On the Politics of Resistance and Refusal

Picking up on a footnote to a recent post in which I indicated that I'm more attracted to a strategy of refusal than offering a form of resistance, someone writes suggesting I'm being a bit pedantic:

"Whether D. H. Lawrence adopted various literary devices in order to refuse or resist the tragic reception of the times in which he wrote, doesn't really matter. The important fact is that he was not a tragedean in the conventional sense of the term. And besides, the difference between these two verbs is often fuzzy; a refusal of something often involves resisting its effects."   

I suppose that's true: though I'm not sure expressing a concern for semantic precision necessarily makes one a pedant. And, even if it does, there are worse things to be. So let me try to explain the distinction between resistance and refusal in a bit more detail ... 

Baudrillard has shown how the idea of resistance in a transpolitical era characterised by the techno-social immersion of the individual rather than their alienation, has become problematic and even a little passé. Absorbed within a global network, from where might one find a point of resistance? Or, to put it another way, in a virtual world, where all that is solid has been dissolved, how does one stand one's ground?  

We might, perhaps, internalise resistance and thus retain it as a kind of ethical component in our own lives (resisting, for example, the temptation to surrender to the molecular forms of fascism that haunt our dreams and fool us into thinking we might find easy or final solutions to complex problems).

Alternatively, we are obliged to do one of two things: either accelerate the process we might otherwise have resisted, pushing it beyond its own internal limits to the point of completion and collapse; or we can become like Bartleby and turn away from the things we find distasteful, refusing the game we are invited to play (a game in which the illusion of resistance is merely a complementary form of opposition).

The latter is the strategy of he or she who refuses to take tragically an essentially tragic age; who reacts with irony, indifference, or insouciance in the face of falling skies etc. Such a strategy may lack the optimistic possibility of political coherence, but, on the other hand, it might trigger a chain reaction of (rapid, violent, unexpected) events (destructive of what Lawrence terms the Umbrella).   

Refusal, then, is a form of nihilism and what Baudrillard terms abreaction, rather than a progressive politics of resistance and reaction:

"We have to make a clear distinction between reacting, which is to arm oneself against - and try to destabilize - the system, and abreacting. Abreaction consists merely in expelling something: you just don't accept it, but you don't fight it either, and you harbour no illusions about possibility of overcoming it. It’s simply unacceptable."

Arguably, Lawrence anticipated this line of thought in his late work, realising that even a desperate fictional analysis of the times written among the ruins and which ends a little droopingly, is preferable to writing another novel like The Plumed Serpent which fantasises about armed resistance and revolution.

Mellors would love to "'wipe the machines off the face of the earth [...] and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.'" But he knows that's impossible. So, all he can do is hold his peace and try to live his own life as far as possible without compromising his manhood, as a kind of outlaw and refusenik.

Notes

Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, trans. Chris Turner, (Routledge, 2004), p. 72. In this same interview with François L'Yvonnet, Baudrillard says:

"I'm a bit resistant to the idea of resistance, since it belongs to the world of critical, rebellious, subversive thought, and that is all rather outdated. If you have a conception of integral reality, of a reality that's absorbed all negativity, the idea of resisting it, of disputing its validity, of setting one value against another and countering one system with another, seems pious and illusory. So there doesn't seen to be anything that can come into play except a singularity, which doesn't resist, but constitutes itself as another universe with another set of rules, which may conceivably get exterminated, but which, at a particular moment, represents an insuperable obstacle for the system itself. But this isn't head-on resistance. That doesn't seem possible any more." [71]

This nicely summarises his position, which is also pretty much my position. Readers who are interested should see my essay 'Jean Baudrillard: Thinking the Transpolitical', in Visions of Excess and Other Essays, (Blind Cupid Press, 2009), pp. 147-68.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 220.

Tell Them the Cross is a Tree Again

The Budding of the Cross  

Stephen Alexander (2016)

For Nietzsche, innocence is the power to accept oneself as a mortal creature and to forgive oneself for crimes ranging from scrumping to deicide. Indeed, the innocent human being has the ability also to forget past deeds, past shames, past horrors; to forget, ultimately, that there is anything to forgive.

When man can forget and rise in innocence before the present, then the past has no claim over him. And what is man's self-overcoming if not an overcoming of an historically constructed and determined subjectivity? By liberating himself from the past, he is able to reinvent himself in the present and project himself differently into the future.
 
It's fatal, argues Nietzsche, to be unable to close oneself off from history; just as it's vital that we learn to discriminate and evaluate amongst memories - for this is a sign of a healthy will to power. The stronger an individual or a people, the more history it will be able to recall and assimilate without developing a bad conscience and the less it will be obliged to forget.
 
Nietzsche refers to this as the plastic power of an individual or people. Those who could incorporate the entire historical experience of humanity as their own and endure such would exhibit a plastic power of almost superhuman proportion and would constitute, says Nietzsche, a new nobility "the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of". Not only would such a new nobility be innocent, they would be happy.

Nietzsche writes: "if one could burden one’s soul with ... the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling - this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter ..."

This godlike feeling is what Nietzsche understands to be the humaneness of the future.

It seems to me that D. H. Lawrence closely follows Nietzsche here and agrees that it's vital for mankind, having bitten and swallowed the fruit of temptation, to find a way to digest the apple. When this is achieved - when the Old Adam is able to rid himself of belly ache and bad conscience - then, and only then, will man be free to re-enter paradise and the New Eve pick fresh fruit and consort with serpents as she pleases.

Although Lawrence chose to discard the following passage from the final version of The Plumed Serpent, it is particularly pertinent to our discussion here. Ramón tells Kate:

"'Go! Tell them the Cross is a Tree again, and they may eat the fruit if they can reach the branches. Tell them the snake coils in peace around the ankle of Eve, and she no longer tries to bruise his head. The fruit of Knowledge is digested. Now we can plant the core.'"

The symbolism could hardly be clearer: the Cross is a Tree again - i.e. an instrument of torture and sacrifice upon which mankind has been fatally self-divided for two millennia has been transformed back into the sacred Tree of Life. And the fruit of this tree may be eaten, for with the death of God there's no longer any divine law or categorical imperative to prevent us - providing that is that we can reach the branches, which is to say, surpass ourselves as a species, overcoming our old humanity.

As for the second line concerning the relationship between the Eve and the snake, this is telling us that in her new nakedness and innocence the woman has overcome the burden of shame which robbed her and all the world of its joy, and that the serpent of desire has finally been accepted as having its own raison d’être and its own beauty.

In an essay entitled 'The Reality of Peace', Lawrence had some years earlier entered into his own slightly uneasy truce with the serpent:

"I must make my peace with the serpent of abhorrence that is within me. I must own my most secret shame and my most secret shameful desire ... Who am I that I should hold myself above my last or worst desire? My desires are me, they are the beginning of me, my stem and branch and root. ...
      I shall accept all my desires and repudiate none. It will be a sign of bliss in me when I am reconciled with the serpent of my own horror, when I am free from the fascination and the revulsion. For secret fascination is a fearful tyranny. ... The serpent will have his own pure place in me, and I shall be free."

The fruit of knowledge is digested: this means not only can we now move beyond good and evil, but so too can we overcome our obsession with having to know everything in our heads and exert our fanatical will to truth. For now we can plant the core and that means we can be free to experience life directly and come into full being as creatures with bodies, not just minds. And so too can we develop a new culture based on innocence, laughter, and forgetting and a new society in which men are more than well-trained house pets.

As victors, then, we travel to Eden home; victors over God and over our own humanity. For too long have we roamed in the land of Nod, that twilight zone of sleep and death, suffering from mad dreams and hallucinations: "'Who sleeps shall wake! Who sleeps shall wake!'" cry the men of Quetzalcoatl. And men shall awaken in the way of the snake; i.e. into earthly, sensual life.

This, then, is how Lawrence develops the Nietzschean project of revaluation in The Plumed Serpent. Via moral transgression, a revolutionary politics of cruelty and the substantiation of religious mystery, Lawrence suggests we can regain an earthly paradise.

Obviously, I now have difficulties with this line of thinking - how could I not in an age of militant Islamofascism? But I thought of all this once more as I sat eating a bunch of grapes last night and reflected on the strange beauty of the stem ... 


See: 

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), IV. 337.

D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 547 and 128.

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 36-8.

The Plumed Serpent

The Plumed Serpent (1926) was the third novel in Lawrence's so-called power trilogy (Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo being the other two works grouped in this manner). 

It's the story of an attempted neo-pagan revolution in modern Mexico, based upon the contentious premise that only a god can save us. Lawrence mixes Aztec mythology, theosophy, and his own brand of fascism into a potent but poisonous combination that allows us to momentarily step out of the categories and conventions of the present as shaped by rationalism, liberalism, and moral humanism.

The middle-aged Irishwoman at the heart of the novel, Kate Leslie, is initially skeptical about the attempt by Ramon and his generals to introduce the gods back into history and rediscover the grandeur of their own being via an awakening of racial mysteries. She experiences the same weariness in regard to religion that many of us share and tells Ramon that his quest to reconnect with the divine is sentimental and reactionary; a creeping back into empty shells.

Ramon - who is not stupid, even if he is clearly insane - concedes that Kate may have a point. But he continues to insist that only religion can serve to bring about fundamental change and argues that even if he cannot resurrect a dead god, he can nevertheless locate what is god-given within himself and on the basis of this fulfill his destiny (or manhood). 

It might be suggested at this point that Ramon suffers from what Nietzsche terms a psychology of error; a form of delusion in which a leader mistakes their heightened sense of power to be the result of divine inspiration, rather than acknowledging that their belief in the supernatural is itself an effect of their elevated well-being. But it's difficult to tell with Ramon; for on other occasions he appears to be more of a political shyster than a genuine holy fool. 

So it is that for all the apparent sincerity of his belief, Ramon is nevertheless prepared to admit when pressed (and in private) that his talk of the gods is simply intended for popular consumption. In other words, he cynically utilizes religious imagery and language in order to garner support amongst a people prone to superstition. Like all cult leaders, Ramon has no doubt about his absolute right to tell lies and to make use of whatever methods work in order to achieve his aims. Thus Ramon acts with good faith as he sets about dissolving politics into a religion that is in turn to be inscribed into the daily fabric of civil society. 

The problem that he eventually has to face is this: faith and authority are no longer fully possible in a modern world in which the lie of religion has been repeatedly exposed as such. And so there is always a need for tyranny and military muscle. Ramon can't accomplish his plumed serpent revolution on a wing and a prayer; he also requires manipulative controls and coercive regulations exercised over all those who might otherwise resist or evade his rule. 

Thus, just as all totalitarian states require an ever-greater number of secret police and an ever-more extensive system of prison camps, so too does Ramon's dreamed of utopia rest ultimately on violence and an element of horror. And whilst Ramon's concerns are largely religious and his affinities artistic, his practical alliances are from necessity with the army.

To his credit, Lawrence recognizes this and eventually acknowledges that even his own attempt within a fictional space to mix politics with religion into a revolutionary form of racial-nationalism, ends in bloodshed and terror. And so, whilst many critics label The Plumed Serpent a failure, it remains an immensely important and instructive failure I think. If only more people prone to idolatry were to read this work and learn from it, then they might be better able to resist the temptation to surrender to those archaic and malevolent forces that are prone to infiltrate our thoughts and feelings.

Those who invoke the gods and dream of unleashing religious mania into the world in order to give men back their pride and sense of self-importance, invariably succeed only in empowering ayatollahs, war-mongers, and political psychopaths. And surely we're all sick of this by now ...