The Ghosts of the Past Continue to Haunt our Futures while Transitioning into the Digital Age
by James Albert Barr
"It is the task of the philosopher to restore, by representation, the primacy of the symbolic character of the word, in which the idea is given self-consciousness, and that is the opposite of all outwardly-directed communication. Since philosophy may not presume to speak in the tones of revelation, this can only be achieved by recalling in the memory the primordial form of perception." - Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama
"What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career." - T.S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent
"Just when I think I'm winning
When I've broken every door
The ghosts of my life blow wilder than before
Just when I thought I could not be stopped
When my chance came to be king
The ghosts of my life blew wilder than the wind." - Ghosts by David Sylvian of new wave band, Japan
"Cannot the time be rejointed?... O cursed, aeon,
That ever we were born to its anon and on." - variation on Shakespeare's Hamlet upon confronting his father's ghost
According to Fredric Jameson (following Max Weber's initial conclusions), in his 1988 essay, The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller, Protestantism enabled the Western historical conditions that unwittingly created capitalism, as opposed to the Marxist theory of "class struggle" through historical materialism. Protestantism was, allegedly, the "vanishing mediator" between medieval feudalism and modern capitalism. Consequently, via Hegel's concept of "negation of the negation", Protestantism, which negated feudalism, was, itself, negated by capitalism, thus becoming a privatised activity of personal worship after having taken on, through the initial Lutheran advent and then the teachings and example of Calvinism, an ascetic-acquisitive stance prior to capitalism's emergence. Jameson had come to this conclusion via his study of Max Weber's monumental, sociological study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was published shortly after the turn of the 20th century, that is, in 1905.
Slavoj Zizek borrowed Jameson's "vanishing mediator" concept, and has used it in his own work, such as For They Know Not What They Do. And it was actually Zizek that first noticed a "negation of the negation" in the vanishing mediator. So, what actually provoked the "bifurcation of human consciousness" and the "dissociation of sensibility" that Frank Kermode and T.S. Eliot, respectively, issued forth? Keith Alldritt, in his 1968 study of George Orwell, The Making of George Orwell: an Essay in Literary History, summed up Kermode's claims thusly:
"As Frank Kermode has reminded us in his Romantic Image (a study of William Butler Yeats), a fundamental tenet of symbolism is that at some point in the history of western civilisation there occurred a 'bifurcation of human consciousness' which resulted in a degeneration in the quality of art, culture and life itself. This is the assumption that lies behind Yeats' question: 'had not Europe shared one mind and heart until both mind and heart began to break in to fragments a little before Shakespeare's birth?' And it is the same assumption which is present in T.S. Eliot's concept of 'the dissociation of sensibility'. Yeats and Eliot [both identify]... a moment in history at which both the unity of the individual mind and the unity of society become broken, and which heralds a subsequent impoverishment of life, that very impoverishment which stands as the prime donnee of symbolist thought and art."
And in Eliot's 1921 essay, The Metaphysical Poets, he states, by implication, after the initial "bifurcation of human consciousness" in the 16th century, shortly after the Reformation began, and Henry VIII's converting the Church of England from Catholicism to Protestantism:
"In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress.
The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt in fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated."
Eliot never mentioned anything regarding capitalism, or the "bifurcation of human consciousness", at least directly, in his brief description of his "dissociation of sensibility" concept in his essay, and, to my knowledge, Kermode didn't mention capitalism either in his Romantic Image. If I conjoin the ramifications of Eliot's and Kermode's respective theories with Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama, and all it entails pertaining to late-16th and early-17th century conditions that engendered its particular idiom, tone and attitude - not just in Germany, of course, but all of Europe during that critical time-span - then certainly a connection with the advent of capitalism is tenable, because that's precisely what Benjamin is concluding in his indispensible 1928 book. And not only that capitalism emerged, gradually (like a "rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouching towards [modern man] to be born!"), as Weber concluded, from the ascetic-acquisitivity of Protestantism, but that it also, by consequence, inaugurated modernity! through the crucial alteration of time itself, hence Hamlet's famous, and implication-filled declaration: "The time is out of joint!"
Interestingly, Benjamin felt that Weber had not been radical enough in his critical study of capitalism's emergence. Benjamin saw Protestantism as not just the condition that stirred the early iterations of capitalism, but that it, unwittingly, acted as host to capitalism's parasitic nature, which itself, again according to Benjamin, became a "religion" of sorts: "Capitalism is an unprecedented religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction."
Benjamin differentiated between Greek tragedy and the German trauerspiel, or "mourning play" in general (of which Benjamin declares Hamlet the greatest of all mourning plays, despite its English derivation), by describing the former as one which used "symbol", and a linear, resolvable form of time to depict the action, where as the latter used the Baroque sense of "allegory", via much ostentation and dramatic excess, and revealed a non-linear, fractured, unresolvable sense of time in the action, which was chock-full of ambiguity, disunity, delay and catastrophe creating an ontologically new experience which was, ultimately, modern. In Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama, he says:
"Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. That which is original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and reestablishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete."...Hence, Jameson's notion of the "vanishing mediator" and Derrida's, and later Mark Fisher's, idea of hauntology, half a century or more after Benjamin's seminal book was published.
And, so, what exactly was it that was being "mourned", and ultimately "haunting", in these trauerspiel/mourning plays during the first half of the 17th century? Simply put, man's sense of agency, which was "denied any spiritual effect to human action", because, as Martin Luther proclaimed, man's only path to salvation depended on grace through faith alone, thus closing the book, so to speak, on any competing theologies, thus bringing about Divine Right monarchs, and absolutist states, and of course ever-expanding commercial markets. But what was really being mourned off-stage, from a collective unknowingness on the surface, was the coming, inexorable transition into "capitalist modernity". The plays of German playwrights such as Daniel Caspers von Lohenstein (1635-83) and Andreas Gryphius (1616-64), as well as the Spaniard, Pedro Calderon de la Barca (particularly in his 1635 play, Life is a Dream), exemplified the characteristics of these mournful times, arguably initiated in Shakespeare's tragedies, namely Hamlet. The world had become drained of all substantial meaning ("What a piece of work is man!") with only Luther's stark notion of faith in scripture alone to fortify oneself from the pervasive meaninglessness and absurdity of the zeitgeist, but also the Calvinist propensity to collect wealth through the Protestant Ethic to at least better your chances to get into Heaven when your hard-working existence was finally "spent".
The Wikipedia entry on Hauntology says, "The term refers to a situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction in which the apparent presence of being is replaced by a deferred non-origin, represented by 'the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.' The concept is derived from Derrida's deconstructive method, in which any attempt to locate the origin of identity or history must inevitably find itself dependent on an always-already existing set of linguistic conditions - thus making 'haunting the state proper to being as such'. In the 2000s, the term was taken up by critics in reference to paradoxes found in postmodernity, particularly contemporary culture's persistent recycling of retro aesthetics and incapacity to escape old social forms. Critics like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds have used the term to describe art preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and defined by a 'nostalgia for lost futures.'"
Jacques Derrida's initial use of hauntology as a concept was incorporated into his 1993 book, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Some musical examples of hauntology can be heard on albums by such artists as: Broadcast, Pram, Boards of Canada, Burial and The Caretaker. In the case of The Caretaker, and his 2011 album, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, for example, he very aptly references Stanley Kubrick's classic horror film, The Shining, which is rife with hauntological aspects.
As it likely was around four hundred years ago, we, in the early part of the 21st century, are also experiencing and wallowing through a very palpable "mourning period" (hence all the confusion, depression, anxiety and mental illness abounding in society, presently) of a collective loss of a future, and sense of meaning, we were foolishly promised in the 20th century, but have now been utterly denied, despite its continuing to haunt us, and instead have been mercilessly imposed upon with a seemingly soulless, post-culture, transgendered, transhumanist, coldly antiseptic (thus compromising immune systems, and strategically so), accelerationist, digitised, robotic, automated and possibly post-human altogether, "future". The vanishing mediator that will signal the transition of our world and our human existence and experience, collectively, into the so-called "Great Reset", the Fourth Industrial Revolution (according to globalist and technocrat, Klaus Schwab, who's been planning this since the 70s!) unto quite possibly the Singularity itself, seems likely to be our very nature, our democratic freedom, our human identity, our mortal and immortal mind/s (as a collective spirit and as an individual), and our very heart and soul.
