An extract from the book Destroy Nineveh! Wiping Out the Past (forthcoming). The conversations in the book concern how we often contribute to the destruction of the past through the means by which we try to make sense of it. The conversations are set between 2001 and 2016, in and around Berlin. The book is in six parts, and three extracts are available via this blog.
TY, October 21 2016.
***
A seminar room at Humboldt University in Berlin, less than
ten days after the attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001. The room is
one of those reconstructed after the immense damage to the fabric of the
university, during WW2. To reach it you have to go up the main stairs from the
ground floor in the main building, and pass a quotation on history by Karl
Marx, in letters of gold incised in black marble, who was a student of the
university. Since for most of the post WW2 period, the university was in East
Berlin, the rebuilding of the university was controlled by the communist party
– hence the prominence of the Marx quotation. The quotation is ‘The philosophers have
only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point,
however, is to change it.’
Round the seminar table are around eight students, in
addition to Dr. Sadiq Kishati, and Dr. Ralf Ganz. Dr Kishati is chairing a
discussion, which should have been exclusively concerned with the nature of history,
historical inquiry, the interpretation of evidence, and the models and
paradigms in which history can be understood. However the event of September eleventh has
naturally intruded on the thoughts and discussion of the participants.
Dr Kishati asked if those around the table had heard about
the remark about the twin towers, made by the avant-garde musician KarlHeinz
Stockhausen. Some had, some had not. So Kishati repeated Stockhausen’s
statement, which was to the effect that the assault on the twin towers was one
of the greatest works of art ever made. ‘Naturally this has caused uproar,
since the ‘work of art’ involved the death of thousands of people’. ‘It sounds
an incredibly insensitive and inappropriate things for anyone to say,
especially by an established artist, as Stockhausen is’ was the response from
the far end of the table. Another student said ‘but then, he thinks he comes
from a planet revolving around the star Sirius’. There was laughter in the
room.
Dr Kishati waited for the laughter to subside. ‘So he says,’
was his response. ‘But I wonder what you think he meant by the remark, however
ill-judged it might have been to say it so close to the event?’ There was a
short pause, and then a graduate student named Wolf Holliger began to speak. “It
was a deliberate attack on something which cannot be directly attacked by a
subversive organisation. Not in purely military terms. The World Trade Center
buildings are emblematic of global capitalism. You can’t easily attack the idea
of global capitalism, but you can attack something which symbolises it’.
Kishati responded, saying, ‘so you think Stockhausen meant by describing the
assault as a work of art, that it was a symbolic attack?’
Holliger responded in the affirmative. ‘And that makes it a
piece of art – in Stockhausen’s mind at least, since art works with symbols,
symbolic constructions, and symbolic acts. Plus the fact that it was captured
on many cameras, meaning that the event has been represented in terms of
images.’ ‘Indeed’, said Kishati. ‘And images which will haunt our
imaginations.’ Kishati paused for a moment, and Doctor Ganz took the moment to
remark that ‘the attack was clearly conceived in terms of spectacle, in a place
occupied by millions of people who would see and experience the attack. It
wasn’t about removing the function of the World Trade Center in global
capitalism, but about showing that someone really hated either capitalism, or
the US, which is the engine of global capitalism. Which means that since the
function of the attack was symbolic, rather than representing a real and
damaging attack on global capitalism, it might be considered as a piece of
art.’
‘Ok’ said Dr Kishati, ‘We’ll take that as our starting point
for today’s discussion. Mainly because the event can be understood as a
representation of something beyond the act itself. Which is an aspect of the
meaning of history. I think we have just witnessed something of immense
historical importance, not just for the United States, not just for global
capitalism, the people of the world, but, in the long-term at least, also for
the perpetrators.‘
Kishati reached into a folder sitting on the table slightly
to his left, and took out two or three sheets of papers. ‘We might begin be
asking ourselves what our understanding of history is, given that there is an
element of spectacle involved in it. Does anyone want to attempt a definition?’
He looked around the table, and saw no takers. Then after a few seconds,
another graduate student, named Jan Schmollen, shifted in his chair, and began
to speak. ‘Well we know it is about ordering information. It is also about
asking questions, in consequence of the need to order information’
.
Kishati smiled. ‘That’s quite correct. Historical writing as
we understand it began with the Greeks, and their word for it was ‘historia’,
and it always implied both ordering and questioning patterns of information. Other
earlier cultures wrote about events also, but it isn’t always clear the basis
on which they are recording events. They are almost exclusively official and
royal accounts of the actions and deeds of kings. However accounts written at
different periods of a reign might relate past events in quite different ways,
which is difficult for us to understand. The point does not seem to have been consistency,
and what they understood to be to be true is often unknown to us.’
‘One Egyptian pharaoh – or rather his scribes - wrote about
a campaign in Syria in which he fought a great battle against the Hittites. He
described it as a victory. This was the first contemporary account of the event
to come out of the ground when scientific excavation had begun. Unfortunately
for the pharaoh, eventually a Hittite account of the same battle emerged from
an excavation, and related things differently, suggesting that the Egyptian
king was lucky to escape with his life. It would be easy to assume that there
was a heavy element of propaganda in the Pharaoh’s account of the battle, and
quite possibly also in the Hittite account. At this distance it is hard to say
what the difference in the accounts means. But they are quite different, so
whatever the objective was in writing about the battle, it wasn’t about what we
might imagine to be an objective account. They may have had no such concept.’
Kishati paused, and adjusted his spectacles on his nose. ‘However,
the origin of historical writing might have been quite similar. The word
‘historia’ joins together a number of ideas which we do not automatically
connect in modern times. Such as the importance of blood, which is often
referred to in antiquity. By this I mean the importance of the family and
family connections. This concept was often extended to social groups such as
the gens, the clan, or the tribe. It was an important idea in Greece, in
ancient Rome, and also in Mesopotamia and in Egypt. The beginnings of historia therefore can be
understood in terms of a response to the importance of social ordering which
was understood in terms of blood relations.’
‘Ancient times were often violent times. There could be
internecine warfare, war between tribes, or between groups of tribes. It could
be war against an alliance, or a war to make an alliance possible; a war for
resources, for trade, a war to enforce justice and rights, or to establish or
reinforce power and prestige. Any number of things in fact. Often there would
be several grievances wrapped together. And almost always the gods were
understood to be involved in the struggle, as we can see strikingly illustrated
in Homer’s Iliad. I will return to this aspect of what history is a
little later.’
‘The point I’m making is that change was often an important
aspect of life in antiquity. Change could happen because of the nature of
personal relationships. Marriages, dynastic relationships, personal and tribal
enmities, changes in climate, bad harvests, changes in regional power, the
demand for tribute, and so on.’
Kishati paused for a few seconds. ‘Change needs to be
explained, because it happened all around, and often it was an unpredictable
phenomenon. The same is true today, but we use a different set of models and
approaches in order to explain things which happen. We think our modes of
explanation are generally more powerful and accurate than those in use in the
ancient world, and in fact we use our tools retrospectively to understand what
was going on in antiquity.’
‘We wouldn’t for example argue that if something bad
happened in antiquity, it was because the gods were displeased for some reason.
We wouldn’t look for some fault in ritual observance, nor would we look at a
list of omens for a clue as to the intentions of the divine, as the Romans did.
We wouldn’t look at the entrails of a sacrificial animal in order to gain an
insight into the cause of the ill-fortune.’
‘Not only that, we would not look seriously at their
contemporary understanding of the event, or their attempts to clarify and
rectify the problem. All these things are simply nonsense, and so they are
studiously disregarded by us. We look at the event and its context, and look
for the kinds of causes which we expect to be operable in the modern world, and
interpret accordingly. We look for the material, political and social causes
which lie beneath most if not all public events.’
‘In doing so, we have effectively removed a key concept from
consideration in the ancient world, which they understood to be intimately
involved in change, and which they considered to be one of the causal factors
of great importance to the conduct of human life.’
‘We have removed the divine. And we have removed the gods.
That is an important step in making events, and the human story in antiquity,
intelligible to us. But it means that we are not using the materials available
to us to analyse the ancient world in terms which they themselves would have
understood. They would have some grasp of what sense we make of their world,
since essentially what we do is analyse the past in terms of Aristotle’s
concept of the efficient cause, which is what we are doing when we explain
things in terms of a materialist conception of the world. But they would have
thought of this as a very limited mode of explanation, which is why they
employed another three principle causal mechanisms. These other causal
mechanisms are the formal, the material, and the final causes.’
‘There is no need to discuss the other causal mechanisms in
any detail, at least not at the moment. We think we do not employ them, though
we do. We simply do not single them out as causal mechanisms. It is important
however to be clear that, though there is a material cause available to
Aristotle, that is not the same thing as what we now understand as part of the
materialist conception of the world. When we look at antiquity in terms of that
conception, we are looking mainly at the efficient and physical cause of
change. That is what we think lies beneath all change, though it may not be
obvious to us unless we explore the evidence in detail.’
‘The upshot of the materialist conception of the world can
be understood in different ways. One of these is the implicit assertion that
everyone in antiquity was wrong as far as their understanding of the true
forces acting in their world is concerned. That’s quite an assertion. We aren’t
saying that they understood some aspects of their world, but hadn’t yet found
their way to a modern interpretation of their reality. We are saying that they
were for the most part plain wrong, and about most things. A world populated by
gods, demons and spirits, replete with magic and ritual, and the worship of
divine images, the sacrifice of animals, and the ritual examination of the
entrails of sheep and other animals, in order to understand the will and
intention of the gods, is a world of nonsense. And as it is nonsense to us, it
was nonsense then too, though, for whatever reasons, they failed to understand
this.’
Ralf Ganz looked over to Kishati, and said: ‘I think you are
talking about false consciousness’.Kishati looked across the table, and smiled. ‘I am indeed
talking about false consciousness. Which is one of the explanatory mechanisms
invoked by the creator of the materialist conception of the world, Karl Marx,
to explain how it is that we find so many different modes of understanding
among the human population. Most of which are nonsense, as we know.’
‘The idea of course is that whatever people actually believe
about their world, they are actually functioning within an array of societal
and physical forces which we understand in terms of materialism. That is Marx’s
great advance, and his legacy to the modern world.’
Ganz looked over again, and began to speak. ‘That insight
did not arrive all of a piece, and it is perhaps worth spending a few minutes
about its origin’. Kishati signalled that he was happy to hand over to Ganz.
‘Most of you at this university will know that Marx’s
doctoral dissertation was on the Greek philosopher Democritus, who was the
inventor of an ancient form of materialism, which sought to understand reality
in terms of the interplay of small objects which he called atoms. So we got a
material conception of the world, and the very beginnings of atomic theory from
the same person. So Marx was interested in materialism from his days as a
student.’
‘The actual route by which we got Marxist theory is actually
quite complicated, and involves an engagement with a body of ideas apparently
wholly at odds with a materialist understanding of the mechanics of change in
the world. The explanation for this may be that since Marx was looking, not
just at the mechanics of change in the world, but wanted to create a doctrine
in which man could be the principal agent of change, rather than an
intellectual framework which merely provided an explanation of change.‘
‘Firstly, it is important to know that Democritus did not
necessarily make a radical break with other Greek ideas about the world in
creating his materialist theory. It is perfectly possible to understand it
within a Parmenidean picture of the world, in which only one thing is
ultimately real, and that one thing does not change, and is wholly transcendent
of physical reality. But the physical world is filled with a near infinity of things,
and Parmenides did not deny the evidence of our senses, except to say that the
world of the many is a species of illusion.’
‘We do not dwell on that way of looking at things however,
and prefer to understand the world in terms of an uncritical acceptance of the
existence and reality of matter, and the physical forces which are associated
with it. That is the principal difference between materialism in antiquity, and
modern materialism.’