Victory Columns

With the defeat of the French, world history seemed to be safely interred in its glorious grave, and this column was the funerary stele.

—Walter Benjamin, from “Victory Column,” Berlin Childhood Around 1900

Every middle class child believes without knowing it, feels in his new run-faster sneakers, that history is concluded in a permanent present, puffily insulated and Kodachromatically saturated, an increasingly knowable now sustained and guaranteed by the whole general shape of things, of rooms and homes and yards and cars uncaused, given, just there, a form-fitted and climate-controlled arc of infinity in every hammock, sleeping bag, leaf pile, hay-bale fort, couch-cushion fort, screen porch, tree house, and coat closet. So a kid can believe that history is over: there were dinosaurs, there were knights and dragons, there were Nazis; now there’s Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, and color TV.

The sense that the world is normal and natural is like a child’s belief in his own invulnerability —you can win any fight and survive any accident, because the universe seems to be constituted such that you’re always in it, mostly enjoying things—which is plausible if your picture of the world has never been seriously challenged by events radically contemptuous of your preferences, self-regard, will, or being.

I can also understand the claim that Americans act as if things were pretty much set in stone—green lawns, cheap branded clothes, driving, life in suburban isolation and safety, all of this is here to stay, and if it’s metaphysically necessary, the physical conditions that support it will simply follow. This belief was well summarized by George H.W. Bush at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio: The American way of life is not up for negotiation.

However, I am puzzled when an adult speaks in theoretical/philosophical tones of the end of history and endorses it as a thesis. I do not understand the content of the belief that history is over or what line of reasoning might have led one to it. Help make this real for me.

Comments

[CR]

If yr talking about Agamben or Benjamin, my sense is that they're bringing forward (impossible, messianic, fictional) ends of history in opposition to the fact that during our period, our interminably long period, history just keeps ending over and over and over again. For all the wrong reasons.

Have you ever read Flaubert's notes for the end of Bouvard and Pecuchet, a novel he didn't live to finish? He gives us two ends of history at once, two which would reiterate themselves sometimes syncopatedly, often simulanteously, for the next 130 or so years and, so the forecast claims, will continue to do so for awhile yet. A novel about doubles finds its end (or doesn't quite) in an irreconcilable pair of what is to comes.

Actually, the title of yr post over on FK might just be an early version of the consumate Joycean version of the end of history. What fills the gap when the story stalls, can't quite bring itself to End with a capital E. A final dull note held forever and forever. End of History meet End of Literature.

Which instance of "snow is general" in "The Dead" were you citing? I'd pick this one myself, rather than the final line.

"--They say, said Mary Jane, we haven't had snow like it for thirty years, and I read this morning in the newspapers that the snow is general all over Ireland."

Das man... the consumately modern avatar of apocalypse.

[Matt]

Carl, what a wonderful surprise! (I'm glad now that it took me so damn long to complete my post, so that it didn't push you and yours right off the top.)

It is a puzzling question. And there's always the reactionary branch of the Neo Hegelians to be wary of as well. I think it's important to note the differences among philosophers or theorists with regard to this question (but also that this doesn't necessarily mean they are strictly incompatible, or even at counter-purposes, perhaps). Sorry that's not much help. It's something well worth struggling with anyway; one idea is that philosophy as traditionally, metaphysically-oriented, has ended, and that idea one could trace from say Heidegger to Nancy (the end of philosophy doesn't mean anything like the end of thought, rather it may mark the call for a new kind of community or being in-common...)

As someone or other recently said, there's a bit of a tendency to "go all postal" as well, among certain trendy thinkers shall we say (as in post-politics, for instance), too glibly or without making clear what may be at stake in such rhetoric. So, as for making this "real" however, I second your plea.

[Matt]

In retrospect, I wonder if the Benjamin reading group could have been conducted, or stylized (as in made plain), for a wider audience. (My post fails miserably at this, I know.) There can certainly be a cloistering effect among people, new groups especially, for whom the general trajectories and language of various thinkers is more familiar currency, of a sort, but that has its benefits too.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge my own complicity in this. A better service to Benjamin might really be the opposite, drawing on him (in the plural and more gently, I think) to help confront the various obstacles of the day. Instead of posing, or re-posing, a Chess game between Derrida and Agamben, in fact. In my defense I can only say that those subtle, often elliptical confrontations between thinkers (and not just proper nouns of course), those tensions and those details excite me too. But then even the incorrect readings that make something--however marginal or inconsequential--"real," are sometimes more valuable than all of that.

[Carl]

>our period, our interminably long period, history just keeps ending over and over and over again

I don't understand periodization outside of the context of the interests of whoever is periodizing. There are lots of periods and subperiods that light up and segment themselves off depending on what you're looking at (herding, paper making, patronage, contract law, steel, Kanye West). I can't imagine feeling as though I had an understanding of history that wasn't built up from an understanding of lots of particular telescoping subhistories.

>Flaubert's notes for the end of Bouvard and Pecuchet, a novel he didn't live to finish? He gives us two ends of history at once

I haven't read those notes, but thanks for the tip. Provincial life, boredom, and middle-class dissatisfaction are topics for a study of ends of history, too.

>Which instance of "snow is general" in "The Dead" were you citing?

"Snow is general" and "snow was general" are phrases in my winter vocabulary. The causal pedigree of my saying these things leads to "The Dead," but my speech act was not primarily citation, but rather reporting on a state of affairs.

>End of History meet End of Literature.

I find it easiest to grasp notions like these as ways of referring to possible curricula, probably boring ones. I tend to think that these things were not the guiding interest of modernist writers.

>one idea is that philosophy as traditionally, metaphysically-oriented, has ended

I guess this could be a statement about the self-image of certain philosophy departments. But as long as humans continue to find out about the world on their own, which humans do as a matter of biological course, framing and testing hypotheses and attempting to find natural kinds and giving better accounts of the "what it is", metaphysical thinking will be a part of mental life. The real history of metaphysics is the succession of each individual's explanatory concepts and principles. Like Kant, I believe that basic forms of metaphysical thought provide a constitutive grammar of perception, social awareness, class understanding, aesthetic pleasure, scientific knowing, and so on, and that many of these grammatical elements can be articulated, though I don't believe in proofs of the completeness of the table of categories or anything. On this view, the history of philosophy, as the study of the writings of certain authors, is the history of the articulation of forms of thought that are deployed in human life.

[Matt]

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest metaphysical thinking had ended, Carl. That would be a little pat, wouldn't it? I think it's about a bit more than just the self-image of certain philosophy departments (but then, I wouldn't know).

But if one is really interested in grasping Heidegger and Nancy (just for example, and many people are not), or in doing some justice to their thought of this 'end' (which of course demands always to be put in inverted commas, as unfashionable as that may be, right now) -then isn't it, finally, rather hard to circumvent the potentially boring close readings entirely?

We could debate the efficacy of close readings as a methodology. I'll get my boxing gloves. They are certainly not sufficient in themselves. But without them, without the basic good faith gesture of a mutual care and attention to the text they presuppose (such as one can only hope for in a dedicated "reading group")...well of course some complex thoughts deserve to be unpacked, thought not with any vain pretenses to final closure.

I've taken up enough space with this comment; thanks for the response.

[CR]

Provincial life, boredom, and middle-class dissatisfaction are topics for a study of ends of history, too.

Yep. Just what I'm at work on. Exactly.

>End of History meet End of Literature.

I find it easiest to grasp notions like these as ways of referring to possible curricula, probably boring ones. I tend to think that these things were not the guiding interest of modernist writers.

Really? Have you read much modernist literature? Think Eliot didn't have both in mind while writing The Waste Land, for instance?

[Craig]

We could debate the efficacy of close readings as a methodology.

I firmly believe in exegetical work. It may not be the most interesting stuff to read, but as an intellectual practice -- especially for someone in "theory" (small 't') or "philosophy" -- it is one of the best things you can do. Especially when you are either starting out (as a beginner) or working on a new text. A lot of interpretive excesses -- the kind that "anti-Theory-ists" rightly complain about -- would be minimized through the practice of reading and exegesis. It's hard to make a silly claim when you actually know a text.

To an extent, I'm sad that my contribution on Benjamin wasn't more exegetical than it was. But then it is hard to be anything but superficial in a twelve-hundred word essay on a text you just read for the first time. This is my reply to my being singled out for poor writing pratices in the Benjamin reading group. While I do apologize for not being concrete, I don't apologize for proceeding "as if the actual social world, in which people eat sausages and drink mulled wine at night-markets, does not exist." I didn't know sausages and beer were part of the assignment! Had I known, I would have spent years in the archives finding out how mulled wine, sausages, and violence fit together or out among people doing ethnographic work on violent sausage eating before making my comments!

I am, of course, joking. But only a little bit.

[Phil]

There is a way of talking around someone's point (which may be conveyed as much by tone as anything), desiring perhaps to conjure it's more deeply-landed barbs away, by grasping and ironing (irony-ing) the fallen thorns lying at one's feet (cf. John Holbo). No doubt there is an analytic term for this, the smug Socratic response. I for one hope that the authors here are held in somewhat greater esteem, or at least still heard that their openness to criticism is at root very sincere. They seem hardly a group to just hear what they want to hear.)

Craig also quite rightly touches on an old common prejudice worth addressing sometime, and perhaps at more length. It would seem that John Ransom has already made a good start, and though it would probably make little difference to some...as others less delicately, or less affably might say, it's something that just needs to fucking die already. Descartes and Kant are always on the real battlefield, damnit (along with Schmitt, Hegel, Derrida and Benjamin).

[Carl]

>>>End of History meet End of Literature.

>>I find it easiest to grasp notions like these as ways of referring to possible curricula, probably boring ones. I tend to think that these things were not the guiding interest of modernist writers.

>Really? Have you read much modernist literature? Think Eliot didn't have both in mind while writing The Waste Land, for instance?

I haven’t read much modernist poetry or drama. I’ve read an undergraduate number of modernist novels. But I think your question should be, “Have you read much criticism of modernist literature?” or “Have you attended many classes on modernist literature?” End-of-History/End-of-Literature themes seem to me to be more a preoccupation of secondary literature. (“The Wasteland” probably counts as secondary literature.)

What would be some paradigm EOL/EOH texts? Ulysses has some end-of-literature anxieties circling through it, but to see it as endorsing EOL as a thesis, you’d have to think the book was primarily about Stephen, or that the Oxen of the Sun chapter had priority over the others. If the book makes an argument about literature, I think it’s that the scope and originality of literature is limited only by the originality of speakers/thinkers/doers in language. In spite of Joyce’s remark about putting in bits for the professors, and the agon-with-Shakespeare narrative, and Derrida’s (and others’) claim about Joyce’s attempt to incorporate all possible future writing/criticism, I tend to see Ulysses as widening the field of literary possibility. I guess I can see Finnegans Wake as an end-of-history book, but I didn’t get to that conclusion by struggling with FW on my own. The best thing a non-specialist could take away from FW is not a thesis it endorses/performs, but a way of looking at language and the world, a certain sort of mode of perception.

In a way, I think the end of metaphysics—sort of Matt’s suggestion—is a more plausible unifying theme among modernist writers (if there’s a point to attempting to see unities here), the increasing implausibility of traditional guarantors of sense, progress, purpose, coherence, justice—not that this is a particularly new theme (read King Lear)—and how one might respond to this implausibility. (If literature and history are thought to be extrahuman forces with rich and interesting properties, then worries about their fate fall under the end-of-metaphysics rubric.) The rapid erosion of tradition, as hastened by science/technology/industrialization, and the problem or promise of the open space left in its wake, is a topic that pretty much anyone could find in modernist texts; EOL/EOH seems to me a little more arcane. But whatever. Modernists can certainly be willfully arcane, and what pretty much anyone could find in a text isn’t necessarily a measure of anything.

>It's hard to make a silly claim when you actually know a text.

One of my favorite professors had an extremely literal way of reading Kant. He rejected almost any paraphrase, let alone a connection to the extra-textual world, in favor of glosses one could find elsewhere in Kant’s work. At times he seemed to endorse a disquotational theory of interpretation: ‘When Kant says “p,” I think he means that p.’ This can get a little silly. But if the principle of charity is the guiding principle of your method, I agree that you should strive to take the text at face value and try to read it against it self. (I take it Matt’s “mutual good faith gesture of care and attention” was suggesting this.)

>This is my reply to my being singled out for poor writing practices in the Benjamin reading group.

I ought to have remembered the wisdom of Destiny’s Child: “I'm not gonna dis you on the internet,/’cause my mama taught me better than that.” I didn’t realize that I was tuning in to one part of a much larger conversation (the reading group project), the whole of which helps the parts make sense.

>years in the archives finding out how mulled wine, sausages, and violence fit together

It occurs to me that that’s the just sort of thing Stallybrass and White worked on.

>violent sausage

Aren't there living sausages in Rabelais?

[blah]

Why yes, I believe there are.

[Matt]

Don't forget C.S. Lewis, blah. The Catholic Tolkien was quite appalled by his High Eclecticism.

[Matt]

I firmly believe in exegetical work. It may not be the most interesting stuff to read, but as an intellectual practice -- especially for someone in "theory" (small 't') or "philosophy" -- it is one of the best things you can do [...] A lot of interpretive excesses -- the kind that "anti-Theory-ists" rightly complain about -- would be minimized through the practice of reading and exegesis.

I agree with you entirely, Craig. It's tempting to add the rather obvious parallel (that a lot of the interpretive excesses of the self-declared "anti-Theory-ists" would also be minimized by such practice. But then, as someone recently mentioned, the genre itself might disappear, and that would be bad news indeed, for publishers).

Carl, thank you, belatedly, for the patient comments. It's really nice to have you around here.

[Craig]

It's not like "anti-Theory-ists" are any better at reading than "pro-Theory-ists". None of them can read. It's not their fault, though: no one ever taught them how to read.

I took this course during my PhD coursework (it sounds so long ago... and not the year that it actually is) that was co-taught by, incidentally, my supervisor and another one of my committee members. The requirements were quite light (in my view) for a doctoral level full course (i.e., two semesters or twenty-four weeks). A single term paper and two exegetical exercises. The result would be about forty pages total of written work.

My fellow students -- who all wanted to be or thought of themselves as "social" or "political" theorists or even "philosophers" -- had no idea what to make of this idea, "exegesis". It was foreign to them. "What do you mean pick out a particular and definite theme?" or "What do you mean write ten pages on a single paragraph or page or even a single word?". Needless to say -- and this is a rarity as far as I can tell in graduate coursework in Canada -- most of them bombed the rather simple assignment. (FYI: this was at the Berkeley or Warwick of Canada -- York.)

And, if you can believe it, some of them thought of themselves as "Derrideans" or "Heideggerians"! Guess they didn't read their masters very closely.

The point: it's easy to pass yourself off as a theorist, being one is another matter. But maybe that is lucky for my less dedicated (or, as it were, anal) colleagues: being a sloppy social theorist isn't as much of a crime as being a good "Theory-ist". Other than Mouzelis and Seidman, no one really cares about this at all.