A Rubbishing of General Theory posted by Richard Seymour

Tentatively, I'd like to plug a new blog I've encountered amid the pullulating threads of the e-ther. Someone called "Will" has began a blog entitled A General Theory of Rubbish . I say "tentatively", because I sort of suspect from the links to Harry's Place, Normblog, SIAW, and other cantankerous bastions of the pro-war Left that he will soon degenerate into sour, lumpen attacks on "pseudo-leftists", "Islamo-apologists" and others of impure creed.

I hope not, because much of what I've read so far is entertaining and intelligent. I have deposited a comment beneath a post of his about "Stupidity", thus offering maximum opportunity for an effluviation of bile... In fact, I note already the presence of that empurpled phrase favoured by the Latter Day Imperialists: "pseudo-Leftists" . This in a post in which the following is offered served up (extracted from The Last Superpower) as a piece of wisdom:

"Revolutionaries are historical optimists who stress the inevitability of progress. Pseudo-Leftists are reactionaries who merely denounce how bad things are and actively reinforce the idea that they cannot be changed. But when revolutionaries reject the irrational obscurantism and moralistic posturing of pseudo-Leftists and line up together with the ruling class against them, by asserting that "all that is real is rational", they are also implicitly saying "all that exists deserves to perish" as explained by Engels..."

Oh no. I hope not. We may be doomed if there are still socialists preaching the inevitability of progress. Progress? Inevitable? Have these people ever heard of irradiation? Technological progress has already given the ruling class, with whom the "revolutionaries" are apt to "line up together with", the capacity to put an end to history. I prefer Walter Benjamin's definition of progress to the "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind":

Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, Theses On the Philosophy of History, Illuminations).

Or perhaps, apropos the possibility of thermonuclear extinction:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. (Ibid).

Still, I see the appeal of sunny-side-up, shit-eating-grin, optimism. For one thing, one may support the Last Superpower as the only remaining force with any international muscle (farewell to the proletariat, then; Catalonia was merely a dream), and still maintain one's "revolutionary" stance. For all this, The General Theory will inform and entertain - even as you sigh, roll your eyes, fan your armpits and shake your head.

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