Abstract
Nietzsche’s herd are happy because they do not know either the past or the future. This is so due to their absolute forgetfulness. They cannot communicate this to the curious man who also wants to forget, but cannot, because his inquiry turns out to be a complete failure.
Ye sons of Britain.
Who once were free.
Ye now are slaves to factory.
Those who walk the path of mole.
Expect in time to kill thy soul.
(Donovan, Celtic Rock).
If loss, mourning, and absence set the imaginary act in motion and permanently fuel it as much as they menace and undermine it, it is also undeniable that the fetish of the work of art is erected in disavowal of this mobilizing affliction.
(Julia Kristeva, “On the Melancholic Imaginary”).
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Notes
- 1.
I discuss William Morris’s ideas on labour and aesthetics more extensively in my Labours of the Mind. Labour in The Culture of Production.
- 2.
“In alienating (1) nature from man, and (2) man from himself, his own active function, his life activity, alienated labor also alienates the species from him; it makes species life the means of individual life” (Marx 1967: 289).
- 3.
Perhaps it was for this reason that the regularity and rhythm of the industrial production were not a significant part of the disciplinary system at the Working Men’s College. There was a space in it for a high degree of indiscipline, also on the part of teachers. “Rossetti’s Bohemian ways”, for instance, “could become irritating at times, as Ruskin himself discovered. Regularity was not one of Rossetti’s strong points. […] The Suggestion Book contains an entry for 1857 – ‘Suggested that Mr. Rossetti attend regularly.’ And in the same year there was another suggestion […] ‘that Mr. Rossetti’s Drawing Room be papered or coloured a green or some other quiet colour, as the present red colour hurts the eyes of the students” (Harrison 2013: 68).
- 4.
Locke explains various aspects of remaining the same in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the chapter entitled “Of Identity and Diversity”. His short definition of “person”, which he complicates later in the text, says that a person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it”. (Locke 1975: §9).
- 5.
Though only implicitly marked in Locke, Englishness seen as an additional mark of belonging to the visible church, the theme upon which I will not extensively elaborate here, is also discernible in various writings in which English reason and industriousness are shown as exceeding the same qualities in others, not only in Indians. The lack of predispositions to work was projected upon numerous other colonized people and peoples, and J.M Cotzee’s essay on laziness in South Africa insightfully discusses the significance of “its power to scandalize” which is still present in various discourses and is “as radical today as it ever was” (Coetzee 1988: 34). The lack of predispositions to reasonably act, also as radical today as it ever was, was projected not only on “savages”, but also on England’s neighbours by Locke’s almost contemporary radical thinker John Milton who, in Areopagitica, traced the origins of English reason back to the Persian wisdom and found English wit natural, as contrasted with the artificiality of the work of the French. Milton’s Areopagitica was written as a speech addressed the English Parliament in 1644. Meant as a defense of freedom of speech, the text argued that reason was the only tool to be used in choosing between good and evil, and thus between good and evil books. The British kind of reason, as described by Milton, seems to be of some special quality: “Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtile and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient, and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and ablest judgment have been persuaded that even the school of Pythagoras, and the Persian wisdom, took beginning from the old philosophy of this island. And that wise and civil Roman, Julius Agricola, who governed once here for Caesar, preferred the natural wits of Britain before the laboured studies of the French” (Milton 1918: 50). I owe the incentive to read Areopagitica to discussions and talks with Francis Barker, and to his The Tremulous Private Body, Essays on Subjection (Barker 1984).
- 6.
Much later, Alexis de Tocqueville used the argument of Indians’ occupation of land in the first volume of his Democracy in America (1835) “Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it. It is by agricultural labor that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of North America lived by the produce of the chase. Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these nations began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing the completion of it. They seem to have been placed by Providence amidst the riches of the New World to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them. Those coasts, so admirably adapted for commerce and industry; those wide and deep rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the Mississippi; the whole continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation, yet unborn” (Tocqueville 1946: 27, italic added).
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Rachwał, T. (2017). How? Poetically, Contingently, Plastically. In: Precarity and Loss. Prekarisierung und soziale Entkopplung - transdisziplinäre Studien. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-13415-0_2
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