Infinite Revolution and Posthistory

Culbreath's Comments

Photograph by Alexandre Kojève, taken during his tour of China

I know that I said in yesterday morning’s post on Mao’s ‘infinitization of the dialectic’ would be my last one until New Years, but my good friend Jonathan Culbreath dropped an intriguing comment that I’ve felt deserved a response in post form, rather than letting it linger down in the endless endnotes that comment sections tend to become.

Jonathan writes:

This is very interesting to me, because I always read that section from Boris Groys, about, communism as the coexistence of contradictory opposites, to be a kind of rephrasing of Kojève’s characterization of posthistory. The same idea Vince [Garton] was channeling in his piece on liberalism as the supremacy of language. So it’s interesting to me to take that also as an interpretation of Mao’s endless revolution, which initially seems to jettison the idea of a posthistory. In fact, there is a footnote somewhere in the Introduction where Kojève explicitly criticizes the idea of a permanent revolution, and I always wondered whether Kojève was referring at all to Mao’s idea here. The other alternative is that Kojève is just referring to the liberalism of endless discourse - but that raises the question what differentiates Mao’s idea here from liberalism?

I definitely agree that Groys, when discussing communism as the mode of political administration that allows the full expression of paradox, is drawing upon his study of Kojève—I have read an article or interview, which I’m too lazy/tired to locate at the present moment, where he cites specifically the Kojève analysis of Soviet philosophy that seems to have engendered the very weird argument of Communist Postscript. At any rate, I do not believe that particular essay of Kojève’s has been translated yet, but there might be some folks on twitter dealing in second-hand samizdat copies of it.

It is interesting though. When I first read Communist Postscript, having not become familiar with Kojève yet, Mao’s transformation of the dialectic is the first thing that I went to as a foothold to understand exactly what Groys was trying to say. There may be a matter of historical-intellectual filiation at work here: there’s an open debate in academic circles that study Mao (and this is something that Allinson touches on, albeit briefly, in his book) about how much Mao was borrowing from Stalin when he rejiggered/decapitated the dialectic, though it seems that Mao was plumbing these territories before studying the Soviet coursework on dialectical materialism. At any rate, there have been suggestions that Stalin himself dispensed with the negation of negation, and thus carried out a de facto extension of the dialectic to infinity. This would seem very flush with the Kojève-Groys reading of Stalin’s embrace of the real, ontological weight of paradox.

Maybe this is something that is elucidated by material history itself. I think we can pose Mao’s program as the next developmental step beyond Stalin, picking up within the Chinese context the ‘real movement’ after the USSR began to deviate in the post-Stalin years (this being the ultimate victory of the new class over proletarian interests within the party bureaucracy). One can almost think of think of the bifurcating and untethered dialectic at work in the Sino-Soviet split itself: the One socialist sphere became split into Two poles, a Chinese pole and a Soviet pole, now functioning as antagonistic contradictions. To compound matters is the fact that this was the multiplication of global poles, the deadly triangle of the United States - Soviet Union - China that underpinned Cold War tensions.

I dunno. Something to mull over.

At any rate, it seems to be that much of this problem revolves around the question of time. At almost precisely the midway point of Communist Postscript, Groys gives a pretty neat definition of what exactly dialectics do: “the dialectic temporalizes paradox” (my emphasis). In other words, the dialectic does not allow paradox to remain stable, it puts it into motion—and here we’re converging with Mao in a quite direct way. But this is a motion that is both within time, and allows the experience of time to be felt, or in other words actually expresses that temporality that it has been cast into.

Which raises the question: what is the time of the dialectic? Kojève has some comments, buried in the chapter of the Introduction titled ‘A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept’ that might be relevant here. He writes there that “the Time that Hegel has in view is the Time that, for us, is historical (and not biological or cosmic) Time”. He then a critique of Hegel, precisely for Hegel’s maneuver of conflating of historical time with this elusive figure of cosmic time:

In the Phenomenology, Hegel is very radical. As a matter of fact (at the end of the next to last paragraph of the book and at the beginning of the last, page 563), he says that Nature is Space, whereas Time is History. In other words: there is no natural, cosmic Time; there is Time only to the extent that there is History, that is, human existence-that is, speaking existence. Man who, in the course of History, reveals Being by his Discourse, is the "empirically existing Concept" (der daseiende Begriff), and Time is nothing other than this Concept. Without Man, Nature would be Space, and only Space. Only Man is in Time, and Time does not exist outside of Man; therefore, Man is Time, and Time is Man that is, the "Concept which is there in the [spatial] empirical existence" of Nature (der Begriff der da ist).

But in his other writings, Hegel is less radical. In them, he admits the existence of a cosmic Time. But in so doing, Hegel identifies cosmic Time and historical Time.

He adds in a footnote:

This, in my opinion, is his basic error; for if life is a temporal phenomenon, biological Time surely has a structure different from that of historical or human Time; the whole question to know how these two Times coexist; and they probably coexist with a cosmic or physical Time, which is different from both in its structure. [my emphasis]

Kojève does admittedly wonder: can we even consider ‘cosmic time’ to be a form of time? Going further, he draws both biological, cosmic, and historical time into alignment with different temporal expressions. Biological time is concerned with the primacy of the past (“fundamental biological phenomena is probably Memory in the broadest sense), cosmic time is associated with the present (it is presence as such), and historical time deals with the influx of the future into present. It is time “characterized by the primacy of the Future”, and he draws this out by describing a figure who acts in anticipation of a future that hasn’t been actualized yet, who acts negatively towards other possibilities that would prevent that future.

So the question of time is related intimately related to this question of posthistory, because posthistory proceeds from the development of history itself, which is this unfolding of historical time. Posthistory marks the ultimate culmination of historical processes: it is the realization of all possibilities, and so the decisions that he uses to describe historical time are all exhausted. I suppose this means that in posthistory, historical time itself stops. Yet, because cosmic time (the time of the universe) isn’t identical with historical time, it would follow that it persists even alongside the end of history.

This becomes even clearer when we take posthistory as being, basically, the ‘nothing ever happens’ meme, in the sense that nothing happens that truly has historical meaning. But clearly things continue to happen, there are events and catastrophes and innovations and revolutions, the natural world continues to chug along—the cosmos itself hasn’t been reduced to an infinite crystallization of stasis. So in that sense I think we can say that yes, while notions of posthistory do not exist in Mao as far as I know (though it also isn’t foreclosed—his suggestion that socialist economics will be lost over the course of a million years says little about these transformations in the conceptual avenue that Kojève was pursuing), there isn’t much in the way blocking these two position from being woven together.

Where it gets tricky is that Mao isn’t making this Kojèvean move of splitting historical and cosmic time; historical time is cosmic time for Mao. The historical development of civilization, subjected to radical and abrupt changes, heavy contingencies and ironic reversals, are a reflection of underlying universal laws, even if this is driven in the first instance by acts of voluntary will. But both also equivocate at times. On the side of Kojève, he writes in a footnote that “it could be that the cosmic and biological forms of Time exist only as Time only in relation to Man—that is, in relation to Historical time”. On the side of Mao, he almost seems to suggest at times that the infinite character of the universe (time and space as infinite at the macroscopic level, infinitely divisible at the microscopic) is really a question of human cognition, the relationship to nature as mediated through activity and technical instruments. This would indeed be the cosmic form of time existing only in “relation to Man”, in “relation to Historical time”.

This brings us on how to differentiate liberalism’s ceaselessness from Mao’s own revolutionary sense of infinite transformation (and, for what it’s worth, I believe that when Kojève used the term ‘permanent revolution’, he’s alluding to the concept put forth by Trotsky, which Mao went to great lengths to distance himself from. We can set that aside for now, but it would be cool to return to it at some point). I think the precise point of division is our starting place, the importance of the paradox: because liberalism is organized around flexible networks of competing private interests, it stabilizes itself through the achievement of compromise, which are mediated through an institutional matrix grounded upon the rule of law.

At the same time, liberal is forever modifying these institutions, lending to them a kind of morphological substance, because it must be forever adding to itself (i.e., bringing differentiating interests into alignment with its legal order and system of rights). It becomes a self-subverting worldview, and we might align this morphological character with Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the ‘addition and subtraction of axioms’ that allows capital(ism) to remain stable while forever pursuing absolute instability.

In other words, liberalism is a machine that reconciles the Other to itself, and in doing so strives to eliminate the problem of the paradox by pushing itself to the furthest horizon. The irony is that this is ultimately a paradoxical configuration, liberalism seems to ultimately obscure the ‘dark space of the paradox’ while being forced, constantly, to grapple with its existence. This is ultimately isomorphic to Garton’s own critique of liberalism, because he points out that liberalism’s language-based regime can never encompass the true Real that underpins it. Liberalism for him is basically simulation, and it is a simulation that is constantly breaking down.

Mao, meanwhile, fully grounds the Chinese experiment in socialism not in principles of compromise, but in the paradox itself, the splitting of the One into the Two. While the Soviet Union under Stalin might have implicitly organized themselves around the recognition and embrace of paradox (the Groysian example of A and not-A all at once), it is made totally explicit within the Chinese experiment at every stage.

One could probably counter that when China under Xi speaks of “win-win cooperation” in geopolitics and international economic affairs, that this is ultimately a capitulation to a liberal worldview (and China does, at times, defend the ultimately liberal basis of international law, as it would be realized ideally in transnational organizations like the United Nations). But “win-win cooperation” exists in a secondary position to the more primary paradox or contradiction that I talked about in my post, which was the embrace, all at once, of integrating world marketization and multipolarity.

On last note: it is worth keeping in mind that in the Kojèvean articulation of posthistory, this snaking path of historical development does ultimately proceed in a circle, bringing us right back to the beginning of things. But this shouldn’t be understood directly as a simplistic cyclical theory of history: it is the encompassing of all human thought that has happened across the span of historical time, the total summation not being realized as the ultimate negation of it all, but the whole contradiction-strewn consortium being allowed to be properly expressed for the first time. And that is true paradox.

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Ok, this is me really signing off for the holidays. Cheers!