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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.
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