v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday

 

Released in 1942, Stefan Zweig's The World Yesterday is an enlightening book about the past in Europe that tells us a lot about today. A must read. Chris Aderne's review gives us some good insight:

It’s very easy to read about Kaiser this, and Franz Ferdinand that, but this is by far the best window into what people were thinking in 1914 (and before) and what people felt about the likelihood and then onset of war. Everyone (including Zweig) was so confident that war couldn’t possibly break out in Europe. How could interest rates go on being 4% forever if war broke out! Interesting to think about our present feeling of how unlikely war seems, hard to tell if there’s a lesson there for us.

We thought railway workers would blow up the tracks rather than let their comrades be loaded into trains to be sent to the front as cannon fodder; we relied on women to refuse to see their children and husbands sacrificed to the idol Moloch; we were convinced that the intellectual and moral power of Europe would assert itself triumphantly at the critical last moment. Our common idealism, the optimism that had come from progress, meant that we failed to see and speak out strongly enough against our common danger.

But he shares a pertinent story about a surge of emotion in a French village when the German Kaiser appeared at the beginning of a film — this is the first time he realises that things are amiss! And there is definitely a lesson for us moderns here.

At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst.

Then when War broke out, Zweig expected dark moods, but people (in Austria, and presumably elsewhere) were enthusiastically dancing in the street. They thought it would be a quick trounce, and that their wise leaders were obviously right and obviously the winners. He contrasts this with 1939, when there was a very different response; everyone was grim and had fewer notions about heroism. Except in America! maybe? they were less involved in the Great War, and so you still read stories about sexy GIs going off to the Pacific…

Why did the masses not burn with the same enthusiasm in 1939 as in 1914? Why did they simply obey the call to arms with grave determination, silently, fatalistically? Wasn’t it the same as before, was there not even something higher and more sacred at stake in the war now being fought, which began as a war of ideas and was not just about borders and colonies? The answer is simple—they did not feel the same because the world in 1939 was not as childishly naive and gullible as in 1914.

It is only when Zweig leaves the city that he finds people with a more sensible view of the situation. During the war he goes to the eastern front (Russia) and notes that the peasants there saw it more clearly than the jingoistic urbanites back home. They saw that it was just a crap thing that had happened and that they shared with their poor “enemies” on the other side of the lines.

I had an irresistible feeling that these simple, even primitive men saw the war in a much clearer light than our university professors and writers; they regarded it as a misfortune that had befallen them, there was nothing they could do about it, and anyone else who was the victim of such bad luck was a kind of brother.

Zweig himself was incredibly mobile and connected during the war. He was in Belgium when it started, so he hopped on a train home and saw guns a-moving. Then he trained to Switzerland during the war, and just across the border the Swiss were enjoying luxuries in abundance while starving Austrians and Frenchmen murdered each other. And finally he trained home after the war (crossing paths with the departing Emperor!) and saw what a dump his home had become in four years of war. He’s also able to write to friends all over Europe, publish books and pamphlets^[3] .

The absurdity of European wars was made physically evident to me by the close spatial proximity of conditions on the two sides—over there, on the Austrian side of this little border town, its placards and signs still clearly legible with the naked eye, men were being taken out of every little house and hovel, put on trains and sent to the Ukraine and Albania to murder and be murdered; here, five minutes away, men of the same age could sit at ease with their wives outside their ivy-clad doors, smoking their pipes.

A Sense of Rebellion

 

A highly recommended podcast of a think tank that existed in the 1060's and 70's and the characters that populated it. A must hear.

Kamala for President Endorsement by the Atlantic

The Atlantic's Endorsement of Kamala Harris:

This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme. Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. “We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,” the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This year’s election is another.

About the candidate we are endorsing: The Atlantic is a heterodox place, staffed by freethinkers, and for some of us, Kamala Harris’s policy views are too centrist, while for others they’re too liberal. The process that led to her nomination was flawed, and she’s been cagey in keeping the public and press from getting to know her as well as they should. But we know a few things for sure. Having devoted her life to public service, Harris respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.

This endorsement will not be controversial to Trump’s antagonists. Nor will it matter to his supporters. But to the voters who don’t much care for either candidate, and who will decide the country’s fate, it is not enough to list Harris’s strengths or write a bill of obvious particulars against Trump. The main reason for those ambivalent Americans to vote for Harris has little to do with policy or partisanship. It’s this: Electing her and defeating him is the only way to release us from the political nightmare in which we’re trapped and bring us to the next phase of the American experiment.

Trump isn’t solely responsible for this age of poisonous rhetoric, hateful name-calling, conspiracies and lies, divided families and communities, cowardly leaders and deluded followers—but as long as Trump still sits atop the Republican Party, it will not end. His power depends on lowering the country into a feverish state of fear and rage where Americans turn on one another. For the millions of alienated and politically homeless voters who despise what the country has become and believe it can do better, sending Trump into retirement is the necessary first step.

If you’re a conservative who can’t abide Harris’s tax and immigration policies, but who is also offended by the rottenness of the Republican Party, only Trump’s final defeat will allow your party to return to health—then you’ll be free to oppose President Harris wholeheartedly. Like you, we wish for the return of the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, a party animated by actual ideas. We believe that American politics are healthiest when vibrant conservative and liberal parties fight it out on matters of policy.

If you’re a progressive who thinks the Democratic Party is a tool of corporate America, talk to someone who still can’t forgive themselves for voting for Ralph Nader in 2000—then ask yourself which candidate, Harris or Trump, would give you any leverage to push for policies you care about.

And if you’re one of the many Americans who can’t stand politics and just want to opt out, remember that under democracy, inaction is also an action; that no one ever has clean hands; and that, as our 1860 editorial said, “nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers.” In other words, voting is a right that makes you responsible.

Trump is the sphinx who stands in the way of America entering a more hopeful future. In Greek mythology, the sphinx killed every traveler who failed to answer her riddle, until Oedipus finally solved it, causing the monster’s demise. The answer to Trump lies in every American’s hands. Then he needs only to go away.

Recent experiments with reflections and abstract space.

Vallejo Nocturno 2024-Flood Series

Fredric Jameson Gone

 

Fredric Jameson left us this last week at the ripe old age of 90. A towering intellectual of the Left in the USA. Terry Eagleton writes about his work at the London review of Books:

Fredric Jameson’s sentences could be of Proustian length, great intricate chains of syntax that pursue their stately course in no hurry to arrive at a full stop; but his prose was never deliberately obscure, as it is with those theorists who make their arguments irrefutable by rendering them unintelligible. Obscurantism is as much the product of anxiety as it is of arrogance. In fact, The Years of Theory, his final book, is one of the most accessible Jameson ever produced. It is the transcript of a series of seminars he gave in the US three years ago and instead of his usual burnished rhetoric, magisterial if somewhat monotone, we have the speaking voice of a more unbuttoned, self-deprecating Jameson, a man who was clearly at ease with his audience and attentive to them (‘Don’t worry about that right now’; ‘I think you’re probably not going to ... read through that, and I don’t think it’s even necessary’; ‘I would like you to feel the excitement of the stuff’). The tone is democratic American, very different from that of the French divas of both genders whose thought he expounds. There are touches of wry humour: Lévi-Strauss ‘is obviously an enormously brilliant figure who, like a lot of such people, is absolutely untrustworthy’. Unlike the gurus of the Left Bank, he didn’t regard it as beneath his dignity to explain some basic ideas: patriarchy, for example, or the fact that Freud has no real concept of the mother. When it comes to affairs of the mind, at least in the cultural domain, the United States is a colony of Europe, and the style of this book reflects the fact. There are even some snatches of gossip and odd bits of biography. The young Lacan met James Joyce and may have psychoanalysed Picasso. He was also consulted by Sartre, who happened to be having hallucinations at the time. We learn that Foucault and Derrida couldn’t stand each other, rather as one imagines Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver don’t get on too well. Derrida was the only member of the intelligentsia to visit his fellow Algerian Louis Althusser when he was locked up for killing his wife. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, doyens of the Frankfurt School, were avid consumers of Marx Brothers movies. There is even a reference to Sartre’s squint, as well as to the fact that Jameson himself had a tendency to put on weight. This is not the kind of stuff one would have heard at Lacan’s renowned seminars in Paris, voguish as well as highbrow affairs, like a cross between academia and Ascot.

The book pushes the years of French theory back to the aftermath of the Second World War (Sartre, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty) and in doing so weaves a personal biography into its intellectual history. Jameson’s first book was on Sartre; he regarded himself as a ‘more-than-former-Sartrean’ and was inclined to overrate Being and Nothingness, which along with The Age of Reason was Jameson’s first introduction to the theory business. In fact, he tells us that he always tried to remain faithful to existentialism, which is almost as surprising as being told that he always remained loyal to the Buddha. It is hard to see any evidence of this commitment in his voluminous writings. . . .

Jameson’s knowledge wasn’t confined to a single nation. One suspects that nobody alive today has read as many books as he had, from Heraclitus and Parmenides to obscure texts and tracts only he had heard of. This urge for totality has its drawbacks. Jameson was always too generous-spirited a thinker, holding with the Hegel he admired that the truth lies in the whole, and that one must judge ideas in this context rather than dismissing them out of hand. There may be an American impulse to affirm at work here, in contrast to the negativity which marks French thought from Mallarmé’s aesthetics and Sartre’s nothingness to Derrida’s différance and Alain Badiou’s ineffable Event. Jameson tells us that he adheres provisionally to all the theoretical cases he outlines, which ignores not only the flagrant contradictions between them but the incompatibility of some of them with his own Marxist politics. It is an approach more typical of the lecture room than the political rally. For Marx, by contrast, not to mention the ferociously partisan Jesus, the truth is not a totality but one-sided. It is a scandal and stumbling block, a cutting sword which seeks to lay bare falsehood and deceit in the name of human emancipation.

Jameson praises Deleuze as ‘one of the most marvellous thinkers of the 20th century’, while going on to claim that he turns all the thinkers he deals with into himself. That doesn’t seem all that marvellous to me, any more than there’s much to admire about the squalid idealising of schizophrenia to which his work gave rise. It isn’t really possible to derive an ethics from Deleuze’s grandiose philosophy of desire, or for that matter a feasible politics. Jameson was silent on these questions, seeking as usual to understand rather than censure. One mustn’t lapse into a simplistic opposition between good and evil, which would be ripe for deconstruction. But you don’t need to wax metaphysical to denounce Donald Trump. It’s rather that denunciation wasn’t his style, any more than satire or parody was. He was one of the least polemical of left-wing writers.

Cultural theorists like Jameson are a reinvention of the classical intellectual. Intellectuals differ from academics in ranging across a number of disciplines, but also in bringing ideas to bear on society as a whole. They are typically both polymaths and polyglots. Jameson was fluent in several languages and had a voracious appetite for knowledge. He was as learned in Czech science fiction as he was in Taiwanese cinema. He continued to produce major works until his death last month at the age of ninety. His exceptional range of interests pointed to the way an otherwise socially pointless literary criticism might manage to justify its existence. By becoming a form of cultural critique, it can play a modest role in changing the world as well as interpreting it.