[slightly modified 24/8]
As this excellent article makes clear, a colophon can be as good as a concept, and a concept little more than a colophon....
The phantasmatic comb of ‘The Death of the Left’ continues to be fought over by various ideological baldies. Nonetheless, perhaps Nick Cohen’s assertion that the Left has no ‘coherent message of hope’ is little more than a truism. Can one really expect what is in reality a globally heterogeneous collection of movements to have a single ‘message’? And what exactly would ‘a message of hope' look like? When did the left (singular) have such a ‘message’? How did it fare in the marketplace of messages? But when you ask these kind of questions, you realise that trying to analyse Cohen’s argument is about as productive as trying to tune in to the Olympics on a microwave. Anyway, might not this very ‘incoherence’ be itself an interesting symptom rather than a moral failing (an always suspect argument), as this – from a John Berger piece on subcommandante Marcos - suggests:
On the one hand, the new order does away with frontiers and distances bythe instantaneous telecommunication of exchanges and deals, by obligatoryfree-trade zones (such as the North American Free Trade Association) andby the imposition everywhere of the single unquestionable law of the market; and, on the other hand, it provokes fragmentation and the proliferation of frontiers by its undermining of the nation state - for example, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, etc. "A world of brokenmirrors," writes Marcos, "reflecting the useless unity of the neo-liberalpuzzle."
The seventh piece of the puzzle has the shape of a pocket, and consists of all the various pockets of resistance against the new order that are developing across the globe. The Zapatistas in southeast Mexico are one such pocket. Others, in different circumstances, have not necessarily chosen armed resistance. The many pockets do not have a common political programme as such. How could they, existing as they do in the brokenpuzzle? Yet their heterogeneity may be a promise. What they have in common is their defence of the redundant, the next-to-be-eliminated.... The seven pieces will never fit together to make any sense. This lack of sense, this absurdity, is endemic to the new order
When I think of hope and the Left I think of many things, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin for example, not necessarily ‘messages’ if by that you mean something that would fit on a billboard. But something that could indeed fit on a billboard is Antonio Gramsci’s’s: “pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.” One way of reading this might be that 'hope' bypasses the register of 'messages' altogether, that hope exists precisely inspite of the messages registered by the intellect. Within the available categories, within the available consensus of what is legitimate, hope is itself 'incoherent', perverse, stubborn.
n.b., At the weekend I watched the old Lubitsch film To be Or Not To Be. Those of you who have seen it will doubtless remember the episode where an affected Polish thespian is called on to impersonate the Gestapo officer Erhardt as part of a clandestine operation. He does so in an overly-theatrical way with an uber-complacent bearing and loud aggressive laughter. We assume this is a grotesque parody, until later, when the real Erdhart appears and turns out to be exactly the same as his imitation – exaggerated gestures, belligerent guffaws etc. Some things preempt parody. Well, here is a completely unrelated item.
30/8 A critical but not unsympathetic review of the Berger essay mentioned above can be found here.