There’s some shit going round the academo-blogosphere (office hours of the soul!) about the decline and fall of literary studies as an academic discipline.  External factors play a large role of course: corporate Stalinism dictates that all monies will be spent erecting shiny silver and glass buildings to house the graduate school of business and the biomedical center for the production of new diseases to be treated by the pharmaceutical companies rather than clearing the asbestos out of the English professors’ offices.  And some of the internal factors in the fall of literary studies are symptoms of this problem rather than problems strictly endemic to the discipline’s, um, ‘logic,’ as we’ve come to say in literary studies.  The problem remains, however, even if it’s not much of a problem compared to what other people are going through.  

And what is the problem?  Well, as an insider, I would diagnose it this way: undergraduates (and I’m talking about English majors) don’t know how to read a literary text and we are not teaching them.  They can, by and large, say nothing whatsoever about tone, about literary tradition, about formal structures, and this is not their fault: they are following the cues of their instructors, particularly the young ones, who were themselves reared in a tradition of the most boring and finally pointless historicism.  Not a politically engaged historicism nor a philosophically informed one; neither Benjamin’s seizing of a flash from the past in a moment of danger in order to lend strength to a liberatory politics, nor Auerbach’s sweepingly inductive text-based cultural analyses, no, none of this.  Rather instead we have a procession of ‘recovered’ texts, recovered to no obvious purpose except to ‘complicate’ our notion of this or that, which texts then get used in an intellectually illegitimate fashion to say something about some giant topic (capitalism, empire, war) which would be much better remarked upon using the techniques of historical inquiry rather than masked behind a patina of literary criticism.  Some wag parodied the circumstance decisively by characterizing all current job talks as being about ‘novels written by pirates.’  Which wouldn’t bother me (I come not to defend any canon) if those job talks weren’t actually armchair attempts to do an anthropology of pirates based on some novels.  If you want to do anthropolgy, get off your ass!  Literary criticism is not anthropology, nor should it pretend to be.  

What is to be done?  I have one revolutionary proposal to urge: we in literary studies, unless we are actually involved in the preservation or editing of texts, must cease to see ourselves as scholars and must cease to characterize our pedagogical or critical work as having anything to do with the production of knowledge.  We don’t produce knowledge.  If it’s knowledge you want to produce, you should spend your time reading non-fiction books.  If you want to spend your time reading poetry instead, and only in this scientistic society could that be seen as a worthless pursuit, then you should realize that you primarily are in the business of producing affect and creating values.  The education we provide is of the sentiments fully as much as of the intellect; indeed, literature should be that discourse which recognizes no dissociation of sensibility.  To do this properly, one must attend to the text to understand the nuances of its affective power (and intellectual power as well) rather than ramming some historical factoids into its gaps for the hell of it, for want of anything better to do.  Again, I don’t care about canons and I’m not against imaginative historicism.  But I’m not a historian and history is made out of other things than literature, and vice versa.

M. John Harrison (brilliant author, in case you don’t know, of The Course of the Heart and Light) wonders what comes after postmodernism. He writes in his comments section:

I’m only saying that pomo’s had its day as the Great Interrogator, time to look for the next one. Anything that opposes itself to a seamless theory is bound to look, at first, like a return to one of the many competing theories it has selected as its patsies; & pomo, like all the paradigms which preceded it, has many clever rhetorical patches for every possible kind of puncture. It’s been almost as busy in that respect as the Catholic church. At the moment it’s in its predictable Maoist phase, horror of the counter revolution–bound to happen, given that most of its adherents are in their 40s. All paradigms have a vested interest in claiming that they can’t possibly be replaced except by a return to some kind of demonised old days. That’s essentially a threat. But things move along despite it. Who knows what shape they’ll take ?

The reminds me of something Roger at Limited ,Inc. wrote a few weeks ago about people who had truly followed the examples of Foucault and Derrida. When I read that, I wondered what it must be like to be of a generation that experiences Derrida and Deleuze and Foucault as liberating. For me, I only experienced that material as a body of settled dogma to be genuflected toward and then ignored as far as possible.

But there are phases within phases. Postmodernism has been steadily ending and something has been steadily taking its place over the course of the last decade, but it’s difficult, I think, to perceive, unless we impose a somewhat artificial regime of connection among all levels of culture.

The end of postmodernism comes in the mid-to-late ’90s, when it dissolves into mysticism. Remember the ’90s? When Roma Downey was touched by an angel every week just as Mulder and Scully assiduously pursued the truth “out there”? At the same time, Grant Morrison received his communication in Nepal from the fifth-dimensional entities who unveiled the mysteries of spacetime to him while Alan Moore entertained a visit from the demon Asmodeus. And don’t think this is some merely low-culture matter: the gnostic black madonna brought the girls back to life at the end of Toni Morrison’s Paradise too, and the great novel of the decade, DeLillo’s Underworld, culminated in the visions of Sister Edgar and the miracle of Esmerelda. And academia witnessed the elevation of Walter Benjamin, the Marxist who found his revolution in a gnostic theology, to near-saint status.

After this ascension of the spirit, the turn of the millennium clapped like disapproving thunder in every realm: the swaggering macho neo-Hegeleninism of Zizek in academic philosophy, nu-metal and rap metal in pop music, the rise of Warren Ellis/Garth Ennis ultraviolence in comics, and in politics, most obviously, the phony declaration of war between the neoconservatives and their enemy-ally Islamic warriors. After the goddess-worshipping faux-pacific wisdom of the ’90s comes a masculinist stance of violence for its own sake, with or without reference to some telos which will obviously never be arrived at. And now I think people are sick of this, sick of the wars, sick of the posture.

Where do we find ourselves culturally now? Is there any text I could point to that might suggest where we’re headed next? I think there is. Going back to the ’90s, we can find something new coming in texts as disparate as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the (admittedly very conservative and not really to my taste) novels of Michel Houellebecq. And now we have the pop philosophy of John Gray and the artpop music of Joanna Newsom. What is it on the horizon? I think it’s a kind of neo-paganism, not in the key of goddess-worshipping boosterism, but one rather that embraces a Homerically tragic sense of life coupled with a pro-pleasure attitude. The Real is acknowledged as that which will eventually bring the darkness down over one’s eyes. In the meantime, one’s creativity is to be cultivated and ethical standards, but not necessarily global or natural ones, are to be maintained. I’m not necessarily advocating this, though I find it attractive, and I find that its crytpo-Saidian Tory Anarchism comports better than a more ideologically-frought rebellion with my own preference for socialism in economics, anarchism in politics, sex-and-gender radicalism in culture and a certain classicism in aesthetics.

Well, anyway, that’s my best guess. And go read IOZ’s post of yesterday for a good example of what this looks like as an honest-to-goodness first-rate poem: “The Defeatists”.

(Caveat: I said already my scheme was artificial, and of course, for example, Gaiman could be subsumed under pomo mysticism just as Benjamin could work his way to some kind of neo-paganism and Houellebecq could be an instance of the new millennial violence. This is just a little exercise in cultural diagnosis, not to be taken too too seriously.)

My life has only just ceased to be scored by the insectoid hum of news helicopters. I sit here typing a mere and disconcerting ten blocks from the televisual catastrophe I suppose you’ve all been enjoying.

People here in the land of “Minnesota Nice” are certainly enjoying it: I’ve never quite experienced the peculiar giddiness, the high spirits and festiveness that enters a population in a moment of public calamity. I was reporting this last night to a friend who called from Chicago to check in, and we concluded that if this was the psychological state of Minneapolis, then Baghdad must be a laugh riot. Nobody went to work today, and everyone rushed, camera in hand, to the site of the disaster, hoping to snap that perfect shot. I, unemployed, walked by but did not pause, so firm is my integrity.

The response of the liberal blogosphere and commentariat has been coordinated and strong. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes that this country is physically disintegrating, and the occurrence of this collapse in a city rightly renowned for its quality of life and public institutions ought to be a startling reminder of the price of endless foreign wars, disestablishment of the public sphere and a sick fetish for sports stadiums.

Oh yes, we have the stadium problem here in Minneapolis. It reminds me of my vanished youth in Pittsburgh PA, where the government put the prospect of two new stadiums to a referendum. The voters, looking around them at a city many parts of which were and are coming to resemble something out of the old Second World, rejected the measure. The city swiftly implemented what they called Plan B. Plan B was, “Fuck you, we’re doing it anyway.” Things are no different up here. I say, if you want to privatize something, privatize sports in all its aspects.

Speaking of privatization, we already see the old shell game being played. Tucker Carlson today advocated having all bridges sponsored by corporations! What a trick: defund public infrastructure, wait till it falls apart, when it falls apart blame government inefficiency, then hand everything over to private interests.

Where, by the way, are all of these super-efficient corporations of neoliberal mythology? Corporations are in my experience vast, grey, faceless, wasteful and arbitrary bureaucracies, dehumanizing and inefficient beyond the wildest dreams of Lenin. (Hence my preferred phrase: Corporate Stalinism.) Enough of this bullshit.

Anyway. A commenter on The Nation’s blast against defunded infrastructure accused the left of not coming to terms with the fact that one cannot have everything. I may not be public-spirited; I may not even plan to vote for Barack “Invade Pakistan” Obama or Hillary “Don’t Say You Won’t Nuke ‘Em” Clinton or any other member of that wretched party; I may want to vomit when Senator Amy Kloubachar says that bridges should not fall down in America, thus implying that it’s just fine and what you’d expect for bridges to fall down in Peru or Indonesia; I may even be some kind of anarchist. But surely, surely, we mustn’t despair so much that we cannot even imagine a collective effort to ensure that the very ground does not fall away from beneath our feet.

I saw at Rigorous Intuition the news that Theresa Duncan and her partner Jeremy Blake had evidently committed suicide. My first thought was, “Who is Theresa Duncan?” But after two minutes’ poking around her blog I learned that she wrote for Artforum a comparative piece on Kill Bill and Lost in Translation that I long ago clipped out of the magazine and taped into a notebook that I’ve been carrying around with me for the last three years.

This particular issue of Artforum was given to me by friends who lived in Portland, ME, and whom I was then visiting immediately after my graduation from college. This was around the time of the beheading of Nick Berg, an event used by the right-wing to bolster the case that “we” were at war with wicked barbarians in Iraq. However, a number of bizarre events surrounding the murder raised suspicions about its perpetrators and their motivation. At the time I recall even moderate liberals wondering aloud if Berg’s murder were not staged by agents of the US government.

While in Maine, I drunkenly opined that Berg was probably involve in the whole unfolding catastrophe, from September 11 to Iraq. On my return home, I took a newspaper article on Berg and, without reading it, cut it into its constituent paragraphs, put them in a carrying case for M&Ms, shook them up, drew them at random and taped them into the same notebook in which I had saved Duncan’s article. (This practice was based on the cut-up technique popularized by William S. Burroughs, in which a text is randomly re-arranged in order to take advantage of chance’s capacity for revealing hidden or implicate meanings.)

My reading of the re-assembled, disjointed article issued only one surprise: the frequency with which Berg was recalled by relatives as being interested in repairing electrical towers. “He was a tower guy,” one relative recalled. This means sweet fuck all, of course, and I am, on most days of the week, a rationalist and an anti-cabbalist, though I have been known to frequent occult bookstores, and my adolescent heroes were the PoMo warlocks Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Anyway, Berg was a tower guy, and this information sat a few papers’ widths’ from Theresa Duncan’s masterful demolition of Sofia Coppolla’s hymn to the patriarchy (which, by the bye, you can read here.)

What does this have to do with the untimely demise of Ms. Duncan? Well, it seems that she was caught up in some spooky shit of her own. One blog post in particular details her and her partner’s harassment both by a certain “church” which starts with a Scient- and ends with an -ology and by persons associated with a certain rich guy connected with the mob and possibly also with higher powers than that.

There is, I would caution you, no point to my observing these tenuously connected events. I trawl conspiracy theory websites to scare and entertain myself, and only half believe what I read there. I don’t know what happened to Ms. Duncan; I will probably never know; and to be honest with you I don’t want to know. There is that famous moment in The Red and the Black when Mathilde de la Mole elects Julien Sorel to be her lover because he is the only man in the room who might plausibly do something daring enough to warrant his decollation by the powers that be. I am not Julien Sorel. My rebellion against society goes only so far as my commitment to spend as much time unemployed as possible. More and more, I lose my public-spiritedness. More and more, I come to think that revolutionaries talk as much rubbish as reformists.

Interestingly, or maybe not, the only two professors I’ve ever had who showed any interest in conspiracy type matters were quite opposed on the question.

One was a Marxist, an old-fashioned Leninist type, and though he never came out and said so, he seemed to believe that the rise of deconstruction in U.S. academe in the late ’70s/early ’80s, spearheaded by ex-Nazi de Man and inspired by the Nazi Heidegger and the proto-Nazi Nietzsche sure was suspicious. I thought I saw a twinkle in his eye when he mentioned CIA funding of abstract expressionism.

On the other hand, my other conspiracy-minded professor was himself part of the deconstruction in-crowd, BFF with JD, the Dark Lady and others. He was more or less an anti-Marxist, or anti-Hegelian anyway (”Lukacs is boring!” he once declared), and yet he would frequently mention weird goings-on in the Middle East and even once entertained us with a large excursus on Leo Ryan, George Moscone, Harvey Milk, Jim Jones etc.

As for me, I’m convinced that all the more plausible conspiracy theories are true. But this is not really what I meant to say. RIP Theresa Duncan.

He made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees
—XTC

Today I finished J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel Life & Times of Michael K. This is the second Coetzee novel I’ve read, the first being the harrowing, controversial Disgrace. I’ve also browsed around a lot in his later criticism, that collected in Stranger Shores and Inner Workings.

I would say anecdotally that he is a major figure for my generation of writers and intellectuals. Why? Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading wrote of those authors whose works the ephebe was safe in reading an hour before he or she took up the pen. Coetzee is such a writer. His style is one, in Joyce’s phrase, of scrupulous meanness. The scrupulousness, not the meanness, makes him an essential figure in an age of cant and bombast. Whatever his other virtues and vices, the knowledge of the value of words for which he praised Defoe in one of his essays makes him appealing after an orgy of the vatic/phatic in international novels and high theory.

In Life & Times of Michael K, Coetzee describes the journey of a hare-lipped Coloured man from Cape Town to the country and—after passing through several labor and re-education camps—back again during a civil war in South Africa. The first and longest part of the novel gives K’s journey, first with his mother and then with her ashes, up through his sojourn in the re-education camp in attentive, descriptive, quiet prose through K’s eyes. This section reaches its climax when, after escaping a labor camp back to the abandoned farm where his mother may or may not have been born, he grows his own pumpkins by dark of night while hiding out by day in a burrow. In these pages, Coetzee recalls Defoe in his careful descriptions of tools and labor, and attains an unanticipatedly high register in his evocation of K’s attunement to the earth and its cycles.

Eventually, he is captured by the army, who suspect him of guarding supplies for rebels. They send him to the second camp, and his stay there occupies the novel’s second section, narrated this time by the doctor in the camp, an educated white man of liberal sympathies. The imprisoned, starving K refuses to eat, telling the doctor that after the pumpkins he has grown, no other food tastes good. The doctor’s confrontation with this refusal, and with K’s seeming freedom from all teleologies, prompts him to what amounts to an eloquent paraphrase of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (AKA “Theses on the Philosophy of History”). It’s hard to say whether we’re meant to sympathize with the doctor’s reading of K’s life as an allegory for how meaning can erupt into a system without being claimed by the system’s terms. He wants so badly to be K, but can only describe him—largely in the terms of other systems, which perhaps lends more aesthetic credibility to the echoes of Kafka and Benjamin. It reminds me a bit of Lewis Carroll’s parodies of Wordsworth, in which the latter’s “egotistical sublime” was reduced, justly or unjustly, to sheer moral obtuseness.

In the brief final section, K returns to Capetown and meets up with some shady characters: a man demonic in his sense of fun, accompanied by his sisters, who may or may not be merely his whores. One of them gives K a blowjob, an experience that brings him shame, before he returns to his mother’s small room to rest, fantasizing about finding company on his journey to freedom from all the “camps” springing up to claim human beings.

This aspect of the novel famously disturbed Nadine Gordimer’s admiration for it back in the mid-’80s. She found K’s near-anarchism and political quietism to be a slight against the liberation struggle of black South Africans and an unfortunate derogation of the intellectual’s duty to aid such struggles. She censured him in terms derived from Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, saying that he had failed to provide in his novel the integration of the hero’s destiny with the destiny of his society, which is the primary task of the novel form in an age when the social totality is not immanent. Whether Gordimer still thinks this way, I don’t know. She’s not wrong: Coetzee in this novel is more Heidegger than Lukács (philosophically, I mean, not politically). Now that the particular struggle of South African blacks has ended, Gordimer’s criticism seems off the mark or irrelevant. This discloses a law of literary transmission about which we ought to be ambivalent: posterity doesn’t care whether you served or deserted.

Well, l’affaire Rushdie returns to disturb the “world republic of letters,” to use Pascale Casanova’s somewhat ironic phrase. What to say? First, any religious bigots or political opportunists who call for assault on Rushdie can of course go take a jump. This should go without saying. However, what the U.S. and the U.K. cannot do, and what its representatives in the republic of letters should know better than to do, is to claim that “we” enjoy freedoms which fit us uniquely for confrontation with the forces of repression.

For one thing, “we” are aligned with the forces of repression—in Palestine, in Iraq, in Haiti, in Turkey, in Pakistan, in Egypt and in other places as well. Indeed, it is just this alliance that sometimes calls forth counter-forces, equally repressive or even moreso. The benighted mullah is recto to the verso of the enlightened imperialist. For another thing, in the wake of Norman Finkelstein’s denial of tenure by DePaul University and David Graeber’s dismissal by Yale University, not to mention the sheer impossibility of ever seeing Finkelstein or Graeber or Noam Chomsky or Amy Goodman or Howard Zinn or Tariq Ali or Naomi Klein on mainstream American TV, it’s simply laughable to claim that, just because our rulers are wiser than the commissars of old who shot or locked up dissidents, thereby winning sympathy to their cause, they allow all voices to be heard equally in a deliriously impure pluralism. From academia to publishing to television, anyone who knows anything can tell you that we in the U.S. live under a regime of de facto censorship which is, in its way, worse than that practiced by theocrats in that theocracy in its very crudeness naturally attracts opprobrium. De facto censorship is silent and thus harder to oppose because so many refuse to believe that it even exists.

I would like to see nothing more than a global united front against repression and exploitation in all its forms, but it appears unlikely in the current climate of belligerence from all quarters and amnesia about the old dreams of universal liberation that once animated both writers and workers, westerners and easterners. It brings to mind the saddest of political protest songs, The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” a satirical broadside against the censorious mullahs of Iran written and performed by a band unremitting in their attacks against their own government and the global system of oppression of which it formed a part. There once was a time when it was understood that, whatever proclamations they issued to the contrary, warmongering capitalist prime ministers and presidents were on the same side as theocratic ayatollahs, and that the proper place for an intellectual, artist or radical was on the other side. Alas, fatal confusion was sown, much of it, suspiciously enough, by al-Qaeda, that paramilitary wing of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and it will probably take centuries to recover.

Returning to pop music, it bears recalling that John Lennon came to live in the United States and risked deportation to oppose its murderous policies. He was able to do this without being a dupe of the forces of repression abroad, as he showed when he quite rightly chided those who would “[carry] around pictures of Chairman Mao.” I think he would be disturbed by the current use of his image and likeness by those who wish to “save Darfur.” What does it mean, after all, to save Darfur in the current context, when international law is either unenforcible or enforcible only in accordance with the wishes of individual states who stand to gain by concealing their drive for profit and power with reference to humanitarian concerns?

I do not for a moment doubt that the Khartoum government and its hired militias are vicious in the extreme and are bent on exterminating civilians whom they see as in the way of their territorial hegemony—though at the moment the situation is dynamic, it should be said. Nor do I doubt that the Chinese government, with its increasing need for oil, supports this vile policy. Whether or not this amounts to “genocide” (the word, like “antisemitism,” has been so cheapened by opportunists that I’m sorry to say I always regard it with suspicion), it’s certainly evil and ought to be opposed.

However, the United States is not the force to oppose it. The U.S. too has an interest in oil, just as the Chinese do, and great-power interference in profitable regions can result in an intensification and exploitation of conflict rather than de-escalation and a negotiated peace. Imperialism’s policy is always “Let’s you and him fight.” But, the humanitarian would object, wouldn’t you allow that U.S. intervention, however crassly motivated or barbarously pursued, might have unintended consequences? I suppose, and so might my immediate death, but that doesn’t give you the right to kill me. It is difficult enough to realize one’s own intentions; to claim to know or control the unintended results of one’s actions is the sheerest hubris and will be punished by the gods. To repeat myself: the United States has occupied a country, destroyed its state and civil society, and instigated and continues to meddle in a civil war that will probably lead to its partition. In the process, anywhere from half a million to a million people have been murdered and an entire culture destroyed. This is a body count in excess of that for which the Janjawid is responsible. A state which has done this has no moral credibility. It has no standing from which to tell others how to live. It ought not be allowed a military, if it comes to that.

John Lennon well knew this about his adopted country, back when it was carrying out another mass sacrifice to the god of democracy, and when he sang of a world in which there was nothing to kill or die for, he did not confuse it with the present, with capitalism, with the United States or with “the international community.” He did not spend his time denouncing foreign devils from a position of comfort and moral superiority but worked to exorcise those evils in front of his face, even at cost to himself. Sadly, he’s gone. We are left with a back-handed tribute to him, and with the annoying vision of his old partner McCartney selling iPods on TV with a song so meretricious and second-rate that I half suspect it to have been written by the author of The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then lump them together to save time. All souls’ day. Twentyseventh I’ll be at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds. Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death’s door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and so, wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a woman’s with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew. Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it. Old Dr Murren’s. The great physician called him home. Well it’s God’s acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the Church Times. Marriage ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing. Immortelles.

A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hu! Not a budge out of him. Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder. Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.

The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve.

—”Hades”

And then my favorite of the book’s many profundities:

STEPHEN (Laughs emptily.) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but modern philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

—”Circe”

From the Wikipedia entry on Muriel Spark:

In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark “had pointed out that it wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic … that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do.”

I am not a Catholic, though I was brought up that way. In fact, I am the kind of sturdy rationalist atheist who would write a book called something like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, except that I think the people who write those books 1.) wittingly or unwittingly provide aid and comfort to those murderers who would prosecute a “clash of civilizations” and 2.) demonstrate a misunderstanding of human culture that would be put right by a quick review of the “Theses on Feuerbach,” if nothing else.

No, it’s not the Catholicism in that quotation that I appreciate, but rather its refutation of a certain cliché about novels and their writers. What is this cliché? Well, here is Jonathan Rée, who supported the Iraq war because of his dialectical understanding of history, writing about recent essays on “the novel” by Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag, J. M. Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa. Here he summarizes the views of Kundera and Coetzee:

Novelists are specialists in the kind of moral wisdom which knows “that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical.” And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the “Manicheism” that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently. Kundera joined the Communist party, where he was taught that art must take sides in a historic “battle between good and evil,” but he was never quite convinced. (In 1950 he was expelled from the party for his obtuseness, but eventually gained readmission, only to be expelled a second time in 1970, after which he escaped to France and set about rebuilding his literary life in a second language.) “Art is not a village band marching dutifully at History’s heels,” Kundera now says, and politics itself will suffocate without access to the forgiving fluidity of the novel. “The novel alone,” as he puts it, “could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.”

But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is “not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros.” Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply “an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins.” And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin’s Marxism—”something forced about it, something merely reactive”—it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. “As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people,” Coetzee says; he had “no talent as a storyteller,” and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

On this view, which funnily enough couples its typical anti-Communism with a Marxist understanding of cultural history, the novel is the literary form par excellence of the bourgeoisie and its liberal values. Being somewhat contrary, I have less of a quarrel with the content of this concept of the novel than with its ubiquity, especially when it comes with moralizing reference to l’affaire Rushdie, as if this were the key to understanding what novels are and what they do (Rée blessedly neglects to mention Rushdie here, but Kundera, Sontag and Coetzee have insisted on it before).

The example of Muriel Spark shows us that, in fact, one need not be a secular liberal to write a good novel. One might be an agrarian conservative, a Latin Mass Catholic, a Communist, a fascist—I believe William Gibson once opined that a fascist couldn’t write a good novel, but I don’t see why not. Look at Dostoevsky, patron saint of the dialogic. He was, in his extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism, at the very least a proto-fascist, and yet who can match his burning sympathy for the exiled and the oppressed? It might be that the best novelists are precisely those who do not feel themselves to be at the center of their culture or its professed values. They have a clearer view from their distant prospect, and more sympathy for their fellow outcasts from life’s feast, in Joyce’s phrase. They can take a truer measure of the deed as against the word. Again, a little Marx could put us right: he famously preferred the conservative Catholic royalist Balzac to the good socialist Zola.

I do think that to measure the word against the deed requires a stable metric, in Donald Rumsfeld’s felicitous locution. Thus, Don Quixote, which always gets pulled into these discussions, and which Nabokov, lately read by the good liberal ladies of Tehran, thought a very cruel book. It is cruel, but not gratuitously so; it pictures the tragicomedy (which an anti-Communist ought to appreciate!) of a man who causes havoc in his attempt to impose upon a miserably recalcitrant world a global scheme of justice. The novel permits us neither to be easy in our sympathy for his crusade nor to dismiss it as lightly as his torturers do. That (take note: a dialectic!) is its genius and the reason it should always be read, as Coetzee seems to imply. But whatever this has to do with liberalism, it has nothing to do with the cant phrases of the present day, which itself has, as anyone can see, no premium on empathy and liberality. Homer can do these as well (or as badly) as any contemporary novelist.

Perhaps he could even do them better:

In this book, the events aren’t enough, or they are too much, which amounts to the same thing for a novelist. There appear to be few writers in America now who could bring us to know what might have been going through the minds of those people as they fell from the building—or going through the minds of the hijackers as they met their targets—but there is no shortage of those who would do what DeLillo does, which is to show us an anxious, educated woman watching a performance artist hanging upside down from a metal beam in Pershing Square. It is a form of intellectual escapism. The oddity of the art world can easily be made to stand in for the profundity of life and death, but none of us who lived through the morning of September 11, 2001, could easily believe that the antics of a performance artist, no matter how uncanny, would suffice to denote the scale and depth of our encounter with dread. The Falling Man, the artist, can do no better than constitute some figurative account of the author himself, suspended in freefall, frozen in time, subject to both the threat of gravity and the indwelling disbelief of the spectators below.

I haven’t read DeLillo’s novel, though I admire many of his other novels, particularly Underworld. I won’t comment on this paragraph at length except to say that I find its second sentence disturbingly true. Perhaps it’s to do with the paucity of commies and Catholics and witches scared away from novel-writing by the liberal/secular dogma!

A few posts ago, I speculated incautiously on the congruence of terrorist groups/militias with the aims of empire, saying that I found the support of organizations like Britain’s Trotskyist SWP for the Iraqi resistance or for Hezbollah to be short-sighted given the symbiotic relationship between great powers and their armed resisters.

Now Nafeez Mosadeq Ahmed reminds us of “the strategy of tension” in which the CIA and MI6 conspired (oh yes, conspired! it happens, you know!) to destabilize western European governments by conjuring a non-existent Communist threat. This conjuring also took the form of carrying out terrorist attacks under the auspices of radical leftist groups—the 1980 Bologna bombing is the most famous example here, and the jury is of course still out on who killed Aldo Moro, but let’s say that I have my suspicions.

Right now we should understand that the strategy of tension is global. Any terrorist attack strengthens the hand of the empire. Oppose terror, oppose violence. Pacifism is the only true radicalism now, and here in the imperial center that means a word as dreaded as “conpiracy”—isolationism, or non-intervention. If you have an imprimatur to lend, don’t lend it to any armed militias: you don’t know whom they’re working for! And hell, they might not know whom they’re working for either!

Anyway, here is Ahmed:

The “strategy of tension” denotes a highly secretive series of interconnected covert operations conducted jointly by the CIA and MI6 largely in Western Europe during the this period. Well-documented by several respected historians, confirmed by official inquiries, and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the “strategy of tension” is one of those unsavoury moments in contemporary history that we don’t learn about in school, or even university.

My favourite book on the subject, and the most authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the UK as part of the “Contemporary Security Studies” series of London-based academic press Routledge, Ganser’s study is the first major historical work to bring the “strategy of tension” into the mainstream of scholarship.

During the Cold War, indeed through to the late 1980s, the United States, United Kingdom, and Western European governments and secret services, participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to galvanize public opinion against leftwing policies and parties, and ultimately to mobilize popular support for purportedly anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad – most of which were really designed to legitimize brutal military interventions against nationalist independence movements in the “Third World”.

Ganser was a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, before he moved to Basel University to teach history. Citing the transcripts of European parliamentary inquiries; the few secret documents that have been declassified; interviews with government, military and intelligence officials; and so on, Ganser shows how intimately the British were involved.

In fact, it wasn’t even an American idea – it was very much ours. The strategy of tension began on the order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in July 1940 called for the establishment of a secret army to “set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory.” (p. 40) By 4th October 1945, the British Chiefs of Staff and the Special Operations branch of MI6 directed the creation of what Ganser describes as a “skeleton network” capable of expansion either in war or to service clandestine operations abroad: “Priority was given in carrying out these tasks to countries likely to be overrun in the earliest stages of any conflict with the Soviet Union, but not as yet under Soviet domination.” (p. 41) In the ensuing years, Col. Gubbins’ Special Operations branch of MI6 cooperated closely with Frank Wisner’s CIA covert action department Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) on White House orders, and in turn coordinated US and UK Special Forces, to establish stay-behind secret armies across western Europe. (p. 42)

Among the documents Ganser brings to attention is the classified Field Manual 30-31, with appendices FM 30-31A and FM 30-31B, authored by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to train thousands of stay-behind officers around the world. The field manual was published in the 1987 parliamentary report of the Italian parliamentary investigation into the terrorist activities of “P2”, the CIA-MI6 sponsored Italian anti-communist network. As Ganser observes: “FM 30-31 instructs the secret soldiers to carry out acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of fear and alertness. Alternatively, the secret soldiers are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and then urge them to use violence.” In the manual’s own words:

“There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of Communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness… US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger. To reach this aim US army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the most radical elements of the insurgency… In case it has not been possible to successfully infiltrate such agents into the leadership of the rebels it can be useful to instrumentalise extreme leftist organizations for one’s own ends in order to achieve the above described targets… These special operations must remain strictly secret. Only those persons which are acting against the revolutionary uprising shall know of the involvement of the US Army…” (p. 234-297)

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents in intricate detail how a subversive network created by elements of western intelligence services – particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio phenomenon; NATO’s close-doors admissions to European ambassadors; confirmations of the international operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together consistently declined to release their secret files on the matter.

The Strategy of Tension simply isn’t part of our historical consciousness. Very few historians of the Cold War are fully conversant with it, let alone academics working in international relations and political science. This is despite the fact that it played an instrumental role in physically constructing a threat, projected into the USSR, which did not ultimately exist. Ipso facto, the Strategy of Tension belongs to the waste-bin of history.

The immense fear and chaos generated by the impact of the Operation Gladio phenomenon throughout western Europe was instrumental in legitimizing the interventionist policies of the Anglo-American alliance in the South, throughout the Cold War period. Although the Soviet Union was supposed to be the real threat and source of terror, and thus the ultimate object of the over 70 military interventions conducted since 1945 [see William Blum’s Killing Hope (London: Zed, 1995)] the Soviet threat was in fact actively exaggerated ideologically – and even physically constructed through clandestine operations – to mobilize the comprehensive militarization of western societies. This does not mean that many government officials did not believe their own propaganda. But we now know that there was a secretive sub-section of the Western intelligence community, known only to very few members of elected governments, that was involved in this.

The number of people who were killed across the “Third World” as a consequence of this militarization process is shocking, its implications genuinely difficult to absorb. According to Dr. J. W. Smith, a US development economist who runs the Institute for Economic Democracy in Arizona, in our glorious self-evidently noble fight to defend the “Free World” from imminent Soviet attacks, invasions, and general inconceivably irrational hell-bent pure evilness, Western states:

“… were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15 million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions more as their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism, that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945 to 1990” [Smith, Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century (2003)]

12 to 15 million people from 1945 to 1990.

I have to repeat these figures to myself to absorb their implications.

Repeat these figures to yourself.

Six million Jews in the Second World War, and now 12 to 15 million innocents in the post-WWII period. The former in the name of German lebensraum. The latter in the name of the free market.

A final word here, partially to explain my extreme impatience with “liberal internationalists.” Very few leftists nowadays have anything nice to say about Joseph Stalin. Stalin is known first and foremost as the murderer of twenty million, rightly enough, though, as Ken MacLeod reminds us in his “Open Letter to an Open Enemy,” Stalin is as defensible as any of western history’s great modernizing statesmen (Cromwell, Napoleon, Lincoln, etc.), which perhaps is a point against them rather than for him. I mention this, though, because today’s “liberal internationalists,” speaking so blithely of the blessings of empire and of humanitarian bombs and the promise of globalization are the equivalents of Stalinists. They contort a liberatory philosophy until it serves no end but power and profit for elite groups, while issuing copious denials that these groups have ever done anything untoward. But they have raised a mountain of corpses to rival those of Stalin and Hitler. It doesn’t matter what warmongers say. What they do is murder.

1. Abolish the automobile.

2. Abolish the prison system.

P.S. Also expropriate all heiresses and the like…