Ping Pong 29: The Time and the Man
It is one of the odder chicken and egg conundrums: That is, the way that the human world is defined to a fairly large degree by how and under what conditions, individuals are thinking about and relating to one another. We (by which I probably mean Western Anthropologists) give names to different peoples and different cultures based on these relations (people are face-to-face communities or a matriarchal society or peasant or mercantile). Each name implies a certain way of understanding one’s relationship to one’s fellows. The relations might appear fixed, and yet they have at least in one case (and probably in very many others as well) changed over time. The problem is then, how one knows that this change has happened. That is, does some other agent, some element in society, suddenly create a new and rather unsuspected outcome (the ‘discovery of America’ or the microchip)? or do, very quietly, the societies themselves gradually complicate how they understand their own nature, and suddenly become out of sorts with the current social order and then all hell break loose? The problem here is a surprisingly complex one. All our good sense would insist that change happens because something has changed, because people have got poorer or richer or technology has changed everything (or nothing), or the spirit is moving us hither and thither or… And no doubt any of the panoply of reasons that can be supplied to understand a change are applicable, and some might even be caught up in the process of revolution itself.
However the problem here is very intricate, as both the nature of the so called revolutionary elements is problematic, but also (a problem discussed in other Rants) of the problem of understanding itself intervenes. That is, on the one hand, many of those called revolutionary agents appear specific to a certain culture and time (gunpowder changed Europe but not China, while the heavy plough changed Feudal Europe but not Rome). While on the other hand, there runs a across a revolution, a problem of language and description. It is now a cliché of the most debased form that whoever invents a language (or narration) for a revolution is its master (for a while). That is, whoever creates a language with another’s belief will effectively create a new collectivity, and has the right for a while at least to define how that collectivity might evolve. Or to put it another way, such narratives work because one aspect of a revolution comes to take over the very collectivity that produced that problem itself, and dominates driving it onwards in someway.
Great revolutions are therefore caught up in a double axes. On the one hand there are God knows what elements changing the way that humans understand their collectivity. These elements are likely to be highly complex, and inter-related. As, if they were simple, they would hardly be collective. Or to put it another way, it is the essence of complexity and collectivity that there is no one agent driving the process forward. In extreme cases it will be impossible to know when such revolutions start (as is certainly the case in the Industrial Revolution) or how profound it initially will be. How can one plot a simple line of development for such changes? They tend to be everywhere and nowhere. Changes are made and lie around awaiting use, while others stagnate into nothing. Such complex systems do of course throw up patterns, but these patterns are not resolved into any one element of the system, and will only be fully understood once they have occurred, that is once they are stabilized. Hence (as will be discussed fully next week) there is no real course or single defining moment for the Industrial Revolution or the French Revolution. Nor is there any real defining moment in our time for such processes as globalization or even economic turmoil. Things happen, and people understand the connections with others anew, and we all then take the consequences.
However at some point the picture is deeply complexified by the ‘defining moment’ narrative merchants. They come into the turmoil of a change which lacks clear causes, but has a pattern nonetheless, and supply it with a clear reason, and series of consequences. It matters not at all that this clear reason, this set of consequences, came from somewhere internal to the system. Nor that therefore in a sense the usurpation of the entire reality of the change is a little piece of political opportunism. All that matters is that they provide for those lost in the agony and glory of a system so much greater than any one of them, a name for that system and a manner or means of approaching it, and understanding roles within it. The system is then apparently tamed in such a naming.
Except of course, that that would be a little too simple. A good narrative does not tame so much as work out a simple language within which not just the system can be contained, but also one can contain (in possibly other ways) the exceptions to that system (of the problems that the named system appears to produce, that is, the moments when it appears to stand beyond itself). Finally a good opportunist narrative, will also be careful to re-write a history to ensure that whatever did eventually happen is seen as a result of its intention, and not merely the randomness of history. One has then here, as it were, three tenses for the usurpation of a revolution by a narrative: A present of action, a future of containment and a past of redrafting. If this complex temporality has a name then perhaps it really ought to be named after its greatest individual proponent: Napoleon.
Napoleon embodied the very contradictions and complexities of this process. The first, the present, is perhaps his most enduring legacy. Napoleon, as a young man claimed that he dreamed of being the Newton of the infinitesimal. That is, the master of the science of the small. He therefore was interested in Law, and the regulation of every day. This interest of course matched the revolution and the forces it had thrown up, perfectly. That is, the Republic of Virtue and the Terror had unleashed new forces, the forces of a population acting en masse, forces that it took the genius of Napoleon to take up and to regulate. He invents then a Code in which the collectivity of the people can be both enshrined and yet very carefully delimited. Freedom was then given a name and limit and thence could easily slip into oppression.
Here of course Napoleon allows one to understand the deep taproot (and the problem) of regulation. A regulatory system would dream to operate as a crystal within which freedoms are captured. The science of the small, is the science which defines what freedom could be and should be allowed. The problem is then, that this allowing of course immediately sparks off grey areas. I mean that that very system, is itself caught within a crystal of the laws. Systems become bound in legislation. That is they become bound in something other than they were.
The trouble within this system is that there is a real and very deep ambivalence in these grey areas. The limited freedoms within the system of regulation may well attempt all kinds of ruses to escape their regulation (as of course money can be made is such areas or power acquired). These temptations are not just felt by the agents within the system, but also those who perhaps should enforce it, and who might ‘get creative’ within it (as Napoleon certainly attempted to, but also as did Gordon Brown) to save their own skins. Regulation therefore has a tendency to create the art and science of exceptions, exceptions that will then warp the system itself (even if it can then be said to be its salvation, such as illegal takeovers or government buy out): So that the system of regulation is actually bound up with events that force exceptions upon that system, exceptions which then plague the system for years to come, in the form of the unlovely combinations of regulation, legislation and freedoms, that such moments produce. And which then have the effect of warping the entire process. That is, there comes a point within any system however it is contained, if it is complex enough (and therefore involves enough people doing enough things) where it steps beyond what it was, and into another sphere. In this beyond, all hell breaks loose, as the very rules that lay down that system come under question; and do so just when it is that one lacks the time to set up viable ‘answers’ to these questions. Therefore complexities breed limited freedoms and regulations, which in turn breed anomalies and new complexities. These second order complexities then need to be bound into a new system of their own (or else reflected back into the old one).
Napoleon understood (as few other did) that the second of these moves was fraught with dangers (as the government would inevitably become caught up in the mess of having to draw and redraw the rules until it found a paradigm that people could for a while, work within (think Northern Rock, where everyone got exhausted by the process). Napoleon’s chosen course was of course War, which is the alternative that every state has when things get too complex at home. In fighting such a war, he was of course the beneficiary of the change which the revolution had inaugured, the change which allowed for very large armies. He therefore hit the rest of Europe with a deep challenge, of how to organize their societies such that their armies were good or large enough to counter the kind of armies which he was able to put into the field. This challenge was rather different in different parts of Europe. For those in the direct firing line of France (Austria and Prussia) the problem was acute. How could the ruling classes maintain their ascendancy and yet raise the kind of armies which Napoleon seemed to muster? Where could the unity come from if not revolution? The only plausible answer was nationalism, which would give a people something other than a ruling class to fight and die for. The rise of Napoleon was therefore caught up with the rise of nationalisms elsewhere in Europe (or perhaps the acceptance on the part of the rulers for the need for national politics as the only reason why they could be entitled to the kind of armies which they needed). In Britain the situation was rather different. Protected by the Channel, the story line which Britain would follow, tied freedom to the Navy which kept the French out, but also kept food coming in. The lesson then of Napoleon for Britain was the lesson of the freedom of the Seas, and the importance of trade over all things (including mere nationalism). A lesson that would linger in Britain for years to come. In Russia the situation was different again. The land itself with its vast resources and bitter climate appeared enough to defeat Napoleon, irrespective of the people. The lesson he taught was then the lesson of the importance of Mother Russia to her people and the necessity to hold on to her at all costs.
Napoleon, the arch gambler answered the local problems at home, the problems that his obsession with the small created, with a series of great gambles, and great wars. Wars that for a while saved his skin, but more than, that defined the geography and to a degree at least the temperament, of nations for years to come. However in defeat he has once last throw. Writing in exile in St Helena, he ensured that the legend that he would be remembered by was not the legend of the gambler or even the small scale regulator, but rather the profit of one of their consequences, that is the profit of nationalism. He thereby sought to tie together two aspects of the changes which he had affected. I.e., the reform in law, with the rise of nation states. The law he argued, was the expression of the state, and reflected its nature, and therefore its peculiar concerns. On a wider level, this claim was accepted, as nations defined themselves off by such peculiar concerns, be they language or custom or legend. These concerns then carried the badge of collectivity forwards, and allowed one group of people to pitch themselves against all the rest. A banner which many of us still live by.
Underpinning all such moves is the same very deep problem. There is no rational ending point to collectivity, and yet end it does. That is, there comes a point where all the personal motives that are caught up in the manner in which humans think about others and include them into their minds, become confused and destabilize the entire process. There is then, always a point where what was collective appears to stray beyond itself, and appears to no longer function (or better, it becomes part of other stories, other collections). This destabilization was always running alongside the cooperation, and yet for all that, may well destroy everything. The point then, of a narrative, is not to invent a single account of what is, but rather to delimit and regulate how any one collectivity implodes into another one. Narratives will therefore pitch themselves at the margins of the shared, and yet will, from the margin, come to dictate everything that was collective (and is now seen in terms of the single story alone). One element of the system is thereby transfigured, and the rest loses out in the process. Hence there really are two revolutions. The invisible revolution which occurs when one least expects it, and forces connections between people, changing everything; and the noisy revolution which reforms the disorder of this last one, and makes it behave. The problem then becomes – can these two elements ever be reconciled with anything more than hindsight (which was the Napoleonic ruse ?) And if so how? What could such a reconciliation look like? Could it be carried out in the name of technology and the world which it forces on us? Or would it carry the higher name of human destiny and spirit? That is, is it to be carried out in the name of trade and technology (the British solution) or the name of higher ideals and national identity (the Germanic solution). These will be topics for the next two Rants.
