Writing to Destroy
Pearl diving, the negative case
Today’s post continues from: Tradition is Broken.
Yesterday I promised to talk about why it might be better to leave history broken. This is the negative case of pearl diving, when the objective of the writing is to “have a redemptive relation to the past, and a constructive bearing on the present” — the objective of Benjamin and Arendt (de Valk, p. 40) — rather than write in the guise of a “misleading naturalness” that ends up “legitimizing past injustices and supporting the status quo.” The latter is what von Ranke and other “historicists” do, who write “the way it really was,” according to Benjamin’s accusation in Thesis VI. To write of bad things happening in the past as if they were in accord with the Laws of Nature or the Laws of History, were according to natural causes, inevitable, and rationally to be expected, all suggesting nothing to be done but to accept in resignation where we have ended up (“oh well”), is the wrong way to write history.1
Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism was accused by reviewers of lacking “unity” between its three parts (‘Anti-Semitism’, ‘Imperialism’, ‘Totalitarianism’) and of obscurity about her choice of materials to include and how they related to the central thesis. Arendt responded that she faced a real dilemma about how to write about something she wanted to destroy, not conserve. If one offers a clear, unequivocal explanation for how something as evil as totalitarianism arose historically, don’t you in some sense legitimate it, support its continued existence, or its possible future re-emergence?2
‘How to write historically about something – totalitarianism – which I did not want to conserve but on the contrary felt engaged to destroy[?] My way of solving this problem has given to the rise to the reproach that the book was lacking in unity. What I did (...) was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history as far as I deemed proper and necessary.’ (Arendt, 1953)
[The book does not give an unequivocal explanation of how totalitarianism could arise, but] ‘gives a historical account of the elements which crystallized into totalitarianism.’
(Source: de Valk, Pearl Divers, p. 42, quoting Arendt, who is replying to a review of her book by Erich Vogelin)
Better to show that totalitarianism is something that in no way “develops along foreseeable lines, but occurs all of a sudden” (de Valk), when certain historical elements just happen to “crystallize into new forms.” There’s nothing deterministic about it. Antisemitism and imperialism — along with ideologies, isolation and loneliness, and so on — are the elements, ingredients out of which totalitarianism in the cases of Nazism and Stalinism uniquely fashioned specific recipes for terror, ones that had never been contrived before. This particular constellation, crystallization, configuration of elements should never happen again, and this is why
Arendt refuses to write about the Holocaust as if it would be a logical outcome of history. Instead, she presents a lot of different events, as precipitated in the most various sources, that can help us to understand the nature of totalitarianism. Breaking historical continuity is a way of dealing with a past Arendt ‘felt engaged to destroy’, and in which Benjamin could only detect a ‘continuity of horror’.
(Source: de Valk, p. 42)
To be sure, the many events Arendt dredges up from “most various sources” are not pearls in the sense of being positive events (they are highly negative); but they are pearls by way of promoting understanding. If the new practice of history succeeds, it in some way creates not only a redemptive relation to the past (Benjamin), a constructive bearing on the present, but also — hopefully, especially for Arendt — a strong preventative against making similar mistakes in the future.
We must “think what we are doing” — and have done.
We should see in Arendt’s accusations against Laws of Nature and Laws of History, against the “law of movement,” the specter of Hegel. See esp. Origins p. 465ff on terror, totalitarianism’s essence.
I am reminded of David Bentley Hart’s fierce criticism of theologians who would try to rationalize or “make sense of” natural evil. See Hart’s original essay, Tsunami and Theodicy in First Things after the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, culminating in the book, The Doors of the Sea. Evil is, precisely, senseless.
The question is how to think about the political functioning of historical narratives and causal explanations. We're familiar with the idea of re-writing history for political purposes, e.g. the 1619 Project. What I find astonishing is that Benjamin, and Arendt following him, are entirely ready and willing to throw over traditional historiographical practices, and to develop entirely new ones(!), for the sake of de-legitimating ANY "explanation" for totalitarianism, saying not only that it was totally unprecedented, but that it was truly without any historical-causal rationale. In the end, it must be purely arbitrary, chosen, in no way inevitable.
I think, as I indicated in a footnote, it is Hegel at the back of everything. (Existentialism would then be read as the absolute repudiation of Hegelian-inspired politics.) As Arendt argues at the end of her long (!) Origins book, totalitarianism's own internal rational heavily depended on the "Laws of Nature" and the "Laws of History" to justify its "logic." She wasn't going to give one ounce of credence to that, even to the point of working out a whole new genre for research and writing.
The lesson we probably should take is that there is a huge danger in any political philosophy that would justify itself based on "nature" -- i.e. "it can't be otherwise." I can't help but think this includes political philosophies based on "natural law," like integralism on the New Right. Fukuyama's idea of an "end of history" is also implicated.
I think you can posit a cohesive and continuous explanation for the ills of history without endorsing them or supporting them as inevitable. If readers cannot understand that what has happened is not inevitable just because it did happen, then that is the fundamental problem. That would imply that humans have no free will at all, and everything is simply inevitable. It is lazy or maybe hopeless.
Now, I can see how different historical narratives can obscure the 'truth' of what happened - the rewriting of history as it were. There is certainly a lot of modern mistrust of historical narratives for exactly this reason. I'm curious how this would inform Arendt's diving. Not that this is her fear, but it is a modern counterpoint to examining the pearls of history.