Estate

This is going to be a post principally about getting on with what in the last of my ‘brief items’ posts, Oct. 19, I said I would try for, which is to start more deliberately attending to Pankaj Mishra, his work and dialogical intersections and so on. But it’s not going to begin with Mishra, it’s going to begin (and end, to a degree) with Vlad Vexler, for whom I sustain genuine appreciation and admiration in spite of many, only I think ever-deepening points of disagreement.

Useful for jumping in is Vexler’s third short (9 min.) post-U.S.-election chat, from Nov. 7. Its content will be in no way new to anyone much familiar with Vexler. (For the reader who may not be: he records here from bed owing to an ME / CFS setback after contracting Covid over the summer.)

I’ve set that to start playing midway-through because I intend in part, here, to resume with the thread pursued, in past posts, of a sort of core of concern toward which my reaction to Vexler mainly orients — that is, with his central and centering ‘democratic decline’ theme.

It won’t at this point be altogether a parenthesis to note that a good thing to do as you hear Vexler, if you give him time, is to listen for different ways he’ll make the political ‘center’ object or subject of reference. In the recording above, about the 7-min. mark, we have:

So, in twenty- [pause] twenty?, trust in America is lower — trust in institutions — than in twenty-sixteen. And it’s lower in 2024 than in 2020. And it will be lower in 2028 than in 2024. So notice this, right? If a certain kind of technocratic centrism doesn’t work today because there is not enough trust, it will certainly fail to work when there is even less trust in society four years from now.

In the first of these short post-U.S.-election responses, posted late (Americas-time) on Nov. 5, in a contrast of some significant subtlety, the liberal center is a you, the primary audience he’s urgent to address.

One way this matters for me is in that I recognize myself, simply, in that ‘you’ Vexler’s talking to. If disagreement with Vexler I find in myself today identifies me with a broad political left, that’s a mark of large, long-developing change in my understanding of the world, for which this post — together with quite a few preceding posts now — serves in part to help me keep on in observing and thinking through. From my present perspective, there certainly is in a ‘center’ Vexler sees and speaks to something I must acknowledge as belonging to my own journey and with which as matter for reflection I’ll always find it necessary to identify.

In another way, I take this to matter to us as interpretive question to test and apply in making sense of people with views like Vexler’s. ‘Center’ for him isn’t a simple term, and listeners in turn do well not to take any usage Vexler may give to it at face value merely.

If you do watch the second half of that video above, anyhow, let me now recommend also having a listen to the first, in which Vexler offers a summary account of what he’s calling ‘historical tendency’ and digresses on difficulties in grasping the West’s Cold-War and early 21st-century period as anomaly in the greater pattern.

Now, — forgive me! — the tendency with Vexler on history, I’m afraid, is to leave a good deal of history out. Not in a total way, of course. He can cover a lot of ground, and I enjoy him thoroughly in big-narrative mode, as for instance on Putin’s Russian-Hellenism-redux. But (what I regard as) Vexler’s great ‘democratic decline’ mistake doesn’t derive from confusion or obtuseness about democracy’s meanings only, it derives from his big story’s being lopsided, out-of-kilter, in erratic and degenerating orbit. Our line of thinking now threatens, as you may have seen already, to bring us shortly to Mishra. But while we’re doing post-election self-work, let’s have a look at ‘Exit Right,’ Gabe Winant’s Nov. 8 article for Dissent.

I’m not going to review Winant’s argument. The piece is free to read, and better that you spend time reading Winant than reading me. I will however borrow a chunk from its borrowing from Stuart Hall’s Hard Road to Renewal, published in 1988 when, by comparison with today’s, the moment both for Western and for global democracy as understood by someone like Vexler looks positively pregnant. Hall speaks, in the text, to a Labour Party viewed from its left, to a political center long on its heels under Thatcher’s hard-right premiership, in a way almost seeming to overlap at points with Vexler — but in the end readable only as calling for democracy founded in a way Vexler seems to show little interest in seeing achieved. (But then, one thing Vexler never encourages you to think you might reasonably call him is a socialist.)

If politics energises people to develop new demands, that is a sure sign [to party leadership] that the natives are getting restless. You must expel or depose a few. You must get back to that fiction, the ‘traditional Labour voter’ . . . .

[Labour] politics has ceased to have a connection with this most modern of all resolutions — the deepening of democratic life.

Without the deepening of popular participation in national-cultural life, ordinary people don’t have any experience of actually running anything. We need to re-acquire the notion that politics is about expanding popular capacities, the capacities of ordinary people. And in order to do so, socialism itself has to speak to the people whom it wants to empower, in words that belong to them as late twentieth century ordinary folks.

You’ll have noticed that I’m not talking about whether the Labour Party has got its policy on this or that issue right. I’m talking about a whole conception of politics: the capacity to grasp in our political imagination the huge historical choices in front of the British people today. I’m talking about new conceptions of the nation itself: whether you believe Britain can advance into the next century with a conception of what it is like to be ‘English’ which has been entirely constituted out of Britain’s long, disastrous imperialist march across the earth. If you really think that, you haven’t grasped the profound cultural transformation required to remake the English.

To remake the English (or the Americans) — that’s a note you won’t hear Vexler strike. You won’t hear Vexler assert straightforwardly that Western countries have liberal-democracy paths forward on the basis of ‘a conception of what it is like to be [e.g.] “English” . . . entirely constituted out of [their] disastrous imperialist march[es] across the earth’ either, certainly. And yet neither by any means is that sort of conception of citizen-subject national identity, the sort Hall dismisses as dead end, alien to what Vexler’s liberal-democratic advocacy aims at. Why that should be so isn’t this post’s topic. I’d like to come back to the problem in a future post. In any event, we are going to hang with Vexler a little longer on the way to Mishra.

Mishra’s work has entirely to do, in one way of looking at it, with the project of assisting heads in need of getting themselves around the Western citizen’s, and the world’s, inheritance in long, disastrous — economically disastrous, politically disastrous, morally disastrous — imperialist marches like Britain’s. (Britain in this respect the paradigm, I expect we can fairly allow.) I hope however to avoid, here, appearing to contrast Mishra with Vexler in a simplistic way, as though to say that Vexler fails in some crude sense to notice colonialism and its consequences. Such a Vlad Vexler it wouldn’t be worth our time to listen to. (If you’re a liberal — and you are — he is worth listening to at least a little.) Vexler’s critical posture and Mishra’s could in fact be said, on various points, to have lot in common — which makes it for me all the more striking to hold mentally in view the things that exercise Vexler in his frequent commentary on the subject of journalism and media, critically important in his view of liberal-democratic order’s basic character, as I’m listening to the recorded talk by Mishra we’re coming to below.

Not the ideal example of Vexler on journalism and media, but in any case a recent and clear one, is his taking-to-task last week of The Guardian for ending (for now) active employment of their account on Elon Musk’s Twitter.

It’s another topic that needs its own post. For now I’ll just say that most absurd, in my view, about the discussion Vexler offers in this instance is his insistence that Twitter — above all, Twitter as it stands now — be seen as constituent part of whatever ‘the public square’ may be. How does anybody, let alone someone of Vexler’s faculties, arrive at so barren and pointless an understanding of public space?

I am being pretty harsh toward someone I actually like. To be fair, his is a view of ‘public square’ reflecting what so many, not least in the mix the generations of stewards of worthy cultural edifices like The Guardian itself, have worked to establish and will today naturally go on validating, even as the forces produced elevate new little gods of Musk’s or comparable type to places where they can wave their dicks in all our faces and require it be received as ground of public discourse. And again to be fair to Vexler, the Guardian statement seems to me nine-tenths play for attention, free of substance even where elementally correct. (I certainly do support the organization’s move. Never mind the statement.)

But the susceptibility to vapidity in the liberal mind — by which I do not mean anything anyone else has more truly or intensively or shamefully a share in than I — evident for a fleeting online moment in counterpart posts from the Guardian’s institutional burden-bearer execs and editors on one hand and an ordinarily sharp-thinking solo critic like Vexler on the other, is something to wonder at.

I’m not going to offer the slightest suggestion as to a possible how, a causal path, but I will put it out there even so that in some aspect, what we observe at moments such as this one, framed for us by Vexler from an impulse somewhere between the philosopher’s to clarify and the content-creator’s to react, is just symptom of our readiness at once to see in the great liberal common thing its genius and fruitfulness and to unsee the famines, mass oppressions, unbounded industrialized wars, genocides, &c., which have been just as much, at least as much, its condition of formal continuity.

At any rate, having heard a version of Vexler’s admonitions to the priesthood of Media to hold soberly its responsibility for democratic life and adhere truly to the form of liberal doctrine he recommends, let’s give a little space to Mishra. The award event recorded was held in mid-September — before, as far as I can recall, I had any awareness of him. My introduction to Mishra was in early October. CBC Ideas published the recording at end of October, and I turned it up (I forget whence) last week. The text of the award address has been published in article form by N + 1.

I wonder about Mishra’s state of mind as he put this award speech together. It’s not very hopeful in outlook. (Moments of ebullient audience response captured in the recording give the funny feeling that you’re overhearing some people listening to a different talk than the one you are, or maybe that a bunch of folks got a little drunk just before coming to the auditorium.) He doesn’t encourage us to believe that democratic order has yet its chance to prevail, only that there will be . . . change.

Rather than charge the media professions to renew their commitment to a form of liberal myth, Mishra invokes Karl Kraus, prophet in 1920s Vienna against ‘intellectual self-annihilation,’ humankind’s ‘war of extermination against itself’ induced by the institutional press. He does on the other hand suggest that if younger journalism / non-fiction guild members, less trammeled with the baggage of what Vexler’s in the habit of referring to as Fukuyamianism than are those Mishra’s (and my) age and older, gained greater latitude to shape the profession — that is, if older writers were in effect to take a back seat (exactly how he doesn’t say) — then the profession’s prospects for making a difference for the good in the world, currently pretty poor, could improve.

Maybe most pause-worthy about this speech where we’re concerned is something we might hear as echo of Stuart Hall, above — that what it is to be English needs, long has needed, ‘remaking.’ More than echo, though: Mishra elaborates and extrapolates ‘remake the English’ as from the perspective of a generalized global non-West:

Long before [Israel’s current multi-front] war erupted, and coverage of it became brazenly mendacious, people of non-Western ancestry were making urgent demands to decolonize Western systems of knowledge, and a change in the self-image of the former empires that enforced white supremacy. This involves an overhaul of public cultures, from replacements of place names, statues and museum holdings to refining of academic curricula, journalism and political rhetoric.

And he doesn’t leave us to assure ourselves that (as to structure and effect, at least) the white supremacy and political racism lie in an unevolved past or, today, wholly with the right.

Understandably, this makeover is unacceptable to many in the West. Their response is to double down on failed ideas and shattered assumptions, and scramble to reinforce the structures of inequality that benefitted them. White nationalism in politics today has come to have a sinister counterpart in the cultural realms that seeks to stamp out intellectual diversity even while paying lip service to demographic pluralism.

We have seen this despotic power at work in the attempt by many in Western political, corporate, and media classes to suppress scholarly and artistic explorations of racism and imperialism. We see it now in the crackdown on ordinary political dissent. A lecture I was scheduled to give on Israel, Gaza, and the West for the London Review of Books was pre-emptively canceled by its hosts, London’s Barbican Center. Coming to Canada, I have discovered more instances of people who try to resist the enforced depoliticization of literature and arts and find themselves ostracized.

He advises people in Western political settings to be ready to stand against prevailing normative forces.

The South African writer Kagiso Lesego Molope asked at the Writer’s Trust gala in Toronto a few months ago, ‘The time is coming when the world will start to apologize for what is happening — and when that time comes we will be asked: what did you do with your power?’ It is a question that all individuals and institutions have to ask ourselves. But many of them have, at best, assumed the posture of those Democratic delegates in Chicago who plugged their ears to the names of dead Palestinian children as they walked out of the convention center.

Vexler would — I think — have it (something like) that it is with getting yourself into power, yourself together with those you make common cause with, that people as ‘political actors’ ought to be concerned. Those especially who really hold principles of political order constituted for equitable sharing of power, I suspect he would say, need to be about the work of attaining it in existing institutional contexts. To be guessing anticipatorily about how under a reset future condition of the landscape you might or might not be prepared to account for choices made while in some prior place of relative access to power, he might object, falls somewhere down the list of priorities and, perhaps further, betrays misunderstanding of what he means to convey under the term ‘historical tendency.’ Insofar as that’s a decent approximation of Vexler’s view, I think we have to say that he can’t be altogether wrong. Still, following Vexler here leaves one strangely abstracted from the sphere of real conflict, where so many experience acting politically and just making it to tomorrow as one undifferentiable thing. His political orienteering and his history need the grounding and the dimensionality toward which someone like Molope might urge him.

How far, finally, Mishra and Vexler might agree or disagree about which are the failed ideas and shattered assumptions remaining in contention in and adjacent to Western arenas of power, for instance, or about what it is to be ‘depoliticized’ — an often-recurring expression in Vexler’s videos — are lines of inquiry I like the thought of working through, even if one were to say they aren’t examples of the most important things we could ask about the main concerns of either. I could wish for the two to encounter each other someday, and would wish in any event for Vexler to find himself in the end nearer in understanding to Mishra.