The Audio Stylings of Chris Levens
"I'm a Gangster"

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Historical Cycles

Yes, that's right, more Hardt and Negri. This time, it is a double edged quote: on the one hand, it should put to rest the complaint Stratkey made about these guys being Marxist and Hegelian; on the other hand, it offers a healthy view of history.

"History has a logic only when subjectivity rules it. [. . .] We find this entire mode of reasoning [historical cycles] completely inadequate, because every theory of cycles seems to laugh at the fact that history is a product of human action by imposing an objective law that rules over the intentions and resistances, the defeats and the victories, the joys and the suffering of humans."

So first, putting to rest the Marxist/Hegelian smear. Hegel's dialectical understanding of historical cycles, and Marx's own version of dialectical materialism, don't work in the era of postmodern Empire. The dialectic is a product of Modernity's own internal crisis. When Modernity ends and its crisis evaporates, so does its dialectical logic. These guys are saying that we shouldn't maintain a theory of historical cycles, Hegelian or otherwise. They go on to say that these superimposed theories of historical necessity blind us to the possibilities that are around us.

Once they make this point, I'm not sure in what sense we can label them Hegelian or Marxist.

Now to my second point: I like their view of history. History isn't objective -- it is subjective. In other words, it takes human subjectivity to create a theory of historical laws. We may use these theories of historical laws or logic, as they call it, to try to understand experience, but we must always make sure we do not naturalize these laws -- we can't mistake the creation of our minds with independent reality.

It reminds me of Old Testament mockery of idolatry: the human makes a statue out of wood one minute, then the next minute they are kneeling down before the statue as if the statue were their creator. The creation becomes naturalized.

The value of their understanding of history's subjectivity is that it allows us to identify short comings in our own theories. If we don't recognize the subjective nature of history, then we are trapped in the theoretical creation of others. Like an idol worshipper, we mistake the creation of humans with something uncreated, something natural, something objective. But once we realize that the idol was our creation -- once we see historical laws as human creations -- we are no longer enslaved to it.

If we think something is impossible, then it becomes impossible. We make it impossible by thinking it is impossible. We won't try to do things we think are impossible. If we think there is a natural law that makes certain things impossible, then we will never try to achieve those things. The first step to opening up new possibilities is to recognize that "natural laws" are the creation of subjectivities -- they do not exist independently.
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