Doom Prophets II: A Catalogue of Terror, Research Time, 18/02/2016

Continued from last post . . . Antonio Negri gives a list of apocalyptic prophets at the end of Empire. They may not be purely prophets of doom and death (at least not all of them), but they’re philosophers who articulate the sense that something is ending, and that the end will be terrible.

Why is it valuable for us to go back to the first prophets of modernity’s apocalypse? Because we’re still living through that apocalypse. And people are still driven to monstrous acts by apocalyptic visions. 

Too often I've seen the language of success
masking a dream of domination, that
you can only live well by forcing others
to suffer and die. So you should learn to
love the suffering, pain, and poverty of
others. This ideology of success on the
corpses of others will kill us all. It's
killing us already.

The end of modernity has come, and it was a kind of cultural apocalypse, because so much of Western culture was forged through the ideology of modernity. The secular values of our civilization have been adrift since the First World War, since we could no longer lie to ourselves seriously about the nature of empire.

Western culture needs a vision of peace, universal brotherhood, and the creative power of the people to replace modernity. Because in our century of scrambling, all we’ve done is fall back into old patterns of oligarchy, religious fundamentalism, the cutthroat values of new liberalism, the violent resentment of bullying culture, and a politics of global war.

Maybe if we start looking through the first prophets of modernity’s burnout, we’ll find a path forward. Negri made one list, and I’m modifying it with some additions of my own.

The obvious first one on the list is Friedrich Nietzsche. Most of the time, I concentrate on the productive aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The Nietzsche revival post-1960s. His conception of humanity and life as having as its highest power creativity. 

But Nietzsche was also a profound critic of modernity’s currents of nationalism. You can see this most clearly in his writings that critique the decadence of German culture in an increasingly violent nationalism and anti-Semitism. 

This is a core message of The Case of Wagner and Beyond Good and Evil. The rise of an aesthetics of bombastic, overpowering nationalism and imagery of racial pride started a process where the popular morality of German people eroded and destroyed all that was noble within it.

The irony is that Nietzsche’s notebooks were edited, after his final collapse in 1889, by his virulently nationalist sister Elisabeth to make him into a prophet of the nobility of racism. Which is why Nietzsche needed a revival in the first place.

But the value of his writings for understanding the end of modernity is immense. Nietzsche hits the most profound diagnosis of the self-immolation of modernity’s essential concepts, ideologies, and moral ideas. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, the most
profound philosopher-prophet
of the implosion of Western
modernity.

Where to go from the end gets even trickier than Nietzsche’s difficult and sometimes bizarre writings. Negri discusses Carl Schmitt as a major apocalyptic figure of modernity. And his concept of politics as total war between existentially threatening cultures, peoples, movements, and states is practically a blueprint for the destruction of humanity.

Hell, in the age of nuclear weaponry, it's a blueprint for the destruction of Earth. Still, you’ll probably see some posts about Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political later this year as I dive into the bloodbath. Most important is trying to understand why a person could believe that such a bloodbath would be the only sustainable way forward for Western society.

The experience of the First World War and the vision of human nature that its most insightful survivor expressed seems only to confirm terror and mass destruction as the only way forward after modernity’s promises collapse under their own hypocrisy. 

Ernst Jünger’s work will probably fill that role in the Utopias book, a vision of humanity’s future as blood-drenched machines whose individualities disappear in a mass-movement of violence. A vision that understands itself as noble, which is more terrifying than the vision itself. 

But there are more ambivalent responses to the end of modernity. . . . To Be Continued

Bringing the Brutality, Research Time, 02/06/2015

Storm of Steel had a curious finish. It’s the story of the First World War, of course, and I’ve read many historical accounts of that story. But most of them were historical accounts that focussed on the geopolitics, brief films that depicted the war through more conventional narratives, or through a lens of satire that eventually couldn’t maintain its bite in the light of the war’s final horror.

The best was the first. Ernst Jünger, and the pummelling repetitions of bomb after bomb, shell after shell, after shell after shell after shell.

The first lesson in how to survive a war is not to fight.

Jünger lived this pummelling for nearly four years, and his diaries, adapted into the loose narrative of Storm of Steel, best depict the terror and madness of the entire affair. So here are my thoughts, as I put the book down, of the most striking parts of the work itself and what may become its most important influences as my Utopias manuscript comes together over the following years. 

The last major sequence of Storm of Steel happens during the Ludendorff Offensive, the final German push of the war, a desperate attempt, in 1918, to turn the tide. It was an offensive based on stormtroopers, the most experienced infantry fighters leading a mass charge against British lines. 

The attack had to succeed absolutely in one gesture to avoid being rolled back as soon as the troops stopped moving, which Jünger’s unit did because the Germans’ own artillery wouldn’t stop pounding British positions, even after the German army had occupied them. Although these further details aren’t mentioned in the book, since it’s based only on Jünger’s diaries of the time and place, German supply deliveries couldn’t keep up with the troops’ advance, and mass strikes by merchant navy sailors in Germany itself were crippling the country’s ability to move material to the front.

The human toll from the mass movement of the Ludendorff Offensive was unsustainable if it hadn’t resulted in the immediate and total defeat of the Britain-led alliance. Enormous numbers of German soldiers died in one last, insane rush at all the encampments and artillery stations of the British lines. Jünger takes nearly two full lines of text to list all his friends and comrades who, despite having survived the last four years of brutal war, would be dead by the end of this offensive.

In 1935, General Erich Ludendorff
published Der Totale Krieg, whose genesis
you could see in the gruesome mass suicide
attacks of his army in the First World War.
He had long supported Hitler's nationalism,
having joined him in the 1923 Beer Hall
Putsch. Hitler would continue Ludendorff's
dream to annex almost all of eastern
Europe, expel the native populations,
and settle the land with Germans.

Jünger himself nearly died during the assault, taking his worst wound of the entire war. Over the last four years, he had been lacerated with shrapnel, shot in the leg, had his head grazed by bullets and shrapnel splinters, and shot in the chest already. As he’s jumping over a New Zealander trench, during the German retreat from its counter-attack, he gets his worst wound of the war.

Insanity doesn’t invalidate you from combat. If anything, you have to be crazy to go into this kind of combat, where your entire physical presence is dwarfed by explosions and artillery barrages beyond your control. Jünger describes, after what’s left of his unit reaches the British machine gun dugouts, a Lt. Breyer, calmly striding through the mud and flesh of the battlefield, swinging a riding crop, smoking his pipe, taking the occasional potshot at a retreating British soldier with the rifle he carries slung over his back. 

That’s the more colloquial definition of insanity: behaviour that’s utterly disconnected from your real-world circumstances. Jünger himself eventually embodies a different kind of insanity, the dissolution of his personality into a pure force of will through the trauma of that last push. The push toward enemy lines in which the infantry itself isn’t made of men, but is an organic wave. The soldiers are ground-based shells, a mass meant to overwhelm through their sheer weight and number.

Among the shouts and war cries of the German soldiers before this mass attack is the scream “I don’t care what happens to me anymore!” Individuality disappears from your own conception of who and what you are. 

Jünger himself doesn’t engage in much philosophy throughout the book. The meaning of his images and descriptions comes from the reader trying to make sense of them. They aren’t philosophy themselves, as much as provocations for the reader to start thinking philosophically.

Soldiers throw themselves at the enemy until the enemy is overwhelmed or they can no longer move. After four years of faithful service, this is the culmination of Jünger’s life, and his book. The book was almost never written, because in his last moments as an active duty soldier, he’s almost killed.

Storm of Steel ends on a note of strange
validation: the honour of the Kaiser.

But the drive to destroy appears in his actions again. He doesn’t know how long he was unconscious after falling into the trench he was leaping over, a bullet having blasted into his chest and out through his lung. Each time a fellow soldier picks him up, whether on a stretcher or on his shoulders, he’s soon shot down, sprawling Jünger on the filthy earth again.

As he lies there, his position is surrounded by UK-allied troops. His entire regiment is surrendering around him. Yet he still gets up and gathers a few soldiers to attack a British machine gun nest. He isn’t shot again, though everyone around him falls dead. A German medical officer rolls him in tarpaulin and finally puts him on a horse-drawn cart bound for a field hospital.

He had become the will to destruction itself. And the end of the book comes with his reward. Invalidated for the next few months of hostilities thanks to his wounds, he receives official notice on 22 September 1918 that he’s received the Pour le Mérite medal, the highest honour in the Kaiser’s military.

He was one of its last recipients, and the last living holder of the military version of the award when he died in 1998 at the age of 102.

Scars Etched in History Itself I: Figuring Out Ernst Jünger, Composing, 25/05/2015

What I’m about to write over the next two or three entries is going to get a little weird. But it’s also going to make a lot of sense. While also being weird. 

Let me explain. 

One of the purposes of this blog, when it comes to my philosophy writing projects, is taking a first, exploratory, crack at making sense of some idea I’ve come across in my research. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel is a seminal book in understanding the cultural legacy of the First World War: the mechanization of humanity. This is the vision of what humanity is that drives true totalitarianism. 

Yes, those are people in the distance. The cause of this
devastation was constant artillery bombardment. The
First World War was absolutely horrifying.

Storm of Steel is the diary of a veteran. A veteran who served four years on the front line of a war so cataclysmic that it fundamentally transformed European culture forever. I’ve described before how difficult I find it simply understanding the full power of these images – artillery bombardments so powerful that they’ve literally churned the earth over so that the shattered body parts of dead soldiers will stick through the walls of freshly dug trenches.

Jünger experienced these images every day. They were part of his ordinary existence for the same length of time that a lot of folks today spend in full time university. And it was at the same time in his own life that we’d spend in class, volunteering on campus, working part-time jobs, and partying. Jünger enlisted right at the start of the war in 1914. He was born in 1896.

He writes about, for example, seeing comrades from his unit lying dead in a field hospital with each of their mouths bloodily shot off. Even when his unit was out of combat duty and resting in a nearby French village, they’d live in constant fear of warheads flatting their houses and killing them while they slept, because the British artillery were constantly bombing the village to kill German soldiers while they slept. 

As I’ve said before, he uses the same kind of casual tone that we’d use to talk about a class we went to in college, or a story about playing pool in a bar with your old friend. Emotions are absent from a narrative describing four years of sustained horror. On the face of it, it seems incomprehensible.

Of course, I say things like “on the face of it” purely rhetorically, because it’s perfectly clear that Storm of Steel is an expression of soul-shattering trauma. In adapting his war diary into an autobiographical book within two years of the war’s end, Jünger is articulating the trauma of himself, all the veterans and other survivors of the war, his country, and the whole of Western civilization. 

People of my generation, those who are younger, and the fuzzy boundary of my own generation’s upper limit, have a deeper understanding of what trauma is and how it works than any older demographic. The generation that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s discovered the core concepts of trauma through the popularization of psychology and the political engagements of Vietnam veterans in the United States. 

Ernst Jünger
Deutsches Heer
Class of 1918

But my generation was immersed in the popular understanding of trauma as part of our social environment. This was Jeet Heer's point about what trigger warnings in educational environments really are. They aren't a resurgence of the political correctness driven by identity politics.* They’re an institutional way to take trauma seriously.

* This always bugged me about talk of trigger warnings, because no one was advocating that triggering classics be taken off the list. Reading Storm of Steel, I think the book should be taught to middle school children. Jünger's descriptions of life in the First World War is much more affecting and informative than any of the drier descriptions I ever got at school. The trigger warning is like a film rating, only with enough detail to identify what individuals might find the content especially disturbing.

The experience of severe trauma is when emotional torture and horrifying thoughts occur to someone with the most innocuous stimulus because a past event was so unsettling to her in deep and complex ways. In the popular knowledge of psychology, we know that this is a matter for individuals and small groups like families.

Even though my earlier comment about Jünger expressing the trauma of his entire community of veterans, Germany, and Western civilization was metaphorical, that metaphor also expressed a real aspect of how enormous events like the First World War affect a whole culture. It occurred to me that an account of civilizational trauma could be an element in understanding the political drive to perfect the world in a single vision that’s at the heart of my Utopias project.

Of course, I would never simply upscale talk of trauma at the individual level as functioning exactly the same as at the civilizational. These are incredibly different systems, even though one is an aggregate of millions of the other system. That's how aggregates work. But it could definitely help inform the overall narrative of the philosophy. . . . To be Continued.

An Alternate History of War Stories, Research Time, 19/05/2015

I thought I’d try one more time to get a coherent post about Ernst Jünger onto the blog. If the blog is the pilot testing zone for the core ideas of works that I want to develop in officially published projects, then tackling the greatest diarist of the First World War is necessary.

The story was ridiculous, but Flyboys looked fantastic.

What stands in the way of truly appreciating Jünger’s writing, because you are instead shocked into mute terror, is the ordinary, casual tone he takes with such events as artillery barrages so dense and terrifying that they churn the battlefields of the Somme into a melange, or perhaps a kugel, of dirt, rocks, plants, the fragmented body parts and flesh of soldiers, and unexploded munitions.

Jünger’s style has its advantages, aside from his understated ability to leave his readers frozen with trauma. One is that he overcomes cliché with ease, and this was well before most of those clichés were ever invented. Reading Storm of Steel reminded me of Flyboys, a film that I saw when it came out ten years ago as part of my work on a movie review radio show.

The film, an early James Franco starring vehicle, perhaps an attempt by his agent to turn him into a conventional thinking-folk’s movie star before his artistic projects, scholarly work, and Apatow franchise comedy, has a plot assembled from the most hackneyed war movie stereotypes. 

Of course, this wouldn’t have been stereotypes in Jünger’s day. The square-jawed American war hero, the band of mismatched enlistees who become brothers-in-arms through the alternating battle sequences, the grizzled veteran who meets a heroic end, the climactic battle avenging the inspiring hero’s death, the handsome lead’s romance with a generic brunette actress. 

Wings was the first Hollywood war movie, a film you
watch today to respect its historical innovations, not
for the VERY 1920s morality in the story.

All these are the creations of the American film industry, the earnest dramatic plots of professional mythmakers created in an era before widespread advanced media literacy killed our bright-eyed capacity for inspiration at such stories. It’s just as true of early examples like Wings, patriotic John Wayne vehicles like The Longest Day, and even the acid-headed cynicism of Apocalypse Now. The drama of war is a tale of heroes, where the war is the backdrop for the inspiring play of these figures who are more icons than characters. The war movie is our epic poetry.

Jünger doesn’t give us epic, and he doesn’t give us drama. There’s a story of a sort, or at least a narrative, the succession of event after event and the slow accumulation of a transformation in the narrator. 

But only that kind of war story, the accumulation of bomb after bomb, death after death, horror after horror, the pounding repetition of the same hammer blows over and over again, actually approaches what is it to experience the First World War. The daily reality of the war has no conventional Aristotelian plot, as all life never does. 

The story structure of the small cast undergoing a clear plot whose intensity rises and falls at a set pace within the narrative’s duration, from beginning to end credits, has long been a feature of the mythical stories we tell ourselves. It’s part of the fundamental fabric of our culture, a core template for the entertaining story.

The Big Red One is a film I'd say captures the slogging
ordinariness of a soldier's life with a similar power as
Jünger did with his book.

I wonder if this is why we’re so tempted by the Great Man conception of history, to understand the entire past of the human race as if we only needed to know the highlight reel, that the power of one or a few people is really all we need to shape a civilization’s historical narrative. 

When you read Jünger, it’s clearly not the story of a Great Man who determined the historical path of the world, even though Storm of Steel would itself be so influential as to contribute to the national consciousness of a society. Its power is that it is the story of an ordinary man, and the extraordinary, unspeakable terrors he was lucky enough to live through.

There's one moment where the barest seed of a Great Man concept appears in the narrative. Jünger is walking down a road while the town is under bombardment,* when a friend from another unit calls out hello. As he walks over to his friend at the roadside, a shell lands in the middle of the intersection that he would otherwise have walked right into.

* The town is always under bombardment. 

At this one moment, he allows a brief belief that he’s somehow special in all of this. Well, he is special. None of those seven wounds he got in the war, and some were pretty severe, ever killed him. He lived.

Digressions for the Sake of My Sanity, Research Time, 12/05/2015

Reading Ernst Jünger’s biography of the First World War, Storm of Steel, is oddly bracing. His language is very straightforward and ordinary, but its precisely his ordinariness that makes what happens to him all the more terrifying. This is a book that chronicles the day to day life of a man who’s constantly surrounded by violent death on a casual basis.

Artillery warped the land into the surface of an alien
world on which humanity as it was could not survive.
It didn't.

I mean, this is the First World War we’re talking about here. But like I’ve said before, the First World War seems very distant to us today. We learn the most in school, and even just in popular culture, about the Second World War, and depending on how much time the curriculum allots you, discussion of the First World War is pretty cursory. The prelude to the Second, if anything.

Because Jünger seriously impresses me. I’ve been watching the Netflix years of Trailer Park Boys lately, so I’ll say it like this. Jünger impresses the fuck out of me. 

He writes Storm of Steel without a genuine narrative or argument. It’s a series of incidents, events that punctuate his memory when he thinks back to the war. Each event takes place over a period of time, but that’s what the book is: an assemblage of durations. You let them stack one on top of the other, and see what affects they produce.*

* Pretentiousness break. One other piece of writing that this aspect of Jünger’s work reminded me of: Gilles Deleuze’s description of the style of the Marquis de Sade. He describes how Sade’s work impacts you through a constant barrage of repetition, slamming into you again and again until you’re pulverized. Almost like artillery shells.

So here are a few impressions for now, arranged in the order I remember them. 

I love Jünger’s phrase “strenuous monotony.” This is how he describes life in the trenches in the first year or so of the war, before the mass offensives start. Ammunition is casually lobbed back and forth across trenches as people notice an opportunity. There is the occasional skirmish or battle. 

The ground is slowly worn away to mud. The mud walls of your trench erode away after the winter to reveal the remains of a soldier from your regiment, who had sunk deep underground through the churning of the land itself under artillery shells. 

Trauma makes people mechanistic. Maybe I should say instead that we should think of trauma as making people mechanistic, so that we can get some insight about how we should treat each other. A helpful metaphor to illustrate a moral and ethical point. That would be philosophy.

The trenches have been worn down into hills, tourist
attractions as ordinary as a field of grass. We forget
our collective trauma, even though we are all scarred.

But consider the phrase as poetry for a minute. A one line poem whose meaning I have only the barest idea of. Wonder if this is a brief little methodical breakdown that makes an author admirable in his fearless experimentation, or if he’s just being needlessly weird. If I wrote a poetry blog, where I just composed little poems and put them up for people to see, would I be considered weird? 

Some of the greatest poets were working professionals who wrote in their spare time. Wallace Stevens composed verse in his head during his walk to work. It makes me wonder why no commuter has dictated an epic the length of Paradise Lost into her phone in a traffic jam on the way home to Burlington from her office near Warden Station in Scarborough.

I’m getting self-consciously Torontonian. It’s obnoxious; I should stop. Forgive me.

This is what I do when I find myself unable to express the kind of weird horror that Jünger describes with such ordinary language. He speaks with a tone as workaday as you would describing running into a friend at the grocery store. This is what happens to a person when the daily horrors of the First World War are your daily life for nearly four years. 

Ernst Jünger impresses the fuck out of me. I don’t know how anyone to whom that kind of horror became ordinary could let himself live another year after it was over. He died in 1998 of being 102 years old. I was 15 that year. That’s how close the First World War is, although it gets farther away ever day.

That’s part of what the Utopias project will address. The First World War as an event in history, those four terrible years, and the shadow it still casts over our civilizations.