“Now everybody—”: Pynchon, Hegel, and the Caesura of Modernity

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the-mystery-of-a-summer-night-1892
Edvard Munch, The Mystery of a Summer Night (1892).

The film has broken, the projection bulb burned out, leaving imprinted in the corneas of the audience a vision of the angel of death, a portent of the missile which hangs in that moment above the theatre, its arrival inaugurated by a brief hymn and a narratorial interjection cut short by the rocket’s descent.

“And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and forever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t.

There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to you, or to reach between your own cold legs … or, if song must find you, here’s one They never taught anyone to sing, a hymn by William Slothrop, centuries forgotten and out of print, sung to a simple and pleasant air of the period. Follow the bouncing ball:

There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret’rite one…
Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road,
All through our crippl’d Zone,
With a face on ev’ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev’ry stone. …

Now everybody—”

(GR, p. 760).

Implicitly, the final scene of Gravity’s Rainbow returns us to the opening scene of the novel, when a screaming comes across the sky, a sound we have heard before though we did not recognise it at the time. Now the roar of the rocket comes belatedly to our attention, though it evades our senses: moving faster than sound, the tip of the rocket reaches us ahead of its announcement—though in a double-inversion its arrival was already announced on the first page. What is going on? The event is declared ahead of its realisation; the declaration is only recognised after its moment of realisation is missed. We will return to this double disjunction of time in due course.

Continue reading ““Now everybody—”: Pynchon, Hegel, and the Caesura of Modernity” →

Beyond the Law: Deleuze and Guattari’s System of Ethical Life

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1200_1490700192La_Junta_de_Filipinas-1
Francisco de Goya, The Junta of the Philippines, c.1815.

In the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus and in the “Treatise on Nomadology” that takes up chapters twelve and thirteen of A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari chart the development of the state as an ‘apparatus of capture’ that imposes on social life its system of legal codes. Although the content of these texts is largely historical, their composition does not conform to either the standards of narrative history or reflective historiography. That is, Deleuze and Guattari do not recount a series of past events or attempt to systematise the rules that govern historical knowledge. Instead, they utilise historical material not for its own sake but to furnish their theoretical account of the core institutions of capitalist modernity. Their approach produces not a history but a genealogy of the social relations of the present, which eschews the historical view of the past as a domain of facts and attempts a retrospective reconstruction of the conditions that made those relations necessary.[1] Aside from uncovering the inner logic of the state, the goal of these works is to exposit the positions of nomads, war-machines, and non-state peoples such that a standpoint beyond the state becomes possible. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari’s genealogical exposition proceeds from pre-state society, to state society, to global capitalism as three stages each containing the seeds of the stage that follows, whereas in A Thousand Plateaus this framework is further emptied of explicit historical referents so that the primordial structures of state, law, and economy may be viewed through the intervening millennia.

Offering one historiographic comment on the method of their exposition, Deleuze and Guattari note that their “universal history is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical.”[2] With each of these terms in mind, it should be no surprise that, despite their best intentions, Deleuze and Guattari’s genealogical project bears some formal similarities with the phenomenological approach of Hegel. Concerning Hegel’s universal history we can also say that it is retrospective, being the conceptual reconstruction and systematisation of the past stages of Spirit, as well as ironic in its eye for dialectical reversals, and even contingent in its recognition of the precarious and partial forms that Spirit takes in its long journey toward the absolute. But beyond these formal analogies, it is the critical element of Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history that makes common cause with that of Hegel, for whom the work of phenomenology is not that of explaining or justifying the existence of its object, but of showing how it fails to complete itself, how it exists in a self-contradictory state, and how it persists even in this tendency toward self-abnegation.

Indeed, if the problem for Deleuze and Guattari is not the historical question of giving an account of the emergence of the capitalist state but the theoretical question of locating the fractures within its present globalised totality, this question is one that finds a clear precursor in the works of Hegel. Specifically, it is in the main precursor text to the Phenomenology of Spirit, a manuscript posthumously titled the System of Ethical Life, that Hegel attempts his own critique of the legal state as a system of relations that prevent the realisation of absolute ethical life. In a series of quasi-historical stages, which as we will see map neatly onto the key moments of Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history, Hegel’s System of Ethical Life attempts to describe the composition of the legal state, to identify the nomadic forces that transverse it, and to locate routes of escape from the conceptual order of abstract legality. Though the System was never finished, and appears to have been abandoned at the threshold of its exposition of absolute spirit, the stages of ethical life that it describes would ultimately serve as the conceptual framework for the Phenomenology of Spirit, which attempts to complete the exposition of the absolute that could not be accomplished in the earlier text.[3] In this too, I wish to draw an analogy to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, both to the manner in which the second volume attempts to resolve the unanswered questions of the first, and to suggest that the answers which the Phenomenology of Spirit provides for the System of Ethical Life may also prove fruitful for the conceptual impasses faced by Deleuze and Guattari’s two volumes. Continue reading “Beyond the Law: Deleuze and Guattari’s System of Ethical Life” →

Nature is Not Unjust: Hegel’s Tragedy as Trauerspiel

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Philpot - Oedipus 1932-3
Glyn Philpot, Oedipus (1931).

The genre of tragedy occupies a central place in the works of G.W.F. Hegel, from its role in the Phenomenology of Spirit at the end of classical life to its place in the Lectures on Fine Art as the prototypical form of dramatic art. In both works, Hegel identifies the object of tragedy as the struggle for justice between equally justified claims—whether those claims are backed by the incongruous laws the state and the gods, as in Antigone, or because they are asserted by equally arbitrary and individual whims, as in Macbeth. In both cases, however, Hegel diverges from the classical ideal of tragedy, which seeks to transcend these conflicts in the completion of the hero’s fate, and instead makes the ruin of heroic ambition the genre’s goal. Hence, this paper will argue that Hegel’s reading of tragedy is far closer to what Walter Benjamin would later define as the Trauerspiel, or mourning-play, which severs tragedy from its divine goal and submerges its drama in the imagery of natural ruin. As I hope to show, the repositioning of Hegel’s account of tragedy as trauerspiel will reveal the anti-classical impulse in Hegel’s philosophy of art, which effects a modernisation of a genre already in ruins.

How are we to distinguish tragedy from trauerspiel? For our purposes, we may identify two main conceptual points upon which the genres diverge: namely, the perfection of the tragic hero and the transcendence of natural life. In tragedy, the character of the hero is defined by their fate, which, although unknown at the beginning of the play, exerts an irresistible influence over them. Character and fate are not entirely coterminous, as the hero struggles to avoid what is coming, though the drama ultimately concludes when what was fated becomes realised in the person of the hero. In many tragedies this is the moment of death, but what is essential is not the hero’s demise but their fulfilment and recognition of a fate that existed in the background of their character. In Oedipus the King, the hero does not die, but he does achieve a self-knowledge that is at once terrible and sanctifying: he knows who he is and is delivered in that self-knowledge into the ranks of heroes. In Oedipus at Colonus, then, we see the hero in this state of perfection, a sacred man who no longer belongs among the living, but whose resting place would grant a blessing on whichever city would risk housing it. In this intertwining of character and fate, as a drama of the hero’s perfection in death, the tragedy is therefore a genre of transcendence, which seeks to resolve the contradictions of individual and state, sovereignty and sanctity, in a figure who succumbs to their travails so as to be set above them.

Although the trauerspiel shares many thematic features with tragedy, its treatment of these themes is markedly different. Although the hero of the trauerspiel may see their life come undone, although they may suffer and die, they see no fulfilment in the dimension of fate. Whereas the death of the tragic hero achieves a kind of ironic immortality, as they are preserved only in the moment of their passing into history, the hero of the trauerspiel does not find transcendence in the realisation of their fate.[1] Rather, they are granted an illumination of the profane world, which appears in the trauerspiel as a realm of nature bereft of the divine. Benjamin describes the world of the trauerspiel as one of “eternal transience,” presided over by the emblem of the ruin, which stands for all the ambitions of humanity now overgrown and decayed.[2] Benjamin’s points of reference for defining the trauerspiel are primarily German, but its typical hero is not so far removed from Hamlet, whose melancholy vacillations mark him as a character with one foot in the grave, or Lear, whose decline on the heath signals the general collapse of his kingdom into ruin. Continue reading “Nature is Not Unjust: Hegel’s Tragedy as Trauerspiel” →

Year of Reading in Review (2023)

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booksread2023

Throughout 2023 I kept a Twitter thread of the books that I finished (which can be found here). As Twitter continues to fall apart, long threads are now worse than ever to navigate, so I’ve amalgamated my comments here. A rough chronological order has been maintained, though the books are sorted into several key categories. Continue reading “Year of Reading in Review (2023)” →

Marxist Philosophy of Language and the Sociality of Reason

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liubov_popova-linear_composition-1919-trivium-art-history-1
Lyubov Popova, Linear Composition (1919).

This paper was originally presented for the Marxist Work Day held by the Critical Research Association Melbourne on September 21-22, 2023. 

“Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought.”[1] This is the proclamation that marks the end of Gillian Rose’s reconstruction of Hegel’s speculative philosophy in Hegel Contra Sociology and the wager that informs her critical intervention in Marxist thought. To think the absolute is to cease merely representing it in the form of a divine, inhuman power, and to comprehend ourselves in our rational works as the subject of absolute knowing. For Rose, the project of a critical Marxism therefore entails the recognition of Marxism not as the science of capital’s abstract laws, but as a culture capable of reforming these laws in its revolutionary practice.[2] Such a re-conception of Marxism is informed by Hegel’s speculative thought, which navigates the contradictions of concept and reality to attempt a statement of the absolute that is no longer abstractly situated ‘in-itself,’ set apart from the subjective position for which this ‘in-itself’ appears.[3] And yet, the four decades since Rose’s intervention have seen a proliferation of Hegelianisms—whether poststructuralist or analytic—that shy away from the absolute, instead seeking models of language capable of representing human rationality in partial forms. Hence, to arrive at my topic, I would like today to talk about language, or specifically the Marxist philosophy thereof, and the role that language plays in these disputes over the thought—that is, the declared, spoken or written thought—of the absolute. Continue reading “Marxist Philosophy of Language and the Sociality of Reason” →

The Messianic Remnant (Reading Benjamin’s Theses A & B)

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Hirémy-Hirschl_Seaside_Cemetery_1897
Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, Seaside Cemetery (1897).

Overview

• A: Summing up the structure of historical time presented in the theses.
• B: Summing up the critical reading of Benjamin and bringing to the fore the unresolved problematics of the theses.

☛ Return to contents
☛ Previous section (XVII & XVIII)

Thesis A:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus among various moments in history. But no state of affairs having causal significance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He grasps the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time. Continue reading “The Messianic Remnant (Reading Benjamin’s Theses A & B)” →

A Universal History of Decay (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XVII & XVIII)

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walton ford - falling bough
Walton Ford, Falling Bough (2002).

Overview

• XVII: Universal history, its methods, and its structuring principles.
• XVIII: Natural time in its negative and positive relations to history.

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Thesis XVII:

Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. It may be that materialist historiography differs in method more clearly from universal history than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its procedure is additive: it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialist historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystallized as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history; thus, he blasts a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and sublated [aufheben] in the work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era. The nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its interior as a precious but tasteless seed. Continue reading “A Universal History of Decay (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XVII & XVIII)” →

Frozen in Time (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XV & XVI)

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van gogh - snow-covered field
Vincent van Gogh, Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet) (1890). 

Overview

• XV: Elaborating on Benjamin’s notion of fulfilled historical time by comparing the time of the festival day with that of the clock.
• XVI: Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image as a mediation between the past and present, and the broader question of Benjamin’s relation to dialectical thought

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☛ Previous section (XIII & XIV)
☛ Next section (XVII & XVIII)

Thesis XV:

What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar presents history in time-lapse mode. And basically it is this same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance [Tage des Eingedenkens]. Thus, calendars do not measure time the way clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe, it would seem, for the past hundred years. In the July Revolution an incident occurred in which this consciousness came into its own. On the first evening of fighting, it so happened that the dials on clocktowers were being fired at simultaneously and independently from several locations in Paris. An eyewitness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:

Qui le croirait! on dit, qu’irrites contre l’heure,
De nouveaux Josues, au pied de chaque tour,
Tiraient sur! es cadrans pour arreter le jour.
[Who would believe it! It is said that, incensed at the hour,
Latter-day Joshuas, at the foot of every clocktower,
Were firing on clock faces to make the day stand still.] Continue reading “Frozen in Time (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XV & XVI)” →

The Shape of History (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XIII & XIV)

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Chernikhov - image-1
Iakov Chernikhov, from Cycle of Architectural Landscapes (1930).

Overview

• XIII: Dogmatic progress and the concept of homogeneous empty time, with reference to Benjamin’s early formulations of mechanical clock-time time and historical time.
• XIV: The concept of ‘now-time’ as a secular analogue to messianic time and the forms of historical repetition that return the past to the now.

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Thesis XIII:

Every day, our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter.
—Josef Dietzgen, Social Democratic Philosophy

Social Democratic theory and to an even greater extent its practice were shaped by a conception of progress which bore little relation to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of the Social Democrats was, first of all, progress of humankind itself (and not just advances in human ability and knowledge). Second, it was something boundless (in keeping with an infinite perfectibility of humanity). Third, it was considered inevitable—something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these assumptions is controversial and open to criticism. But when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these assumptions and focus on what they have in common. The concept of mankind’s historical progress cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must underlie any criticism of the concept of progress itself. Continue reading “The Shape of History (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XIII & XIV)” →

Labour, Nature, and Dream (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XI & XII)

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Klutsis_(1920)_Electrification_of_the_Entire_Country 2
Gustav Klutsis, Electrification of the Entire Country (1920).

Overview

• XI: Conceptions of labour and nature as they relate to utopian desire.
• XII: The figure of the working class and its place in the capitalist dream-world, with a postscript on the role of technology in this relation.

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Thesis XI:

The conformism which has marked the Social Democrats from the beginning attaches not only to their political tactics but to their economic views as well. It is one reason for the eventual breakdown of their party. Nothing has so corrupted the German working class as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological development as the driving force of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work ostensibly furthering technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant work ethic was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as “the source of all wealth and all culture.” Smelling a rat, Marx countered that “the man who possesses no other property than his labor power” must of necessity become “the slave of other men who have made themselves owners.” Yet the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: “The savior of modern times is called work. The … perfecting … of the labor process constitutes the wealth which can now do what no redeemer has ever been able to accomplish.” This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor scarcely considers the question of how its products could ever benefit the workers when they are beyond the means of those workers. It recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features that later emerge in fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one advocated by socialist utopias prior to the Revolution of 1848. The new conception of labor is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which, with naive complacency, is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared to this positivistic view, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, cooperative labor would increase efficiency to such an extent that four moons would illuminate the sky at night, the polar ice caps would recede, seawater would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that now lie dormant in her womb. The sort of nature that (as Dietzgen puts it) “exists gratis,” is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor. Continue reading “Labour, Nature, and Dream (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XI & XII)” →