Chris Goode d.2021
Kevin Nolan has just made me aware of some of the material available on-line about the history of Chris Goode. The story seems to be that Goode had been dodging stories of sexual abuse of young men in his theatre companies for a number of years before being forced to close both of them. His husband then found illegal (category A) explicit images on Goode’s hard disc, and went to the police about them. Goode was arrested, questioned, released again. He then killed himself (in June 2021). We don’t know what the police knew, or what they would have done.
"He was one of the good guys, wasn’t he?
Maddy Costa thought so when she was invited by Goode to join Chris Goode and Company to write about the work as critic-in-residence in 2011. A fan of Goode’s work, she saw it as “a very romantic proposition” and at the time didn’t see it as being part of the myth-making that Goode was enacting around himself.
Over the past four years she has had to question everything she thought she knew about Goode. “It’s been so shattering, because I really believed that the work that Chris was doing was about finding different ways to live and finding alternatives to hierarchy, patriarchy and capitalism, and to find that all to be a front for abuse and paedophilia has properly broken me.”"
I am now going to quote material written by Xavier de Sousa and posted on Maddy Costa’s website, in the part given over to a dossier on Goode – and not about his creative side, I fear. The whole blog is subtitled “thoughts on theatre, writing, music, feminism, dancing, dreaming & mothering, by maddy costa”. There is more to life than Chris Goode, fortunately. Both de Sousa and Costa worked for one of Goode's theatre companies.
“”Manipulation of narratives is exactly where I place a big focus of his abuse. He used us, our stories, and our collective history, as protective shields for himself to normalise his abuse. When I say ‘us’ I mean everyone who worked with him but specifically queer and trans people and our shared histories.
Across his work, he often narrated and wrote about young men, inter-generational relationships, queer utopias. Often his work revolved around entering a new, exciting if obscured world. Weaklings had the form and narratives one might find when lost in an internet-hole at 4am in search for something one hasn't quite figured out yet. Ponyboy Curtis was about young men’s explorations of their own identities and sexuality. Men in the Cities explored fantasies of intergenerational lust and rape among other things. This was all merged within a broad artistic practice that existed in a grey area of definition, intentionally. The constant greyness of it all, allowed for him to play with nuances of trauma and fill them with obscurity and abuses that obfuscated our understanding that those narratives were actually an attempt to normalise the concept of paedophilia. The violence in those stories was the point, the normalisation of abuse was the point.
There are some incredibly dangerous precedents set by his actions. First, the ‘experimentalism’ of his writing and directing styles. He used experimentation as departure point but also as cloaking shield. Reflecting back now, I can see that the nuances he so revered in his writing, was in the language used, not in the actual content. The content was abuse, as was the goal, and they were actually in plain sight, framed as ‘difficult’ and ‘dark’ aspects of the human condition. The language was intricate and nuanced to obfuscate our perception of the abuses that happen in these stories, and their normalisation.
Secondly, many contexts have told me that they won’t engage or commission “this type of work any more” (i.e. queer work). Experimental theatre and performance art are already considered ‘too challenging’ in the UK theatre landscape, often too risky to programme/support.””
This much excerpted from de Sousa’s text, leaving out much else of great weight. This is only relevant to the poetry world because of the role which Goode played in that world. To my knowledge, that included making a theatre available for the avant-garde series SubVoicive on Monday evenings, when his theatre troupe had a night off; the anthology he edited, Better than language (i.e., love is better than language); and his poetry pamphlet, Boomer Console. It follows, obviously, that he liked modern poetry – he was one of us. I think concerns about his career as a serial abuser of young men tend to distract from his more obvious role as the embodiment of smugness. This is the aspect I prefer to dwell on. He couldn’t enter a room without feeling that he was making a stand, poignant and yet robust, against patriarchy, capitalism, convention, and heteronormativity. I found this hard to take. In the aurasphere, his aura reminded me profoundly of David Cameron. They just gave off the same vibe of fatherly and immovable smugness.
In 2000, I was asked to review a batch of pamphlets, of which Boomer console was one. I didn’t like it. Terrible Work published my review. I got echoes back telling me that the younger generation (of pamphleteers) were outraged and didn’t think I had any right to an opinion. Goode was an Important Person and knew other Important People. I was supposed to consecrate, not record my reactions. My feeling about that batch was that the poets had given up logic, so the bond which connects primary experiences to inner states of mind. They wanted states of mind to be autonomous from experience, and an accelerated, incoherent, excited, and confused manner of utterance was how they imposed that. They could be insulated from experience, so from a world run by people who didn’t care about them, by randomness. This loosed state was able to take the place of lyric utterance -at least for that group and their followers. I found that the inherited poetry had allowed the reader to share states of mind by being told what the series of experiences was, which had led up to them. That was the basis for sharing. The new random style didn’t arouse any particular state of mind in me. It didn’t work as poetry. It was like a building falling over on the horizon. What I wrote about Boomer Console was “What is the opposite of blank logic? darkened logic? chromatic logic? gloss logic? logic matte? logic latte?Chris Goode's pamphlet is called Boomer Console. If you are going to cut very rapidly it is useful to develop a way of making the images arresting and recognizable in a short space. If the individual snatches are blurred and uninterpretable, the overall effect is like a camera bouncing down a flight of steps one by one. From handheld authenticity to what? The impression made by this pamphlet is one of indifference and frustration. The “feel” of the eye constantly being distracted by a new thing from the old thing which it didn’t really engage with may be “contemporary” in that young people are having this experience while watching TV, flipping through racks of CDs, wandering around shopping malls, patrolling university libraries, etc. However, we suspect that one part of the future is being interested. The text gives off messages like “skittish” “fear of commitment” or “not taking things in”. The Stooges, of course, were able to take states of boredom and indifference and make you emotionally identify with them. But they knew how to fill the subliminal channels. Not use them as garbage chutes.”
When Chicago Review did an issue on Young British Poets, they took on four poets of whom Chris Goode was one. I suppose this is what tends to happen in these international showcases, that they get lumbered with people who are Impressive but Bad. Was that around 2005?
I can now see that severing links of logic could also be the basis for rejecting morality and persuading yourself that your actions have no effect on others, and so you aren’t accountable. I suppose that should have been obvious.
I have taken the ultimate step of using my catalogue and locating those books on the shelf. Console is still no good. However, his anthology, Better Than Language, is important. I read it as part of a batch of nine anthologies of New Poets, which muffled its impact on me somewhat. I collected 200 names from those books; I was overloaded. In a good way. Someone corrupt can enjoy, and understand, modern art, in the same way that a bank robber eats exactly the same doughnuts that everyone else eats. Ten years later than Console, it is better thought out, the irrationality more integrated and contoured. Goode had got a long way into ‘alternative’ poetry as it stood in 2011. I think some of these 13 poets have actually given up (hard to check that!), anyway this is a document and still stands. In the introduction, he says “[…] on the whole – and this is something we see perhaps for the first time in thirty years (with a handful of glorious exceptions in the interim) – these high-end poets are nonetheless genuinely energised by pop culture, by the pop artefact and pop syntagmata and the vivaciousness of pop rationales (the pop of population more than the pop of fizzy-pop): as opposed to squeezing a lonely titillation out of a clumsy excited thrumming on pop’s sticky-out bits, gloved in ticklish ironies and throwing the dreamless shapes of sarcastic dancing.” This is vivid more than realistic, but it’s pretty good. This group were actually ten years younger than the poets I reviewed for T Work, and arguably a new generation.
The use of the theatre in Euston (I think the venue was called Tom Tiddler’s Ground, or maybe it was next door to a pub called that) was crucial for the fragile London alternative scene. If you don’t have a venue, you don’t have an event, or an events series. It was probably the Camden People's Theatre. I think that was around 2001 to 2004.
It's good that Goode's career as predator and abuser has been so well documented. I am posting this to acknowledge the truth, which several people gave up their careers in theatre to make public and bring to an end. But I don’t think this sort of pattern exists inside the poetry world. There is no power imbalance, because nobody is making any money and the prizes are so abstract. There is no role for a casting couch in the poetry world. It is a remarkably flat social structure – it is very hard to acquire power over others, and to some extent it is equally hard to satisfy ambition in it. The satisfactions are, shall we say, abstract, aesthetic, invisible. It's not quite "self-importance is the only importance there is". It really is flat and fair.
Fairness - Xavier de Sousa and Maddy Costa are properly the central and heroic figures of this story. That is a fair account of it. I have not written much about the Goode story, because accounts, including first-person ones, are already available on-line.
Monday, 16 December 2024
Thursday, 12 December 2024
Carl Schmitt
Schmitt
Am in a hotel room in Cambridge reading a copy of Carl Schmitt’s Glossarium which I have just borrowed from the university library. Schmitt was a lawyer dealing with the law of the State who spent the period of the Third Reich saying that Might was Right, and that since Power was the source of law then anyone who had power could not act illegally. This coincided with the policy of the government at that time. After May 1945, he spent two years in detention, as a potential criminal. Since he had been a vocal supporter of a previous chancellor, and an earlier ‘state of emergency’, he was marked as an enemy of Hitler– although obviously a Fascist. This meant that he was never employed by the Reich. He was an unemployed whore. He made the offer but the expensive cars didn’t stop to pick him up. So, on examination, he had not taken part in any war crimes, and was released. But he lost his job as professor of law – having failed the practical. You can’t teach students that everything the State does is lawful. So in the period 1947-58 (when this book was composed) he had a lot of time on his hands.
‘Glosse’ means an explanation of part of a law but also a satirical and witty interpretation of something a politician has said, or some event in the news. It is, then, an act of resistance. So a glossarium is a collection of glosses. It has elements of a diary but is mainly bilious grumbles about items in the news. He disapproves of Europe without Hitler and Pétain. It all seems wrong to him. He quotes early-modern Spanish jurists in Latin, but is also scurrilous and paranoid.
The new Right in Germany is furious about the need to feel guilty about the national past. They want to reach a state in which Nazism was a perfectly normal part of history, just another set of neutral facts and of glorious victories. It is attractive for them to go to Schmitt, who never went through the stage of feeling guilty about any of that.
He grumbles on about his loss of power every few days. He never mentions the fact that the Reich had taken away the liberty and lives of so many people. He is indifferent to that. He is a lawyer who has chosen a client, and nothing the client does can be bad in his eyes. He does chide the Reich for exaggerated racial policies– but only while making anti-Semitic remarks.
The Allies won the war. If might is right, then what they did to ex-Nazis (not so ex in some cases) was just by definition. Schmitt never even mentions this. He only believes in power – and his side lost. Establishing a moral basis for criticising Allied occupation policies is a task he never even starts on. He lacks self-awareness. In this condition, a diary cannot shed very much light on anything.
This is not a work of literature. It does describe personal feelings throughout, it is emotional, but it has a minimum of psychological content. He just wants to argue all the time. And it all feeds back into the central complex, whereby the wrong side won the war and he deserves to be a professor of law again. So democracy in America must be wrong, because it led to America winning the war, and so the wrong side being defeated.
People who respect pretention, as a symbol of social power and links to the powerful, look up to Schmitt. For me, his erudition is misplaced. For example, when he refers to himself as peripsema. I had to look this up, it means “offscouring, anything wiped away”. Like the French word décapage. So perhaps something dirty that is excreted through the skin. He had been purged by the university, scoured off. But he adds nothing by using a Greek word, in Greek characters, when several German words would have done just as well. He is signalling that his thoughts are significant. It is not a work of learning, but that does not make it literature. Schmitt is super erudite, but if you are wrong about everything then it doesn’t make any difference that you can quote some opinion in Latin.
Schmitt was almost a Literat, at one point in his life (around 1912-20?). He was at least on the periphery of the Stefan George world. When he talks about his house (modest as befits someone fired from his job), the paintings he mentions as decorating it are by Ernst-Wilhelm Nay and Werner Gilles. This is embarrassing. I wouldn’t mind some Nays on my wall. Of the George followers, he mentions Norbert von Hellingrath as being more important than Rilke or George. Hellingrath wrote the essay on parataxis which Adorno made so much of. I suppose Schmitt and Adorno were reading the same books, at a certain point. Hellingrath was killed in the First World War and is less significant, if only for that reason, than Schmitt suggests. Perhaps it was only part of a house. It was in a small town about halfway between the Rhine and the Dutch border. It was his home town, in fact.
He writes several times about a work by Otto Brunner on dominion and aristocracy in the Middle Ages, a work which came out in 1949. I have no use for this book, it is legal history with no interest in sociology. The land-owners may have been 3% of the population (already a sociological fact) and Brunner has no interest in the other 97%. He never mentions the ones who actually cultivated the soil. For him, the ownership of estates and attached rights is something abstract and purely conceptual, noble like gold. The soil and its bacteria have vanished from his view along with the peasants. No wonder Schmitt likes this, it reflects his view of history. Marc Bloch was a century ahead of Brunner even though his book came out a decade before.
At that time, 1949, the land-owners were being ‘collectivised’ in a whole strip of Europe, from the Baltic to Greece. I think that excludes the south Slavs, the big land-owners there were part of the Ottoman regime and had lost their estates generations before. I think the land was owned by the peasants in pre-communist Serbia or Bulgaria, although I might be wrong. Croatia was probably more thick with lords and estates. This was a moment of great estates being broken up, the end of the Middle Ages for somewhere like Pomerania. And that process created a group of dispossessed and resentful ex-landowners.
Generally, serfdom was destabilsied by the Black Death of the 14th century, which created a labour shortage, and this led to the end of serfdom in Western Europe. However, the same processes led to the continuation of serfdom in eastern Europe, where also landowners throve by exporting grain to western Europe. This parting of the ways led to the differentiation between Western and Eastern Europe, a difference which we still find as basic and formative. The strip, from the Baltic to the Balkans, which saw the end of serfdom only in the 19th century, was also the strip where the break-up of great estates, and the redistribution of land, was taking place in the later years of the 1940s. The landowning pattern had reproduced the later stages of serfdom, because the serfs received freedom but not any right to the land which they worked. So years like 1947 and 1948 were seeing one of the largest changes ever in European society. Schmitt pays no attention to this.
In 1950, there was a stratum of off-scoured and worthless Europeans, the survivors of the Fascist world and also of a feudal-monarchist world. They were like a nation, one without a territory. It is helpful to recognise the sounds they made, the self-justifying ideas which they exchanged. Reading a book from that zone is like visiting a foreign country. Like disaster tourism, I suppose.
Why am I reading Schmitt? It goes back to an atlas, which I believe my mother owned, which dated from the 1960s (I think) and marked East Germany as “Soviet occupied zone” (SBZ) and most of Poland as “Eastern Germany”. So this was a map of resentment and projective fantasy – of lost territory. I had the idea of a map of Far Right ideas which would link isolated acts of irrationality into a larger pattern. Schmitt owned that pattern, he was trapped inside it.
I have been pursuing that for forty years, probably a bit more. My worry is that I can read this book and not locate any new ideas, to round out my collection. Suppose we ask, what is the difference between Schmitt and Steve Bannon. It is not simple. But if you collect the ideas you get closer to an answer. Bannon was recently trying to organise the Right anti-democrats of Europe into an alliance. Presumably Schmitt would be a text-book for that movement of thought. The database of academic papers which I occasionally use shows publications on the use of Schmitt by Putin. Presumably, once Putin had suppressed democracy, his lawyers went on a shopping trip to collect anti-democratic thinkers.
There is another reason – in the glossarium, there are quite a few characters, and it is helpful to recognise them. Reading Schmitt is part of the equipment for recognising characters in some other text, not yet identified, where it would be important to know what is being said. So this is part of my work as a philologer.
For example, he reads poems by Max Kommerell. Now that I have looked up Kommerell, I at least know who he was. Conversely, when S attacks Bernanos this gives me reason to respect Bernanos, although he was politically far to the Right (Action française style) and in his lifetime was only read by people from that section of opinion. Schmitt spends time reading poetry by Kommerell and Däubler.
One of the papers I looked up, and glanced at, records a meeting between Schmitt and Mircea Eliade. In summer 1942. They discussed René Guénon. This was a moment of the occultist Right. Schmitt is also, fractionally, a writer of myth. He refers more often to Jünger than anyone else. Yes, those four are part of the syllabus of 20th C culture which we have to know about.
15/1/49. “I am reading an author, who develops an allegedly purely scientific theory, for example the descent of Man from the apes or the psychoanalytical explanation of dreams and neuroses. I however see only the author. The material is multiple, ambiguous, unpredictable in its consequences, never completed, therefore at base completely uncontrollable and open to every mythical interpretation. The more clear and irrefutable becomes the shape of the author and his historical position. From Darwin’s Origin of Species results nothing but a portrait of Darwin, his psychological make-up and his sociological situation. From all books and writings of Sigmund Freud, the same. In both cases scientific conviction is only the reflection of the certainty of victory of an upwardly mobile layer striving against a dying-out class. The animal developing from ape to human, that is the plebeian on his way in the 19th C; this was allowed by the European situation in the first generation after 1848, from that the huge success of “Origin of Species” in 1856. And now afresh the Viennese psychoanalysis since about 1912!” So, workers becoming enfranchised is like monkeys becoming humans. Except that both processes are wrong. And the scientific accuracy of Darwin is irrelevant because his idea must have been a justification of democracy, the barbaric and criminal theory of godless liberals. I don’t see any process of seeking the truth in Schmitt. He doesn’t even ask if evolution might be a true theory. He doesn’t care. For him, science and democracy are part of the same disaster, an error of History. There is a system here. The violence of the Third Reich is justified because it was the adequate instrument for fighting off Bolshevism. But the working-class movement in Germany was part of Bolshevism, not a separate thing. And democracy brought it about. So, Hitler abolishing democracy is not really a loss to feel bad about. You give them the vote and they use it to vote for a Marxist party. So it’s for the best that you take it away again.
The problem with reducing scientific knowledge to a reflection of sociology is that Schmitt doesn’t believe in sociology. It is one of the plebeian sciences which he rejects. It conflicts with law, as a knowledge of society.
17/5/49. “Grade 1: there are people, who are not ashamed to have accepted the Nobel Prize. Yet lower grade, 2:there are people who are not ashamed to have accepted the National prize founded by Hitler in opposition to the Nobel; all-lowest grade 3: there are people, who let themselves be compensated, because they received a prize from Stalin and not from Hitler, and for that reason announce and recommend themselves as candidates for the Atlantic-Nobel-Prize. Miracle of the D-Mark: Thomas Mann re-appears in Germany!”
The “Atlantic” qualification is meant to suggest that the prize bestowed by the Swedish Academy is now aligned with NATO, the Atlantic treaty organisation. Sweden was not a member of NATO. S is denouncing Mann, and other Nobel Prize Winners, and moves on to equate them with Stalin Prize winners. The point is to revalue winners of the Hitler Prize and to relativise the criticism which removes from such winners their rightful praise and admiration. The interest in prizes is significant because it connects to a scale, or scales, of worth and value. Something which preoccupies Schmitt is denying worth to people, and to the cultural objects they produce. He wants tight control over that, before anything else. He has to be the examiner; other people should not think of awarding prizes. The authority which ascribes value to achievements. So he starts with denying any value to science and democracy. Mocking Mauriac and Bernanos is just a moment in a long process of freezing disapproval. Mann was anti-Hitler so he couldn't be a good writer.
So, you have scholars who have never read a book by a working-class writer. Ones who have never read a book by a Jewish writer. Who have never read a book by a Protestant. And there are bookshops which guarantee this, because they don’t stock any books which would cross those lines. That was the everyday of European conservatism. Had Schmitt ever read a book by a Jewish writer?
Disdain is a central activity for Right-wing thinkers of this era. At maximum, they just spend all day expressing, and experiencing, disdain. It is like a job. This is partly a way of erasing independent knowledge - the validity of knowledge is constrained by the status of the people uttering it. Everyone who is not of the Far Right has to be discredited, before they can utter. Disdain carries that function.
November 1947. Discussion of the space left for resistance. And of the ocean. Possibly the idea that continental powers have continuous authority and naturally expand to the physical borders of the space; whereas oceanic powers are surrounded by the free ocean (and allow the activity of different parties?). The ocean is like a space open for resistance. The idea isn’t clearly made out – because of the diary style. But this is interesting. He thinks the ocean gave rise to Utopias, thought of as colonies with arbitrary and “philosophical” laws. So that the Ocean gives birth to the world of “total planning” of the 1950s. Interesting, although it was the navally weak Third Reich which was into “total planning”. He almost emerges into the idea that resistance is necessary to a state, and that is so because totalitarianism is wrong. But he never actually says that. His small house as hermit is, within the land of west Germany (which he never recognised as an independent state) a “space of resistance”, that is the basic position of the whole Glossarium.
He elsewhere quotes Heracleitus as saying that “nomos is space”. I don’t understand this. Perhaps simply that a law attaches to the territory of the state which makes the law. But does ”nomos” actually mean “law” in the 6th century BC?
He refers (November 1947) to the katekhon, identified in Second Thessalonians, 2,6-7 as the restrainer, which restrains Antichrist so that he cannot break loose and bring about the End of Days (and the Millennium). “only he who now letteth will let until he be taken out of the way”. Let is like let or hindrance, a restraint. He mentions an essay of 1932 on the subject. The Third Reich was the katekhon which held back Bolshevism. But he says that there was a katekhon in every century. It was the Jesuits, in their day. So the Jesuits hold back the Enlightenment, they are abolished and the Enlightenment breaks loose. It roams the land and brings about the plagues of democracy and the end of serfdom. The sequel is Bolshevism. And the katekhon which can deal with that is the Nazi Party and its instruments.
“One must be able to name a katekhon for every one of the last 1948 years. The post was never unoccupied, or we would not be in existence. Every great emperor of the Christian Middle Ages took himself with all faith and consciousness for the katekhon, and he was it, too.”
I find that this is an anomaly in the New Testament, a fragment of myth which has drifted in through the window and lacks connection to the main doctrines. It is ambiguous because it is isolated. It is not even certain that the thing which Paul refers to is the same as the Antichrist. He calls it “the mystery of iniquity”, the secret of evil. This mythic strand is like pieces of naive art in a museum full of learned paintings, which correspond to the work of Greek theologians. I am not sure why it is a mystery, surely it's visible and audible and you can even smell it.
What is the status of the rule of the Occupying Powers in Germany from 1945 to 1949? evidently it was only legal as an Emergency Situation, Notzustand, and so extralegal and comparable to the rule in Germany from 1932 to 1945. We have to concede this to Schmitt. He had theorised this situation. It was the suspension of democracy – an American conducted an opinion poll in 1946 and discovered that 80% of Germans would have voted for the Nazi Party. So they had the vote taken away from them. Might is right, the government was legitimised by the armies which had won the war and not by the consent of the people. One can only judge this situation by noticing that the Allies pulled out and handed power over to democratic government in 1949. That changes everything. (Of course the Soviet Zone did not turn into a democracy and did not really regain sovereignty until 1990.)
I find that Utopia was composed in 1516, and that England had no colonies at that date. It was very slightly engaged in Atlantic trade at the time, and had few ships capable of sailing the Atlantic. Moreover, Brave New World is an anti-Utopia. So Schmitt’s idea is wrong. An interesting idea, though. And could work for Bacon’s New Atlantis.
Am in a hotel room in Cambridge reading a copy of Carl Schmitt’s Glossarium which I have just borrowed from the university library. Schmitt was a lawyer dealing with the law of the State who spent the period of the Third Reich saying that Might was Right, and that since Power was the source of law then anyone who had power could not act illegally. This coincided with the policy of the government at that time. After May 1945, he spent two years in detention, as a potential criminal. Since he had been a vocal supporter of a previous chancellor, and an earlier ‘state of emergency’, he was marked as an enemy of Hitler– although obviously a Fascist. This meant that he was never employed by the Reich. He was an unemployed whore. He made the offer but the expensive cars didn’t stop to pick him up. So, on examination, he had not taken part in any war crimes, and was released. But he lost his job as professor of law – having failed the practical. You can’t teach students that everything the State does is lawful. So in the period 1947-58 (when this book was composed) he had a lot of time on his hands.
‘Glosse’ means an explanation of part of a law but also a satirical and witty interpretation of something a politician has said, or some event in the news. It is, then, an act of resistance. So a glossarium is a collection of glosses. It has elements of a diary but is mainly bilious grumbles about items in the news. He disapproves of Europe without Hitler and Pétain. It all seems wrong to him. He quotes early-modern Spanish jurists in Latin, but is also scurrilous and paranoid.
The new Right in Germany is furious about the need to feel guilty about the national past. They want to reach a state in which Nazism was a perfectly normal part of history, just another set of neutral facts and of glorious victories. It is attractive for them to go to Schmitt, who never went through the stage of feeling guilty about any of that.
He grumbles on about his loss of power every few days. He never mentions the fact that the Reich had taken away the liberty and lives of so many people. He is indifferent to that. He is a lawyer who has chosen a client, and nothing the client does can be bad in his eyes. He does chide the Reich for exaggerated racial policies– but only while making anti-Semitic remarks.
The Allies won the war. If might is right, then what they did to ex-Nazis (not so ex in some cases) was just by definition. Schmitt never even mentions this. He only believes in power – and his side lost. Establishing a moral basis for criticising Allied occupation policies is a task he never even starts on. He lacks self-awareness. In this condition, a diary cannot shed very much light on anything.
This is not a work of literature. It does describe personal feelings throughout, it is emotional, but it has a minimum of psychological content. He just wants to argue all the time. And it all feeds back into the central complex, whereby the wrong side won the war and he deserves to be a professor of law again. So democracy in America must be wrong, because it led to America winning the war, and so the wrong side being defeated.
People who respect pretention, as a symbol of social power and links to the powerful, look up to Schmitt. For me, his erudition is misplaced. For example, when he refers to himself as peripsema. I had to look this up, it means “offscouring, anything wiped away”. Like the French word décapage. So perhaps something dirty that is excreted through the skin. He had been purged by the university, scoured off. But he adds nothing by using a Greek word, in Greek characters, when several German words would have done just as well. He is signalling that his thoughts are significant. It is not a work of learning, but that does not make it literature. Schmitt is super erudite, but if you are wrong about everything then it doesn’t make any difference that you can quote some opinion in Latin.
Schmitt was almost a Literat, at one point in his life (around 1912-20?). He was at least on the periphery of the Stefan George world. When he talks about his house (modest as befits someone fired from his job), the paintings he mentions as decorating it are by Ernst-Wilhelm Nay and Werner Gilles. This is embarrassing. I wouldn’t mind some Nays on my wall. Of the George followers, he mentions Norbert von Hellingrath as being more important than Rilke or George. Hellingrath wrote the essay on parataxis which Adorno made so much of. I suppose Schmitt and Adorno were reading the same books, at a certain point. Hellingrath was killed in the First World War and is less significant, if only for that reason, than Schmitt suggests. Perhaps it was only part of a house. It was in a small town about halfway between the Rhine and the Dutch border. It was his home town, in fact.
He writes several times about a work by Otto Brunner on dominion and aristocracy in the Middle Ages, a work which came out in 1949. I have no use for this book, it is legal history with no interest in sociology. The land-owners may have been 3% of the population (already a sociological fact) and Brunner has no interest in the other 97%. He never mentions the ones who actually cultivated the soil. For him, the ownership of estates and attached rights is something abstract and purely conceptual, noble like gold. The soil and its bacteria have vanished from his view along with the peasants. No wonder Schmitt likes this, it reflects his view of history. Marc Bloch was a century ahead of Brunner even though his book came out a decade before.
At that time, 1949, the land-owners were being ‘collectivised’ in a whole strip of Europe, from the Baltic to Greece. I think that excludes the south Slavs, the big land-owners there were part of the Ottoman regime and had lost their estates generations before. I think the land was owned by the peasants in pre-communist Serbia or Bulgaria, although I might be wrong. Croatia was probably more thick with lords and estates. This was a moment of great estates being broken up, the end of the Middle Ages for somewhere like Pomerania. And that process created a group of dispossessed and resentful ex-landowners.
Generally, serfdom was destabilsied by the Black Death of the 14th century, which created a labour shortage, and this led to the end of serfdom in Western Europe. However, the same processes led to the continuation of serfdom in eastern Europe, where also landowners throve by exporting grain to western Europe. This parting of the ways led to the differentiation between Western and Eastern Europe, a difference which we still find as basic and formative. The strip, from the Baltic to the Balkans, which saw the end of serfdom only in the 19th century, was also the strip where the break-up of great estates, and the redistribution of land, was taking place in the later years of the 1940s. The landowning pattern had reproduced the later stages of serfdom, because the serfs received freedom but not any right to the land which they worked. So years like 1947 and 1948 were seeing one of the largest changes ever in European society. Schmitt pays no attention to this.
In 1950, there was a stratum of off-scoured and worthless Europeans, the survivors of the Fascist world and also of a feudal-monarchist world. They were like a nation, one without a territory. It is helpful to recognise the sounds they made, the self-justifying ideas which they exchanged. Reading a book from that zone is like visiting a foreign country. Like disaster tourism, I suppose.
Why am I reading Schmitt? It goes back to an atlas, which I believe my mother owned, which dated from the 1960s (I think) and marked East Germany as “Soviet occupied zone” (SBZ) and most of Poland as “Eastern Germany”. So this was a map of resentment and projective fantasy – of lost territory. I had the idea of a map of Far Right ideas which would link isolated acts of irrationality into a larger pattern. Schmitt owned that pattern, he was trapped inside it.
I have been pursuing that for forty years, probably a bit more. My worry is that I can read this book and not locate any new ideas, to round out my collection. Suppose we ask, what is the difference between Schmitt and Steve Bannon. It is not simple. But if you collect the ideas you get closer to an answer. Bannon was recently trying to organise the Right anti-democrats of Europe into an alliance. Presumably Schmitt would be a text-book for that movement of thought. The database of academic papers which I occasionally use shows publications on the use of Schmitt by Putin. Presumably, once Putin had suppressed democracy, his lawyers went on a shopping trip to collect anti-democratic thinkers.
There is another reason – in the glossarium, there are quite a few characters, and it is helpful to recognise them. Reading Schmitt is part of the equipment for recognising characters in some other text, not yet identified, where it would be important to know what is being said. So this is part of my work as a philologer.
For example, he reads poems by Max Kommerell. Now that I have looked up Kommerell, I at least know who he was. Conversely, when S attacks Bernanos this gives me reason to respect Bernanos, although he was politically far to the Right (Action française style) and in his lifetime was only read by people from that section of opinion. Schmitt spends time reading poetry by Kommerell and Däubler.
One of the papers I looked up, and glanced at, records a meeting between Schmitt and Mircea Eliade. In summer 1942. They discussed René Guénon. This was a moment of the occultist Right. Schmitt is also, fractionally, a writer of myth. He refers more often to Jünger than anyone else. Yes, those four are part of the syllabus of 20th C culture which we have to know about.
15/1/49. “I am reading an author, who develops an allegedly purely scientific theory, for example the descent of Man from the apes or the psychoanalytical explanation of dreams and neuroses. I however see only the author. The material is multiple, ambiguous, unpredictable in its consequences, never completed, therefore at base completely uncontrollable and open to every mythical interpretation. The more clear and irrefutable becomes the shape of the author and his historical position. From Darwin’s Origin of Species results nothing but a portrait of Darwin, his psychological make-up and his sociological situation. From all books and writings of Sigmund Freud, the same. In both cases scientific conviction is only the reflection of the certainty of victory of an upwardly mobile layer striving against a dying-out class. The animal developing from ape to human, that is the plebeian on his way in the 19th C; this was allowed by the European situation in the first generation after 1848, from that the huge success of “Origin of Species” in 1856. And now afresh the Viennese psychoanalysis since about 1912!” So, workers becoming enfranchised is like monkeys becoming humans. Except that both processes are wrong. And the scientific accuracy of Darwin is irrelevant because his idea must have been a justification of democracy, the barbaric and criminal theory of godless liberals. I don’t see any process of seeking the truth in Schmitt. He doesn’t even ask if evolution might be a true theory. He doesn’t care. For him, science and democracy are part of the same disaster, an error of History. There is a system here. The violence of the Third Reich is justified because it was the adequate instrument for fighting off Bolshevism. But the working-class movement in Germany was part of Bolshevism, not a separate thing. And democracy brought it about. So, Hitler abolishing democracy is not really a loss to feel bad about. You give them the vote and they use it to vote for a Marxist party. So it’s for the best that you take it away again.
The problem with reducing scientific knowledge to a reflection of sociology is that Schmitt doesn’t believe in sociology. It is one of the plebeian sciences which he rejects. It conflicts with law, as a knowledge of society.
17/5/49. “Grade 1: there are people, who are not ashamed to have accepted the Nobel Prize. Yet lower grade, 2:there are people who are not ashamed to have accepted the National prize founded by Hitler in opposition to the Nobel; all-lowest grade 3: there are people, who let themselves be compensated, because they received a prize from Stalin and not from Hitler, and for that reason announce and recommend themselves as candidates for the Atlantic-Nobel-Prize. Miracle of the D-Mark: Thomas Mann re-appears in Germany!”
The “Atlantic” qualification is meant to suggest that the prize bestowed by the Swedish Academy is now aligned with NATO, the Atlantic treaty organisation. Sweden was not a member of NATO. S is denouncing Mann, and other Nobel Prize Winners, and moves on to equate them with Stalin Prize winners. The point is to revalue winners of the Hitler Prize and to relativise the criticism which removes from such winners their rightful praise and admiration. The interest in prizes is significant because it connects to a scale, or scales, of worth and value. Something which preoccupies Schmitt is denying worth to people, and to the cultural objects they produce. He wants tight control over that, before anything else. He has to be the examiner; other people should not think of awarding prizes. The authority which ascribes value to achievements. So he starts with denying any value to science and democracy. Mocking Mauriac and Bernanos is just a moment in a long process of freezing disapproval. Mann was anti-Hitler so he couldn't be a good writer.
So, you have scholars who have never read a book by a working-class writer. Ones who have never read a book by a Jewish writer. Who have never read a book by a Protestant. And there are bookshops which guarantee this, because they don’t stock any books which would cross those lines. That was the everyday of European conservatism. Had Schmitt ever read a book by a Jewish writer?
Disdain is a central activity for Right-wing thinkers of this era. At maximum, they just spend all day expressing, and experiencing, disdain. It is like a job. This is partly a way of erasing independent knowledge - the validity of knowledge is constrained by the status of the people uttering it. Everyone who is not of the Far Right has to be discredited, before they can utter. Disdain carries that function.
November 1947. Discussion of the space left for resistance. And of the ocean. Possibly the idea that continental powers have continuous authority and naturally expand to the physical borders of the space; whereas oceanic powers are surrounded by the free ocean (and allow the activity of different parties?). The ocean is like a space open for resistance. The idea isn’t clearly made out – because of the diary style. But this is interesting. He thinks the ocean gave rise to Utopias, thought of as colonies with arbitrary and “philosophical” laws. So that the Ocean gives birth to the world of “total planning” of the 1950s. Interesting, although it was the navally weak Third Reich which was into “total planning”. He almost emerges into the idea that resistance is necessary to a state, and that is so because totalitarianism is wrong. But he never actually says that. His small house as hermit is, within the land of west Germany (which he never recognised as an independent state) a “space of resistance”, that is the basic position of the whole Glossarium.
He elsewhere quotes Heracleitus as saying that “nomos is space”. I don’t understand this. Perhaps simply that a law attaches to the territory of the state which makes the law. But does ”nomos” actually mean “law” in the 6th century BC?
He refers (November 1947) to the katekhon, identified in Second Thessalonians, 2,6-7 as the restrainer, which restrains Antichrist so that he cannot break loose and bring about the End of Days (and the Millennium). “only he who now letteth will let until he be taken out of the way”. Let is like let or hindrance, a restraint. He mentions an essay of 1932 on the subject. The Third Reich was the katekhon which held back Bolshevism. But he says that there was a katekhon in every century. It was the Jesuits, in their day. So the Jesuits hold back the Enlightenment, they are abolished and the Enlightenment breaks loose. It roams the land and brings about the plagues of democracy and the end of serfdom. The sequel is Bolshevism. And the katekhon which can deal with that is the Nazi Party and its instruments.
“One must be able to name a katekhon for every one of the last 1948 years. The post was never unoccupied, or we would not be in existence. Every great emperor of the Christian Middle Ages took himself with all faith and consciousness for the katekhon, and he was it, too.”
I find that this is an anomaly in the New Testament, a fragment of myth which has drifted in through the window and lacks connection to the main doctrines. It is ambiguous because it is isolated. It is not even certain that the thing which Paul refers to is the same as the Antichrist. He calls it “the mystery of iniquity”, the secret of evil. This mythic strand is like pieces of naive art in a museum full of learned paintings, which correspond to the work of Greek theologians. I am not sure why it is a mystery, surely it's visible and audible and you can even smell it.
What is the status of the rule of the Occupying Powers in Germany from 1945 to 1949? evidently it was only legal as an Emergency Situation, Notzustand, and so extralegal and comparable to the rule in Germany from 1932 to 1945. We have to concede this to Schmitt. He had theorised this situation. It was the suspension of democracy – an American conducted an opinion poll in 1946 and discovered that 80% of Germans would have voted for the Nazi Party. So they had the vote taken away from them. Might is right, the government was legitimised by the armies which had won the war and not by the consent of the people. One can only judge this situation by noticing that the Allies pulled out and handed power over to democratic government in 1949. That changes everything. (Of course the Soviet Zone did not turn into a democracy and did not really regain sovereignty until 1990.)
I find that Utopia was composed in 1516, and that England had no colonies at that date. It was very slightly engaged in Atlantic trade at the time, and had few ships capable of sailing the Atlantic. Moreover, Brave New World is an anti-Utopia. So Schmitt’s idea is wrong. An interesting idea, though. And could work for Bacon’s New Atlantis.
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