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Arabica Robusta

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www.versobooks.com/...092-resisting-left-melancholia

social movements leftism economic theory political economy

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Hall insisted that the “crisis of the Left” in the late twentieth century was due neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he charged, this ascendency was consequent to the Left's own failure to apprehend the character of the age, and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character.
  • For Hall, the rise of the Right was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure, just as the Left's dismissive or suspicious attitude toward cultural politics is for Hall not a sign of its unwavering principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought, and its fears and anxieties about revising those habits. In short, the Left's disintegration and disarray must be pinned not on external events or developments in the late twentieth century, but on the way the Left positions itself in relation to those events and developments.
  • But “Left melancholia” is Benjamin's unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, not serious about political change, who is more attached to a particular political analysis or ideal — even to the failure of that ideal — than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In the context of Benjamin's enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical historical grasp of the time of the Now, Left melancholia represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than “empty time” or “progress.”
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  • Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of Left melancholy. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those beholden more to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholic's investment in “things.” In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he argues that “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,” here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (“every loyal vow or memory”) about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality.
  • Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms “Left,” “socialism,” “Marx,” or “movement.”
  • The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and of the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labour and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism.
  • But in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss — the promise that Left analysis and Left commitment would supply its adherents with a clear and certain path towards the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as Leftists and for our fellow feeling towards other Leftists?
  • But if read through the prism of Left melancholy, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly since we would be forced to ask: what aspects of Left analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents, but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism?
  • this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket — an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, the problematic of language. And it is the combination of these two causes of failure that is deadly: “Our sectarianism,” he argues in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal, “consists not only of a defensiveness towards the agendas fixed by now-anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and 1945), but is also due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory, more as a habit of mind.”
  • Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics itself “is either conducted ideologically or not at all.”11 Or, in another of Hall's pithy formulas, “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.”12
  • It is important to be clear here. Hall never claims that ideology determines the course of globalization, but that it harnesses it for one political purpose or another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will also themselves bring into being certain political-economic formations within global capitalist developments.
  • Walter Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Erich Kästner, the popular Left-wing poet in the Weimar Republic who is the subject of his "Left melancholy” essay: “This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed one's idiosyncracies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted.”14
  • What is entailed in throwing off the melancholic and conservative habits of the Left to invigorate it with a radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), critical and visionary spirit again? This would be a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than recoiling at this prospect, even as we must be wisened to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history would carry us towards whatever reformulated vision we might develop. What political hope can we nurture that does not falsely ground itself in the notion that “history is on our side” or that there is some inevitability of popular attachment to whatever values we might develop as those of a new Left vision?
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