The ressentiment of future generations, and the cannibalisation of history. posted by Richard Seymour

In The Illusion of the End, a marvellously dyspeptic essay about the End of History, 1989 and all that, Baudrillard writes:

Celebration and commemoration are themselves merely a form of necrophagous cannibalism, the homeopathic form of murder by easy stages. This is the work of heirs, whose ressentiment toward the deceased is boundless. Museums, jubilees, festivals, complete works, the publication of the tiniest of unpublished fragments - all this shows that we are entering an active age of ressentiment and repentance.

While taking pictures of London, I've done my fair share of the cliched stuff - pictures from Royal Parks, sightseeing stuff of monuments, buildings, the City and what have you. It seemed the proper thing to do. But there's a curiously over-compensatory sanitary quality to the neoclassical facades, a deliberate architectural supression of a turbulent and often seamy history. Have a look at this:



Shit picture, I know, but what's the purpose of that bloody great arch apart from the fact that it was supposed to tower over the Mall and was too narrow? Could it be that one misses the tree for the dead wood? That is, the Tyburn Tree, where Elizabeth I sent Catholics to their deaths and where Cromwell had his Leveller enemies hung, drawn and quartered. Eventually, one supposes, they'll rebuild those gallows and allow tourists to stand with their head in the noose and have pictures taken for a tenner. Already, one is invited to the Tower of London or the Dungeon to take in a kitschy pantomime of History, to wallow in tales of bloody execution, to boo and hiss and become the mythical baying mob of historical renown.

The same logic is also evident in those thousands of monuments to dead people through which crocodiles of school students are acquainted with some embalmed History. Particularly, that Cenotaph that politicians and royals gather around every November - truly a case of the dead eating the dead. It is especially apparent in the way that Cromwell's statue sits outside parliament - the Puritan revolutionary turned Lord Protector, the beneficiary of an historical caesura turned sign and sanction of an invented tradition. (No place for Anna Trapnel or Edward Sexby in this corny slice of Brittanica, and Wat Tyler has no statue outside parliament - although he has become a pub).

The culmination of this double gesture of suppression and murder-by-reappropriation has to be the sort of 'seedy' 'underground' history of London that one gets from the likes of Peter Ackroyd, those who provide the vicarious thrill of lawlessness, revelry, insurrection, criminality, festering filth, misery, poverty and repression. It is the ceaseless stream of banal, pseudo-popular history from the likes of Liza Picard, in which the rarefied language and conceptual apparatus of 'academic' history is eschewed in favour of 'heart-warming' or 'chilling' detail from day to day life. The dead are exhumed and set up in a diaroma, with their functions clearly tagged to their clothing - A Villeyn, A Vagabond, A Lord, A Heinous Robber, A Highwayman, Several Cheerful Bakers, A Seamstress, A Mistress, Two Courtiers, the Queen etc etc. As the story of their lives crackles over some well-worn speakers, the corpses are set to motion by levers and pulleys in a ghastly dance of bygones; various archived and preserved combs, tools, bits of clothing and so on are wheeled past the eye on a conveyor belt; sound effects and atmospheric alterations induce oohs and aahs in the viewer. This is 'real' history, unmediated by the fancy academic argot that Ordinary Bloody People so despise. This is the 'social history' of the mortuary. More aptly, this is the historian at the service of the Tussauds group.

Speaking of France, Baudrillard adds:

And all our monuments are mausoleums... There are two forms of forgetting: on the one hand, the slow or violent extermination of memory, on the other, the spectacular promotion of a phenomenon, shifting it from historical space into the sphere of advertising, the media becoming the site of a temporal strategy of prestige ... This is how we have manufactured for ourselves, with great swathes of promotional images, a synthetic memory which serves as our primal reference, our founding myth, and which, most importantly, absolves us of the real event of the Revolution.

This was written in reference to France at the end of the Cold War. About the 'Velvet' Revolutions, Zizek wrote in Tarrying With the Negative that the West's fascination with these upheavals was nostalgia for the lost object of the democratic revolution. The repressed truth was that since the nation is the fantasy object for liberal democracy, the inevitable result of these revolutions if they were to become capitalist democracies was a re-emergence of the worst kind of nationalism, intersected with 'ethnic tensions' as access to the polis was increasingly defined by an imagined national community. Nostalgia? snorted Baudrillard. Not even that: "Nostalgia had beauty because it retained within it the presentiment of what had taken place and could take place again", had beauty precisely because it was never achieved, whereas we have no right to expect it ever to happen again. The colour-coded revolutions of late have almost been like a funereal parade of the drama of democratic revolution - street scenes acted out with fidelity to nothing but literary and Hollywood cliche. History would not end, Baudrillard averred, because all of its elements were infinitely recyclable - and how.

Baudrillard's light sabre demolishes the End of History, the democratic revolution, the consecration of an imagined past and the facile optimism about a utopian future. Capitalism's savagery continues unabated, however much its traces are expunged from the news, the movies, the teevee, even the fucking street furniture. Yet on that wreckage, and from that wreckage must be constructed the next permanent opposition. Baudrillard was miserably and stupidly vilified after 9/11 for some essays he wrote in which he was accused of having said that the attacks were a legitimate reaction to globalisation (and therefore, so one was supposed to gather, history had resumed with Al Qaeda as the new Jacobins). On the contrary, he construed the attacks as part of a war within globalisation, in which the apparently pure antagonism between 'Islam' and the 'West' had to be demystified - Islamism is specifically implicated in globalisation. Thus, the towers collapsed 'under their own weight', were brought down by the very form of society which created them. And now, as the Washington political class exhumes its cornball History Of America, and parades formaldehyded American Values, the liberal-left shows its ressentiment toward the espousers of those Values by espousing them more vehemently, proudly and emphatically than Messrs Ashcroft of Bush dare. They collude in the necrotic re-animation of the Founding Fathers and the constitutionalist platitudes that sustain this long-dead Democratic Revolution, especially in its neo-imperialist guise. Rather than burying the dead and driving forward with a new project, they cling to the fantasy object of America. America, and the Democratic Revolution which gave it birth, is dead. Its permanent exclusions (of the remaining Native Americans and of African Americans), which have been expressed in various as a necessary and logical fact of the American idea, from slavery to New Orleans, have infirmed and finally killed it.

Hoist up the red flag. Hoist it up because it is an alien flag, because it has nothing to do with American Values or the constitution or liberalism or John Dewey. Hoist it up and show a sign of life, damn you!

PS: there's a fucking awful bot that's going round stealing people's websites. It has happened to the Young Hegelian and now Charlotte Street (copy here. I'd create a copy of your website and make your password as complicated as possible. Beware: the price of Bloggery is eternal vigilance.