Against Anglofuturism
Notes
The most arresting piece of ‘futuristic’ writing I have ever read is actually a depiction of the past, from Stendhal’s book ‘The Charterhouse of Parma”:
“On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte marched into the city of Milan, at the head of the youthful army which had just crossed the Bridge of Lodi, and taught the world that, after the lapse of centuries, Cæsar and Alexander had found a successor at last. The prodigies of genius and daring witnessed by Italy in the course of a few months, roused her people from their slumbers. But one week before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still took them for a horde of brigands, whose habit it was to fly before the troops of his Royal and Imperial Majesty. Such, at all events, was the information repeated three times a week in their little newspaper, no bigger than a man’s hand, and printed on dirty-looking paper. In the middle ages, the Milanese had been as brave as the French of the Revolution, and their courage earned the complete destruction of their city by the German emperor. But their chief occupation, since they had become his “faithful subjects,” was to print sonnets on pink silk handkerchiefs whenever any rich or well-born young lady was given in marriage…. Between such effeminate habits and the deep emotions stirred by the unexpected arrival of the French army, a great gulf lay. Before long a new and passionate order of things had supervened. On May 15, 1796, a whole people became aware that all it had hitherto respected was supremely ridiculous, and occasionally hateful, to boot. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the downfall of the old ideas. To expose one’s life became the fashionable thing.”
This passage, ever since I first read it, immediately reminded me of the brief flourishing of happiness attending the events of 2016. Immediately, one gets the sense of what everyone, even the detractors, felt were absolutely hallucinogenic change undergone by European society in the years 1789-1815. It was to document these changes that Reinhart Kosselleck wrote his book Futures Past; thereby inaugurating the academic study of temporality. The 18th century saw the emergence and maturity of ‘History’ as a serious discipline: Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon and many others sought to write a new sort of History in which ‘the sentiments’ (i.e: natural forces, psychological dispositions and fashion - what we’d today call determinism) took priority. From this, it was a natural step to propose historical laws by which both ‘progress’ and ‘decline’ could be measured.
Consequently, the 18th century was the first to experience the vertigo and paranoia of ‘the End of History’: it was already perceived, before Auschwitz or Stalin, that civilisation had reached a kind of placid stasis in which commercial activity, driven by the new economics of ‘luxury’, would supplant politics for good. All of the old allegiances, with which the Enlightenment generation had grown up, such as Catholic vs. Protestant, Jacobite vs. Hanoverian and Commonwealthman vs. Cavalier had, by 1750, become quaint relics of an earlier time. Many perceived the scientifically trained armies of the 18th century, which to us seem very real and dangerous, as akin to how we perceive drone warfare in the 21st century: as proof that individual heroism no longer mattered on the battlefield. In this opening speech from The Robbers, Schiller gives eloquent voice to what was, in fact, the European cultural consensus in the years immediately preceding the revolution: