5B

Political: National Allegory

Commentary

The preceding essay was, on its appearance in 1986, the object of numerous and varied attacks, both from Marxists who deplored the absence of class politics from its framework and from the various adherents of race, ethnicity, and gender (identity) politics who found it a useful vehicle for attacking socialist and Marxist positions. Indeed, the radical Indian intellectual who set off the debate has since regretted the way his own intervention was consistently used as a vehicle for various anti-communist attacks and critiques.¹ It is still worthwhile disentangling the issues in this debate, despite transformations of the world political scene which will perhaps make it less recognizable for some readers.

My intent was to raise questions about what (since globalization became a concept) has come to be called world literature, by insisting on the radical differences of Third-World Literature from the insularity and parochialism of an Americanist literary study for which foreign and foreign-language literatures (even the European ones) scarcely exist. It may therefore seem paradoxical that such a discussion should be attacked from positions of identity and minority cultural politics; but for the most part these critics felt that the term “Third World” was a slur, despite the fact that this slogan was initiated by the 1955 Bandung conference, which united many of the poorer countries in the world who did not officially belong to either the American or the Soviet satellite blocs.

This was also the point with which Aijaz Ahmad took issue, inquiring whether the great tradition of Urdu poetry was somehow to be ranged under this incongruous label. I felt at the time that his remarks reflected the discomfort of formerly powerful imperial formations, such as were to be found in India and China, with a rather disreputable association involving “underdeveloped” countries of distinctly different cultural backgrounds. In fact, all the Indian leftists I have known personally were very free with the offending term (although their Chinese counterparts were not). But obviously enough, the concept of a Third World can no longer have the same currency today in a world in which some of the countries in question have evolved into industrial and manufacturing centers, China has become the second-greatest world power, and the former Second or socialist World has disintegrated, most of it enjoying a dubious “transition to capitalism.”

I.

Ahmad’s more fundamental objection to my essay sprang from his (quite correct) sense that the text reflected a Maoist practice at odds theoretically and politically with classic Marxist or Bolshevik principles. The central quotation from Lin Biao²—that the international class situation of the period could be mapped as an insurrection of the international peasantry of Third World countries surrounding the international city bourgeoisie of the rich countries—seemed to displace the class struggle within the various nation-states onto a global and as it were foreign-policy level; and thereby to dismiss the concrete class relations which inevitably obtained within both Third and First World countries alike. This was not at all my intention, particularly inasmuch as I felt that class struggle existed on both levels but in different forms.

The simpler way of staging this historic conflict on the left can be put this way: that while classical Marxism theorized the revolutionary function of an urban working class, Maoism on the contrary appealed to an immense peasantry as its primary revolutionary force, with a resulting tension that ultimately realized itself in the Sino–Soviet break of 1960. Perhaps this oversimplified version of the conflict needs to be revised in two ways, so as to reflect not an ideological dispute but rather a representational dilemma.

First of all, it makes a difference if one considers the Soviet Revolution of 1917 as two simultaneous and distinct revolutions,³ one of anti-Czar-ist and anti-war urban working classes and a different one in the countryside, carried out by peasants who demanded private ownership of the land (as traditionally in the French Revolution and many other peasant uprisings). In that case, Stalin’s collectivization of 1928 constituted a second Soviet Revolution, or if you like, the fulfillment of the first one. This is a view that would seem to sharpen the ideological differences in question and to underscore the originality of Maoism with respect to Bolshevism.

The second point to be made is that today the peasantry has virtually disappeared, with the green revolution and the subsequent emergence of an agribusiness for which the former peasants have simply become (farm) workers, their private plots absorbed, not into collective forms, but into monopolies. At the same time, however, the distinction between Third and First World states, now reformulated as one between developing and developed countries, has lost its political significance in the light of the industrialization of some of the formerly Third World powers, such as Korea, Vietnam, and even China itself; and that of an industrial working class as such called into question by automation and the development of information technology and computerization. Under these circumstances the very conception of nonnational social groups (which could be allegorized according to my proposal) has either become wholly problematic or has been adapted to the situation of other kinds of groups altogether (those of race, ethnicity, and gender, themes which always played their part in the construction of a national idea but had hitherto necessarily remained subordinate to economic production).

These political dilemmas have their bearing on the problem of allegory, for the culture of such “identity” groups necessarily remains allegorical. But what seems to me more productive for any discussion of my old essay today is rather the earlier form of the debate: for it raised the fundamentally allegorical nature of international politics as such. Its two dimensions—class struggle with a given national situation and the globalized forces at work outside it on a world scale—are at least for the moment incommensurable: which is to say that it is their very disparity and the difficulty of finding mediations between them that is the fundamental political problem for the Left today, in a transitional situation in which neither form of traditional politics—the internal political struggle and the very different dynamic of international politics—has reached any kind of stable or definitive, recognizable, and identifiable form. Is a self-proclaimed resistance to American hegemony and empire (in other words, to world capitalism) sufficient to qualify its adherents as occupying left, revolutionary, or socialist positions in their internal political situations? In any case, Ahmad’s objection, which did not include any criticism of the idea of allegory, foregrounds the crucial allegorical question of the relationship of the levels to one another, and whether any proper allegorical reading exists in a situation in which there is, if not a contradiction, then at least a fundamental disjunction between the anagogical (or world-political) level and the literal or domestic-political levels. Allegory thereby serves as a diagnostic instrument to reveal this disjunction, which is itself the cause of political aimlessness and apathy. We are in a period of global class formation; we cannot expect a coherent class politics to emerge from the antagonism between the levels of internal and external class struggle that Ahmad’s article, perhaps unwittingly, reveals.

Perhaps I can best illustrate the dynamics of this incommensurability and the nature of simultaneous but multiple dimensions that interact by way of difference and nonintersection with a few familiar illustrations. In the area of theory, this kind of multidimensional incommensurability has famously been conceptualized by Ernst Bloch in his memorable phrase nonsynchronous synchronicity (ungleichzeitige Gleichzeitigkeit),⁴ a far more pungent and arresting formulation of the Marxist notion of uneven development and one Bloch first designed to characterize the Germany of the 1920s.

But I prefer to think of the process in terms of a strange and incomprehensible thought image, namely that of so-called multidimensional chess, in which a number of distinct chessboards coexist simultaneously with distinct configurations of forces on each, so that a move on any one of these boards has distinct but unforeseeable consequences for the configurations and the relative power-relations on the others. We exist in just such a world, just such a totality, in which for the moment the moves on these various boards and in these various dimensions fail to coincide: is it unimaginable that a moment should come in which, by virtue of the most cunning multidimensional strategies, these moves might in one extraordinary conjuncture all reinforce each other? But this science-fictional example can easily be converted into a more homely and realistic contemporary one, if we turn to that activity which is, in the United States, called soccer.

For football (the “beautiful game”) is in fact a combination of chess and stamp collecting. Contemporary world football indeed exists on multiple, yet very real, dimensions, which are those of globalization itself, and which we can simplify into the local, the national, and the international dimensions. In the beginnings of football, players train as children in the streets and tend therefore to come from the poorer neighborhoods. This is why in the first great footballing cities, there often spring up two teams, one of popular origins and one which draws its public, and many of its players, more substantially from the so-called middle classes and their schools. Such class oppositions are obviously not detrimental to the sport, which even within a single locality requires the stimulus of opponents and can only be enhanced by mass followings of a competitive and antagonistic kind on both sides. But such antagonisms, required in order for the game to develop, are only the first and most obvious natural class symptoms of the undertow of capitalism as it develops simultaneously with football itself, the directionality of the first moving transversally across the internal evolution of the game itself and its strategies.

In a second moment, the more successful teams will want to test themselves against their opposite numbers in other cities and regions of the nation-state. But as the profitability of the game increases, the wealthier teams will begin to buy star players from their adversaries, marking a first break from the dimension of the local. Fans may well adopt these outsiders, and the latter may well wholeheartedly adapt to their new athletic homelands; but the inner distance is still there, and the possibility that they may well be seduced by other local teams and owners undermines the local character of the game, however vigorously fans retains its local patriotism and loyalties

Meanwhile, a further intervention of the commercial into the autonomy of the sport becomes visible, not only in the increasing prosperity of the really successful teams and their national adversaries, but also in the increasing attraction of outsiders and even foreigners for the acquisition and transplantation. This development, of course, reflects increasing trade and commercial interactions on an international scale (such as the emergence of the Russian oligarchs as a new source of investment); and it heralds the expansion of the game itself on yet a broader and now international scale, both in the growth of minor European and non-European teams and in the (as it were) primitive accumulation of football “capital” from the Third World, and in particular South America and Brazil, where a remarkable “reserve army” of extraordinary players becomes available to the formerly local and now formerly national teams as such.

The new transnational competitions and international cups, on the model of the modern Olympic games, clearly offer a whole new “dispositif” for the investment of the various nationalisms, ranging from nationalism to xenophobic and racist passion. Those accompany the next step up from the more open class antagonisms of the local and national rivalries; and that ambiguous thing, the nation, begins to serve as the medium for (or indeed the mediation between) both types of collective emotion inasmuch as the struggles within the nation reinforce the latter’s central role in what may be called international class struggle.

The seemingly positive development of an international market in football, however, is accompanied by other kinds of more negative effects in the home markets (and this is the moment to insist that our telling of the story is structural rather than chronological): above all, by monopolization, whereby little by little all the best players are bought up by a few major teams, downgrading the rest of the local participants to provincial status and rendering purely domestic competitions less and less interesting. The nation, then, takes on a twofold function: it is on the one hand the group of first-class teams who represent national football; and on the other, the actual “national team” that become the official participants in international competitions like the World Cup.

In that international world, then, rivals from the national teams find themselves obliged to play side by side against the enemy, in a paradoxical, and I may even say dialectical, shift in subject position. But it is a dialectic far more dramatically visible for the foreign players who have been recruited to play on the various national or local teams. Here the two systems visibly begin to intersect: and the stars from other areas, such as the Balkans or Latin America, find themselves (however enriched in fame and fortune) obliged to return to their home countries to play on a national team often opposed to that of their temporarily former teammates, who have themselves dispersed, however unwillingly, in answer to the call of their own respective countries.

This is a dual identity far more significantly fraught than that adoption of local provincial players by the more powerful teams of other national entities; and it conjures up a bizarre double standard in which a given player exists in two distinct modes of being at once, defined by the subsystems of which he is simultaneously a member. In each he has a celebrity coach whose methods and worldview may be in the sharpest conflict with his opposite number and teammates who may have been his most detested adversaries in another life. Yet in one of those paradoxes that characterizes globalization, in a period in which the nationstate continues to exist and to function as a form (often hostile to its assimilation into a different kind of world system), the international player who returns to play in his national team recovers his own original language, the one he spoke in his earliest existence as a local footballer.

It is the circulation of these foreign nationals throughout an essentially three-tiered system of institutions that seems to me preeminently characteristic of the mapping problems of the world system today, for, as in multidimensional chess, they may well experience autonomy and subordination simultaneously. The soccer player, caught between his origins, his home team, and his national representation, is only the most dramatic figure for the multidimensionality of globalization evoked and presupposed in the essay on national allegory.

The philosophical background of this experiment in cognitive mapping may be identified by the two concepts of simultaneity and incommensurability. The first of these, richly glossed in Benedict Anderson’s work on the emergence of nationality,⁵ must be accompanied by a vigilant emphasis on negativity and contradiction. This kind of simultaneity is best observed when the two or three planes in question are dissonant, and which both can emerge in their autonomy. It is a dissonance we have then characterized with the term incommensurability, borrowed from Niels Bohr’s account of the representational dilemmas of quantum physics, a term which has the advantage of a properly historical undecidability which can be mapped, schematized, or diagrammed (that is to say, represented), without lapsing into either of the tempting alternatives of the mystical ineffability or dogmatic decisionism. But it should be understood that this situation, which we have illustrated by way of our two examples, holds for world politics fully as much as for world literature; and it is in the light of this situation that allegory must today be understood as a solution that is a problem in its own right.

II

Does not the very proposal of a national allegory mark a reversion to the practice of personification to which I have so often objected? A collectivity is not a person and cannot be reified in the form of this or that personification. The problem is that collectivity cannot really be conceptualized either, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, cannot even properly be named (proper being the appropriate Derridean word here): even the seemingly neutral term collectivity is misleading, insofar as the cognitive abstraction it flaunts suggests some kind of interpersonal homogeneity that does not exist. But the same can be said for all the names collectivity has borne throughout history, from clan or polis all the way to nation or people, or its political cover in terms like democracy or republic. Rousseau’s General Will is the most daring of these experiments in nomination, inasmuch as it designates its own distance from any numerical collectivity of existing individuals: despite its critics, it is not the state, which is an empirical entity. Perhaps the General Will is rather the ideological “regulative idea” every collectivity requires for collective action.

At any rate, it is this radical lack in the conceptualization of the collective—Lacan’s “pas-tout”—that signals the scandal of the much-maligned word totality. The latter has the advantage of being nonanthropomorphic and the disadvantage of bringing numerical and additive overtones with it, making it seem a cousin of Hegel’s “bad infinite.” For critics who have imbibed a little Foucauldianism, its evil lies in its claim to assign a place of total knowledge, a place ripe for so-called totalitarianism. But the unhappy Lukács, who pioneered the slogan, never claimed as much and indeed theorized the very opposite, in his crucial expression, “aspiration to totality” (Intention zur Totalität), an aspiration his critics clearly do not share.

Perhaps this is clearest in the area of nationalism, another reproach the critics of this article have felt able to make. Nationalism is, to be sure, a powerful collective force that one can admire aesthetically and from a distance in that specific sense; it is at one with language and geography, and this, too, raises unexplored issues. But I share with Deleuze the conviction that it is only positive when emergent and still powerless;⁶ a triumphant nationalism, a nationalism in power, a national state, if it does not in the process of coming to power transcend itself qua nationalism, is never very admirable. And this, for the very good reason that the very concept of the nation (like all the other collective concepts I have listed above) is vacuous and can lead nowhere except into unhealthy collective narcissism and soccer hooliganism. We have as yet found nothing satisfactory in the way of a new concept to replace it: federalism has not often worked, but more significantly, it does not seem to work as a concept, as a value. Perhaps it still carries a little too much of the atmosphere of tolerance and altruism and too little of a vital narcissism to be viscerally attractive. Here, to be sure, we approach the domain of collective psychologizing, which is to be avoided at all costs (and into which Marx, unlike Freud, never fell).

This is then the sense in which we have so frequently insisted on the unrepresentability of the collective, an argument which must candidly also denounce the use of this last term as well, whose terminological innocence, secured by an appearance of scientific objectivity, is as ideological as all the others. I would only add that its predecessors—people, nation, tribe, race, clan, group, ethnie, masses, along with all those strange words with which tribal peoples have named themselves in unknown or extinct languages—all express, not some universal condition of unnameability, but rather the specific historical conjuncture in which each of them has seemed a useful second best: in much the same way the absence of an analogous term in our current state of dawning globalization is not a permanent one and will no doubt ultimately be challenged by new proposals and possibilities. (Indeed, Hardt and Negri’s contribution of the word multitude is one of those, and not the least valuable.)

At this stage I wish to propose another term—a suitably exotic and thereby fresh and unfamiliar one—for Deleuze’s “peuple à venir,” the collectivity that has as yet no name: and that is the word asabiyya which the translators of Ibn Khaldun render as “group feeling.”⁷ Like any other, it carries the stain and traces of its origin, in the clan system and might technically etymologically be translated as kinship or blood relation. This reflects the thinking of the great Berber philosopher of history, in the Muqaddimah, that stable societies can only be formed around kinship groups or clans. Indeed, the apparently cyclical character of Ibn Khaldun’s vision of history finds justification in his conviction that a state disintegrates to the degree to which it develops further and further away from its original unity as a clan. It is probably wrong to consider Ibn Khaldun a philosopher of history, to the degree to which he has no ultimate telos in mind, not even that of a universal Islamic commonwealth. Rather, like Machiavelli, his real interest lies in what keeps a given state together, what ensures its duration, and what finally brings about its decay and dispersal. (This shared preoccupation explains why Machiavelli is so often and traditionally considered to be immoral: for his concern with the duration of a state in time extends indifferently to dictatorships as well as republics, oligarchies, and the rest of the logical forms of government.) Indeed, it might be worth speculating whether every alleged “philosophy of history” does not secretly share a similar preoccupation with what is lasting in a political formation. The so-called “end of history” thus reduces itself to that: how to found a state that will last forever; and Utopia is no different in this respect.

Yet the concept of asabiyya is useful to the degree to which it posits a collective cohesion that is not based on an idea or on that far more limited concept named family: for the group precedes the family. It is not a psychological concept either despite attempts to render it in English; and any identification with group psychology must be strenuously resisted. The notion of blood ties is a figurative or imaginary link, a kind of fetish, inasmuch as no one really knows who their relatives are, but only the tribe in which they are raised. Nonetheless the concept itself insists on an indistinguishable relationship between body and spirit, between object and subject, between a collective materiality and a collective ideology or group spirit; and it posits the constitutive relationship of this first solidarity to the social coherence of the society as such, without passing through abstract political arrangements. But it also includes a quantitative element in the conception of the clan, itself distantly related to that earliest intuition of the first humans that their groups of hunters and gatherers could not survive beyond certain dimensions and a limit on population growth.

This first requirement is what secretly undermines the nation as an adequate social form, inasmuch as the national is an imaginary solidarity, largely overstepping any concrete forms of coexistence. The nation must therefore have recourse, for its cohesion, to two analoga or quasi-physical substitutes for those direct relationships, and those substitutes are language and geography, material entities which however function in purely symbolic ways.

Today, in an era of full globalization, the distance between the life of concrete social networks and population size is so great as to be virtually unconceptualizable. The only theorist to have today confronted the issue of global population in any serious way is Peter Sloterdijk, in a position he summarizes as follows: “People today are not prepared to coexist consciously with a billion other subjects.”⁸ Unfortunately, his own complex and stimulating investigations and speculations are limited by the familiar fallback stereotype of a global–local formula.

Meanwhile, any new solution to this dilemma must take into account Rousseau’s counterposition, which is that of a General Will, or in other words a group spirit absolutely divorced in advance from any existent and quantitative group and corresponding to no specific population size. This logical alternative is so far the only coherent alternative in this dilemma, for which minds formed in smaller traditional social units are “unprepared,” just as we have seen that rational or philosophical speculation is similarly limited: the limits of our conceptuality, meanwhile, are also not to be found in the size of the brain but rather in the sheer number of other people who coexist with us. Asabiyya is as useful an idea as any other for driving home this fundamental idea.

The problem of the collective needs to be thought of as an engineering problem as well; and it might begin with Carl Schmitt’s great definition of the political as such—the choosing of friend and foe.⁹ Sartre puts this another way, namely that the collective cannot be formed, that a collective cannot achieve the living cohesion of a group however large or small, without an external enemy, an external threat.¹⁰ This is a baleful structural principle, if true; and even if you take the realities of class and class struggle to be the ultimate ones, beyond even the spurious promises of the various nationalisms, it foretells the difficulties of any imaginable future classless situation.¹¹ (Ecological wisdom might suggest that in that case we might still be united by our ultimate enemy, namely Nature itself, a prospect no more appealing than the alternative. Right now, “nature” is a political ally in a crisis situation in which only socialism can save us from its destruction. Yet, as human mortals, nature always was our enemy in the first place.)

III

In all these senses, then, the collective cannot be conceptualized, yet we cannot not give it a name or acknowledge its being. This is why personification necessarily persists, as an indispensable second best, and flourishes everywhere from what I will call diplomatic allegories to the worst racist, ethnic, and even gender slurs, and also the most affectionate ones. We do not need ethical judgments, or binary oppositions such as good and evil, to sort out good from bad uses of collective personification: both are implicit and dialectically united in reification itself. When I single out a collectivity for my libidinal investment, what counts is not the emotional content but rather the singling out, the naming of the group, which can only occur stereotypically: and every stereotype or personification is always a potential slur: philosemitism being but a stone’s throw away from anti-Semitism.

Yet wherever mixed groups live together, the individual is obliged to navigate them by way of stereotypes. The word nation itself emerged from the mixed populations and languages of the students in medieval Paris. Here is the way in which in one of his letters Gramsci describes the characterological views of his fellow prisoners on their fellow Italians:

There are four fundamental divisions: northerners, people from central Italy, southerners (including Sicily), and Sardinians. The Sardinians live totally apart from the rest. The northerners evince a certain solidarity among themselves, but no organization, it would seem; for them it is a point of honor that they are thieves, pickpockets, swindlers but have never spilled blood. Among the people from central Italy, the Romans are the best organized; they will not even denounce their spies to people from the other regions, and keep their distrust to themselves. The southerners are highly organized, so it is said, but among them there are subdivisions: the Neapolitan State, the Apulian State, and the Sicilian State. For the Sicilian, the point of honor consists not in having stolen but only in having spilled blood.¹²

It goes without saying that such judgments will be even more extreme when it comes to the coexistence of peoples not bound together by a common “nationality.” The racisms and ethnicities act all this out on a different level of collectivity; and on a larger diplomatic scale, we may observe characterizations that are not immediately formed by the materials and systems examined in our chapter on emotions, but which reflect the kind of common knowledge or cultural literacy offered by the public sphere, where there are no longer any “distant countries of which we know nothing.” It is as though an esoteric development of theories of “affect” now relegated the systems of the older named emotions to lower class usage, where they lead their own posttheoretical life in the form of the various racisms and national stereotypes, all organized around categories drawn from the older emotional systems.

These now themselves become bifurcated into a rather antiquated collection of stereotypes of the various national characters, and a storehouse of invective, insult, prejudice, and ethnic or racial stereotypes as such, it being understood that generalizations about collective groups will always necessarily be caricatures and stereotypes even where they are used positively. One may, for example, wish to express one’s admiration and fascination with this or that national or ethnic group, but what results is always a combination of features (they’re so productive, or they really know how to enjoy life, for example) on which the valences can immediately be reversed (workaholics, lazy spongers), making the characteristics available for the most violent outbursts and vilifications.

Indeed, it has already been observed that the term nation originated as a classification of the various foreign students who came to live and study in Paris during the later Middle Ages and who lived together in various quarters which were called nations perceived to be distinct in language, dress, and behavior by the local population and its disciplinary forces. In the Renaissance these qualifications became systems in their own right, and a literary genre emerged around national “character” that served as a guide to travelers in the various parts of Europe, the rest of the world being vague enough to be dealt with in even more general cultural stereotypes, like the one most recently called orientalism.

These characterological distinctions are all based on the available systems of emotions (as, paradigmatically, in one of the oldest of these, the system of the four humors), which serves to transcode the predominance of the various emotions into characterology (phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, melancholic). The resultant systems of stereotypes are still alive in areas in which linguistically and religiously distinctive populations coexist, such as the Balkans, the Caucasus, Scandinavia, Southeast Asia, and so forth (in comparison with which our own local racisms are intellectually rather impoverished). We here thus enter the domain of what I venture to call diplomatic allegory.

Does such a thing as a “national character” still exist? Travelers often think so; but the development of a world tourism industry (along with the omnipresent doxa of the withering of the nation-state under globalization) makes such conjecture trivial if not disreputable.

IV

That such stereotypes, however, are also real—in other words that they have the effectivity of that “reality of the appearance” which Hegel so often evoked—and that they are also necessarily narrative in nature, I want to illustrate by way of one of the great historiographic cruxes—the causes of World War I—which has come in for renewed interest today, probably owing to the similarity of our own current decentered diplomatic world situation. I follow here the version of Christopher Clark in his monumental work on the subject, The Sleepwalkers (2012), where it is clear that much of the narrative interest itself lies not so much in the rigid identification of the national personification as in its very fluidity.¹³

Friend or foe: it is obvious enough that in the French Imaginary, since the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, Germany preeminently occupied the place of the foe, the primal national enemy. Yet since the defeat of Napoleon, there was already just such a foe in place, namely perfide Albion: and indeed Clark emphasizes the degree to which the British Empire uniquely inspired anxiety among all the other European powers—in Germany less so indeed (Clark downplays the naval rivalry) than in Russia, whose Great Game in Afghanistan positioned Britain as the principal adversary (and vice versa). This is the result of a crucial organization of space: the great colonial or imperial powers, Clark explains, can make their moves on two distinct chessboards—Europe and the colonies, whether in Africa, Central Asia, or China, all three crucial sites of struggle. The chessboard of the colonies then provides an alternate space in which rivalries can be played out and assuaged:

As the possessors of vast portions of the earth’s inhabited surface with a military presence along extended imperial peripheries, Britain, France, and Russia controlled tokens that could be exchanged and bargained over at relatively little cost to the metropolis.¹⁴

But the Austro-Hungarian Empire was in a more ambiguous spatial position: in some sense the Balkans corresponded to that second, extra-European playing field; on the other hand, as the very border of that empire, moves in the Balkans could already be considered as European, and in any case, as far as Austria was concerned, there were no tokens to give and no one to bargain with—Serbia being not one of the great-power rivals but rather itself a kind of token in the game.

As for Germany, it was almost wholly restricted to Europe as such; and the only equivalent of African or Chinese tokens to be exchanged in this imperial competition was Alsace-Lorraine, whose abandonment, as with Bosnia-Herzegovina for the Austrians, did not come into question. These two powers, then, Germany and Austria, were reduced to a single playing field, namely Europe itself.

Returning now to our primary allegorical exhibit, we have seen that France faced a fundamental dilemma in its selection of a primary enemy or foe. Can one not have two different enemies at the same time? I suspect that for the Imaginary, or the political unconscious, the one will always be subordinated to the other and emotionally assimilated to it. To be sure, the allegorical array into which otherness is multiplied and organized, like the constellations of the starry heavens, will inevitably be parceled out into a cast of different characters and a rank order running from the starring roles to the extras, as well as being divided into the two basic camps.

In this case, however, Clark isolates the moment in which France is able to reassign its antagonisms: it was the Moroccan crisis of 1900. Before that, “the shared suspicion of Britain that had helped to bring about the Franco-Russian Alliance also prevented it [the Alliance] … from acquiring an exclusively anti-German orientation.”¹⁵ The implication is that the issue of Alsace-Lorraine was only one of the components of French Germanophobia: this issue could be libidinally subordinated in situations in which the desire for cooperation with the Germans (particularly in a situation of rivalry with Britain) took center stage. What happened in the Moroccan crisis with Britain, however, was that the Germans refused a potential alliance with France against Britain: “from this moment, the French foreign minister abandoned any thought of Franco-German collaboration … the decision to appease rather than to oppose Britain facilitated a more forceful articulation of the anti-German potential in French foreign policy.”¹⁶

This is to say, in allegorical terms, that the situation had realigned in such a way as to allow Germany to be substituted for Britain as the ally of choice, a rearrangement that, after the disappointment of Morocco, was not to be. To be sure, Clark goes on in his next chapter to warn against such allegorical readings. Citing a political cartoon from the eve of the Boxer Uprising in China (1898), he observes:

personifying states as individuals was part of the shorthand of European political caricature, but it also reflects a deep habit of thought: the tendency to conceptualize states as composite individuals governed by compact executive agencies animated by an indivisible will.¹⁷

He goes on to chart the personal rivalries and animosities within the various foreign offices and public opinion itself, replete with the most savory anecdotes; but this shift of emphasis to the distribution of the various allegorical “semes” (envy, hostility, theft of employment, contempt, and so on) among distinct individuals, where the bearers of various distinct kinds of antagonisms to Germany are realigned in new combinations, is itself an allegorical narrative that only shifts the levels of this material and the bearers of its meanings, rather than changing the structure of this multidimensional chess game.

Still, this is a moment in which we must dispel a basic misunderstanding of our topic, which Clark characterized rather unreflectively as “a deep habit of thought.” Is not his own shift of attention from the national diplomacies to the individuals involved in the various national decisions in some way a shift from appearance to historical reality? Is Clark not suggesting, in the most complete agreement with common sense, that the idea of antagonisms (or friendships) between nations is a misleading fantasy, inasmuch as a “nation” is not a substantive entity, whereas individual acts of the decision-makers constitute a reality that the historian can document with some precision? So there would be a reality of history, particularly when the discipline identifies and restricts itself to something called diplomatic history; while the rest would belong to the nebulous realm of so-called public opinion, itself easily dismantled into the decisions of administrative newspaper publishers and the even more nebulous ideologies of the various classes and subgroups. We must emphasize that Clark is not interested in this essentially philosophical problem about reality and appearance in history (or in historiography, for that matter): since his argument, in this excellent work, lies elsewhere, namely in his conclusion that the cause of world war is to be located in the uncertainty of the various national players about each other’s intentions in the first place.

An allegorical reading, within its multiple levels, would seems a more adequate solution; this is precisely the point at which our practical problems begin to arise. For Clark’s argument would seem to suggest the advantages of a clear and relatively fixed narrative, a relatively fixed set of characters, over a confused narrative, in which a number of plots are superimposed and the value of the characters themselves in constant flux depending on which narrative position they find themselves. Which is the enemy? Britain or Germany? It depends on whether it is the British Empire that is the threat, or the occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, and those are two distinct narratives, which could themselves be multiplied by others—the value of Russia as a partner, the ambiguous status of the Ottoman Empire and the control of the Dardanelles, and so on. World War I emerged from the superposition and confusion of these narratives. But then our basic question arises: if instead of that confusion, the dominant narrative were clearly delineated, with friend and foe distinguished on a single level in some relatively stable and identifiable way, would the outcome then be more desirable? But here we are describing, not the onset of World War I, but rather the Cold War, long or short, which did not in fact eventuate in war (although its equivalent in the seventeenth century certainly did), but which has also been characterized as ending in a “victory” of one of the parties and a “defeat” of the other (even though from another perspective Hobsbawm feels able to characterize it as the “golden age” of capitalism).¹⁸

Does not the fundamental scenario of narrative as such—based on the distinction between friend and foe, or to use the more traditional terms, hero and villain—always necessarily tell the story of a struggle that is a zero-sum game and in which there is a winner and a loser (or perhaps, to use Marx’s bleaker version, “which ends in the mutual destruction of both parties”)?¹⁹ In fact, the original structural or narrative theorists preferred to think of the process as a return to order. We begin with order, an equilibrium or homeostasis, into which an element of disorder is introduced; the narrative then works through this disorder, which is in the process gradually (or violently) resolved, so that the end of the narrative is able to restore order, albeit of a different kind than what we confronted at the outset. This has always seemed to me a very conservative way of interpreting narrative processes, but perhaps Marx’s alternative way of putting it—“ends with the revolutionary reconstruction of society”—offers a more progressive take on the “order” that is reestablished at the end (which we then call closure). Anarchists, however, might well see even this formulation of Marx as a capitulation to that oppression of society, of the state and its normative order which was always their primary target and nightmare. I believe that the—to me utterly ideological and unacceptable—formula of the open versus the closed was always an attempt to paper over this interpretation of narrative “closure”: if closed is bad, and open is good, then it follows that we should always somehow call for an open ending rather than a closed one.

A final reading is thus possible in which the very notion and structure of narrative itself is denounced and repudiated: this is more or less what happens in a famous passage of Sartre’s Nausea, in which he shows that “stories” (adventures, as they are called here) always involve a chronological reversal and illusion.²⁰ We start with the ending and reorganize the aimless facts into a telos, a sequence of events that is going somewhere and in which something happens: here the aleatory is turned into necessity. Yet this classic denunciation of narrative or storytelling only reconfirms our argument here: namely that narrative is a ghostly allegory into which a given set of events is reorganized, a shadowy second-degree structure imposed on what Henry Ford memorably called “one damned thing after another.” What Sartre does not resolve here, in a novel itself organized as a day-by-day journal, is whether this structure, this second-degree ordering of the initial raw material, can be avoided, and if so, what takes its place. In the philosophical tradition, that more direct contact with events without narrative meaning would be available only to the Deleuzian ideal schizophrenic, in the perpetual present of the schizo’s wandering and aimless existence. Yet it would seem that for most of us, Deleuze here enunciated not a phenomenological description, but rather an ethic, the way an ideal life ought to be lived—a Utopian vision not necessarily attractive to everyone. In the earlier Sartrean world, the ethic is decisionist; we ourselves choose to organize our lives into specific stories of whose arbitrary nature we are aware in advance. This is the ethical solution of Nausea’s other protagonist, Annie: with age, however, she tires of this narrative freedom. The whole problem is then recast when, as more recently, we decide to abandon the narratological language of analysis for the terminology of the Event, which thereby subsumes narrative as such. The problem here then becomes its opposite, whose noneventful structure has already been defined in advance as daily life, the quotidian, habit, and so forth. But was it not precisely the achievement of modernism—or to be more precise, Ulysses—to have shown us how the smallest and most contingent if not altogether meaningless details of everyday life could be drawn back into a new kind of narrative structure and thereby rescued and renarra-tivized? Do they not, those details, themselves then become in their own way events, albeit of less visibility and notoriety than the great ones, the capitalized Event as such (the quotidian now itself coming to constitute History)?

These are problems of a philosophical nature, which can fall under the purview of metaphysics, of politics, of linguistics, or phenomenology (it being understood that each of these classifications will inevitably determine its own solution), but which we do not have to resolve here. All I have wanted to argue is that the problem of narrative is an allegorical one and that it holds for history fully as much as for daily life; and, I suppose, that it is a permanent problem as such. Allegory is always with us, in politics, in narratology, in daily life, and in “common sense.”

It is therefore worth showing that it is also a synchronic or systemic problem and not just a narrative or chronological one. Schmitt’s formula already implied this, but I want to put it out in the open, where its consequences can be assessed. My proposition consists in grasping national identity in terms of a cast of characters—sometimes large, sometimes small, just like concrete groups, families, and so on—whose imaginary presence defines the situation of the individual, who identifies it with this imaginary situation of his country or nation-state. It is not only in diplomacy, I think, that whole countries are taken to be allies (friends) or adversaries (foes): I want to assert these structures as existential ones, and indeed, as proto-narratives. Let me take as a relatively distant example the China of the 1980s, which knew a sufficiently complex imaginary cast of characters to enrich Schmitt’s scheme as well as to add interesting complications to Propp’s classical format. (I hasten to add that it is an exercise that could be practiced on any country in the world.)

The principal question to be decided about China’s twin enemies—the Soviet Union and the United States—is how each could function differently in this momentary constellation. China fought a war against the United States in Korea, and yet, with the famous Nixon visit, neutralized that antagonism without yet wholly opening itself to US business. Perhaps at this point we could add to the standard analyses of trade a narratological function: in these as it were diplomatic-level narratives, trade takes on the function of love and marriage on the level of personal stories (“la douceur du commerce”); and the objects of trade (“Made in Japan,” “Made in Germany,” “Made in China”)—while not exactly the Lacanian objet petit a—nonetheless are greeted with something of the mixed familiarity, nostalgia, or repulsion of Baudelaire’s old souvenirs and love tokens—unpleasant reminders of dependency or grateful tokens of mutual aid.

Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet split involved no outright warfare (save for several now well-known border clashes) and yet left behind a bitterness that only temporal and spatial distance has gradually assuaged. The Soviet Union was a former friend, but the United States a former enemy with whom a warm friendship was in the process of developing, which was itself intensified by the world-historical dimension of meaning of a kind of second-level allegory: for the United States as the land of new technologies (particularly of information technology) and of universal entertainment commodities and consumption, as the land also of English as the new universal lingua franca, was also identified as a locus of Utopian desire—not so much of envy as of a new type of historical wealth the Chinese were intent on acquiring.

Japan, to be sure, figured as a former enemy that can never be forgiven and is talked and thought about as little as possible, but with which one has correct and distant dealings. Taiwan was something closer to an alienated cousin—tainted by Japanese culture and corrupted by the self-proclaimed and alleged friend, the United States—but whom one does not despair receiving back into the family, a blood relationship officially to be publicly proclaimed from time to time.

As for Vietnam, it was a very ungrateful neighbor, whose help in its hour of need was rewarded with independent views and a resistance that provoked a not very lovely little war.

I could go on, noting the peculiarities of Hong Kong, some of which were deflected onto the British; and also, much earlier, the gratifying reception of China into the great third-world or “non-aligned” alliance of Bandung—something like recovering the admiration of society at large, in a situation in which China had little libidinal identification with the majority of the third-world countries, in perhaps a ghostly survival of the pride of the Middle Kingdom. (India is another special case here, as another former empire whose mentalities survived on into modern times.) As for Europe, it will have become clear in our illustrative map (Figure 5.1) of Chinese judgments that it is today, as far as China is concerned, little more than a collection of oddities; while Africa has acquired a new (and old) value as a space of extractive colonization.

Figure 5.1
Source: Reprinted with permission from
Financial Policy Magazine, March 2, 2016

One could then very easily go on—I have only included a few hints—and turn this into a full-blown family novel, perhaps a dynasty during the transitional passage to modernity and the nuclear family, but still internally cohesive with neighbors and rivals and a more distant geography outside the family compound. I call this allegorical fantasy a proto-narrative to the degree to which each “character” in it is accompanied by its own history and by the fantasy of its own relationship to the protagonist in both past and future and also in the sense in which, given such an initial cast of characters, in any decisive encounter or dramatic crisis there will be an accounting, a lining up of various figures on multiple levels and their assessment in terms of alliances or unreliabilities: who can help us out here, who is deceitful and not to be trusted, and so forth. And I will add that, as in personal identity, the partage d’alterité—the way in which these varied others are taken to map out a combination of dependence and autonomy—will necessarily define or better still construct my own national identity.

I have not yet pointed out the obvious, that the main character has not been dealt with in this enumeration and that the center has been taken for granted, as “my” position, as what does not require characterization, as the inside of which all these friends and foes form the heterogeneous outside, the situation, the terrain, and thus define “selfhood” itself and as such.

V

We must, however, end this commentary on a metaphysical note. What has been affirmed here, what is presupposed by the specific text in question, is the status of the collectivity as the “ultimately determining instance.” That is Marxist terminology for the primacy of the economic (speaking loosely), the infrastructure, the mode of production, over all superstructural forms: the legal, the cultural, the religious, the philosophical, and the like. It has most often been taken to mean capitalism, since that is what we are in and is the only mode of production Marx analyzed extensively; and one possible conclusion to be drawn from this primacy is the superstructural omnipresence of the commodity form, of commodity reification, a position I thoroughly endorse.

But in Marx’s very rudimentary model of base and superstructure (it really only appears once, in the 1859 Preface to the contribution to a Critique of Political Economy), we confront what is clearly an allegorical schema, complete with “levels”:

If we understand the forces of production to be the technology of a given mode, while the relations of production essentially names the collective structure of the labor process, then it would certainly seem as though this distinction is replicated on the more fundamental levels of the mode, namely in the distinction between base and superstructure itself. Typically, that distinction will be taken to be modeled after the incorrigibly human (or let’s say anthropocentric) opposition between object and subject, or, to put it even more crudely, between body and soul. (And perhaps I have not insisted enough in this book on the irresistible temptation to read allegory and its interpretation according to the same conscious or unconscious paradigm, namely that of letter and spirit.) As humans, we do not ever really get out of this instinctive, unconscious, deeply rooted category mistake, which we certainly can’t solve but whose illusions it would be disastrous to ignore. The human mind is idealistic in its very nature; at best we can attempt to discount this epistemological distortion in advance or reckon it into our experiments.

As for the allegory of the modes of production, however, we need to take it further: for the initial opposition of base and superstructure will then reduplicate itself and recur within the superstructure itself, where in general the materialist term will turn out to be one form or another of the state or the law, while the superstructures of the superstructure will be assigned to the relative sandboxes of culture, religion, philosophy, and the like. This sort of Foucauldian materialism of the superstructures is a widespread vice of our current thinking, in which it is so often politics and political power which are alone the truly materialistic levels, the more fundamental lower level of the economic being sublimated into those superstructures themselves: not capitalism but the idea of capitalism, not production but productivism, not production but consumption and so forth. If then, we try to correct the idealism of this political and judicial bias with some new emphasis on the base, what mostly comes out is a fetishization of the forces of production and the technologies of modern or contemporary capitalism, which are today, of course, informational and digital, communicational and cybernetic, that is to say, immaterial. But that is also a category mistake.

What must be understood is that Marx is not a mechanical materialist but a historical one. Not the chapter on the commodity form but rather the chapter on cooperation—asabiyya—is in Marx the crucial and “materialist” intervention. The fourfold scheme emerges here as the allegory of production itself: the literal level, the text itself, is the illusion that it is our machinery, our technology (the industrial revolution, the digital revolution), which is the driving force both of the bewildering metamorphoses of our daily lives and also the direction of our history as such.

Paradoxically, then, this means that what has generally been understood as the base or infrastructure in Marxist theory—the forces of production and the relations of production—is itself more complicated than its stereotypes allow: and is in fact divided internally into a kind of base-and-super-structure combination in its own right. What is not generally understood is that it is the social relations of production—the labor process itself—which is the truly material base of the process, while the so-called forces of production—technology and science—are somehow (in a material sense) “super-structural” to the relations and determined by them. The most consequent Marxian historians of science have insisted (generally in vain) on the priority of class relations and the labor process (including population) over scientific and technological “discoveries” and innovations whose story necessarily results in the various idealist theories of progress that still govern our textbooks and our unconscious or habitual pictures of historical change.²¹ Philosophies based on technological progress are necessarily ideological; and their “materialism” must ultimately be identified as a mechanical materialism of the static, deterministic type developed in the eighteenth century and denounced by Marx in his proposal for a more dynamic and more truly dialectical historical materialism.

This is no doubt the point at which metaphysics enters the argument, along with the various temptations to posit this or that human nature. Human individuals are biologically incomplete, and the intelligible unit of which they are a part is not even the reproductive unit of the two sexes but rather the larger group whose work in whatever way assures their existence, their survival, and indeed their reproduction.

It is important to avoid the temptation to classify the historical variety of such groups, whose dimensions and structure vary widely, in political terms such as the polis or the empire, or in cultural terms such as the clan or the kinship group, or the religious or linguistic community. The level on which these various collective structures are determinate is unrepresentable; and political science, along with cultural anthropology itself, are themselves mere allegories of its deeper structural determination.

But if we cannot account for the collectivity in positive terms, which are invariably tainted by their various self-generated ideologies, then at least we can try to discern them by way of the limits they impose on all the other levels. This is the sense in which the shape of the group limits our thinking, our representations (as for example in the various literary genres), and even, I would argue, our conceptual knowledge itself. For each age has the science (and political science) it deserves, and the dimensions of that specific historical collectivity is the ultimate instance that either permits the mind’s invention of the calculus or of quantum mechanics, or prevents it. Perhaps it is this notion, that the forces of production, now grasped as the evolution of Western science, take the form of Enlightenment progress, which is the most pernicious pre-Marxist illusion, not to speak of the quantity of books produced by its pseudodiscipline, the so-called history of ideas.

A Marxian revision of the allegory of the capitalist mode of production would then look something like this:

ANAGOGICAL: culture (commodification)

MORAL: power and domination (politics, the state), the juridical system

ALLEGORICAL: the collective (relations of production)

LITERAL: technology (the forces of production)

I would add that it is also an ideological mistake to situate class struggle on the political level, whereas in reality its existence lies in the labor process itself, whose form the other levels cooperate to preserve and to legitimate, at the same time that the whole structure is swept forward by time and historical contradiction into those unintended consequences of our intended ones which Hegel called “the ruse of reason.”

But we must also emphasize the positive by underscoring the productive effects of this unrepresentability of the collective: something very precisely to be found in the allegorical structures that complete and compensate our empirical experience of the defects, the insufficiencies, and the failures of our particular collective system with Utopian fore-shadowings of a radically different system. This shadowy Utopian dimension of our represented realities is a kind of anagogical consciousness always present even if by negation in the most reactionary or dystopian images of our “current situation”; and it is also the unrepresentable transcendence which fulfills the most explicit progressive and political representations of that situation, whose practical thrust its conscious identification can only enhance.

VI

In conclusion, I return to the texts at issue in the essay on which this is a commentary. One of the most frequent misunderstandings of this essay lay in the assumption that it fetishized the national or state form and that it is meant to propagate the idea that all allegory is national.

This was an illusion essentially produced by my choice of texts, both of which arise from a specific historical period in which the nation is called upon to regenerate the collectivity, as in Lu Xun, or is literally in the process of emergence and state formation as in Ousmane, whose production was largely stimulated by decolonization (along with an accompanying disillusionment). But a later period of world literary development that one might still characterize as Third World began to allegorize other kinds of collective units, subgroups, and ethnicities, as in the Biafra rebellion and (from another side of the political spectrum) the resistance of the Zulus to South African liberation. Indeed, the whole period of the wars of national liberation produced a variety of group models that resist the old models of the nation and of so-called nation formation, as in the Palestinian resistance or the Cuban conception of the foco. At the same time, one finds elegiac celebrations of the nation in countries in decline (my example was the Galdos of the Spanish loss of empire at the end of the nineteenth century), as well as the promotion of seemingly private and individual relationships as forms of Utopian protest against a universal conformism or an omnipresent and puritanical traditionalism. The situation is here, as always, everything; and our slogan should be, not only that everything is allegorical, but even more, that all allegory is Utopian!