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Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] there is little reason to suppose that some putatively pure, 'mere' Marxism should be any healthier. A strictly cataphatic Marxism is, at best, in denial. A Marxism afraid of silence is a Marxism afraid of the declaratory. It is afraid of politics. It is afraid of the human, and of the fear that it perceives in itself.
And it is afraid, too, of the vatic and exhortatory. Apophatic Marxism might be not only more curious and rigorous, but more subtle and effective in its interventions than any silenceless Marxism. Apophasis may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.
as with a lot of his writing, you kind of just have to take it on faith (rather than being presented with arguments) but it's so beautifully written that you're often willing to
When in The German Ideology, Marx insists that communism is not 'an ideal to which reality will have to conform itself' but 'the real movement which abolishes the present condition', it is precisely the immanence of a radical alterity that precludes its being spoken. Whatever Marx may at times have thought, or thought he thought, was possible, whatever passing glimmers of vision one might glean from him, it is no surprise that he never, despite Engels' pleas, wrote 'the famous Positive, what you "really" want'. Because '[w]hat we have here,' as Colon O'Connell astutely puts it in 'Marxism and the Logic of Futural Discourse', 'is an image of the future primarily based on the via negativa'.
How could it be otherwise? Social totality is fractured and fractious, but as David McLellan says, '[i]f all ideas were a product of contemporary social reality' - and they are - 'then a detailed projection of those ideas into a distant future was bound to result in idealism - ideas that were completely imaginary since they lacked an empirical referent'. It is not that no notions can be entertained, as he rich traditions of utopianism attest: it is to insist that whatever their undoubted uses, as dreamwork, provocation, thought experiment or myth, and no matter how things ultimately turn out, such projection cannot, properly, be rigorous predictions. Our thinking is a function of our reality: the beyond, definitionally, is unthinkable. [...]
love this
There are those for whom such apophatic Marxist eschatology is dereliction. On the left, some insist that blueprints for a realistic alternative, the more precise the better, will be the most effective mobiliser. [...]
[...] The request that capitalism be replaced with 'something nicer' should be criticised - for its tweeness, its mannered, unthreatening cuteness in place of the fire and salt the moment demands. Its apohasis, however, is by far its best element.
Such unsaying is not evasion but respect, taking seriously the scale of potential, of alterity necessary and possible beyond capitalism, escaping 'realistic', articulable, reformist visions truncated by the real, actually-existing hope. It is thus, to appropriate from the eschatology of the theologian Jurgen Moltmann, a hope against hope. Its horizon, like that he recalls from his youth, 'is a boundary which does not confine but rather invites one to go beyond'.
It is in such unsaying, rather than in anxious left assurance that the world can be said, that true radical Prometheanism inheres.
Class rule necessitates violence and its contested, overlapping, jostling ideologies. It justifies, or more, Orgreave in 1984, the armed wing of the state laying down manners on insurgent workers. It insists that waterboarding is not torture and anyway it defends our freedoms. It explains the necessity of the spikes carefully fitted at the bases of new buildings to ensure the homeless can’t sleep there. Rising unevenly from a fundamental necessity to capital – oppression – are brutalities necessary to sustain class rule at home; to sustain imperialism abroad; everyday sadisms so metabolised their cruelties often hide in plain sight.
The drives to such phenomena are hazy-edged, non-identical but inextricable, imbricated, mutually constituting. They’re constant but not static. The parameters and place of violence, repression and sadism change with history. And with them, from the rush of jouissance they tap, inevitably flows their excess – a scandalous, invested sadism, enjoying its own cruelty. A surplus sadism. Baum’s Halloween party.
Colonial sadism is not a result of racism; racism, rather, is created by that sadism – viciousness justifying itself post-facto. The agonies inflicted by the metropole’s torturers are the ‘civilising process’.
This exonerated colonial savagery continues even – especially – where the ‘civilised’ population is a subset within the borders of the state. Thus the management techniques of slavery, the panoply of baroque, spectacular, inventive viciousness, whips and rapes, punitive scatology, spiked wheels, salt-rubbed wounds.
Capitalist social sadism is still, of course, a racialised, colonial logic. Its victims are by no means always non-white, nor are those who apply it always white, but it’s intrinsically derived from these techniques of colonialism, its social Darwinism and naturalisation of hierarchies, and the racialising drive is irrepressible. New configurations of viciousness illuminate this, as neoliberalism stretches the boundaries of quotidian sadism.
[...] The liberal is often the most outraged and vociferous chanter on the demonstration. Richard Seymour once made the indispensable distinction between those who are liberals out of fidelity to liberal ideas, and those who are liberals out of fidelity to the liberal state. The latter will never be on the side of emancipation. The former, to the extent that such ideas embed ethical politics predicated, however fallaciously and ideologically, on certain supposedly liberatory and universal claims, may be.
Humans have many capacities. It’s a doomed enterprise to prefigure socialism, but we can certainly feed the drives that, as far as we can imagine, we’d like to hope will cut with its grain.
[...] "The Führer himself," Virginie said heavily, "is an artist, after all." Reproductions of his barely competent watercolors, his hesitant lines, his featureless faces, his vacuous, pretty, empty urban façades, had circulated as curios in occult Paris. Virginie and Thibault shared a glance of contempt.
FORESHADOWING
I saved Paris, Thibault makes himself think. Destroyed a new utter demon. I saved th world. He feels flat. Outside, the sunlight hits them differently than it did within the old city.
Is this it? Are they done?
thought this was a nice passage
"He never could paint people," Sam whispers. "He always left them out. Painted everything empty. Even when he drew himself, he couldn't do features ..."
The figure turns and Thibault glimpses its faceless face. Empty. A faint graphite sweep where there should be eyes. Blank as an egg. A poor, cowardly rendition, by a young bad artist.
"It's a self-portrait," he hears Sam repeat. She and Thibault reach for each other, hold each other up in fear.
Thibault says, "Of Adolf Hitler."