Maintenant

Here is a poem by Louise Michel. This is a picture of a microfilm reproduction (hence the low quality) of its appearance in Le libertaire, in the Dec 28-Jan 4 (1895-6) issue. This was an anarchist newspaper, which Michel had co-founded together with Sebastien Fauré earlier that year. Born in 1830, Michel would have been in her middle 60s. She had spent a significant amount of her life in exile, although she had been back in France for more than a decade at this point. She'd recently published a book of poems, but I haven't looked to see if this was among them or not.

Of course I’ve read about Louise Michel, particularly in the context of the Paris Commune, but also about her later agitation. I had not realized that she published poems. I was looking at Le libertaire—which had her name all over it, especially at first, since of course she was the famous one—and was struck by this. Plenty has been written about radicalized poets, about the aesthetics of anarchist violence, Mallarmé-as-anarchist, and so forth. But there was also a great deal of more didactic poetry, even in the nascent Marxist press in the 1890s, material which was neither (apparently) out for literary capital nor very closely connected to the chanson and other oral traditions.

This poem is not exactly didactic. In fact it is gnomic and abstract enough to be symbolist. But it also has features that appear to me typical of the revolutionary world that was, at this moment, passing away. For instance, “éocène” is a geological term, here applied to the “genre humain.” Perhaps in, say, Elisée Reclus it has specific meanings beyond simply ‘dawn.’ Swords, haloes, prisons: there is a nice anarchist trinity of evil. The second two stanzas though, I find difficult to interpret. The discourse remains in some way scientific. The natural instincts of man have taken over in the second stanza. People are grouping naturally, strong and self-aware, everything seeing and following its right path. But what is meant in this context by “Le givre tombe sur le givre,”? I have not the slightest idea, beyond a rhyme for “suivre.” The final line of the second stanza gives us our transition to the third and final stanza, indicating that this instinctive impulsion now being followed by humans beings is, perhaps, common also to the material world. And in the third stanza, everywhere—stars and islands—“les atômes sont attirés.” And this disjunction reaches what I suppose is its sharpest articulation, which I also find incomprehensible: “Poussières d’êtres ou de sphère,” to the night or the light, both “choses, êtres.” So here we have a principle of universal attraction, or at any rate a universal principle of movement and action, whose advent also means a new dawn for humankind. And this, as the title tells us, is upon us even now. I'm surprised by the abstraction of this poem, by the compression evident especially in the final lines. 

Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (NYRB 2012) left me with the strong urge to write. Indeed among its strongest implicit lessons is that writing is a moral and political task. In the final, hurried chapter Serge defines “intellectual work” as “understanding and expression” (437)—the clarity and force of this makes me think it must be a well-worn line drawn from some classic author unknown to me. It’s an excellent, if capacious, definition. Here, in any case, are some extremely disorganized reactions to this extraordinary book.

           

Serge tells his own story from when he was a boy in Belgium in the pre-war years, up to his arrival in Mexico from Vichy. His memory is almost incredibly prodigious. How can he recount all these things, all these names, with such confidence? Doubtless he make some mistakes, but perhaps we can say this is what you get when you combine a novelist’s eye for detail and character with the time to think that prison can give a person, and with the necessity, born of political chaos and danger, of carrying everything in your head. And in any case, especially once the narrative arrives in Russia, there is a clear work of memory or witness going on. Serge has known many extraordinary people, almost all of them on one loosing side or another. The Old Bolsheviks he knew, in particular, were actively erased from history. Not even history will be safe if we loose (or, rather, if they win). Indeed. 

           

I picked this book up almost by chance. The milieu of Serge’s early life, French-language radical and anarchist, is one I know a little. And it is a compelling read. Serge’s family background—Russian and very political—profoundly shaped his engagement with French and Belgian milieu, of course, but the language of pure revolt, the instinct, the vital necessity of revolt, this is all familiar. And it seems to me that Serge never gives up certain aspects of this early world. For instance an almost biological approach to revolutionary possibility matched with a capacious and idealistic humanism. And he seems to have been an unusually acute participant-observer of the revolutionary years in Russia. I hedge here only because I feel myself radically unequipped to pass judgment on his judgments.

           

The central question, for Serge at least, in writing about 1917-20 is, what went wrong? His answer, at bottom, is simple: the Cheka. Serge recognized the political realities of the civil war, the necessity for rapid, summary justice in certain cases. In places he suggests that the Cheka had from very early on de facto independence, was essentially uncheckable by the political authorities, even when they sought to do so. Thus when the central committee decides to end capital punishment for political crimes, the Checka ‘liquidates their stock’ just before the new policy comes into effect, and this without repercussion. This interacts with other explanations, of course. Serge suggests for instance that if the Red Army had taken Warsaw in 1920 (126ff), then the domestic situation might have been quite different. But other conjunctural and psychological explanations for the Bolshevik choice for Terror are also offered. My own preference is usually for institutional or meso-level explanations for this sort of thing.

In any case, life and death, critical intelligence and fatal necessity, are at war everywhere in the Memoire (and these are basically 19^th century categories). For instance there is the (to me) surprising question of suicide, which returns at many points in the narrative. Does a Bolshevik have the right to take her or his own life? Does this not belong to the party? Is it not for the Party to decide when your usefulness has ceased? And then during the discussion the Moscow trials, we get the chilling line: “In any case, it was not a matter of persuasion: it was, fundamentally, a matter of murder” (394). But can this be entirely right? What about the spectacle of it all? Without claiming to understand better than Serge, it is nonetheless possible to say that, writing in 1940, the Terror of the late 1930s did not make sense to him (although perhaps it is only to me that it does not make sense?). It could not be explained in the way that some earlier episodes of terror could be. Even much of the systemic violence of these years, the destructive, criminal, inefficiencies of agricultural collectivization, this can be rationally understood on the basis of the relative powers and incentives of the various actors. How Stalin’s bureaucracy could fool itself at the expense of the peasant makes sense. But the Terror? Perhaps not. Interestingly, one line of analysis that he does not seem to pursue is the pathological-Stalin line. Neither the Terror nor anything else is laid entirely at Stalin’s door.

The critical intelligence, the free individual, has political prediction as one great and dangerous task. Many of Serge’s predictions seemed uncannily accurate. Almost untrustworthily so. Indeed some lines are very remarkable for being written in the early 1940s. For instance, “the most atrocious and tragic crime of our age: the extermination by the Nazis of the Jews of occupied Europe. Nothing at the present can measure the political, social, and psychological consequences of this crime. Even the idea of the human, acquired over thousands of years of civilization, has been put in question” (444). Also from late in the book, I was surprised to see a reference to Walter Benjamin’s suicide (and that he is described as a “poet” (427). In any case, the point for me is that Serge’s clairvoyance has very little or nothing at all to do with any reading of Marx he has done. Of course this vocabulary is important for him, and he is perfectly capable of class analysis when it is useful, but his background is anarchist and his politics are left-Bolshevik. And here I’m thinking less of the—in themselves very interesting—remarks at the end of the book, for instance the struggle with pessimistic conclusions about the value, never mind utility, of critical intelligence, but of the actual substance of his life as he recounts it.

This is the kind of book I want others to read and think about. I’m not sure that I would assign it to undergraduates—although perhaps it would be possible to excise a really useful 15 pages from it on the early Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War. Serge as a character is on the one hand appealing—intelligent, human, strong-willed in the best possible way. And on the other hand, one wonders. I had to consult the notes before I realized that he’d had three wives—this is how little a part they play in the narrative. At least one is also from, as it were, radical stock, but it’s still difficult to read about the in-laws being made to suffer for the sins of the son-in-law. Serge’s son is a much more fully-drawn character than anyone else in the narrative, certainly than the various wives. But this moral problem—the commitment to uncompromising truth versus the obligation to family—is not something Serge is willing to entertain. Nor indeed could he possibly have done for very long in his own life without wavering much more than he did. Nor are all of his political formulations ones it would be easy to accept today, for instance he is very, it seems to me oddly, aware of who looks Jewish.

Finally, a missed connection, unusual for someone like Serge who seems to have met practically every consequential person in his vicinity. For me one of the only really sour notes in the text was near the end, when he arrives in Martinique and finds “childlike Negroes” who are a “people...still in their infancy” and so unlikely to overthrow the “diluted form of slavery” that Serge quite rightly recognizes there (430). Serge knew André Breton quite well, and stayed with him in Marseilles waiting to get across the Atlantic. Breton does not seem to have been on the boat that took Serge to Martinique (unless I misremember). But Breton came to Martinique in the same period, and there seems to have wandered into a bookshop run by Aimé Césaire and his circle, where he picked up Tropiques and, looking through this locally-printed journal, declared it excellent. This was an important encounter because useful for Césaire and others. I wonder if Serge came into the same bookshop? The margins of empire and the gutters of war indeed.

Dubois on the historiography of Haiti's 19th century

Dubois, Laurent. “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century.” small axe. 2014. 18.2. 44: 72-79.            

Since it is still the first half of 2015, I’m not egregiously too late in reading Laurent Dubois’ “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century” from last year. Probably it’s best to consider this short essay an historiographic postscript to Dubois’ Aftershocks (2012).

Anglophone historians, academics, etc., are now paying attention to Haiti. This attention is mostly to the spectacular moment of revolution and independence—one thinks here of Buck-Morss’ influential Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History—or to the recent history of the country, including inglorious coups and a devastating earthquake. Perhaps we (duly noted) go back to the first US occupation in the earlier 20^th century. But what about the 19^th century? What about the century after revolution and independence? For Dubois, this period is defined by the remarkable success of the “counterplantation system” in bringing a higher quality of life in particular to the rural “masses.” This is why, as Dubois points out, more people moved to Haiti than left it in these years. Haiti in the 19^th century was a successful society, but successful in a way that is largely absent from archival sources—which, Dubois emphasizes, in fact do exist in Haiti for these years, and remain to be worked. This is because, in an important sense, it was the goal of this rural society to escape the control of the state.

Reading Dubois, this historiographical field seems wide open and important. His own Aftershocks was a suggestive synthesis (and, from personal experience, very useful in the classroom). A few things to note about the shape of this historiographical field. First, for Dubois, a key part of new thinking about both the revolution and its legacy will be research on land ownership and production patterns. This is intuitive, on a certain level—after all, the revolution was in part against forced plantation labor—but is not the way the story has typically been told. There’s a nice echo of Marc Bloch and French peasant farming in Dubois’ account of the pioneering work by here be Georges Anglade. Other essential historiographic points of reference here, and throughout the essay, are Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Jean Casimir. The story of post-revolutionary society, also, will be one that foregrounds the activity of women in organizing and maintaining the lakou system. This rural society, after all, is organized to avoid a state that is militarized and male. So historians will need to attend more creatively, and make use of other archives. Dubois suggests, following Dayan and others, the large body of vodou song.

Which brings me to a larger point about language and historiographic community. The point of “Thinking Haiti’s Nineteenth Century,” is to highlight certain aspects of the historiography of Haiti in this period, and in particular what is missing or remains to be done. Many of the books that are most important to Dubois are decades old, but were written in French, and several of them in Haiti. One gets the sense of monumental thèses left to languish on the shelves of perhaps 12 libraries in the world...Fundamental primary research remains to be done, to be sure, but so too does the integration of existing historiography into the Anglophone field. Historians of France working in the United States are of course, to varying degrees, aware of the various ouvrages de base on their subject in French. But this is quite a different thing from a functional integration of the two historiographic systems. And I say system because historiography is not just a set of books, but also the scholars, patronage links, conferences, journals, etc, that produce them and keep them in motion. That there is a gap between the Anglophone world and the French one here is surely unavoidable and probably all to the best. In this case, though, the space between French, Anglophone, and Caribbean historiographies seems—at least to this relative outsider—less of a productive gap than a yawning abyss.  

In any case, perhaps the fundamental point made by Dubois here is very much a welcome one: the capacity of a given social arrangement to bring autonomy and satisfaction to those who inhabit it is often not something well-recorded in conventional archives, and often--not always!--because this capacity has existed outside and against the makers of archives. 

Trees and other anarchists

James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. 1998.

The basic ideas of Seeing Like a State may be expressed in two of Scott’s favorite examples. The first, used to introduce the themes of the book, is that of scientific forestry. This is basically the practice of treating a forest like a specialized kind of farm. Rather than allowing the trees to propagate in their own way in the context of a whole ecosystem, managed timber production planted the trees in rows, and systematically cleared out underbrush and fallen deadwood. This had the effect of enormously increasing both the efficiency with which the wood was harvested and, at least as important, the predictability of production. Yet it turned out that this radical simplification of the forest was simply not sustainable. 70-80 years after the practice was first introduced, the growth rate of the trees had drastically fallen. The lesson is, for Scott, clear. The simplified point of view of the state (although this also applies to other organizations with simplified incentives, such as capitalist corporations) lead to the simplification of the environment, with catastrophic results. This is itself a simplified example, and the great bulk of Scott’s book is given over to other examples of the same phenomenon: planned cities, agriculture, economy, revolution.

The second example, almost more of an anecdote, receives less attention, but is perhaps yet more revealing of Scott’s basic worldview. It is the so-called grève du zèle, or the work-to-rule strike. In such a strike, the workers do not explicitly stop working, but they rather scrupulously follow every rule and regulation, and do precisely, exclusively, the work assigned to them in their job description. In even the most ‘scientific’ and Taylorized factory, Scott says, this has the result of drastically reducing or even entirely halting production. The point here is that even in those cases in which scientific simplification appears to have had the greatest success, it in fact requires for its survival the support of what Scott calls mētis. Or, as he puts it, rationalization is always parasitic on mētis, cunning, skill, the art of muddling through, which is practical, experiential, rigorously ‘empirical,’ and neither transparent nor democratic (as rationality strives to be).

Scott’s book is a litany of catastrophes visited upon humankind by ‘high modernist’ planning, which is essentially the drive to simplify and to codify. One of Scott’s suggestive points is that ‘high modernism’ has a strong aesthetic component, so that it is apparently unable to make the rather elementary distinction between visual and other forms of order. Thus a cityscape, from a ‘high modernist’ point of view is orderly only if it appears planned, if functions are distinguished from one another, if all the units are the same (Jane Jacobs is Scott’s reference point here). The explanations he gives for why governments and certain other forms of organizations ‘prefer’ or tend toward transparent, conceptually simple and standardized solutions, makes good sense. Why this should manifest in such a strong visual aesthetic is not so clear. Scott would probably want to argue that this drive for visually manifest order at every level is an iteration or effect of the completely practical need for agents of the state to literally see the people from whom they need to extract taxes (or who might be plotting violence, or practicing the wrong religion…). What I question is really the relation between this practical need and, for instance, Le Courbusier, who even Scott would admit is an easy target. Surely a great deal of explanation must come between the aesthetic canonization of this sort of order, and the practical need for it? This seems like a more vexed question—although, arguably, also a less important one—than that of the institutional conditions under which a bureaucracy comes to be driven by incentives that are literally counter to those of the human beings over which it rules.

Also problematic is the epistemological status of mētis. Doubtless, Scott would not want to take a very firm stand on this. It just is. Scott might point especially to the example of the doctor who is able to diagnose a disease intuitively. This intuitive capacity itself cannot be codified, but through careful study the particular cues in the patient that the doctor unconsciously used were isolated, and therefore could be codified and taught. One interesting characteristic of Scott’s position here is the inversion of what I think of (perhaps incorrectly) as the Habermasian evaluations of kinds of reason. Mētis, for Scott, is pure instrumentality. It is always intimately connected to getting things done in the chaos of the world. It is empirical and practical. And, despite Scott’s prudent cautionary notes, he certainly believes it should be more highly valued than it is. The reason of state (not Scott’s phrase—he would say the vision of the state), is conceptual and rationalistic. It is not really empirical, since it tends to shape reality to itself, rather than the other way around. Its goal in this sense, is not practical, but solipsistic. Its universalistic impulse is the opposite of critical, and if it is democratic, it is in the worst possible sense. The main epistemological point here is that the movement of the world as a whole cannot be ‘mapped’ by science (hence the invocation of Borges at the beginning of the chapter on mētis). From this derives the main political lesson of the book as a whole: the state naturally strives to simplify and to codify, this is indeed its function; very bad things can happen when civil society is weakened to the point that the state is able to do this in an unrestrained fashion.