Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

 
Sometime ago, I came across a piece by Tristam Hunt, arguing that the counter-factual genre represented an inherently conservative view of history, in that it privileged notions of individual initiative over deeper forces of socio-economic change. Now Slavoj Zizek has written on the same subject:

"Why is the flourishing genre of ‘what if?’ histories the preserve of conservative historians? The introduction to such volumes typically begins with an attack on Marxists, who allegedly believe in historical determinism. Take this latest instalment, edited by Andrew Roberts, who has himself contributed an essay on the bright prospects that would have faced Russia in the 20th century had Lenin been shot on arriving at the Finland Station...

Roberts ignores the central ideological paradox of modern history, as formulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In contrast to Catholicism, which conceived of human redemption as being dependent on good deeds, Protestantism insisted on predestination: why then did Protestantism function as the ideology of early capitalism? Why did people’s belief that their redemption had been decided in advance not only not lead to lethargy, but sustain the most powerful mobilisation of human resources ever experienced?"


Zizek makes a number of valid points, noting that the communist left required some notion of individual scenarios precisely in order to effect the Russian revolution (since Marx had supposed that only capitalist societies would be ripe for revolution while a fedalist society like Russia would have to become a captialist state first). As a recent spat of comments on this blog demonstrated, much hard-left thinking deals with the possibility of a communist society that was constructed in the manner Marx indicated rather than having being perverted by Lenin; not a proposition I agree with but nonetheless its difficult to conclude that wish-fulfillment is solely the province of the right (what if Trotsky had replaced Lenin rather than Stalin, for example?). Equally, it could be argued that counter-factual fiction has more commonly reflected a whig view of history, with both Pavane and Bring the Jubilee reflect changes that were aberrations from a idea of history as progress.

One further issue, is that much of modern conservatism strikes me as having a rather limited approach to the idea of individual agency, due to much if it having embraced a form of determinism that is considerably more rigid than anything proposed by Marx (whose writing was after all concerned with little more than alternative means of social and economic organisation) whether that applies to Fukuyama's End of History or Pinker's The Blank Slate.

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posted by Richard 2:36 pm