinking yields greater caution in belief.
“What about entire subcultures where analytic thinking is the gold standard, inculcated every day? These subcultures are called universities. And indeed, this link between analytic thought and disbelief might explain the overrepresentation of disbelievers among the more educated classes (p 185).”
He ought to have added, “In WEIRD societies.” [= White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic] For this doesn’t appear to happen here. For evidence that socialisation rather than analytic thinking makes us cautious in belief-claims, look no further than the hatriots churned out of universities in Bangladesh. These people are in a cultural fix: with their Western drinking-buddies, they must don an analytic hat; with their local confreres, they must doff the cap. For our university graduates have more in common with high school dropouts in Paris than with the Sorbonne graduates: they are as nationalist as the National Rally voters and not at all likely, in private, to receive with approbation Emmanuel Macron’s elitist barb: the leprosy of nationalism.
He echoes and amplifies the words of Norman Davies regarding Europe before the Great War: “The educated, multilingual cosmopolitan elite of Europe grew weaker, the half-educated national masses, who thought of themselves only as Frenchmen, Germans, English or Russians, grew stronger.”
Collective life will always trump individual rationality in Bangladesh, and, indeed, South Asia.
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Ironists of a Vanished Empire
Adam Kirsch June 22, 2017 Issue
Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire
by Marjorie Perloff University of Chicago Press, 204 pp., $30.00
Marjorie Perloff is one of America’s leading critics of poetry, having spent a long career writing on the work of avant-garde poets from Frank O’Hara to Charles Bernstein. But though she is the author of many books, she wrote in her 2004 memoir, The Vienna Paradox, “when I see [my] name in print…there is always a moment when I wonder who Marjorie Perloff is. It just doesn’t look or sound like me.” That is because, until she became a US citizen at the age of thirteen, she was called not Marjorie but Gabriele—Gabriele Mintz, the name she was born with in Vienna in 1931. Just seven years old when she came to America, Perloff can be counted as perhaps the youngest of the great wave of European Jewish intellectual refugees who immeasurably enriched American culture. On March 13, 1938, the day after Hitler’s armies marched into Austria to annex it to the Reich, the Mintz family boarded a train for Zurich, and kept moving until they had reached the Bronx, where Perloff would spend the rest of her childhood.
The dramatic metamorphosis from Gabriele to Marjorie, from haute-bourgeois Jewish Vienna to middle-class Riverdale, is the subject of Perloff’s excellent memoir. The Austria where she was born was a rump state, carved at the end of World War I from the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. But it retained some of the grandeur of the empire’s multinational culture. And none of the empire’s many ethnic groups—Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slavs—did more to create that culture, or held it in greater reverence, than its Jews. The emigration of Jews from rural villages in Galicia and other parts of Eastern Europe to the capital in Vienna had created, before World War I, an intelligentsia of amazing accomplishment, including figures like Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud.
As Perloff writes, Vienna’s Jews were passionate about German culture even though, or perhaps because, they were for the most part rejected as members of the German nation:
The alternative to…nationality was the Kulturnation of German Enlightenment culture—the liberal cosmopolitan ethos of Bildung [development], which had its roots in the classical Greek notion of paideia. Bildung was more than “civilization,” since…it was conceived as having a distinct spiritual dimension. Thus the cult of Kultur was gradually transformed into a kind of religion.
In her memoir, Perloff is alternately nostalgic for this religion of culture and suspicious of it. Plainly, the Viennese Jews’ enthusiasm for art and intellect did not earn them a secure place in Austrian society. On the contrary, fin-de-siècle Vienna was one of the birthplaces of political anti-Semitism, the place where the young Hitler first expressed his hatred of Jews. For all the accomplishments of the German Jews, Kultur could be seen as a kind of lullaby they sang to themselves as the walls closed in.
For a young girl trying to grow up into an American, Perloff writes, her parents’ inherited snobbery toward all things American, their nostalgia for the Vienna they had left behind, was maddening. “As a teenager, I was always hearing conversations culminating in the phrase, Dass ist doch nur Kitsch! (This is merely kitsch!),” she remembers. When Perloff “expressed my enthusiasm for Carousel,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, “my mother and grandmother gave each other a look, as if to say, ‘Poor child, she doesn’t yet understand.’” In a sense, Perloff’s career as a literary critic can be seen as an attempt to bridge these two realms of taste and value, showing that American postmodern writers, though saturated in mass media and popular culture, can be as sophisticated and rewarding as the Old World modernists.
In Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire, Perloff returns to the world of her birth. She engages in a close reading of six major post-imperial Austrian writers, making the case for the existence of a distinctive and valuable tradition of “Austro-Modernism.” Modernism, in the twenty-first century, is almost as venerable as the Renaissance. When we look for the writers who shaped our world, we are likely to name the titans who lived a hundred years ago—Woolf, Pound, Proust. As these names suggest, however, it is “French and Anglo-American Modernism,” Perloff observes, “that has been the source of our norms and paradigms for the early century.” When it comes to the German-speaking world, too, there is a whole academic industry devoted to the writers, thinkers, and artists who flourished in Weimar Germany—figures like Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and Kurt Schwitters.
But Perloff believes that this focus on Germany has cast a shadow over the distinctively different work done by twentieth-century German writers who lived in the territories once belonging to the Habsburg Empire. The poet Paul Celan was born in Czernowitz in Romania; the memoirist Elias Canetti was from Rustchuk in Bulgaria; the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth was from Brody, which after 1918 became part of Poland. But all of these places were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Perloff considers them all as belonging to a coherent Austrian tradition. She reads them alongside three other writers closely associated with Vienna: the satirist Karl Kraus, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Robert Musil, the only one of the six who was not Jewish.
It is a disparate group, but Perloff believes they share a certain sensibility, a way of thinking and feeling, that can be traced to their situation as legatees of a vanished empire. Modernism is usually thought of as being radical in all directions; whether they were politically revolutionary or reactionary, modernist thinkers strove for a new beginning in art and culture. “The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt,” announced F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in 1909. For the Austro-Modernists, by contrast, the dominant spirit was irony, as Perloff explains:
Its hallmark [was] a profound skepticism about the power of government—any government or, for that matter, economic system—to reform human life. In Austro-Modernist fiction and poetry, irony—an irony less linked to satire (which posits the possibility for reform) than to a sense of the absurd—is thus the dominant mode. The writer’s situation is perceived not as a mandate for change…but as an urgent opportunity for probing analysis of fundamental desires and principles.
This preference for diagnosis over prescription, for retrospection over renovation, is so far from what we usually think of as modernism that it may not seem to deserve the name. But in her case studies, Perloff argues convincingly that post–World War I Austro-Hungarian literature—a literature named after a country that had ceased to exist—did share fundamental elements with the wider modernist project. The preference for fragments over wholes, the resistance to “closure,” the dissolving power of analysis—these qualities, which we find in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Pound’s Cantos, Perloff also locates in works ranging from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to Kraus’s epic satirical play The Last Days of Mankind. The difference is that, while Eliot and Pound put their faith in various reactionary doctrines to repair the damage of the twentieth century, the Austro-Modernists remained poised in skepticism. To use a word that Perloff avoids, there is something liberal—in the sense of anti-utopian, anti-ideological—about these writers.
This skepticism about ideology appears to be an echt-Austrian quality, which developed over the course of the long reign of Emperor Franz Josef, from 1848 to 1916. During this period, the rise of nationalism in Eastern Europe and of Prussian military power robbed the Austro-Hungarian Empire of its raison d’être. The empire satisfied neither the militant pan-Germans, who looked to Prussia for leadership, nor the other ethnicities living under Habsburg rule, who yearned for independence. All that was holding the empire together, it came to seem, was the personal authority of Franz Josef, who was revered as the symbol of a continuity everyone knew was on its last legs.
For writers looking back on this long Indian summer of empire, from the vantage point of post-1918 anarchy, it was the very mildness of this ruling principle—its tolerance, even its slovenliness—that inspired nostalgia. This was especially true for Jewish writers who found themselves in successor states where anti-Semitism flourished, and who remembered the monarchy as a bulwark that had once held anti-Jewish hatred at bay.
One of the greatest elegies for the empire came from Robert Musil, who was born in 1880 and raised in Bohemia. In his unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, which is set in Vienna in 1913, Musil evoked the atmosphere of resigned mediocrity that sustained the empire he called “Kakania.” The name is a double pun. It evokes the phrase kaiserlich und königlich, “imperial and royal,” which was affixed to the empire’s institutions, since Franz Josef—in a typically Austrian compromise—reigned as both emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. But it also puns on the word “kaka,” which in German as in English is a childish name for excrement.
The eighth chapter of the first book of The Man Without Qualities is Musil’s ode to Vienna’s mixed-up, ridiculous, but curiously resilient regime. Musil writes:
By its constitution it was liberal, but its system of government was clerical. The system of government was clerical, but the general attitude to life was liberal. Before the law all citizens were equal, but not everyone, of course, was a citizen. There was a parliament, which made such vigorous use of its liberty that it was usually kept shut; but there was also an emergency powers act by means of which it was possible to manage without Parliament, and every time when everyone was just beginning to rejoice in absolutism, the Crown decreed that there must now again be a return to parliamentary government.
To Musil, all this confusion left Franz Josef’s subjects “negatively free,” and he concludes that “Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all; and that, probably, was the ruin of it.” Certainly his own novel is a portrait of genius—in the shape of Ulrich, the titular man without qualities—that can find no expression, no worthy aim, no intellectual or spiritual discipline. What Ulrich finds instead is a job with the Parallel Campaign, an initiative to celebrate the seventieth year of Franz Josef’s reign, in 1918.
Of course the reader knows, as the characters do not, that the emperor will die before that anniversary, and so will the empire. The whole campaign is an exercise in hubris and blindness, accentuated by the fact that no one involved can actually define what they intend to accomplish. All they can do is rhapsodize: “Their goal must stir the heart of the world. It must not be merely practical, it must be sheer poetry…. It must be a mirror for the world to gaze into and blush.”
The Austrian idea is empty, but at least it is not menacing. The same can’t be said of another character, Hans Sepp, whom Perloff sees as a representative of the fascism that would triumph after the war. Sepp, Musil writes, was part of a “Christian-German circle” that opposed “‘the Jewish mind,’ by which they meant capitalism and socialism, science, reason, parental authority and parental arrogance, calculation, psychology, and skepticism.” Musil, writing his novel in the 1920s—the first two parts were published in 1930 and 1933—could already see that this kind of all-too-definite ideology had triumphed over Kakanian “negative freedom.” Musil himself, like the Mintz family, had to flee Austria after the Anschluss—among other things, he was vulnerable because he had a Jewish wife—and he died in penury and obscurity in Switzerland in 1942.
A similarly grim end was in store for Joseph Roth, whose The Radetzky March is the other major novelistic elegy to the vanished empire. This book too, in Perloff’s words, “tracks the dissolution of a particular complex of values—values in many ways absurd and regressive, but benign in comparison to the political climate of post–World War I Europe.” The story concerns three generations of the Trottas, a family elevated to the nobility when the grandfather, an ordinary peasant turned soldier, saves the life of Franz Josef at the Battle of Solferino. The grandson, Carl Joseph von Trotta, is an officer in the imperial army on the eve of World War I, where he too experiences the breakdown of traditional martial and aristocratic values. Perloff emphasizes that this is above all a breakdown of language: “Words—the official words and state dogma—can no longer control actions.”
Language was inevitably a central issue for writers in a polity that was riven along linguistic lines, and it is one of the recurring themes of Edge of Irony. Karl Kraus, the arch-satirist of imperial and post-imperial Vienna, edited a one-man journal, Die Fackel, whose major purpose was to expose and denounce journalistic clichés. Perloff’s chapter on Kraus focuses on The Last Days of Mankind, his immense antiwar drama, which he worked on throughout World War I and completed in 1922.
The work is unperformably long: as Kraus himself wrote, “the performance of this play, which according to terrestrial measurement of time would encompass about ten evenings, is intended for theater on Mars.” Rather than a script, Perloff thinks of it as “hypertextual,” an assemblage of “newspaper dispatches, editorials, public proclamations, minutes of political meetings, or manifestos, letters, picture postcards, and interviews—indeed, whatever constituted the written record of the World War I years.” In this way, Kraus anticipates today’s conceptual poets, such as Kenneth Goldsmith—a writer much admired by Perloff—whose work consists largely of transcriptions. (Goldsmith once led a project called Printing Out the Internet, which attempted to do just that; it’s easy to imagine Kraus admiring this impossible dream.)
Kraus famously referred to Vienna as a “proving ground for the destruction of the world,” and in The Last Days of Mankind he showed that the first stage in this process was the destruction of language. In one scene, Kraus mocks the wartime vogue for banning German words of foreign origin by having a character deliver a speech on behalf of “the provisional Central Commission of the Executive Committee of the League for the General Boycott of Foreign Words”—a speech that, Perloff observes, is “a tissue of foreign phrases,” including the word “boycott” itself.
In another scene, he has two characters discuss the proliferation of wartime rumors, in a dialogue where the word “rumor” appears thirty times, reducing language to nonsense: “The rumor going around in Vienna is that there are rumors going around in Austria,” and so on. Kraus’s emphasis on language might seem excessive until one remembers the euphemisms coined by the Nazis to conceal their crimes—proof that the corruption of language is indeed indispensable to the corruption of human beings.
The issue of language unites post-imperial writers as different as Elias Canetti, known mainly for his study Crowds and Power and his memoirs, and the poet Paul Celan. Perloff observes that, in describing his own childhood, Canetti makes much of the continual changes of language to which he was subject. Born in a Sephardic Jewish community in Bulgaria, he grew up speaking Ladino at home and Bulgarian to his neighbors; meanwhile his parents spoke German to each other, and a move to England brought English into his repertoire as well. Not until he turned eight and the family moved to Vienna did German become his “mother tongue.” But can a mother tongue acquired so late really be called native speech? Perloff argues that Canetti’s own prose “is the language of the always already translated,” as if “he intuitively looked for words and syntactic constructions that would ‘go’ in the other language.” In this sense, cosmopolitanism is a kind of dispossession.
If Perloff finds Canetti’s language insufficiently knotty and idiosyncratic, the same certainly can’t be said for Celan, one of the most difficult poets of the twentieth century. With Celan, she writes, “irony is carried to its logical conclusion, which is to say, a refusal to define, to assert, to take a stand,” even when it comes to matters of simple denotation. Perloff focuses particularly on the love poems Celan wrote to the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, in which “the scene of encounter tends to be abstract.” “White and Light,” for instance, reads in part: “White,/what moves us./without weight/what we exchange/white and light:/let it drift.” There is eroticism in these lines, a sense of something intimately shared. But there is also a profound sense of disconnection, Perloff observes: “The love proffered here is intense but hardly a source of joy,” partly because the world of the poem is abstract and underpopulated, a place where “no one else exists but the lovers.” Language, in Celan’s verse, often seems to have broken away from the world altogether, becoming almost a self-referential medium.
This pessimism about the power of language to communicate and refer may be the most important marker of Austro-Modernism. Kraus’s aggressive burlesque of journalism and slang, Roth’s melancholic mockery of the codes of chivalry and military honor, Canetti’s sense of being permanently lost in translation—in various ways, all of Perloff’s subjects seem to be in mourning not just for an empire and a way of life, but for the transparency and meaningfulness of language itself. As Austrians and, in many cases, as Jews, these writers had a unique vantage point on the crisis of language that was to become so central to modernism in all its guises. The edge of irony, Perloff shows, was an uncomfortable place to live, but a fruitful place to write from.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/06/22/marjorie-perloff-ironists-vanished-empire/
@catcomaprada as if you do not have enough to read lol
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Walter Bagehot would have loathed government by referendum
EARLY day motions are parliamentary devices which give backbench MPs a chance to ask for a debate on a subject they choose. Two such motions doing the rounds note that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walter Bagehot’s “The English Constitution”. The first, tabled by two Conservatives, notes that Bagehot’s “great facility” for explaining the “practical workings” of the political system ensures that his classic text remains “both relevant and highly influential today”. The second, tabled by five Labour MPs, invokes Bagehot as it urges Europe’s nations to ensure that “parliaments do not become mere constitutional decoration in the face of the continuing encroachment of the EU on parliamentary democracy.”
Bagehot’s great work is still worth debating. G.M. Young, the foremost historian of Victorian England, argued that Walter Bagehot (pronounced to rhyme roughly with gadget) was nothing less than “the greatest Victorian”. He was certainly the greatest Victorian journalist-cum-intellectual. He edited The Economist for 16 years, until his death from pneumonia in 1877, aged just 51. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, from politics to literature to finance. “Lombard Street”, his analysis of a Victorian banking panic, still provides central bankers with their template for what to do in a crisis, as Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve during the crisis of 2008, fulsomely acknowledges.
“The English Constitution” revolutionised political debate because it succeeded in exposing the reality of power behind the façade of abstract formulae. Montesquieu’s idea that government can be divided into three branches—the executive, legislative and judicial—had proved so influential that the Founding Fathers built it into America’s constitution. Bagehot argued that the real division of powers is that between the “dignified” and the “efficient” branches of government. The dignified branch consists of the monarchy, and Parliament when it is engaged in ceremony. The efficient branch consists of the prime minister, the cabinet and the government ministries. The job of the dignified branch is to win the people’s loyalty by putting on a show. The job of the efficient branch is to use that loyalty to run the country. Bagehot argued that Britain is a “disguised republic” and a hidden meritocracy. The real rulers are secreted in the second-class carriages but are obeyed because of the splendour of the waxwork rulers in the first-class carriages.
Bagehot expressed himself in sparkling prose. The monarchy puts “a family on the throne” and “brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life”. A “princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact”. The cabinet is a “hyphen which joins, a buckle which fastens” the executive to the legislature. Bagehot famously warned, in discussing the monarchy, against letting in daylight upon magic. But his every sentence is a shaft of brilliant light.
The five Labour MPs are certainly right that Bagehot would have worried about the transfer of power from Britain to the EU. As a creature of his time, he regarded continental Europe as a political backwater, governed by either unaccountable bureaucracies or wilful despots. And as a liberal pragmatist, he thought that power should be exercised as close to home as possible. It is possible to imagine Bagehot admiring the single market as an instrument of easier commerce. It is impossible to imagine him endorsing Utopian fantasies about forging an ever-closer union out of a hotch-potch of political systems and cultures.
That said, it is equally impossible to imagine Bagehot as a Brexiteer. He had doubts about extending the franchise to the uneducated masses, let alone giving power to the people in the form of a referendum. He thought that the popular will had to be filtered through institutions that tamed raw emotions and countered brute self-interest. Parliament was only the first of these institutions. Bagehot thought that MPs were wiser than the electorate in general but nevertheless too apt to act like a crowd. The heart of Parliament lay in the prime minister’s government, which had the responsibility to pursue the long-term good of the country, even if it meant ignoring the voice of the masses. For a prime minister to entrust the future of the country to a referendum would have struck him as an abomination.
Governed by weakness of imagination
Bagehot thought that the genius of the British political system lay in its moderation. Moderation is the hallmark of cabinet rule, and of British culture. The British dislike grand ideologies, regarding them as the afflictions of foreigners—and particularly of those worst of all foreigners, the French. The Brexit referendum has replaced moderation with polarisation and realism with ideology. The Brexiteers have more in common with the sans-culottes of France than they have with sensible Victorian Englishmen. They are in the grip of an idea that knows no compromise—sovereignty pure and unsullied—and they are willing to support that idea even if it crumbles on contact with reality. This week a minister suggested that Britain could grow its own food if it reached no deal with the EU.
It may be too late to put the demon of populism, unleashed by the referendum, back into the constitutional bottle. The wild men of Brexit continue to drive the debate. Anyone who wants to compromise is labelled, disgracefully, a saboteur. Europe’s bureaucrats are playing into the wild men’s hands by focusing on legal niceties rather than strategic interests. But Bagehot’s “English Constitution” suggests that it is not too late to salvage the situation. Britain is a land of pragmatism, compromise and common sense. The ideological zealots who have brought the country to this sorry pass are impostors who are waiting for their bluff to be called. Parliament should debate the 150th anniversary of Bagehot’s “English Constitution”—and use that debate to consider the state of British democracy in an age of Brexit and bile.
http://ift.tt/1PKyNMd
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Bagehot v Brexit"
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Not-Messianic (Jewish History)
Working on a chapter revolving on messianism (or rather non- or anti-messianism) as a topos of “philosophical Talmud,” I’m embarrassed to say that I’m coming late to Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History (1992). Edited by Mark Saperstein, the volume includes essays by Zvi Werblowsky, Eliezer Schweid, Morton Smith, Israel Friedlander, S.D. Goitein, Gerson Cohen, Salo Baron, Scholem (of course), Benzion Dinur, Arthur Green, Jacob Katz, David Biale, Jacob Taubes, and others. These are, indeed, essential papers without which one should not even think about approaching the subject.
I had been worried that these historical studies written by eminent scholars was going to put a sudden and rude damper on my own more skeptical ruminations, which I have based on what are undoubtedly idiosyncratic readings of the Bavli. As my luck would have it, the historians have only confirmed my doubts regarding the existence of messianism as a central or defining phenomenon in Jewish history and the history of Judaism, and how we should locate its position as a figure of religious thought and philosophical reflection.
How essential a feature is messianism to Judaism? Note that in this volume we are no longer talking about “the messianic idea,” the “messianic,” or “messianicity.” As explained by Saperstein in the excellent introduction he wrote, the volume for the most part ignores those poetic and theoretical speculations that appear in Jewish literary texts (biblical, rabbinic, liturgical, poetic, mystical) but which are devoid of practical actual social-political effects (p.1). In this volume, what counts as a messianic movement is one organized around a messiah, as charismatic figurehead and leader (p.4). What we learn from many if not all of the contributors is that the “appearance” of messianism is unevenly distributed historically and geographically. The critical conclusion is that We this appearance is not a consistent feature or essential component part of “Judaism” as such.
From Scholem, readers of contemporary Jewish philosophy know that messianism is non-normative, that messianism was rejected by traditional Jewish authorities particularly for the way it threatens political stability and nomian order (pp.5, 16). (This is an argument actually contested by Friedlander and Baron who point out that Persian Jewish messianic figures did not reject rabbinic law; pp.117-18, 173, 174). But more to the point is this self-reflexive moment when Saperstein admits that volumes such as this that are focused on a single theme will perforce distort the object of analysis by overemphasizing its centrality and importance in the larger cultural matrix in which it appears. While he concedes the possibility that messianism may well have been a popular phenomenon in the history of the Jews, the evidence would suggest otherwise. By and large, messianic movements after the Greco-Roman period were not mass movements, and indeed, Sapperstain notes, there were centuries without any documented messianic activity at all. The non-messianic in Judaism would seem to stand out as the standard norm.
At stake are epistemological questions. How do we know anything about messianism when the messianic would appear to be a virtually indiscernible phenomenon? Messianic movements flit into and out of view as episodic affairs, local and brief. About most messianic movements, we are reminded that they are known only through terse descriptions mentioned briefly by chroniclers and letter writers (pp.10, 16, 45). Given this non-appearance, messianism is not a clear object of analysis as much as it is an abstract or theoretical object of speculation (p.103). One can track the idea in literary sources while remaining unclear as to its historical impact.
One such speculation about messianism in Judaism relies on quasi-psychoanalytic theories of culture. This would be the claim that messianism represents a constant but latent energy that animates Judaism by feeding the eschatological hope of a beaten people or described in terms of ambient “overtones” and “undertones” that strike “responsive chords in the Jewish soul.” This is Werblowsky’s speculation, although he also understands that, in actuality, such movements were always doomed to fail (pp. 43-6, 50-1). The precise nature of the contradiction or tension between animation and failure (even catastrophic failure and disaster) goes unexplored in the literature, although perhaps it might have to do with fantasy and illusion.
The epistemological problem, of course, is that if the messianic is an indiscernible phenomenon in the history of Judaism, then it cannot be known. At best, it can only sensed, perhaps as a vague horizon of expectation or even an affect. As an invisible thing, however, one would be well to judge that theories regarding an abiding latent messianism animating the psychic and social life of the Jews are unfalsifiable. There’s no way to prove or disprove its existence, except by seeking out historical traces, which turn out to be only minimal. We can claim to detect in the outbreak of a modern political movements (e.g. Zionism, socialism) secular forms of messianism. But here too the evidence at hand is cursory at best; such identifications on discretely distinct historical phenomena and ideological super-structures are based on either the charisma of the scholarly interpreter or by loose inferences made possible by structural analogies (see Schweid, pp.61, 66, as well as the essay by Jacob Katz). In the end, these analogies between messianic movements and secular political movements ultimately rely upon mid 20th century modernization/secularization theories that have been since been discredited. One could posit the messianic as some kind of latent force, even though there’s too little manifest content to do so with any real assurance.
One could point to literary, especially liturgical sources as a way to buttress this kind of speculation regarding the central position of messianism in the history of Jewish ideas. But on what hermeneutical basis? Do ideas and images transpose into practical programs of action. Can one identify an expression with a formal semantic content? Must one mean what one says? Saperstein asks if praying three times a day for the coming of the Messiah predisposed Jews to embrace an individual who claimed to be the anointed messiah (p.17). Would a liturgical performance predispose an actor to this or that project of restorative or utopian justice? There’s reason for skepticism, assuming that a poetic expression does not always track neatly onto sematic beliefs and practical programs of action. As Saperstein reminds us, Zionists accused traditional Jews of praying for the Messiah to come while remaining indisposed to leave the Diaspora, suspecting that there might be a kernel of truth to this polemical exaggeration (p.17). I would put it this way. Perhaps, after all, prayer has nothing directly to do with semantic content; one can pray three times without it “meaning” anything at all.
A look at the historical sources, because they are so local, does much to dissolve the figure of the messiah as a clear and orienting point in Judaism.
As historical movements, one can locate them with relative ease. There are basically four historical junctures:
[1] The messianic tradition is originally shaped by biblical traditions (images) of anointed kingship, the figure of the family redeemer who extends protection over his dependents, the righteous judge whose judgments are just, and, finally, the cosmic and supernatural messiah (Schweid; pp.55-60)
[2] The reappearance of these traditions-figures during the Greco-Roman period when messianic figures emerged from a social milieu determined by bandits, teachers, lunatics, and magicians (Smith, pp.73-80). As noted by Richard Horsley, mentions of the messiah and son of David are “remarkably infrequent” prior to the first century of the common era. Horsley posits the combination in Roman Judea of a “great tradition” of scribal, pietistic, and pharisaic circles and the little tradition” of the illiterate classes forming around popular kings who lead the people in their fight against the illegitimate rule represented by Herod and Rome.
[3] Essays by Friedlander, Baron, and Cohen locate the appearance of minor messianic movements as ripple effects of the multiple religious and political currents in early Islam, the rise of sectarianism around the time of the collapse of the Ummayad caliphate, and then especially Shi’ite messianism (with which Jewish messianism shares many features, inter alia, the idea of the messiah’s return, the idea of the one true prophet, successive incarnation, the politicization of messianism, the appearance of messianic forerunners, and so on. From the wild east of the Abbasid empire, Persian Jewish messianic movements were removed from the influence exercised by rabbinic centers of learning and from the authority of geonim and exilarchs.
[4] Messianic movements appear in a Spanish and North African milieu defined by rationalism, not by apocalypticism. Spanish Jews, in particular, sought to predict the coming of the messiah based on astrological calculations, a confidence that the coming of the messianic age was based on the harmonious movement of stars and planets, committed by the Creator to the immutable laws of nature; the coming of the messiah was seen to be part of the natural order. This was not the religion of the oppressed, as much as nativistic pride in genealogical purity picked up from Babylonian sources. Spanish messianic activity, it is speculated, built on the success of Spanish Jewish viziers, and the revival of Hebrew, all of which whetted appetite for power and the restoration of Zion (p.222). The glimmer of messianic activity in the 12th century occurs only under Islamic cultural ambit stretching from Spain, across North Africa to Baghdad, Palestine, and Yemen.
It turns out that Jewish messianism is a largely Greco-Islamic phenomenon, and a curious and wayward one at that. From Friedlander, Baron, and Cohen, we are given to understand that the appearance of messianic movements was not an Ashkenazi phenomenon. Cohen makes this explicit, stating that, between 1065 and 1492, there was not a “single, unequivocal instance” among Franco-German Jews of messianic revolt. There is no messianic movement in Europe until the beginning of the 16th century and even that one Cohen calls “obscure and short-lived, with traces of Sephardic influence, leaving no original messianic literature. All of this Cohen calls a “startling phenomenon.” Cohen chalks this up to Ashkenazi “quiescence and passivity,” faith in a free, omnipotent, and inscrutable God not subject to nature, the tranquilizing effect of apocalyptic and mystical ascent literature, and the proclivity for martyrdom as an atoning act of sacrifice combined with certainty in God’s just and vindicating power (pp.216, 219, 222, 223-5).
The upshot would be that Jewish messianism is a fantasy structure with relatively little historical impact. With the exceptions of the early Christian movement, the Bar Kochbah revolt, and Shabbtai Zevi, what is on hand is a small group of pretenders and a handful of followers leaving few extant writings (pp.24ff). What one observes instead is how that messianism was channeled by the rabbis into visionary fantasy and commemorative ritual (p.203); or perhaps later into the beautiful tales of Rabbi Nahman, even though these end in failure and tears (422-5). Once again, there is no getting past Scholem, who understood like no other this “uninhibited” fantasy aspect in Jewish religion and intellectual history (see especially p.296), although the actual effect remains unclear up until the emergence of religious Zionism after the 1967 and 1973 wars in Israel. Historically, the messianic idea along with messianic movements came to nothing, and explains nothing. In Judaism, there is no actual messianic event structure per se. As a figure of thought or historical moment, messianism appears here and then there. The power that it enjoys is the power of the virtual.
What’s left is almost just barely a phenomenon. Messianism is an idea, and image, the echo of this or that theo-political figment and failure from a long time ago and then crystallized in Jewish liturgy. The appearance of messianism in nineteenth century Germany as a figure of thought was something of an accident, in large part the responsibility of liberal historians whose writings are suffused with strong predilections for “oriental” literature and poetry.
The messianic character of Zionism would be the only outstanding question mitigating if not refuting entirely the takeaway I am seeking to grab from Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History. There is, of course, an enormous literature on Zionism and messianism. In peculiar way, classical Zionist historiography (represented in Saperstein’s volume by Schweid, Werblowsky, Katz, Morgenstern, Tal, and Kellner) and anti-Zionist writing have both made it a point to set Zionism in synch with Jewish messianism. In doing this, Zionist historiographers create a usable tradition linking modern Zionism (a nationalist movement) with a centuries old religious tradition meant to establish the people of Israel in the Land of Israel. For their part, it would seem that the intent of anti-Zionist writers is to associate in a critical way Zionism with an unreasoning eruption of atavistic and racist religion, secularism, liberalism, socialism, and the like. Lending proof to the connection between Zionism and messianism are the writings of Abraham Isaac and Zvi Yehudah Kook, the domination of religious Zionism by messianism after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and what seems to be the domination of the State of Israel today by the settler movement. In contemporary Israel, messianism, it is safe to say, has not been neutralized, at least not yet.
Katz’s essay, “Israel and the Messiah” is indicative of so much confusion surrounding this argument. It suggests a kind of structuralism, presuming that messianism is built into the mental DNA of the Jewish people. He menions “a residue” of former national existence maintained through constant reading of the Bible that provided “oundless energy” to Zionism (pp.477, 489). Appealing to “popular sentiments” and “the popular imagination,” Katz maintains that “ideal” of messianism is “deeply ingrained” in “the Jewish mentality” (pp.486, 487, 479). He presumes that Zionist settlement in the economic backwater of Ottoman Palestine was an “irrational act” lacking “logical consistency” (p.484). None of these kinds of claims lend themselves to empirical verification or falsification.
It would have been simpler to say that statements and beliefs about messianism and Israel are part of the systems of Judaism. Throughout most of Jewish history after the Bar Kochba revolt, messianism was a structural element that was largely neutralized. That secular Zionists, especially under the influence of neo-romanticism and Russian utopianism in the 1890s and early 1900s, drew poetic idiom from a rich reservoir of messianic expression does nothing to establish the subterranean messianic undertones of Zionism as a political movement. If anything, it was the success of Zionism as a political movement in 1948 and 1967 to acquire, maintain, and expand territorial possession that lent itself to attempts by religious actors to realize all kinds of what Scholem called “uninhibited fantasy.” Attempts since 1973 to fuse politics and religion only make Jewish messianism all the more fantastical, not less so. Unless one wants to entertain essentialist beliefs about latent psychic energies and religious and cultural DNA, one would be more correct in concluding that the appearance of messianism today in contemporary Israel is itself a contingent phenomenon of profound historical accident. It remains to be seen if it will be enflamed or neutralized by responsible political authorities, representatives of the religious establishment, and members of the broader public.
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Lecture 4 Notes: Utopia. Dystopia. - 19/11/2019
Use of art to effect change.
Today – LO A3 evidence understanding between theory and practice – analyse and evaluate critical approaches to creative practice.
2013 – Whitechapel exhibition – The Spirit of Utopia – look up.
Books:
The Principle of Hope by Ernst Bloch – PDF online:
He says we should seek out utopian moments from a wide range of texts, these contain ”visions of a better life that question the organisation and structure of life under capitalism”.
Argues for and against within his text:
For – Expressions of desire; Utopian residue; Useful for social critique; Potential to advance political emancipation; Appeal to the deep-seated desire for a ‘better life.’
Against – Contained error; mystification; manipulation and domination techniques (e.g. Hitler’s views and domination of the world to meet his personal idea of utopia).
If you could create your own perfect world, what would it look like?
Equality of humans, animals and nature.
Animals could talk to us.
No gender gaps.
The arts valued as much as other career choices.
No difference in social classes / social hierarchy.
No such thing as money.
Video example – Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’ – a Dystopia
Foucault “Of Other Spaces” – text
Utopia:
A perfect place; an impractical idealistic scheme; a non-place; society in its perfect form; the unreal space.
Broadly defined – ‘the desire for a better way of living expressed in the description of a different kind of society that makes possible an alternative way of life.’ – Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema
A utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia. – Wikipedia definition.
A utopia is not always bound in the here and now. Utopia could be a moment or an experience.
List of utopian literature – Wikipedia. Examples:
Rutger Bregan
Marge Piercy
Sir Thomas Moore – wrote the first ‘Utopia’ in 1516. Created the word from Greek language. Eutopia definition: “good place”; utopia “no place”. **
Joanna Russ
Ernst Bloch
** Thomas Moore imagined a complex, self-contained world set on an island where communities shared a common culture and way of life. He defined systems of punishment, social hierarchy, agriculture, education, and customs for marriage, dress and death.
What function does a fantasy fulfil?
Financial Times front page article: “Capitalism. Time for a Reset.” ‘Business must make a profit but should serve a purpose too.’
Two types of utopia:
The concrete: images are transformative; they drive forward action to a real transformed future.
The abstract: Images are purely a form of escapism; They are just wishful thinking; They are merely compensatory for not living in our ‘best life’
Dystopia:
An imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.
Definition: A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control. Dystopias, through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or political system.
Literature:
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Brave New World
1984 by George Orwell
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Attwood
Characteristics of Dystopian Society:
“Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciences and drives of men and women who can change the world.” (Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension).
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