A Left With No Future, T.J. Clark

7/29/2019 A Left With No Future, T.J. Clark

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new left review 74mar apr 201253

t. j. clark

FOR A LEFT

WITH NO FUTURE

How deceiving are the contradictions o language! In this landwithout time the dialect was richer in words with which to

measure time than any other language; beyond the motionless andeverlasting crai [meaning tomorrow but also never] every day inthe uture had a name o its own . . . The day ater tomorrow was

prescrai and the day ater thatpescrille; then camepescrufo, marufo,marufone; the seventh day was maruficchio. But these preciseterms had an undertone o irony. They were used less oten to

indicate this or that day than they were said all together in a string,one ater another; their very sound was grotesque and they were

like a reection o the utility o trying to make anything clear out

o the cloudiness ocrai.Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli1

I hope sincerely it will be all the age does not want . . . I haveomitted nothing I could think o to obstruct the onward march o

the world . . . I have done all I can to impede progress . . . having put

my hand to the plough I invariably look back.

Edward Burne-Jones on the Kelmscott Chaucer2

Left intellectuals, like most intellectuals, are not good

at politics; especially i we mean by the latter, as I shall be

arguing we should, the everyday detail, drudgery and charm

o perormance. Intellectuals get the fngering wrong. Up on

stage they play too many wrong notes. But one thing they may be good

or: sticking to the concert-hall analogy, they are sometimes the bass-

ists in the back row whose groaning establishes the key o politics or

a moment, and even points to a possible new one. And it can happen,though occasionally, that the survival o a tradition o thought and action


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54nlr 74depends on thison politics being transposed to a new key. This seems

to me true o the let in our time.

These notes are addressed essentially (regrettably) to the let in the old

capitalist heartlandthe let in Europe.3 Perhaps they will resonate

elsewhere. They have nothing to say about capitalisms long-term invul-

nerability, and pass no judgementwhat ool would try to in present

circumstances?on the sureness o its management o its global

dependencies, or the eectiveness o its military humanism. The only

verdict presupposed in what ollows is a negative one on the capac-

ity o the letthe actually existing let, as we used to sayto oer a

perspective in which capitalisms ailures, and its own, might make

sense. By perspective I mean a rhetoric, a tonality, an imagery, an argu-ment, and a temporality.

By let I mean a root-and-branch opposition to capitalism. But such

an opposition has nothing to gain, I shall argue, rom a series o over-

weening and antastical predictions about capitalisms coming to an

end. Roots and branches are things in the present. The deeper a political

movements spadework, the more complete its ocus on the here and

now. No doubt there is an alternative to the present order o things. Yetnothing ollows rom thisnothing deserving the name political. Let

politics is immobilized, it seems to me, at the level o theory and there-

ore o practice, by the idea that it should spend its time turning over

the entrails o the present or signs o catastrophe and salvation. Better

an infnite irony at prescrai and maruficchioa peasant irony, with an

earned contempt or uturitythan a politics premised, yet again, on

some terracotta multitude waiting to march out o the emperors tomb.

Is this pessimism? Well, yes. But what other tonality seems possible in

the ace o the past ten years? How are we meant to understand the

1 Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli [1945], London 1982, pp. 200, 178.2 Letter rom December 1895, quoted in William Peterson, The Kelmscott Press: AHistory o William Morriss Typographical Adventure, Oxord 1991, p. 252.3 My thanks to Iain Boal, who asked me or a frst version o this essay or his coner-ence, The Luddites, without Condescension at Birkbeck, May 2011; and to audiences

there and at subsequent readings o this paper. I draw occasionally on material usedpreviously, and apologize to readers who come across things they already know.


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clark:No Future55arrival o real ruination in the order o global fnance (This sucker could

go down, as George Bush told his cabinet in September 2008) and the

almost complete ailure o let responses to it to resonate beyond the

ranks o the aithul? Or to put the question another way: i the past

decade is not proo that there are no circumstances capable o revivingthe let in its nineteenth and twentieth-century orm, then what would

proo be like?

It is a bitter moment. Politics, in much o the old previously immov-

able centre, seems to be taking on a more and more total orman

all-or-nothing character or those living through itwith each succes-

sive month. And in reality (as opposed to the antasy world o Marxist

conerences) this is as unnerving or let politics as or any other kind.The let is just as unprepared or it. The silence o the let in Greece, or

exampleits inability to present a programme outlining an actual, per-

suasive deault economic policy, a year-by-year vision o what would be

involved in taking the Argentine roadis indicative. And in no way is

this meant as a sneer. When and i a national economy enters into crisis

in the present interlocking global order, what has anyone to sayin any

non-laughable detailabout socialism in one country or even partly

detached pseudo-nation-state non-fnance-capital-driven capitalism? (Isthe let going to join the Eurosceptics on their long march? Or put its

aith in the proletariat o Guangdong?)

The question o capitalismprecisely because the system itsel is

once again posing (agonizing over) the question, and thereore its true

enormity emerges rom behind the shadow play o partieshas to be

bracketed. It cannot be made political. The let should turn its attention

to what can.

It is difcult to think historically about the present crisis, even in gen-

eral termscomparisons with 1929 seem not to helpand thereore

to get the measure o its mixture o chaos and rappel lordre. Tear gas

rereshes the army o bondholders; the Greek or General Strike is on

everyones lips; Goldman Sachs rules the world. Maybe the years since1989 could be likened to the moment ater Waterloo in Europethe

moment o Restoration and Holy Alliance, o apparent world-historical

immobility (though vigorous reconstellation o the productive orces) in


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56nlr 74the interim between 1815 and 1848. In terms o a thinking o the project

o Enlightenmentmy subject remains the response o political thought

to wholesale change in circumstancesthis was a moment between

paradigms. The long arc o rational and philosophical critiquethe arc

rom Hobbes to Descartes to Diderot to Jeerson to Kanthad ended.

Looking with hindsight, we can see that beneath the polished surace

o Restoration the elements o a new vision o history were assem-

bling: peculiar mutations o utilitarianism and political economy, the

speculations o Saint-Simon, Fouriers counteractuals, the intellectual

energies o the Young Hegelians. But it was, at the time (in the shadow

o Metternich, Ingres, the later Coleridge), extremely difcult to see

these elements or what they were, let alone as capable o coalescing into

a orm o oppositiona resh conception o what it was that had to beopposed, and an intuition o a new standpoint rom which opposition

might go orward. This is the way Castlereaghs Europe resembles our

own: in its sense that a previous language and set o presuppositions or

emancipation have run into the sand, and its realistic uncertainty as to

whether the elements o a dierent language are to be ound at all in the

general spectacle o rozen politics, ruthless economy and enthusiasm

(as always) or the latest dim gadget.

The question or the let at present, in other words, is how deep does

its reconstruction o the project o Enlightenment have to go? How

ar down? Some o us think, Seven levels o the world. The book we

need to be readingin preerence to The Coming Insurrection, I eelis

Christopher Hills The Experience o Deeat. That is: the various unlikely

and no doubt dangerous voices I fnd mysel drawing on in these notesNietzsche in spite o everything, Bradley on tragedy, Burkerts terriying

Homo Necans, Hazlitt and Bruegel at their most implacable, Moses Wall

in the darkness o 1659, Benjamin in 1940come up as resources or

the let only at a moment o true historical ailure. We read them only

when events oblige us to ask ourselves what it was, in our previous stag-

ings o transfguration, that led to the present debacle.

The word let in my usage reers, o course, to a tradition o politicshardly represented any longer in the governments and oppositions we

have. (It seems quaint now to dwell on the kinds o dierence within

that tradition once pointed to by the prefx ultra. Ater sundown all cats


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clark:No Future57

look grey.) Let, then, is a term denoting an absence; and this near non-

existence ought to be explicit in a new thinking o politics. But it does

not ollow that the let should go on exaltingits marginality, in the way

it is constantly tempted toexulting in the glamour o the great reusal,and consigning to outer darkness the rest o an unregenerate world.That

way literariness lies. The only let politics worth the name is, as always,

the one that looks its insignifcance in the ace, but whose whole inter-

est is in what it might be that could turn the vestige, slowly or suddenly,

into the beginning o a movement. Many and bitter will be the things

sacrifcedthe big ideas, the revolutionary stylisticsin the process.

This leads me to two kinds o question, which structure the rest o these

notes. First, what would it be like or let politics not to look orward

to be truly present-centred, non-prophetic, disenchanted, continually

mocking its own presage? Leaving behind, that is, in the whole grain

and rame o its sel-conception, the last aterthoughts and images o

the avant-garde. And a second, connected question: could let politics

be transposed into a tragic key? Is a tragic sense o lie possible or theletor a politics that remains recognizably in touch with the tradi-

tion o Marx, Raspail, Morris, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Platonov, Sorel,

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Little Tower of Babel, c. 1565. Museum Boijmans van Beuningen,Rotterdam; Model of Tatlins Monument to the Third International, c. 191920.


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58nlr 74

4 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy [1904], New York 1968, pp. 289.

Pasolini? Isnt that tradition rightlyindeliblyunwilling to dwell on

the experience o deeat?

What do I mean, then, by tragedy, or the tragic conception o lie? The

idea applied to politics is strange, maybe unwelcome, and thereore my

treatment o it will be plain; which need not, in this instance, mean

banal. Bradley is a tremendous late-Victorian guide; better, I think,

because more political, than all the great theorists and classicists who

ollowed; and I choose him partly because he is such a good example

o the kind o middle wisdomthe rejected high stylethat the let

will have to rediscover in its bourgeois past. He addresses his stu-dents (colonial servants in the making) mainly about Shakespeare, but

almost everything in his general presentation o the subject resonates

with politics more widely.

Tragedy, we know, is pessimistic about the human condition. Its subject

is suering and calamity, the constant presence o violence in human

aairs, the extraordinary difculty o reconciling that violence with a

rule o law or a pattern o agreed social sanction. It turns on ailure andsel-misunderstanding, and above all on a all rom a great heighta

all that rightens and awes those who witness it because it seems to

speak to a powerlessness in man, and a general subjection to a Force or

Totality derived rom the very character o things. Tragedy is about great-

ness come to nothing. But that is why it is not depressing. [Man] may

be wretched and he may be awul, says Bradley, but he is not small. His

lot may be heart-rending and mysterious, but it is not contemptible. It

is necessary that [the tragic project] should have so much o greatnessthat in its error and all we may be vividly conscious o the possibilities

o human nature.4 Those last two words have traditionally made the let

wince, and I understand why. But they may be reclaimable: notice that

or Bradley nature and possibility go together.

Bradley has a great passage on what [he] ventures to describe as thecentre o the tragic impression. I quote it in ull:


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clark:No Future59This central eeling is the impression o waste. With Shakespeare, at any

rate, the pity and ear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to unitewith, and even merge in, a proound sense o sadness and mystery, which

is due to this impression o waste . . . We seem to have beore us a type o

the mystery o the whole world, the tragic act which extends ar beyond thelimits o tragedy. Everywhere, rom the crushed rocks beneath our eet to

the soul o man, we see power, intelligence, lie and glory, which astoundus and seem to call or our worship. And everywhere we see them perish-

ing, devouring one another and destroying themselves, oten with dreadul

pain, as though they came into being or no other end. Tragedy is the typi-cal orm o this mystery, because that greatness o soul which it exhibits

oppressed, conicting and destroyed, is the highest existence in our view. It

orces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realize so vividly the worth othat which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comort in the reection

that all is vanity.5

One thing to be said in passing about this paragraphbut I mean it as

more than an asideis that it can serve as a model o the tone o politics

in a tragic key. The tone is grown up. And maybe that is why it inevita-

bly will register as remote, even a trie outlandish, in a political culture

as devoted as ours to a ventriloquism o youth. The present language

o politics, let and right, participates ully in the general inantilization

o human needs and purposes that has proved integral to consumercapitalism. (There is a wonderul counter-actual desperation to the

phenomenon. For consumer society is, by natureby reason o its real

improvement in living standardsgrey-haired. The older the average

age o its population, we might say, the more slavishly is its cultural

apparatus geared to the wishes o sixteen-year-olds.) And this too the

let must escape rom. Gone are the days when inantile disorder was a

sluran insult rom Lenin, no lessthat one part o the let could hope

to reclaim and transfgure. A tragic voice is obliged to put adolescencebehind it. No more Rimbaud, in other wordsno more apodictic inside-

out, no more elated denunciation.

Here again is Bradley. The tragic world is a world o action, he tells us,

and action is the translation o thought into reality. We see men and women

confdently attempting it. They strike into the existing order o things inpursuance o their ideas. But what they achieve is not what they intended;

5 Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 29.


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60nlr 74it is terribly unlike it. They understand nothing, we say to ourselves, o the

world on which they operate. They fght blindly in the dark, and the power

that works through them makes them the instrument o a design that is nottheirs. They act reely, and yet their action binds them hand and oot. And

it makes no dierence whether they meant well or ill.6

Politics in a tragic key, then, will operate always with a sense o the hor-

ror and danger built into human aairs. And everywhere we see them

perishing, devouring one another and destroying themselves. This is

a mystery. But (again quoting Bradley, this time pushing him specif-

cally in our direction) tragedy is the . . . orm o this mystery [that best

allows us to think politically], because the greatness o soul which it

exhibits oppressed, conicting and destroyed, is the highest existencein our view. It orces the mystery upon us. And it localizes the mystery,

it stops it rom being an immobilizing phantomit has any one poli-

tics (or instance, our own) be carried on in the shadow o a specifc

political catastrophe.

Our catastropheour Thebesis the seventy years rom 1914 to 1989.And o course to say that the central decades o the twentieth century, at

least as lived out in Europe and its empires, were a kind o charnel house

is to do no more than repeat common wisdom. Anyone casting an eye

over a serious historical treatment o the periodthe one I never seem

to recover rom is Mark Mazowers terrible conspectus, Dark Continent:

Europes Twentieth Century (1998)is likely to settle or much the same

terms. The Century o Violence, I remember an old textbook calling it.7

The time o human smoke.

The political question is this, however. Did the centurys horrors have a

shape? Did they obey a logic or ollow rom a central determination

however much the contingencies o history (Hitlers charisma, Lenins

surviving the anarchists bullet, the psychology o Bomber Harris)

intervened? Here is where the tragic perspective helps. It allows us not

6

Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 32.7 The actual title is David Thomson, ed., The Era o Violence 18981945, Cambridge1960. The overall editors o The New Cambridge Modern History, in which

Thomsons volume appeared, quickly ordered a revised edition called The ShitingBalance o World Forces.


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clark:No Future61

to see a shape or logica development rom past to utureto the last

hundred years. It opens us, I think rightly, to a vision o the period as

catastrophe in the strict sense: unolding pell-mell rom Sarajevo on,

certainly until the 1950s (and i we widen our ocus to Maos appall-

ing Proletarian Cultural Revolutionin a sense the last paroxysm o

a European antasy o politicswell on into the 1970s): a alse uture

entwined with a past, both come suddenly rom nowhere, overtaking thecertainties o Edwardian London and Vienna; a chaos ormed rom an

unstoppable, unmappable criss-cross o orces: the imagined communi-

ties o nationalism, the pseudo-religions o class and race, the dream o

an ultimate subject o History, the new technologies o mass destruc-

tion, the death-throes o the white mans burden, the dismal realities

o ination and unemployment, the haphazard (but then accelerating)

construction o mass parties, mass entertainments, mass gadgets and

accessories, standardized everyday lie. The list is amiliar. And I sup-pose that anyone trying to write the history that goes with it is bound to

opt, consciously or by deault, or one among the various orces at work

as predominant. There must be a heart o the matter.

Collectivization campaign, ussr circa 1930 (We kolkhozniks are liquidating the kulaks

as a class, on the basis of complete collectivization).


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62nlr 74Which leads to the question o Marxism. Marxism, it now comes clear,

was most productively a theorya set o descriptionso bourgeois

society and the way it would come to grie. It had many other aspects and

ambitions, but this was the one that ended up least vitiated by chiliasm or

scientism, the diseases o the cultural ormation Marxism came out o.

At its best (in Marx himsel, in Lukcs during the 1920s, in Gramsci, in

Benjamin and Adorno, in Brecht, in Bakhtin, in Attila Jzse, in the Sartre

o La conscience de classe chez Flaubert) Marxism went deeper into the

texture o bourgeois belies and practices than any other description save

the novel. But about bourgeois societys ending it was notoriously wrong.

It believed that the great positivity o the nineteenth-century order wouldend in revolutionmeaning a fnal acceleration (but also disintegration)

o capitalisms productive powers, the recalibration o economics and

politics, and breakthrough to an achieved modernity. This was not to

be. Certainly bourgeois societythe cultural world that Malevich and

Gramsci took or grantedell into dissolution. But it was destroyed, so

it transpired, not by a usion and fssion o the long-assembled potentials

o capitalist industry and the emergence o a transfgured class com-

munity, but by the vilest imaginable parody o both. Socialism becameNational Socialism, Communism became Stalinism, modernity mor-

phed into crisis and crash, new religions oVolk and Gemeinschat took

advantage o the technics o mass slaughter. Franco, Dzerzhinsky, Earl

Haig, Eichmann, Von Braun, Mussolini, Teller and Oppenheimer, Jiang

Qing, Kissinger, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Ayman al-Zawahiri. This is the past

that our politics has as its matrix. It is our Thebes.

But again, be careul. Tragedy is a mystery not a chamber o horrors. It isordinary and endemic. Thebes is not something we can put behind us.

No one looking in the eyes o the poor peasants in the 1930 photograph,

lined up with their rakes and Stalinist catch-phrases, o to bludgeon a

ew kulaks down by the railway stationlooking in the eyes o these

dupes and murderers, dogs fghting over a bone, and remembering,

perhaps with Platonovs help, the long desperation the camera does not

seeno one who takes a look at the real history o the twentieth century,

in other words, can ail to experience the sense o sadness and mysteryBradley points to, which is due to the impression o waste . . . And every-

where we see them perishing, devouring one another and destroying

themselves . . . as though they came into being or no other end.


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clark:No Future63However we may disagree about the detail o the history the kolkhozniks

in the photo are living, at least let us do them the justice not to pretend

it was epic. Historical materialism must renounce the epic element inhistory. It blasts the epoch [it studies] out o the reifed movement o

history. But it also explodes the epochs homogeneity, and intersperses

it with ruinsthat is, with the present.8 The shed on the right in the

photo might as well be a Lager, and the banner read Arbeit macht rei.

The world is now very dark and barren; and i a little light should breakorth, it would mightily reresh it. But alas: man would be lited up above

himsel and distempered by it at present, and aterwards he would die

again and become more miserable: this is the Puritan revolutionary

Isaac Penington in 1654, conronting the decline o the Kingdom o

Saints.9 Penington thinks o the situation in terms o the Fall, naturally,

but his attitude to humanity can be sustained, and I think ought to be,

without the theological background. His speaking to the uture remains

relevant. And it can coexist ully with the most modest, most moderate,o materialismsthe kind we need. Here or example is Moses Wall,

writing to John Milton in 1659when the days o the English republic

were numbered:

You complain o the Non-progressency o the Nation, and o its retrograde

motion o late, in liberty and spiritual truths. It is much to be bewailed;

but yet let us pity human railty. When those who made deep protesta-tions o their zeal or our Liberty, being instated in power, shall betray the

good thing committed to them, and lead us back to Egypt, and by that orcewhich we gave them to win us Liberty, hold us ast in chains; what can poorpeople do? You know who they were that watched our Saviours Sepulchre

to keep him rom rising.

(Wall means soldiers. He knows about standing armies.)

Besides, whilst people are not ree but straitened in accommodations or

lie, their Spirits will be dejected and servile: and conducing to [reverse

8 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, ma 1999, p. 474, Convolute N9a, 6.9 Isaac Penington, Divine Essays, London 1654, quoted in Christopher Hill, TheExperience o Deeat, New York 1984, p. 120.


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64nlr 74this], there should be an improving o our native commodities, as our

Manuactures, our Fishery, our Fens, Forests, and Commons, and ourTrade at Sea, &c. which would give the body o the nation a comortable

Subsistence . . . 10

Still a maximalist programme.

A tragic perspective on politics is inevitably linked, as Walls letter sug-

gests, to the question o war and its place in the history o the species.

Or perhaps we should say: to the interleaved questions o armed conict,

organized annihilation, human psychology and sociality, the city- andthen the nation-state, and the particular orm in which that something

we call the economy came into being. I take seriously the idea o the

ancient historians that the key element in the transition to a monetized

economy may not have been so much the generalization o trade between

cultures (where kinds o barter went on unctioning adequately) as the

spread o endemic warare, the rise o large proessional armies, and

the need or transportable, believable, on-the-spot payment or same.11

And with money and mass killing came a social imaginarya picture ohuman natureto match.

When, in a battle between cities, says Nietzsche,

the victor, according to the rights o war, puts the whole male populationto the sword and sells all the women and children into slavery, we see, inthe sanctioning o such a right, that the Greek regarded a ull release o his

hatred as a serious necessity; at such moments pent-up, swollen sensation

ound relie: the tiger charged out, wanton cruelty ickering in its terribleeyes. Why did the Greek sculptor again and again have to represent war and

battles, endlessly repeated, human bodies stretched out, their sinews taut

10 Moses Wall, letter to Milton, 25 May 1659, quoted in David Masson, Lie o Milton,London 185880, vol. 5, pp. 6023; quoted in part and discussed in Hill, Experienceo Deeat, pp. 53, 2801, 3278. Massons great Lie is a good companion to Bradley.11 On a deeper level, Jean-Pierre Vernants argument or a connection between therise o de-individualized hoplite warare, the generalizing o a culture o competi-

tiveness (agon), the move towards a conception o social equality or isonomia (orthe citizen ew), and the drive towards a numerical valuation o more and moreaspects o social lie, remains undamental. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins oGreek Thought [1962], Ithaca 1982.


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clark:No Future65

with hatred or the arrogance o triumph, the wounded doubled up in pain,the dying in agony? Why did the whole Greek world exult in the pictures o

fghting in the Iliad? I ear we do not understand these things in enough oa Greek ashion . . . and we would shudder i we did . . . 12

Nietzsche is vehement; some would say exultant. But much the same

point can be made with proper ethnological drabness.

Many prehistoric bone ractures resulted rom violence; many orearmsappear to have been broken deecting blows rom clubs. Most parrying

ractures are on the let orearm held up to block blows to the let side o the

body rom a right-hander. Parrying ractures were detected on 10 per cento desert men and 19 per cent o east-coast women; or both groups they

were the most common type o upper-limb ractures . . . Fractured skulls

were twice to our times as common among women as men. The racturesare typically oval, thumb-sized depressions caused by blows with a blunt

instrument. Most are on the let side o the head, suggesting rontal attack

Baldwin Spencer, Men quarreling after accusations over disobedience of social laws, Alice

Springs, 9 May 1901; in The Photographs of Baldwin Spencer, Carlton vic 2005, plate 36.

12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Homers Contest (unpublished ragment rom circa 1872),in Nietzsche, On the Genealogy o Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge 2007,pp. 1745.


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66nlr 74by a right-hander. Most head injuries are thus the result o interpersonal

violence, probably inicted by men on women.13

Do not think, by the way, that dwelling in this way on mans erocity

leads necessarily in a Nietzschean direction. Listen to Hazlitt, speaking

rom the ironic heart o the English radical tradition:

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up o antipathies: without

something to hate, we should lose the very spring o thought and action.

Lie would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not rued by the jarring inter-ests, the unruly passions o men. The white streak in our own ortunes is

brightened (or just rendered visible) by making all around it as dark as pos-sible; so the rainbow paints its orm upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy?

Is it the orce o contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there

is a secret afnity, a hankeringater evil in the human mind . . . Protestantsand Papists do not now burn one another at the stake: but we subscribe to

new editions oFoxs Book o Martyrs [a contemporary equivalent might beThe Gulag Archipelago]; and the secret o the success o the Scotch Novelsis much the samethey carry us back to the euds, the heart-burnings,

the havoc, the dismay, the wrongs and the revenge o a barbarous age and

peopleto the rooted prejudices and deadly animosities o sects and par-

ties in politics and religion, and o contending chies and clans in war andintrigue. We eel the ull orce o the spirit o hatred with all o them in

turn . . . The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we eel like hunting-animals, and as the hound starts in its sleep and rushes on the chase in

ancy, the heart rouses itsel in its native lair, and utters a wild cry o joy . . . 14

This has more to say about Homs and Abbottabad, or Anders Breivik

and Geert Wilders, than most things written since.

It is a logical error o the let, this is the point, to assume that a ull

recognition o the human propensity to violenceto blood-soaked

conormitycloses o the idea o a radical reworking o politics. The

13 Josephine Flood, The Original Australians: Story o the Aboriginal People, CrowsNest nsw 2007, pp. 1223, ollowing Stephen Webb, Palaeopathology o AboriginalAustralians: Health and Disease across a Hunter-Gatherer Continent, Cambridge 1995,pp. 188216.14 William Hazlitt, On the Pleasure o Hating (1823), in Hazlitt, Selected Writings,Harmondsworth 1970, pp. 3978.


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clark:No Future67question is: what root is it we need to get down to? And even a Hazlitt-

type honesty about a hankering ater evil in the human mind can

perectly well coexist (as it did in Hazlitts post-Augustan generation)

with a By our own spirits are we deifed. Human capacities may well be

infnite; they have certainly been hardly explored, hardly been given their

chance o owering; but the tragic sense starts rom an acknowledgment

that the infnity (the unplumbable) is or bad as much as good.

It likewise is wrong to assume that moderacy in politics, i we mean by

this a politics o small steps, bleak wisdom, concrete proposals, disdain

or grand promises, a sense o the hardness o even the least improve-

ment, is not revolutionaryassuming this last word has any descriptive

orce let. It depends on what the small steps are aimed at changing.It depends on the picture o human possibility in the case. A politics

actually directed, step by step, ailure by ailure, to preventing the tiger

rom charging out would be the most moderate and revolutionary there

has ever been.

Nietzsche again is our (Janus-aced) guide, in a amous glimpse o the

uture in The Will to Power. As a view o what the politics o catastrophe

might actually be like it remains unique. He begins with an overall diag-nosis that will be amiliar to anyone who has read him; but then, less

typically, he moves on. The diagnosis frst:

To put it briey . . . What will never again be built any more, cannot bebuilt any more, isa society, in the old sense o that word; to build such,

everything is lacking, above all the material. All o us [Nietzsche means usmoderns] are no longer material or a society; this is a truth or which thetime has come!15

We moderns no longer provide the stu rom which a society might

be constructed; and in the sense that Enlightenment was premised on,

perhaps we never did. The political unolding o this reversal o the

social will be long and horrifc, Nietzsche believes, and his vision o the

century to come is characteristically venomous (which does not mean

inaccurate): the passage just quoted devolves into a sneer at good social-

ists and their dream o a ree society built rom wooden ironor maybe,

Nietzsche prophesies, rom just iron on its own. Ater socialism o this

15 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882], trans. Walter Kaumann, New York1974, p. 304 (trans. slightly modifed). I opt or the Gay Sciences ormulation o athought repeated constantly, but never so economically, in The Will to Power.


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68nlr 74sort will come chaos, necessarily, but out o the chaos a new orm o poli-

tics may still emerge. A crisis that . . . purifes, that . . . pushes together

related elements to perish o each other, that . . . assigns common tasks

to men who have opposite ways o thinking . . . O course, outside every

existing social order. And the upshot is as ollows:

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course o this? The most moderate;those who do not require any extreme articles o aith; those who not onlyconcede but actually love a air amount o contingency and nonsense; thosewho can think o man with a considerable reduction o his value without

becoming small and weak themselves on that account . . . human beings

who are sure o their power and who represent, with conscious pride, thestrength that humanity has [actually] achieved.16

O course I am not inviting assent to the detail (such as it is) o Nietzsches

post-socialism. His thought on the subject is entangled with a series o

naive, not to say nauseating, remarks on rank order as the most pre-

cious ruit o the new movement. But as a sketch o what moderation

might mean to revolutionaries, his note goes on resonating.

Utopianism, on the other handthat invention o early modern civil

servantsis what the landlords have time or. It is everything Carlo Levis

peasants have learnt to distrust. Bruegel spells this out. His Cockaigne is

above all a de-sublimation o the idea o Heavenan un-Divine Comedy,

which only ully makes sense in relation to all the other oers o other-

worldliness (ordinary and abulous, instituted and heretical) circulating

as Christendom ell apart. What the painting most deeply makes un o

is the religious impulse, or one main orm that impulse takes (all themore strongly once the hold o religion on the detail o lie is lost): the

wish or escape rom mortal existence, the dream o immortality, the

idea o Time to Come. And God shall wipe away all tears rom their eyes;

and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither

shall there be any more pain: or the ormer things are passed away.

What Bruegel says back to the Book o Revelationand surely his voice

was that o peasant culture itsel, in one o its ineradicable modesis

that all visions o escape and perectibility are haunted by the worldly

16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power[1901], trans. Walter Kaumann and R. J.Hollingdale, New York 1967, section 55, pp. 389 (trans. slightly modifed).


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clark:No Future69

realities they pretend to transfgure. Every Eden is the here and now

intensifed; immortality is mortality continuing; every vision o bliss isbodily and appetitive, heavy and ordinary and present-centred. The man

emerging rom the mountain o gruel in the background is the modern

personifed. He has eaten his way through to the community o saints.

The young man on the ground at right, with the pens at his belt and

the bible by his side, we might see as none other than St Thomas More,

awake but comatose in his creation. And the lad gone to sleep on top o

his ail? Who but Ned Ludd himsel?

Utopias reassure modernity as to its infnite potential. But why? It should

learnbe taughtto look ailure in the ace.

About modernity in generalabout what it is that has made us mod-

erns no longer stu or the socialI doubt there is anything new to

say. The topic, like the thing itsel, is exhausted: not over (never over),

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Land of Cockaigne, 1567. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.


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70nlr 74

just tired to death. All that needs restating hereand Baldwin Spencers

great photos o the longest continuing human culture are the proper

accompanimentis that the arrival o societies oriented toward the

uture, as opposed to a past o origins, heroisms, established ways, is a

act o history not nature, happening in one place and time, with com-

plex, contingent causes. Personal religion (that strange mutation) and

double-entry book-keeping being two o them. And by modernity is

meant very much more than a set o techniques or a pattern o residenceand consumption: the word intends an ethos, a habitus, a way o being a

human subject. I go back to the sketch I gave in a previous book:

Modernity means contingency. It points to a social order which has turnedrom the worship o ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit o a pro-

jected utureo goods, pleasures, reedoms, orms o control over nature,

new worlds o inormation. The process was accompanied by a terribleemptying and sanitizing o the imagination. For without the anchorage o

tradition, without the imagined and vivid intricacies o kinship, withoutthe past living on (most oten monstrously) in the detail o everyday lie,

meaning became a scarce social commodityi by meaning we have in

mind agreed-on and instituted orms o value and understanding, orders

Baldwin Spencer, Final burial ceremonies, Tennant Creek, 23 August 1901;in Photographs of Baldwin Spencer, plate 75.


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clark:No Future71implicit in things, stories and images in which a culture is able to crystal-

lize its sense o the struggle with the realm o necessity and the realitieso pain and death. The phrase Max Weber borrowed rom Schiller, the

disenchantment o the worldgloomy yet in my view exultant, with its

promise o a disabused dwelling in the world as it isstill sums up thisside o modernity best . . .

Secularization is a nice technical word or this blankness. It means spe-cialization and abstraction, as part o the texture o ordinary doings; social

lie driven by a calculus o large-scale statistical chances, with everyone

accepting or resenting a high level o risk; time and space turned into vari-ables in that same calculus, both o them saturated by inormation and

played with endlessly, monotonously, on nets and screens; the de-skilling

o everyday lie (deerence to experts and technicians in more and more othe microstructure o the sel); available, invasive, haunting expertise; the

chronic revision o everything in the light o studies.17

This does no more than block in the outlines: descriptively, there would

be many things to add. But rom the present point o view only two

motis need developing. First, that the essence o modernity, rom the

scripture-reading spice-merchant to the Harvard iPod banker sweating

in the gym, is a new kind o isolate obedient individual with technical

support to match. The printed book, the spiritual exercise, coee and

Le Figaro, Time Out, Twitter, tobacco (or its renunciation), the heaveno infnite apps. Second, that all this apparatus is a kind or extension o

clockwork. Individuality is held together by a fction o ull existence to

come. Time Out is always just round the corner. And while the deepest

unction o this new chronology is to do work on what used to be called

subject positionskeeping the citizen-subject in a state o perpetual

anticipation (and thus accepting the pittance o subjectivity actually

on oer)it is at the level o politics that the Great Look Forward is

most a given.

What, in the trajectory o Enlightenmentrom Hobbes to Nietzsche,

say, or De Maistre to Kojvewere the distinctive strengths o the right?

A disabused view o human potentialno doubt always on the verge o

tipping over into a rehearsal o original sin. And (deriving rom the frst)

an abstention rom uturity. Nietzsche as usual is the possible exception

17 Clark, Farewell to an Idea, New Haven and London 1999, p. 7 (changed slightly).


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72nlr 74here, but the interest o his occasional glimpses o a politics to come is,

as I have said, precisely their ironic moderacy.

Does the right still possess these strengths? I think not. It dare not

propose a view o human nature any longer (or i it does, it is merely

Augustinian, betraying the legacy o Hume, Vico, even Freud and

Heidegger); and slowly, inexorably, it too has given in to the great mod-

ern instruction not to be backward-looking. The right has vacated the

places, or tonalities, that previously allowed itto the lets shameto

monopolize the real description and critique o modernity, and fnd lan-

guage or the proximity o nothing. The let has no option but to try to

take the empty seats.

Pessimism o the intellect, optimism o the will? Not any more: because

optimism is now a political tonality indissociable rom the promises o

consumption. Future exists only in the stock-exchange plural. Hope is

no longer given us or the sake o the hopeless: it has mutated into an

endless political and economic Micawberism.

The tragic key makes many things possible and impossible. But perhaps

what is central or the let is that tragedy does not expect something

something transfguringto turn up. The modern inantilization o

politics goes along with, and perhaps depends on, a constant orientation

o politics towards the uture. O course the orientation has become weak

and ormulaic, and the patter o programmers and gene-splicers moreinane. Walter Benjamin would recoil in horror at the orm his weak

messianism actually took once the strong messiahs o the twentieth cen-

tury went away. The Twitter utopia joins hands with the Tea Party. But

the direction o politics resists anything the reality o economicseven

outright immiseration making a comebackcan throw at it. Politics, in

the orm we have it, is nothing without a modernity constantly in the

ofng, at last about to realize itsel: it has no other telos, no other way to

imagine things otherwise. The task o the let is to provide one.


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clark:No Future73Presence o mind as a political category, says Benjamin,

comes magnifcently to lie in these words o Turgot: Beore we havelearned to deal with things in a given state, they have already changed

several times. Thus, we always fnd out too late about what has happened.And thereore it can be said that politics is obliged to oresee the present.18

You may ask me, fnally, what is the dierence between the kind o anti-

utopian politics I am advocating and reormism pure and simple. The

label does not scare me. The trouble with the great reormists within

the Internationals was that they shared with the revolutionaries a belie

in the essentially progressive, purgative, reconstructive destiny o theorces o production. They thought the economy had it in it to remake

the phenotype. Thereore they thought reorm was a modest proposal,

a pragmatic one. They were wrong. (The essential and noblest orm o

socialist reormismBernsteinscame juddering to a halt in 1914, as

the cycle o twentieth-century atavisms began. As a socialist project, it

proved unrevivable.) Reorm, it transpires, is a revolutionary demand.

To move even the least distance out o the cycle o horror and ailureto

leave the kolkhozniks and water-boarders just a little way behindwillentail a piece-by-piece, assumption-by-assumption dismantling o the

politics we have.

To end by rephrasing the question posed earlier: the let in the capitalist

heartland has still to conront the act that the astonishingstatistically

unprecedented, mind-bogglinggreat leap orward in all measures oraw social and economic inequality over the past orty years has led most

polities, especially lately, to the right. The present orm o the politics o

ressentimentthe egalitarianism o our timeis the Tea Party. In what

ramework, then, could inequality and injustice be made again the object

o a politics? This is a question that, seriously posed, brings on vertigo.

Maybe the beginning o an answer is to think o inequality and injus-

tice, as Moses Wall seemed to, as epiphenomena above all o permanent

18 Benjamin, Arcades Project, pp. 4778, Convolute N12a, 1.


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74nlr 74warareo the permanent warare state. And to rame a politics that

says, unequivocally: Peace will never happen. It is not in the nature

o (human) things that it should. But that recognition, or the let, only

makes it the more essentialthe more revolutionary a programme

that the ocal point, the always recurring centre o politics, should be to

contain the eects and extent o warare, and to try (the deepest revolu-

tionary demand) to prize aggressivity and territoriality apart rom their

nation-state orm. Piece by piece; against the tide; interminably. In the

same spirit as a let which might ocus again on the problem o poverty

or o course there is no let without such a prime commitmentall

the more fercely or having Jesuss words about its permanence ringing

in their ears.

The question o reormism versus revolution, to take that up again,

seems to me to have died the death as a genuine political question,

as opposed to a rhetorical ourish. To adapt Randolph Bournes great

dictum, extremismsthe extremisms we haveare now the health

o the state.

The important act in the core territories o capitalism at present (and

this at least applies to Asia and Latin America just as much as Europe)

is that no established political party or movement any longer even pre-

tends to oer a programme o reorm. Reorming capitalism is tacitly

assumed to be impossible; what politicians agree on instead is revival,

resuscitation. Re-regulating the banks, in other wordsreturning, i we

are lucky, to the age o Nixon and Jean Monnet.

It surely goes without saying that a movement o opposition o the kind

I have been advocating, the moment it began to register even limited

successes, would call down the ull crude ury o the state on its head.

The boundaries between political organizing and armed resistance

would dissolvenot o the lets choosing, but as a simple matter o

sel-deence. Imagine i a movement really began to put the question o

permanent war economy back on the tablein however limited a way,

with however symbolic a set o victories. Be assured that the brutality othe kettle would be generalized. The public-order helicopters would be

on their way back rom Bahrain. Jean Charles de Menezes would have

many brothers. But the question that ollows seems to me this: what are


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clark:No Future75the circumstances in which the predictable to-and-ro o state repression

and let response could begin, however tentatively, to de-legitimize the

states preponderance o armed orce? Not, or sure, when the state can

show itsel collecting severed and shattered body parts rom the wreck-

age o Tube trains. Extremism, to repeat, is the states ticket to ride.

There will be no uture, I am saying fnally, without war, poverty,

Malthusian panic, tyranny, cruelty, classes, dead time, and all the ills the

esh is heir to, because there will be no uture; only a present in which

the let (always embattled and marginalized, alwaysproudlya thing

o the past) struggles to assemble the material or a society Nietzschethought had vanished rom the earth. And this is a recipe or politics, not

quietisma let that can look the world in the ace.

A Left With No Future, T.J. Clark

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