So it must be for ever

Thomas Meaney

‘It is a sign of true political power when a great people can determine, of its own will, the vocabulary, the terminology and the words, the very way of speaking, even the way of thinking, of other peoples,’ Carl Schmitt wrote in 1932, at the wick’s end of the Weimar Republic. Schmitt, the most formidable legal and strategic mind in Germany, who would join the Nazi Party the following year, was thinking of America. The US was already the unrivalled hegemon of its hemisphere. Schmitt admired its ample living space and its protected position between two oceans. Americans had cleared out the native populations and intervened as they pleased in the Latin south. It would be harder going for the Germans in Europe.

For Schmitt what was extraordinary about the American empire was the way it added to its geographical advantage by continually refiguring the nature of its triumph. US imperialism would go by other names: Manifest Destiny, Greater America, the American Century, the Free World, Internationalism. Colonies and dependencies were rarely declared outright: Americans knew how to conceal an empire, territorial or otherwise. (Who made a fuss in the 1950s when the US continued to add stars to its flag while Europe started disgorging its colonies, or noticed that, until the decolonisation of the Philippines in 1946, the number of US subjects overseas exceeded the number of black Americans on the mainland?) Schmitt found the sharpest expression of America’s imperial precociousness in the Monroe Doctrine, a quasi-legal fiat issued in 1823 from a position of relative weakness: the US decreed that European powers were barred from meddling in its zone of influence; inside that zone, it would decide what was peace, what was intervention, and what was security. For National Socialists in the 1930s, the power to make all legal questions of sovereignty answer to political exigency was a tantalising prospect. ‘As a German making remarks about American imperialism,’ Schmitt wrote, ‘I can only feel like a beggar in rags speaking about the riches and treasures of foreigners.’

The problem for the Germans was that just as they were trying to make their own Grossrauma reality – Hitler called it a ‘Monroe Doctrine for Europe’ – the Americans were dreaming of becoming a global power. This step was not as obvious or inevitable as it may now appear. Americans before the Second World War spoke less of the country’s exceptional primacy than of its exceptional aloofness from European-style power politics. They prided themselves on being above espionage, diplomatic intrigue and standing armies; they preferred to speak of international legal solutions and courts of arbitration. The possibility of a German-controlled Europe made such detachment harder to sustain. As the liberal historian John Thompson shows in A Sense of Power, it was neither the threat that the Germans and Japanese posed to the US mainland that drove the country into the war, nor the imperative to secure international markets, since the US economy in the 1940s was overwhelmingly based on domestic growth and consumption. The chief motive behind America’s entry into the war, Thompson argues persuasively, was that its leaders realised that it would cost them relatively little to bend the world in the political direction they wanted. To justify intervention, Roosevelt had to tack between security concerns and economic ones, which he exaggerated for effect. ‘Wages and hours would be fixed by Hitler,’ he told the public on the radio, while ‘the American farmer would get for his products exactly what Hitler wanted to give.’ And in an age of air power, the US could no longer set faith in the oceans’ protection, not to mention the threat that a German invasion of Brazil posed to America’s supply of the minerals and metals it needed for its weaponry. ‘Do we want to see Hitler in Independence Hall making fun of the Liberty Bell?’ William Bullitt, Roosevelt’s ambassador to France, asked a year before Pearl Harbor.

US war planners were already envisioning the utopia to come. Its premise was the defeat of Germany and Japan, but also the break-up of European empires into a world of discrete nation-states, each with its own liberal multi-party system and regular elections and each umbilically connected to the dollar. The Trusteeship System of the United Nations would serve as an incubator for premature nations, coaxing them from colonial rule into statehood, or in the case of some American holdings, towards a convenient grey zone between colony and military base. In this utopia the US was to be at once the summa of world history, never to be equalled, and the model that would have to be followed. The planners drafted blueprints for the United Nations as a way to package ‘internationalism’ for an American public assumed to be reluctant to prolong its global mission. As the historian Stephen Wertheim has recently found, ‘isolationism’ wasn’t a word with much currency before the war; New Dealers fashioned it into a term of abuse to tar dissenters from US globalism – including those at home who were still committed to the equal legal status of all nations. ‘There is literally no question, military or political, in which the United States is not interested,’ Roosevelt told a weary Stalin in 1944. The Kremlin would have been more comfortable keeping to some form of a zones-of-influence system for a while longer, a wish shared by many ‘wise men’ of the West, from Alexandre Kojève to George Kennan, who preferred a world of bounded empires to one of nation-states. But by war’s end no one was in a position to gainsay the broad shape of the Pax Americana.

Perry Anderson, in American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, his first sustained critique of US power, concentrates on two unstable compounds in the empire’s image of itself, both of which crystallised in the decisive postwar years, when it was still unclear how American utopianism would adjust to postwar realities. The first such ‘compound’ is made up of two elements, exceptionalism and universalism, which Anderson treats as analytically distinct impulses. Providential exceptionalism came first, originating in the Puritans’ attempt to build a ‘city upon a hill’ that would impress the England they had left behind. At least in theory, Anderson suggests, American exceptionalism could be modest. Here he is on firm ground. One of the most forceful denunciations of American expansionism was made eight years before the expression ‘manifest destiny’ first appeared in print, when the leading Unitarian preacher, William Ellery Channing, warned that America’s ‘sublime moral empire’ should ‘diffuse freedom by manifesting its fruits’, since ‘there is no Fate to justify rapacious nations, any more than to justify gamblers and robbers, in plunder.’

American universalism, in Anderson’s view, is more dangerous. It was effectively propagated by Woodrow Wilson, who saw the entire world as a receptacle for America’s values. ‘Lift your eyes to the horizons of business,’ Anderson quotes him telling American salesmen, ‘and with the inspiration of the thought that you are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.’ On the face of it, the message sounds like Channing’s call to spread American values through non-forcible means, but the circumstances had changed. In 1910 the country’s economic output was higher than that of Germany, France and Japan combined; by the middle of the First World War, it had surpassed that of the British Empire. The country’s excess material power opened fresh possibilities for what Anderson calls ‘messianic activism’.

The second of Anderson’s unstable compounds is the tension between the needs of American supremacy and the needs of global capitalism. For much of the postwar era, US leaders rarely bothered to distinguish between the two: the build-up of US power and capitalist husbandry went hand in hand. When they were forced to prioritise, American leaders tended to privilege political-military global leadership over the needs of capital, with the expectation that this would be better for capitalism in the long run. At Bretton Woods, the US triumphantly established the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and created supporting institutions, including the World Bank and the IMF. Over the cries of Wall Street banks, which demanded a much less constricting set of controls and were privately exploring the idea of lending Europeans reconstruction funds, the Truman administration embarked on a programme dedicated to economic stability. The reconstruction of Japan and Europe – which American historians persist in presenting as unique acts of beneficence – was undertaken to ensure the bedrock of the world capitalist system, even if that meant keeping the European empires on their feet a bit longer. ‘The US state,’ Anderson writes, ‘would henceforward act, not primarily as a projection of the concerns of US capital, but as a guardian of the general interest of all capitals, sacrificing – where necessary, and for as long as needed – national gain for international advantage, in the confidence of ultimate pay-off.’

The drama of US foreign policy for Anderson comes in the way the country and its policy elite balance the requirements of global capitalism with what they perceive as the national interest. From the 1940s to the 1970s, these interests were blurred, sometimes more than Washington could tolerate. Truman complained that the first draft of his doctrine for containing communism in Europe read too much like ‘an investment prospectus’. Anderson’s survey doesn’t parse the different types of US intervention in the global south, but these could be roughly plotted along his axes of global capital and national interest. US-backed coups in Guatemala and Grenada were salves for regional irritants, but the meddling in Iran and Congo was undertaken in the general interest of global capital and the US-led world order at large.

By the early 1970s, it was apparent that global capital wasn’t serving the US as effectively as the US was serving it. ‘The remit of the imperial state beyond the requirements of national capital,’ Anderson writes, ‘was for the first time under pressure.’ Since the war, the US had privileged the economic self-interest of its recovering allies, accepting their protectionism and an overvalued dollar as the price to be paid for its political hegemony. But the Vietnam War had depleted the Treasury, escalated inflation and upset the balance of payments, which only worsened when Nixon removed controls on US corporate investment abroad. The total value of dollars outside the country soon exceeded the government’s gold reserves. France under De Gaulle attacked the greenback with purchases of bullion, sending a cruiser to New York to pick up its share. Describing Nixon as ‘the only president with an original mind in foreign policy’, Anderson counts his decision to sever gold from the dollar and his declaration of the end of the Bretton Woods system as a remarkable coup de main. ‘The principles of free trade, the free market and the solidarity of the free world,’ he writes, ‘could not stand in the way of the national interest.’ Or as John Connally, Nixon’s militantly economic nationalist Treasury Secretary, put it, ‘The foreigners are out to screw us. It’s our job to screw them first.’

But, as the historian Daniel Sargent notes in his shrewd reconstruction of this episode, the tactic was ‘less purposeful than ironic’. Nixon had intended to threaten Europeans with a dollar devaluation that would improve the US trade balance, restore American employment and better his chances of re-election. The plan was to embark on a temporary period of floating currencies before a return to the status quo; no one in the Nixon administration wanted to give up control of the monetary order to market forces. No one, that is, except for Connally’s successor, George Shultz, a University of Chicago economist who beat Kissinger in the bureaucratic turf war and committed the country headlong to floating currencies and the free flow of capital without national controls. (Kissinger worried that the policy Shultz called for would encourage a hostile bloc of Western European economies to form, shattering the Atlantic Alliance.) Nixon’s economic demarche had begun as an attempt to protect US markets and insulate them from capital flows, but it turned out, in Anderson’s telling, to be a boon for both capital markets and US power, which could now manipulate world currency valuations by means of Federal Reserve interest rate adjustments. Wall Street, sceptical at first of a departure from fixed-exchange markets, learned to love the new order.

*

It is a sign of the limited intellectual range of American diplomatic historians that when Anderson’s critique first appeared in the pages of New Left Review, they detected an update of William Appleman Williams’s New Left classic, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy(1959). But Anderson’s picture of American imperialism departs from several presuppositions of New Left historiography. He salutes Williams and the ‘Wisconsin School’ – the prairie populist tradition associated with him – but he also makes a point of distancing himself from it. In particular, Williams’s contention that American imperialism was grounded in the ideology of the ‘open door’ – which began with the US’s determination to be granted equal access and fair treatment in China’s European-dominated port cities – and the continuous extension of American capitalism towards ever larger markets, first across the continent, then across the Pacific and beyond, doesn’t square with Anderson’s view of a predominantly protectionist United States before the Second World War, the Republican Party having long equated the ‘conspiracy of free trade’ with British imperial interference with growing American industry. What for Williams is a story of continuous American economic expansion is for Anderson a story of the way Americans came to conflate the global capitalist system with the projection of their own national power, continually looking past the fissures in their own ideology and interests.

Anderson’s interpretation has more in common with the Swedish left historian Anders Stephanson, along with several putatively conservative critics of American empire, among them Chalmers Johnson, who argued in his Blowback trilogy that US imperialism ‘breeds some of the most important contradictions of capitalism’ – not the other way round – and that much of post-1989 US policy, from the inflicting of the 1998 financial crisis on the Asian Tigers to the current push for the TTP and TTIP, has been aimed at prying open markets that the US was content during the Cold War to give leave to be protectionist and heterodox. Unlike Johnson, however, Anderson doesn’t chase down equivalences between the Soviet Union and the US, with the Eastern European nations mirroring the US’s satellites in East Asia, Japan figuring as America’s East Germany, and the Kwanju massacre as America’s more murderous version of Tiananmen Square. The competition was never close to equal in Anderson’s telling, which finds support in rich new archival studies, such as Oscar Sanchez-Sibony’s Red Globalisation, which shows how desperate the Soviet Bloc was to participate in Western markets as early as the 1950s, and Jeremy Friedman’s Shadow Cold War, which lays out the immense cost of the Soviet Union’s revolutionary posture in the Third World, a beleaguered and misguided attempt to maintain radical credibility against the allure of Maoism.[*]

Anderson’s critique of American power is also distinctive in a more basic sense. Many of the most prominent American critics of US imperialism came to their positions while serving as ‘spear-carriers of empire’, in Johnson’s phrase. Williams’s thinking grew out of the racism he witnessed as an ensign in the US Navy, and his narrow escape from taking part in the nuclear tests on Bikini Island. Johnson, himself a US Navy veteran of the Korean War, was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates in the CIA, and a longtime academic Cold Warrior. Along with perhaps the most prominent contemporary conservative critic, the former US Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, Johnson expected US globalism to readjust after the downfall of the Soviet Union. When no such adjustment came – in fact, the number of bases expanded – these critics began to question whether American globalism really grew out of the need for Soviet containment. Their scepticism was bolstered by first-hand disgust with imperial practices: in Johnson’s case, the rape culture and environmental devastation he witnessed at US bases in Okinawa; in Bacevich’s, the hubris and technological utopianism of the ‘no-fault operations’ of the Persian Gulf War. The anti-imperial passion shared by Bacevich, Johnson and Williams issues from their belief that US foreign entanglements, especially in service of the maintenance of global capitalism, threaten a truer version of American republican principles. Each of them has a commitment to what Williams called ‘an open door to revolutions’, his term for a world order where the US doesn’t impose its own economic hegemony and different peoples are able to pursue their own forms of social life.

Anderson entertains no such possibility of redemption. There’s no better republic to go back to, no way to roll back the messianism. Though he doesn’t endorse it, the version of US globalism that seems to interest Anderson most is that of the mid-century émigré geostrategist Nicholas Spykman, who in America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) – ‘perhaps the most striking single exercise in geopolitical literature of any land’, Anderson says – spared his readers the dogmas of liberal democracy and the free market. Instead, he advised his adopted country to face up to the realities of class warfare, the increasing concentration of wealth and the coming race for resources. The more clear-eyed the US was about its interests, in other words, the less savagery it would perpetrate in the name of idealism. Carl Schmitt counselled something similar in his retirement, when in 1958 he published a platonic dialogue in which an American called ‘MacFuture’ interrupts – Alcibiades-like – a conversation between two German thinkers about geopolitics. MacFuture believes the US has a duty to submit the entire galaxy to a Monroe Doctrine, and that the conquest of space will be a repeat of the conquest of the New World. The Germans feebly try to interest their guest in the notion of limits.

Anderson doesn’t mention another tradition of domestic US anti-imperial critique, Black Internationalism, which bridged the distance between black American intellectuals and their African counterparts in the colonial world, seeking to solder their cause together with appeals to colour-blind communism and pan-Africanism. As Robert Vitalis notes in his book White World Order, Black Power Politics, Black Internationalism was born alongside the white chauvinist version of international relations at the end of the 19th century, when ‘international relations meant race relations.’[†] The academic field of IR was focused more on the study of global racial hierarchies and the problems of colonial administration than on the abstract interplay of nation-states. Vitalis shows just how preoccupied American IR thinkers were in maintaining white dominance and purity in the colonial world, which of course included their own colonies. Foreign Affairs – still the house IR journal of the US foreign policy establishment – began its life in the 1920s as the Journal of Race Development. The tragedy of Black Internationalism is that some of its most radical advocates – Ralph Bunche at the United Nations, for example – became moderates in their attempt to reform American globalism from within. Meanwhile, some of the most stubborn figures – Rayford Logan, Alain Locke, Merze Tate – were institutionally and financially isolated in the black academy, outside of which their work was ignored. They were nearly forgotten by the following generation of black radicals, who had to cut their anti-imperial critiques from whole cloth in the 1960s and 1970s.

If Anderson’s analysis does have a precursor, it is in the work of Gabriel and Joyce Kolko, two radical historians of the 1960s. Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War (1968) – now forgotten, but recognised in its time by Hans Morgenthau and other conservatives as a scathing and persuasive revision of orthodox Cold War history – showed how US policy following the Second World War was dedicated to eradicating the threat of the anti-fascist left, which was poised to sweep elections across the world, especially in Europe and Korea. For the Kolkos, it was this more or less internal threat to the global capitalist system, rather than any possible communist takeover, that Washington couldn’t tolerate. But where the Kolkos found a concerted, coherent strategy among US postwar planners, Anderson sees American strategists cobbling together an ideology that’s less a cover than part of the substance of American imperialism itself. Instead of peeling back American rhetoric to reveal imperial intentions, Anderson examines the way the rhetoric contributes to and shapes those intentions.

*

The second part of American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers plunges into the contemporary American dreamworld of empire. Anderson has always been attracted to those who speak of the world without euphemism, and he appraises the recent offerings of American ‘Grand Strategists’ with sardonic respect: however rabid or fantastic their conceptions, these are writers who take in the whole globe and describe it in a lucid register aimed at a wide audience. They don’t much condescend to election cycles, party affiliation or the preoccupations of American political science. The two boldest thinkers Anderson treats have much in common ideologically but have very different strategies. In 2014, Robert Kagan published an essay entitled ‘Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire: What Our Tired Country Still Owes the World’ in the New Republic. Partly a policy memo directed at the president (Obama promptly called Kagan in for lunch), it was also pitched at American millennials who grew up in the shadow of Afghanistan and Iraq and have little trust in the efficacy of American power. In Kagan’s world, authoritarianism is the default human condition, which only America stands capable of pushing back. Iran, Russia, China: all of these form a new authoritarian front every bit as dangerous as the USSR. ‘What gives the United States the right to act on behalf of a liberal world order?’ Kagan asks. ‘In truth nothing does, nothing beyond the conviction that the liberal order is the most just.’ ‘The liberal order,’ Kagan goes on, ‘was never put to a popular vote. It was not bequeathed by God. It is not the endpoint of human progress.’ So then what does justify it? Its enemies, Kagan declares, which are worse than itself. Just as liberal capitalism’s foes wish to impose their worldview, so America must impose a liberal world order, ‘and as much as we in the West might wish it to be imposed by superior virtue, it is generally imposed by superior power.’ The planet’s silent majority is grateful for this service. ‘Imagine strolling through Central Park,’ Kagan writes, ‘and, after noting how much safer it had become, deciding that humanity must simply have become less violent – without thinking that perhaps the New York Police Department had something to do with it.’ What Kagan calls for is what Schmitt thought impossible: a Monroe Doctrine for the world, which Kagan speaks of as a heavy moral burden. ‘In the international sphere, Americans have had to act as judge, jury, police, and in the case of military action, executioner,’ he writes. So it has been since 1945, so it must be for ever.

At the opposite end of the strategy spectrum from Kagan, Anderson has found a curious specimen. Thomas Barnett is a former Naval Academy instructor, and a self-declared economic determinist who delivers TED talks to the military top brass about the limits of American power. His work, Anderson writes, is ‘not unlike a materialist variant, from the other side of the barricades, of the vision of America in Hardt and Negri’s Empire’. ‘America needs to ask itself,’ Barnett writes in Great Powers (2009), ‘is it more important to make globalisation truly global, while retaining great-power peace and defeating whatever anti-globalisation insurgencies may appear in the decades ahead? Or do we tether our support for globalisation’s advance to the upfront demand that the world first resembles us politically?’ For Barnett, the answer is clear: America must trust in the market, which will solve all strategic problems. Russia? It is experiencing its Gilded Age, and will come around in fifty years. China? Already capitalist anyway, and Xi is just China’s version of Teddy Roosevelt trying to root out corruption and make markets more functional. Iran? Proceed with every deal possible, let the market penetrate, and stop threatening it with military strikes. Tell Israel to back off: Iran will take the position in the Middle East to which its culture and educated population entitle it. North Korea? First let Beijing extract from it all the minerals it needs. Then, when it reaches rock bottom, the Chinese will invite the South Koreans in to clean up the mess. In a world so tilted in the US’s favour, Barnett calls for drastically reducing the military to a small force with only a handful of bases that will be used to handle terrorist pin-pricks. In every other respect the time has come for stay-at-home capitalist husbandry.

What strikes Anderson about the collection of American strategists he’s assembled is how – despite their radically different worldviews – they all agree that the US will and must remain the supreme world power. In Walter Russell Mead’s eyes, America’s genius, with its special British lineage, is simply too difficult to replicate. In John Ikenberry’s, the world is already signing up to mimic America’s image. To Kagan, American dominance is simply a matter of political will. As Barnett sees it, the US is already so ahead in world history, it’s almost unfair. As the strategist Christopher Layne, one of the rare dissenting voices in Anderson’s account, points out, when American foreign policy pundits speak of the ‘post-American world’, what they really mean is ‘the Now and Forever American World’. The presidential candidates who tend to win are those who most seamlessly embody the contradictory calls for more vigorous projection of American power on the one hand, and more aggressive globalisation on the other. This is something the Clintons have always understood.

[*] Red Globalisation: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, 294 pp., £65, March 2014, 978 1 107 04025 0); Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (North Carolina, 312 pp., £30.50, September 2015, 978 1 4696 2376 4).

[†] Susan Pedersen wrote about White World Order, Black Power Politics in the LRB of 20 October 2016.

Fredric Jameson on ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

No Magic, No Metaphor

Fredric Jameson on ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

The first centennial of the Soviet revolution, indeed the fifth centennial of Luther’s, risk distracting us from a literary earthquake which happened just fifty years ago and marked the cultural emergence of Latin America onto that new and larger stage we call globalisation – itself a space that ultimately proves to be well beyond the separate categories of the cultural or the political, the economic or the national. I mean the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, which not only unleashed a Latin American ‘boom’ on an unsuspecting outside world but also introduced a host of distinct national literary publics to a new kind of novelising. Influence is not a kind of copying, it is permission unexpectedly received to do things in new ways, to broach new content, to tell stories by way of forms you never knew you were allowed to use. What is it, then, that García Márquez did to the readers and writers of a still relatively conventional postwar world?

He began his productive life as a movie reviewer and a writer of movie scenarios nobody wanted to film. Is it so outrageous to consider One Hundred Years of Solitude as a mingling, an intertwining and shuffling together of failed movie scripts, so many fantastic episodes that could never be filmed and so must be consigned to Melquíades’s Sanskrit manuscript (from which the novel has been ‘translated’)? Or perhaps it may be permitted to note the astonishing simultaneity of the beginning of his literary career with the so-called Bogotazo, the assassination in 1948 of the great populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (and the beginning of the seventy-year long Violencia in Colombia), just as García Márquez was having lunch down the street and, not much further away, the 21-year-old Fidel Castro was waiting in his hotel room for an afternoon meeting with Gaitán about the youth conference he had been sent to organise in Bogota that summer.

The solitude of the title should not at first be taken to mean the affective pathos it becomes at the end of the book: first and foremost, in the novel’s founding or refounding of the world itself, it signifies autonomy. Macondo is a place away from the world, a new world with no relation to an old one we never see. Its inhabitants are a family and a dynasty, albeit accompanied by their fellows on a failed expedition which just happened to come to rest at this point. The initial solitude of Macondo is a purity and an innocence, a freedom from whatever worldly miseries have been forgotten at this opening moment, this moment of a new creation. If we insist on seeing this as a Latin American work, then we can say that Macondo is unsullied by the Spanish conquest as also by indigenous cultures: neither bureaucratic not archaic, neither colonial nor Indian. But if you insist on an allegorical dimension, then it also signifies the uniqueness of Latin America itself in the global system, and at another level the distinctness of Colombia from the rest of Latin America, and even of García Márquez’s native (coastal, Caribbean) region from the rest of Colombia and the Andes. All these perspectives mark the freshness of the novel’s starting point, its utopian laboratory experiment.

But as we know, the form-problem of utopia is that of narrative itself: what stories remain to be told if life is perfect and society is perfected? Or, to turn the question inside out and rephrase the problem of content in terms of novelistic form, what narrative paradigms survive to provide the raw material for that destruction or deconstruction which is the work of the novel itself as a kind of meta-genre or anti-genre? This was the deeper truth of Lukács’s pathbreaking Theory of the Novel. The genres, the narrative stereotypes or paradigms, belong to older, traditional societies: the novel is then the anti-form proper to modernity itself (which is to say, of capitalism and its cultural and epistemological categories, its daily life). This means, as Schumpeter put it in an immortal phrase, that the novel is also a vehicle of creative destruction. Its function, in some properly capitalist ‘cultural revolution’, is the perpetual undoing of traditional narrative paradigms and their replacement, not by new paradigms, but by something radically different. To use Deleuzian language for a moment, modernity, capitalist modernity, is the moment of passage from codes to axioms, from meaningful sequences, or indeed, if you prefer, from meaning itself, to operational categories, to functions and rules; or, in yet another language, this time more historical and philosophical, it is the transition from metaphysics to epistemologies and pragmatisms, we might even say from content to form, if the use of this second term did not risk confusion.

The form-problem of the novel is that it isn’t easy to find sequences to replace those traditional narrative paradigms; the replacements inevitably tend to reform into new narrative paradigms and genres in their own right (as witness the emergence of the Bildungsroman as a meaningful narrative genre, based as it is on conceptions of life, career, pedagogy and spiritual or material development which are all essentially ideological and thereby historical). These newly created yet soon familiar and old-fashioned paradigms must be destroyed in turn, in a perpetual innovation of the form. Even then, it is rare enough for a novelist to invent wholly original replacement paradigms (paradigm change is as momentous an event in the history of narrative as elsewhere), let alone to replace narrative itself, something modernism can be seen everywhere to strive for, unsuccessfully I might add: for what is here demanded is a new kind of novelistic narrative which replaces narrative altogether, something obviously a contradiction in terms.

The perpetual resurrection of newer narrative paradigms and sub-genres out of the still warm ashes of their destruction is a process I would attribute to commodification, as the primary law of our kind of society: it isn’t only objects that are subject to commodification, it is anything capable of being named. Many are the philosophical examples of this seemingly fatal process, and the philosophers who – like Wittgenstein or Derrida in their very different ways – set out to free us from stable, reified, conventional categories and concepts have ended up as brand names in their own right. So it is with the creative destruction of narrative paradigms: your ‘knight’s move’, your deviation or defamiliarisation, ends up becoming just another ‘new paradigm’ (unless, as in postmodernity, it chooses the path of what used to be called irony, namely the use of pastiche, the play with a repetition of dead forms at a slight remove).

Such are, in my opinion, the consequences of Lukács’s insights in the Theory of the Novel – insights which did not have the benefit, as we do, of generations of accumulated modernist experiments in this direction. Returning to One Hundred Years of Solitude with a view to demonstrating and validating what I have proposed, let’s begin with its principal narrative paradigm, the family novel. It has been debated a good deal lately, the upshot being that it is no longer possible, if it ever was (and perhaps, indeed, in the West it never was). The Bildungsroman is not a family novel but a flight from the family; the picaresque novel turns on a hero who never had a family; and as for the novel of adultery, its relation to the family speaks for itself.

Someone, I think it was Jeffrey Eugenides, has claimed that the family novel today is only possible in the non-West, and I think there is a profound insight here. We may think of Mahfouz, for example, but I would argue that it is one of the greatest of all novels, the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber, one should have in mind. After all, it is from China that we have the slogan that epitomises the ideal of the family as the fundamental structure of life itself: five generations under one roof! The great manor or compound thereby includes everyone from the eighty-year-old patriarch to the newborn baby, including the intermediate generations of parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents, at the appropriate twenty-year generational intervals: patriarchy in its ideal or even Platonic form, you might say (overlooking the often malign role of the various matriarchs and uncles in the process). Folk wisdom through the ages has – along with many philosophers, beginning with Aristotle – assimilated the state itself to this patriarchal or dynastic family, and it is this deep ideological archetype that One Hundred Years of Solitude brings to the surface and makes visible. The extended family founded by José Arcadio Buendía is the ‘mythic’ state, which will only later, in its days of prosperity, be infiltrated by personnel of the professional or official state, in the person of a ‘magistrate’ and his police, who are at once assigned a minor and inconspicuous position, along with the other hangers-on of any city-state, such as merchants and booksellers. And just as an extended family has its own service personnel – gardeners, electricians, pool maintenance specialists, carpenters and shamans – so also these appear and disappear punctually in the entourage of the Buendía family, of which they may be considered honorary members.

The family considered as its own city-state has, as the anthropologists teach us, one fundamental problem: it is endogamy, the centripetal tendency to absorb everything external into itself, risking the danger of inbreeding (the intermarriage of cousins and even incest), and all the consequences of triumphant identity, including repetition, boredom and that fateful genetic mutation, the family pigtail. What is not the family, to be sure, is the other and the enemy. Still, the law of endogamy does have its own way of thinking inoffensive otherness; it has its own thought categories for acknowledging difference and relegating it to a subordinate and intermittent, indeed cyclical and harmlessly festive category. It calls such incursions from the outsidegypsies. These bring, as the opening pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude so memorably show us, radical difference, in the form of trinkets and inventions: magnets, telescopes, compasses and, finally, the only true miracle achieved by these swindlers and con-artists, the wonder that testifies to their authentically magical power: ‘Many years later,’ the immortal first sentence of the novel reads, ‘as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ Ice! An element with inconceivable properties, a new addition to the atomic chart. The existence of ice in the tropics is ‘memorable’ because it is remembered, as Benjamin might have put it. It marks, in that opening sentence, the dialectical nature of reality itself: ice burns and freezes simultaneously.

So it is the raw material of the ‘family novel’ which will in this opening section be worked over for all its resources and all its possibilities of musical variation, structural permutation, metamorphosis, anecdotal invention, the production of endless episodes which are all in fact the same, structural equivalents in the myth of ‘magic realism’, whose production and reproduction is itself what is then tautologically described as ‘mythic’. Yet the identity of this seemingly irrepressible and irreversible proliferation of familial anecdotes is betrayed by the repetition of names down through the generations – so many Aurelianos (17 of them at one point), so many José Arcadios, even with some Remedios and Amarantas thrown in on the distaff side. Harold Bloom is right to complain of ‘a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is crammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb’.

I would add to this an embarrassment the literary commentator is loath to confess, namely the difficulty of keeping the characters’ names separate from one another. This problem is rather different from students’ complaints about impossible Russian patronymics and matronymics (and now Chinese or non-Western ones), and worthier of attention in its own right as a symptom of something historically more important: namely, the renewed significance of generations and the generational, in an overpopulated world henceforth doomed to synchrony rather than diachrony. I can remember when, in the development of that now respectable literary genre the detective story, a writer of some originality (Ross Macdonald) began to experiment with multi-generational crimes: you could never remember whether the murderer was the son, the father or the grandfather. So it is with García Márquez, but deliberately, in a spatial world beyond time itself (‘No one has died here yet’; ‘the first person born in Macondo’ and so on). Everything changes in Macondo, the state arrives, and then religion, and finally capitalism itself; the civil war pursues its course like a serpent biting its own tail; the town grows old and desolate, the rain of history begins and ends, the original protagonists begin to die off; and yet the narrative itself, in its rhizomatic strings, never grows extinct, its force remaining equal to itself until the fateful turn of its final pages. The dynasty is a family of names, and those names belong to the inexhaustible narrative impulse, and not to time or history.

So, as Vargas Llosa has observed, there lies behind the repetitive synchronicity of García Márquez’s family structure a whole diachronous progression of the history of society itself, against whose shadowy, inexorable temporality we follow the structural permutations of an ever changing yet static family structure, whose generations ring the changes on its permanency, and whose variations reflect History only as symptoms, not as allegorical markers. It is this dual structure which permits a unique and unrepeatable solution to the form-problem of the historical novel and the family novel alike.

But the family narrative has one last trick up its sleeve, a final desperate move at its moment of saturation and exhaustion: the absolute structural inversion or negation of itself. For what defined the autonomy of Macondo and allowed its luxurious exfoliation of endogamies was its monadic isolation. Yet as in the ancient cosmologies of atomism, the very concept of the atom produces a multiplicity of other atoms, identical to itself; the notion of the One generates many Ones; the force of attraction that pulls everything external into the internal, that absorbs all difference into identity, now subverts and negates itself, and the repulsion into which attraction suddenly turns acquires a new name: war.

With war, One Hundred Years of Solitude acquires its second narrative paradigm, only apparently a mirror-image of the first, whose secondary, eccentric filial protagonist now suddenly becomes the hero. The war novel, to be sure, is itself a peculiar and problematic kind of narrative: if you like, it is one manifestation of a deeper structural necessity of all narrative, namely what the screenwriters’ handbooks recommend as conflict, and what narrative theorists such as Lukács (and Hegel) see as the essence of the pre-eminence of tragedy as a form.

The Latin American version of the war novel, however, is a little more complicated than it looks. Colombia’s institutionalised civil war, the Austrian-style alternation of its two parties, is at first memorialised in Aureliano’s identification with the Liberals, but is then transformed by his repudiation of both parties in the adoption of guerrilla warfare and generalised social ‘banditry’. Meanwhile, in the country of Bolívar, this atomisation is modified by a truly Bolívarian pan-Americanism (of the type aspired to by both recent Latin American revolutions, the Cuban and the Venezuelan), which is itself but a figure of that ‘world revolution’ onto which the original Soviet revolution had hoped to open. The ambiguity is not only that of South America as a distinct geographical and ethnic ‘autonomous zone’ in a world history of which it nonetheless wishes to be a central part; but also of the imbrication of these various autonomies – from village to nation-state to region – between which the representation freely moves. We remember that the mythic founder, José Arcadio, set out from the Old World ‘in search of an outlet to the sea’ (discouraged by his discovery of a primal swamp, he settled on the halfway position of Macondo). The space of independence (and solitude) is thus something like the attempt to become an island. The sea here figures that ultimate boundary and end of the world otherwise socially and economically embodied for Latin America by the US. (It is true that the other great regional autonomous zone in which García Márquez’s Cartagena participates is the Caribbean, but it scarcely has the importance in One Hundred Years of Solitude that the regional centrality of the Cuban revolution had in García Márquez’s own life.)

This would be the moment to speak about politics, and of One Hundred Years of Solitude as a political novel, for despite Colombia’s eternal civil war, the enemy is always the US, as Porfirio Díaz’s inexhaustible sigh reminds us: ‘Alas, poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!’ But these gringos, a strange and alien race, whose very approach tenses the muscles and always arouses suspicion, are here personally reduced to the self-effacing Mr Brown then replaced by the faceless banana company, which brings with it capitalism, modernity, union-busting, bloody repression and an inevitable relocation (an uncanny anticipation of the US’s own plague of factory expatriation decades later). It also brings the desolation of eight years of rain: a world of mud, the worst possible dialectical synthesis of flood and drought. But what is truly and artfully political about this sequence isn’t just its mythic symbolism, or even the way in which the combined form-problems of the representation of villains, foreigners and collective actors is skilfully circumnavigated, but rather the redeployment of García Márquez’s supreme theme, which is not memory but forgetting. The plague of insomnia (and its resultant amnesia) has long since been surmounted; but a specific – one wants to say, a surgical – amnesia is here revived: no one but José Arcadio Segundo can remember the massacre of the workers. It has successfully, magically and yet naturally been eradicated from the collective memory in that archetypal repression which allows all of us to survive history’s immemorial nightmares, to live on happily despite ‘the slaughterhouse of history’ (Hegel). This is the realism – yes, even the political realism – of magic realism.

There is, however, something peculiarly sterile and skeletal in this context about the war paradigm as such: warfare cannot provide the anecdotal richness of the family paradigm, particularly when it is reduced, as in this novel, to the stark reciprocity of enemy sides. What emerges isn’t so much a war novel as a play of executions, beginning with that famous first sentence (‘as he faced the firing squad’), and a set of surprise reversals (Aureliano will not be executed – twice over – but his brother José Arcadio will be, along with various alter egos). Here, at this temporal rather than geographical ‘end of the world’, what the execution promises is a momentary halt in that breathless continuity of filled time and perpetual narrativity which Bloom deplored, thereby making room for a new kind of event altogether: namely, memory (‘Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember’). The representation of memory as an event transforms this temporality altogether: utterly unlike the familiar Proustian version, it comes as a thunderbolt in its own right. Nostalgia is anecdotal; memory here is no resurrection of the past, in this filled space of unremitting sentences, of something like a Churrigueresque narrativity. There can be no past in that traditional sense, nor any real present either (what there is, as readers of the novel already know, is a manuscript, to which we will come in a moment).

But the structural reversals that make up the eventfulness of the novel do draw their most intense off/on energies from the war material, and this very precisely in the characterology of Aureliano (who for this reason most often seems to be the novel’s protagonist, even though it has no protagonist except for the family itself and the space of the named collectivity). García Márquez is behaviourist in the sense that the characters have no psychologies, depth or otherwise; without being allegorical, exactly, they are all obsessives, possessed and defined by their own specific, all-encompassing passions. Secondary characters are marked by mere functions (plot or professional); but when the protagonists withdraw from their obsessions, it is into the néant of closed rooms and shuttered houses, as with Rebeca, who persists forgotten into her old age in a kind of narrative sequestration, where the distraction of the novelist (or better still the impersonal chronicler) is rigorously the same as the forgetfulness of society (and of the family) as such; without their anecdotal captivations, they do not simply become normal, they disappear.

Or else their passions suddenly mutate into new missions, new demonic possessions: this is what is paradigmatic about Aureliano, who moves from the fascination of ice in childhood, through the alchemy of his year-long handicraft (in his father’s laboratory) of little golden fish-trinkets, to the political vocation of war and rebellion, which seizes him as soon as Macondo threatens to be absorbed into the institutional reification of a state, and falls away again like a deconversion and a fit of dejection at the end of the age of revolutions, at which moment he reverts to his handicraft and his closed quarters: in Macondo only ceaseless activity sustains life.

In Macondo only the specific and the singular exist: the great abstract schemas of dynasty and war can only preside over minute and empirically identified activities. lt is clearly in some unique, not to say impossible co-ordination of these narrative levels that the specificity of García Márquez’s narrative solution lies: not in the unification of episodic poetic inventions within the continuity of a single bizarre character’s life (as in the parallel generic line of the mega-novels of Grass and Rushdie), but rather in a unique structural constellation, perhaps the last thing to call which is ‘magical realism’. Indeed, let’s stop using this generic term for everything unconventional and consign it to the bin in which we keep such worn-out epithets as ‘surrealistic’ and ‘Kafkaesque’. Alejo Carpentier’s original version is that the real itself is a marvel (the ‘real maravilloso’), and that Latin America is in its paradigmatic unevenness – in which computers co-exist with the most archaic forms of peasant culture and on up, through all the stages of the historical modes of production – itself a wonder to behold. But this can only be observed and told absolutely deadpan, and with the unsurprising undeniability of a simple empirical fact. García Márquez’s ‘method’, he tells us, must be ‘to tell the story … in an imperturbable tone, with infallible serenity, even if the whole world resists, without for one instant calling into doubt what you are saying and avoiding the frivolous and the truculent alike … [this is] what the old ones knew, that in literature there is nothing more convincing than your own conviction.’ So nothing remarkable, nothing miraculous, about the fact that Mauricio Babilonia, a man who is all love, pure love, should constantly be surrounded by a swarm of yellow butterflies (‘accompanied by a stupendous odour of grease’); nothing tragic about the fact that he should be shot like a dog by someone whose plans he hampers; nothing magical about the fact that a priest disturbed by the utter absence of God or religion in Macondo should seek to call its citizens to decency and piety by levitating a foot above the ground (after fortifying himself with a cup of hot chocolate); or that Remedios the Beauty should rise into heaven like a windy tangle of backyard sheets. No magic, no metaphor: just a bit of grit caught in transcendence, a materialist sublime, drying the wash or changing the oil caught in an angelic perspective, celestial grime, the Platonic Idea of Socrates’ dirty toenails. The storyteller must relate these things with all the ontological coolness of Hegel confronting the Alps: ‘Es ist so’ (and even then, without the philosopher’s ontological emphasis).

Not ‘magic’, then, but something else must be evoked to account for the undeniable singularity of García Márquez’s narrative invention and the form that allows it to come into being. I think it is his uncanny, rapt concentration on his immediate narrative object, which isn’t without resemblance to Aureliano’s awakening to the world ‘with his eyes open’:

As they were cutting the umbilical cord, he moved his head from side to side, taking in the things in the room and examining the faces of the people with a fearless curiosity. Then, indifferent to those who came close to look at him, he kept his attention concentrated on the palm roof, which looked as if it were about to collapse under the tremendous pressure of the rain.

Later on, ‘adolescence … had restored the intense expression that he had had in his eyes when he was born. He concentrated so much on his experiments in silverwork that he scarcely left the laboratory to eat.’ It is interesting, but not particularly relevant for our purposes, that like his own sequestered characters García Márquez himself never once left his house during the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude; what is essential for grasping the peculiarities of the novel is this notion of concentration itself which, far more than vague ideas of the magical or the ‘maravilloso’, give us the key to its episodic narrative.

We might draw back and sketch a long development between Aristotelian logic and Freudian free association, passing through the 18th-century psychology of associationism and culminating in Surrealism, on the one hand, and Jakobsonian structuralism (metaphor/metonymy), on the other. In all these frameworks, what matters is temporal succession and the movement from one topic to another, as when Aureliano’s nascent vision moves from object to object, or as the emplacement of the objects of this or that ‘memory theatre’ remind the speaker of the order of his remarks. I want to suggest that far from the baroque disorder and excess of that ‘magic realism’ with which he is so often taxed, the movement of García Márquez’s paragraphs and the unfolding contents of his chapters are to be ascribed to a rigorous narrative logic, characterised precisely in terms of a peculiar ‘concentration’, which begins with the positing of a specific topic or object.

From a relatively arbitrary starting point – the gypsies and their peculiar mechanical toys or playthings, the wife’s family, the construction of a new house (to mention just the openings of the first three chapters) – an association of events, characters, objects, is followed with all the rigour of Freudian free association, which isn’t free at all but in practice demands the utmost discipline. That discipline demands exclusion rather than the epic inclusion so often ascribed to García Márquez’s narrative. What does not arise in the specific line of associated topics must rigorously be omitted; and the narrative line must lead us wherever it goes (from the curse of the pigtail to the slander of Prudencio Aguilar, his killing, the haunting by his ghost, and as a consequence the attempted abandonment of the haunted house, the exploration of the region, the founding of Macondo, its peopling by their children, the organ which is far from being a pigtail etc). Each of these follows rigorously on its predecessor, whatever shape the series takes under its own momentum, but it is not the form of the narrative sequence but rather the quality of its transitions as they emerge from García Márquez’s rapt concentration on the logic of his material, as well as the sequence of topics that emerge from that undistracted stare, from which neither abstraction nor convention can move him. This is a narrative logic which is somehow beyond subject and object alike: it does not emerge from the unconscious of some ‘omniscient narrator’; nor does it follow the habitual logic of daily life. It would be tempting to say that it is embedded in the raw material of that Latin America Carpentier characterised as ‘maravilloso’ (owing, I believe, to the co-existence of so many layers of history, so many discontinuous modes of production). Anyway it isn’t really appropriate to credit some exceptional storytelling genius to a fictive entity called García Márquez’s ‘imagination’. Rather, it is an equally indescribable or unformulatable intensity of concentration which produces the successive materials of each chapter, which then, in their accumulation, result in the appearance of unforeseeable loops and repetitions, ‘themes’ (to name another literary-critical fiction), finally exhausting their momentum and beginning to reproduce themselves in static numerical patterns.

This concentration, however, is the quality we consume in our unique reading, and which has no real equivalent in The Tin Drum, say, or Gravity’s Rainbow, or Midnight’s Children, even though their momentum is analogous, as are the associations from which their episodes are constructed. We have no ready-made literary-technical terms with which to approach the strange mode of active contemplation that lies at the heart of this compositional process (and of reading too). It would be philosophical and pedantic to hearken back to the notorious Fichtean formula – ‘the identical subject-object’ – which has had its day in fields beyond the aesthetic; but there is a sense in which it remains the most satisfactory characterisation, and incites us to an essentially negative approach to these narrative strings. No, there is no point-of-view here, no implied narrator (or reader either). There is no stream of consciousness, or style indirect libre. There is no initial order, challenged and ultimately restored. No digressions either; the string pursues its own internal logic without distraction and without realism or fantasy. The great images – ghosts who grow old and die, the lover emanating yellow butterflies – are neither symbols nor metaphors, but simply designate the string itself, in its inexorable temporal progression and its stubborn repudiation of any distinction between the subjective and the objective, the inner feeling and the external world. The starting points alone are arbitrary, but they are given in the family itself, less a genre or a subject matter than a network of points, any of which can serve until the associations begin to peter out and are broken off. The dialectic of quantity into quality leaves its mark as the episodes pile up and begin to burden what used to be new references with layers of memory. And indeed, this is what, for want of a better word or concept, García Márquez calls the narrative logic of his strings: ‘memory’, but memory of a strange and unsubjective kind, a memory within the things themselves of their future possibilities, threatened only by that contagious epidemic of insomnia that threatens to wipe out not only the events but the very meaning of the words themselves.

It would be philistinism of the most unreceptive and boring kind to pronounce the word ‘imagination’ here, as though García Márquez were a real person and not (as Kant thought of ‘genius’ itself) simply the vehicle of a physiological anomaly, like his own characters, the bearer of that weird and inexplicable gift we have called concentration, the inability to be distracted by what is not implicit in the narrative sequence in question. Our happy accident as well as readers, if we are able in much the same way to lose ourselves in that precisely situated oblivion in which everything follows logically and nothing is strange or ‘magical’, a hyperconscious yet unreflexive attention in which we are unable to distinguish ourselves from the writer, in which we share in that strange moment of absolute emergence which is neither creation nor imagination: participation rather than contemplation, at least for a time. It is a defining characteristic of the spell of the marvellous that we are unaware of our own bewitchment.

*

Still, certain features of the work of art in general offer privileged access to what the Frankfurt School used to call their truth-content; among these, temporality has always played a significant role in the more productive analyses of the novel as a form. Just as Le Corbusier described the dwelling as a ‘machine for living’, so the novel has always been a machine for living a certain kind of temporality; and in the multiple differentiations of global or postmodern capitalism, we may expect a far greater variety of these temporal machines than there were in the transitional period we call literary modernism (whose experimental temporalities, paradoxically, seemed initially on the face of it far more varied and incomparable).

The novel is a kind of animal, and just as we speculate about the way in which a dog experiences time, or a tortoise, or a hawk (both in its limits and its possibilities, and granted that we assess these in terms of our own human temporal experiences), so also each distinctive novel lives and breathes a kind of phenomenological time behind which non-temporal structures can sometimes be glimpsed. This is why, for example, I have insisted on grasping what is here called the act of memory as a punctual experience, an event that interrupts the anecdotal yet irreversible flow of narrative sentences and is at once reabsorbed into them as yet another narrative event. Thus, what seems as if it might be the pause and distance of a moment of self-consciousness turns out to be another instance of unreflexive consciousness, that unremitting attention to the world which is itself shaped and tensed by a contradictory ontology in which everything has happened already at the same time that it is happening afresh in a present in which death scarcely exists, although time and ageing do. Repetition has become a popular topic in contemporary theory, but it is important to insist on the varieties of repetition of which this temporal one – past and present all at once – is a unique type.

This particular temporal structure then intersects with another, in which fundamental historical breaks are registered: the founding of Macondo is one such ‘break’, but it is reabsorbed owing to the tendency of mythic events to loop back into themselves. The arrival of the banana company, which registers the traumatic event of US economic colonisation, is assimilated into the continuity of everyday life in Macondo as its agents and actors become part of the secondary personnel of Macondo; and then wiped away altogether by the misery of the years of rain which renders its presence invisible. Here too then, temporality as a form-problem reflects that more general dilemma I have characterised as endogamy, in which the autonomy of the collective and its internal events must somehow find a way of defusing external shocks and assimilating them into its fabric, whether by marriage, warfare or, in this case, by a naturalisation that turns the socio-economic into acts of god or forces of nature. Historical temporality becomes natural history, albeit of a miraculous kind; while its recipients retain the option of withdrawing into the real interior space of crumbling buildings.

Such withdrawals, the long-awaited deaths of the principal protagonists, indeed the very indices of capitalist modernity itself in the imperialist penetration by the banana company of Macondo’s ever more threatened autonomy, and with all this the gradual exhaustion of the dual plots or narrative paradigms (the cyclical repetition of names; the gradual enlargement and effacement of military rivalries into ideological conflict and the dialectic of guerrilla resistance and ‘total war’): all of this betokens increasing impatience with the paradigms whose structural originalities have been exhausted and which, after their two-part development, give way to the interminable repetition of tale-spinning and the piling up of anecdote on fresh anecdote. (Where does the break take place? This is the historian’s unnamed vice, the hidden jouissance of periodisation: a deduction of the beginning of the end times, of ‘when it happened’, or in other words when it all stopped – the opposite of the Freudian primal scene. I would personally select the moment in which ‘Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was the first to perceive the emptiness of the war’, but I leave it to others to identify their own secret ‘break’.)

This kind of memory-event is utterly different from what happens in the great predecessor, Faulkner’sAbsalom, Absalom!

Once there was – Do you mark how the wisteria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity’s myriad components? That is the substance of remembering – sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel – not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

Faulknerian memory is profoundly sensory, in the tradition of Baudelaire – the odour that brings a whole moment of the past back with it. Despite its assignment to a poetic avant-garde, this is the mainstream Western ideological conception of time and the body, where that of García Márquez is on the contrary a reversion to chronicle time, the time of miracles and curiosity, of heightened attention, of the memorable, the exceptional event (Benjamin’s storyteller) – what generally goes down in collective or folk memory, even though here it is the ‘folk memory’ of an individual character. And the other way round: for is not all of Faulkner somehow transmitted via memory as such, so that events, soaked in it, are no longer to be distinguished as present or past, but only conveyed by the interminable murmur of the remembering voice? No such voice in García Márquez: the chronicle records but does not evoke, does not fascinate and immobilise us, rapt, in the web of a personal style; and the absence of style is also in general the mark of the postmodern.

‘The history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions,’ Pilar Ternera says towards the end of the novel, ‘a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle.’ We can recognise the onset of this final section by the emergence of sheer quantity as its organising principle, and above all the apotheosis of those dualisms dear to structuralism in general, in which content gives way to pattern and empty formal proliferation; but also, as I have already hinted, by the signs of modernity that begin to show up in the village like so many unwanted strangers who must somehow be accommodated.

The denunciation of imperialism would scarcely be a novelty for Latin American literature: the genre of the ‘great dictator novel’ would be another version (García Márquez himself took it up in his next book, The Autumn of the Patriarch) – the portrait of the political monster who is alone powerful enough to resist the Americans. Here, however, the analysis is more subtle: only the rain can force the banana company out of the country, but the cure leaves its own insuperable desolation behind it – the very epitome of ‘dependency theory’.

The ways in which this penetration of ‘Western modernity’ is registered in temporality itself are more problematic, for it brings with it what we now call ‘daily life’ but what the novel’s title has already identified as ‘miserable solitude’, the absence of the miraculous event, whose boredom must now be filled by mindless rote work: in the case of Amaranta, sewing, whose ‘very concentration gave her the calmness that she needed to accept the idea of frustration. It was then that she understood the vicious circle of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s little gold fishes.’ But this introduction of ‘understanding’ into the sheer activity of the chronicle is already a contamination, and points towards other kinds of narrative discourse the novel means to avoid. So also the notion of ‘truth’, which appears at the very moment when José Arcadio Segundo finds that the memory of the workers’ massacre has been, in Orwellian manner, effaced from collective memory. Truth then becomes the negative in a quasi-Hegelian sense, not the interminable listing of events of the chronicle, but rather the re-establishment of old events in the place of their distortion or omission. But this is also another kind of discourse, another kind of narrative, from the one we have been reading.

This is the twin face of the exhaustion and onset of readerly boredom to which Harold Bloom gave voice: for here the chronicle mode has fallen into deterioration, and the novel itself has begun to lose its reason for being, threatened by psychology on the one hand and depth analysis on the other. The chronicle mode was itself a kind of archaic utopia, but of a more subtle and effective kind than in those outright indigenista novels of which Vargas Llosa so bitterly complained. The chronicle took us back to an older kind of time and place, an older mode of origin. Now suddenly for the first time we begin to grasp the novel as itself a duality, the existence, alongside García Márquez’s impersonal yet contemporary narrative, of the old parchments in Sanskrit in which Melquíades composed the same history in another, more authentic form. And at this point, One Hundred Years of Solitude paradoxically becomes a trendy text espousing all the ideological furor of 1960s ‘écriture’; for in an unexpected final flourish, a concluding originality arises to match that of the novel’s beginning, and when ‘real life’ finally coincides with the confabulation of the parchments everything ends up in a book, just as Mallarmé had predicted, and the novel swirls away in a gust of dead leaves, just as Macondo is wiped out by the wind.

Η εποχή των επαναστάσεων

 Μέρτικας Γιώργος

Η μορφή που λαμβάνει η γενική βούληση του λαού είναι η συντακτική εξουσία. Η συντακτική εξουσία είναι η ανώτερη εξουσία στην οποία υπάγονται όλες οι υπόλοιπες. Κι αυτό γιατί ο λαός έχει δικαιώματα κι όχι καθήκοντα. Το βασικό (φυσικό) δικαίωμα ενός λαού είναι η άσκηση της βούλησής του, από την οποία δεν μπορεί να παραιτηθεί, γιατί τότε παύει να ’ναι λαός, χάνει την πολιτική του υπόσταση και γίνεται μια μάζα δούλων. 

Προκειμένου να μιλήσουμε για τον αβά Σεγιές χρειάζεται να αναστείλουμε την γκροτέσκα αίσθηση της ασημαντότητάς μας, και μέσω της φαντασίας -της εναίσθησης- να βρεθούμε εκεί όπου οι άνθρωποι πίστευαν ότι μπορούν να πάρουν την τύχη στα χέρια τους, να κάνουν ιστορία. Με τον Σεγιές βρισκόμαστε στην καρδιά του ιδρυτικού μύθου της (πολιτικής) νεοτερικότητας: στη γαλλική επανάσταση.

Στις μέρες μας είναι του συρμού η αναθεώρηση είτε του συνόλου είτε πτυχών του μείζονος αυτού συμβάντος στο όνομα του τέλους των ιδεολογιών (της κυρίαρχης δηλαδή ιδεολογίας), του αντι-ολοκληρωτισμού και ποικίλων φληναφημάτων. Κι αν δεν συμφωνούν όλοι οι αναθεωρητές μεταξύ τους, υπάρχει μία στιγμή της επανάστασης στην οποία συγκλίνει η δημοκρατική ευαισθησία τους: η γκιλοτίνα.

Η πιο υψηλή στιγμή της επανάστασης, με την έννοια του Υψηλού που μας καταλαμβάνει σαν δέος και τρόμος, είναι η στιγμή της Τρομοκρατίας. Αναρωτιέται κανείς τί θα ήταν η επανάσταση χωρίς την Τρομοκρατία του Αδιάφθορου (Ροβεσπιέρος) και του Σαιν Ζυστ∙ τί θα ήταν χωρίς τον δήμιο -του οποίου σε άλλα συμφραζόμενα πλέκει το εγκώμιο ο ντε Μαιστρ- και τους 35.000 πάνω-κάτω αποκεφαλισμένους. (Κι ας μην ξεχνάμε ότι μεταξύ των τελευταίων δεν ήσαν λίγοι εκείνοι που είχαν προσηλυτιστεί στα κηρύγματα του Βολταίρου και του διαφωτισμού).

Επανάσταση χωρίς επαναστατικές ιδέες δεν νοείται. Επανάσταση είναι η στιγμή που τα ιδεώδη, τα αφηρημένα ιδανικά, γίνονται Ιδέα που πραγματώνεται εδώ και τώρα, μέσα στην ιστορική στιγμή. Βέβαια, ο ένσαρκος εμπνευστής των ιδεών της γαλλικής επανάστασης, η επαναστατική διανόηση, πόρρω απέχει απ’ ό,τι σήμερα μας έρχεται στον νου άμα αναφερόμαστε σε διανοούμενους. Όταν μιλάμε για τους πρωτεργάτες και τους διανοούμενους της επανάστασης, για τους όμοιους του αβά Σεγιές, θα πρέπει να θυμόμαστε ότι μιλάμε για λιοντάρια κι αλεπούδες κι όχι για κάποια εξημερωμένα κατοικίδια -για κάποια πετ. Γι’ αυτό η κάθε λογής ερμηνεία του στοχασμού τους, όταν επιδιώκει να τους προσαρμόσει στα μέτρα των καιρών μας γεννά καρικατούρες των ιστορικών προσώπων. Η σκέψη του Σεγιές, μ’ αποκορύφωμα τη συνταγματική θεωρία του περί συντακτικής και συντεταγμένης εξουσίας υπερβαίνει τον ζουρλομανδύα του κοινοβουλευτισμού κι έχει ως λογική απόληξη τον εσχατολογικό μοντερνισμό μιας διαρκούς επανάστασης.

Ο αβάς Σεγιές δεν ήταν καιροσκόπος∙ ήταν Ιδεολόγος, μ’ εκείνη την περιφρονητική σημασία, αν θέλετε, που προσέδωσε στον όρο ο Ναπολέων (και που στη συνέχεια επεξεργάστηκε ο μαρξισμός). Υπήρξε μέτοχος όλων των μεγάλων στιγμών της επανάστασης κι όλως περιέργως -όπως έλεγε κι ο ίδιος-, ...επέζησε. Στη διάρκεια της προεπαναστατικής περιόδου σύχναζε στις λέσχες και στις μασονικές στοές όπου ζυμώνονταν οι ιδέες κι εξυφαίνονταν οι συνωμοσίες των επαναστατών, ενώ υπήρξε ιδρυτικό μέλος της στοάς των «Εννέα Αδελφών». Στη συνέλευση των γενικών τάξεων το 1789 θα εκλεγεί ως ο τελευταίος (εικοστός) αντιπρόσωπος της τρίτης τάξης από το Παρίσι, παρ’ ότι ήταν κληρικός και ανήκε στην πρώτη τάξη. Συγγραφέας της δεύτερης εκδοχής της διακήρυξης των δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου και του πολίτη, μέλος του Διευθυντηρίου, κι εμπνευστής του πραξικοπήματος της 18^ης Μπρυμαίρ, θα γίνει Ύπατος μαζί με τον Βοναπάρτη. Η ψευδής συνείδησή του -η ιδεολογία- τον έκανε να πιστεύει ότι μπορούσε να θέσει υπό τον έλεγχό του τον Ναπολέοντα κι ότι ο ίδιος θα αναλάμβανε την ηγεσία του κράτους∙ εκεί τελειώνει η πολιτική του καριέρα...

Η πνευματική κληρονομιά του Σεγιές είναι μια σειρά επαναστατικών φυλλαδίων, που διεύρυναν τη θεωρία της λαϊκής και της εθνικής κυριαρχίας. Με τις παρεμβάσεις του έκανε ευρύτερα γνωστή τη διάκριση μεταξύ της συντακτικής εξουσίας και τηςσυντεταγμένης εξουσίας. Στα κατάλοιπα του, τέλος, βρίσκεται και ο όρος «κοινωνιολογία» που συνήθως αποδίδεται στον Αύγουστο Κομτ.

Ο Σεγιές στην πολεμική του κατά του anciem regime, παρ’ ότι παρακολουθεί τη συγκυρία, στηρίζεται πάντοτε σε γενικές αρχές -σε ιδέες. Όντας άνθρωπος του διαφωτισμού, ο Σεγιές λαμβάνει σοβαρά υπ’ όψιν τον εμπειρικό κόσμο και όσες αναγκαιότητες απορρέουν από τους νόμους του. Ωστόσο, όπως ο ίδιος γράφει στο Notice sur la vie, οι νόμοι της φυσικής -που στηρίζονται στην αναγκαιότητα- δεν αφορούν την πολιτική. Σε αντίθεση με τον μηχανιστικό ορθολογισμό του Χομπς, για τον οποίο οΛεβιάθαν, το κράτος, είναι ένας θνητός θεός, μια τεχνητή μηχανή, ο Σεγίες στρέφεται στη σφαίρα της αισθητικής, στο έργο τέχνης. Ακολουθώντας την αναγεννησιακή σκέψη που συλλαμβάνει το κράτος σαν ένα έργο τέχνης, ο Σεγιές υποστηρίζει ότι υπόδειγμα της πολιτικής είναι το μυθιστόρημα που στόχο του έχει να ταιριάξει τα γεγονότα στις επιθυμίες και στα γούστα μας. Στην πολιτική, όπως και στην τέχνη, λέει, μπορούμε να κάνουμε υποθέσεις, να έχουμε ως αφετηρία μια πνευματική σύλληψη και να την πραγματώνουμε.

Αυτή η πρωτοκαθεδρία της ανθρώπινης βούλησης στην πολιτική, η αναπλήρωση της θεϊκής παντοδυναμίας με την ανθρώπινη, είναι ιδρυτικό γνώρισμα της νεοτερικότητας εν γένει κι όχι μόνον του ρομαντισμού. Πρόκειται για μια βούληση που απαιτεί τη δημιουργία (πολιτικών) μορφών, κι όχι τη χύδην έκφραση, τη συμμόρφωση με κάποια «αντικειμενική πραγματικότητα» και την αναπαραγωγή της. Στη σφαίρα του πολιτικού, όμοια με τη σφαίρα της τέχνης, ο νεοτερικός άνθρωπος θέλει να δημιουργήσει εκ του μηδενός, και σ’ αυτό το προμηθεϊκό έργο ο εμπειρικός κόσμος είναι η πρώτη ύλη του -το μηδέν, το τίποτα. Έτσι, ο σκοπός της πολιτικής του Σεγιές είναι να οικοδομήσει τη γαλλική πολιτεία σύμφωνα με τον ορθό Λόγο, με τον οποίο πιστεύει ότι είναι προικισμένος ο Άνθρωπος. «Μας ενδιαφέρει η γνώση του Ανθρώπου», γράφει στο παραπάνω δοκίμιο, «κι όχι των ανθρώπων, με την ασήμαντη εμπειρία των δολοπλοκιών ... μιας μικρής ομάδας». 

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Ωστόσο, ό,τι εκτίναξε τη φήμη του Σεγιές είναι το φυλλάδιο Τι είναι η τρίτη τάξη; -που μόλις τώρα αποδόθηκε στην ελληνική, με μια υποδειγματική μετάφραση της Φροσύνας Στεφοπούλου. Το 1788 ο Λουδοβίκος ΙΣΤ πρότεινε τη σύγκλιση των γενικών τάξεων ύστερα από ενάμιση αιώνα. Αυτή η πρόταση και η πρόσκληση του Ζακ Νεκέρ στους Γάλλους συγγραφείς να διατυπώσουν τις επόψεις τους για την οργάνωση της κοινωνίας μέσω των τάξεων, ώθησαν τον Σεγιές να δημοσιεύσει τον Ιανουάριο του 1789 το φυλλάδιο Τι είναι η Τρίτη τάξη; Ένα φυλλάδιο που οι εισαγωγικές του αράδες ξεσήκωσαν τα πνεύματα του καιρού: Τι είναι η τρίτη τάξη; το παν. Τι ήταν μέχρι σήμερα; Τίποτα. Τι απαιτεί; Να γίνει κάτι. [Η πατρότητα, βέβαια, αυτών των φράσεων, σύμφωνα με όλες τις ιστορικές μαρτυρίες, δεν ανήκει στον Σεγιές αλλά στον Σαμφόρ].

Η τρίτη τάξη, λέει ο Σεγιές, είναι το έθνος και σ’ αυτήν την απόφανση έχουμε μία από τις πρώτες νεοτερικές ταυτίσεις μιας τάξης με το έθνος. Η οργανική εξέλιξη, η συνέχεια (παρελθόν) του γαλλικού έθνους διαρρηγνύεται στο όνομα της τρίτης τάξης (παρόν), η οποία έχει τη βούληση να δημιουργήσει μια νέα πολιτειακή οντότητα (μέλλον). Ο λαός, από την άλλη πλευρά, δεν ταυτίζεται με το έθνος, είναι ένα ευρύτερο σύνολο∙ απολαμβάνει τα γενικότερα (φυσικά) δικαιώματα, χωρίς όμως το δικαίωμα της ψήφου. Το έθνος αποτελείται απ’ όσους έχουν δικαίωμα ψήφου, πράγμα που για τον Σεγιές καθορίζεται από τη θέση τους στην παραγωγή. Η ανατίμηση της παραγωγικής εργασίας εις βάρος της αργόσχολης τάξης των ευγενών είναι ένα ακόμη νεοτερικό στοιχείο το οποίο εισάγει, δίνοντας έτσι την πρωτοκαθεδρία στην τρίτη τάξη. Η παραγωγική εργασία (που γεννά την ιδιοκτησία των αστικών τάξεων) ως θεμέλιο του δικαιώματος ψήφου και η εκλογή αντιπροσώπων όχι κατά τάξη (πράγμα που θα σήμαινε τρεις ισότιμες ψήφους των τριών τάξεων), αλλά με βάση την ισότητα της ψήφου ενός εκάστου αντιπροσώπου είναι οι δύο πυλώνες του αντιπροσωπευτικού συστήματος του Σεγιές.

Αυτό το σύστημα τον φέρνει πιο κοντά στον Τζων Λοκ παρά στον Ρουσσώ. Ο Ρουσσώ απορρίπτει κατηγορηματικά την ιδέα της αντιπροσώπευσης και τάσσεται υπέρ της άμεσης δημοκρατίας, πράγμα που τον τοποθετεί στον αντίποδα του Σεγιές. Αναλογική αντιπροσώπευση, όμως, των τριών τάξεων δεν σημαίνει και εκλογή των αντιπροσώπων με καθολική ψηφοφορία. Ο Σεγιές κατασκευάζει ένα αρκετά πολύπλοκο σύστημα έμμεσης εκλογής αντιπροσώπων, θέλοντας έτσι να αποφύγει την αντιπροσώπευση των επιμέρους συμφερόντων, την εξάρτηση των αντιπροσώπων από αυτά.

Το μείζον ζήτημα αυτού του φυλλαδίου, ό,τι διαφοροποιεί τον Σεγιές από το σύνολο των θεωρητικών του φυσικού δικαίου και του συμβολαίου είναι η ιδέα του για τη γενική βούληση. Αυτή η ιδέα είναι το υπόβαθρο της σχέσης μεταξύ συντακτικής και συντεταγμένης εξουσίας. Σε αντίθεση με την ατομοκεντρική θεώρηση της φυσικής κατάστασης -όπου συναντάμε άτομα τα οποία πολεμούν αναμεταξύ τους μέχρις ότου συνάψουν το συμβόλαιο- ο Σεγιές υποστηρίζει την έποψη ότι η γενική βούληση υπάρχει στη φυσική κατάσταση. Στη φυσική κατάσταση δεν συναντάμε μεμονωμένα άτομα που αγωνίζονται για την αυτοσυντήρησή τους αλλά συνομαδώσεις με ενιαία βούληση. Το έθνος, ο λαός υπάρχουν στη φυσική κατάσταση και η φυσική κατάσταση είναι ελευθερία. Το έθνος, ο λαός δεν δεσμεύεται από πουθενά παρά μόνον από τα όρια της βούλησής του∙ είναι η γενική βούληση που υπάρχει πριν από την εκάστοτε συντεταγμένη εξουσία∙ είναι η πηγή της συντεταγμένης εξουσίας, η οποία απορρέει από τη βούλησή του. «Εάν», γράφει, «η ύπαρξη ενός έθνους εξαρτιόταν από τους θετούς κανόνες δικαίου που δίνουν περιεχόμενο στην ύπαρξή του, δεν θα είχε υπάρξει ποτέ».

Η μορφή που λαμβάνει η γενική βούληση του λαού είναι η συντακτική εξουσία. Η συντακτική εξουσία είναι η ανώτερη εξουσία στην οποία υπάγονται όλες οι υπόλοιπες. Κι αυτό γιατί ο λαός έχει δικαιώματα κι όχι καθήκοντα. Το βασικό (φυσικό) δικαίωμα ενός λαού είναι η άσκηση της βούλησής του, από την οποία δεν μπορεί να παραιτηθεί, γιατί τότε, προσθέτουμε, παύει νάναι λαός, χάνει την πολιτική του υπόσταση και γίνεται μια μάζα δούλων. Το έθνος κι ο λαός δεν έχουν καθήκοντα, γιατί τα καθήκοντα απορρέουν από κάποιο είδος συμβολαίου και «τι νόημα έχει να συνάψει κανείς συμβόλαιο με αντισυμβαλλόμενο τον εαυτόν του;» Το έθνος και ο λαός, όμοια με τον παντοδύναμο Θεό είναι legibus solutus, δηλαδή απαλλάσσονται από τους νόμους, δεν δεσμεύονται από τους νόμους.

Από την άλλη πλευρά, η συντεταγμένη εξουσία, είναι το περιεχόμενο της βούλησης που έχει την ίδια νομική αξία με το περιεχόμενο ενός συνταγματικού καθορισμού. Η συντεταγμένη εξουσία είναι κάθε εξουσία που υπάγεται στην εγκυρότητα όσων νόμων, κανόνων, διαδικασιών δεν μπορεί να αλλάξει, καθόσον η βάση της ύπαρξής τους είναι το σύνταγμα που δημιούργησε ο λαός. Μια εξουσία που στηρίζεται, ιδρύεται ή απορρέει από το σύνταγμα δεν μπορεί νάναι ανώτερη απ’ αυτό. Το κράτος είναι οι αρμοδιότητές του που απορρέουν από την ιδρυτική συνταγματική πράξη. Υπ’ αυτήν την έννοια τόσο το κράτος όσο και η κυβέρνηση δεν έχουν κάποια αυτόνομη, ανεξάρτητη υπόσταση, αλλά είναιαπορροή της γενικής βούλησης, τρόποι έκφρασής της.

Η φαινομενολογία της γενικής βούλησης αποκαλύπτεται στη σχέση συντακτικής και συντεταγμένης εξουσίας. Η οντολογία της όμως γίνεται κατανοητή μόνον εάν ανατρέξουμε στη φυσική κατάσταση. Ο Σεγιές βρίσκεται σε αντίθεση με τα μεγάλα ρεύματα του ρομαντισμού που μέσω της οργανικής ανάπτυξης θεμελιώνουν το έθνος και τον λαό σ’ ένα απόμακρο παρελθόν. Μέλημά του είναι να σπάσει τον αέναο κύκλο του φυσικού μεταβολισμού και γι’ αυτό διαρρηγνύει, ακρωτηριάζει τη σχέση με το παρελθόν χάρη στο δόγμα της συντακτικής και συντεταγμένης εξουσίας. Η πλήρης ισχύς της γενικής βούλησης εκδηλώνεται μέσω των έκτακτων αντιπροσώπων, οι οποίοι με μια κυρίαρχη πράξη, της συντακτικής εξουσίας, δίνουν σχήμα και μορφή, διαμορφώνουν τη γενική βούληση. Στον Σεγιές η γενική βούληση ενεργεί στο παρόν αποβλέποντας στο μέλλον∙ πρεσβεύει το επαναστατικό πρόταγμα ενός διαρκούς γίγνεσθαι που έχει ως τέλος την πραγμάτωση της ιδέας του Ανθρώπου. Κι αυτό εξηγεί τις πολιτικές μετατοπίσεις του Σεγιές, από τον μεταρρυθμισμό της προεπαναστατικής περιόδου μέχρι το πραξικόπημα της 18^ης Μπρυμαίρ και τη «δικτατορία» του Ναπολέοντα. Η λογική συνέχεια μιας τέτοιας αλυσίδας σκέψεων είναι πως όταν η τρίτη τάξη το 1848 παύει νάναι επαναστατική, όταν γίνεται καθεστώς, παρόν, τότε το μέλλον ανήκει σε μια άλλη τάξη (για την ακρίβεια στην πρωτοπορεία της). Ο κληρονόμος του επαναστατικού πραξικοπηματισμού είναι η τροτσκιστική διαρκής επανάσταση.

Σ’ αυτό ακριβώς το σημείο υπενθυμίζουμε μιαν άλλη αντιστοιχία, εκείνη της αντιπροσώπευσης[represantation] με τη μεσαιωνική-θεολογικήαναπαράσταση [representation]. Αναπαράσταση είναι να κάνεις ορατή μιαν αόρατη οντότητα, μέσω ενός πλάσματος που είναι δημοσίως παρόν. Η εκκλησία και οι θεσμοί της θεωρούνται αναπαράσταση της πολιτείας του Θεού επί της γης, ή -στη γλώσσα της εκκοσμίκευσης- η πολιτεία και οι θεσμοί της είναι μια αναπαράσταση της γενικής βούλησης. Η αναπαράσταση για να μπορεί να υπάρξει χρειάζεται το φά(ντα)σμα μιας ιδέας, μιας υπερβατικής δύναμης που ξεπερνά το δεδομένο είναι. Η ιδέα μπορεί να αναπαρασταθεί και άρα να προσωποποιηθεί. Ο θεός, ο λαός, η ελευθερία, η ισότητα μπορεί να αναπαρασταθούν και να εκδηλωθούν μέσω ενός προσώπου ή μιας ομάδας προσώπων και μάλιστα δημόσια.

Όλως αντιθέτως, στην κοινοβουλευτική αντιπροσώπευση έχουμε την κατίσχυση του ιδιωτικού έναντι του δημοσίου, των ιδιωτικών συμφερόντων τα οποία αντιπροσωπεύονται μέσω μια ιδιωτικής -μυστικής- ψηφοφορίας. Η κοινοβουλευτική αντιπροσώπευση έχει ως συνέπεια τη διείσδυση της οικονομίας στον δημόσιο χώρο. Στη σκέψη που παράγει τους κανόνες της από την οικονομικο-τεχνική σφαίρα η Ιδέα εμφανίζεται ως εξωτερική βίαιη παρέμβαση, σαν μια διαταραχή της αυτοκινούμενης μηχανής. Λογική απόληξή της είναι η μεταμοντέρνα κατάσταση που στην προοπτική του Φ. Ένγκελς, φάνταζε σαν το ιδεώδες μιας ανθρωπότητας όπου θα κυβερνούν τα πράγματα.

Το ζήτημα σ’ αυτή τη συνάφεια, που παραμένει ανοικτό(;), είναι πότε πράγματι ο λαός μπορεί και εκδηλώνει τη βούλησή του. Κι αυτό αφορά τη στιγμή που ο λαός δεν καλείται να επιλέξει δημοψηφισμαστικά μεταξύ ανούσιων διλημμάτων, αλλά μεταξύ ενός παλαιού κι ενός νέου πολιτεύματος. Με το ίδιο ακριβώς νόημα το ζήτημα που παραμένει ανοιχτό(;) στη σφαίρα της τέχνης είναι κατά πόσον έχει πλέον την ικανότητα να αναπαραστήσει μιαν Ιδέα ή απλώς αντιπροσωπεύει μια εκδήλωση, ένα μανιφέστο της «κακής» πραγματικότητας.

 http://www.avgi.gr/article/10812/8165736/e-epoche-ton-epanastaseon#