Disenchanting Ensorcelled Time

I’m becoming, perhaps, a madman.  I want to shake every person i meet and scream, “nothing’s changed!”

There’s a secret to every book by Patricia McKillip, a subtle spell woven into every word.  There are a few writers like this, a few novels which, in the precise (but perhaps un-intentional) style of the writer, a subtle shift occurs within the mind of the words’ recipient, bending and re-routing conscious streams of thought into new channels, new floods.

A writer must, in order to ensure her story takes life, ensure her reader is able to think like her.  For most stories, there’s little fear–concrete sucessions of plot in quite familiar patterns, in the linear flow of mundane western thought (“he woke, dressed, fumbled for his keys and stumbled out the door”).  Things we already expect to happen as consequences of earlier happenings, all fitting neatly into the cloth of a story so we miss the flaws, are unsuprised but still rewarded with a decent tale.

But there are other writers, for whom linear time and succession are foolish mistakes that get in the way of the story they’re trying to tell.  They write in ways to train the reader, to interrupt the long series of pluses in the string of our enchained, mathematical thought, coaxing or forcing us to think as they do.  Virginia Woolfe’s To the Lighthouse was the first time i noticed this–standing, 40 pages past the first, to make myself tea, my mind narrated memories and pasts into the waiting for water to boil so that tea was not just tea, it was the end and the beginning, an intersection of all the people i’ve ever known and heard and loved fragmented wondrously around me.  Linear time had fallen away, the eternal, or the eternal-aware narrator who in this case might have been me, had swept through all the bulwarks and tide-walls of progress and history and all the “and then, and then, and then”s…

McKillip, too, weaves such a spell, though not so fragmented.  Every book is a succession of dreams, a concurrence of time inseparable into “past and future and present,” imparting not just the obvious gift (a beautiful story), but a second, residual one which does not easily fade.

The narrative is still here.  The past has refused to end.

I stumbled upon a few strange sites today, offering paramilitary services to corporations of the sort one thought, according to linear time, they no longer needed.  Not, you must understand, the typical anti-terrorist stuff one’s told are necessary in this silly little modern age of ours, but the sort offered by groups of armed men hired by industrialists in the 20’s, to corral and chide unwilling factory and railroad workers into forgetting certain complaints.

Their services seem outdated.  The smiling photos of Uncle-Ben the overseer dressed in rental blue seem so anachonistic (i mean, isn’t a black man running for president?  Everyone tells me this means liberation, arrival, the end of the past.  I’m never quite convinced).

But, the gift of McKillip’s prose weaves past and present together still in my mind, following only the strict, unwritten rules of dreams, and the eternal opens, slashed out of the swollen distended bowels of democratic/scientific history and escapes, undigested.  The monster swallowed the eternal whole, and just like all good fairy tales, the knife which splits the giant’s stomach disgorges the lost friend holding the key, both whole and unharmed, into the strange light of understanding.

Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Leela Ghandi)

Both Lenin and Orwell wrote tirades against “the immature left”–the strange web of “juice-drinkers and sandalwearers” (orwell’s words) who refused to embrace True Leftism (that is, white-boy, scientific socialism) and instead had messy sex lives and linked their vegetarianism or their gayness to occultists and anarchists and anti-colonialism. Wildes “The Soul of Man under Socialism” was rejected by the Adults for its childish linkage of aesthetics to liberation. For those who wanted scientific Socialism, people like Wilde were dangerously naive. But for the rest of us, it’s the only way to live.

Leela Ghandi’a accounts of british vegetarian, aesthetic, occult, anarchist and gay movements is precisely the redemption (and a big fuck you) to Lenin’s “Left-wing Communism: an infantile disorder” of fin-de-siecle political movements. But more than that, it’s a guide, written by Ghandi’s great-granddaughter, for anyone who is both anti-colonialist and also a little off-kilter.

Her radical thesis: it isn’t gayness or vegetarianism or even anarcho-socialism that is the truly radical link which connects “leftists” the the plights of the oppressed–there’s nothing radical about having gay sex. Rather, it’s the politics of friendship, the messy (she calls it “Radical Relationality”) relationships which undermine the bourgeois/capitalist governance. Vegetarianism wasn’t radical (the nazi’s built a cult out of it), but the hospitality of certain british vegetarians who took in a young mahatmas ghandi into their homes, a radical extension of friendship which bridged the colonialist vs. colonised gulf, undermining that power relationship. The circles of Oscar Wilde were large and dangerous to power, undermining governability, and however the Scientific/Adult Left disparaged him, almost every gay-boy who’s ever read him finds more there than in Orwell or Lenin’s tirades.

Leela Ghandi makes deliciously outrageous statements (quite in the manner of Zizek, with whom she quarrels a bit), and liberates quite a bit of territory usually dismissed as infantile or immature (the point of her last chapter, “An Immature Politics”).

Better still, Radical Relationality creates a new constellation in which to place a host of things seen by the western left as immature, or, better yet, completely undermines the white-privelage vs. every-other-non-white-subaltern class. That it takes Ghandi’s great-granddaughter to extricate us from the mess of criticising ourselves (oh, but never ourselves, just each other: how many times does crimethinc or a queer pagan vegan syndicalist tori-amos listening f-to-m have to be labeled by other white leftists as “suburban, middle-classed, white and privelaged” before we all just shoot each other?) and instead re-orients, for those willing to stop doing the work of governanance for the governed, resistance and radicalism within a beautiful tapestry far richer than the internalised “white man’s burden” of the “Scientific Left.”

Also useful is the slight work she does adding to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work on paganism and the agency of the gods. Scientific Socialism (and Western Capitalism both) make the same claims of materialism, and both hope someday to uproot from the minds of the people the “immature” notions of gods and deities, etc.. But what precisely to do with India? (or with those pesky First Nations?) Either project would need to shed quite a bit of blood to uproot that “divine suspicion.” What if neither Dawkins nor Lenin’s “mature” rejections of pagan “superstitions” work for you? You’re not alone (materialism is still mostly limited to the West), and have already quite a lot more in common with millions of oppressed indigenous peoples than you think. I, for one, don’t mind being on their side.

A History of Pagan Europe (Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick)

The question of paganism in europe doesn’t present itself immediately as a matter of scandal, though the relative absence of histories on the subject does at least hint at the controversy of the topic. Usually relegated to Folkloric studies (with their classifications and archetypes) the issue of paganism is miserably under-treated.

Contention exists over the very definition of pagan–the general “western-academic” consensus is that it is a useless or over-used word, stolen by new-age neopagans to mean something somehow universal. History usually attempts to draw straight lines through time, successions of tendencies and thinkers one after the other until the present (or until the death of the idea), and is more than happy to this sort of thing as long as funding for “history of science” grants continue. Everything that can fit into the grand-narrative is important (or, conversely, nothing that has already been used in the grand-narratives matters), leaving the question of pagan/indigenous beliefs of europe to the celtic-tapestry lot (of which, i’m told, i belong).

So, what then to make of the libraries and archives full of catholic denunciations of “pagan” practices remaining all the way into the 19th century? Offerings at well, shouting at the moon, refusing to eat certain animals or drinking certain things on certain days. Injunctions against paying any attention to the phase of the moon at all are rife. The Catholic (and its reformist-children) church has long tried to uproot these practises, and as facile as it might be to attribute such tirades to religious hysteria, the fact people that some people still throw spilled salt over their shoulder or that most of old bretons in northwest france still tie ribbons over “fairie wells” (i’ve seen it personally) suggests that the pagan-tendency was never fully uprooted.

So, come we now to Jones and Pennick. Their book is an inadequate (but welcome) addition to the shelf that so far only contains books like The Golden Bough. Slim (288 pages), well-researched, but unsatisfying. I don’t mean to be hard on them, seeing as how they couldn’t seem to secure any sort of funding whatsoever for their subject matter (and recieved rather vicious reviews by folklorists for disturbing their comfortable calculus). But it’s too small, a tiny drop in an drained pool. Still, since it’s something at all, and more than interesting to read, i highly suggest it. Work on the lithuanian pagan kingdom is appreciated (not original, but most wouldn’t know where else to turn), but the sense that they’re screaming into the wind is difficult to shake. They know they’re not wrong, they’re not being foolish, and yet they seem to apologise almost–take us seriously, they almost say, even though the reader probably already is. I did, i still do. But having read other accounts alluding to the same periods, i can’t help but think they could use a little more confidence.

One thing they do well, however, is begin to place european paganism within the context of other paganisms. One of the biggest objections to anyone beginning to address the issue is the right-wing tendency of some european and anglo paganisms: every white-boy software coder was pretty certain he was scottish after Braveheart, and not a few of them used this new-found heritage to argue against other indigenous-rights movements (scots were an oppressed people, too, and so why are all the american First Nations complaining?). There’s a way out of this, and it seems humorously simple, though one needs to look elsewhere (I suggest India–Chakrabarty and Leela Ghandi). J&P begin some of the work to link paganisms outside of racial/tribal groups (race didn’t exist as a notion till the 19th century–is no one reading Hannah Arendt anymore?), and a lot more could be done, but again we come back to the question: why should J&P have to apologise for a bunch of white idiots at Microsoft calling themselves “goths in the traditional germanic sense”?

REVIEW: The Origin of Capitalism–A Longer View (Ellen Meiksins Wood)

While I’m still waiting for someone to do a treatise on the alchemical language employed by Marx to explain Capital and the magic the Capitalists/Bourgeoisie employ (“everything that is solid melts into air…”), I’ve had to settle instead with general clarifications.

So in the meantime, TOoC was quite useful. This is the second time i’ve read it, though for some reason the first reading (about 6 years ago) really must have been inadequate. Or, rather say, I had at that earlier point less exposure to most of the historians and economic theorists she uses and conflicts. I’d heard of E.P. Thompson but never read him; Weber was un-opened on my bookshelf, and I hadn’t even read Das Kapital yet. But none of that adequately explains why, on the second reading, i held in my hands an entirely different book.

Her premise is simple: The birth of Capitalism was a recent historical event. Within that statement, however, exists a myriad of complications, and it’s a minority view.

The typical story of Capitalism goes like this: after massive european plagues, the printing press and the Reformation, so many people lived in towns instead of feudal arrangements that we all became somehow liberated to our own self-interest, investing surplus funds (“primal accumulation”) into our own improvement and, with enough people doing so, the rate of “technological progress” sped up to make most of us not need to raise our own food anymore. We all became Capitalists (after a few beheadings in France) and spread the good word to the rest of the world, constantly making life better for ourselves and others, though we were a bit sloppy and maybe shouldn’t have burned so much coal.

Capitalism in this scenario is a natural outgrowth, then, a step along the way (or the Final Step, if you aren’t a Marxist) towards democracy and space exploration and flat-screen tv’s and kidney transplants. Marxists point to the exploitation within the system and suggest another step (Communism, or central-planned economies, where our lives will finally be better), but either way, Progress will win out (or our cities will flood).

The very lazy or the very Ayn-Randian posit Capitalism as already-always existing, merely waiting to be freed by oppressive trade barriers (like Feudalism), but their further arguments still usually follow the aforementioned pattern. Evolutionary-Psychologist sorts also get into this (Stephen Pinker’s a great example), coming up with all sorts of Scientific ™ ways of explaining how well natural selection and Capitalism go hand in hand.

But Wood has none of it. For her, Capitalism began in England when rent for farms became a market, something which had never happened in recorded history. Landlords, with the death of feudalism (she argues that Capitalism did not destroy Feudalism, against most histories), had to collect “surplus” from tenants in the form of monied-rents without “extra-economic” coercion (i.e., taxes, levies, outright violence) because they had lost much of their legal/juridical power. Markets (and trade) had always existed, but economic coercion had not (Florence and the Dutch Republic were both massive urban areas with huge markets without Capitalism–even most of the “Commercialists” agree to this and call them “failed transitions”).

With the pressure from landlords now to collect surplus money, the farmers on their land found themselves needing to grow even more than before (previous feudal arrangements were typically one-third of all produce, but now the amount was set, regardless of what markets provided). Farmers suddenly had to compete with each other for profit, which destabilised prices and made some people lose their farms. The landlords, in response, could charge more for the land of the “productive” farmers, could re-lease unrented land to them, thus rewarding the successful competitor taking from the loser their very access to self-reproduction (substinence, etc.). Those dispossessed farmers became reliant on the market now for everything they used to be able to make for themselves before, thus creating “consumer-goods” markets.

The key-word for her is Imperative. Farmers didn’t take advantage of “opportunities,” they responded to imperatives (grow/make more or lose your land). Landowners also found themselves no longer in a voluntary position–once one landowner can’t farm out his land to tenants, his land is threatened by other landowners who can. Markets previously were governed not just by supply and demand, but community/social obligations and restrictions, but the pressure of so much displacement and imperative to earn/invest violently reduced these restrictions (Enclosure had happened before, but not with so much speed and legislative authority).

But therein lies another complication. Any Free-market fool will tell you that the state gets in the way of the market, though they still consistently rely upon central authorities to ensure the right conditions for their profit-taking. Without police, no one’s around to arrest the thieves or squatters, because the coercion of Capitalism is pristinely Economic. Political Coercion must come from outside of it, must serve it, and must not get too much in the way. The English State’s willingness to serve this role ensured capitalism’s naissance (consider Foucault’s point in Discipline and Punish about the number of “economic-crime” laws–and their commensurate violence-of-punishment–which did not exist before Capitalism took hold).

Capitalism didn’t take hold elsewhere for a little while, nor did it “spontaneously generate” anywhere else. Other states responded to the pressure eventually to the point we’re at now, but it’s vital for her that we continue to see the exact genesis point (in england, in the rural areas).

She makes a few other arguments, some of which almost seem extraneous and besides-the-point. Placing the birth of Capitalism in agriculture, rather than the cities, places into doubt the traditional/marxist understanding of the Bourgeoisie. She’s right to point out that the bourgeoisie in France were not fighting for capitalism, but rather access to extra-economic coercion (offices, titles, etc. that would allow the professionals of the city to collect taxes).

I’m willing to accept this, but I don’t like the consequences of her final conclusions. She separates the French and English Enlightenment (England had Locke–arguing that natives should be forced off their land because they refused to put it to productive use; France had Voltaire and Rousseau), and she can do this to a point, but by the French Revolution i don’t think the differences continue. She makes a great argument for separating “modernity” from “capitalism,” believes as I do that most food shortages are due to capitalist profit-imperative, not productive capacity, and she almost completely destroys the notion of Progress.

But something suddenly stops her. The last two chapters find her shredding through her entire argument, leaving the pieces on the floor for us to paste back together in her search for some way to keep Human/Universal Rights as Progress. She’s canadian, you see. She rejects much of the “post-modern” arguments about the meta-narrative concerning Capitalism, for human rights/western secularism is something too important for her to destroy. She’s almost there, she’s about to axe them, and then you hear her gasp as she suddenly realises she’s throwing out what she thinks is the baby in the muddy water of the bath. It’s not a baby, actually, there never was one. Capitalism used her tub as a toilet, and she’s mistaking one of the undissolved turds for a drowning child.