Emergency Brake

 

I want to begin with a remark recently made by Fredric Jameson:

we may pause to observe the way in which so much of left politics today – unlike Marx’s own passionate commitment to a streamlined technological future – seems to have adopted as its slogan Benjamin’s odd idea that revo­lution means pulling the emergency brake on the runaway train of History, as though an admittedly runaway capitalism itself had the monopoly on change and futurity. (2011: 150)

This is, of course, a reference to a remark by Benjamin in the ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’ (1940):

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake. (Benjamin 2003: 402)

For Jameson, obviously, this conception is an ‘odd idea’ because it is a failure to measure up to Marx’s own embrace of capitalism, and capitalist production, as the condition of revolutionary change; as Marx puts it: ‘if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.’ (Grundrisse) Jameson’s implication is that by giving capitalism a monopoly on the future we lose, in advance, any alternative ‘utopian’ vision of free production. The result is that we then embrace the past as shelter – if not feudal socialism, then perhaps feudal Keynesianism.

            Obviously, one immediate rejoinder to Jameson is the explicit context of Benjamin’s ‘odd idea’. This is the critique of German Social Democracy, especially in Thesis XI of ‘On the Concept of History’, where it is remarked that ‘[n]othing has so corrupted the German working class as the notion that it was moving with the current’ (2003: 393). The conformity of Social Democracy to the ideology of progress, and not least technological progress, meant that it was unable to grasp the dynamic of fascism and unable to critique capitalism effectively. The detachment of Social Democracy from recognising the destructive side of technology, was, as Benjamin argued in the essay ‘Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ (1937) (2003: 349−386), due to an alienation from the destructive side of the dialectic (2003: 358). The ‘movement with the current’ is a movement that replicates the faith in the productive forces, while denying that these are also destructive forces. The reply to Jameson might be, to borrow another familiar image from the theses, that stopping the clock is not turning back the clock.

            Here I want to place Benjamin’s thought-image in a deeper context of the thinking of temporality and interruption that can be traced across his work. My account is by no means exhaustive, but rather selects and traces certain moments of interruption across his corpus. I want to suggest that Jameson’s style of critique misfires, as Benjamin’s thinking of interruption engages with ‘material conditions’ to explode them, in a way which does not replicate capitalist dynamics of production. These forms of interruption certainly modulate across Benjamin’s thinking, but they suggest an engagement with the present, rather than the ‘nostalgic’ image that Jameson portrays – Benjamin as historian of destruction, or the ‘Sebald option’. In this conception only one side of Benjamin’s conception of history remains, that of it as the ‘negative totality’ of catastrophe, as the ‘pile of wreckage’ (McGettigan 2009: 26). I want to probe another side – a critical politics of temporality (McGettigan 2009).

 

Interruption

Benjamin’s modelling and critique of the temporal forms of progress was present, as Michael Löwy notes, in Benjamin’s early essay ‘The Life of Students’ (1914). There Benjamin wrote:

There is a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of time and this concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with which people and epochs advance along the path [or, we could add rails] of progress. (in Löwy, 2005: 6)

From the very beginning Benjamin ‘tracks’ [forgive the pun] a critical politics of temporality that stands against the unfolding or advancement of progress that is premised on infinite extension.

            This ‘infinite extension’ has to be, in the early work, interrupted or disrupted by a thinking of the ‘absolute’. In these early texts, as Howard Caygill has indicated (Caygill 1998), Benjamin takes-up a thinking of the ‘absolute’ within and against the neo-Kantian moment. Tracking Kant’s strictures on the conditions of experience, Benjamin also pushes at the limits of Kant to consider an absolutisation of experience.

            This is not a ‘pure’ absolute, so preformed ‘interruption’, but a critical method that entails a task and intervention. To return to ‘The Life of Students’, Benjamin writes:

The elements of the final state are not evidently present as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every present moment as the most vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts. To shape the immanent state of perfection clearly as absolute, to make it visible and dominant in the present, is the historical task. (Benjamin in Caygill 1998: 8)

We could consider this, anachronistically and problematically, as a rewriting of Marx’s contention that we have to find concealed in society the material conditions to explode it. In this case, the ‘explosion’ is one that operates by reading the ‘absolute’ in terms of ‘the warps, distortions and exclusions of bereft experience’ (Caygill 1998: 25). We find our ‘conditions’ not in the acceleration of productive forces, fettered by the relations of production, but in the ‘most vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts’. This is a ‘metaphysical structure’, at once messianic and revolutionary.

            Andrew McGettigan points out, in regards to this programme of instantiating the absolute, that: ‘Its abandoning coincides with Benjamin’s first reading of Marx around 1924. If we turn to the work of the 1930s, we can see that several consistent themes – interruption, suspension, caesura – continue into the later work’ (2009: 27). This is true of the key example of Benjamin’s ‘Brechtiania’ (Gough 2002: 58): ‘The Author as Producer’ [Der Autour als Produzent] (1934) (Benjamin 1999: 768−782). It is this essay that Gershom Scholem refers to, probably snidely, as ‘an apex of [Benjamin’s] materialistic efforts’ (2003: 253). For Benjamin the ‘refunctioning’ of literature is a result of new technologies producing a ‘molten mass from which the new forms are cast.’ (1999: 776) Again, the process of destruction of old forms is the condition for the new, which has to traverse this ‘melting-down process’ (1999: 776). Benjamin stresses the necessity of ‘an organizing function’ of this destruction.

            He takes Brecht’s Epic Theatre as a model for this organization, but one which operates through interruption: ‘[y]et interruption here has the character not of a stimulant, but of an organizing function.’ (1999: 778) Samuel Weber has drawn attention to how this function of interruption, which Benjamin works-through with Brecht, releases the possibility of citability (2002: 31). It makes available new material to be organized in a new fashion. Interruption is ‘the mother of dialectics’, in Benjamin’s formulation (Weber 2002: 31). Andrew McGettigan remarks that: ‘Benjamin’s approach to historiography should not be understood separated from the outline of the operative writer’s activity in ‘The Author as Producer’. (2009: 32) What I would like to suggest is that this ‘activity’ is one of organized interruption, which reflects a disruption of capitalist temporality. What Benjamin will call, in the ‘Surrealism’ essay, after Pierre Naville, ‘the organization of pessimism’ (1979: 237).

‘Angelic Locomotives’

In his essay on Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for children Jeffrey Mehlman draws attention to Benjamin’s 1932 talk: ‘The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay’ (‘Die Eisenbahnkatastrophe vom Firth of Tay’) (Melhman 1993: 11−14; Benjamin 1999: 563−568). As the title suggests the central subject of the essay is the railway disaster of 28 December 1879, when a passenger train of six carriages and two hundred people was lost after plunging into the Tay, when the iron bridge it was passing over collapsed during a fierce storm. Benjamin does not begin with the disaster, but rather with the early technologies of iron working and train construction and with what he calls, in the essay on Eduard Fuchs, the ‘defective reception of technology’ (Benjamin 1979: 358). This ‘defective reception’ turns, in part, on acceleration, with the medical faculty at Erlangen suggesting that the speed of rail travel would lead to cerebral lesions, while an English expert suggested that moving by train is not travel but simply being dispatched to a destination like a package (Benjamin 1999: 565). Perhaps neither could foresee the current British train system…

            In terms of describing the disaster itself Benjamin quotes from a poem by Theodor Fontane, not the renowned poem by William Topaz McGonagall – renowned for being terrible.[1] Benjamin reports how when the accident occurred the storm was raging so severely that it was not evident what had happened. The only sign were flames seen by fishermen, who did not realise this was the result of the locomotive plunging into the water (Benjamin 1999: 567). They did alert the stationmaster at Tay, who sent another locomotive along the line. The train was inched onto the bridge and had to be stopped a kilometre out, before reaching the first central pier, with a violent application of the brakes that nearly led to the train jumping from the tracks: ‘The moonlight had enabled him to see a gaping hole in the line. The central section of the bridge was gone.’ (Benjamin 1993: 567)

            Jeffrey Mehlman parses this talk on catastrophe as part of Benjamin’s reflection on a gap or rift in communication (1993: 14). What interests me is the use of the brake as interruption. While one catastrophe has already occurred, in which 200 people have lost their lives, the act of braking prevents, although only barely, a second catastrophe. It is not a great stretch to consider this as prefigurative of Benjamin’s ‘emergency brake’ (2003: 402).

            Also, we can place this consideration of the locomotive, speed, and the malignancy of technology, alongside Benjamin’s remark in the essay on ‘Eduard Fuchs’ that:

The disciples of Saint-Simon started the ball rolling with their industrial poetry; then came the realism of a Du Camp, who saw the locomotive as the saint of the future; and a Ludwig Pfau brought up the rear: ‘It is quite unnecessary to become an angel’, he wrote, ‘since the locomotive is worth more than the finest pair of wings.’ (1979: 358)

We have here a counterpart (and opposite) to the Angelus Novus of ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940), which is turned to the past, with the ‘angelic locomotive’ that races forward into the future.

            The ‘Angelic Locomotive’ is the sign of acceleration to the point that indicates that the ‘energies that technology develops beyond their threshold are destructive.’ (Benjamin 1979: 358) Destruction here is the technology of capitalism that is pushed beyond the threshold. I am suggesting that Benjamin’s dialectical thought-image of the locomotive interweaves destruction and production, and the necessity of interruption.

            In his essay ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929) Benjamin criticises the surrealists ‘overheated embrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines’, which can be found wanting in comparison to ‘the well-ventilated utopias of a Scheerbart.’ (1979: 232) I would suggest that we see this, again, as a reminder that we not simply embrace the accelerative and ‘overheated’ function of technology. In fact, earlier in that ‘Surrealism’ essay Benjamin remarks of the surrealists that: ‘No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors, enslaved and enslaving objects – can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihilism.’ (1979: 229) This suggests another instantiation of the earlier project in which the absolute is found in ‘the most vulnerable, deformed, ridiculed creations and thoughts’. The surrealists proffer a ‘method of nihilism’ that can traverse the destitution of the present to a dis-placement (ent-setzt) that is not subordinate to the ends of accumulation (Gess 2010; 688), a ‘constructive destruction’ (Gess 2010: 706) that, in Gess’s words, ‘presum[es] great intimacy with the things it takes apart.’ (2010: 706)

 

Revolutions per minute

To conclude I now want to return to the remark by Benjamin that ‘Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.’ (Benjamin 2003: 402) I have suggested that this remark be not only read as a critique of German Social Democracy, or as a critique of Benjamin’s own ‘productivist’ moment,[2] but also as a politics of temporality. Rather than read teleologically towards the emergency brake as the ‘final moment’ or ‘fulfilment’ of Benjamin’s work, his (literal) ‘last word’, I want to suggest that reading across these moments complicates our understanding. In rejection of Jameson’s claim that Benjamin’s remark is an ‘odd idea’, even an example of the ‘left-wing melancholia’ Benjamin himself derided in a 1931 essay (Benjamin 1999: 423−427), I think we can find a politics of temporality that is, precisely, engaged in reworking or retooling. Benjamin has not given up all hope in any political change, pace Scholem, but continues to think the conditions and possibilities of that change.

            If we read this remark in the context I have elaborated we could also argue that the revolutionary locomotive of Marx is paired by Benjamin with the ‘angelic locomotive’ of capitalist productivity that has gone off the rails. In this case we have the pairing of a critique of capitalist and Stalinist politics of production and accelerationism. The implication is that without attention to destruction we can only have a malignant politics of acceleration, rather than grasping the necessity of the brake as the means to refunction production. In Michael Löwy’s words:

The image suggests implicitly that if humanity were to allow the train to follow its course – already mapped out by the steel structure of the rails – and if nothing halted its headlong dash, we would be heading straight for disaster, for a crash or a plunge into the abyss. (2005: 67)

Or, we could add, into the Tay.

            Benjamin’s registering of destruction, and its equivocation, suggests exactly that heterogeneity of time that will find its formulation in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940). Homogenous empty time is the time of the train on the tracks, which can speed up and slow down. The emergency brake of Benjamin’s metaphor for revolution is not simply the stopping of a train on the smooth tracks of progress. Rather, as with the metaphor of the angel of history, it suggests that the train tracks into the future are being laid immediately in front of the train. In fact, the anecdote of the Tay Bridge disaster suggests that the emergency brake is applied precisely due to the derailing of the train, and threatens another catastrophic derailing. The ‘rails’ of history accelerate us to disaster if we are not aware of the destructive side of the dialectic of production.

            The irony, as Benjamin’s notes make clear, is that the desire for acceleration on the tracks of history breeds passivity before the productive forces:

Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. (Benjamin 2003: 402)

Linking this with the neo-Kantian deviation from Marxism, the idea of the tracks stretching into the future leaves revolution as a receding moment – the station we never quite arrive in. The result, contra to the revolutionary intervention, it is the constant stoking of the train, i.e. the capitalist productive forces. In this way ‘accelerationism’, as I’ve called it (Noys 2010: 4−9), either tries to actively increase the speed of capital, or simply becomes the passenger on the train, allowing the constant destruction of living labour at the hands of dead labour to do the work.

            The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist history (say Swedish Social Democracy – which the American Republican Right now takes as the true horror of ‘socialism’). Neither is it a return back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of Marx and Engels’s anathemas against ‘feudal socialism’. Rather, Benjamin argues that: ‘Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.’ (Benjamin 2003: 402) We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the greater destruction of acceleration.

            In this sense the emergency brake is the operator of Benjamin’s non-teleological politics of temporality predicated on the wresting away of the classless society from the continuing dialectic of production/destruction that is the constant ‘state of emergency’ (Benjamin 2003: 392).

            Rather than acceleration into destruction, we find the detachment of destruction into an integral ‘intimacy’ with things that it destroys. This is supposed by the surrealism essay’s argument that the ‘organization of pessimism’ requires the removal of moral metaphor and the grasping of the image within, 100% within, the image sphere (Benjamin 1979: 238). In this case action ‘puts forth its own image’ (Benjamin 1979: 239), without external reference. If then we read Benjamin’s ‘method called nihilism’ in terms of what I am calling the ‘organization of destruction’ we can argue that interruption and detachment from the temporality of acceleration is required to find a real ‘variable and non-positing’ construction. This would be an ‘intimate’ production, a production that ‘puts forth its own image’, and insubordinate production not coordinate to ends.

            Although ‘On the Concept of History’, as Andrew McGettigan points out (2009: 26-7), involves a correction of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, we could say it could be brought into agreement with a later central contrast of the essay. Marx remarks that:

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out:

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

[Here is the rose, here dance!]

(my italics)

While not hoping to add to the potential for ‘misinterpretation’ Benjamin noted, hence leaving the essay unpublished, I do want to suggest that something of the ‘interruption’ speaks to Marx’s notion, even in it would problematise the claim to ‘growth’ in certain forms.

            Of course, whether this enough to cope with the capacity of capital to ‘posit its presuppositions’, even, or sometimes especially, on destruction, remains in question. The resistance of ‘variability’ has no a priori guarantee to produce the truly new. Therefore, we can consider the emergence of production as a series of experiments that have ‘frequently miscarried’, and which require an ‘ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption’ as their real condition.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter (1979), One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: New Left Books.

Benjamin, Walter (1999), Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2 1931-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Benjamin, Walter (2003), Selected Writings, vol. 4 1938-1940, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Caygill, Howard (1998), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, London: Routledge.

Gess, Nicola (2010), ‘Gaining Sovereignty: On the Figure of the Child in Walter Benjamin’s Writing’, MLN 125.3: 682−708.

Jameson, Fredric (2011), ‘Dresden’s Clocks’, New Left Review 71: 141−152.

Löwy, Michael (2005), Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso.

McGettigan, Andrew (2009), ‘As Flower Turn Towards the Sun: Walter Benjamin’s Bergsonian Image of the Past’, Radical Philosophy 158: 25−35.

Mehlman, Jeffrey (1993), Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Noys, Benjamin (2010), The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Scholem, Gershom (2003), Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, New York: New York Review Books.

Weber, Samuel (2002), ‘Between a Human Life and a Word. Walter Benjamin and the Citability of Gesture’, Benjamin Studien / Studies 1: 25−45.

 

---

[1] Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

[2] A point made to me by Irving Wohlfarth.

Ariadne's Thread

 

Reflecting on the comments on my paper from the Walter Benjamin paper, particularly Paula Schwebel's point that I tended to talk about spatial images when referring to a politics of time and Andrew McGettigan's suggestion about intoxication, I fortuitously came across this 'thread'.

Reading Benjamin's On Hashish on an appropriately slow and apocalyptic Saturday night journey home from the badlands for South London I found this:

To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance [Rauschgluck], one ought to meditate once again on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread! And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of intoxication, just as it is to the joy of creation. We go forward; but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave into which we're venturing, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread, The certainty of unrolling an rtfully wound skein - isn't that the joy of all produtivity, at least in prose? And under the influence of hashish, we are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power. (53)

I then came across this passage, today, from the 'Paralipomena':

Only when the course of historical events runs through the historians hands smoothly, like a thread, can one speak of progress, If, however, it is a frayed bundle unraveling into a thousand strands that hang down like unplaited hair, none of them has a definite place until they are all gathered up and braided into a coiffure.

 Here, I think, we can see the imposition of a spatial line of progress by the historian, which I think corresponds to the image of the rail tracks extending into the future, and to the infinite idea of progress. This spatialised conception captures the spatial features of capitalist time as 'empty, homogenous time'.

The intoxicated image of unwinding Ariadne's thread, which recurrs in the Hashish writings, suggests a 'productive' act that takes as its power not to unwind one thread as the line of progress, but to multiply and trace different 'threads' that need to be gathered together, or made citable, to resist being 'spatialised' as the line of progress. I think this may be another image of the variable production Benjamin invokes and which suggests another image of time as gathered threads.

It may also be linked to Kant's invocation of 'guiding threads'. Its probably an equally enigmatic image as the train, once we'd got through nearly all the permutations on that metaphor, but I think it suggests the kind of intoxicated self-extinguishing practice Andrew was invoking (against some more pious conceptions) and suggests another way of figuring 'spatialised time' on the grounds of that spatialisation (as with the Arcades project), but also against it.

Western Nihilism

Presented at

‘Weighs Like a Nightmare’, Historical Materialism Ninth Annual Conference

(8−11 November 2012)

Next evening, Profane was sitting in the guardroom at Anthroresearch Associates, feet propped on a gas stove, reading an avant-garde western called Existentialist Sheriff, which Pig Bodine had recommended.

Thomas Pynchon, V (1963)

 

I want to consider the politics of the Western under the sign of ‘epic nihilism’, which I derive from Alain Badiou’s The Century (2007: 85). Previously I have used this concept to analyse the ‘Spaghetti Western’, as a form which explicitly engages in a left politics of nihilism. We might say that these Westerns operate in that mode suggested by Walter Benjamin, via Naville: the ‘organization of pessimism’. What I want to do today is to attend to some of the equivocations of this ‘epic nihilism’, vectored particularly through what we might call ‘late’ US-westerns. I have in mind here the emergent revisionist Western on the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which the political crises of that period (especially the Vietnam War) came to inflect the form of the Western. This is, therefore, a parallel case to the Italian Western. To do this I will focus on one particular case, Robert Aldrich’s 1972 film Ulzana’s Raid. Something of a political exception, Aldrich was a union activist in Hollywood. He was also responsible for perhaps the most nihilist ending of a film (alongside Monte Hellman’s Two-LaneBlacktop (1971), with the literally apocalyptic Kiss Me Deadly (1955). In the case of Ulzana’s Raid, what I am concerned with are the tensions and equivocations of political nihilism.

            First, I want to set some of the coordinates of the politics of nihilism, and especially the ‘epic nihilism’ of the Western. My approach will be, admittedly, idiosyncratic and impressionistic. I want to select a number of moments, literary and filmic, which trace the coordinates of an equivocal politics of nihilism. My concern, in particular, is how these moments trace a politics of nihilism through a particular politics of labour.

 

A Very Brief History of Western Nihilism

We can consider the dubious kind of politics of nihilism at work in the writings of Joseph Conrad. Crucial to his work is the conception of a fundamental absence of transcendent or transcendental value. This is most clear from Lord Jim (1900), when after the eponymous central character is found guilty of cowardly misconduct for fleeing his ship while it seemed to be sinking the judge of the inquiry commits suicide. The implication appears to be this is a result of the collapse of value, later given its most resonant formation by the character Stein:

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns — nicht wahr? . . . No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me — how to be?

His answer to the rhetorical question is, famously, ‘In the destructive element immerse.’

            Yet this recognition of the collapse of the transcendental signifier is answered with a politics of labour, of the job well done, embodied in the cooperative work of the ship’s crew. The unpleasant nature of this politics is everywhere, from Marlow’s remark on the map of Africa in Heart of Darkness (1900):

There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow.  Dead in the centre.

Matters are even more explicit in The Nigger of the‘Narcissus’ (1897), in which the smooth and efficient running of the ship, the only bulwark against nihilism, is disrupted by the ‘nigger’ and by the socialist agitator. The nihilism that results from the ‘death of God’ is answered by a politics of labour that holds only one ‘value’ – efficiency – which is at best neutral, although in fact definitely constructed as the domain of the right. This is a colonial and capitalist politics of domination.

            In terms of the Western, we can find such a politics of efficiency everywhere. To choose a more recent example, the neo-Westerns of Cormac McCarthy most explicitly evoke both nihilism and the katechon of efficiency. Usually declaimed in burnt-out churches, just to make the point, McCarthy’s declarations of cosmic nihilism are a persistent feature of his work. The Judge in Blood Meridian (1985) puts this in typically portentous style:

A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man’s destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone. (348)

This ‘universe of blood’ is not exactly redeemed but only resisted by moments of quiet containment; such as John Grady, in All the Pretty Horses (1992), quietly tapping the ash from his cigarette into the turn-up of his jeans.

 

            In the domain of film, we can consider Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), in which the decision of the gang to suicidally attempt to save one of its members is signalled only by the laconic instruction ‘let’s go’. Again, the appeal is to a quiet activity of necessary labour, the one necessity in a world that has no meaning and necessity other than a certain code of ‘honour’ and friendship. The bulwark against nihilism deliberately aims at a minimalism, which itself achieves an overblown quality in the very repetitions that construct it as ‘code’ or habit. This is not (simply) the ‘will to power’, but rather the ‘will to efficiency’ – ‘wil’ against ‘nill’, but also the ‘wil’ that is ‘nill’.

The Infrastructure of Error

Robert Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid (1972) concerns a raid led from the San Carlos Indian Reservation by the Apache Ulzana, and the pursuit of the raiders by the US Cavalry, led by a naïve new lieutenant Garnett DeBuin (Davison) and the scout MacInstosh (played by Burt Lancaster), with the Apache scout Ke-Ni-Tay (Luke). Central to the film is the debate and discussion between MacIntosh and the lieutenant over the nature of the Apache and the means to hunt down Ulzana’s raiding party. The film is known for its brutality of presentation. In one of the opening scenes a US Cavalryman is escorting a female homesteader and her son when they are caught by the Apache raiding party. Begging the soldier to return and save her, the soldier turns and shots the female homesteader through the head before turning his gun on himself. The Apache, in pursuit of horses and ‘kills’, leave a trail of rape and torture of which the aftermath is graphically shown.

            The lieutenant, son of a pastor, constantly tries to understand the cruelty of the Apache. Drawing the Apache scout into conversation, the scout explains that the infliction of slow death by torture is a means to take a man’s power. The Apaches on the reservation have become weakened and ‘old men’ in terms of status, while their world is ruled by a metaphysics of power gained through the taking of a man’s spirit. Although trying to maintain his Christian beliefs the lieutenant is soon ‘hating’ the ‘Indians’, while MacIntosh comments he doesn’t have time for hate, preferring to simply fear them.

            Soon, the pursuit of the raiding party becomes a kind of game in which, as MacIntosh explains, the first to make a mistake will get killed. This conforms to Alain Silver’s characterization: ‘Most of Aldrich’s films, in their own genre contexts and particular plots, are explorations of the infrastructure of error.’ (2002) Having to conserve their horses and match pursuit with the faster Apache results in the constant attempt of each group to circumvent the others strategies. Ulzana leaves a raped woman alive, for example, to slow down the cavalry, or force them to split their forces to return her to the fort. This will then allow Ulzana to capture the cavalryman’s horses and slaughter the cavalrymen. The result is the final strategic bluff of the film, in which the cavalry patrol do split their forces to entice Ulzana into attack, while then planning to later rejoin and so surprise and defeat Ulzana. The planned strategy fails, as although Ulzana attacks the other troops do not arrive quickly enough and most of the original group are killed, with MacIntosh left mortally wounded. The lieutenant’s decision to sound the bugle also succeeds in warning off Ulzana, who escapes. MacIntosh remarks on the lieutenant’s error, before noting ‘there ain’t none of us right’.

            The film ends with MacIntosh requesting to be left behind to die, rather than face the agonizing and pointless attempt to get back to the fort for medical attention. In the meantime the apache scout Ke-Ni-Tay has succeeded in running down Ulzana and returns with Ulzana’s body. After the lieutenant has ordered Ulzana buried, rather than taking his body or, as one trooper suggests, his head, back to the fort they leave. The final image is of MacIntosh trying to light a cigarette, before dying.

            The film presents a twist on Richard Slotkin’s virtually contemporaneous thesis of ‘regeneration through violence’ (1973). Slotkin, critically reflecting on the continuity of this myth from the Western frontier to the Vietnam War, suggests the linking of the desire for independence with the capacity for violence as mechanism of rebirth. James Wood (2005), writing on Cormac McCarthy, has noted the equivocation in which Michael Herr hails McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) as ‘a classic American novel of regeneration through violence.’ In this case critique is turned into valorization. Noting, instead, McCarthy’s attempt to articulate an ‘antimyth’, we could see the same task in Aldrich. In Ulzana’s Raid regeneration fails, precisely through error and the inability for violence to lead anywhere. The risk run, however, is the one Wood identifies as ‘metaphysical cheapness’, which is never far away in figurations of nihilism.

            Reflecting on Aldrich’s films, Alain Silver writes:

the one constant in Aldrich’s work is that ultimately no one is untouched by the savagery of the surrounding world. For those who expose the more visceral layers of their psyche to it, the risk is intensified. It is not merely annihilation but also, what may be worse, a descent into an unfulfilled, insensate existence. If, in the final analysis, Aldrich’s sympathy resides most with individuals who are anti-authoritarian, with anti-heroes like Reisman in The Dirty Dozen or Crewe in The Longest Yard, it resides there because these are persons who survive. They survive by resolving all the conflicting impulses of nature and society, of real and ideal, of right and wrong, in and through action. (2002)

In the case of Ulzana’s Raid this doesn’t seem quite right. Certainly the film exemplifies the exposure of the psyche, particularly in the figure of lieutenant, whose ideals are shattered, but also for MacIntosh and the other troopers. Also, the sympathy of the film lies with MacIntosh, who has a Native American wife, and who is largely responsible for the sensible decisions made during the pursuit. He is marked as anti-authoritarian as the cavalrymen at the fort regard him as morally and socially dubious. Yet, of course, he does not survive and certainly does not ‘resolve all the conflicting impulses’.

It is in this way that the nihilism of the film plays itself against dialectical, or better, pseudo-dialectical solutions, of ‘resolving’ or ‘regenerating’. In particular, I think, it questions the resolution ‘through action’ that, as we have seen, often structures a dubious politics of nihilism. If action necessarily fails then its valorization fails also. Here is where Aldrich does not take the path of ‘metaphysical cheapness’ by invoking new nihilist myths (as does McCarthy), instead embedding nihilism in the very ‘infrastructure of error’. The nearest the film comes to metaphysical pathos is the scene in which a homesteader is trapped by the apache in his shack. Nearly burned out the apache kick in the door, but none enter. Then he hears the bugle of the cavalry, and starts to praise God. We cut to the cavalry troop to see the bugle is not being sounded, in fact it’s a trick played by the Apache. The result, considering the terrible death inflicted on him, is more bathos than pathos. This is a deflationary nihilism in which, as in the conversation between the lieutenant and MacIntosh at the end of the film, one is forced to pick knowing no choice is right.

War is God

Cormac McCarthy’s nihilist antimyth is ‘war is God’; this was recently retooled in Karl Malantes’s Vietnam novel Matterhorn(2010), with its proclamation, as Jackson Lears’s (2010) argues of ‘War as authentic experience: this is the nihilist edge of modern militarism, unalloyed by moral pretension.’ This form was perhaps best articulated in Ernst Jünger’s valorization of war as ‘inner experience’, in 1922. Despite Alain Badiou’s contention that we have passed beyond the ‘passion for the real’ figured in the scission of combat this shadowy continuity suggests a more problematic attachment to the forms of militarized nihilism. Here the modelling of efficiency finds its form in a disregard for ideology, hence nihilism, and a valorization of the act of killing as the ‘sacred act’ which permits contact with the ‘Real’. Of course, as any Lacanian would say, this is an evasion of the trauma of the Real through its displacement. Contact with the Real is predicated on the death of the Other and the survival of the self, hence the pronounced egotism of this ‘heroic nihilism’.

            In contrast, Aldrich suggests war is a human-all-too-human ‘infrastructure of error’, evident also in his film Attack! (1956). What I am suggesting is, beyond its evident critique of the Vietnam War, Ulzana’s Raid speaks to a critique of the valorization of nihilism in combat and efficiency. While certainly not unproblematically poised the film’s acceptance of a nihilism of error that does not attain the ‘metaphysical cheapness’ of these myths, undermines a particular and singular form of ‘epic nihilism’. The latter examples suggest, however, the fleeting nature of this insight, which belongs to the particular configuration of the American experience of defeat in Vietnam. Marlantes’s work, in fact, suggests the ‘reversal’ of defeat into epic nihilism, and it is notable that Jünger’s elevation of war is also borne from the experience of defeat. This suggests the difficulty which an ‘infrastructure of error’ might have in breaking with the ideology of military nihilism.

 

The Ethos of Nihilism

To conclude, I want to borrow Alberto Toscano’s memorable citation from The Big Lebowski (1998): ‘Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos’. My suggestion is that nihilism, or at least in the dominant form I have traced here, is an ethos. To be precise, it is an ethos of labour, an ethos, to borrow from Fredric Jameson’s characterization of Heidegger, which is a ‘handicraft ideology’. In this form the ideology is of expertise and craft that is indifferent to the job itself, hence its nihilism, but only concerned with the doing of that job. It is ‘handicraft’ because it retains that element of personal expertise that will be eroded by the deskilling effects of capital – hence its relation to capital’s nihilism, rooted in the indifference of abstract labour, is somewhat equivocal.

            The persistence of this form of ideology speaks to the constant reinvention of the epic, away from the form of national foundation and towards the form of nation ‘saving’. Hence, the Western plays a particularly equivocal role in the US in the 1960s and 1970s as this ‘will to efficiency’ incarnates a resistance to nihilism in the context of, admittedly limited, national self-questioning. That this is politically dubious can be seen in the ‘hard hats’ versus ‘the hippies’, and Jefferson Cowie’s tracing of the declension of US labour during the 1970s in his Stayin’ Alive (2010). In this case the disappearance of the West is tracked to the disappearance of labour (or certain forms of manual and handicraft labour).

            Therefore, we might risk locating the twists and turns of this politics of nihilism qua politics of labour not only within the context of war, but only in the context of this collapse of the usual role of labour within the ideological and economic space of capitalism. In this way, Aldrich’s Ulzana’s Raid becomes not only an ironic commentary on the nihilism of war, but also on the nihilism of labour. Whereas the Italian Western responded with explosive outbursts of violence, embedded within longueurs, here we have violence, but within an ‘infrastructure of error’ that finally leads to resignation. This is, of course, not enough to escape this ideology, but rather, I think, it registers its internal faultlines and incapacities – a certain impossibility in the ‘will to efficiency’, a failure in labour as a bulwark. Perhaps a failure that points to the true impossibility of labour under capital.

Real Savages & Imaginary Philosophy

This will probably be my one and only post on speculative realism (SR) or, to be more precise, a post on someone else on SR. I wanted just to give a sense of the paper by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (EVC) at the conference The Ontological Turn, which I recently attended. Eduardo spoke in Portuguese (which was streamed), and probably/did depart from the English text I had for his presentation (for which I was respondent).

He began with the fact that philosophy has been content to speak of imaginary savages to generate real philosophy and so, as an anthropologist, he wanted to speak of real savages to do imaginary philosophy. Welcoming the speculative turn, EVC valorised metaphysics as a Borgesian branch of fantastic literature. He also agreed with the need to get over correlationism but, and this is a big but, his means to do this pass through Amerindian thought, the metaphysics of others, to return to the dissident tradition of panpsychism (Tarde, Latour, Whitehead, et al), the 'other metaphysics'.

 

The crucial intervention is rather than turning to so-called 'hard science', which SR has usually done, we can turn to anthropology as science, as the science not of one reality, but of multiple realities ('savages want the multiplication of the multiple', Pierre Calstres). The ontology of Amerindian societies is not merely another view on 'Nature', but rather a reinscription of the very relation to 'nature' - a multinatural perspectivism.

 

This cosmological theory stands with and against Western thought, implying 'a radical materialist panpsychism that manifests itself as an immanent perspectivism: an ontological and topological perspectivism.' Probably the key point is EVC's valorisation of relation, a hot topic in SR. His argument was that in Amerindian thought relation occupies the place of substance, and that the primary mode of relation is 'the alterity nexus'. This thought is one of metaphysical predation and consumption, metaphysically anthropophagic (a thesis outlined in Metaphysiques Cannibales).

 

In terms of SR, this means that EVC is anti-correlationism but pro-relationism. This is performed by distinguishing between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, which are often run together. Amerindian thought is anthropomorphic, but not anthropocentric. In this argument the problem with SR, particularly with Meillassoux, is that it is the negative form of anthropocentrism. The real way to break with correlation is via anthropomorphism, via panpsychism, and in a sense to 'drown' or specify 'correlation' as one limited form of relation within a sea of other forms of relation. 

 

This radicalised alterity posits proliferating difference, so the irony is the Amerindian affirmation of humanity as the original condition from which animality derives does not entail 'super-correlationism', but rather a panpsychism of existence = thought that places all in relation and otherness. There is a universal relationality, of which even this thinking of relation is only one part.

 

___

I'd add my own coda that although I think the material is fascinating, and agree with the need to really change thought with its 'outside' on a truly equal basis, I do have some problems. These are the invocations of 'insurrection' and 'alteration' to replace revolution, and the usual affirmative casting of critique as 'merely' negative (in the bad sense). I also think we need to think through the politics of the 'other metaphysics' (Latour & Tarde especially), which is not exactly 'innocent'. EDV himself remarked how Amazonia is becoming a crucial geopolitical nexus, and so I still think we need to think the ontological politics of the 'metaphysical predation' of capital. This is tricky because capital is not conjoint with the substantialist metaphysics of the 'West', which is why it is so hard to think. The promiscuity of capital's absorption, the minimal status of its own effects of real abstraction need, I think, to be thought alongside and inside 'Western metaphysics' (a category a little baggy for me).

Black Metal Neuralgia

With the publication of Black Metal: Beyond the Darkness and the new issue of Glossator on Black Metal, both of which I've bought, I wanted to consider Black Metal Theory again. I wrote a piece for the earlier Hideous Gnosis on the politics of BM and was due to write something for Glossator. One of the obvious things that struck me was the hostility BM Theory attracted ('bedwetters' being one of my favourite comments, before I decided to stop reading people slagging me off). Of course, as the Hardcore Continuum 'debate' proves, writing on music theoretically seems to reactivate antitheory positions automatically: the abstract, cold, and intellectual ('theory wank') versus lived experience, truth, authenticity and the fan(atic). The use of masturbatory metaphors to condemn theorists as sterile, self-obsessed and narcissistic, implies the virile, (hetero)sexual coupling associated with the true experience of BM as creative practitioner/fan.

Of course obvious points can be made, not least that BM is often a heavily self-theorised from (this is partly what interested me). While that's true I think that the antagonism is due to the fact that this self-theorisation is explicitly opposed to the usual forms of theory, stressing the authentic, true, grounded, cthonic etc. More than that, BM's own theory (to collapse too much together) has something of the traditional in method: philological, autodidact, deliberately and provocatively amateur, if not gentlemanly. In a sense it is 'pre-theoretical' in quite a true sense, returning to forms of analysis even before modernist 'new critics' and the so-called humanism that theory was supposed to be reacting against (I have respect for these forms, just to be clear).

It was this hostility, in part, that lead me to abandon my piece for Glossator (you can read the abstract in the collection) and to be wary about writing anymore on BM (ironically, I've been listening to it a lot). I was also, however, dissatisfied with my piece for HG. I want to make a brief autocritique, which will be seen as another sign of theory narcissism, of course. The reason for this is that I do think legitimate problems were raised within the 'debate'.

1. I think the tone of my piece was wrong. It was too arch and too 'theoretical' in an overwritten bad sense (some truth to the 'pseudy' accusation). I also think it missed the humour in BM and was too po-faced. It was an inability to find a correct tone that also nixed my trying to write anymore on BM.

2. In terms of the analysis I tried to account for the difficulty of writing about 'BM in general' and its politics, but this could have been noted more. I took Peste Noire as a metonymic case study (and now appear on their wikipedia page, much to their annoyance I'm sure), but the difficulty is that part of the self-theorisation of BM is the resistance to commonality. This is a communal form in which practitioners insist on singularity, hence the proliferation and typologies of forms of BM.

3. In terms of the theoretical analysis of a certain politics of BM I do hold by what I said. I don't think aesthetics and politics can be split, and I do think the 'grounding' of BM in the matrix of the friend/enemy actually also speaks to much of the hostility the debate generated. I want to add a quote from Fredric Jameson's study of Wyndham Lewis Fables of Aggression (a great title for a collection on BM, in fact):

his artistic integrity is to be conceived, not as something distinct from his regrettable ideological lapses (as when we admire his art, in spite of his opinions), but rather in the very intransigence with which he makes himself the impersonal registering apparatus for forces which he means to record, beyond any whitewashing and liberal revisionism, in all their primal ugliness. (21)

I think there is still much to be written or, yes, theorised, about BM as an 'impersonal registering apparatus'.