by Joseph S. O’Leary

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. 

Now that Stephen K. Bannon has been removed from the White House (August 18, 2017), it has become possible to consider his six months’ presence there as a unified, substantial whole. One stumbles already at the words “unified” and “substantial,” for though Bannon is more “all of a piece” than President Trump, the unity seems to reduce to vacuous slogans or vague ideologies such as “nationalism” and “populism,” supposedly pitted against the “globalism” of others in the White House. Trump, as Slavoj Žižek says, using a mathematical term sported by Alain Badiou, is an “inconsistent assemblage”; his very inconsistency is his strength, frustrating efforts to pin him down, as he instinctively changes tack in opportunistic response to audiences and situations—racist, or pretending to be, on the campaign trail, but stoutly declaring he hasn’t a racist bone in his body when challenged. In contrast, Bannon sticks to his ideological guns pertinaciously, but there is an emptiness to his consistency and a frustrating lack of substance to his presence. So he too, like Trump, is “as the air, invulnerable, / And our vain blows malicious mockery.”

Now Bannon is yesterday’s man, and however he may rage, unshackled, against his former boss from his Breitbart pulpit, his words will be “but a spume that plays / Upon a ghostly paradigm of things.” Even his recital of his palmy days—“I said, ‘Look, I’ll focus on going after the establishment.’ He [Trump] said, ‘Good, I need that.’ I said, ‘Look, I’ll always be here covering for you’”—is destined to become an old wives’ tale, perhaps to share over an ebbing fire with Sarah Palin, about whom he once made a hagiographical movie. It is hard to write of these people without falling into the key of ridicule. But Noam Chomsky might approve: “The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the ‘post-truth’ moment that the proper response might best be ridicule. For example, Stephen Colbert’s recent comment is apropos: When the Republican legislature of North Carolina responded to a scientific study predicting a threatening rise in sea level by barring state and local agencies from developing regulations or planning documents to address the problem, Colbert responded: ‘This is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don’t like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved’” (Yancy and Chomsky, 2017).

Looking back, one recognizes that Bannon’s brief career at the pinnacle of power must be deemed a triumph, since he achieved to an astonishing degree just what he aimed at. His boast in The Hollywood Reporter, “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” the power behind the throne and the real agent of revolutionary change, was not a vain one (Wolff, 2016). Like Cromwell, he sometimes failed to steer his monarch, who axed him in the end, but he did succeed in changing beyond recognition the State he served. Bannon modeled himself on Lenin as well: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment” (Radosh, 2016). In pursuit of this goal he had encouraged Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs, and Jeff Sessions to run for President, sighting in them likely instruments of his revolutionary aim. Under normal circumstances such a sophomoric scheme would get nowhere, but Bannon knew the man of destiny when he saw him and adroitly won his confidence. As the world contemplates the shambles of American government today, surely Bannon can justly take some credit?

A Slippery Customer

To measure the difficulty of finding an effective critical perspective on Bannon and Trump, one need look no farther than to an article in Civiltà Cattolica titled “Fondamentalismo evangelicale e integralismo cattolico” and penned by editor Antonio Spadaro, SJ, along with Marcelo Figueroa, editor of L’Osservatore Romano in Argentina. This authoritative piece takes the ideological stand-off between Pope Francis and President Trump beyond cartoonish slogans—“Care for the poor. Care for the earth, Embrace the immigrant. Strive for peace,” on one side, “Scrap benefits. Bring back coal. Build a wall. ‘I love war,’” on the other—and offers a more detailed hermeneutic of Francis’s allusions and frowns (such as the one that, quite deliberately, spoiled his photograph with the Trump family). But the article’s focus on a “mingling of politics, morals and religion” that “divides reality between absolute Good and absolute Evil,” seems rather beside the point. George W. Bush talked about an “axis of evil” and claimed that it was the USA’s duty to “free the world from evil,” but such language has little real purchase in the Trump world, any more than the language of truth and falsehood; such terms have become a thoroughly debased currency.  However, it is true that Bannon seems to have an entrenched view of apocalyptic warfare between good and evil: journalist James Ulmer claimed that Bannon “hoped to destroy the Hollywood establishment” and would say: “We’re the peasants with the pitchforks storming the lord’s manor.” Bannon “was always making these grand, hyperbolic analogies between good and evil, the culture of life versus the scourge of death that, in his view, Hollywood had become. Hollywood was the great Satan” (Bruck, 2017).

When Spadaro and Figueroa decry the “dominionism” that sees ecologists as “people who are against the Christian faith” and sees “natural disasters, dramatic climate change and the global ecological crisis” as confirming “their non-allegorical understanding of the final figures of the Book of Revelation and their apocalyptic hope in a ‘new heaven and a new earth,’” their remarks are again off-key. Biblical references have a merely occasional and tactical function in the Trumpian regime of truth. The ideology behind Trump’s ecological recklessness may well be nothing more than dislike of liberal fads espoused by Obama and Hillary Clinton and belief that they are bad for American business.

When the Civiltà Cattolica authors recite elements of the alleged Trumpian creed—“Theirs is a prophetic formula: fight the threats to American Christian values and prepare for the imminent justice of an Armageddon”—and offer a theological diagnosis—“Such a unidirectional reading of the biblical texts can anesthetize consciences or actively support the most atrocious and dramatic portrayals of a world that is living beyond the frontiers of its own ‘promised land’”—they seem to be floundering. They identify the “dominionism” of Rousas John Rushdoony as “the doctrine that feeds political organizations and networks such as the Council for National Policy and the thoughts of their exponents such as Steve Bannon, currently chief strategist at the White House and supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics. … Rushdoony’s doctrine maintains a theocratic necessity: submit the state to the Bible with a logic that is no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.” Most people have never heard of Rushdoony—perhaps Bannon and Trump haven’t either—and Bannon’s name does not figure on the leaked membership list of the secretive Council for National Policy. So the claim made here looks less like a brilliant piece of detection than a tilting at windmills.

“Appealing to the values of fundamentalism, a strange form of surprising ecumenism is developing between Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists,” an “ecumenism of hate” marked by a “xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations.” Does this grasp the mind of Donald Trump? Probably not, since he does not work with a consistent ideology. Does it reflect the views of Stephen Bannon? Who can say, since Bannon remains quite discreet about his actual beliefs. The authors then turn on some noisy American bloggers, no doubt to their great delight: “There is a shocking rhetoric used, for example, by the writers of Church Militant, a successful US-based digital platform that is openly in favor of a political ultraconservatism and uses Christian symbols to impose itself. … It has created a close analogy between Donald Trump and Emperor Constantine, and between Hillary Clinton and Diocletian.” For some fundamentalist supporters, it’s true, Trump is the equivalent of King David, chosen by God as his anointed, and who can be forgiven anything, including adultery and murder, because of his status as the Lord’s instrument. But these are a fringe element. In general the article may comment correctly on troubling developments in the American religious landscape, but it does not close in on Bannon and Trump themselves. I would add it to the honorable list of failed attacks on Trumpism, on all of which Trump has thrived, from his rhetorical massacre of his fellow-contestants in the Republican primaries in 2016 down to the broad approval his reactions to the Nazi rally in Charlottesville secured despite condemnation from politicians and the media. For his supporters the New York Times and the Washington Post are every bit as biased and vicious as Fox News is in liberal eyes, and Trump knows he has nothing to lose by lashing out at “lying media.”

Bannon has a previous history with the Vatican, as contributor to a conference of the Human Dignity Institute held there in 2014. The chairman of this Institute, Cardinal Raymond Burke, is Pope Francis’s foremost critic and an icon for diehard Catholic traditionalists. He holds that “Islam wants to govern the world”; “Islam is a religion that, according to its own interpretation, must also become the State. The Koran, and the authentic interpretations of it given by various experts in Koranic law, is destined to govern the world” (Catholic Herald, 2016). Bannon’s speech referred to a coming “brutal and bloody conflict” with “this new barbarity that’s starting.” The barbarity has two faces: soulless capitalism, and “a global war against Islamic fascism.” “It’s very difficult to know what Bannon is saying, because he’s so fuzzy,” commented theologian Matthew Fox: “His definition of Christianity is very archaic”; “it’s peculiar that he never uses the word ‘justice’” (Fox, 2017). But here again the trail peters out, for I do not know of any indication of further substantial links between Burke and Bannon, though they are said to have exchanged emails. Catholicism does not appear to have had any marked presence in the White House during Bannon’s tenure. 

The Silent Sage

 Bannon is a simpler figure than Trump, yet a more elusive target, because of his silence and invisibility, based on his policy that “darkness is good” and “I am not doing media,” which, along with his reputation as an intellectual and a cogent thinker, lends him inscrutable dignity. The White House, a “dump” according to its present occupant, is said to be haunted, and Bannon loomed there rather spectrally. He did not provide the Trump presidency with a backbone or a secure framework, a task that has defeated even the “axis of adults” now surrounding the incumbent—Generals John Kelly, James Mattis, Joseph Dunford, and H. R. McMaster, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. An opportunistic ectoplasm, Bannon made his influence felt as occasion offered. One can imagine him overawing his presidential protégé by a pregnant silence, or dropping laconic counsels at well-chosen moments into the depths of the presidential mind. Flourishing amid the insubstantiality and surreal evanescence of a White House that had become a reality show, that is, an unreality show, Bannon could inject a series of reactionary prompts on such matters as ecology, immigration, the transgender ban, the Iran nuclear agreement, the war in Afghanistan. One wonders how he would guide the unsteady finger that hovers over the nuclear button.

This dignified eminence began to be punctured toward the end of his tenure, when Bannon flickered into eerie prominence in Anthony Scaramucci’s job-ending interview with a reporter he later compared with Linda Tripp. Scaramucci’s fantastical image of an auto-fellator exploiting the president’s strength to boost his own brand, and his gangster-style threats: “The president knows what he’s going to do” and “has a very good idea of the people that are undermining his agenda,” were good for a laugh, but the threats turned out not to be idle ones, though Scaramucci’s own head rolled before Bannon’s. Then came a second lurid flare: Bannon’s own astonishing interview with The American Prospect, seemingly a hasty effort to express his views forcefully while he still had the White House position he knew he was doomed to lose within days. He used the opportunity to focus not on Islam, but on Asia, now apparently a more real threat: “We’re at economic war with China. It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path.” Contrary to Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” to North Korea, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution, forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” When Bannon actually speaks, he is emphatic and grandiose; but when his words are no longer backed by the title of Chief Strategist they will lose most of their weight.

Does Bannon write? Does he even tweet? One solid text by him would provide something to chew on, instead of having to speculate about the influences that feed his rhetoric. According to James Hohmann (2017) these include Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (a critique of J. F. Kennedy’s advisers), William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning (an absurd theory of historical cycles), Steven Emerson’s American Jihad, and Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile (polemic against big government). This somewhat nerdy list does not yield a satisfyingly sharp profile, and in the absence of such the entertainment industry and even leading politicians have resorted to crude caricature (on Saturday Night Live) and ineffectual name-calling (“Nazi,” “white supremacist,” “Rasputin”). Bannon has also expressed himself in agitprop movies that are far outclassed by those of Michael Moore. One of them, Generation Zero, orchestrates a tale of cultural decline dating from Woodstock in 1969 with over-wrought images of an apocalyptic abyss. Its sees the USA as gripped in a fore-doomed “fourth turning,” which must lead to a big war. As Micah L. Sifry (2017) writes: “Bannon doesn’t just believe that we are in an existential conflict with Islam or with China.  It seems he wants to exacerbate those conflicts into a new world war.  As a believer in Strauss and Howe’s theory of history, Bannon fantasizes that he can use that cataclysm to forge a completely new order.”

That a man in thrall to such a tawdry and dangerous ideology was allowed to attend the Principals Committee of the National Security Council from January to April 2017 troubled people greatly. Far from acting to restrain the president’s belligerent attitude towards the media, the judiciary, environmental protection, Obamacare, and the rights of immigrants and gender minorities, Bannon was suspected of acerbating it and feeding the president a fascist script. The contempt that Bannon expressed in his American Prospect interview for “ethno-nationalism” as a “fringe element”—“we gotta help crush it”—does not extend to his own economic nationalism; nor does it quite dispel the suspicion that he advised the president to spread the blame for Charlottesville equally between right and left (Kuttner, 2017). Yet it is clear that Trump needed no one’s advice for that, as shown in the pugnacious press conference of 15 August 2017. This press conference eerily echoed a CNN interview recorded, but not aired, two hours earlier with Jared Taylor, editor of the neonazi American Renaissance. “Same ideas, same ideology, same talking points,” noted Uygur (2017) on “The Young Turks;” but that does not necessarily make Trump anything as substantial as a white supremacist; he merely parrots the memes of the Charlottesville apologists who sprang up across the social media in the days preceding his press conference. In any case it remains possible that the chaos in the White House is entirely Trump’s doing, and that Bannon’s ministrations have had only atmospheric effect, so that even his claimed triumph in reshaping US politics may turn out to be yet another mere illusion.

The Inaugural Address

Bannon’s most glorious moment was Trump’s Inaugural Address of January 20, 2017, if it is true that he contributed to its composition, to the point that it offers an undiluted expression of Bannonism. Both in its picture of American decline and its promise of a glowing future, the speech had a hollow unreality that was far from the norm of US political discourse but that reflected the essence of Trumpism as Bannon would define it, namely the hollowing out of democratic values and their replacement by populist pap: “January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before” (Time, 2017). Trump embodies a revolt of the masses, and has a visceral bond of mutual loyalty with the people who have thrust him to supreme power. But he is likely to redeem them from the burden of too much government and regulation not by inaugurating any new deal that would end poverty and inequality, but by casting them loose to fend for themselves. He paints this disempowerment as empowerment: “For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. … This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” The willfully constructed scenario is mendacious on both sides: the negative picture bears no relation to actual achievements and efforts of previous administrations, and the promise of sudden, radical change is of a piece with Trump’s long history of false advertisement and unpaid wages. As a speech-act it is a salesman’s dazzling spiel, not a concrete commitment likely to be soberly enacted. It offers a blank check for unabashed plutocracy and kleptocracy, all covered by the assurance that this is what the people want.

But above all its apocalyptic scenario is fantastically unreal, bearing the stamp of Bannon’s fanaticism. Before Trump, America was a scene of utmost desolation; but now a golden age has suddenly dawned. Before Trump we saw “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” He does not mention the mass incarceration of Americans by the prison industry, on racist premises, with massive use of solitary confinement; nor the huge inequality between the plutocrats and the poor; nor the relative success of the USA in protecting the environment, reducing crime, providing health care, ensuring civil rights of minorities, all of which Trump seeks in practice to reverse.

The gap between glowing promise and mean practice is astronomical, yet the faith of Trump’s supporters is great enough to wing that abyss. The speech uses literary tropes to appeal to an apocalyptic imagination, and to dull the civic imagination traditional in America. Its use of the language of royal edicts underscores its tangentiality to sober reality: “So to all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean, hear these words: You will never be ignored again.” Or the language may sound like the diktat of a revolutionary elite: “We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power.” The actual content of the grandiose decree turns out to be petty: Americans will no longer be pushed around, but will give priority to their own interests.

Understanding the Post-Truth Ideology

 We are now seeing daily how an entire population can sleepwalk into the clutch of an authoritarian regime, and how fragile are the ideals and structures of modern liberal democracy. Even the famed checks and balances of the US system are proving ineffectual, and some suggest that the only effective action is a coup of some sort. Much of what is afoot is standard fare—attacks on freedom of the press, academic freedom, freedom of opinion, and independence of the judicial branch—but something eerily new is also emerging. We are beyond Neoconservativism, and beyond the “moderate right.” We are moving into the territory of the “reactionary right,” the “radical right,” the “extreme right” (see Eatwell and O’Sullivan, 1989).

Trump’s new form of populist rightism draws elements from all these categories, but it also introduces an original twist that is principally located in the realm of epistemology. The reckless and compulsive lying of the President is a pathology, but one that has enabled him to sail to victory again and again. His claims that the head of the Boy Scouts of America phoned him to praise his deplorable speech to them as the greatest ever, and that the President of Mexico had phoned to compliment him on the wall, were so blatant and so easily refuted that one must wonder if “pathological” is a strong enough word; such a disconnect invites the label “psychotic.” But in the world of showmanship, business wheeling and dealing, and confidence trickstership, reality is what works, and the confident liar will feel he is more tuned in to things than the scrupulous fussers about veracity whom he scorns as losers. Reviewing three books titled Post-Truth, Leith (2017) writes: “Whereas the liar has a direct relationship with the truth value of what he or she is saying, and implicitly honours the truth by denying it, the bullshitter simply doesn’t care about whether his or her statement is true, half-true or outright false: he or she cares only about what it achieves. Here we are in the territory not of logic but of rhetoric.” Trump dismisses discomforting truth-tellers as liars, since truth and falsehood in his mind are reducible to what boosts the ego and what does not; he is presented with flattering reports twice a day by his excruciatingly servile staff. Truth holds no weight in his thought and rhetoric, as the language of “alternative facts” and the use of lying as a rhetorical method indicate. In contrast, Bannon is something of a true believer, asserting his tawdry ideology with real conviction. That is why Trump is President and Bannon is not.

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it” (Arendt, 1966, p. 350). For the Nazis, as the 1947 US War Department film Don’t Be a Sucker says, truth was “their oldest and most persistent enemy” so “they decided to abolish truth,” via book burnings, propaganda, censorship, discouraging education, etc. This background lends gravity to the core scandal of Trumpism—its disregard for truth. But with Trump, this is not the cold calculation of a budding totalitarian leader. Rather it is inherent in his cultural milieu. Its matrix is a corruption of conservative culture. Ironically, though conservative critics of modernity frequently rail against relativism and cynicism, as conservatism has increasingly taken a postmodern turn this battle line has become blurred; those who originally stepped forward as champions of unchanging Truth have strangely morphed into intellectual opportunists who wave the banner of Truth as a weapon in their changing ideological battles.

But there has been a treason of the clerks on the other side too, among clever postmodern intellectuals, who can find their own distorted image in Trump’s parody. Our endless delicate talk about the contextuality, historicity, culture-boundedness, conventionality, socio-political determination, and endless deferral of the “truth-effect,” has been orchestrated by Trump with a vengeance, while Bannon flaunts the fateful word “deconstruction.” If postmodern attitudes to truth secrete any poisons, they have materialized in the deadliest form in the Trump ideology. Not a subtle and refined relativism, but a blanket discrediting of experts, eggheads, science, journalism, facts, and truth itself, is the staple of Trump epistemics. Building on old resentments, this tactic has so far been astonishingly successful.

One of Trump’s favorite locutions is “It’s true!” and he postures as the scourge of mendacity, be it that of the “lying media,” “lying Ted,” or “crooked Hillary.” But this is truth as ammunition for the will to power. When Trump finds a truth that works, it is raised to the status of a meme or a dogma to be intoned on all occasions. Sometimes the truth actually is true, as in his excoriation of the USA’s interventions in the Middle East. But it is not the true truths that are most to his taste or that he most often repeats. In a world where conspiracy theories flourish in proportion to their unbelievable strangeness, Trump’s weapon of choice is the untrue truth, proclaimed as a revelation that can be immediately sloganized, and stamped with his trademark “Believe me!” that recalls the “Amen, Amen, I say unto you” of the Gospels. As if challenging his supporters to ever braver acts of faith and loyalty, he not only advances implausible claims without a shred of evidence (as in the claim that millions voted fraudulently in the presidential election) but proclaims as fact matters that the simplest inspection of the empirical data shows to be false. One example of this “gaslighting” (from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight about a husband who undercuts his wife’s perceptions, driving her mad) is Trump’s claim to have had a huge crowd at his inauguration, despite photographic proof to the contrary.

The incredible power of someone who can thus disable truth and fact must be very exciting, and indeed many addicts of such media as Fox News and Breitbart have known this excitement for years. Bannon, in his Breitbart career, has both shaped and been shaped by the culture of round-the-clock slander, fear-mongering, and lurid speculation, but in some ways he is more reminiscent of the Bush era neo-cons such as Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld. He builds up an image of the ideological enemy, first Islamic terrorism and more recently China’s bid for world hegemony, but he does not subscribe to the fashionably postmodern claim that there are no facts, only interpretations.

“The nature of reality is an open question in the age of Donald Trump. As the president regularly decries ‘the Fake News Media’ and journalists catalogue his many lies, the battles of our time seem not just political but philosophical, indeed epistemological” (Heer, 2017). But this “postmodern” twist to presidential politics goes back to Bill Clinton’s famous parsing of the meaning of “is” and Donald Rumsfeld’s sophistries. The denial of anthropogenic climate disruption by a host of specious arguments (whether advanced in good faith or as paid propaganda) was one of the earliest and most widespread manifestations of the turn to post-truth. Despite the clearest evidence of recent and sudden disruption, the post-truth apologists simply declared that climate change has always been happening (while ignoring the contrast between the this long-duration change and the suddenness of what has happened over the last century); some added a religious twist by denouncing the presumption and faithlessness of humans who usurped the Lord’s job of being the steward of creation and failed to trust him to make everything work out all right. Here the ludic attitude to truth has catastrophic impact in the real. Trump may turn out to be the most expensive joke of all time.

Jeet Heer’s quotations from Fredric Jameson do not quite capture what is new in the Trump phenomenon: “a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the ‘real’ into so many pseudoevents;” “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” where “depth is replaced by surface.” Trump thrusts his all too solid or sullied flesh on the world’s attention daily—no subtle play of depth and surface here. When Trump is Trump, holding a crowd in the palm of his hand or fiercely confronting the press, he grabs attention; only when he is scripted is he an utter fake, as in his nauseous “let us love one another” rhetoric after Charlottesville.

“For Baudrillard, ‘the perfect crime’ was the murder of reality, which has been covered up with decoys (‘virtual reality’ and ‘reality shows’) that are mistaken for what has been destroyed. ‘Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath our excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information—the sign and reality sharing a single shroud,’ Baudrillard wrote in The Perfect Crime (1995). The Trump era is rich in such unreality” (Heer, 2017). That’s not entirely true, for there is an anemic or skeletal form that shows up through the frenetic flimflam of the Trump show, a pathetic reality—sad!—that stares back at us whenever we fix our eyes on the abyss, as in one act of blinding showmanship Trump fixed his own eagle eyes on the eclipsed sun.

A boy sobs alone in the corner of an empty room, not for any “excess of meaning” but for its absence. Unlike The Truman Show, in which the “excess of reality” is stunningly unmasked as unreal, this show is known to be mere show from the start. Its harking back to the 1950s, or the 1930s, or even the “good old days” of the 1850s, when blacks who protested would be “ripped from their chairs” or “carried out on stretchers,” may launch a thousand rallies, a thousand golf weekends or expensive shopping expeditions, but cannot take a single step forward in real historical time. In the time of his imagination Trump is a king, but in 2017 no such matter. He does not belong to the real 2017 at all. A time-traveling stray from a dream past, he cannot grasp the first thing about the “brave new world” of today nor exclaim with Miranda “How many goodly creatures are there here!” Generic praise—“doing a great job” (even in speaking of the long dead Frederick Douglass) or “fine people” (even in speaking of the white supremacists of Charlottesville)—is the most articulate response he can manage; and when that world rises before him in its unpleasant facticity, all he can do is shriek “It’s a lie! it’s fake!”  No, this is not Baudrillard’s “information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information” but an extreme exinanition of real information. The social media, held in thrall for two years already by one man’s pathology, battens on his empty soundbites, stunts, and gags. It’s a roller coaster, with lots of thrills, but always ending where it began.  Or is this the new real? Are we just entering the Age of Trump? Has our entire culture prepared this ghastly moment, when it implodes on its own unsuspected hollowness?

The Ghost of Ayn Rand

The effort to pin down Bannon’s outlook by studying his sources leads to strange destinations. Perhaps a catalogue of the things to which he is virulently opposed is more revealing. Generation Zero, his 2010 documentary, shows how the “capitalist system” was undermined by spoilt baby boomers and socialist policies that sapped the spirit of enterprise. In a lecture for the Liberty Restoration Foundation he accused baby boomers of “abandoning the tried-and-true values of their parents (nationalism, modesty, patriarchy, religion) in favor of new abstractions (pluralism, sexuality, egalitarianism, secularism).” “Unmoored from a Judeo-Christian moral framework, capitalism can be a force of harm and injustice—exemplified by the US’s economic decline” (Guilford and Sonnad, 2017). Bannon wants to reform America and he proceeds about his task with moral earnestness.

If the disruptive and unpredictable Trump is the Luther of this reform, a man who speaks from the gut and to the gut, and whose twitterstorms trouble the world’s ear as Luther’s printing avalanche did, then Bannon could be cast as his steady if shadowy Melanchthon, brooding on the principles of the movement and clarifying them. The President is a businessman and Bannon is an intellectual, a line-up that would gratify Ayn Rand, for it is exactly the combination she saw as replacing the ancient collusion of Throne and Altar: “Capitalism wiped out slavery in matter and in spirit. It replaced Attila and the Witch Doctor, the looter of wealth and the purveyor of revelations, with two new types of man: the producer of wealth and the purveyor of knowledge—the businessman and the intellectual” (Rand, 1961, p. 21). Ironically, Trump bids fair to rival all Attilas as looter, while Bannon purveys not knowledge but rather rigid formulas. A businessman unrestrained by business ethics (though he may see his presidency as fulfilling his social responsibility) and an intellectual hobbled by ideological fixation make a strange couple as they tread the halls of supreme power.

Does Rand haunt those halls? Ray Dalio, a hedge fund billionaire, declared: “Her books pretty well capture the mindset. This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers” (Dalio, 2016). Rand’s influence is strong in the world of business, especially in Silicon Valley. “Her overarching philosophy that ‘man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself,’ as she described it in a 1964 Playboy interview, has an obvious appeal for self-made entrepreneurs” (Stewart, 2017).

Her appeal for Republican politicians seems just as strong. Her name keeps coming up, since she is probably the most convenient source for legitimizing their ideas. An article denying her influence nonetheless provides ample evidence of it:

The Washington Post’s James Hohmann recently devoted many column inches to trying, and failing, to paint the Trump administration as somehow Randian. His headline notwithstanding there’s virtually no evidence that Donald Trump is an Ayn Rand “acolyte.” Hohmann notes a report by USA Today’s Kirsten Powers, which, in full goes: “Trump described himself as an Ayn Rand fan. He said of her novel The Fountainhead, ‘It relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.’ He identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.” Hohmann’s article goes on to note that three of Trump’s cabinet appointees show appreciation of Rand’s works. Rex Tillerson called Atlas Shrugged his favorite book in a 2008 feature for Scouting Magazine. Andy Puzder named his private equity fund in honor of a Rand hero, one of whose friends stated that he reads Rand in his spare time, and he recommended to his six children that they read Fountainhead first and Atlas Shrugged later. Rep. Mike Pompeo told Human Events, in 2011, “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was Atlas Shrugged, and it really had an impact on me….” (Benko, 2016).

“In a 2005 speech, [Paul] Ryan said that Rand was required reading for his office staff and interns. ‘The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,’ he told a group called the Atlas Society” (Benko, 2016). In a 2009 campaign video, prompted by soaring sales of Rand’s novels, Ryan acclaimed her as “sorely needed right now” when “we are living in an Ayn Rand novel, metaphorically speaking,” due to President Obama’s “attack on the moral foundation of America.” Rand “did a fantastic job in explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.” Three years later he embraced Aquinas, dismissing as “an urban legend” the idea he was inspired by Rand. “‘I reject her philosophy. … It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. … Don’t give me Ayn Rand!’” (quoted by Costa, 2012). All of this suggests that Rand has been officially banished from GOP circles, but the need of exorcism suggests that her ghost does linger. Indeed, some might say that authentic Randism would be preferable to the parody of it offered by Trump and Bannon.

But here Bannon eludes us again, for like his fellow-Catholic Ryan he is sharply critical of Rand in his speech to the 2014 conference in the Vatican; yet he speaks of her with a lingering sympathy, and treats her as an authoritative reference for understanding contemporary capitalist culture:

There’s a strand of capitalism today—two strands of it, that are very disturbing. One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia. … The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative movement—whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States. However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people … and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.” (Feder, 2016)

The heroine of Rand’s first novel, We the Living (1936), indulges a violent Nietzscheanism: “What is the people but millions of puny, shrivelled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words that others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all” (quoted in Merrill, 1991, p. 38) Robert E. Merrill believes that minor stylistic alterations in this passage in the second edition (1959), such as the replacement of “justice for all” with “the giving of the undeserved” and “men are not born equal” with “men are not equal in ability,” show how Rand kept Nietzsche’s “emphasis on achievement, on aspiration, on pursuing supremely important values” while “she was able to clear away the debris of his ethical monstrosities” (Merrill, 1991, 40). Nietzsche is caricatured for the purpose of this argument, and even so it seems clear that Rand remained a pop pseudo-Nietzschean in 1959 as in 1936. Merrill speaks of Rand in cultic tones: “A hundred years from now, if civilization survives its present crises, Rand will be seen as a giant among twentieth-century thinkers. Not only will Objectivism be recognized as a major contribution to philosophical thought; not only will Rand’s ideas be accepted as correct; but very likely our whole way of thinking about philosophy will have changed” (163). The grandiosity here and the awed expectation of radical change bear a resemblance to the Inaugural Address. This middle-brow philosophizing is matched by equally tawdry esthetic judgment: “Strictly as a writer, Rand will certainly be classed among the top ten of her century. Her novels are already classics by any sensible definition.… Our descendants will envy us that we were her contemporaries” (163). At a time when academics teach Star Wars as a classic epic, and when Bob Dylan is widely regarded as an exemplary Nobel Prize for Literature, this sophomoric, nay, adolescent level of thought has wide purchase. The semi-intellectual Bannon has sponged up such half-baked notions, which allow him to project wisdom and depth to the shallow and impressionable Trump.

For another Rand scholar, she opposed “a statist society in which there is a deadly alliance between government, science, and big business” (Sciabarra, 1995, 339) and in the passage quoted by Merrill “Kira may not be expressing a Nietzschean contempt for the masses as much as she is expressing a desire to break free of a system that crushes the individual under the weight of an undifferentiated collective” (105). Bannon aimed to smash up government in favor of individualistic libertarianism, and Trump projected the charms of such an ethos; but in reality that is another bait and switch, for the winners will be the faceless capitalist and militaristic institutions that increasingly force citizens into a collectivist lifestyle. Had Trump been a truly charismatic great leader after Rand’s heart, who would raise the masses from their hebetude, the danger to democracy would be much greater than that posed by the actual farce his administration has become. Democracy faces a double threat: from economic liberalism, deregulation, and unbridled capitalism on one hand, and from right-wing populism on the other. But the two forces collude: the liberals need the rightists either to maintain order (Weimar and Hitler) or as a bogey man to get themselves elected (Hillary Clinton and Trump, Macron and Marine Le Pen). Their candidate may alienate support on the left, who “lack all conviction” about his or her merits, thus leaving the door open to the rightist candidate, sustained by the “passionate intensity” or his or her gung-ho supporters. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” written just after the Great War, is more and more on our lips as a new season of convulsions opens. “The centre cannot hold” and makes way for a “rough beast, its hour come round at last.”

The Ghost of Julius Evola

America for Bannon is an empty signifier, provided with an unreal paradisal past, an unreal apocalyptic present—the “crisis”—and an unreal future, blank and undefined. An anonymous article at summeroflove85.wordpress.com (2017), titled “The Unhappy Ghost of American Identity: Hauerwas, Bannon and the ‘Emptiness’ of National Promise,” notes that “most of Bannon’s claims are less to do with cultural essence and more to do with economic freedom of the nation ‘to do things’ (‘sovereignty’, ‘bringing back jobs, and ‘supporting deregulation’);” “That’s all a story-less politics can really do. It can only talk about conditions of action, it has no account of what actions should be preferred and why. Beyond the defense of doing and choosing, it has little substance.” Should we think of the fascist hyper-activism, energeticism, decisionism cultivated in the age of Gabriele d’Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt? Perhaps, but Bannon lacks their wit and their power to grip; his preachy prescriptions are banal and deathly dull.

Still Bannon, playing Mephistopheles to Trump’s Faust and Rasputin to his Nicholas II, invites comparison with Baron Julius Evola who played, briefly, a comparable role for Mussolini. Here again connections are elusive. “While Bannon’s references to Evola don’t prove he sees eye to eye with the philosopher, the openness with which he mentioned the Italian philosopher suggests that Evola’s name is not only circulating in Bannon’s circles, but that Bannon does not consider Evola’s thinking particularly problematic” (Merelli, 2017). Bannon’s actual words, in response to a question about Russia, were: “When Vladimir Putin, when you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of his beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism; he’s got an adviser who harkens back to Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian fascism” (quoted by Liverant, 2017). As in the case of Rand, Evola is put at a distance but his name keeps recurring. It is true, however, that his critics have been too quick to put Bannon in the same basket as these two thinkers.

When Mussolini came to power with his amorphous and flexible fascist ideology, many stepped forward to give it shape: “Like Gentile, all the most articulate hierarchs or ideologues who served the regime nurtured the illusion that they could be the mid-wives of a new Italy reborn in their image” (Griffin, 1991, p. 69). Evola, a Dadaist painter who believed that civilization was entering the “black age” or Kali Yuga of Hinduism (Griffin, 2007, p. 6), bears a resemblance to the composer of the Inaugural Address. Evola was a similar literary attitudinist, and Mussolini “early decided that Evola was an hysteric—but that his views might serve to convey, to equally hysterical fanatics in National Socialist Germany, Fascism’s seriousness of purpose” (Gregor, 2005, 218). Meanwhile, “Evola clearly held Mussolini and Fascism to have been nothing other than a ‘hypnotic’ side show that might be conveniently employed as a means of communicating the profound realities of a transcendent world to those capable of understanding” (219). It would not be surprising if Bannon had an equally cynical attitude to Trump, for his own apocalyptic world-view is far more sublime than what any ordinary politician can begin to comprehend.

Mussolini rued his use of Evola, who started an independent right wing movement that through its influence on Mussolini’s rump Republic of Salò rendered Fascism for the first time “complicit in the murder of Jews” (220).  Trump should have learnt from Mussolini’s mistake in “burdening Fascism with an ill-contrived and immoral racism” (221). Ideologists may look lightweight, but if given a hold on power they can swing things in a sinister direction. “Montini [the future Paul VI] identified Evola as suffering from ‘those strange forms of cerebralism and neurasthenia, of intensive cultivation of incomprehensibility, of the metaphysic of obscurity, of cryptology of expression, of pseudo-mystical preciosity, of cabalistic fascinations magically evaporated by the refined drugs of Oriental erudition’” (198). How many have trashed with equal flamboyance the intellectual misery of Trump and his supporters. But their kind of power is not measurable in those terms, and in fact is better secured by the intellectually mediocre who are adroit communicators. “The wholly Fascist intellectuals … were for the most part middle-notch figures, among whom one could distinguish the delirious Julius Evola or a dilettante in the vein of grandeur such as G. A. Fanelli, who defined Fascism as ‘integral monarchy.’ No one took them seriously” (Bobbio, 1973, 230-31). The doctrine of these thinkers had little consistent positive content beyond its opposition to democracy and socialism (232). Trump has found no major intellectual to lean on, no one like what Giovanni Gentile (Mussolini’s first education minister) was for Fascism or Carl Schmitt was for Nazism. Bannon may have seemed a lucky catch to him for a few months, but disappointment set in, for Bannon did not have the capacious and realistic political intelligence of figures in previous administrations who starred as the “brain of the president.” “The fact that totalitarian government, its open criminality notwithstanding, rests on mass support is very disquieting” (Arendt, 1961, vii). Trump enjoys the solid support of at least a third of the American population, and if he were called upon to be the leader in a terrorist or military crisis that support would shoot up. So it is perhaps fortunate that his charism is not of a higher order and that he has not found collaborators of genius.

One difference from Evola is that neither Bannon nor Trump are traditionalist in the European style. They would not say, with Evola in his defense statement of October 1951, “My principles are only those that before the French Revolution every well-born person considered healthy and normal” (quoted in Furlong, 2011, p. 9). Also missing among Trumpists is the mystic exaltation that Evola experienced and that led him to study Buddhism (see Furlong, pp. 2-12). Yet their contempt for empirical fact and their faith in instinct (“my temperament” as Trump calls it) does suggest a quasi-religious assurance, a belief in an alternative source of truth, a gnosis.

At the end of our brief inquiry, Bannon remains not so much an enigma as something of a blob. The alleged brain of Trumpism turns out to be a disappointing blank. There is nothing as substantial here as the neocon ideology of a previous deplorable regime. When the show ends, we will be left with a sense of empty exhaustion, for the sound and fury of this tale told by an idiot indeed signifies nothing. The morning after will be bleak and cheerless, but it will be a blessed relief to return to the light of common day, freed of all the ghostly ghastliness.

 References

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Benko, Ralph. 2016. “Ayn Rand’s Ghost Does Not Haunt the Trump Administration.” Forbes, December 18. www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2016/12/18/ayn-rands-ghost-does-not-haunt-the-trump-administration/#d474a6435fd0

Bobbio, Norberto. 1973. “La cultura e il fascismo.” In Fascismo e società italiana, edited by Guido Quazza. Turin: Einaudi, 209-46.

Bruck, Connie. 2017. “How Hollywood Remembers Steve Bannon.” The New Yorker, May 1. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/01/how-hollywood-remembers-steve-bannon

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Costa, Robert. 2012.  “Ryan Shrugged,” National Review, April 26. www.nationalreview.com/article/297023/ryan-shrugged-robert-costa

Dalio, Ray. 2016. “Reflections on the Trump Presidency, One Month after the Election,” LinkedIn, December 19. www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflections-trump-presidency-one-month-after-election-ray-dalio

Eatwell, Roger, and Noël O’Sullivan, eds, 1989. The Nature of the Right: European and American Politics and Political Thought since 1789. London: Pinter.

Feder, J. Lester. “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World.” Buzzfeed, November 15. www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world?utm_term=.jhQL2mDvD#.rb7Jgpaxa

Fox, Mathew. 2017. “Steve Bannon on the Crisis of Capitalism and the Divine Right of Billionaires.” The Real News Network, 5 April 2017.

Furlong, Paul. 2011. Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola. London and New York: Routledge.

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Griffin, Roger. 2007. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kuttner, Robert. 2017. “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant.” The American Prospect, August 16. www.prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant

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Merelli, Annalisa. 2017. “Steve Bannon’s interest in a thinker who inspired fascism exposes the misogyny of the alt-right.” Quartz, February 22. www.qz.com/909323/bannons-interest-for-julius-evola-unveils-the-sexism-at-the-core-of-trump

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by Martin Hägglund

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has been widely celebrated and the English-speaking world is now awaiting the translation of the sixth and final volume, itself more than a thousand pages long. Drawing on the original Norwegian, Martin Hägglund here presents a reading of My Struggle as a whole, pursuing the existential stakes, philosophical implications, and transformative quality of Knausgaard’s project. 

This article has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective and will also be published in boundary 2.

More than sixteen hundred years ago, Saint Augustine explored the experience of time through a simple exercise. You can still try it today. Choose a song that you love and learn it by heart. Keep practicing until you remember every part of the song and every shift in the melody. As you sing it, you will know how much of the song has passed since the beginning and how much of it remains until the end. Yet—in holding the song together—you will find that it is already slipping away. There is never a moment in which the song is present to you. You can sing it only by retaining the notes that have passed away, while anticipating the notes still to come. Even each individual tone is never present: it begins to recede as soon as it sounds and you have to hold onto it to hear anything at all.

This experience of time is, according to Augustine, at work in every moment of our lives. You may think that you are present here today. But in everything you do, you are divided between the past and the future. As you get up in the morning, part of the day is already gone and what remains of the day is still to come. Even if you wake up at dawn and just focus on the first hour of the day, you will never be able to seize it as a present moment. “An hour,” Augustine writes, “is itself made of fleeting moments. Whatever part of the hour has flown away is past. What remains of the hour is future” (Augustine 1963: 11: 15).[1]

You may then try to forget about the hour and direct all your attention to the present moment, concentrating on what you are experiencing right now. Yet, as you grasp the present moment, it is already ceasing to be. As Augustine observes, “if the present were always present and did not go by into the past, it would not be time at all, but eternity” (11: 14). Even the most immediate experience is marked by this temporality. There is never a presence that reposes in itself. Rather, every moment of time is disappearing. This is not to say that the experience of time is an illusion. On the contrary, it is at work in everything you do. Any experience requires that you hold onto a past that is no longer and project yourself into a future that is not yet.

Augustine dramatically describes the experience of time as a distentio that pulls you apart in two different directions. Living on in time you are always distended, torn between a past that you cannot fully recover and a future that you cannot finally predict. By the same token, there is no guarantee that you can sustain what you love. Happiness consists in having and holding (habere et tenere) what you love. But since both you and the beloved are temporal, your having and holding will always tremble with the anticipation of mourning. The moments you stretch out to keep in memory may be taken away and the possibilities you strain toward in hope may never arrive.

The result is a life where opportunity and danger are inseparable. The light of bliss—even when it floods your life—is always attended by the shadow of loss. “Either loss of what we love and have gained,” Augustine explains, “or failure to gain what we love and have hoped for” (Augustine 1982: 62). This is the condition of secular life. Augustine uses the Latin word saecularis to evoke how we are bound by time, through our commitments to a shared world and history, as well as to generations before and beyond us. The historical world in which we find ourselves is the saeculum and this world (hoc saeculo) depends on generation across time.

Instead of pursuing the passions of a secular life, Augustine urges his soul to turn toward God’s eternity as “the place of peace that is imperturbable” (Augustine 1963: 4: 11). This is the movement of his religious conversion. Augustine implores himself not to be “foolish” by trying to hold onto what passes away. Unless the soul turns toward the eternity of God “it is fixed to sorrows” (4: 10), since all things that are temporal will cease to be. With remarkable precision, Augustine locates the risk of mourning not only in erotic love but also in the basic enjoyment of his physical senses. Merely to enjoy the light that illuminates the world is for Augustine a dangerous temptation, since it makes him dependent on something that is transient. “That corporeal light,” he explains, “is a tempting and dangerous sweetness” (10: 34). Enjoying the light of the day leads him to want more light and to suffer when it is absent. Because he loves the light that makes the world visible, “if suddenly the light is withdrawn, I seek for it with longing. And if it is absent for long, I grow sad” (10: 34). Similarly, when Augustine recites and is moved by a song, he warns himself against becoming attached to the sounds and words that vanish in time. “Do no let my soul attach itself to these words with the glue of love [glutine amore] through the sensations of the body. For all these things move along a path toward nonexistence. They tear the soul apart with contagious desires” (4: 10).

Augustine’s aim, then, is to convert the passion of a secular experience that is bound by time into a passion for the eternity of God. He wants to persuade us that it would be better to enjoy the stillness of eternity than to suffer from the drama of living on in time, torn between the past and the future.

Yet Augustine’s own account gives us good reasons to reject his appraisal of eternity. The attraction of eternity is supposed to be that “there you will lose nothing” (4: 11). But if you can lose nothing in eternity, it is because there is literally nothing left to lose. Nothing that happens can matter anymore and it is no accident that the activities offered in Heaven turn out to be remarkably monotonous. “All our activity will consist in singing ‘Amen’ and ‘Alleluia’,” Augustine explains in one of his sermons, and “we shall praise God not just for one day, but just as these days have no end in time, our praise does not cease” (Augustine 1992: 163). Leaving aside the question of whether one could sing or praise something forever, the real question is why one would want to and how any significant aspect of who we are could survive the transformation to timeless rapture. Being absorbed in eternity, there would be nothing left for you or me to do, since nothing could begin or end. As far as I am concerned, I would be dead.

To pursue the latter perspective would be to write a secular—as distinct from a religious—confession. Such a confession would take up Augustine’s explorations of how the identity of the self depends on the fragile operations of memory and how the experience of time cuts through every moment. Like Augustine in his Confessions it would declare: “See, my life is distended” (Ecce distentio est vita mea). But unlike in Augustine, the distention of time would not be regarded as a fallen state from which we need to be redeemed by a religious revelation of eternity. Rather, the distention of time would be seen and felt as the opening of life itself. The task would be to “own” the fact that this is the only life we have—for better and for worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind. While Augustine denounces the “glue of care” (curae glutino) that binds us to the world, a secular confession would maintain that it is only through finite bonds that we can seize our lives and become who we are.

My aim here is to trace such a secular confession in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. First published in Norwegian and now the subject of wide international acclaim, My Struggle can be read as a contemporary response to Augustine. Ranging over three thousand six hundred pages, the six volumes of My Struggle are framed by Knausgaard’s resolution to tell the truth about his life in detail. Augustine initiated this genre of confessional autobiography with a move that was particularly radical in his religious context. Before Augustine, texts devoted to the lives of holy men (hagiographies) were all written in the third person, with the saint himself withdrawing from the world, leaving someone else to recount his path to transcendence. In contrast, Augustine tells the story of his own life, confessing his doubts, his sexuality, and his sins. Rather than hiding behind the third person, he owns the first person like no one before. We learn about his aging body, his psychological dramas, and even his nocturnal emissions. “In my memory,” Augustine confesses, “there still live images of the past acts that are fixed there by my sexual habit. These images attack me… in sleep they not only are pleasurable but even elicit consent and are very like the act itself” (Augustine 1963: 10: 30).

To expose himself in such detail may seem to be risky for an aspiring theological authority, but for Augustine it is part of a strategy. He exhibits his finite life to inspire a sense of how shameful and inadequate it is by comparison to the eternity of God. This is what Augustine calls “making truth” (veritatem facere). To make truth is not only to tell the truth—to confess what one has done—but also to make truth come into being in oneself by relinquishing the sinful attachment to life in this world and instead turn toward God.

Yet Augustine’s vivid account of the life he is supposed to leave behind also opens the chance for a secular inheritance of his work, where making truth is not a matter of devoting oneself to God but of remaining faithful to a finite life. The great French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to take up this possibility (in his own epochal Confessions from 1769) but Knausgaard pushes it further. Unlike Rousseau, Knausgaard does not claim to be exceptional and he does not hold out the promise of a timeless presence. He is the subject of an ordinary life that will irrevocably end and yet he devotes more attention to its minute details than would have been thinkable for either Augustine or Rousseau. The one obligation he recognizes as the writer of My Struggle is to be true to this life.

Thus, Knausgaard places himself under the obligation to account for his life as it is actually lived, only writing about things he has experienced while confessing to how he experienced them—no matter how quotidian, painful, or intimate the details may be. As readers, we get to follow the narrator and protagonist Karl Ove (avowedly identical to the author) in the midst of everyday life. At the time of writing My Struggle, he is in his early forties, absorbed and overwhelmed by being married with three young children. While this domestic life keeps getting in the way of his writing, he makes it a centerpiece of the story itself. We spend many pages going grocery shopping, pushing baby prams in the city, and attending to daily exchanges with his children. All is rendered with a fidelity to everyday life that neither idealizes nor deprecates the experiences in question. We become attuned to the weight of waking up too early while trying to meet the demands of family life, the sinking feeling of facing an apartment in chaotic disorder, and the numbness that follows from an endless array of tasks. Yet the same attunement also yields the radiant moments of everyday life. Precisely because Knausgaard perseveres in exploring his mundane existence, he loosens the hold of habit and makes us see the world anew.

The same holds for when Knausgaard shifts focus from his present life and descends into his past, excavating the world of being twenty-five, or eighteen, or twelve, or seven. His achievement is not simply an act of remembering but of reliving: inhabiting the way the world was given at a time, letting the constraints and the promises, the mistakes and the fortunes, reverberate with the same force they had when first experienced. The impact of falling in love at the age of seven, or despairing over the future at the age of twelve, is here revived with the same depth as the pain of losing a parent or the bliss of having a child in adult life.

As a result, Knausgaard enables the reader to turn back to her own life with a more profound attention and concern. This effect is one described not only by prominent critics but also by the large number of general readers who have been captivated by Knausgaard’s work. When My Struggle was released in Norway (selling more than half a million copies in a country of less than five million people), readers testified to how Knausgaard—in opening up his life through writing—had opened their own lives to them. The same testimony can be found among many of his readers in the US and elsewhere. The transformative effect of Knausgaard’s writing does not necessarily depend on sharing his cultural background or personal circumstances. You are a potential addressee of his work by virtue of being a time-bound, practically committed agent, who can be moved to explore and deepen the commitment to the life you are leading. Knausgaard’s writing can give you new access to your own life not necessarily because you identify with his experiences but because My Struggle exemplifies a devotion to life as it is lived—a devotion that you can take up and practice in relation to your own existence.

The key here is the sustained act of attention that characterizes Knausgaard’s writing. When he dedicates twenty pages to exchanges over breakfast with his daughters on a rainy Wednesday morning—or seeks to pry open every sensation and emotion that resonated in his twelve-year old self on the way home from swim practice one particular winter night—he is not simply imposing his life on us. He is teaching us (and himself) how we can remember what we tend to forget. By describing the quotidian in painstaking detail, he opens our eyes to how much is going on even during days when nothing seems to happen. And by resuscitating his former selves, he sensitizes us to all the vanished moments that remain inscribed in us—triggering memories that can open painful wounds but also bring you back to life.

The appeal of Knausgaard’s writing, then, is not that it forces you to see his life with your eyes. Rather, his writing enables you to see your life with his eyes—with the level of attention he bestows on a life. Thereby, you can come to recognize the myriad ways in which you are indeed alive, even when you seem dead to yourself or lost in the mundane events of everyday existence. As you take care of the tasks at hand, what you see bears the weight of your love and your evasions, the history of who you have been and may turn out to be. Evenings that no one else can remember live in you, when the snow touched your face or the rain caught you unprepared, when you were all alone and yet marked by all the others that have made you who you are. There are things you cannot leave behind or wish you could retrieve. And there is hope you cannot extinguish—whether buried or insistent, broken or confident, the one never excluding the other.

Such a distended life is what Knausgaard’s prose invites you to recognize as your own. Stretching toward the past and straining toward the future, an entire world emerges through you. You did not make this world, you were made by it, and now you sustain it. This is your life. There is nothing else. But what there is—and what you do—binds you to the world in ways that are deeper than you can ever disentangle.

The struggle, then, is how to make this life your own. That is the starting point for Knausgaard’s project. When My Struggle begins, he finds himself detached from the life he is living. He endures what he has to do, but he has withdrawn from being truly involved in what happens. At a remove from his existence, he feels as though he has nothing to lose and by the same token his life appears to be meaningless. “The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it,” he writes. “So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle” (Knausgaard 2014: 67).

The struggle to make life his own is not a quest to become independent or self-sufficient. His life is not his own in the sense that he would be able spontaneously to decide who he is or what he is going to do. On the contrary, there is a keen awareness in Knausgaard of how we belong to a world we did not create and depend on others who exceed our control. To own your life is not to free yourself from this dependence. Rather, your existence is inseparable from the ways you are engaged in and committed to being in the world. For example, you may find yourself (as Knausgaard does at the beginning of My Struggle) married with children and overcome by a sense that you cannot make it work. You are trying to succeed—trying really to be there for your loved ones—but keep failing and feel yourself disintegrating in the process.

To disown your life in this situation is to settle for mere perseverance, going through the motions while numbing yourself and dreaming of being somewhere else. Knausgaard is attuned to this temptation and he himself repeatedly disowns his life. Yet the struggle he engages in through his writing is to own his life. He actively seeks to identify himself with what he is doing and acknowledge what he loves. This is an ongoing struggle. To own what you do and what you love is to put yourself at stake, to make your life depend on the fate of your commitments. To own your life is not to own what you love (it is not your possession) but to own that you love what you love. This is the condition for anything to matter to you—for anything to have meaning—but it also puts your life at risk. If you own what you do, you are bound to be deeply affected by how it is received. Precisely because you are engaged in a meaningful activity—precisely because you are doing something that matters to you—you are susceptible to the experience of failure. Likewise, if you own that you love what you love, you make yourself vulnerable to what happens. Your dreams may come true or your hopes may be shattered. You now have something that matters to you, but by the same token you have something to lose.

To own your life, then, is not to have it as your sovereign property. On the contrary, to own your life is to expose yourself. Only someone who owns his life—only someone who makes his life depend on what he does and what he loves—can have the experience of it being taken away from him.

Whence the temptation to disown your life: to bury your hopes before they fail to come true, to withdraw your love before it makes you suffer. These are paths of detachment, where you can come to seek protection from the pain of failure or loss by divesting yourself in advance. There are certainly situations where such strategies make sense and some degree of detachment is necessary to endure in our lives—otherwise anything could break us. But as a principle detachment is a dead end: it can lead to nothing but the destitution of meaning or a nihilistic rejection of the world.

The animating principle of Knausgaard’s writing is rather one of attachment, which is all the more profound because it remains faithful to the ambivalence of any attachment. The credo of his work, I will argue, is a phrase that recurs throughout the six volumes of My Struggle and is difficult to translate. “Det gjelder å feste blikket,” Knausgaard writes in Norwegian. The phrase could be rendered as “one must focus the gaze” or “what matters is to focus the gaze.” But the Norwegian verb that we would then translate as to focus (“å feste”) literally means to attach and the phrase is clearly a personal injunction rather than a simple statement. So a better translation would be: attach yourself to what you see, focus your gaze by attaching yourself to what you see. This is the imperative of My Struggle.

The imperative can be understood in three different senses. These senses are intertwined, but it is useful to distinguish them to see different aspects of Knausgaard’s writing. The first sense of the imperative is to focus your gaze on the life you are actually living. This explains why Knausgaard can devote more pages to apparently trivial activities than to transformative life events. If he is going to focus his gaze on the life he is actually living, he cannot just capture the moments of trauma or bliss that glow in the dark (birth, death, love, mourning); he must also capture the stretches of time out of which they emerge and the things he does on days he would not remember: setting the table, cleaning up the house, flipping through books, taking a walk on a gray afternoon, staring out the window. Knausgaard has an extraordinary ability to open up and dilate such moments, making even dull experiences come alive with the sensory, perceptual, and reflective richness of being in the world.

Yet it is not enough to focus your gaze on what you do, you must also acknowledge the ways in which you are attached to what you see. This is the second sense of the imperative. Accordingly, Knausgaard seeks to render the waves of boredom and elation, ambition and frustration, intense joy and absentminded occupation, which form the rhythms of his days. Above all, he tries to focus his gaze on what means the most to him. Here too it is a matter of acknowledging how he is attached to what he sees, even at the cost of confessing painful ambivalence. We learn of the absorbing love affair that brought him and his wife together but also of the fears, the petty grievances, the daily resentments, and the storming conflicts that almost tear them apart. In focusing his gaze on his children, there can be an exceptional tenderness in attending to their unique personalities and the daily dramas of their vulnerable, growing selves. But there are also detailed, excruciating accounts of how he loses sight of who they are and what they need—of parental love clouded by anger, exhaustion, or resignation.

Knausgaard’s writing could here be described as a form of mindfulness, but one must then separate mindfulness from Buddhist meditation, with which it is often associated. According to Buddhism, you should focus your inner gaze and attend to your attachments with the aim of detaching yourself from the struggles they entail. By paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that arise in your consciousness, you are supposed to learn to disengage from them—to not identify with what you think and feel. The goal is to attain a state of pure consciousness, where there is perfect serenity because you have ceased to care. Thus, while certain meditation techniques can be adapted for the secular purpose of reengaging with the world—helping you recover from negative experiences or simply increasing your concentration and energy—the religious aim of Buddhism is quite different. On a secular understanding, meditative detachment is a relative and temporary means employed for the sake of being able to better engage the struggles that follow from being attached to life. In Buddhism, on the contrary, absolute detachment is an end in itself. Since all attachments entail suffering, only absolute detachment can bring about the elimination of suffering that Buddhism holds out as your salvation. What ultimately matters is not who you are or what you do, what ultimately matters is that you attain a state of consciousness where everything ceases to matter—so that you can rest in peace.

The aim of Knausgaard’s mindfulness is the opposite. By attending to the struggles that emerge from his attachments, he seeks to identify more deeply with them: to become more attached to the life he is living. This is the third sense of his imperative. You must attach yourself to what you see—even at the cost of suffering—because without attachment there is no meaning: nothing to care for and no one who binds you to the world. To counter such nihilism is the animating ambition of Knausgaard’s secular confession. “Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life,” he writes at the end of the second volume. And in the final, sixth volume he presses home the stakes of being able to focus your gaze, attaching yourself to what you see:

I know what it means to see something without attaching yourself to it. Everything is there, houses, trees, cars, people, sky, earth, but something is missing nonetheless, because it does not mean anything that they are there. They could just as well be something else, or nothing at all. It is the meaningless world which appears like that. It is possible to live in the meaningless world too, it is just a matter of enduring, and that one will do if one must. The world can be beautiful… but it does not make any difference to you, it does not affect you. You have not attached yourself to what you see, you do not belong to the world and can, if push comes to shove, just as well leave it. (Knausgaard 2012: 365)

This is the position of someone who has disowned his life. What renders the world meaningless—or meaningful—is not an objective feature of what there is but proceeds from the degree of your attachment to what you see. This does not imply that you are free to decide the meaning of the world. But it does entail that any meaningful engagement depends on your attachment to others and to being in the world. Your capacity to attach is not simply up to you—it can be enabled or disabled by what happens to you—but whether and how you attach makes all the difference in the world.

The difficulty of owning such a life is an integral part of Knausgaard’s writing. He struggles with the temptation to disown his life and dwells on the many ways in which we may come to give up on our existence. The quotidian way is the slow death of a gradually increasing indifference, but prominent in his work is also the reckless renunciation of obligation at the depths of alcoholism, the short-circuiting of emotion at the heart of depression, or the ultimate self-destruction of suicide. Knausgaard explores these forms of disowning one’s life without recurring either to moralizing judgment or to condemnation. Yet, in and through these explorations, he recalls us to the fact that it is only by owning our lives—as essentially being in the world—that we have a chance at a meaningful existence. This is the secular conversion at work in Knausgaard’s confessions. By focusing his gaze on his life and attaching himself to what he sees, he turns us around: not toward eternity but toward our finite lives as the site where everything is at stake. Like all conversions, this is not one that can be achieved once and for all: it is a continuous struggle to own our lives. But unlike in a religious conversion, the goal is not for the struggle to come to an end. Rather, to own our lives is to acknowledge that struggle belongs to the very life we want to lead. If we want our lives to matter, we want to have something that we can lose.

Nevertheless, Knausgaard himself is liable to devalue his life from a religious perspective. At one point in the final volume, he is reading the Church Fathers (of whom Augustine is the most prominent) and comes to feel that his own experiences are impoverished in contrast to their mystical ecstasies. Knausgaard now maintains that his own search for meaning is pathetic compared to “the devotion of the mystics” (Knausgaard 2012: 610) and condemns himself as “one of the world’s many soulless and banal human beings” (611). This is in line with the sense of shame Augustine hoped to inspire. From a religious point of view, a finite life without redemption is indeed soulless and banal. This view is inherited even by many who do not have religious faith—regarding their lives as futile because they lack a sense of the eternal—and Knausgaard is tempted by it in a number of the essayistic reflections that pervade My Struggle. He repeatedly argues that art aspires to retrieve a sense of the holy, while lamenting that we can no longer attain it. “The longing and melancholia that Romantic art expresses is a longing for this,” he writes with reference to a religious sense of the holy, “and a mourning of its loss. At least that is how I interpret my own attraction to the Romantic in art” (610). On this conception, art would strive to open a world that is “holy” in the sense of being untouched by time and finitude, a world where everything is present in itself, but which we cannot enter because we are “fallen”: incapable of living in “the indifference of the divine” and “the all extinguishing light of the good” (409).

Since these religious ideas are so familiar—and supposedly profound—they are likely to be taken as a guide to Knausgaard’s work. Yet that would be a mistake. Throughout My Struggle (and particularly in the final volume) there are numerous statements or small essays that appear to present the philosophy of the book. Many of them are in conflict with one another or internally contradictory and to take them at face value would be to miss almost everything that is important in them. Knausgaard is a tremendous essayist, but his particular talent is to allow his essays to emerge as part of the narrative. The theoretical reflections exist on the same plane as the practical actions; they reflect how someone thinks and feels at a particular time rather than expressing the perspective of someone who is outside the narrative and in control of its meaning.

To understand the philosophical poetics of My Struggle, then, we must attend to what happens in the narrative alongside the many and often contradictory statements of intent. The view that our secular lives are soulless and banal—that we need to be saved from our time bound existence—belongs to the tendency to disown his life. While this tendency persists throughout My Struggle, the very writing of the book goes in the opposite direction. Far from regarding his life as soulless or banal, the writer of My Struggle depends on the faith that there is enormous significance and depth in the experiences of a finite life, one worthy of being explored down to the most subtle nuances and emotional reverberations. The aim is to attach himself more deeply to his life, rather than transcend it. From this perspective, it is Augustine’s mystical ecstasies that are soulless and banal, since they seek to leave the world behind in favor of an eternal presence where nothing happens. What is profound in Augustine is not the ascent to heaven but the descent into time and memory. It is the latter, descending movement that Knausgaard follows in his practice as a writer.

The key issue here is time. By using the first person like no one before, Augustine dramatizes what it means to be torn apart by time. Even his abstract philosophical speculations in the Confessions are marked by his concrete existence as he is longing and languishing, seized by hope or fear, elated by an insight or frustrated by an impasse. Accordingly, when Augustine pursues his philosophical analysis of time-consciousness in the Confessions, he also makes his reader feel how the problem of time is an intimate, personal concern. The investigation of time must itself be carried out in time and Augustine foregrounds the effort to articulate his own arguments, as an ongoing line of thought that at any moment may be broken. Likewise, when Augustine analyzes the work of memory, he does so by descending into “the caves and caverns” of his own memory (Augustine 1963: 10: 17), exposing the ways in which the integrity of his self is breached by a past he cannot fully recover. Moreover, as Augustine is writing his Confessions, he is still vulnerable to change and this drama becomes a part of the book itself. Intensifying the sense of his own vanishing presence, Augustine even highlights the fleeting time in which he composes his text: “Consider what I am now, at this moment [in ipso tempore], as I set down my confessions” (10: 3).

The same turn toward his own passing presence is pursued by Knausgaard in My Struggle. “Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m.,” we read early on in the first volume, as he records the night when he begins to work on the book (Knausgaard 2013: 25). A couple of pages later we learn that six days have passed for Knausgaard at the time of writing, as we find him at his desk again: “It is now a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning. It is March 4, 2008. I am sitting in my office, surrounded by books from floor to ceiling, listening to the Swedish band Dungen while thinking about what I have written and where it is leading” (28). These explicit marks of time recur throughout My Struggle, returning with a particular frequency in the final volume, when he is trying to complete the book. “I am sitting all alone as I am writing this. It is June 12, 2011, the time is 06:17 a.m., in the room above me the children are asleep, at the other end of the house Linda is asleep, outside the window, a few yards out in the garden, angular sunrays descend on the apple tree. The foliage is filled with light and shadow” (Knausgaard 2012: 227).

These apparently simple observations encapsulate the poetics of My Struggle. Knausgaard’s writing develops a careful attention to the time and place where he finds himself. The fundamental form of such attention is the turn toward what is happening at this very moment—trying to capture life as it unfolds right now. The aim is to slow down the experience of temporality, to dilate moments of time and linger in their qualities. This movement does not yield a stable presence but, on the contrary, a stronger sense of how the present moment is ceasing to be and has to be held in memory, as it opens onto a future that exceeds it. By instilling this sense of transience, Knausgaard seeks to awaken his own attention and the attention of his readers. He wants to counteract habit: to prevent himself from taking his life for granted and see the world anew. This attempt to break with habit—to deepen the sensation of being alive, to make moments of time more vivid—is necessarily intertwined with a sense of finitude. It is because his life is finite that he cannot take it for granted and his desire to linger in a moment is animated by the awareness that it is passing away. Indeed, the sense of transience is an essential part of the radiance of the moment itself. Seeing the world anew is inseparable from the sense that the world you see anew is finite. It has not always been, it will not always be, and therefore it must be seized before it vanishes.

Knausgaard’s great predecessor here is the modern writer who explored the experience of time more deeply than any other: Marcel Proust. Knausgaard recalls that he not only read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time “but virtually imbibed it” (Knausgaard 2013: 29) and My Struggle bears the imprint of many passages from Proust. The influence is visible already in the basic form of the project. In Search of Lost Time devotes seven volumes, stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. My Struggle apparently follows the same model, devoting six volumes, also stretching over more than three thousand pages, to a man recollecting his life. While Knausgaard transforms the Proustian project in an important way—to which I will return—it is illuminating to dwell on what he learns from Proust. The protagonist Marcel is himself in the process of learning throughout In Search of Lost Time. From early childhood, he wants to become a writer, but he is plagued by doubts about his talent and not until the end does he discover what the subject of his book should be, namely, his own life. Rather than a transcendent topic of writing, which has always left Marcel’s imagination blank, it is “this life, the memories of its times of sadness, its times of joy” (Proust 2003: 208) that he comes to see as the basis for his book. “The greatness of true art,” he argues, “lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize…this reality which we run a real risk of dying without having known, and which is quite simply our life” (204).

Accordingly, Marcel emphasizes that his work will be devoted to “the thing that ought to be most precious to us,” namely, “our true life, our reality as we have felt it” (459). This is why he can dwell on the experience of falling asleep for more than thirty pages, or seek to distill every nuance of an erotic touch, a flickering memory, an awakening sensation. Through the power of his prose, he wants to sharpen our perception and refine our senses. The aim is not to transport us to another life, but to make us genuinely experience the life we are already living. And as Marcel understands, to achieve this aim we must transform our relation to time. If habit tends to deaden and dull our experience, it is because it reduces the impact of time on our senses. Even though every day is different and there is no guarantee that there will be another one, habit makes us feel as though our life has been all the same and will continue indefinitely. Thus, when we get used to seeing something we love, we tend no longer to notice its details or marvel at its existence. Likewise, when we get used to living with someone we love, we run the risk of taking him or her for granted and no longer appreciating his or her unique qualities.

The key to breaking habit, then, is to recall that we can lose what we love. Far from devaluing life, the dimension of loss is part of what makes it emerge as valuable. We may know that we are going to die, but the role of art is to make us feel what that means and thereby intensify our attachment to life. Accordingly, when Marcel comes to narrate his own life, he is all the more attentive to the impact and nuance of his past experiences. Even many events that were unremarkable or unhappy return with a luminous quality in his memory, since they appear as irreplaceable in the light of loss. The value of a past experience may thus be enhanced when it is infused with the pathos of being lost, just as the value of a current experience may be enhanced by the sense that it will be lost.

Yet Marcel pursues his insight only in relation to a distant past and not in relation to his ongoing life as he is writing. In Search of Lost Time ends with the revelation that leads Marcel to become an author and to write the book we have been reading. Nevertheless, we never learn under what circumstances Marcel is writing the seven volumes, how much time it takes, and what he is struggling with as he is trying to complete the book. To be clear, In Search of Lost Time is not Proust’s autobiography. It does not tell the story of Proust’s life but is the autobiography of the fictional character Marcel, who within the frame of the novel writes the story of his life. We know that Proust worked on In Search of Lost Time for more than thirteen years and was unable to finish the book before his death, struggling to enter revisions in the galley proofs up until the end. Within the frame of the novel, however, we do not get to witness an analogous struggle on the part of Marcel as the supposed author of the pages we are reading. Indeed, we have no sense of what his daily life is like as he is writing, or what happens to him during the years it takes to compose his autobiography. All his efforts are devoted to giving meaning and significance to his past, not to his ongoing life.

This is the structure that Knausgaard transforms. Within the frame of My Struggle, the current life of the narrator Karl Ove is itself part of the story and we are even told exactly how long it takes for him to write the six volumes. He begins to work on the first volume at 11:43 p.m. on February 27, 2008, and he completes the last volume at 07:07 a.m. on September 2, 2011. To be sure, the beginning and end of the narration cannot be dated with such complete precision, but what is important is the ambition to situate his writing as part of an ongoing life. We learn in detail about how his work on the book is interrupted by child care, practical worries, relationship troubles, and personal anxiety. All of these things belong to the subject matter of the book itself. The struggle is not only to recover the past, but also to grasp hold of and engage with the life that continues.

Knausgaard thereby reveals a difficulty that Proust tends to conceal. If you only focus on the distant past (as Marcel does) it is relatively easy to gain a new appreciation of your life, since you can transform the past into an object of contemplation that no longer makes any direct demands on your engagement. You can dwell on details you previously overlooked, absorb the impact of events you did not understand at the time, and even feel a surge of nostalgia for things you did not enjoy when you first experienced them. Indeed, the sense that all these things are irrevocably gone can make them appear more precious than they actually were. Your nostalgia, then, can come to shelter you from the demands of a life that still has to be lived. It is telling that In Search of Lost Time ends with Marcel withdrawing from the world to write his book. His life is effectively over and the only thing that remains for him is to tell his story. Of course, Marcel still has to live, but we are supposed to forget about this in favor of an immersion in the past. Thus, the few times we catch a glimpse of him in the act of narration, it is the image of someone who has reduced his engagements to a minimum and apparently places no value on his current life. “I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness” (Proust 2002: 371).

In contrast, the structure of My Struggle looks like a deliberate inversion of the one that shapes In Search of Lost Time. While Marcel’s book ends with him becoming an author through the decision to write the story of his life, Karl Ove’s book begins with him already being an author who decides to write the story of his life and ends with the declaration that he is no longer an author after the completion of his book. “I will enjoy, really enjoy, the thought that I am no longer an author,” are the last words of My Struggle (Knausgaard 2012: 1116), followed by a separate page with two sole sentences that address his wife and children: “For Linda, Vanja, Heidi, and John. I love you” (1117). Where Marcel ends by retreating from life into literature, Karl Ove ends by retreating from literature and turning toward life. This is not a strict opposition, since Marcel retreats into literature to understand and appreciate life, while literature is an essential part of Karl Ove’s ability to understand and appreciate life. Nevertheless, the way he transforms the ending of In Search of Lost Time indicates the challenge Karl Ove poses to himself. The retreat into writing is supposed to lead back into his actual life and not out of it. Indeed, he explicitly wants to change and become a better person in his daily existence. In addition to recovering the past, his task in My Struggle is to keep faith with what he is seeing and living now—not years later when he is looking back on it.

By the same token, he has to confront the difficulty of appreciating his life and sustaining his deepest attachments. Loving his wife and children is not something that can be accomplished once and for all; it is an act of devotion that has to be sustained every day and one that can always fail, with joy giving way to tedium, loving care compromised by indifference or frustration, and the sense of wonder lost in deadening habit. The aim of My Struggle is not to purify one from the other, but to confront the daily, interminable battle between the two. This is why we find the narrator in the midst of life, rather than at a remove from life as in the case of Marcel. Karl Ove is never at rest and even when he retreats to the writing desk he is caught up in the practical engagements of everyday life. The engagements may be painful or passionate, tedious or elevating, but the point is to make them all glow in their particularity.

Thus, at different intervals in telling the story of his life, Karl Ove transitions from recounting the past to depicting himself at the time of writing. Within the space of a sentence, we can move from a young Karl Ove in action to his older self recollecting the events several decades later. The first time this happens is early in the first volume, when we learn about his current life situation on the evening in February when he begins to work on the book. After an immersive description of one night when he was eight years old, Knausgaard looks up from his desk and speaks to us in ipso tempore—at the very moment of writing:

As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed. In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow. Two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek, all of them as if filled with darkness, and with the eyes staring and serious, and the corners of the mouth drooping, it is impossible not to consider this face gloomy.

What has engraved itself in my face?

Today is February 27, 2008. The time is 11:43 p.m. I who am writing, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and I am accordingly, at this moment, 39 years old. I have three children, Vanja, Heidi, and John, and I am married for the second time, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö, where we have now lived for a year and a half. Apart from some parents of the children at Vanja and Heidi’s nursery we do not know anyone here. This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don’t get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except when I am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can now last for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees me. This is what must have engraved itself in my face, this is what must have made it so stiff and masklike and almost impossible to associate with myself whenever I happen to catch a glimpse of it in a shop window. (Knausgaard 2013: 25-26)

This is not only the night when he begins to write the book; it also marks the degree zero of his project. The man who looks at himself here is someone who can barely recognize himself. He has withdrawn from the world, but by the same token he has disowned his life and lost hold of himself. The writing of My Struggle is an attempt to reverse this process, to turn him back toward his own life. He who never says what he really thinks and really means will now do so for thousands of pages. And he who does not want anyone to see him, who does not want anyone to get close to him, will now expose himself and make his life visible for anyone to see. This is not to say that he has a hidden kernel of identity that is independent of others and ready to be revealed at will. On the contrary, the difficulty of owning his life is that he is inseparable from the way he is acting in the world. Even withdrawing from others is a form of being with them and seeking to leave the world behind is itself a way of being in it. To own his life is to acknowledge this dependence, to recognize—for better and for worse—that he is attached to what he sees.

The project of owning his life, then, begins with a literal self-reflection. He sees his face in the dark window and has to grapple with what has happened to him. In a way, all of My Struggle can be seen as an attempt to answer the question he asks here: “What has engraved itself in my face?” He descends into the past to recover his life, but also to be able to engage the present and the future.

Consequently, he has to confront what Proust calls “embodied time” (temps incorporé). Embodied time designates how we carry the past with us, even when we are not aware of it or in control of how it affects us. This embodied time is for Proust the very condition of writing an autobiography. Because the past is inscribed in our bodies, we have the chance of reconnecting to our former selves, recalling not only what we did but also how it felt and thereby retrieving a genuine sense of our lives. For the same reason, however, our connection to the past is tenuous. We may never gain access to many of the experiences that are stored in us and—even when we do—the meaning of the past is never given in itself but refracted through our current sense of self and our projections of the future. Moreover, if our memories are embodied it means that they can be damaged or effaced by what happens to the body. The duration of the past is not secured by an immaterial soul, but depends on the retention of time in a frail and material body.

Thus, when Marcel discovers the importance of embodied time, he is haunted by an awareness of all the factors that may eradicate the memories that are retained in his body. “I felt the present object of my thought very clearly within myself… but also that, along with my body, it might be annihilated at any moment” (Proust 2003: 345-46). The discovery of embodied time inspires him to write In Search of Lost Time, but it also marks the precariousness of his project. At the end of the last volume, on the verge of beginning to write, Marcel worries about how brain damage or various accidents may prevent him from composing his autobiography. And indeed, before starting to work on his book, Marcel falls in a staircase and suffers from a memory loss that heightens his anxiety over not being able to write. “I asked myself not only ‘Is there still enough time?’ but also ‘Am I still in a sufficiently fit condition?’” (345). In pursuing the implications of embodied time, Marcel is thus finally led to the dead body, which underlines the finitude of the lived time to which he is devoted. “After death,” he writes on one of the last pages, “Time leaves the body, and the memories—so indifferent, so pale now—are effaced from her who no longer exists and soon will be from him whom at present they still torture, but in whom they will eventually die, when the desire of a living body is no longer there to support them” (357).

While the problem of the dead body only appears at the end of Proust’s novel, it is foregrounded from the beginning of My Struggle. Like Proust, Knausgaard wants to evoke the depths of time in our lives; how we go far beyond our physical location in space by bearing the past with us and projecting ourselves into a future. It is this distention of time that allows us to have a history and a lived experience. Yet, in Knausgaard there is a strong parallel awareness of how the dimension of lived time—with its hopes and fears, hidden riches and emotional upheavals—depends on a material body that will remain after the distended life has expired.

Thus, with a remarkable incision, the first sentences in the first volume of My Struggle force us to witness the very transition from a living to a dead body:

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action ceases of its own accord and the blood begins to run toward the lowest point of the body, where it gathers in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain… The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to spread through the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they tried only a few hours earlier they would have met with immediate resistance, but now everything around them is still, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes, Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity for which its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, one may imagine, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable-buckets stretching up the hillside. 

The moment life departs the body, the body belongs to the dead. Lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of the nonliving. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered in the ground or cremated in the oven. (Knausgaard 2013: 3-4)

For a novel that is so devoted to the first-person perspective, it is striking to begin with a view of life that only can be given from a third-person perspective. No one can experience the moment of death that Knausgaard describes. We can infer it when we observe another body at the moment of death, but when it happens to ourselves we are already gone. And yet we belong to this body that is not under our command. We are altogether dependent on our body—cannot exist without it—but our body is not dependent on us. After we are gone, it can remain as an object in the world, indifferent to our absence. Presumably, this is why the dead body is so uncanny and tends to be hidden away. The dead body reminds us that we are not only in the world but also of the world, made of materials that will degrade and decompose.

The materialist reminder runs throughout My Struggle. Specifically, Knausgaard employs a bifocal vision, where every existential phenomenon is seen both in its own right and as dependent on a physiological machinery. The paradigmatic example is the heart, which is the major and apparently conventional metaphor in My Struggle. The heart in Knausgaard is explicitly a metaphor for the living principle of his existence, expressed most forcefully in the intuitive experience of love. “The heart is never mistaken,” is the phrase he employs repeatedly, to explain his life changing decisions. The heart, then, designates his deepest and most intimate sense of self. At the same time, the heart is treated not metaphorically but literally. As in the opening paragraph quoted above, Knausgaard repeatedly lays bare the heart as a physical mechanism that is utterly indifferent to his sense of self. The heart beats and then it stops beating, whether he wills it or not. The dissection of his heart becomes not only an intimate confession but also an exploration of his own biological-material constitution, as though he were opening his heart in both a romantic and a chirurgical sense.

Knausgaard thus pushes the notion of embodied time to a stark conclusion. Looking at pictures of himself as an infant, he asks:

Is this creature [his infant self] the same person as the one sitting here in Malmö writing? And will the forty-year-old creature who is sitting in Malmö writing this one overcast September day—in a room filled with the drone of the traffic outside and the autumn wind howling through the old-fashioned ventilation system—be the same as the gray, hunched geriatric who forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home somewhere in the Swedish woods? Not to mention the corpse that at some point will be laid out on a bench in the morgue. Still known as Karl Ove. (Knausgaard 2015: 8).

Both the tenuous connections and the ultimate fragility of embodied time are here underscored, as he contemplates the radical changes of his body across a lifetime. In composing his autobiography, Karl Ove has to reckon with physical decomposition and is haunted by the absolute termination of his life that will take place when his body is transformed into a corpse. Alongside the existential commitment to his first-person perspective, there is an equally strong third-person perspective, where his life runs from the newborn child to the dead body in the morgue.

The key to Knausgaard’s writing is that these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive but interdependent. Knausgaard persistently recalls us to the automatic functions of our bodies, the decaying matter that we are made of, and the geological time that dwarfs the span of our existence. Yet this materialist perspective does not serve to diminish the importance of our lives. The fact that the duration of your existence is but a speck on the scale of geological time does not mean that it is insignificant. Likewise, the fact that your first-person perspective—the unique experience of your life—depends on a set of physical properties does not mean that it is an illusion. It only means that your life is finite.

Such finitude does not devalue your life, but is an essential part of why it can matter and take on significance, against the backdrop of its possible dissolution. “Death,” Knausgaard writes in the final volume, “is the background against which life appears. If death had not existed, we would not have known what life is” (Knausgaard 2012: 596). Death is the background against which life can light up as something cherished and irreplaceable, but it is also the background that can extinguish all light. “Death makes life meaningless, because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful, too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious” (Knausgaard 2014: 98).

Death is here understood as an existential category but it also opens onto the organic death of the body. Indeed, to confront the corpse—in its material existence—as the fate of everyone we love is a challenge Knausgaard repeatedly poses to himself and his reader. As we have seen, the first volume of My Struggle begins by depicting the moment of death in bacterial detail and the final paragraph of the same volume returns to the corpse, as Karl Ove visits the morgue to see the body of his deceased father one last time:

Now I saw his lifeless state. That there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I had always regarded as the most important dignity in life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. (Knausgaard 2013: 441)

This is a strict materialist view of death. A body has stopped breathing and thereby ceased to function as a living being, instead becoming an object among other objects in the world. “Dad was no longer breathing,” we read a bit earlier. “That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa” (350). To see the living body thus reduced to its dead counterpart is to see that nature is indifferent to our interests and desires, leaving the body to wither away when we can no longer draw on the world to sustain ourselves. “He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world” (350). This ability to interact with the world—and project yourself into a future—is precisely what is lost in death. No longer poaching the air but simply subject to its physical pressure, the individual body decomposes and is incorporated into a cycle of matter in transformation.

There are two traditional ways of addressing this material death and the anxiety it may provoke. The first is to argue that we have an immortal soul that is separate from the decomposing matter of our bodies. Even though our bodies perish, we do not really die but ascend to a higher existence, independent of any body or endowed with an incorruptible body. The second strategy is to argue that we are continuous with matter and therefore have no reason to fear death. Because the matter of our bodies is transformed into something else, nothing substantial is actually lost but only takes on another form. This is, for example, the Stoic view of death. “Yes, you will cease to be what you are, but become something else of which the universe then has need,” as the Roman Stoic Epictetus holds in an influential argument (Epictetus 1995: 215).

While these two perspectives are apparently opposed, they are united in their denial that death entails the loss of a life we should try to hold onto. In the first case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of an immortal soul. In the second case, we are told to detach from the life that is lost in favor of the continuation of matter. Both perspectives thus deny the tragedy of death. Only a secular faith—which remains committed to a life that irrevocably is lost in death—can counter these two forms of denial. Indeed, only a secular faith can account for why death is a tragic loss at all. The sense of tragic loss depends on keeping faith in the irreplaceable value of a life that is gone forever. Nature does not care whether we live or die, but that makes it all the more imperative that we care and remember what has been taken away.

Precisely in and through a materialist vision of death, Knausgaard’s writing is devoted to secular faith. In forcing us to look at the dead body, he makes vivid what separates the dead from the living. For the living, time is distended: we recall a past and project ourselves into a future. This is the time of our lives, the time that Knausgaard is dedicated to exploring. The dead no longer see anything or feel anything, no longer recall a past and project a future. Our fidelity to the person who has died requires that we acknowledge this absolute loss of life. When faced with a dead body, we can remember that this body belonged to someone who lost everything in death—someone who is absolutely gone—and thereby we remain faithful to the memory of a person who is irreplaceable. Moreover, we can anticipate our own death—run ahead into the risk of losing everything—and thereby bring our own finite life into focus.

The remarkable thing with Knausgaard’s writing is how such mortality is allowed to be the source of both fear and love, terror and beauty. The fear of death is not something that should be overcome. Rather, it is an expression of love for a life that will cease to be.

Likewise, being bound to a mortal body can indeed be a source of terror. You may be crippled by injuries or ravaged by brain chemistry and in the end all the living spirit you gather will dissipate in dead matter. Yet, being bound to a body that is beyond your control is also the condition for being touched and moved, the chance of being receptive to the vanishing beauty of the world.

Even in the most serene moments of bliss, then, Karl Ove is aware of how the precious existence of those he loves is bound to their precarious and limited physical conditions:

      I looked at Linda, she sat with her head against the seat, with her eyes closed. Vanja’s face was covered by hair, she lay like a tussock in her lap.

      I leaned forward a little and looked at Heidi, who gazed back at me uninterestedly.

      I loved them. They were my crew.

      My family.

      As pure biomass it was not very remarkable. Heidi weighed perhaps ten kilos, Vanja perhaps twelve, and if one added my and Linda’s weight we reached perhaps one hundred ninety kilos. That was considerably less than the weight of a horse, I would think, and about as much as a well-built male gorilla. If we lay close together our physical range was not much to brag about either, any given sea lion would be more voluminous. However, regarding what cannot be measured, which is the only important thing when it comes to families, regarding thoughts, dreams and emotions, the inner life, this group was explosive. Dispersed over time, which is the relevant dimension for understanding a family, it would cover an almost infinite surface. I once met my grandmother’s mother, which meant that Vanja and Heidi belonged to the fifth generation, and fate permitting they could in turn experience three generations. Thus, our little heap of meat covered eight generations, or two hundred years, with all that entails of shifting cultural and social conditions, not to mention how many people it included. A whole little world was being transported at full speed along the highway on this late spring afternoon…. (Knausgaard 2012: 916-17)

The gentle happiness here is all the more radiant because of the bifocal vision. On the one hand: the tender evocation of an intimate love, where each member of the family is seen as an origin of the world, with “thoughts, dreams, and emotions” that distend beyond anything that can be measured. On the other hand: the reminder that this entire world depends on a limited “biomass” with a determinate weight and height, here even described as a “heap of meat” that is being “transported” along the highway. Remarkably, the latter perspective does not serve to denigrate the value of the lives that are woven together. They can be lost forever if the car meets a fatal accident on the highway, transforming their biomass into a heap of dead meat. Yet this risk is not held out as a morbid fantasy, but as a reminder of how their lives are a treasure that cannot be taken for granted. Anticipating death in the midst of life is a way of focusing his gaze on the ones he loves, attaching himself to what he sees, making their unique existence vivid.

The love that radiates here is the love of a life that is secular in Augustine’s sense: bound to time, marked by history, dependent on generations that have come before and may come after. Throughout My Struggle, this temporal dimension is shown to hold the key to the passions of our lives. The distention of time marks every moment, but it can be stretched out in different ways and discloses the depths of who we are. Thus, Knausgaard explores the sedimentation and resuscitation of events in an individual body, the crystallization of a moment through memory and anticipation, the texture of time in a love relationship, intervals of pleasure and pain, the dead time of trauma and the elation of bliss.

These are all forms of embodied time, through which we distend our lives beyond a physical location in space. But they are also bound to a limited body that cannot be left behind. The wager of My Struggle is to hold these two perspectives together. We are spirit but also matter and the former depends on the latter. We can compose our lives—give them form and meaning—but in the end we will disappear in a meaningless process of decomposition. Knausgaard makes us confront such decomposition, while keeping faith in the value of finite existence. He turns us back to our lives to see both form and formlessness, integration and disintegration.

My Struggle thus moves in the opposite direction from the book whose title it takes over. Knausgaard’s Norwegian title Min Kamp is a direct translation of Mein Kampf, the title of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography. This may seem like a gratuitous provocation, but the choice of title is motivated in the final volume, when Knausgaard devotes more than four hundred pages to Mein Kampf and its context. Knausgaard gives a detailed account of the crisis of the times, as well as the complications of Hitler’s childhood and early adulthood, while showing how Mein Kampf systematically subordinates Hitler’s life story to ideology. The grittiness of everyday life is veiled by euphemism, the complexity of persons reduced to a typology of characters, and everything that is failure or suffering integrated in a narrative of gradual purification. Most importantly, all ambivalence, all doubts and hesitations, are dissolved in a discourse of certainty.

In a remarkable move, Knausgaard here shows how Hitler excludes a second person mode of address. In Mein Kampf, there is an I, a we, and a they, but there is no you that would allow for an intimate relation. Hitler does not allow himself to be seen in any form of frailty and he does not obligate himself to anyone else in his or her frailty. He merges himself with a strong, idealized we and projects all weakness onto an external they. Hitler’s way of narrating his life is thus bound up with his larger ideological scheme for making sense of the world. In Hitler’s universe, there is a pure, good “we” that is in peril of being corrupted by “them”: the impure and evil others who most prominently are figured as the Jews. To the extent that we are in trouble—to the extent that our lives are unresolved or difficult—it is because of them, because of their corrupting influence. If only they (the evil forces) could be eliminated, we would be saved.

Nazi ideology is thus another version—a particularly sinister version—of the religious longing for purity. Knausgaard acknowledges and reckons with such longing for purity, but his writing is an active resistance to any temptation of purification. Indeed, My Struggle is devoted to the imperfection that Mein Kampf sets out to erase. Nothing will save us, since irresolution, difficulty, and frailty are an essential part of the lives we care about. And no one can offer us a final salvation, since everyone who enters our lives are themselves finite. To own our lives is to acknowledge this essential finitude, as both the chance of being together and the risk of breaking apart. This is why My Struggle—which apparently is so devoted to the I—ultimately turns out to be dependent on you. In turning toward you, Karl Ove exposes himself in his dependence on a world that is beyond his control. But he also trains you to see and to acknowledge your own dependence and the dependence of others. This recognition of finitude does not offer any guarantees that we will lead a responsible life and take better care of each other. But without the recognition of finitude the question of responsibility and care would not even take hold of us. To turn toward you—to focus our gaze on another and attach ourselves to what we see—is the deepest movement of secular confession. We are turned back to our lives, not as something that is our property but as a form of existence that is altogether finite and altogether dependent on others. This is not the end of responsibility; it is the beginning.

 

Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008), and Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude (2002). The essay on Knausgaard published here is a part of his next book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom.

 

References

Augustine. 1912. Confessiones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Augustine. 1963. Confessions, translated by Rex Warner. New York: New American Library.

Augustine. 1982. Eighty-three Different Questions, translated by David L. Mosher. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.

Augustine. 1992. Sermons 148-183, translated by Edmund Hill. New York: New City Press.

Epictetus. 1995. The Discourses of Epictetus, translated by Robin Hard. London: Everyman.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2012. Min kamp. Sjette bok. Oslo: Forlaget Oktober.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2013. My Struggle. Book One, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2014. My Struggle. Book Two, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Knausgaard, Karl Ove. 2015. My Struggle. Book Three, translated by Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Proust, Marcel. 1988a. À la recherche du temps perdu, volume III, ed. J-Y Tadié. Paris: Gallimard.

Proust, Marcel. 1988b. À la recherche du temps perdu, volume IV, ed. J-Y Tadié. Paris: Gallimard.

Proust, Marcel. 2002. Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock. New York: Penguin.

Proust, Marcel. 2003. Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson. New York: Penguin.

 

[1] All citations of Augustine’s Confessions are given by book number and chapter number respectively. I employ Rex Warner’s translation (Augustine 1963), while sometimes modifying it in light of the original Latin (Augustine 1912). In a few places, the cited translations of Proust have also been modified in light of the original French (Proust 1988a and 1988b). All translations from the original Norwegian of volume 6 of Min kamp (Knausgaard 2012) are my own, since this volume has not yet been translated into English.

by Racheal Fest

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective. 

The absence of imagination had itself to be imagined.

— Wallace Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things”

US academics have expanded “modernism.” In a founding PMLA article, Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (2008) gather under the rubric “The New Modernist Studies” (NMS) a range of contemporary scholarly activities they argue expand both modernism’s canon and the methods scholars employ when they examine it. More recently, Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers (2015) consolidate these practices and give them a history in Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea. As a look at these documents of self-presentation reveals, scholars loosely affiliated with NMS often imagine their academic work opposes from the left contemporary forces that produce inequality in the US and beyond. This essay reviews these documents and asks whether or not the expansionist methods the New Modernist Studies endorses can fulfill the political desires its practitioners share. It takes up a version of the self-reflexive project Raymond Williams urged upon a previous generation of oppositional academics. “[C]ultural theory,” Williams wrote in 1986, “which takes all other cultural production as its appropriate material, cannot exempt itself from the most rigorous examination of its own social and historical situations and formations, or from a connected analysis of its assumptions, propositions, methods, and effects” (Williams [1986] 1989, 163). Williams encouraged critics, scholars, and historians of culture who believed they carried out radical work to train their field’s critical resources upon their own activities.

The New Modernist Studies deserves attention of this kind not only because its practitioners claim they have transformed the study of early-twentieth-century literary and cultural texts. NMS also typifies some of the guiding methods, values, and goals that animate contemporary literary studies across subfields. Because the study of literature in US universities emerged at once alongside and by way of the poems and novels we associate with modernism, NMS’s practitioners perform again for the present what has become a familiar scholarly gesture. To reflect upon the nature and value of modernism, critical histories of the term indicate, has been to reflect upon—and to make a case for one view of—the nature and value of academic and critical literary activity itself.[1] Although critics and scholars devoted primarily to this period no longer lead the profession, modernists share with others across subfields (and perhaps, disciplines) the hope that US academic activity might have broader social and political effects. Many also share the sense that a primary way to produce desired effects is to expand canons and revise conservative methods previous generations of literary critics established. If these common assumptions sometimes serve, rather than counter, the state and market interests that perpetuate contemporary inequality across economic and identity categories, as I suggest in what follows they may, the field might embrace alternative approaches across areas of specialization.[2] A troubling gulf separates the progress narratives left academics proliferate for a privileged audience of peers and students inside the US university from the narratives of increasing inequality that today pervade other domains of life in the US and beyond.[3] Recognizing this gulf might encourage oppositional critics to think beyond the self-regulating and self-justifying habits of professional life.

The New Modernist Studies

The New Modernist Studies, according to Mao and Walkowitz (2008), describes as “modernist” an increasingly broad set of materials. Over “the past decade or two,” they explain, “all period-centered areas of literary scholarship have broadened in scope,” and so “modernist literary scholarship” has likewise expanded in “temporal, spatial, and vertical directions” (737). Along a “temporal” axis, such scholars as Susan Stanford Friedman extend modernism’s reach beyond the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[4] Jahan Ramazani and others associated with a “transnational turn” (744) attempt to “make modernism less Eurocentric by including or focusing on literary production outside Western Europe” (739). Still others—those who expand scholarship along society and culture’s “vertical” axes—no longer understand modernism as “a movement by and for a certain kind of high (cultured mandarins) as against a certain kind of low” (738). These scholars examine “reportage,” “propaganda,” and “news” alongside artworks and objects of mass culture (746).[5]

Mao and Walkowitz suggest these diverse practices together constitute a common oppositional project. The New Modernist Studies aims to “disrupt” and alter the conservative methods for organizing and evaluating literary texts that dominated US literary studies in the past (738). When Mao and Walkowitz celebrate monographs that emphasize “modernism’s entanglement . . . with . . . feminism, socialism, nationalism, and other programs of social change” (737) or colleagues who “encounter[r] with fresh eyes and ears” artworks “by members of marginalized social groups” (738), they indicate powerful desires for social, political, and economic equality, at home and abroad, drive the disciplinary transformations NMS sanctions.

As some of the major studies Mao and Walkowitz cite make clear, many NMS scholars hope their expansive activities will serve broader left agendas of this kind not only within the discipline of literary studies, but also, outside of the university. A moment in Jahan Ramazani’s acclaimed study, A Transnational Poetics (2009), exemplifies this desire. Ramazani gives new expression to the anti-nationalist and anti-colonial dreams such modernist writers as Claude McKay, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon first voiced when he describes what motivates his book:

I write from within the early twenty-first-century US academy, when the most consequential nationalism in the world is American, when assumptions about civilizational differences sometimes underwrite political discourse and even projections of US military forces abroad. Under these circumstances . . . the usefulness of . . . pluralizing and creolizing our models of culture and citizenship, should not be underestimated. . . . A nuanced picture of cross-national and cross-civilizational fusion and friction is badly needed today, and denationalized disciplines in the humanities may help provide it, however limited their extra-institutional reach. (48–49)

Ramazani hopes his scholarship contributes to vital efforts contemporary state violence requires of those who would combat it. He wants to counter imperial logics that devalue difference across the globe and in so doing license the US state to ruthlessly pursue its own interests. Literary scholars, he argues, might serve this project for equality by expanding, diversifying, and “denationalizing” their own disciplines inside US universities. This moving call for political change represents NMS’s determination to produce from inside of literary studies the new ways of thinking and being contemporary conditions demand.

At the same time, however, Ramazani registers an anxiety that today pervades both the New Modernist Studies and literary studies in general. Ramazani is confident increasingly plural “models of culture and citizenship,” such as those he finds in the poems of the past and present, can counter the ways of thinking he believes perpetuate global inequities. And yet, he wonders whether or not he and other academics can finally contribute to this “extra-institutional” project when they revise disciplinary practices. When Ramazani emphasizes his position “within the early-twenty-first-century US academy”—he works inside a department (University of Virginia’s Department of English) and within one or more subfields (“modernist” and “postcolonial” poetry) of an already specialized area of study (literary studies)—he does so in order to at once identify his sphere of influence and to express doubts about the final significance of the activities he carries out within it. He speaks passionately for a disciplinary change his political commitments inspire, but he also worries about the restricted reach of the change he proposes.

If we take seriously this consummate anxiety—and the urgency of the social and economic inequalities critics want to redress demands we do—we might pick up where Ramazani leaves off and investigate its sources more fully. To do so, I turn now to Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea, NMS’s longest and most ambitious document of self-presentation. Latham and Rogers’s book at once introduces the series, “New Modernisms,” which the authors edit for Bloomsbury’s academic imprint, and tells a story about professional progress that culminates in the New Modernist Studies. It develops an extended version of the narrative of expansion Mao and Walkowitz first sketched and fills in the academic history necessary to understand it. I believe a critical reading of this history, which tracks alongside NMS’s celebrated expansion a tandem movement of contraction, helps explain literary studies’ broader disquiet.

What “Modernism” Was and Is

Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea is the most recent contribution to the special genre of articles and monographs academics have dedicated to defining modernism.[6] It also gives an overview of this genre. The book describes and organizes the twentieth century’s many accounts of modernism before endorsing in conclusion the New Modernist Studies’ expanded vision of it. The writers display deep and wide expertise as they move nimbly over more than a century’s worth of fraught material. They offer students and colleagues a thorough overview of the debates that have constituted the field they call “modernist studies.”

A new version of the genre’s definitional question—first posed by Harry Levin (1960) in the essay “What Was Modernism?”—guides the book. In their introduction and conclusion, Latham and Rogers ask: “What is modernism?” (1). Posing the question this way prepares them to develop a response importantly different from those previous critics generated. “Modernism” is no longer a proper noun, as it was for Levin’s generation, so readers know right away the authors will not try to describe a period’s dominant style and make big claims about Western life based upon it. By asking what modernism is, Latham and Rogers remind readers the term shares with all such constructions its perpetually unfinished character, and critics will always have to define it anew to serve present interests. They thus break with an earlier generation of critics Maurice Beebe (1974) typifies when he extends to readers mourning “the passing of the greatest literary age since the Renaissance” this small comfort: “we can now define Modernism with confidence that we shall not have to keep adjusting our definition in order to accommodate new visions and values” (1076).

In order to answer their question anew for twenty-first century readers—as Latham and Rogers do in their fourth and final chapter on the New Modernist Studies—the authors tell us first what modernism used to be. They begin with the term’s emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At first, they explain, “modernism” circulated widely, freely, and polemically among “writers, artists, and thinkers around the world,” all of whom “believed that something was happening, that the established conventions of realism, representation, and poetic form seemed to be failing in the face of new experiences, new audiences, and new things” (8). Usual suspects T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and others argued in this period over modern art’s nature and value, in part, Latham and Rogers emphasize, as a way to secure a legacy for their own experimental works.

Latham and Rogers next describe what we might understand to be the original contraction upon which their narrative of expansion depends. In chapter two, “Consolidation,” academics step in to settle artists’ charged, vital, and international quarrels. By the mid-twentieth century, the authors explain, the so-called New Critics moved modernism’s artworks out of the “bohemian garrets and ateliers” from which they had emerged and installed them in “college classrooms and student anthologies” (19). Borrowing a figure from Joyce, Latham and Rogers say this generation of critics understood modernism to be “a ‘strandentwining cable’ that weaves together a distinct group of writers and artists around shared aesthetic practices” (7). The New Critics and their kin, in other words, revered an exclusionary canon of difficult, formally sophisticated, and willfully apolitical literary works (mostly) white European and American men composed. In so doing, they “silenc[ed] the voices of artists marginalized by gender, race, sexuality, and geography” (207).

“Iron Filings,” Latham and Rogers’s third chapter (named for a figure they take from Pound), maps the slow demise of this conservative vision. The authors explain how critics writing in the 1970s and 1980s—Edward W. Said, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and others populate their account—first challenged from the left the modernist canon and its attendant sense of art’s autonomy. The chapter glosses work by “feminists,” “Marxists,” “black modernists,” and “postmodernists” (103–49). These groups, Latham and Rogers argue, began “to move modernism away from the relative autonomy of aesthetic difficulty and toward a broader engagement with political and social issues that inhere within an increasingly global modernity” (14). Scholars and critics came to examine diverse texts and develop worldly and historical views of art. Latham and Rogers laud these efforts and find in them the origins for the work the New Modernist Studies advances.[7] These earlier oppositional efforts do not satisfy them, however. This generation, they argue, still focused too often upon the virtues of difficult, formally experimental texts elites composed, failed to privilege works for “identitarian” reasons (8), or promulgated esoteric theories of language with dubious claims to legitimacy (14).

Enter the New Modernist Studies. This loosely affiliated movement, Latham and Rogers explain in their final chapter, emerged in the 1990s to overcome these failures and complete the oppositional project. NMS of course does so by expanding modernism’s materials along the spatial, temporal, and vertical axes Mao and Walkowitz name. Contemporary scholars let speak, on syllabi and in academic journals, those diverse voices literary studies once silenced. They devote increased attention to “women’s experiences of modernity” (161), promote “new awareness of the multiple ways in which homosexuality and queerness defined and constituted many of the works we now call ‘modernist’” (163), and treat race as a vital “part of a larger network of forces, practices, and identities” (168). As part of the same effort to displace elite texts, NMS makes new archives available to period specialists. It “attempt[s] to synthesize rather than to bracket or isolate forms of cultural expression across multiple media and throughout the world” (149–50). Examining a range of media forms, NMS scholars believe, unseats literature as an exclusive activity and affirms that other texts deserve critical attention. NMS scholars also continue to explore art’s many entanglements with history’s forces.

When Latham and Rogers ask themselves one last time the book’s guiding question—“what is modernism?”—they answer it in a way they believe does justice to the radical openness these expanded practices affirm. They leave readers with this “desultory, if nevertheless provocative answer: ‘We don’t know’” (206). The New Modernist Studies, they say, accepts that “there is, finally, no right way to define modernism, just as there is finally no right way to carve up the rich multiplicity of human expression” (207–8). Because the New Modernist Studies is neither a movement nor a method, but rather “the collective work of thousands of scholars,” it generates conclusions that have been and are likely to be in the future “ultimately incommensurable” (149). The book’s final Whitmanian gesture accepts these contradictions in order to applaud expansion itself as a final good. NMS dispenses with the canon, the period container, and the category of the literary as identifiable features of the object it investigates. In so doing, contemporary scholars believe they fulfill a narrative of advancement earlier critics set in motion, but could not complete. According to the New Modernist Studies, fundamental indeterminacy itself constitutes a decisive victory for the left.

This is a happy story. US academics have today completed a project decades in the making, and the left has at last triumphed inside humanities departments. And yet, as canons, periods, and materials have expanded inside US literary studies, the same narrative of inclusion and progress has not unfolded outside the university, as the 2016 US election made clear. If NMS’s practitioners hope the transformations for which they work within their field can contribute to broader political, social, and economic projects for equality, the radical divergence of these two chronologies might provoke oppositional scholars to examine anew the conviction that indeterminacy is itself a self-evident and absolute good. (This is not to suggest literary studies produced, or alone might have prevented, current emergencies. The profession’s progressive victory narrative simply sounds an eccentric note against the right’s rise.)

A figure Latham and Rogers select to represent the New Modernist Studies helps us identify one possible source for this distressing incongruity and thus points the way to alternative projects. In their final chapter, the authors describe the new core exhibition Catherine Grenier curated for Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2013. Under Grenier’s direction, they write, the Pompidou has traded its “canonical and almost exclusively Eurocentric understanding of modernism”—and the modes of display conventional to it—for a new logic of exhibition:

Crucially, the museum abandons a narrative of development and opts instead simply to display as diverse an array of materials on the walls as it can. Picassos rub shoulders with architectural models from Brazil, Japanese prints, and paintings by the Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia—all placed against wallpaper made from hundreds of little magazines. (150–51)

This exhibition style, Latham and Rogers believe, represents something essential about the current state of their field. It signals “we are in an ‘interrogatory’ moment that invites us to ask anew about the range, constitution, and value of modernism” (151). A viewer standing before this display, in other words, stands in the figural space the contemporary modernist scholar occupies.

This figure should be familiar to expert readers of modern discourses. A genealogy of artists, critics, and philosophers proliferated versions of it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Marx and Nietzsche give two of the most famous accounts[8]). When Latham and Rogers invoke it here, they remind readers contemporary US academics confront under their own peculiar circumstances the prototypical dilemma “modern” minds face. The scholar stands before his materials as Walter Benjamin’s ([1940] 1968) “angel” stands before history’s ruins or as Wallace Stevens’s ([1942] 1997b) “Man on the Dump” straddles culture’s dross. To be “modern,” figures of this kind suggest, is to be aware one is a historical being that creates a future out of a past by evaluating materials in the present. It is also to face perpetually the crushing problems proper to this condition, among them, the knowledge that whatever sense one makes of the past will itself one day end up on history’s junk heap.

The figure Benjamin invents to exemplify this dilemma, the “angel of history,” differs from the cheerful twenty-first-century modernist Latham and Rogers find in the museum, gazing raptly at the walls. The contrast is instructive. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin’s angel, a trope for the radical or oppositional historian of culture, experiences the modern subject’s constituting crisis. He looks back upon a past that fills his entire perceptual field, a past he perceives as a “pile of debris” that “grows skyward” (257). As he gazes upon history’s ruins, he experiences a deep and awful longing. He wants nothing more than to “stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” (257–58). Confronted with a disorganized mass of cultural relics that overwhelms him, the radical historian must decide what to do with these materials in order to serve present needs. He wants desperately to make sense of, and in so doing redeem for the present, the violent and destructive chaos of human activity we call history.

Tragically, though, a twofold danger frustrates the oppositional historian’s efforts. He knows, first, that the objects of the past that appear before him, many of which other historians regard as evidence of progress, do not enter his field of attention untouched by powerful interests. On the contrary, the same conditions of brutal inequality he hopes to oppose produce and pass along the “cultural treasures” others believe signal advancement (256). The historian therefore regards with suspicion both privileged works and the means by which they are “transmitted from one owner to another” (256). He believes that “even the dead will not be safe” from ruling interests, so he tries to wrest from them both revered and disdained objects (255).

At the same time as the radical historian struggles to protect the dead, he also struggles to protect himself. While the angel attempts to recover out of the past resources for the present, a “storm irresistibly propels” him “into the future to which his back is turned” (258). The angel cannot easily reinterpret or redeem the ruins because, catastrophically, he is enmeshed himself within the very history he wants to grasp and transform. Just as cruel interests produce, organize, and preserve history’s materials for their own purposes, so too do present conflicts and conditions always over-determine the radical historian’s work. As Benjamin puts it, the “same threat hangs over both [the content of the tradition and its receivers]: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes” (255). (This is in part why Benjamin imagines only a messianic figure, who stops time, can complete the revolutionary historian’s effort.[9])

As Latham and Rogers’s version of this figure indicates, the contemporary scholar of modernism faces with satisfaction the conditions the angel meets with horror and yearning. This is in part because, by its own account, the New Modernist Studies believes it has fulfilled Benjamin’s charge to protect the dead from ruling interests. While Latham and Rogers are critical of Theodor Adorno and those friends of Benjamin’s who “effectively helped build the modernist canon and affirmed its terms,” they are grateful to Benjamin because he “offered a set of tools and perspectives for undoing that work” (106–7). The New Modernist Studies believes it has secured, in the figurative space of the institution the museum signifies, what Benjamin’s angel desperately wanted—time and venue to stay and awaken the dead, to recover and let sound out of the past’s ruinous violence excluded songs.

If the New Modernist Studies protects the dead from ruling interests, however, it does not protect itself. NMS does not recognize, as Benjamin insists oppositional critics and scholars must, that it faces the same danger as do its objects. As the New Modernist Studies fulfills Latham and Rogers’s disciplinary progress narrative of expansion, it also completes the book’s corresponding narrative of contraction. The story about modernism’s enlargement, Latham and Rogers explicitly say, is also a story about its total “institutionalization and professionalization” (134). While some artists and critics in the early twentieth century “conceptualized [modernism] as a site of resistance to modernity’s regulatory and routinizing practices,” Latham and Rogers write, modernism has by 2015 “become part of an institutional system” (15). Today, modernism is, among other things, “an institutionalized profession, self-regulating and fitted somewhat uncomfortably between the nineteenth century and the always-moving present” (207). NMS finds “its strongest support and articulations in the institutions of academia: conferences, journals, scholarly organizations, and course catalogs” (156). The profession, in other words, with its self-directed procedures for formal training, publication, and credentialing, furnishes the domain within which NMS’s progress narrative can register as meaningful.

Attention to the contraction upon which expansion depends reveals a profound contradiction legitimates the New Modernist Studies. As scholars have worked to extend modernism’s materials and to abandon dated claims about art’s independence from political and economic forces, they have at the same time embraced the apparent autonomy the profession seems to tender those (increasingly few) humanities academics universities employ. (Latham and Rogers [2015] note the number of tenure-track positions for specialists in modernism US universities advertise has declined in recent years [157]). The profession creates a seemingly sovereign space in which a fortunate few can freely play over an extended set of materials.

Inside this apparently secure and exclusive domain, the fundamental indeterminacy Latham and Rogers hail as itself an achievement for the left performs another function entirely. Undirected expansion turns out to be a condition for the possibility of professional activity in the present. “Modernist studies,” Latham and Rogers explain, “has been strengthened by the lack of resolution over what exactly modernism is. A perpetual ‘definitional crisis’ has been a boon, in other words, to the wide-ranging debates about the field’s nature, boundaries, and contents” (151). This permanent emergency enables academics to produce scholarship an audience of like-minded period specialists will value. The authors celebrate the remarkable volume of discourse academics continue to publish out of the field’s authorizing crisis: “Even in the troubled world of academic publishing, studies of modernism, anthologies of modernist texts, introductions to the movement, essay collections on modernism and its formation, and other such texts have flourished since the mid-1990s, far outpacing the analogous publications in the 1960s and 1970s that helped entrench the field in universities” (156). The New Modernist Studies finally presents itself as an interminable (and profitable) set of classificatory squabbles elites with common aims perpetuate, but need not resolve, inside protected institutions.

This insular vision of US intellectual activity is not exactly new, and its consequences are not newly dangerous. In the well-known essay “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” Edward W. Said (1983) warned literary critics that the so-called “culture wars” of the 1970s and 1980s might not produce the outcomes across culture and society rival factions on the right and left desired.[10] Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings, Said (1983) argued universities, as institutions located within “civil society,” cannot furnish a protected vantage point from which critics on the left might attack state and market interests (175). The concept of “culture,” as Raymond Williams (1983) has demonstrated, emerged in tandem with and as an instrument of the nation-state. Therefore, Said argues, a critic “acting entirely” within the traditionally restricted humanist “domain” of the “literary specialist” does not destroy, but rather “confirms the culture and the society enforcing those restrictions” (175). This “confirmation,” Said writes, “acts to strengthen the civil and political societies whose fabric is culture itself” (175). When academics conceive of literary criticism as an adversarial activity one can pursue within an autonomous professional space, then, culture’s indissoluble relationship to power ensures that activity paradoxically reinforces “the whole enterprise of the State” (175). The autonomous view of literary studies NMS propagates is an updated version of the one Said challenges.[11]

Benjamin’s fable suggests oppositional scholars and critics who want to promote contemporary change should not be satisfied with this limited view of intellectual activity. To renew a vision of modernism responsive to contemporary inequality, scholars would have to expand more than their visions of the past. They would also have to expand their views of the present.[12] An expansion of this kind would multiply modernist studies’ materials along two new horizons. In addition to past artworks, modernist studies would explicitly consider, first, how ruling interests produce inequality in the present, and second, how its own relationship to those interests influences its activity. A disciplinary program such as NMS would have to begin with and attend to the logics, structures, and institutions that contribute to ongoing inequality, violence, and injustice, not only inside the discipline, but also more broadly, and then ask how its specialized activities might best transform these. Because liberating voices inside elite spaces has not countered inequalities the consequences of which those excluded from those spaces feel most acutely, literary studies might now begin with its expanded materials and ask anew what, more specifically, scholars might do with them.

If these expanded practices guided the field’s historical work, modernist studies might be better positioned to pose and respond to its constituting question—what is modernism? Right now, the field’s leading experts do not believe they need to resolve among themselves answers to it. Perhaps this is because the question is not today an urgent one for radical or progressive movements, or worse, perhaps ruling interests have already seized the question in its moment of danger. We might ask then, not what modernism is or was, but instead what modernism would have to be for it to matter again what it is. How might we look anew at modernism in a way that will best serve our oppositional desires in the present so that we might shape the more equitable futures we want? What vision of modernism can help us best respond to our world? What will modernism be?

What “Modernism” Might Be

Because Benjamin encourages us to take a more expansive view of the conditions that produce contemporary inequality both within and outside of the university when we pose enormous questions of this kind, I want to develop one tentative response by adopting the approach he recommends. After the financial collapse of 2008, many critics of arts and culture writing from the left have come to use the word “neoliberalism” to describe the forces that produce inequality today in the US and beyond.[13] The term has its strengths and limitations. It is simultaneously capacious and specific, so it can name both contemporary economic and political conditions and the popular ways of thinking that fabricate them. At the same time, it often circulates too capaciously. Philosopher of economics Philip Mirowski (2013) reproaches left intellectuals, for instance, who “bandy about attributions of ‘neoliberalism’ as a portmanteau term of abuse when discussing grand phenomena often lumped together under the terminology of ‘globalization’ and ‘financialization’ and ‘governmentality’” (29). In an attempt to avoid this practice, I want to define this abstraction more precisely before I consider how it might help us reevaluate NMS’s progress narrative and develop a revised sense of what modernism might need to be. To do so, I rely upon the more particular sense of the word Mirowski (2013) offers in his recent account of the financial crisis and its aftermath, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Because Mirowski places at the center of his definition a view of epistemology he argues helps produce contemporary inequality, his account is of special interest to those who hope academic activities might counter ruling forces.

For Mirowski (2013), neoliberalism is both a “program” right-wing intellectuals and elites operating across a network of public and private institutions developed over the course of the twentieth century (29) and a “worldview [that] has sunk its roots deep into everyday life, almost to the point of passing as the ‘ideology of no ideology’” (28). His bracingly critical and deeply historical book-length account of this program and worldview includes the familiar tenets we most often associate with the term. Neoliberalism, Mirowski explains, insists “market society must be treated as a ‘natural’ and inexorable state of mankind” (55); it “redefine[s] the shape and functions of the state” to better serve market interests (56); it regards “inequality of economic resources and political rights not as an unfortunate by-product of capitalism, but as a necessary functional characteristic of [an] ideal market system” (63); it maintains “corporations can do no wrong” (64); and so on. This program produces inequalities that cut across economic and identity categories. It sanctions the strong domestic police state activists hold responsible for the mass incarceration and frequent extra-judicial killings of African-American men, for instance (Mirowski 65–66).[14]

Mirowski argues the specific “epistemological commitments” that ensured this program’s ascendency continue to guarantee its future, even in the wake of the devastating global crisis that should have delegitimized it (333). In service of the view that markets best organize human life, Mirowski argues, elites “deploy ignorance as a political tool” (12). He offers this interpretation of the role ignorance plays in economist and neoliberal pioneer Friedrich Hayek’s worldview:

For Hayek, the conscious attempt to conceive of the nature of public interest is the ultimate hubris, and to concoct strategies to achieve it is to fall into Original Sin. True organic solidarity can obtain only when everyone believes (correctly or not) they are just following their own selfish idiosyncratic ends, or perhaps don’t have any clear idea whatsoever of what they are doing, when in fact they are busily (re)producing beneficent evolutionary regularities beyond their ken and imagination. Thus, ignorance promotes social order, or as he said, “knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts.” (81) 

Because Hayek and those who share his views believe markets establish a transcendentally sanctioned order human reason, imagination, and will can only complicate and destroy, Mirowski argues they “strive to preserve and promote doubt and ignorance,” as many economists unwittingly did after 2008 (81). Motivated by this view of knowledge’s nature and value, recent policies have started to eliminate or weaken such knowledge producing institutions as the university by “put[ting] them on commercial footing” (82).[15] Doing so undercuts the critical, theoretical, and imaginative activities in which the humanities (and, just as vitally, the sciences[16]) conventionally offer training. These activities now seem, from this popular perspective, deleterious to omnipotent economic systems, and therefore, to human life. Policies of this kind deny “that it is even possible to speak truth to power, or that one can rationally plan social goals and their attainment” (Mirowski 82).

At the same time, and paradoxically, Mirowski argues elites themselves have relied over the course of the twentieth century upon precisely those modes of knowledge production, theoretical planning, critical rigor, and imagination they denounce in order to construct market-friendly policies and to build cultures of consent around their notions of freedom, human life, and education. Friedman, Hayek, George Stigler, and others associated with the influential and international Mont Pèlerin Society cultivated robust, diffuse, and persistent networks for pursuing creative and epistemological activity inside think tanks, universities, corporations, and state institutions (37-38). As a tactic for consolidating power, neoliberal policies strategically deny opponents access to those resources they utilize to gain and safeguard influence (83).

This epistemological paradigm, experts in modernism will recognize, imperils Benjamin’s figure. The very historical self-awareness writers and artists working in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries associated with being “modern,” in other words, today threatens to disappear. The idea that we might understand and evaluate present political and economic conditions and invent together ways to transform them is under pressure. While US and European elites continue to deploy such terms as “modernization” and “modernity” in what Fredric Jameson (2002) calls “a fundamental political discursive struggle” to guarantee free-market capitalism seems reality’s natural telos (9), they also tactically foreclose certain so-called “modern” ways of thinking others might use to resist current realities. As Mirowski argues, contemporary discourses in part shore up power by denying above all that human activity—be it political, imaginative, or intelligent—can help shape better futures.

A range of practices inside knowledge-producing institutions such as the university contribute to this popular view. US economics, for instance, leaves historical circumstances out of its models, as Thomas Piketty (2014) argues (573–74), or psychology joins with evolutionary biology to prove timeless drives motivate men to purchase luxury vehicles (Sundie et al. 2010).[17] Scholars of culture might counter these tactics from within literary studies if we imagine we are in conversation, not only with our colleagues and our field’s bygone giants, but also with other producers of knowledge across epistemological institutions.[18] Work of this kind would complement interdisciplinary research contemporary scholars already pursue—Latham and Rogers emphasize an “interdisciplinary foundation” grounds the New Modernist Studies (168)—but it would also differ importantly from it. In addition to adopting approaches other fields generate, as many interdisciplinary projects now do, literary studies might challenge the epistemological assumptions that license inequality and violence across fields and identify instead the alternate views of those creative, imaginative, and intelligent human activities neoliberalism attempts to monopolize and conceal that humanities traditions hold out to us.

Some such views, of course, contribute to transcendental worldviews new versions of which continue to foster inequality. Scholars therefore would not be able to return to the romantic or classically humanist ways of thinking about art theorists of the posthuman warn us are dangerously outmoded.[19] Rather, critics might recover and defend, before they disappear, literary visions of the tandem powers and limits of human activity historically conceived, in Benjamin’s sense. Professional readers of modernist texts are uniquely suited to contribute to projects of this kind because late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers and artists conceived in increasingly secular, material, and historical ways precisely those creative and imaginative capabilities popular discourses currently deny.[20]

I turn in conclusion to one such conception. Over the course of a long career, Wallace Stevens developed in verse and prose a potent vision of the capabilities and limitations of human imagination. I want to conclude with Stevens because the demise of the canon NMS achieves—a necessary and vital destruction—enables us to look anew not only at previously excluded materials. It also invites us to see in new ways those now liberated from their advantaged places within a hierarchy Raymond Williams (1987) worried had captured imagination’s radical potential. Because many of us share the sense that lesser known works recently recovered (or, as in the case of the heretofore unknown Claude McKay novel a graduate student at Columbia University found in the archives, discovered[21]) deserve more robust attention, I want to demonstrate how the alternative mode of expansion I am proposing can also help us see previously favored figures in newly apposite ways. (As a tradition of African American writing that moves from Frederick Douglass to Toni Morrison and Claudia Rankine emphasizes, violent hierarchies also disfigure, though differently, those who claim a place at the top.[22]) The field’s pervasive view of Stevens has long been over-determined by such popular misreadings of his poems and essays as those Harold Bloom published in the 1970s.[23] Bloom misrepresents Stevens by insisting he adheres to the willfully ahistorical, autonomous, and unworldly understanding of art Bloom is one of the last US critics to prefer.

Stevens offers one version of his vision of imagination in a poem he composed on the eve of the Second World War, “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.” The poem gives an early sense of what later works—most famously, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction and “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”—elaborate more fully, but it has the virtue, for my purposes, of lovingly antagonizing the same institutional audience I have just suggested literary studies might imagine for itself. “Extracts” assembles scraps taken from lectures and notes a speaker addresses to an audience with a stake in epistemological questions.

The poem’s wry title, as usual, opens onto a subject that turns out to be deadly serious. In the first section, Stevens’s speaker establishes before an academic audience of bearded “Messieurs” a dichotomy readers of Stevens will recognize is fundamental to his project. The speaker contrasts a “wrinkled ros[e]” made of “paper” (227) with “the blood-rose living in its smell” (228). He entreats his audience to consider the relationship between the two categories of being for which these flowers stand, categories which go elsewhere in Stevens’s oeuvre by the familiar names “imagination” and “reality.” At first, the speaker seems melancholy as he remarks the differences between the blooms. The paper rose is “false” and it is “dust,” even if it makes for us “brilliant” sounds (228). The blood-rose might be “silent,” but it is vibrant, pungent, and alive in the “sun and rain” (228).

Immediately, though, we realize Stevens does not establish this difference in order to privilege plant over paper, or reality over imagination, and his elegy gives way to affirmation. Ours, he tells the academy, “is an artificial world,” and the “rose of / Paper is of the nature of its world” (228). What we might call reality—the “sea,” the “mountains,” and the “sky”—is “so many written words” (228). We cannot, then, experience a world of necessity unmediated by or independent of the language we use to describe and know it, because this language shapes our perceptions of what we encounter. We must therefore accept that “the false and the true are one” (228).

For Stevens, who here differs from such contemporaries as Eliot (a villain in the poem), understanding the interdependence of these two categories need not engender melancholy. The very notion that we can know the blood-rose, or the real, without exercising our human faculties seems to Stevens a dangerous fantasy, one he sees emerge out of transcendental traditions. (This essay’s epigraph formulates most simply this insight.) “The rainy rose belongs / To naked men, to women naked as rain,” and we have never truly been these men and women (228). “Where,” the speaker asks, “is that summer warm enough to walk / . . . Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part / Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what / Is real, part of a land beyond the mind?” (228). This rhetorical question suggests humans never could access the paradise of ignorance Christian traditions project into the species’ distant past. This is not because we sinners once traded for knowledge’s paltry spoils the immortality ignorance guaranteed. It is rather because the difficult environments we inhabit on earth—cold, poisonous, dirty—require finite, self-aware beings to know them, and change them, and change ourselves to suit them. In order to do so, the speaker makes clear, we have relied upon what the paper rose represents: intelligence and imagination.

Stevens’s speaker thus asks the academy to renounce any fiction that requires its acolytes cleave epistemological and creative human activity from “reality” and its imagined fulfillments. He entreats his interlocutors to repudiate promises that ignorance can produce a paradise of the real. As the sections that follow demonstrate, Stevens has in mind Plato’s idealism, monarchy’s divine right, and the old world’s monotheisms, systems that make the same seductive promises contemporary “free-market fundamentalism” does (Krugman 2010). Stevens at once challenges these monumental metaphysical systems and suggests we attempt to better understand the character and purpose of the human faculties by which we invented them, faculties without which we can neither know, nor make, reality.

The final section of “Extracts” models such an attempt. Here is the speaker’s closing plea to the institution of fine ideas:

If earth dissolves

            Its evil after death, it dissolves it while

            We live. Thence come the final chants, the chants

            Of the brooder seeking the acutest end

            Of speech: to pierce the heart’s residuum

            And there to find music for a single line,

            Equal to memory, one line in which

            The vital music formulates the words.

 

Behold the men in helmets borne on steel,

Discolored, how they are going to defeat. (233-34)

Stevens concludes the poem with a careful vision of the tandem possibilities and limitations of human creative power. Earth, here a figure for the conditions of necessity the constraints of time and space produce, “dissolves evil” when death erases, and does not oblige an everlasting soul to harbor forever, life’s accumulated injuries. If we accept our own finitude in this way—“Be tranquil in your wounds,” Stevens (after Whitman) bids us (229)—we can turn our attention to the earthly powers we do possess, powers that help us “dissolve evil . . . while we live.” These are our “final chants,” the songs, stories, and ideas we make out of the conditions of mortality we cannot transcend. We compose and perfect these chants, not only because we are intelligent, brooding over what words will satisfy the mind, but also because we are sensuous. Sounds please us. When we hear “the vital music,” we know we have found the material for beliefs that “pierce,” and thereby shape, us (234).

Yet, even as the poem rises in the end to this fever pitch of human celebration, its final chant leaves us with the brutal image of soldiers “going to defeat.” This concluding volta serves a composite function. It warns us, as Stevens (1997) will again in the coda to Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, that the songs of belief and knowledge we invent can stir us to violence. (“How gladly with proper words the soldier dies, / If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech,” the Notes concludes [352]). In so doing, Stevens undercuts the good/evil dichotomy he has developed and emphasizes we can use our saving faculties to produce the same pain they can alleviate. The final couplet also leaves us with an image of precisely that from which the poem suggests we cannot turn away. Our chants comfort us while we live, but we must keep before us our own mortality in order to truly understand what we are and can do. This tempered conclusion at once affirms human creative power and admits, with humility, our profound and irreducible limitations. Stevens neither elevates to divine status intelligence and imagination, as some romantics did, nor denies these faculties influence our lives on earth, as do some contemporary discourses.

This vision cautions us to remain wary of explanations that promise an unknowable set of forces that operate beyond our control can best organize our lives and insists instead that humans are historical beings. Within limits, in other words, we shape out of the past, by way of our creative and critical activities, both the selves we are and the worlds we know. By affirming this vision (which Stevens is only one among many modernists, canonical and marginal, to leave us), and by sharpening it against those views that oppose it, we can seize at the moment it threatens to disappear a historical sense of ourselves. When we privilege this historical view of the human, we need not nostalgically return to and affirm the destructive and arrogant humanism that long licensed the West’s colonial violence and initiated environmental devastation. Rather, views such as Stevens’s can help us pursue in revitalized ways the increasingly material and historical search for self-understanding modernist genealogies value. Because a posthuman view of the species would still have to be able to explain the species’ historical activities, writers who describe these seem as important as ever.

As Benjamin’s vision of the angel warns, oppositional criticism cannot be programmatic, so reading Stevens this way offers no final, reproducible answer to this essay’s title question. It is merely one attempt to mobilize in the face of the conditions that produce inequality today the resources of the past. Because the New Modernist Studies is satisfied simply to expand its store of past materials, it does not encourage scholars to open out of modernism’s discourses specific and identifiable ways of thinking the left might rely upon when it tries to oppose from within the university the forces that produce social and economic disparity. Indeterminacy ensures NMS can continue as an influential, autonomous, and relatively lucrative institutional force, in part because it does not encourage critics to oppose power. Its foundational indeterminacy (“we don’t know”) seems to complement and mirror, rather than to contest, the broader attitude toward epistemological and creative human activity upon which ruling interests strategically insist. When elite discourses attempt to control and conceal the critical and creative practices humanities disciplines previously cultivated, academic trends that do not value these practices can come to suit elite interests.

To ameliorate these shortcomings, contemporary scholars need not necessarily flee the university or contritely devote themselves to public outreach projects. All institutional work is not identical. Mirowski’s epistemological reading of contemporary inequality suggests one of the most oppositional acts a scholar or critic can today perform is to insist—from inside and across the creative, critical, and knowledge-producing fields currently under attack—that historical activity is ongoing and vital.

 

References

Altieri, Charles. 2012. “How the ‘New Modernist Studies’ Fails the Old Modernism.” Textual Practice 26, no. 4: 763–82.

Anderson, Chris. 2008 “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.” Wired. June 23. https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/.

Beebe, Maurice. 1974. “What Modernism Was.” Journal of Modern Literature 3, no. 5: 1065–84.

Benjamin, Walter. (1940) 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken Books.

Bloom, Harold. 1976. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bové, Paul A. 2010. “Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory.” Field Day Review 6: 71–93.

Brzezinski, Max. 2011. “The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?” Minnesota Review 76: 109–25.

Capehart, Jonathan. 2015. “From Trayvon Martin to ‘Black Lives Matter.’” Washington Post. February 27. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/02/27/from-trayvon-martin-to-black-lives-matter/.

Churchill, Suzanne W. 2006. The Little Magazine “Others” and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1817) 1985. Biographia Literaria. Vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2001. “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism.” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3: 493–513.

———. 2015. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Howarth, Peter. 2012. “Autonomous and Heteronomous in Modernist Form: From Romantic Image to the New Modernist Studies.” Critical Quarterly 54, no. 1: 71– 80.

Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present. New York: Verso.

Jauss, Hans Robert. (1970) 2005. “Modernity and Literary Tradition.” Translated by Christian Thorne. Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2: 329–64.

Josipovici, Gabriel. 2010. Whatever Happened to Modernism? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kermode, Frank. 1986. “Modernisms.” London Review of Books 8, no. 9: 3–6.

Krugman, Paul. 2010. “When Zombies Win.” “The Opinion Pages.” The New York Times. December 19. www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20krugman.html.

Latham, Sean and Gayle Rogers. 2015. Modernism: The Evolution of an Idea. New York: Bloomsbury.

Lee, Felicia R. 2012. “New Novel of Harlem Renaissance is Found.” New York Times. September 14. www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/books/harlem-renaissance-novel-by-claude-mckay-is-discovered.html.

Levin, Harry. 1960. “What Was Modernism?” The Massachusetts Review 1, no. 4: 609–30.

Lichtblau, Eric. (2016). “US Hate Crimes Surge 6%, Fueled by Attacks on Muslims.” New York Times. November 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/ politics/fbi-hate-crimes-muslims.html.

Mao, Douglas and Rebecca Walkowitz, eds. 2006. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke University Press.

———. 2008. “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3: 737–48.

Marx, Karl. (1852) 1963. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers.

Mirowski, Philip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism  Survived the Financial Meltdown. New York: Verso.

Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: Vintage.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1876) 1997. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, 57–124. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Ramazani, Jahan. 2009. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Readings, Bill. 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Robbins, Bruce. 1985. “Modernism and Professionalism: The Case of William Carlos Williams.” In On Poetry and Poetics, edited by Richard Waswo, 191–205. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Said, Edward W. 1983. “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism.” In The World, the Text, and the Critic, 158–177. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.

———. 2000. “Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism.” PMLA 115, no. 3: 285–91.

———. 2004. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Stevens, Wallace. (1942) 1997a. “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas.” Parts of a World, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 227–234.

———. (1942) 1997b. “The Man on the Dump.” Parts of a World, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 184–85.

———. (1951) 1997. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” The Necessary Angel, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 643–65.

———. (1955) 1997. “The Plain Sense of Things.” The Rock, in Collected Poetry and Prose, 428.

———. 1997. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America.

Sundie, Jill. M., Douglas T. Kenrick, Vladas Griskevicius, Joshua M. Tybur, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Daniel J. Beal. (2010). “Peacocks, Porsches, and Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption as a Sexual Signaling System.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. November 1.

Toomer, Jean. (1923) 2011. Cane. Edited by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: W. W. Norton.

United States Department of Labor. 2016. “Equal Pay.” December 12. https://www.dol.gov/featured/equalpay.

V21 Collective. 2016. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective: Ten Theses.” December 12. http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/.

Wellek, René. 1985. “Literary Modern?” Review of Genealogy of Modernism, by Michael Levenson. The New Criterion 3, no. 9: 76.

Wicke, Jennifer. 2001. “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble.” Modernism/modernity 8, no. 3: 389–403.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. (1986) 1989. “The Uses of Cultural Theory.” The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, 163–176.

———. (1987) 1989. “When Was Modernism?” in Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, 31–35.

———. 1989. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. New York:Verso.

Whitman, Walt. (1855) 1996. Leaves of Grass. In Whitman: Poetry and Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan, 1–146. New York: Library of America.

Williams, William Carlos. (1923) 1970. Spring and All. Imaginations. New York: New Directions. 85–151.

Epigraph taken from Wallace Stevens ([1955] 1997).

Notes 

[1] For a range of representative instances, see Robbins (1985), “Modernism and Professionalism: the Case of William Carlos Williams”; Williams ([1987] 1989), “When Was Modernism?”; Stanford Friedman (2001), “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism”; Jameson (2002), A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present; and Josipovici (2010), Whatever Happened to Modernism?

[2] A number of critics have challenged the New Modernist Studies and its assumptions from various perspectives. See Wicke (2001), “Appreciation, Depreciation: Modernism’s Speculative Bubble”; Jameson (2002); Brzezinski (2011), “The New Modernist Studies: What’s Left of Political Formalism?”; Altieri (2012), “How the ‘New Modernist Studies’ Fails the Old Modernism”; Howarth (2012), “Autonomous and Heteronomous in Modernist Form: From Romantic Image to the New Modernist Studies.”

[3] In the US, for instance, inequality is today pervasive across categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Piketty (2014) compares rates of income disparity in the US in the early 2010s to those “in France and Britain during the Ancien Regime” (263). A 2010–11 survey indicates “the top decile own 72 percent of America’s wealth” (257). Capehart (2015) tracks recent instances of race violence in the US and the emergence of activist counter-movements. The United States Bureau of Labor (2016) reports US “women working full time only make about 79% of what men earn,” indicating one ongoing gender disparity liberal feminist movements often target.

[4] Friedman’s (2015) book, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time, pursues this “expansive” tendency to the limits of its logic. Friedman argues “modernism” might describe all “aesthetic movements or specific instances that innovatively engage with the specific modernities of their space/time/culture, particularly . . . those whose forms as well as content push against or reinvent inherited conventions” (190). She suggests critics might consider modernist such figures as the sixth-century Chinese poet Du Fu, whose formal innovations responded to changing political and economic conditions under the Tang Dynasty.

[5] See Churchill (2006) and Mao and Walkowitz, eds. (2006).

[6] For key works in this definitional genre, see Levin (1960), “What Was Modernism?”; Maurice Beebe (1974), “What Modernism Was”; Williams ([1987] 1989), “When Was Modernism?”; Friedman (2001), “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism”; Josipovici (2010), What Ever Happened to Modernism?

[7] When Latham and Rogers (2015) rely upon a language of “networks” as a way to explain art’s place in the “world,” for instance, they indicate Edward W. Said is one important influence for NMS (149). Said (1983) encouraged critics with radical ambitions to scrutinize any “art-for-art’s-sake theory” that insists “the world of culture and aesthetic production subsists on its own, away from the encroachments of the State and authority” and to study instead the “network” of “affiliation” that “enables a text to maintain itself as a text” (169, 174).

[8] Marx ([1852] 2004) describes historical consciousness and its challenges this way: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” (15). A few years later, Nietzsche ([1876] 1997) writes: A “human being … cannot learn to forget but clings relentlessly to the past: however far and fast he may run, this chain runs with him” (61). See Jauss ([1970] 2005) for a critical etymology of the term “modern.” Jauss traces the different modes of historical consciousness it has named over the course of Western history.

[9] See Paul A. Bové (2010), “Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory,” for a challenge to the utopian, messianic element fundamental to Benjamin’s vision of history.

[10] Said (1983) characterizes his moment—acerbically—this way: “Indeed, what distinguishes the present situation is, on the one hand, a greater isolation than ever before in recent American cultural history of the literary critics from the major intellectual, political, moral, and ethical issues of the day and, on the other hand, a rhetoric, a pose, a posture (let us at last be candid) claiming not so much to represent as to be the afflictions entailed by true adversarial politics. A visitor from another world would surely be perplexed were he to overhear a so-called old critic calling the new critics dangerous. What, this visitor would ask, are they dangers to? The state? The mind? Authority?” (160).

[11] Said’s later work responds explicitly to these transformations. See, for instance, Said (1993; 2000; 2004).

[12] US academics specializing in Victorian literature and culture have recently called for “presentist” approaches. See V21 Collective (2016).

[13] Critics regularly rely upon the vision of neoliberalism anthropologist David Harvey (2005) develops in his rigorous and accessible A Brief History of Neoliberalism. The term has a long history, as Harvey demonstrates, but its popularity as an explanatory cipher for current political and economic conditions among intellectuals and activists who are not specialists in economics increased after 2008.

[14] For a timeline of recent events, see Capehart (2015).

[15] For an early account of the transformations corporate interests have inaugurated within the university, see Readings (1997).

[16] The same ways of thinking are transforming disciplinary paradigms in the social and natural sciences. See Anderson (2008).

[17] Sundie et al. (2010) claim to prove “conspicuous consumption is driven by men who are following a lower investment (vs. higher investment) mating strategy and is triggered specifically by short-term (vs. long-term) mating motives” (1).

[18] During the “culture wars,” conservative humanists opposed critics on the left who wanted to expand the canon and privilege politics. Although this conservative position has virtually disappeared within humanities departments, contemporary scholars continue to claim as their primary antagonists the New Critics and the deconstructionists, figures from literary studies’ past. It remains vital to reflect upon professional practices so that our methods serve the projects we value—and again, historical self-consciousness teaches us this labor will be perpetual—but literary critics might better accomplish this if we cultivate simultaneously a more critical view of our discipline within a system of other disciplines, many of which endorse and promulgate views of the human and of history radically different from those many experts in culture often sanction.

[19] A number of complementary and overlapping discourses put pressure on the category of the “human” as a means of pursuing a radical or progressive politics for democracy, liberty, and equality. These include the “posthumanist” projects we associate with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and their inheritors, which attempt to destroy transcendental and ontotheological humanisms, and “posthuman” projects we associate with critics such as Donna Harraway, N. Katharine Hayles, and Ursula K. Heise, which assume humans have entered a new stage of being defined by technological innovation, biological change, and environmental catastrophe. These very different discursive formations both attempt to conceive the human anew in increasingly material terms and to trade anthropocentric models of the universe for more complex ones.

[20] Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ([1817] 1985) Biographia Literaria is an originary text for an Anglophone genealogy of poetry and poetics preoccupied with the nature and function of human imagination and intelligence. For a few key texts that pursue these questions in the US, see Walt Whitman’s ([1855] 1996) Leaves of Grass; Jean Toomer’s ([1923] 2011) Cane; and William Carlos Williams’s ([1923] 1970) Spring and All.

[21] See Lee (2012).

[22] Toni Morrison (1987) renders this violence in the novel, Beloved (234). Stevens also uses racist language in some of his letters and poems. See Hayes (2014) for a nuanced engagement with Stevens’s failures.

[23] Bloom (1976) presents Stevens as an American transcendentalist in Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens.

by Robert T. Tally Jr. 

This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial board. 

I

The 1950 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina was fiercely contested, featuring what even then was understood by many to be the opposed ideological trajectories of Southern politics: that of a seemingly progressive, “New South,” characterized by its support for modernization, industry, and above all civil rights (or, at least, improvements to a system of racial inequality) on the on hand, and that of a profoundly conservative tradition resistant to such change, particularly with respect to civil rights, on the other. The unelected incumbent, appointed by the governor after the death of Senator J. Melville Broughton a year earlier, Frank Porter Graham was notoriously progressive, the former president of the University of North Carolina and a proponent of desegregation. The challenger was Willis Smith, mentor to later longtime conservative senator Jesse Helms, who was himself an active campaigner for Smith in this race. At the time, this election was viewed as a turning point in North Carolinian, and perhaps even Southern, politics, so starkly was the ideological division drawn. The primary election—this being 1950, the Democratic primary was, in effect, the election, since no Republican nominee could possibly offer meaningful competition in November—was remarkably vitriolic, as Smith supporters played on the fears of bigots at every turn. (For example, one widely disseminated pro-Smith flyer announced “Frank Graham Favors Mingling of the Races.”) On May 26, a Graham supporter, the idealistic young major of Fayetteville took to the airwaves to castigate the Smith campaign for its repulsive rhetoric and divisive tactics:

Where the campaign should have been based on principles, they have attempted to assault personalities. Where the people needed light, they have brought a great darkness. Where they should have debated, they have debased. … Where reason was needed, they have goaded emotion. Where they should have invoked inspiration, they have whistled for the hounds of hate.

Decades before “dog-whistle politics” become a de facto political strategy throughout the South (and elsewhere, of course), J. O. Tally Jr. lamented the motives, and no doubt the effectiveness, of such an approach, which had made this the “most bitter, most unethical in North Carolina’s modern history.”[1]

That was my grandfather, then an ambitious, 29-year-old lawyer and politician, who must have seen himself as fairly representative of a New South intellectual and statesman. A graduate of Duke University with a law degree from Harvard, Joe Tally had returned from distinguished overseas service in the navy during World War II to teach law at Wake Forest University and to practice at the family firm before running for office in his hometown. His own career in electoral politics ended with a failed 1952 run for Congress, during which his moderate views on segregation likely amounted to an unpardonable sin for many voters in southeastern North Carolina, and he settled for alternative forms of civic and professional service, such as the Kiwanis Club, of which he later became international president. Others of Tally’s political circle had better fortunes with the voters. Terry Sanford, for example, went on to become the governor of North Carolina, then long-time president of Duke University, before returning the U.S. Senate in 1987 as perhaps the most liberal of the Southern senators. (Ah, to recall the time when an Al Gore was considered quite conservative!) Tally’s ex-wife, my grandmother Lura S. Tally, went on to serve five terms in the N.C. House and six in the Senate from 1973 to 1994, where she represented that liberal wing of the old Democratic Party, promoting legislation especially in support of elementary education, the environment, and the state’s Museum of Natural History. However, during the same period, former Smith acolyte Jesse Helms carried that banner into the U.S Senate in 1973, immediately becoming one of the most conservative members of Congress, hawkish in foreign policy, parsimonious in his domestic policy, and ever ready to protect the public from unsavory art in his attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts. Perhaps it is part of the legacy of the 1950 Senate campaign, but North Carolina had always seemed rather bi-polar in its politics, often maintaining a far-right-wing and a relatively liberal contingent in the U.S. Congress. That is, until recently. In the past decade, North Carolina, like all of the South and much of the country, has lurched ever rightward in politics and policies. Today, the spirit of the old conservatives of Willis Smith’s era reigns triumphant.

The same year that the Smith campaign allegedly “whistled for the hounds of hate” in order to secure an election over a liberal vanguard dead set on undermining traditional Southern values, another native North Carolinian lamented that those espousing belief in the such values had been forced out of the South. Speaking of the paradoxical fact that so many Southern Agrarians (including himself) had fled from their ancestral homeland to the urban North, there colonizing institutions like the University of Chicago, Richard M. Weaver proclaimed them “Agrarians in exile,” who had been rendered “homeless,” for “[t]he South no longer had a place for them, and flight to the North but completed an alienation long in progress.” Weaver explained that “the South has not shown much real capacity to fight modernism,” and added that “a large part of it is eager to succumb.”[2] For Weaver, the great Agrarians of the I’ll Take My Stand generation had been compelled to retreat in the face of those, like my grandparents, who in their “disloyalty” to “their section” of the United States exhibited “the disintegrative effects of modern liberalism.”[3] Contrary to appearances, Weaver found that the Southern values which undergirded his preferred form of cultural and political conservatism were under assault, and perhaps even waning, in the South. The baleful liberalism he saw as all but indomitable in the industrial North and Midwest was, in Weaver’s view, ineluctably encroaching on the sacred soil of the former Confederacy.

It is strange to look upon this scene from the vantage of the present. With the defeat of Senator Mary Landrieu in Louisiana’s December 6, 2014, run-off, there were no longer any Democrats from the Deep South in the U.S. Senate. And, as the 114^th Congress convened in 2015, the U.S. House of Representatives contained no white Democrats from the Deep South, this for the first time in American history. Of course, the once “solid South” has been steadily trending ever more toward the Republicans since Brown vs. Board of Education, Governor Wallace’s “segregation forever,” and Richard Nixon’s notorious Southern strategy of the late 1960s. Native conservatism, gerrymandering, demographics, racial attitudes, and other factors have come into play, and the shift is therefore not wholly surprising, but the domination of the states of the former Confederacy by the Republican Party represents a sea-change in U.S. electoral politics. Furthermore, the hegemony of a certain Southern-styled conservatism within the Republican Party and, increasingly, within social, political, and cultural conservatism more generally marks a decisive movement away from not only the mid-century liberalism against which many Agrarians like Weaver railed, but also against the worldly neoconservatives like the elder President Bush whose  embrace of a “new world order” elicited such fear and loathing from members of his own party in the early 1990s. The dominant strain of twenty-first-century political discourse in the United States is thus a variation on a sort of neo-Confederate, anti-modernist theme of the Agrarians,[4] or, rather, of Weaver, perhaps their greatest philosophical champion.

In this essay, I want to revisit the ideas of this mid-twentieth-century conservative theorist in an attempt to shed light on the origins of this distinctively American brand of conservatism in the twenty-first century. Weaver’s agrarian conservatism today seems both quaint or old-fashioned and yet disturbingly timely, as the rhetorical and intellectual force of his ideas seems all-too-real in the present social and political situation in the United States. Weaver’s mythic vision of the South, ironically, has come to symbolize the nation as a whole, at least from the perspective of many of the most influential conservative politicians and policy-makers today. As a result of what might be called the australization of American politics in recent years—that is, a political worldview increasingly coded according to identifiably “Southern” themes and icons, not to mention the growing influence of Southern and Southwestern politicians at the level of national government—we can see more clearly now the degree to which Weaver’s seemingly eccentric, often fantastic views have become not only mainstream, but perhaps even taken for granted, in 2015.[5] The “Southern Phoenix,” celebrated by Weaver for its ability to survive its own immolation and re-emerge from the ashes, now appears triumphant to a degree that the original Fugitives and Vanderbilt Agrarians could not have dreamed possible. And, as is so often the case when fantasies come to life, the result may be more frightening than even their worst nightmares forebode.

II

Outside of certain tightly circumscribed spaces of formally conservative thought such as that of the Liberty Fund, Richard M. Weaver may no longer be a household name. However, his writings and his legacy have been profoundly influential on conservative thinking, and he has been viewed as a sort of founding father or patron saint of the movement. The Heritage Foundation, for example, adopted the title of his totemic, 1948 critique of modern industrial society, Ideas Have Consequences, as its official motto when founded in 1973. A devoted student, literally and metaphorically, of the Southern Agrarians of the I’ll Take My Stand generation, Weaver embraced a certain “lost cause” view of the old Confederacy that informed his wide-ranging criticism of twentieth-century American and Western civilization. He viewed the antebellum South as the final flourishing of an idealized feudalism, doomed to fail as the forces of industry, science, and technology, together with ideological liberalism, secularism, and “equalitarianism,” undermined and ultimately destroyed its foundations. Weaver’s critique of modernity, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s, thus took the form of an almost fairy-story approach to history, in which a mythic past functioned as an exemplary model and as a foil to the lurid spectacle of the present cultural configuration, a balefully “modern” society characterized especially by its secularism, its embrace of scientific rationality, and its ineluctable process of industrialization. Weaver’s jeremiad is thus both dated, redolent of a certain pervasive interwar and postwar malaise, and enduring, as his rhetoric remains audible in social and political discourse today, particularly in all those election-year panegyrics to a “simpler” America, a paradisiacal place just over the temporal horizon, now most known to us by its mourned absence.

Weaver was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1910, but he moved to Lexington, Kentucky, as a small child, where he grew up “in the fine ‘bluegrass’ country,” as Donald Davidson noted,[6] and later received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky. In his autobiographical essay, pointedly titled “Up from Liberalism,” Weaver described the faculty there as “mostly earnest souls from the Middle Western universities, and many of them […] were, with or without knowing it, social democrats.”[7] This information is apparently supplied in order to explain Weaver’s own brief flirtation with the American Socialist Party upon graduation in 1932. Weaver then enrolled in graduate school at Vanderbilt, birthplace of I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 and thus ground zero of the literary or cultural movement by then known simply as “the Agrarians.” At Vanderbilt, Weaver studied directly under John Crowe Ransom, to whom The Southern Tradition at Bay was later dedicated, and he wrote a master’s thesis (“The Revolt Against Humanism: A Study of the New Critical Temper”), which criticized the “new” humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, among others.[8] After receiving his M.A. degree, Weaver briefly taught at Texas A&M, but was repelled by its “rampant philistinism, abetted by technology, large-scale organization, and a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life.”[9] Weaver entered graduate school at Louisiana State University, where his teachers included two other giants of the Agrarian and American literary traditions, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. The latter served as director for Weaver’s dissertation, a lengthy investigation and celebration of post-Civil War Southern literature and culture, evocatively (and provocatively) titled “The Confederate South, 1865–1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and Culture.” This book was released posthumously in 1968 as The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, and it may well be considered Weaver’s magnum opus, as I will discuss further below. After receiving his Ph.D., Weaver taught briefly at N.C. State University, before embracing “exile” at the University of Chicago, where he spent the remainder of his professional life, not counting the summers during which he returned to western North Carolina, apparently to replenish his reserves of authentic agrarian experience and to recapture the “lost capacity for wonder and enchantment.”[10] As it happens, Weaver’s celebratory vision of the Southern culture is comports all-too-well with that of a fantasy world.

Legend has it that the virulent anti-modernist eschewed such new-fangled technology as the tractor, yet he seemed to have little compunction about enjoying the convenience of the railroad and other amenities made possible by modern industrial societies. “Every spring, as soon as the last term paper was graded, he traveled by train to Weaverville [North Carolina, just north of Asheville], where he spent summers writing essays and books and plowing his patch of land with only the help of a mule-driven harness. Tractors, airplanes, automobiles, radios (and certainly television)—none of these gadgets of modern life were for Richard Weaver,” writes Joseph Scotchie, admiringly.[11] Yet Weaver also speaks about drinking coffee with pleasure, knowing well that Appalachia is not known for its cultivation of this crop. As with so much of the fantastic critique of modernity by reactionaries, there is an unexamined (perhaps even unseen) principle of selection that allows one to choose which parts of the modern world to tacitly accept, and which to ostentatiously jettison.

III

Weaver’s most significant and influential work published during his lifetime is undoubtedly Ideas Have Consequences, a title given by his editor at the University of Chicago Press but which Weaver had intended to call The Fearful Descent.[12] It is actually one of only three books published by Weaver during his own life; the others are The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953) and a textbook titled simply Composition: A Course in Writing and Rhetoric (1957). Weaver recalled that Ideas Have Consequences originated in his own rather despondent musings about the state of Western Civilization in the waning months of World War II, as he experienced “progressive disillusionment” over the way the war had been conducted, and he began to wonder “whether it would not be possible to deduce, from fundamental causes, the fallacies of modern life and thinking that had produced this holocaust and would insure others.”[13] Weaver’s bold, perhaps bizarre, premise was that the civilizational crisis in the twentieth century could be traced to a much earlier philosophical turning point in the trajectory of Western thought, namely the proto-scientific nominalism of William of Occam. Weaver draws a direct line from Occam’s Razor to the most deleterious effects (in his view) of modern empiricism, materialism, and egalitarianism.

For Weaver, humanity took a wrong turn in the fourteenth century when it allegedly embraced Occam’s Razor as the guiding principle of all logical inquiry, thus condemning mankind to a sort of secular, narrow, bean-counting approach to both the natural and social worlds. Referring obliquely to Macbeth’s encounter with the weird sisters in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Weaver asserts that

Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.[14]

What follows from this is a lengthy, somewhat disjointed analysis of “the dissolution of the West,” which will include not only the critique of philosophical tendencies or declining moral codes, but also attacks on egotism in art, jazz music, and other forms of popular entertainments. It is almost a right-wing version of the near-contemporaneous Dialectic of Enlightenment, except that Weaver would not have imagined “Enlightenment” to have suggested anything other than “disaster triumphant” to begin with, and Horkheimer and Adorno was all too wary of the latent and manifest significance of the jargon of authenticity as enunciated by writers like Weaver.[15]

Although Ideas Have Consequences is not overtly “Southern” in any way, Weaver’s medievalism, which was developed not according to any deeply philological study of premodern texts (à la Tolkien) but rather from his own sense of that late flowering of chivalry in the antebellum South, indicates the degree to which his discussion of the West’s decline is actually tied to his view of the lost cause of the Confederacy. The first six chapters of Ideas Have Consequences constitute a fairly scattershot series of observations on “the various stages of modern man’s descent into chaos,” which began with his having yielded to materialism in the fourteenth century, and which in turn paved the way for the “egotism and social anarchy of the present world.”[16] The final three chapters, by contrast, are intended as restorative. That is, in them Weaver attempts to delineate the ways that modern man might resist these tendencies, reversing the movement of history, and reaping the rewards of a legacy that would presumably have flourished had only the pre-Occam metaphysical tendency ultimately prevailed. In a 1957 essay in the National Review, Weaver claimed that, contrary to the assertions of liberals, the conservatives were not so much in favor of “turning the clocks back” as “setting the clocks right.”[17] Not surprisingly, Weaver’s three prescriptions in Ideas Have Consequences would neatly align with the fantastic, medieval, or feudal system he had imagined as the dominant form of social organization in the antebellum South, although he does not highlight his regional allegiance in this, a work purportedly devoted to the study of (Western) civilization as a whole.

The first is the principle of private property, which Weaver takes to be “the last metaphysical right” available to modern man. That is, while “the ordinances of religion, the prerogatives of sex and of vocation” were “swept away by materialism” (specifically, the Reformation, changing social values, and so on), “the relationship of a man to his own has until the present largely escaped attack.”[18] Weaver calls the right to private property a “metaphysical right” because “it does not depend on social usefulness. […] It is a self-justifying right, which until lately was not called upon to show in the forum how its ‘services’ warranted its continuance in a state dedicated to collective well-being.”[19] Private property, which Weaver likens to “the philosophical concept of substance,” is depicted as providing a foundation for the renewed sense of self and being in the world. The second principle is “the power of the word”: “After securing a place in the world from which to fight, we should turn our attention to the matter of language.”[20] Weaver offers a critique of semantics as itself simply a form of nominalism, while arguing for an education in poetics and rhetoric as necessary to reclaim one’s connection to the absolute, while also remaining critical of the abuses of language in modern culture. Finally, Weaver concludes with a chapter on “piety and justice,” in which he argues that the piety, “a discipline of the will through respect,” makes justice possible by allowing man to transcend egotism with respect to three things: nature, other people, and the past.[21] Fundamentally, for Weaver, this piety issues from a chivalric tradition that he imagines as the only real hope for a reformation of the twentieth-century blasted by war, spiritually desolate, and (he does not shrink from using the term) “evil.” What is needed, Weaver concludes in the book’s final line, is “a passionate reaction, like that which flowered in the chivalry and spirituality of the Middle Ages.”[22]

As it happened, there was a place in the United States which had previously held, and in 1948 perhaps still maintained, this medieval worldview. Weaver’s beloved South, even though it was under siege from without by the forces of modernity and in peril from within by a generation of would-be modernizers, retained the virtues of an evanescing feudal tradition, which might somehow be recovered and brought into the service of civilization itself. Indeed, Weaver’s first book-length work, which only appeared in print after his death, was an elaborate examination and strident defense of this chivalric culture that once flourished beneath the Mason and Dixon line. If only its message could be distilled and disseminated, this Southern tradition might redeem the entirety of the West.

IV

The Southern Tradition at Bay occupies a unique and important place in Weaver’s corpus. Based on his doctoral thesis but published five years after his death, the book can be read as being representative of his “early” thinking on the subject and as a sort of summa of his entire literary and philosophical program at the same time. Many of the ideas that Weaver here identifies as Southern are clearly connected to those he celebrates in Ideas Have Consequences. For example, Weaver’s elaboration of the “mind” of the Old South focused on four distinctive but interrelated characteristics: the feudal system, the code of chivalry, the education of the gentleman, and the older religiousness, by which Weaver meant a non-creedal religiosity. Combined, these four factors distinguished the unique culture of the “section,” clearly differentiating its heritage from that of other parts of the United States.[23]

Weaver’s medievalism, as I mentioned before, is not rooted in the formal study of the history, philology, or philosophy of the European Middle Ages, although he draws upon certain imagery from its time and place. One might argue that Weaver’s project is literally quixotic, inasmuch as he figuratively dons the rusty armor of a bygone age to tilt at windmills which he imagines to be giants, but in an effort “in this iron age of ours to revive the age of gold or, as it is generally called, the golden age.”[24] Weaver’s tone is simultaneously elegiac and recalcitrant, mourning the lost cause or the waning of a glorious past and ardently defending its values in the present, fallen state of the world. Methodologically, Weaver’s approach is to gather selectively then-contemporary accounts, including public proclamations and individual diaries—or, often, a combination of the two, in the form of published memoirs—as well as more recent historical studies, then add his own assessments of their currency (i.e., in 1943) as evidence of an enduring, twentieth century “Mind of the South.”[25] Weaver somewhat disingenuously cautions that,

In presenting evidence that this is the traditional mind of the South, I am letting the contemporaries speak. They will seldom offer whole philosophies, and sometimes the trend of thought is clear only in the light of context; yet together they express the mind of a religious agrarian order in struggle against the forces of modernism.[26]

Needless to say, perhaps, but such a collective “mind” is likely not to be discovered if the historian were to cast the nets of his research more widely.[27] By identifying only those “true” Southerners whose opinions can thereafter be identified as authentic, Weaver anticipates all of our current politicians and pundits who seem to be forever deferring to these mythical “real Americans” whose viewpoints are curiously at odds with the actual history of the present. After laying out the feudal heritage which characterizes the mind and culture of the South in the opening chapter, Weaver by turns examines the antebellum and postbellum defense of the Southern way of life, the perspectives of Confederate soldiers and the reminiscences of others during the Civil War (or “the second American Revolution”), the work of selected Southern fiction writers, and then the reformers or internal critics who, in Weaver’s view, effectively managed to take the fight out of the “fighting South.”[28]

Weaver concedes by the end that “the Old South may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live.”[29] It is a disturbing and prophetic line, suggestive of how much the Southern heritage might be abstracted, idealized, and then transferred to distant places and times. Comparing his own situation to that of a Henry Adams, who, “wearied with the plausibilites of his day, looked for some higher reality in the thirteenth-century synthesis of art and faith,” Weaver imagines that the old Confederacy, with its feudal hierarchies and chivalric cultural values, may yet become a model for the social formations to come. Calling the Old South “the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world,” Weaver concludes:

It is this refuge of sentiments and values, of spiritual congeniality, of belief in the word, of reverence for symbolism, whose existence haunts the nation. It is damned for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.[30]

Behind this elevated rhetoric lies the hoary old dream, indistinct threat, and rebel yell: the South will rise again!

The title of The Southern Tradition at Bay is provocatively descriptive. Since its purview is the period of American history between 1865 and 1910, following the crushing defeat of the former Confederacy and the disastrous period of Reconstruction—not to mention advances in science, the rise of a more industrial mode of production, and the emergence of modernism in the arts and culture—the study’s elaboration of a cognizable “Southern Tradition” rooted in unreconstructed agrarianism and adherence to the ideals of the old Confederacy is intended to establish it as a preferred counter-tradition to that of the victorious North and to the united States in general. Moreover, the phrase “at bay” is suggestive not of defeat or conquest, but of temporary inconvenience; it refers especially to being momentarily held up, kept at a distance, but by no means out of the game. Such an accomplished rhetor as Weaver would no doubt be aware that the phrase derives from the French abayer, “to bark,” and that it probably referred to dogs that were prevented from approaching further to attack and that were thus relegated to merely barking at their prey. (The image of a group of Southerners barking at an uncomprehending North may be all too appropriate when revisiting I’ll Take My Stand, come to think of it.) In other words, The Southern Tradition at Bay’s title nicely encapsulates two powerful aspects of its argument: that the Southern Tradition exists, present tense, long after its ancien régime was disrupted by war and by modernization; and that it was not ever defeated, much less destroyed, but merely kept in abeyance from the then dominant, though less creditable national culture. Weaver’s vision of the South does not imagine a residual or emergent social formation, to mention Raymond Williams’s well-known formulation,[31] but rather another dominant, yet somehow suppressed or isolated, form which remained in constant tension with the only apparently victorious North. Weaver’s mood is sometimes melancholy, befitting his sense of the “lost cause,” but his conviction that the South ought to rise again, whether he believed it was practically feasible or not, is clear throughout.

Thus, the idea of a distinctively Southern tradition being temporarily held “at bay” suits Weaver’s argument well. However, this was not the original title of the study. When he presented it as his doctoral dissertation at Louisiana State University, where his thesis advisor was Cleanth Brooks,[32] Weaver gave it a much more provocative and politically charged title: “The Confederate South, 1865–1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and Culture.” The difference is not particularly subtle. Here it is asserted that the “Confederate South,” not just a tradition, itself exists outside of the more limited lifespan of the C.S.A., and that its mind and culture—not merely those of a South, a recognizable section of the United States, but those of the Confederacy—survived the aftermath of the Civil War, a conflict which Weaver dutifully names the “second American Revolution.”[33] Weaver submitted the manuscript to the University of North Carolina Press in 1943, but it was summarily rejected. I have found no evidence one way or another, but I like to think that the publishing arm of the university presided over by Frank Porter Graham declined to publish the execrable apologia of the Confederacy’s “survival,” with its idyllic portrait of human bondage and of racial bigotry, on not only academic but also political grounds. The story is probably less interesting than that, for although the book makes a passionate case for a certain worldview, the dissertation’s extremely selective portrayal of the postbellum culture of the south almost certainly rendered its conclusions dubious from the perspective of academic historians and philosophers. Most likely, Weaver’s omissions, as well as his renunciation of any sense of objectivity or nonpartisanship, led to the study’s remaining unpublished during his lifetime. In any case, its eventual publication in 1968, a transformative moment in U.S. politics and society, makes for a rather intriguing, if unhappy, coincidence. The “Southern strategy,” conceived by Harry Dent and launched by the Nixon campaign that very year, had in The Southern Tradition at Bay its historico-philosophical touchstone.

V

It is all too noteworthy that the “mind and culture” that Weaver identifies as surviving in the aftermath of the Civil War is, at once, generalized so as to extend to the entirety of the American South and limited to a fairly tiny slice of that section’s actual population. Weaver makes no bones about the fact the he wanted to consider only the elite members of that society as representative of this tradition. Asserting that “it is a demonstrable fact that the group in power speaks for the country,” Weaver unapologetically writes that, “[i]n assaying the Southern tradition, therefore, I have taken the spirit which dominated,” thus ignoring Southern abolition societies, for example.[34] He also ignores the majority of the people. In order to make his case, Weaver pays little attention to white people who are not aristocratic lords of their own fiefdoms or soldiers who fought in the Civil War, which is to say, Weaver largely overlooks the poor multitudes who vastly outnumbered the wealthy planters, military leaders, and governors. Also, though not unexpectedly, the black population, a not inconsiderable percentage of the populace in these states, is treated far worse, in this account; black Southerners are not ignored, but rather are called out for special treatment in assessing their significant role in making possible the this culture and its tradition.[35]

Indeed, Weaver refers to blacks in the South as “the alien race,” as if he cannot understand that persons of African descent are no more or less alien to the lands of the Americas than are those of European descent. “Alien” cannot here mean “foreign,” since Weaver highlights the Southerner’s kinship to the Europeans, whether genealogically or with respect to social values. Weaver almost blames the black servants for being “inferior,” the mere fact of which itself could lead to abuse and therefore can reflect badly on the moral constitution of the white superiors. For example, after praising the idyllic state of paternalism in which “[t]he master expected of his servants loyalty; the servants of the master interest and protection,” and going so far to note that even at present, “so many years after emancipation,” the Southern plantation owner will routinely “defray the medical expenses of his Negroes” and “get them out of jail when they have been committed for minor offenses,” Weaver concedes that

This is the spirit of feudalism in its optative aspect; some abuses were inevitable, and in the South lordship over an alien and primitive race had less favorable effects upon the character of the slaveowners. It made them arrogant and impatient, and it filled them with boundless self-assurance. Even the children, noting the deference paid to their elders by the servants, began at an early age to take on airs of command. […] These traits [i.e., irritability, impatience, vengefulness], which were almost invariably noted by Northerners and by visiting Englishmen, gave Southerners a reputation away from home which they thought baseless and inspired by malice.[36]

Weaver never doubts  whether the feudal paternalism of the plantation owner, pre- or post-emancipation, to “his Negroes” would have appeared quite so optative in its aspect to the servants themselves. Informed readers, regardless of their own political views, cannot help but question this formulation.

In Weaver’s view, all servants—almost exclusively understood to be members of an “alien race” as well as being a subaltern class—on a Southern plantation are either happy and loyal or hopelessly deluded. During the Civil War, for example, “the alien race, which numbered about four millions in the South, kept its accustomed place, excepting those who through contact with the Federal armies were won away from adherence to ‘massa’ and ‘ol’ mistis’.”[37] This appears in a section called “The Negroes in Transition,” within a long chapter titled “Diaries and Reminiscences of the Second American Revolution,” and Weaver’s unmistakable conclusion is that the black population of the South was almost entirely better off under the system of slavery. Indeed, from his blinkered perspective, the African Americans under consideration would be better off as slaves precisely because they are more naturally suited to that condition. This position constitutes not merely an apologia of human bondage but also a casual acceptance of the most foul racial bigotry. Weaver cannot seem to imagine a reasonable reader who would question white supremacy, which he and the authorities he approvingly cites take to be a matter of fact. “The Northern conception that the Negro was merely a sunburned white man, ‘whose only crime was the color of his skin,’ found no converts at all among the people who had lived and worked with him.”[38] Weaver thus intimates that those, such as the Northerners, who believed otherwise were merely ignorant of the facts familiar to any and all with the least bit of experiential knowledge. Similarly, when Weaver writes that “[m]ore than one writer took the view that it was impossible for the two races to dwell together unless the blacks remained in a condition approximating slavery,” he offers not a word to gainsay the view, and he tacitly endorses it throughout the book.[39]

Weaver’s somewhat disingenuous assertion that he is “letting the contemporaries speak” for themselves is hardly an excuse for this profoundly racist account. Even if he relied only on direct quotations, which he certainly does not, Weaver had already conceded that he was rather selective in how he would approach his project. Needless to say, perhaps, but “The Negroes in Transition” section makes no reference whatsoever to any black authorities; in fact, Weaver here seems to rely entirely on the remembrances of Southern belles, as the footnotes in this section refer exclusively to autobiographies or memoirs written by white women, including one titled A Belle of the Fifties.[40] (The suggestion that free blacks represented a threat to white women is not so subtly hinted at in the pages.) Weaver quotes liberally from the women’s writings, but he frequently editorializes and supplements their mostly first-person perceptions with an almost scientific assessment, expounding on the laws governing society and nature.[41] For example, having just mentioned both slavery and race, and therefore leaving no doubt in the mind of the readers as to the racial criteria by which a social hierarchy of the type he is endorsing would be established, Weaver asserts: “[o]ut of the natural reverence for intellect and virtue there arises an impulse to segregation, which broadly results in coarser natures, that is, those of duller mental and moral sensibility, being lodged at the bottom and those of more refined at the top.”[42] Indeed, Weaver goes so far as to credit the endemic racism of the Southerner with a kind of moral superiority over those who lack this good sense. He argues that, in the Southerner’s “endeavor to grade men by their moral and intellectual worth,” his defense of slavery and racial hierarchy “indicates an ethical awareness” missing from many Northerners’ perspectives.[43]

That politics in the United States has, since 1968, become increasingly characterized by racial division is both controversial and indubitable. The “post-racial” America presided over by Barack Obama has witnessed some of the most acrimonious, racially-inflected public discourse and debate in years. Yet open appeals to racial justice or to discriminatory practices are considered gauche. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, a form of “dog-whistle politics” has infiltrated nearly all political rhetoric in recent decades. Perhaps the most infamous example of this “dog-whistle” political strategy can be found in Lee Atwater’s remarkably candid revelation in a 1981 interview. The former Strom Thurmond acolyte, who later served in the Reagan White House, then as George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign manager, and who later became chairman of the Republican National Committee, Atwater is acknowledged as one of the most astute political strategists of his generation. In speaking (anonymously, at the time) of the Reagan campaign’s far more elegant and effective version of the Southern strategy, Atwater explained:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than Nigger, nigger.”[44]

The fact that abstract economic issues, which presumably would affect both whites and blacks in the relatively poor Southern states in more-or-less equal measure, are so effective as code words for traditional, race-baiting tactics of a previous generation—the era of Willis Smith, in fact—demonstrates the degree to which Weaver’s feudal hierarchies maintain themselves, now in an utterly fantastic way as a vague threat, well into the late twentieth century or early twenty-first. As Atwater suggested, Southern white voters are willing to endorse policies that actually harm them, so long as a byproduct of those policies is that “blacks get hurt worse than whites.” This too, it seems, has much to do with the survival of a mind and culture in the aftermath of slavery and war, and so it is not altogether surprising that Weaver’s examination of the Southern tradition “at bay” focuses so intently on demonstrating why the black population of the South ought to remain subjugated to the white population as the era of civil rights, desegregation, and modernization dawns on the region.[45]

VI

In his appreciative remembrance of I’ll Take My Stand, written on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of its publication, Weaver invoked the image of the “Southern Phoenix,” a mythic reference to a being that had regenerated itself from the ashes following its own fiery destruction. Weaver uses this figure not so much to recall how the Agrarians whose work constituted that epochal text had themselves gone on to greatness, even if the volume had been ridiculed and dismissed by Northern critics in the 1930s. Weaver is also thinking of the tenets and values of the Old South, those that the Vanderbilt Fugitives and Agrarians embraced and promoted, which must have seemed retrograde, even malignant to so many in 1930, but which had reemerged and flourished amid an ascendant conservatism just beginning to take shape nationally in 1960. Yet, for all its usefulness as a metaphor, the phoenix is probably also an apt figure for Weaver’s own conservative vision, since—like an imaginary creature taken from the provinces of mythology—Weaver’s image of the Southern tradition, whether at bay or on the offensive, is profoundly fantastic. This imaginary tradition is rooted in a world that almost certainly never existed, not on a wide scale at any rate, and the polemical forces of Weaver’s argument are directed at a foe that has been conceived as an immense Leviathan, but which we today know to have been largely chimerical.

At times, this argument becomes almost comical. In explaining the importance of “the last metaphysical right,” private property, for example, Weaver cites the example of Thoreau,[46] although the latter’s notorious experiment in living deliberately required him to purchase, not build, a prefabricated hut, then to place it and himself on property owned by another (Emerson, in fact), but which he was permitted to dwell upon rent-free. Far from demonstrating the self-sufficiency and resolve of the individual, Thoreau’s experiment might be taken as exemplary of a kind of localized welfare system; one need not punch the clock at the local factory if one lives off the generosity and largess of family and friends. However, as we have seen increasingly in the United States in recent years, the receipt of corporate and other forms of welfare in no way prevents the recipients from bashing the government for offering support to others. The Republican Party’s adoption of the “We Built It” slogan in 2012 offers a tellingly Thoreauvian fantasy, one where it is possible to accept the public’s funding while insisting upon absolute independence from the commonweal.

Given the importance of a sense of place and of community to Weaver’s fantastic vision of a medieval heritage, such rampant individualism—an ideology subtending the basic neoliberal projection of free markets and autonomous economic actors—seems quite foreign. Indeed, it is odd to talk about Weaver as a forebear to contemporary conservatism. Certainly the economic neoliberalism which celebrates unfettered free markets and the geopolitical neoconservatism which glories in globalization and preemptive military engagements are a far cry from Weaver’s fanciful nostalgia for an idealistic feudalism founded upon rigid social hierarchies, chivalric codes of ethics, and a powerful, culture-shaping religion or religiosity.[47] In his own writings, we can see Weaver’s strong aversion to the emergent globalization and even nationalization, which he views as corrupting the properly regionalist values he favored. Weaver’s worldview would not have allowed him to embrace the preemptive war strategies championed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz during the various military conflicts of the past 30 years. Moreover, Weaver’s ardent defense of the humanities—recall his loathing for the educational and cultural aura of Texas A&M, now home to the George [H. W.] Bush Presidential Library—is entirely at odds with the views on higher education, the arts, philosophy, and “high” culture held by the most prominent and visible members of the G.O.P. today.  Yet, the sectarianism of Weaver’s view paved the way for contemporary neoconservative politics and policies. Weaver’s well-nigh Schmittian, Us-versus-Them antagonism, requires us to envision not merely a Western civilization opposed to its non-western rivals but a truer, more valuable “Southern” civilization against the putatively uncivilized rest of the United States. The loathsome, omnipresent discourse about “real” Americans and what constitutes them is a legacy of the Southern Agrarian traditions apotheosized by Weaver’s philosophy.

Indeed, the particular labels—conservative, neoconservative, neoliberal, and so forth—are not necessarily helpful in understanding the dominant political and cultural discourses in the United States in the twenty-first century. As Paul A. Bové has observed, “[m]any critics of the Far Right movement conservatism mischaracterize it. It is not an epiphenomenon of neoliberalism. In fact, the popular elements of this movement, of its electoral coalition, resent the economic and cultural consequences of neoliberalism and globalization in politics and culture.”[48] To many of the policies and even most of the ideas of the neoconservatives like Wolfowitz, Cheney, and both Presidents Bush, Weaver and his beloved Agrarians would almost certainly object. However, the cultural and intellectual foundations of the neoconservatives’ positions, not to mention the fact of their being elected or appointed to offices of great power in the first place, owes much to an ideological transformation of U.S. intellectual culture whose fons et origo may be found in the fantastic vision of a distinctively Southern exceptionalism.

One might well name this the australization of American politics, as the Southern section’s purportedly unique culture has tended, since the 1960s, to be more and more representative of a national conservative movement. This movement, which has become perhaps the most influential force within the Republican Party at a moment when the conservative politics has itself become more prominent in the United States, thus tends to be the dominant force in national, and increasingly international, politics as well. It should not be forgotten that the rightward shift even in the Democratic Party can itself be linked to this increasingly australized politics, as both Georgia’s Jimmy Carter and Arkansas’s Bill Clinton emerged nationally as the preferable, because more conservative, candidates who would stand up to the old-fashioned liberals in their own party (inevitably symbolized by Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, or Jesse Jackson).[49] In their commitment to economic growth, particularly that made possible by increasingly corporate or industrial development, these conservative Southern Democrats would have earned the agrarian-minded Weaver’s contempt, but their rhetorical and ideological commitments align far better with the agrarian discourse than did the expansive liberalism of the New Deal or the Great Society. Weaver would undoubtedly decry the rapid growth of the South’s population in recent decades, since that growth has been generated in large part by ever more industrial or urban development, but he would probably delight in seeing the rust of the Rust Belt as unionization, heavy industry, and traditional urbanism has declined in the North and Northeast. The shifting numbers of electoral votes in favor of Southern states is also a real consideration for any political or cultural program interested in preserving or expanding Southern “values” in the United States. The fall of the hated North, in this view, is almost as sweet as the South’s rising again.

The costs of this australization of American politics are incalculable, as may be inferred from the increasingly vicious public discourse with respect to all manner of things, including welfare and taxation, education, science, the environment, individual rights, foreign adventures, war, domestic surveillance (a form of paternalism), and so forth. As far back as 1941, W. J. Cash had concluded his study of The Mind of the South by noting the “characteristic vices” of that culture:

Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism—these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.[50]

Taken out of their original context, these words seem all too timely in the twenty-first century, with the events of Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 or Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015, among many other less spectacular and more pervasive examples, resounding throughout the body politic. In Cash’s final lines, he abjured any temptation to play the role of prophet, declaring that it would be “a brave man” who would venture definite prophecies, and it would be “a madman who would venture them in the face of the forces sweeping over the world in 1940.”[51] Bravery or madness notwithstanding, Cash likely could not have imagined the degree to which the characteristic vices of the South in his time could become so widespread to have become the characteristics of a national American “mind” tout court in the next century.

Moreover, as should be obvious, the australization of American politics is not simply a matter of political leaders or voters residing in the southern parts of the United States. The pervasiveness of a certain identifiably Southern cultural signifiers within mainstream political discourse, particularly in the more conservative members of the Republican Party but also throughout the public policy and electioneering rhetoric of both major parties, signals a victory for that fantastic or idealistic “mind and culture” so celebrated by Weaver and his Agrarian forebears. It is a terrifying prospect for many, but the vision of the intransigent Southern traditionalist now operating from a position of broad-based cultural and political power on a national, indeed an international, stage might be the apotheosis of Weaver’s grand historical investigation into the region’s purportedly distinctive past. As Weaver put it in a 1957 essay,

It may be that after a long period of trouble and hardship, brought on in my opinion by being more sinned against than sinning, this unyielding Southerner will emerge as a providential instrument for saving this nation. […] If that time should come, the nation as a whole would understand the spirit that marched with Lee and Jackson and charged with Pickett.[52]

For most people residing in the United States, including many of us in the South (like me, some of whose ancestors did march with these men in the early 1860s), the prospect of a neo-Confederate savior of the nation or world is horrifying, like a mythological monster assuming worldly power. Sifting through the ashes of the triumphant Southern Phoenix, we are likely to find much of value has been destroyed.

Notes

[1]  Quoted in Julian M. Pleasants and Augustus M. Burns III, Frank Porter Graham and the 1950 Senate Race in North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 183. On the term “dog-whistle politics,” see Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

[2] Richard M. Weaver, “Agrarianism in Exile,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, ed. George M. Curtis III and James J. Thompson Jr. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987), 40, 44.

[3] Weaver, “The Southern Phoenix,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, 17.

[4]  See Paul A. Bové, “Agriculture and Academe: America’s Southern Question,” in Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 113–142.

[5]  Recent events concerning the removal of the “Confederate Flag,” the notorious symbol of racism wielded by the KKK and others, from state capitols and other official sites in the South appears to be a surprising turn of events, although cynics could argue that, in turning attention away for gun violence and particularly violence against black citizens and other minorities, the flag issue has provided a convenient cover, allowing the media to ignore more urgent social problems in the wake of the Charleston massacre. Still, symbols are powerful, and the removal of this symbol is itself a hopeful sign as even conservative politicians and pundit have realized, all too late, what the embrace of the lost Confederacy has cost them on a moral level. See, e.g., Russ Douthat, “For the South, Against the Confederacy,” New York Times blog (June 24, 2015): http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/for-the-south-against-the-confederacy/?_r=0.

[6]  Donald Davidson, “The Vision of Richard Weaver: A Foreword,” in Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought, eds. George Core and M. E. Bradford (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968), 17.

[7] Weaver, “Up from Liberalism” [1958–59], in The Vision of Richard Weaver, ed. Joseph Scotchie (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 20.

[8]  See Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver, 1910–1963: A Life of the Mind (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 56 –58.

[9] Weaver, “Up from Liberalism,” 23.

[10]  Ibid., 28.

[11]  Joseph Scotchie, “Introduction: From Weaverville to Posterity,” in The Vision of Richard Weaver, 9–10.

[12]  Ibid., 9.

[13]  Weaver, “Up from Liberalism,” 31. Notwithstanding the use of the word “holocaust,” Weaver makes no mention of the Nazis or the concentration camps in this essay; rather, his example is “the abandonment of Finland by Britain and the United States” (31).

[14]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 2–3.

[15]  See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), 3. See also Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

[16]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 129.

[17]  Weaver, “On Setting the Clock Right,” In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, ed. Ted J. Smith III (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 559–566.

[18]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 131.

[19]  Ibid., 132.

[20]  Ibid., 148.

[21]  Ibid., 172.

[22]  Ibid., 187.

[23]  In a later essay, Weaver compares the difference between the American North and the South to that between the United States and England, France, or China. In the same essay, Weaver adds that “The South […] still looks among a man’s credentials for where he’s from, and not all places, even in the South, are equal. Before a Virginian, a North Carolinian is supposed to stand cap in hand. And faced with the hauteur of an old family from Charleston, South Carolina, even a Virginian may shuffle his feet and look uneasy.” See “The Southern Tradition,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver,  210, 225.

[24]  Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1950), 149. Apparently, many conservatives would not object to such a comparison. For example, in his history on the right-wing Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Lee Edwards approvingly begins by saying of its founder, “Frank Chodorov had been tilting against windmills all his life.” See Edwards, Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003), 1.

[25]  At no point does Weaver cite Cash’s The Mind of the South (originally published in 1941), which in this context must be seen as a sort of “absent presence” for Weaver and others who carried the torch for the Agrarians in the 1940s and beyond. The Mind of the South appeared while Weaver was working on his dissertation, and Weaver’s own study might even be seen as a tactical critique of, or at least alterative to, Cash’s celebrated work. See W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1991). Although these two native North Carolinian authors identify some of the same characteristics and even arrive at similar conclusions about the “mind of the South,” they also maintain rather different social and political positions. For one thing, Cash does not see a feudal or aristocratic Southern character as praiseworthy, whereas Weaver’s entire defense of the Southern tradition rests on his admiration for and allegiance toward the aristocratic virtues of the archetypal Southerner.

[26]  Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, 44.

[27]  One legitimate critique of Cash’s The Mind of the South was that it focused primarily on the attitudes and customary habits associated with Cash’s own Piedmont region of North Carolina (which happens to be my native region as well), thus underestimating the divergences to be found in the Tidewater zones to the east or the “Deep South” below and to the west. Weaver’s Southern Tradition at Bay does not limit its approach by regions, giving more or less equal space to views from all parts of the South, but it does severely restrict itself to materials best suited to make its argument with respect to a feudal system. Hence, Weaver tends to ignore the experiences of those who did not live on large estates or plantations, which is to say, Weaver omits the experiences of the vast majority of Southerners. If Cash’s study could be faulted for its Mencken-esque journalistic techniques—Cash’s original article, “The Mind of the South,” did appear in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, after all—and its lack of intellectual rigor, Weaver’s more academic study (it was a PhD dissertation, of course), in its questionable method and especially in its selectivity, also raises doubts about the “mind” it purports to lay bare.

[28]  Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, 387.

[29]  Ibid., 396.

[30]  Ibid., 391.

[31]  See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–127.

[32]  Weaver’s advisor had been the cultural historian, literary critic, and biographer Arlin Turner, but Brooks stepped in only near the end to serve as the head of Weaver’s thesis committee. In his biography, Young reports that “Weaver was in the final stages of writing his dissertation when Turner left LSU to take a position at Duke University; Cleanth Brooks became his advisor at that point and oversaw the work to its conclusion” (78). However, as far as I can tell, Turner did not arrive at Duke until 1953, ten years after Weaver received his Ph.D. degree. The more likely reason for the change in advisor, as Fred Douglas Young writes, was that Turner was “called up for service in the U.S. Navy,” which is why Weaver asked Brooks to serve as dissertation director at the last minute (see Young, Richard M. Weaver, 67). I am not prepared to speculate on the relationship between teacher and student, but I might note that Turner, a native Texan who wrote a well-regarded biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne and later became the editor of American Literature, likely did not share his former student’s strictly sectarian views with respect to the opposed and irreconcilable cultures of the North and the South.

[33]  See Weaver, The Southern Tradition at Bay, 41, 231–275.

[34]  Ibid., 30.

[35]  Although it lies well outside the scope of the present essay, it would be interesting to consider the other side of Weaver’s celebratory medievalism by looking a Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974). Genovese also identifies a patriarchal, paternalistic society in which religion or religiosity played a crucial role, but he focuses attention on the essential contributions of the slaves in forming this distinctively Southern culture. Genovese, then a Marxist historian influenced by Gramsci, among others, later became a notoriously conservative thinker in his own right, a shift that coincided—perhaps not coincidentally?—with his growing interest in the Agrarians of the I’ll Take My Stand era, which culminated in a book whose title could have come directly from Weaver’s own pen: see Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

[36]  Ibid., 55–57.

[37]  Ibid., 259. Being “won away” is, for Weaver, a sign of the servant’s delusion. Indeed, this line follows directly from a section which concluded that “the blacks suffered as much maltreatment as the whites, the [Union] soldiery being as ready to snatch the silver watch of the slave as the gold one of his master” (258).

[38]  Ibid., 261.

[39]  Ibid., 173. Weaver lists a number of postbellum incidents, including “disturbing reports of Negro voodooism,” as evidence that Southern blacks, now lacking the beneficial effects of a civilizing servitude, would “soon relapse into savagery” (261–262).

[40]  Incidentally, Weaver’s overall assessment of women’s rights is not much more salutary than his position on civil rights for persons of color, at least with respect to the decline of the West. In Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver laments that, although “[w]omen would seem to be the natural ally in any campaign to reverse” the anti-chivalric modern trends that have rendered Western civilization so spiritually vacant, in fact, they have not. “After the gentlemen went, the lady had to go too. No longer protected, the woman now has her career, in which she makes a drab pilgrimage from two-room apartment to job to divorce court” (180). Without chivalry, Weaver concludes, there can be no ladies.

[41]  See The Southern Tradition at Bay, 268.

[42]  Ibid., 36–37.

[43]  Ibid., 35.

[44]  Quoted in Alexander P. Lamis, “The Two-Party South: From the 1960s to the 1990s,” in Southern Politics in the 1990s, ed. Alexander P. Lamis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 8.

[45]  Contrast this view with the lament by which Albert D. Kirwan chooses to conclude his near-contemporaneous, 1951 study of postbellum Mississippi politics: “As for the Negro, whose presence in such large numbers in Mississippi has given such a distinctive influence to its politics, his lot did not change throughout this period. No one thought of him save to hold him down. No one sought to improve him. […] He was and is the neglected man in Mississippi, though not the forgotten man.” See Kirwan, The Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1875–1925 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 314.

[46]  Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, 132. Thoreau seems to be the one Yankee whom Weaver is willing to consider a non-barbarian. See also The Southern Tradition at Bay, 41: “Southerners apply the term ‘Yankee’ as the Greeks did ‘barbarian.’ The kinship of ideas cannot be overlooked.”

[47]  Space does not permit a full consideration of the matter, but Weaver’s embrace of a certain Southern “non-creedal religiosity” would not necessarily seem to fit easily with the rise of the religious right in the 1980s and beyond, particularly when considering the prominence of certain denominations and organization, like the Southern Baptist Convention, in political and cultural debates of recent decades. However, one might also recognize the apparently Southern accent with which must of the new political religiosity has been voiced on a national level, which suggests another aspect of the australization of American politics.

[48]  Paul A. Bové, A More Conservative Place: Intellectual Culture in the Bush Era (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), 10.

[49]  Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, made his name nationally as the Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization founded in the aftermath of the 1984 Reagan re-election landslide. The D.L.C. was established the express aim of promoting more conservative policies within the Party and nationally, and its leadership largely consisted of Southerners, not coincidentally.

[50]  Cash, The Mind of the South, 428–429.

[51]  Ibid., 429.

[52]  Weaver, “The South and the American Union,” in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, 256.

by David Thomas

The West welcomed East Germany to the end-of-history by flying in David Hasselhoff for Berlin’s New Year celebrations. From the top of the fallen wall, clad in a pulsing light-spangled jacket, Hasselhoff regaled half a million people with the period’s unofficial anthem, “Looking for Freedom.” It is still, to date, one of Germany’s bestselling songs.

Two years earlier, as Margaret Thatcher closed in on her second re-election, Hot Chocolate’s former front man, Errol Brown, had also lent his weight to the liberal cause. During the 1987 Conservative Party Conference, the disco hitmaker stepped up to the podium and led the entire caucus in a rousing rendition of John Lennon’s pop-socialist anthem “Imagine” (Wilson 2013: 41):

   Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world

You, you may say I’m a dreamer,

But I’m not the only one

I hope some day you’ll join us

And the world will live as one           

Little wonder that irony was the order of the day. Confident in their unassailable position, and wryly indulgent of the counterculture’s crabby idealism, the architects of globalization rested content on their laurels. There was much to celebrate. Liberal democracy had vaulted over the last great hurdle on its pathway to perpetual peace. Francis Fukuyama captured the mood as he sketched out the lineaments of his wildly popular end-of-history thesis:

What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (Fukuyama 1989: 4)

The course of world events allowed Fukuyama to stand by this claim for almost thirty years. Writing in 2007, on the very cusp of the 2008 financial crisis, he offered a confident and largely unqualified reassertion of his fundamental argument:

I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a ‘post-historical’ world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military. (Fukuyama 2007)

Yet ten years on – as Fukuyama himself has conceded – the same claim has begun to leave behind a bad taste in the mouth. Walls are in vogue again. And as a fragile European Union teeters on the brink of fragmentation, the new political trajectory of the United States seems the more reliable harbinger of the political futures that await us, futures overshadowed by a resurgence of rightwing authoritarianism and a reactive cascade of unpredictable international statecraft. Indeed, as Trump has ridden a wave of anti-establishment discontent into the White House, “Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military” now looms large over the old effort to “transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law.”

Even prior to Brexit and Trump’s election, the new tenor of the times was starting to emerge. As armed guards rolled out the checkpoints and the razor wire, as miles of ad hoc barrier unwound across Europe, it became apparent that the open borders of globalization belonged to another era. The Schengen Agreement was a thing of the past, a bitterly regretted utopian folly. And as the specter of Trump’s “great, great wall” hovered at the outer edge of possibility, it was becoming clearer that other dreams were dying too: You could keep your hungry, your poor, your tired, there was no room for them here.

The truth was, however, these high-walled fever dreams had been under construction for some time. The work had never really stopped. Long before the “great wall” was rumored, and even as the old Iron Curtain came crashing down, the world’s wealthy had peered out from behind their battlements in the sky. This is Mike Davis writing in the mid-1980s:

According to its advance publicity, Trump Castle will be a medievalized Bonaventure, with six coned and crenellated cylinders, plated in gold leaf, and surrounded by a real moat with drawbridges. These current designs for fortified skyscrapers indicate a vogue for battlements not seen since the great armoury boom that followed the Labour Rebellion of 1877. In so doing, they also signal the coercive intent of postmodernist architecture in its ambition, not to hegemonize the city in the fashion of the great modernist buildings, but rather to polarize it into radically antagonistic spaces. (Davis 1985: 112-3)

When Davis wrote, he would probably have been surprised to learn that the proposed owner-occupant of this “medievalised Bonaventure” would one day descend in his golden elevator to lead a populist insurgency against “out-of-touch elites.” He would probably have been less surprised to hear that when he came, he came promising the Rust Belt’s dispossessed fortifications and battlements of their own.

To understand the success of the strategy, and to understand the strange mismatch of class interests that defines the Trump mandate, one has to dig beneath the concrete partitions of the “postmodern” city and search within the rusting husk of the American factory system to grasp the hidden economic imperatives and political contingencies that produced deindustrialization and financialization as coeval phenomenon. Here – as many of us are belatedly beginning to realize – Robert Brenner’s history of postwar economic development proves an indispensable resource.

Much of Brenner’s later work has focused on the turbulent transition from the global economy’s belle époque – the period of unprecedented economic dynamism the lasted from the close of the war to the early 1970s – to the “long downturn” that has followed in its wake. His work has drawn attention to a progressive reallocation of capital investments away from industrial manufacturing and into the so-called FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) sector. In Brenner’s account of the history, as emerging industrial economies began contesting American manufacturing market dominance struggle for market share reached such a pitch of intensity that companies became accustomed to operating with radically reduced profit margins.

In response to a corresponding decline in rates of return, investors became shyer of the manufacturing sector and sought to diversify their portfolios. And as fallow capital sought new routes to profit the structural import of the FIRE sector intensified. From the late 1970s through to the first decade of the new millennium the finance industry’s signature methods and investment strategies became more and more computationally sophisticated and systemically pervasive. Among the symptoms of the FIRE sector’s new significance was the rapid reconstitution of urban space that Davis describes. And it was, of course, in the context of the FIRE sector’s expansion that Trump emerged as the popular face of the resurgent real estate industry, whose towering skylines – so adored by Hollywood – became totemic of American greatness in its autumnal phase.

For the better part of three decades, this increasingly baroque financial system succeeded in restoring dynamism to the world economy, propelling the US beyond a sputtering Soviet regime into the position of uncontested global hegemon. And as the oil and stagflation crises retreated from view, it is perhaps not that surprising that faith in the FIRE sector’s new methods became so strong that creditors began to think themselves so cybernetically insured against loss that they lent in increasingly blithe and unstinting fashion.

It was in this climate of technocratic hubris that Fukuyama sketched out his thesis, one that expressed the dominant structure of feeling then prevailing in elite circles: The common sense of the period all but dictated that a universal “evolutionary pattern” was just then culminating in the globalization of liberal democracy, as “technologically driven capitalism … free[ed itself] of internal contradictions” (Fukuyama 1993: 91; xi).

These dreams seem all the more ironic now that one of the FIRE sector’s most notorious figures has begun to wreak havoc with the signal institutions of liberal democracy, questioning the accuracy of the ballot, wielding executive orders in madcap and draconian fashion, intimidating the judiciary, and attempting to bludgeon the free press into abject submission. The ironies deepen when we recall that it was the increasingly risky expansion of the FIRE sector that triggered the 2008 financial crisis, as the securitization of subprime mortgages opened the door to that last round of dispossession that underlies so much of today’s anti-establishment discontent.

The ramifying consequences of the 2008 financial crisis were evident in this electoral cycle as we saw the two candidates periodically breaking away from the familiar battery of appeals to the middle-class homeowner, to take time to address a dispossessed and precariously employed “working class” who had swelled to such an extent that their political significance could no longer be ignored.

Yet in its resurrection the figure of the worker seemed to have undergone a subtle transformation. In its return to the mainstage of electoral politics, talk of the worker functioned less as a metonym for the workers movement, and more as a shorthand for the plight of the downwardly mobile “worker-citizen,” one who could no longer count on social state protections, whose stake in the real estate market was gone or imperiled, but who was still the bearer of the full legal rights and privileges of the citizen.

To understand the increasingly reactionary disposition of this citizen-worker we have to grasp the long downturn’s ongoing effects on the technical and demographic composition of the real economy. This effort again finds us tacking back to the 1970s, to the last great crisis in the capitalist world system, when attempts to restore dynamism to the global economy saw industrial capital fighting to break free of the constraints that social democracy had placed on its agency, unleashing a two-pronged assault on labor. Capital flight saw manufacturing plants flee the blue-collar heartlands, as industry reconstituted its industrial base in the emerging economies where it could exploit a labor force that enjoyed far fewer legal protections. And at one and the same time as the Thatcher and Reagan administrations drove through the legislation that facilitated and policed this new round of capital flight – a series of legislative actions that also undergirded the FIRE sector’s emergence as the new motor of economic dynamism – manufacturers also fended off the labor movement from within, introducing a new round of automation that saw labor’s relative share in the productive process decline, further securing factories against sabotage and slowdown.

Research collective Endnotes sums up the prevailing political fallout of this double-fronted assault:

Industrial output continues to swell, but is no longer associated with rapid increases in industrial employment … In this context, masses of proletarians, particularly in countries with young workforces, are not finding steady work; many of them have been shunted from the labour market, surviving only by means of informal economic activity (Endnotes 2015)

The use of the term “shunted” here evokes the language of Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis. And in tracking the early effects of this “shunting from the labour market” Hall identified that the policing of deindustrialization’s dispossessed broke differentially along racial lines. As the economy contracted, white Britons closed ranks, consigning immigrant communities to a greater share of the joblessness that capital flight was leaving behind it. Writing that race was “one of the main mechanisms, by which, inside and outside the work-place itself, th[e] reproduction of an internally divided labour force [was] accomplished” (Hall et al. 1982 [1978]: 346), Hall detailed the advantages that the dominant classes gleaned from these divisions:

The ‘benefits’ … must therefore be reckoned to include not only the direct and indirect exploitation of the colonial economies overseas, and the vital supplement which this colonial work-force made to the indigenous labour force in the period of economic expansion, but also the internal divisions and conflicts which have kept that labour force segregated along racial lines in a period of economic recession and decline – at a time when the unity of the class as a whole, alone, could have pushed the country into an economic ‘solution’ other than that of unemployment, short-time, cuts in the wage packet and the social wage. (Hall et al. 1982: 346)

Having identified these developing tendencies – and their role in keeping the “unity of the class as a whole” at bay – Hall went on to explore how black Britons had begun to adapt to their entrapment in the grey and black economies. Explaining the concept of hustling for the benefit of a predominantly white readership, he wrote:

The hustle is as common, necessary and familiar a survival strategy for ‘colony’ dweller’s as it is alien and strange to those who know nothing of it … Hustlers live by their wits. So they are obliged to move around from one terrain to another, to desert old hustles and set up new ones in order to stay in the game. From time to time, ‘the game’ may involve rackets, pimping, or petty theft. But hustlers are also the people who sustain the connections and keep the infrastructure of ‘colony’ life intact. They are people who always know somebody, who can get things done, have access to scarce goods, who can ‘deal’ and service the less-respectable ‘needs’ of the respectable end of ‘colony’ society. They hang out around the clubs, organise the blues parties, set the domino game up, know what day the illegal white rum distilleries produce. They work the system; they also make it work … When the going is good, hustlers are men about the street with style, visibly displaying their temporary good fortune: ‘cool cats.’ (Hall et al. 1982: 351-2)

Of course in the days since he offered this account, hip hop’s rise to pop cultural dominance has made the swaggering resourcefulness of the hustler part of the cultural fabric of millennial experience. Few under the age of forty are not intimately familiar with hip hop’s virtuosic chronicling of Black America’s experience of the racialized policing of the long downturn. Part of the enduring value of Hall’s work lies in its ability to tie hip hop’s signature tropes and stances to the determinations against which they emerged, as the policing of capital’s real movement subjected the black proletariat to the worst effects of this new round of capital flight and automation.

Indeed, in retrospect, it seems that NWA, rather than Hasselhoff, would have been a fitter avatar of the inequities that globalization scattered in its wake as it ground the labor movement beneath its heel. For while Hasselhoff’s words at the Berlin Wall implied that freedom had descended on the former Soviet bloc in a moment of decisive apotheosis, in NWA’s language freedom was difficult to attain; indeed, it was wrestled from the system in the context of an unremitting struggle with occupying powers determined to maintain existing inequities:

Fucking with me cause I’m a teenager

With a little bit of gold and a pager

Searching my car, looking for the product

Thinking every nigga is selling narcotics

You’d rather see me in the pen

Than me and Lorenzo rolling in a Benz-o

In the crosshairs of the carceral state it was more than evident that history and the struggle for emancipation was far from over.

Still, when Hall sketched out his typology of the hustler he, like Davis, would probably have been surprised by the uncanniness of subsequent developments. For at one and the same time as policing practices trended along the lines he identified – with a massively disproportionate number of black Americans subject to incarceration and unemployment – we also saw hip hop’s hustler swagger its way deep into the heart of the American culture industry. So deep was the penetration that one of hip hop’s most celebrated dons would one day take to the stage of Carnegie Hall, backed by a 36-piece orchestra, in a full tuxedo and tie, to make a boast of a rags-to-riches tale that dwarfed anything that Dickens ever conceived:

Momma ain’t raised no fool

Put me anywhere on God’s green earth,

I’ll triple my worth

Motherfucker, I, will, not, lose

I sell ice in the winter, I sell fire in hell

I am a hustler baby, I’ll sell water to a well

I was born to get cake, move on and switch states

Cop the coupe with the roof, gone and switch plates

The epic scale of Jay Z’s biography – from resourceful street kid slinging rocks on the corner, to owner of music streaming service valued at $600 million – charts one self-defined hustler’s traversal of the vast wealth disparities that have characterized the global economy in the wake of the belle époque.

We might pause for a moment here to consider the sociological significance of hip hop’s massive contemporary appeal. Indeed, it might not be too much of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that part of what has driven these accounts of life in the game to the top of the Hot 100 is precisely the more widespread generalization of the conditions of precarity and disenfranchisement that this genre has spent the bulk of its existence recounting and resisting. As the state continues to scale back on the welfarist commitments of the postwar order, and as yet another wave of automation sees the world system further unable to absorb labour into the productive process, a life in the black or grey economy is a very real prospect for increasing numbers of the world’s people. Endnotes write at another juncture:

The social links that hold people together in the modern world, even if in positions of subjugation, are fraying, and in some places, have broken entirely. All of this is taking place on a planet that is heating up, with concentrations of greenhouse gases rising rapidly since 1950. The connection between global warming and swelling industrial output is clear. The factory system is not the kernel of a future society, but a machine producing no-future. (Endnotes 2015)

A poignant statement in light of the last electoral cycle, as the Trump campaign implicitly configured the 1950s “factory system” as the locus of America’s lost greatness, promising to “return” the US to a weird Disneyland recapitulation of its Fordist heyday. And as Trump’s executive actions against environmental and energy agencies have demonstrated in the weeks since his inauguration, this back-to-the-future ride will not tolerate any slowdown or inhibition of its propulsive thrust toward “no-future.”

Endnotes write that today’s left is prone to approach the worker’s movement with the “latecomers’ melancholy reverence” (Endnotes 2015) – a striking phrase that eerily anticipates Trump’s appeal to America’s erstwhile greatness. And these affinities seem capable of identifying a key problematic that has handed the Rust Belt over to Trump, and the British postindustrial zones to the Leave Campaign. For while the architects of globalization succeeded in decimating the worker’s movement, they were markedly less successful in their efforts to subordinate the sovereignty of the nation state to the rigors of transnational law. And thus as citizen-workers look for protection against immiseration, many seem increasingly willing to approve statist measures to both expel noncitizens who “unfairly compete” for scarce jobs, and introduce protectionist regimes designed to shield the nativist worker from the threat of international competition. Unable to organize themselves in a united internationalist front against exploitation, it is hardly surprising that the downwardly mobile worker-citizens of today are instead willing to fall back on the state’s promises to negotiate favorable “deals” on their behalf.

The background to these tendencies seems to be the declining viability of the global development narrative that has attended postwar international policymaking since the Bretton Woods Agreement. In the context of secular stagnation and economic contraction, advanced economies have been forced to rely on our era’s signature admixture of debt and austerity, scaling back on welfarist provisions even as the nation state continues to function as a macroeconomic stimulator and a guarantor of private property. And increasingly, as development of the world system’s “peripheral” regions also stalls (Barone 2015), the core economies appear to be bracing themselves to resist a rising tide of economic and climate migration. It seems that population growth, economic growth, and industrial productivity have fallen out of sync to such a profound extent that we are increasingly “experiencing modernization of industry without modernity’s attendant social forms: without, that is, the institutional, social, cultural features associated with development, such as universal public education, democratic state institutions” and the humanitarian defense of human rights (Brouillette and Thomas 2016: 511).

Yet rather than identify the newness of this geopolitical situation, political discourse on these matters more often coalesces around an introverted and melancholic nationalism that understands the immiseration of the worker-citizen in relation to vague but impassioned narratives of national decline. It is telling that Trump’s notorious baseball cap evokes the popular affluence of the belle époque through the allusive figure of “greatness,” a sleight of hand that evades the tricky question of how exactly one goes about turning back the clock on the technological development of the forces of production. For even if Trump’s protectionist policies do manage to lure back some manufacturing plants, the fixed to variable capital ratio will not be as favorable as it was back in the days when America was “great,” which is to say, when it was Fordist.

Appeals to the figure of the precarious citizen-worker – more often figured in the guise of Thatcher’s “individual, and his family” – thus became a common feature of both campaigns. Yet in Clinton’s case we witnessed the strange spectacle of an establishment standard-bearer attempting to patch together, ad hoc, a fuzzily defined platform that alternately gestured toward the maintenance of the status quo, and toward the construction of a newly “social democratic” pluralism. Trump, meanwhile, staked out a clearly defined appeal to white nativist protectionism, one that was capable of uniting a large cross section of white America around the prospect of a Fordist “restoration,” one that sought to assert the rights and security of the white worker-citizen in the face of intensifying global economic malaise.

In so doing, the Trump campaign amplified a strategy that has been a mainstay of advanced economies in times of crisis throughout the postwar period. Hall describes this strategy in relation to the structural function that migrant workers performed for British industry from the early-1950s to the mid-1970s:

In the early 1950s, when British industry was expanding and undermanned, labour was sucked in from the surplus labour of the Caribbean and Asian subcontinent. The correlation in this period between numbers of immigrant workers and employment vacancies is uncannily close. In periods of recession, and especially in the present phase, the numbers of immigrants have fallen; fewer are coming in, and a higher proportion of those already here are shunted into unemployment. In short, the ‘supply’ of black labour in employment has risen and fallen in direct relation to the needs of British capital. (Hall et al. 1982: 343)

On the one hand, Trump’s wall, Brexit, and the broader European resistance to the Schengen Agreement, faithfully reproduce the pattern that Hall identified, as global conditions of economic contraction have triggered a rising tide of anti-immigration policies.

Yet what separates the dynamics that Hall describes from those that are unfolding around us now, is the extent to which Trump’s anti-immigration policies are also a feature of a larger enthnonationalist projectionist program, one that signals a full-blooded return to the so-called “beggar-thy-neighbor” economic strategies that last openly prevailed prior to the advent of the Bretton Woods Agreement.

Writing in 1937, British economist Joan Robinson argued that “in times of worldwide unemployment, it is indeed possible for one country to increase its employment and total output by increasing its trade balance at the expense of other countries. She coined the phrase ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ to describe such policies” (Pasinetti 2008 [1987]). Robinson itemized four beggar-thy-neighbor economic weapons: wage reductions, officially induced exchange depreciation, export subsidies, and import restrictions. In the last month the US government has publicly evoked most, if not all, of these weapons, either accusing other governments of using them against the US, or signaling its intention to use them itself.[i] It is worth stressing that this is more of an escalation of already-existing dynamics than a complete bolt out of the blue – i.e. beggar-thy-neighbor strategies have been quietly on the rise for a decade or more (Barone 2015) – but the additional level of unvarnished aggression that Trump has introduced into the picture cannot but result in further escalations. The underlying dynamic is one in which – under the prevailing conditions of secular stagnation – economic growth risks becoming a zero-sum game, such that the growth of one nation is always talking place at the expense of another.

Here Robinson’s explanation of the likely geopolitical fallout of beggar-thy-neighbor economics is worth remembering. Robinson wrote that “as soon as one country succeeds in increasing its trade balance at the expense of the rest, others retaliate” and among the economic effects of this cycle of retaliation is a reduced volume of international trade (Robinson 1947, 156).  There are affective consequences to these cycles of retaliation and these increasingly isolationist tendencies. Indeed, Robinson cautions that such policies can “add fuel to the fire” of economic nationalism, as trade wars push nations to the brink of open hostilities (Robinson 1947: 157).

It should be noted that the intellectual circles that fostered this new ethnonationalism are not averse to an escalation of international armed conflict. Indeed, Steve Bannon is on record as thinking a war with China “inevitable” within the next ten years (Hass 2017). Much like Russia’s Alexander Dugin, Bannon subscribes to a world-historical vision that anticipates the onset of another great war, one that will serve as the crucible from which a revived Judeo-Christian culture will emerge victorious:

But I strongly believe that whatever the causes of the current drive to the caliphate was — and we can debate them, and people can try to deconstruct them — we have to face a very unpleasant fact. And that unpleasant fact is that there is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act (qtd. Feder 2016)

We are, at this juncture, a long way from the condition of universal post-historical secularism that Fukuyama anticipated. Indeed, the surprisingly pervasive appeal of Dugin and Bannon’s millennial creeds seems to have done much to consolidate Trump’s white American base, where a paranoiac strain of conservative religiosity has gained a powerful foothold. In a widely circulated address to a Vatican conference, Bannon appealed to the old counter-reformation concept of the “Church Militant” in an effort to recruit foot soldiers for an apocalyptic culture war, one that was to unfold, simultaneously, on domestic and geopolitical fronts:

And we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict, of which if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs, but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting, that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years. (qtd. Feder 2016)

On the international stage, the prime bête noire was the “new barbarity” of “jihadist Islamic fascism” (qtd. Feder 2016). Yet in the same speech in which he made use of this profoundly ironic terminology, Bannon also trained his ire on the architects of globalization, producing a strange taxonomy of “capitalisms” that distinguished between the “enlightened capitalism” of the “Judeo-Christian West,” and the new “crony capitalism” of Davos, one that a “younger generation” had “gravitate[d] to under this kind of rubric of personal freedom” (qtd. Feder 2016).

As Bannon’s remarks make plain, conservative America’s Christianity and its post-Fordist nostalgia are now all tangled up in each other in ways that speak both to the impact that automation and deindustrialization have had on traditional gender norms, and to the much more widely pervasive and ambient sense of melancholy that results from living under the setting sun of a declining hegemon. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the extinction of the blue-collar “oedipal wage,” and the corresponding structural obsolescence of the “traditional” nuclear family, have been key catalysts of the US’s culture wars. For while conservatives have targeted changing gender norms as “dangerous” symptom of liberalism’s lapsarian hubris, what is actually taking place is arguably much better understood as another case of all that was solid melting into air. Sarah Brouillette puts the matter this way:

In our current situation of economic turmoil and stagnation, the reproduction of productive labor in couple-based households is no longer a necessity everywhere –indeed, in some countries, the difficulty of keeping people working and keeping the unemployed engaged in work-like activities worries governments greatly, hence conversations about the possibility of a Universal Basic Income. At the same time, an expanding service sector handles some of what used to keep people too busy to develop multiple relationships: housekeeping, childrearing, and elder care, for example. Under these circumstances, it is more possible than ever for ‘alternative’ ways of being to come to the fore, with some even achieving mainstream respectability: think gay marriage, affective disinvestment in parenting, non-couple coparenting, moving back in with your parents, and ‘conscious uncoupling.’ Flip the coin, and the dwindling of the blue-collar industrial workforce, the expansion of domestic and affective caring work in the service sector, and the creeping obsolescence of the traditional nuclear family, have been crucial drivers of the hyper-conservative Men’s Rights Activist or ‘alt-right’ masculinist backlash against changing norms. (Brouillette 2017)

This is not, however, how this would-be Church Militant understands the situation. And under the leadership of figures like Bannon it has taken up the project of trying to discipline gender norms back into alignment with its particular hierarchy of values and prohibitions, a project that reveals a latently theocratic dimension to the American and Russian branches of ethnonationalism.

Indeed, insofar as the Trump administration continues to signal its commitment to a new counter-reformation – via the metonyms of its opposition to abortion, trans rights, and gay marriage, and its virulent hostility to Islam – it can count on a large base of support among white American Christians, many of whom seem willing to overlook the refugee camps, the prisons, and the ecocide, just so long as gender norms and national holidays are better aligned with the niceties of canon law. The Trump era thus seems set to catalyze a struggle for the soul of Christianity, as clericalist traditionalists – ever vulnerable to allure of state power – do battle with a charismatic and decidedly anti-clericalist, anti-capitalist Pope:

In one of the cardinal’s antechambers, amid religious statues and book-lined walls, Cardinal Burke and Mr. Bannon – who is now President Trump’s anti-establishment eminence – bonded over their shared worldview. They saw Islam as threatening to overrun a prostrate West weakened by the erosion of traditional Christian values, and viewed themselves as unjustly ostracized by out-of-touch political elites. ‘When you recognize someone who has sacrificed in order to remain true to his principles and who is fighting the same kind of battles in the cultural arena, in a different section of the battlefield, I’m not surprised there is a meeting of hearts,’ said Benjamin Harnwell, a confidant of Cardinal Burke who arranged the 2014 meeting. (Pierce 2017)

And thus as the Trump admiration attempts to consolidates its base, it seems set to lean hard on the far right flank of conservative Christianity, as it positions its reactionary, xenophobic, and ecocidal mandate as a noble crusade to save “the West” from external and internal enemies. Early signs suggest that attacks on the press and the liberal academy will intensify in the coming days, as Bannon and company turn their attention to the “enemies within.” The structural position of the press and the academy thus seems set to undergo a seismic shift. Accustomed to offering ambivalent but compliant critiques of neoliberal globalism, the principle organs of the bourgeois sociolect now find themselves thrust into a battle that they had thought consigned to the annals of history, undertaking harried resistance on terrain that is not of their own choosing. The radicalization of the press is already underway as we pass through the looking glass into a world where Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan join The Guardian in drumming up support for a general strike. And as the Trump administration’s cuts to the NEA and NEH budget take hold, it appears that the liberal humanist academy will have little choice but to join the fray, drawing its post-critical turn to a panicked conclusion.

It seems that for those who have been shielded from the harsher effects of globalization, it is hard not to feel nostalgic for the days when it was possible to indulge – however ambivalently – in Fukuyama’s dream. Where we go from here is extremely unclear, and one obviously feels dwarfed by the massive scale of these developments. But I suspect we should not spend too long grieving the loss of Fukuyama’s political horizon, for it helped to bring us to the place where we now stand, occluding the intensifying inequities that have resulted from the long downturn, developments that have opened the door to this new round of ethnonationalist insurgency. The Trump administration’s erratic brand of nascent fascism is a very real and present danger, one that we would be naive not to resist by whatever means we are able, but we also have to keep firmly in mind that this administration is not the sole source of our problems. We are in the grip of another of the violent and eruptive crises that capitalism has, throughout its long history, repeatedly thrust upon us.

And if we find ourselves still burning a candle for some vestige of that dream of unity that Lennon cribbed from the chauvinistic language of the postwar reconstruction, then that may entail putting ourselves on the line in ways that we have been little accustomed to do in recent years. The fight is coming to us whether we like it or not. And in fighting back we will need to rediscover political horizons that extend far beyond the concerns of the individual and his family.

The value of an individual life a credo they taught us

to instill fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’

a fog in our eyes, we are

endless as the sea, not separate, we die

a million times a day, we are born

a million times, each breath life and death:

get up, put on your shoes, get

started, someone will finish     (di Prima 2007 [1971]: 8)

David Thomas is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholar in the Department of English at Carleton University. His thesis explores narrative culture in post-workerist Britain, and unfolds around the twin foci of class and climate change.

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Notes

[i] For examples of the Trump administration’s remarks on currency devaluation see:

http://asia.nikkei.com/Markets/Currencies/Trump-singles-out-Japan-China-Germany-for-currency-attack; and for their current approach to export subsidies, and import restrictions consult: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/02/economist-explains-9 and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38764079