Image: Scotty Hendricks (2018)
I.
The word diversity is frequently used today, particularly by those who regard it as a value and like to signal their politico-moral correctness even if that means denigrating or disprivileging their own people, culture and history.
In order to illustrate this latter point, one might refer to the recent case of students at the University of Manchester who painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling and replaced it with a verse by the African-American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.
This was done in the name of anti-racism - for Kipling, a well-known British imperialist, was said to dehumanise people of colour - and in order to celebrate the diversity of a student body looking to reclaim history by - quite literally - whitewashing it.
I don't here wish to discuss the merits (or otherwise) of either Kipling's or Maya Angelou's work; nor do I want to express my concerns about historical revisionism and literary censorship. But I would like to say something further about diversity and the idea of multiculturalism, from a post-Nietzschean perspective ...
II.
If confronted with a world in which everyone was retreating to their own safe space from which to assert an identity (on the basis, for example, of sex, gender, race or religion) whilst, at the same time, speaking about the benefits of ever-greater diversity within society and culture, I suspect that Nietzsche would feel himself compelled as a philosopher to argue that greatness belongs only to the individual or the people who find a way to stylise chaos and give birth to a dancing star - the latter being a sign of unity within diversity.
Nietzsche loves words like difference, plurality and multiplicity; he thinks of the will to power as composed of a large number of competing forces, flows, and desires. But - and this is important to understand - he doesn't affirm diversity as a good in itself nor as a goal to be aimed at.
On the contrary, Nietzsche insists that culture, for example, has to be unified; that the only alternative to such is a civilization based upon a barbarism of styles and tastes and incapable of ever producing art or sovereign individuals. Nietzsche opposes the systematic anarchy, the aggressive philistinism, and the Volkerchaos that characterise European modernity and are the symptoms of culture's extermination.
Thus, whilst he may have announced the death of God and thereby decentered and demoralised the world, he still believes in shared ethical bonds between people. His nihilism is not the same as the nihilism of those who devote themselves to free markets and money-making, or to the neo-Platonic fantasies of science and technology; those who lack the ability to act under the constraint of a single taste or - as Heidegger would say - to dwell poetically upon the earth.
III.
Deleuze is right to say that, for Nietzsche, history can be read as the process by which "reactive forces take possession of culture or divert its course in their favour". That the will to diversity can therefore be understood as part of an ongoing slave revolt in morals and the overcoding of active forces by the modern State - that coldest of all cold monsters that thrives at the expense of culture and sucks the life out of people in the name of human rights and globalism.
Nietzsche is aggressively opposed to all this and when faced with the ways in which societies become decodified and unregulated, makes no attempt at recodification. But, again, we must be careful here. For whilst Nietzsche makes no attempt to recodify along old lines or patch the holes ripped in the great social umbrella, he very much wants to bring together newly liberated forces onto what Deleuze terms a plane of consistency and regain mastery over the chaos that has been released.
Why? Because for Nietzsche culture is above all unity of style in all the expressions of a people and this requires harmonious manifoldness - not fake diversity built upon idiotic identity politics and an ugly jumble of all styles and peoples. Multiculturalism is not just a failed experiment, it's an absurd fallacy.
Of course Nietzsche's thinking has anti-democratic and illiberal implications - and he wasn't shy about saying so. But I would suggest we need to urgently think about these questions and not simply attempt to close down conversation by calling anyone who does so a fascist or a supporter of the alt-right.
Notes
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (The Athlone Press, 1992), p. 139.
While there is a great deal of condensed political importance here, the writer's depiction of the interior drama of Nietzsche's WtP is for me a vital crystallisation ('You must have chaos INSIDE YOU to give birth to a dancing star'). The 'Volkerchaos' is with us from the start - the vulgar philistine is just as much a part of Nietzsche as the noble overman, as he of course understood. It therefore follows that the Kierkegaardian task of 'becoming who one is', later updated by Jung, through the individuation of one's unique opus, both begins and ends with the love that tore Nietzsche apart, syphilitic or not, in Ecce Homo: Dioynsos (chaos, ecstasy, polycentric madness) vs the Crucified (monotheism, unity, transcendent love). His attempt to resolve the post-Platonic spiritual drama of the West, the cult of the One and the madness of the Many, in one body broke him, as it broke his spiritual cousin, Holderlin.
ReplyDelete1. The matter of who or what constitutes one's 'own' culture (i.e. the issue of cultural ownership) is of course a question by means of which we forestall the fascism in ourselves by keeping open as a wound. In my own (!) case (see how language can entrap us in saying what we don't necessarily want to say?), I was born of an English mother with German ancestry and a Scottish father whose forefathers hail from Ireland. My family name, Thomas, is originally Welsh. I have the spirit of Paris in with me, and a sliver of Massachusetts. Like most of us, I am a hybrid novelty or mongrel being. I 'feel' Irish, German, English and Jewish in roughly that order, but in fluctuating proportions. There probably is no 'synthesis' of my being that could be definitive. Rather, there are, as Nick Cave declares with a Poe-like resonance, bells in the psyche that ring at different times, but no unifying narrative.
2. As far as I understand the news report, the Manchester students did not literally 'whitewash' their institutional wall - they overwrote an imposed text they had not been consulted about. History is of course made of these contestations, rewritings and over-writings. Whether or not they were 'right' to do so re Kipling, the enduring status of whose works co-exists with his imperialism and racism, is a matter of both literary and political debate.
3. Speculating about what reanimated thinkers one admires might think or say if brought back from the dead is of course entertaining sport, but ultimately makes limited sense in even science fiction terms. Whatever his world-historical genius or powers of prophetic vision, Nietzsche was also surely a product of his own time, and as such would not, nor could not, 'be Nietzsche' in the Europe of 2018. As the blogger has argued elsewhere, moreover, such ‘mediumistic’ speculation is at best metaphysical.
http://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/search/label/emily%20brontë
Ultimately, however, we deeply need any debate that liberates us from Roethke's ‘dreary dance of the opposites’ if we are to move between the increasingly parodic and crude duels of the political milieu. A psychological reading of Nietzsche here, is, I think indispensable to containing (rather than projecting) such a task - at least a first step, if one is, to counter-quote him, ‘to touch one’s antipodes’.
Thanks for this S.
DeleteEtymologically, the word diversity refers us to a turning away from what we are, so can be read positively in terms of a becoming-other, or negatively in terms of a loss of integrity (or, if you prefer, a loss of soul, with the latter understood as that dancing star of unity formed out of chaos).
Actually, I wouldn't say you were all that hybrid or mongrel in terms of ethnicity and culture: you're actually what Nietzsche would call a good European. The elements you mention may not have been synthesised in a definitive manner, but they harmonise quite well don't you think?
And that's the key issue: how to achieve harmonious manifoldness or unity of style, as an individual and, collectively, as a people.
Sometimes, this involves cruelty - one must be able to discriminate and make hard choices. Culture and selfhood are born of this cruelty (its intensification and spiritualisation).
We can't be all things and all people - unless, that is, we are happy to be like that motley-coloured scarecrow painted with fifty patches on face and limb and surrounded by fifty broken mirrors; or the last man, written over with the empty signs and symbols of the past and playing with all the customs and costumes of other peoples.