Poetry: “The Oldest of Us All, Part 2”

Mark Elliot Cullen 1 Comment

Why A Left-Leaning Person Should Support Ron Paul

Back in the “Happy ’90s,” Francis Fukuyama published a (now somewhat famous) thesis titled “The End of History.” For those not familiar with Mr. Fukuyama’s historical metanarrative, ironically inspired by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, he stated that history itself had come to an end; that bourgeois liberal social democracy was the best that human society had to offer. Of course, several events since then have led numerous academics to dismiss this thesis tout court (though entirely for the wrong reasons), but it seems to me that there is still some truth to what he wrote. Since the early 1930s, starting with Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, we’ve been living in an era of the unprecedented stabilization of global capital here in the U.S. through the centralization of economic management and incorporation of socialist programs to bring us “capitalism with a human face,” a more exaggerated form of (what’s left of) today’s Third-Way politics.

Recently, however, this “capitalism with a human face” has met with many detractors, some being radical Marxists who accuse it of Fabianism and others being Libertarians who insist that a laissez-faire free-market is a much more suitable dynamic for bringing about (a certain kind of) social egalitarianism. Moreover, it seems to me that the scandalous nature of the Bush Administration has brought about a greater polarization of popular sentiments in regards to the Federal government, though most of today’s new “cynics” would likely identify more with the latter, given its quintessentially “American” quality of unmitigated “individualism” (e.g. Ayn Rand’s huge popularity in the U.S.).

So what should a Leftist do in such times? I think that we should invoke, as Slavoj Zizek does in “Lessons on Rancière,” the remark made by Bertolt Brecht back in 1950, that it would be “much simpler for the Party to dissolve the people.” What we need, according to Brecht and Zizek, is a new people, and I think one way for this to be accomplished would be to elect Ron Paul as president.

By depriving capitalism of its “human” qualities, this very excess of the capitalist dynamic itself could very likely bring us back to the 1930s qua a highly unstable market economy with no social safety nets or centralized regulation. Thus, in today’s current ideologico-political coordinates, the only truly radical action for a Leftist is to irrationally strike out at oneself, a sort of Hegelian infinite judgment—what, to an outside observer, must look like a pathetic attempt at some sort of masochistic nihilism, in some ways exactly like the shocking scene in David Fincher’s Fight Club where Edward Norton’s character unmercifully beats the shit out of himself in front of his boss.

But it must be repeated that at the crucial crossroads of socio-political Revolution, rather than opting for a conservative Third-Way politics, a “capitalism with a human face,” we must instead choose that of egaliberté and terror as the only source of emancipation from the present entrenchment global capitalism, but, paradoxically, only after traversing the fantasy of today’s political Other.

Bryan Klausmeyer 12 Comments

Towards A Politicized Notion of History

This kind of goes along with some of the links I’ve been posting throughout the past couple of months, most of which stem from a lot of ruminating and critical thinking prior to writing my (completely theoretical at the moment) thesis.

In reading Hegel, Zinn and Zizek, there seems to be a common thread that unites their political (and/or philosophical) ontology in relation to history: the question of Essence vs. Notion. To put it simply, it’s not enough that historical events happen, but that there must be reasons for why they happen. I think from here, in answering the question of “why?,” we can broach it by delineating two opposing approaches: one is radical empiricism and the other deconstruction. Obviously, we can all agree that events do occur and we’re fully capable of analyzing them, but I’m unconvinced that strict empiricism or objectivist rationalism is the proper means to that end. What’s lost in the passage of time is the absolute complexity, the impenetrable in-itself of any historical event (which, in a deconstructionist sense, lacks, as a singular event, any telos in-itself), so while fragments remain (and rather abundantly in the case of more contemporary historical research), what we’re mostly left with is the Notion, the social substance constitutive of historiography and pseudo-Habermasian intersubjectivity.

Thus, in answering the “why?” of an historical event, one should exclaim, unabashedly, their ideological commitments, rather than attempting to depoliticize them in favor of how a forensic pathologist determines cause of death—this form of investigation is completely irrelevant to historical analysis, except maybe for an archivist (though I don’t know what, if any, analysis they do). This isn’t to say that we should fabricate history. Obviously, making a claim like “World War II never happened!” just sounds utterly ridiculous, but most of this is in light of the fact that there still remains a significant trace of its “historical essence,” so to speak…

In that respect, the Hegelian point mentioned a few posts ago still stands: the rewriting of history, and thus the actual shaping of history itself, is determined in the present. There is no transcendental truth to be had in historical analysis; the truth is rather the movement of its very rewriting. Thus, if we want to participate in this analysis, we should, again, be open about how we as individuals analyze history, rather than mistakenly associate the intersubjective historical discourse as a transcendental, objective truth. Moreover, I’m unconvinced by historical determinism, because I think there is some wiggle-room for the occurrence of a radical Truth-Event, in the Badiouist sense, that ostensibly shatters the ideological constellation of the present, but maybe I’ll write more on that later.

Bryan Klausmeyer