The Treason of the Clerks
by Robert Bruce (January 2016)
[1] Quite.
Postmodernists are generally reticent in applying their strategy of genealogical subversion to their own ideas and given the degenerate thoughts and commitments that can turn up, this reticence is well advised. Most of the postmodern lexicon is a series of badly written footnotes to Heidegger, the court philosopher of the Third Reich, whose dissimulating retreat into an impenetrable fog of wordplay (in his twilight years he courted Derrida as a worthy protégé), and gnomic sub-Nietzschean aphorisms was to be emulated by many other compromised intellectuals, particularly in France where an inglorious German occupation left its most agile minds groping for alibis. This was the era of bad faith lampooned by Sartre, in which men who might have done better were moved by a desperate inner need to bury the implications of freedom in grand ideological gestures or (same spirit different gifts) the navel gazing narcissism which was its natural accompaniment. This was the heyday of a convoluted structuralism when Parisian intellectuals erected a negation of conscience into a system of philosophy but even as it ostensibly aspired to science its characteristic literary productions betrayed all those elements of anguished special pleading.
Written whilst interned as a prisoner of war, the work with its disappearance of great men, and triumph of impersonal destiny is the eloquent address of a defeated nation, and this decadence reached a particularly high pitch with Paul de Man whose grimly anti-humanist contributions to literary theory laid the foundations of the deconstructionist craze which swept American faculties in the 80s. As anyone who has grappled with this dense cliché ridden genre will confirm, generating any substantive insights from the word salad is a hazardous business but scratch the surface of its laboured prose and it is not too difficult to find a coherence of purpose. Compare if you will these two soliloquies from de Man, the first an uncharacteristically legible passage written in 1941 for the pro-Nazi rag Soire at a time when his youthful idealism had not been tamed by academic careerism, and the second penned at the height of de Man’s liveried tenure.
We could not have much hope for the future of our civilization if it had let itself be invaded, without resistance, by a foreign force. In keeping its originality and its character intact, despite Semitic interference in all aspects of European life, our civilization has shown that its fundamental nature is healthy. What’s more, one can thus see that a solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its higher laws of evolution
* * *
Like the aesthetic act, moral systems are wasteful in that they acquire to spend. Moral systems are by their very nature destructive. They are unserious in that they are liable to change, and in order to certify themselves are forced to travel to their limit expending energy value on their way. Upon arriving at their limit moral systems decay and become stagnant. Therefore history is not continuous, but a discrete system in that there must be a rejection of the past in orders to invent the validity of the different present.
As Alan Bloom noted in that timeless classic The Closing of the American Mind, American universities are adept at producing sensitive illiterates but the conspicuous relativism which comes with it does not lend itself to the fantasy pose of detached irony Rorty imagines a postmodern philosopher king can ascend to after a heavy meal of continental sophistication. Shallow beliefs are after all usually intensely held, and if we are familiar enough with this psychology in the minds of slow witted religious fundamentalists, it is as well to note its prevalence amongst the over-educated. In the absence of any real objects in the soul for moral dedication, all that remains is the ersatz virtue of noisy commitment and everything in the mental hygiene of the modern intellectual has prepared him for this abdication of reason – an homage to Nietzsche leaving them with little but a penchant for violent solutions and all the taints such a mind must inevitably acquire. One of the most remarkable symptoms of this resurgent irrationalism is the influence of a bona fide Nazi philosopher like Carl Schmitt on the modern Left which would not haves surprised anyone familiar with the political psychology of the early twentieth century. For renegade Bolsheviks and anti-Semitic anarchists like Proudhon the difference between extreme Left and Right counted for less than the shared antipathy to bourgeois civilization and the common spiritual root is evident in an aesthetic of violence which was as influential on the hard left as the paramilitary right. George Sorel’s seminal work Reflections on Violence exerted a huge influence on George Lukacs and provided a gateway for similarly sadistic minds who were able to indulge their morbid obsession with blood red tides in Marxist code. In the normal run of things, this playing of the man – notoriously easy to do with radical intellectuals driven by a hatred of people towards a love of humanity – is normally an obnoxious exercise but when one is confronted with the tattered remnants of Marxism and all the evidence of its continuing charm few other options present themselves. When a theory fails so abjectly as a prophecy and ethics the appeal has to be located psychologically.
As Conrad noted, ‘the way of even the most justified revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds’. Scratch the surface of Marxism and a substructure of nihilism floods out – consumed with an obsessively violent imagery which Lenin distilled with particular fervor (it should be remembered that Lenin’s What is to be done? is a conscious homage to the Russian apostle of anarchist terrorism, Cherneshevsky) and which Lukacs put into practice in Bela Kun’s Red Republic. This ultimately is what non-vulgar Marxism, or what Alan Bloom more tellingly referred to as the Nietzscheanisation of the Left, in large part amounts to, and it belies the oft repeated schism played up between Marxism and postmodernism. Most of the central categories of the latter – the death of the author, its primitive disenchantment with technology, and plethora of code-Freudian and linguistic speculations are second hand Frankfurt School deviations and enlist the same nihilistic purpose Lukacs appealed to when he asked who could save us from western civilization. For all the suggestions of high German seriousness, the end result of this vapouring – a suitably Marxised and promiscuous cult of the noble savage helped along by the latest psychedelic aids, was calculated to bring out all the worst instincts of campus juvenilia.
[1] For one admirer ‘the intricacies of Jameson’s sentences are a sign not only of the difficulties of the problems he analyzes but also of the seriousness of his approach. His technical prose bears witness that cultural theory . . . is as valid as those “other disciplines.” Absolutely.
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The author is a low ranking and over-credentialled functionary of the British welfare state.
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