Ghost of a Chance

Posted by Maladjusted on 14/12/2010 · 4 Comments 

[THE SCENE. INT. NIGHT-TIME. Adorno's flat. Max Horkheimer is present, dressed as a WOOLY MAMMOTH...Alban Berg plays Beethoven's "Apassionata" in the background in a way that makes Teddie happier than usual. ]

Adorno, thumbing idly through his copy of Lucretius’s Rerum Natura and as if dictating:

The goal of enlightenment is to emancipate ourselves from the need to make irrational sacrifices. The hope of thought and of art- their necessarily precarious, always half-sophistical justification for their existence – is that the encounter with truth, even the search for it, can be a blow struck against the sacrificial imperative, a defiance of that reality principle which starts by saying “let him who does not work, go without bread”, and ends in the so-called morality by which one assumes (as Nietzsche famously pointed out) that the lives of the blessed will be sweetened by their ability to hear (and, of course, to relish) the cries of the Damned.

The roots of reason, of thought and of creation are in suffering: which is not to say that the activities do not bring joy. Wonder is magnificent, but, like most magnificence, not supsect, but secondary. Our ancestors looked to the stars and were edified; they felt their hearts leap, but they also moved to think by being seeing the charred, unblinking corpses of their loved ones: they felt, as we still feel, the lash-marks on their souls as well as their backs: the great weight of longings become burdensome, even though their first appearance was as gravity-defying as a dream of flight.

Art and thought served the cult, and the cult served, in most interests, the powerful: the old families, the old ways, the sacred, order, sacrosanct and invioable. But this wasn’t (isn’t) the whole story. In every triangle scratched in the dirt, in every cave-painting of those animals whose freedom inspired awe, love, and imitation, in strange beings that we hunted for meat, but also played with, imitated, watched from a distance and painted on the ceiling of our caves, the question rang out: couldn’t it be otherwise? To think, as we’ve always known is always, to some extent, to defy. It is to hold the world up to the standard of the idea. It’s to measure the ways by which the wealth of the city is and “has always been” divided by the standards of the new science of geometry.

To this extent — and though I would never side with that sentimentality towards “youth” and “spirit”, which is too compromised by a very German, very Romantic atavism — to think is, still, in an essential way, to side with the child’s naive hopes of happiness over the sobriety that has been slowly extracted from the adult. To hold the world up to the light of the idea is an attempt to leap over the fences that present-day reality has ringed around the possible, while remembering that a glimpse of the Great Outdoors should not be mistaken for an -actual- exit from a Conquered World, any more than a dream of water in the desert is the same as the arrival in an oasis.

Horkheimer:

Enlightenment is…was….? the dream that knowledge could bring power and relieve the burden which has always been associated with humanity, exiled from Eden. At its best, it meant that truth could be the weapon with which we could knock the tyrant’s crown from his head. We fight, as Benjamin says, against the forces of Fate. Our weapons are courage and cunning, persistence, fraternity, and perhaps surprisingly — hope, faith, and love — a trivium which, irrespective of the fact that it is, today, stained with the heavy dust of platitude and the cloying banality of apologetics — is a conditio sine qua non of even the most humble endeavour. You cannot write a limerick, or build a fire, without at least something of these three virtues, let alone fight a battle against the wisdom of the world. But now that this long day’s journey has turned into night, the old hopes seem more poignant. Didn’t we think that once that once we allowed sunlight into the cave, the gods and monsters who bayed for blood would dissipate into the shadows? What do we say now, when we are told, that the celestial and luminous gods require the same kind of interminable appeasement as their cthonic predecessors?

Someone said — I think he was English — that the day the war began was the day that the lights went out all over Europe. If the dream has now turned into its opposite — if the repressed has returned in maelstrom of hate, in a gleeful monstrous orgy atavism, I wonder, is this the fault of the dream?

Adorno:

Perhaps. Maybe you and I should write a book about that, Max. But, they’ll misunderstand it and think we’re …Heideggerians or something worse. Returning to my normal, prophetic, non-dialogical voice: even if it carries the seeds of this new barbarism, we can’t indict reason or the hopes of equality for this entirely. To do so would be to imitate the atavists and the reactionaries: that strange alliance of scholars, businessman, and ‘ordinary decent folk’ who showed themselves too ready to rally to Hitler once he showed that he spoke for the wish of their hearts. Our Teutonic mandarins and good family men were too prepared, too obscenely quick to say — like Heidegger and Jung — that the present catastrophe is man’s punishment for his hubris, that we must crawl back to a belief in ‘enchantment’, which would actually amount to its opposite — to a belief in Fate, and power and the necessity of the altar, the rack, and the Secret Police. It is the perverse notion that the Order of Things will accept nothing short of total obedience if we are to avoid the sky raining fire down on us forever more. The worst thing imaginable according to these ‘pious Germans’ was to have allowed reason, to hold out a new kind of dream to the wretched of the earth. To this, our contemporary irrationalists reply that the Order of Things should be met with nothing but bowed knees and a dolorous gaze.

Against this, Bloch has eloquently described the way that even the the Old Testament contains more than simply a vengeful sky-god who demands obedience in the face of his unmatched power and caprice, but also the undermining of this very picture. The story of Job, for instance, says Bloch, is consistently and preposterously read by Christians as a story teaching the virtue of patience; that the untold suffering will be accounted for by later rewards. But against this banker’s theology, an endorsement of the platitudes of Job’s friends, there are also, Bloch points out, the seeds of a great heresy: when, asks Bloch, has the case against the notion of God’s justice ever been put with such ineluctable eloquence? Despite the bizarre and inexplicable response of God who thunders about his collection of magical beasts, the author of Job also portrays a God who (as Chesterton already pointed out) chastises Job’s friends — those who represent the worship of raw power throughout the ages and who thus sides with the claims of justice against the landlord’s suggestion that he was there first.

If we see, today, that the means of escaping sacrifice (i.e. Enlightenment) have been betrayed such that their once thundering accents are now used to legitimate sacrifice in the present, isn’t there also a way of restoring these means to their proper purpose in the name of liberation or of justice?
*

Sorry about that, just thinking a few things today. I’m not going to make the connections for you (if there are any!), but:

First, I’ve been following the stories of the British ‘winter of our discontents’ protests largely on Nina Power’s blog. As well as on, Dr. Power’s blog, you will find some accounts (with superb analyses free of charge): the first is from K-Punk, (actually I’ve referred to you to the main blog address, because it’s worth reading the last month or so of posts) the second by Dominic Fox, (For those of you who are interested in such things, you can also find here a brief statement of solidarity from the MSCP.) Dominic Fox’s piece also contains a link to one of the most appalling things I have ever seen in print, even by the standards of a writer for notoriously gutter-scraping English right-wing tabloids: in essence, it is a piece mocking a 20 year old philosophy student who was hospitalised after being severely beaten in the head by the police as essentially having got his just desserts (what was he doing, anyway, exercising a centuries-hallowed democratic right?!?) while surreally, but nonetheless monstrously choosing to mock the young man’s education and intellectual capacity based on the injudicious mixture of an apparent half-quote (way to get to know someone) and the writer’s own smug callousness.

But, despite (and obviously pace) the prurient and in many ways predictable horror of Duffy, the analyses of the protests by Fox, Fisher, Power and others as well as the reports and videos from of the protests have given me the sense of something inspiringly, wonderfully unpredictable: the first wakings of something of…Blakean proportions.

The reasons I say this?

First, the protesters seem extraordinarily articulate, well-organised, united, determined and best, of all, to share a sense of what they are fighting for and why.

Perhaps, you might say that my vision is rose-tinted by distance, fetishism for an ‘overseas’ Other and, of course, by hope, but it does also really seem to me that the English protesters are not only principled, daring, and courageous (in the face of water-cannons, ‘kettles’, beatings and the predictable mass-media reflexes of scorn and head-shaking) but also that this time the rhetoric, and the levels of organisation of the protesters suggest the possibility that the left (even in the Anglophone world!) might be about to leave behind what Felix Guattari once called the ‘years of winter’ that followed the defeat of the Movements of the 1960s. I’m not sure exactly how to justify my sense of this: doubtless someone might say cynically, (and thus wrongly) that everywhere in Europe and around the world there are protests against ‘austerity movements’ — just as there always will be in European countries when people are asked to make [sic] sacrifices in the name of those who are supposed to be above this demand.

But, there’s something more going on here: something like the old spark of univeralism: a rejection of the kind of fissaprous identity politics that always made it too easy for the New (post 60s) Right to perform its standard (gleefully disingenuous) tactic of portraying the left political activism of the same epoch as nothing but the self-assertion of a sub-culture. But I see a kind of explicit, and (better) persistent rejection of such claims in the action and in the speech of the protesters: a persistent message: that says: this is not about being ‘more radical than thou’, this is not about who participated and who didn’t in which rally, nor about which clique’s lifestyle is most meaningful or profound or best represents the world after the revolution. Instead, it’s about making, and not backing away, from the (obvious, yet, constantly obscured) statement (by action and by speech) that the rich and powerful (and not those who protest the sacrifices made in their name) are the strange sub-cultural excess detached from the ‘universal’, and that society, far from being equivalent to what best serves the interest of this group, is the ‘everyone’ that consists of all those who are (in Badiou’s terms) included in the present situation without belonging to it — i.e. not just, the majority, but all that which exists within the given political-national-existential situation, meaning all those who bear features, or attitudes, or who participate in processes, practices or ideas that go ‘uncounted’ by the current social order and its ways of measuring value.

Against the capitalist reality principle, therefore, the protesters are standing against that which has been the rule of the game for too long, against what cannot possibly continue to maintain its pretense of being ‘necessary’, ‘beneficial to’, or even ‘in the interests of’ “the people” by virtue of the mythical, risible, ‘trickle down effect’. Against these sophistries, I get a strong strong sense that the students and workers protesting the current British “austerity measures” are operating with philosophical principles of the kind that are essential to a revification of politics in this century. And politics, surely, whatever it may be, requires something more than a parliamentary moment that briefly interrupts the workings of a planetary casino whose major purpose seems increasingly to be to make sure that the people in the high-rollers room never run out of chips. Against this eviscerated politics (the political equivalent of a 1 minute community service announcement in a 24-7 television bloodsports marathon), we are seeing, at the moment, two new political trends. The first is the rise of atavistic right-wing populisms á la the “Tea Party”. The other, which I think we can see in the current UK protests and elsewhere, is what might be the beginning of a New Left Politics: a left that has cast off the strange defensiveness of the past few decades, the odd alliance with relativism and particularism, athe “I can’t believe it’s not neo-liberalism” fetish for difference and that will once again trumpet liberty, equality and fraternity. It is becoming clearer and clearer that these and even more modest principles of contemporary society are betrayed on a daily basis: that the apparent ‘end of history’ — the seemingly total triumph of capitalism in the 1990s — has after a brief honeymoon — only exacerbated the kind of systemic injustice that will never be registered (let alone rectified) by the great bureaucratic alibi of the ethics committee.

Love,

Mal

P.S. Check out the UCL Occupation blog here.
P.P.S. For those of you who find the link between the opening “dialogue” and the discussion of the protest odd, I should perhaps confess that the immediate inspiration for the first part of this thesis, may well have been this thread over at An und Fuer sich.

“…There is a light that never goes out.”

Nous sommes tous "indesirables"

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Filed under Beings and Events (Philosophy), Left-Right-Left (Politics) · Tagged with adorno, bloch, philosophy, protests, United Kingdom