Feud, Vengeance, Politics and History in Early Medieval Europe

[This is the text of a paper I gave in Aarhus in October 2003, which I haven't (yet) written up.  At some point I might yet work it up into a piece, although I am thinking of using some of it as an illustration in Escaping the Past.  A counter to the various counters to my original article on feud (1998) is probably overdue.  For now, I hope the points of contact with my previous post are clear - especially in the stitching up of time and the non-ending of narrative.]

Feuds make good stories and it is stories, you might say, that make feuds.  I will therefore – as I imagine many of us will – start with a story.  It is set in 1073 or 1074 in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, in the aftermath of a feast.  Feasts were fine times for violence.  The most famous alleged feud of the early Middle Ages – that of Sichar and Chramnesind – apparently originated at a Christmas party.  So much for the season of peace on earth and goodwill towards men!  The case that concerns me was on the other hand – according to some interpretations – the last recorded episode in a feud.  One might expect feasts, with the gathering together of lots of people and the consumption of large amounts of alcohol, to have been the occasion for acts of hot-blooded violence such as begin periods of hostility or feud.  ‘From one, an irascible ale-swiller, a man full of wine, a sword’s edge will thrust out the life on the mead bench; previous to that his words will have been too hasty’, as an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet predicted (note, incidentally the reference to three types of alcohol in a single sentence).  Be that as it may, in this case, the gathering together of a family for a feast presented its enemies with a golden opportunity to wipe them all out at once.

The sons and grandsons of a man called Carl had assembled for a feast at their manor of Settrington.  One, however, stayed away.  He, Sumerled, shared his principal estate with the man who organised the bloodshed in Yorkshire, Earl Waltheof of Bernicia.  As the story’s most recent and most eloquent interpreter, Richard Fletcher, says, this is unlikely to be coincidence.  Waltheof’s men, possibly coming by sea to the Yorkshire coast and thence riding west to Settrington, fell upon Sumerled’s brothers and nephews and butchered the lot of them.  Or almost.  One, Cnut, was spared ‘because of his innate goodness’.  He was lucky.  Few people in early medieval episodes like this were spared just for being nice.

Our primary source for this episode is an anonymous and very brief narrative written not long afterwards, called De Obsessione Dunelmi, ‘On the Siege of Durham’, a hugely misleading title although a siege of Durham does appear in the course of the story.  Its author digresses from his tale, actually about the descent of six manors on the borders of Yorkshire and Northumberland, to tell us of the violent story that cumulated in this massacre.  The story is well enough known to late Anglo-Saxonists but, for those of you who specialise in other eras, the tale, not very much abbreviated, goes like this:

Once upon a time there was a powerful and energetic earl called Uhtred who saved Durham from the Scots.  Uhtred was married three times.  His second marriage, to the daughter of one Styr Ulfsson, was contracted on condition that Uhtred kill Styr’s enemy, Thurbrand.  Alas, when Uhtred came to swear allegiance to his new king (and old enemy), Cnut, Thurbrand Hold (or Thurbrand the Hold) and the king’s soldiers ambushed him and forty other chief men and killed the lot of them.  Uhtred’s brother Eadwulf succeeded him in the earldom but when he died, Uhtred’s son (by his first wife) Ealdred became earl and killed Thurbrand Hold.  Thurbrand’s son, Carl, and Ealdred then campaigned against each other until they were prevailed upon to become sworn brothers and go on pilgrimage together to Rome.  Unfortunately, the ship was delayed by bad weather so whilst they waited, Carl entertained Ealdred at his home in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in Holderness.  One day, whilst showing Ealdred around his estate – you can guess what’s coming – Carl killed Ealdred in (and from now on I quote the source)

a wood called Risewood and still today the place of his murder is marked by a small stone cross.  Some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, who was the son of his daughter, sent a large band of young men and avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.  For when the sons of Carl were feasting together at their elder brother’s house at Settrington, not far from York, the men who had been sent caught them unawares and savagely killed them together, except for Cnut whose life they spared because of his innate goodness.  Sumerled, who was not there, survives to this day.  Having massacred the sons and grandsons of Carl, they returned home bringing with them much booty of various kinds.

Seen from Durham c.1100, this was a series of tit-for-tat killings, such as we might unproblematically call a feud.  In the last episode, at Settrington, according to the writer, Waltheof ‘avenged the killing of his grandfather’.  This all looks fairly straightforward but, unlike the story of Sichar and Chramnesind, which, although far from straightforward, everyone (except me) sees as a feud, there has been significant debate about whether the conflict (to use a neutral term) between Uhtred’s and Thurbrand’s families can in fact be called a feud at all.  I want to contribute to that debate and use recent analyses of the story to highlight some of the problems involved in studying feud in the early Middle Ages.

In my past writings about feud I have expressed profound scepticism about the existence of feud, as we would understand it, in the early medieval west – or most of it anyway.  This of course raises the definition of feud, something I expect we will spend much time doing during this conference!  I feel strongly that we need a fairly precise – but not over-restrictive – analytical definition of feud, a definition which distinguishes feud from simple violent dispute or potentially violent hostility.  It seems to me that much recent discussion of feud runs the risk of dissolving feud into any relationship of hostility, even into any potentially violent dispute.  Thus far I suspect I am on solid ground.  Where I suspect I may not be, and where I expect to be rigorously questioned by people specialising in periods with better evidence, is in that I think we also need to distinguish feud from vengeance.  This point raises what is an absolutely fundamental problem in defining and studying the early medieval ‘feud’ (and I hope you can hear the inverted commas around feud there).  The words that meant, or are translated as, ‘feud’ in the early Middle Ages did not mean ‘feud’ as we would understand it.  Faida, faehþe and their cognates were generally rendered into Latin as inimicitia, perhaps hostilitas.  I hope we can agree that enmity and hostility are not, necessarily, feud. 

More to the point, the relationship rendered by these words was a one-way relationship.  ‘Feud’, as rendered by these early medieval vernaculars, was not a two-way, reciprocal relationship.  It meant the right, by one party, either to avenge, or rather to punish, an affront (actually, as far as I can see, it invariably meant a killing) through a reciprocal act, usually vengeance-killing, without (and this is the key) any fear of a subsequent revenge attack by the initial aggressors; or, probably more commonly, it meant the right to exact a compensation payment in lieu of such an attack, through the threat of such an attack.  ‘Bearing the feud’ can mean the obligation to seek redress for a wrong, by one party.  At the same time, to ‘bear the feud’ means to bear the threat of vengeance against you, or to bear the cost of the compensation payment.  I have seen no use of the word to mean a lasting and reciprocal relationship of violence, and I have found very little evidence indeed of feud in the modern sense of lasting vendetta.  Now, we may be happy to call this relationship feud, because early medieval people called it feud.  The problem is that in English at least, what people today understand by feud is something rather different.  And, more to the point, the phenomenon analysed as feud in other historical periods, or in anthropological fieldwork, is something rather different.  In a sense that is the root of the problem and why we need tight conceptual frameworks.  Most work on early medieval feud acknowledges the point about contemporary, medieval understandings but then understanding is badly hindered by the fact that modern notions of feud keep bleeding into the analysis.

I should make it clear that I am not sceptical about the historical or anthropological existence of the phenomenon of feud.  I don’t adopt an unnecessarily stringent or exacting definition of feud but I have to say that I can find very little evidence that would satisfy even a minimal (if rigorous) definition of feud in the early medieval West.

The principal area of contention in response to my work appears to lie in a discussion of motivation: feud versus ‘politics’.  Now, of course, this distinction is crude, neither hard and fast nor very clear – perhaps not even very useful.  Nevertheless, it is an important issue, and what is at stake should become clear in the course of my discussion.  Some writers, William Kapelle and Matthew Bennett for example, have argued that some violent early medieval encounters were not feuds but simply part of politics.  The counter, needless to say, is to argue (as, for example, John Gillingham, Isobel Alfonso, Richard Fletcher, Christopher Morris) that you cannot separate feud from politics.  In a sense they are quite right.  But in a sense, too, this is not a very satisfying argument if you really want to analyse and understand feud in the early Middle Ages.  I would argue that we do need some way of distinguishing feud from violent competition for resources between powerful groups or families that happen to have found themselves upon opposing sides in the past.  At least we need to think about it, and conceptualise such differences.  Many of my points run straight up against the frustrating lack of evidence in the early Middle Ages.  Here I would like guidance from those who work on better documented eras.  One lesson I have to underline, however, is that we must work from the (however vaguely) known to the unknown.  So much writing about early medieval violence is beset by assumptions, cherished, long-held notions about the nature of the period.  But feud as a central facet of early medieval life (as many think it was) has to be demonstrated, not assumed.  It won’t do to argue that the fact that we cannot find dramas of repeated tit-for-tat violence running beyond two acts – one initial wrong, and one act of revenge – just because the data is patchy.  And it won’t do, either, to argue that the reason some of our famous ‘feuds’ don’t, on close scrutiny, seem to be feuds is because the authors of the accounts of them were churchmen who did not understand the concept of feud.

There are a number of issues, most of which can be illustrated with reference to the story of Uhtred and Thurbrand’s families.  The first, possibly the most important, is that of history and narrative.  The point that historians shape the traces of the past into a story is often associated with the ‘post-modern’ turn in historiography but it has actually been made since the very earliest days of modern history.  Thomas Carlyle said as much in the earlier nineteenth century.  To be crude, we choose items from the information that has come down to us and connect them together to make a story.  This is, of course, especially relevant to the study of feud, doubly relevant because the point also applies to many of our witnesses.  Contemporaries, or near contemporaries like the Durham Anonymous, selected episodes from the past and linked them together to make a single strand of narrative – the story of a feud.  But was it a feud?  Or was it simply written up as such?  The episodes in the Northumbrian feud sound unproblematic, as related by the Durham Anonymous.  However in fact there were long gaps between them.  If, as is usually assumed, the Thurbrand, enemy of Styr Ulfsson, and Thurbrand Hold are one and the same (no one appears to have wondered why, if they are the same man, the author only explains who Thurbrand Hold was on his second appearance – and one lesson of the story is that name-giving was confusingly unimaginative in eleventh-century Northumbria) then it took ten years for any violence to erupt as a result of Styr’s injunction to Uhtred to kill Thurbrand.  Uhtred had remarried in the interim in any case and, furthermore, it was Thurbrand who did the only recorded attacking.  Styr and Thurbrand might have been rivals but rivalry is not necessarily feud.

Then there must have elapsed another seven years or more before Ealdred exacted his revenge on Thurbrand.  As William Kapelle noted the next episode is interesting in that it is described not as Carl trying to ambush Ealdred, trying to find an occasion to carry out his vengeance killing, but as a period when the two tried to do away with each other.  And the period up to Carl’s killing of Ealdred was another long one.  Ealdred’s murder dates to 1038, that is twenty-three years after his father’s murder of Ealdred’s father, and at least ten years after Thurbrand’s killing.  As noted, the Anonymous proceeds from the death of Ealdred to say simply that ‘Some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, ... avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.’  What might not be clear from this is that the Settrington massacre, the fourth and final episode of the Northumbrian ‘feud’, took place no less than thirty-six years after Ealdred’s murder.  Indeed Carl killed Ealdred four years before Waltheof was even born.  Thirty-six years is a long time – most of my lifetime.  It took as long to happen in the eleventh century.

So: four acts of murderous violence spread over fifty-eight or fifty-nine years, with probably at least a decade between each of them.  It might be argued that this is to limit discussion to the recorded acts of hostility but that is one area where I object that we cannot assume the existence of types of violence.  For one thing, we do know about other acts of violence involving these people.  The war (let’s call it that) between Ealdred and Carl has been mentioned.  Another war is mentioned over the estates in Teesdale.  Waltheof, ‘avenger’ of Ealdred, was the son of Siward, who married Ealdred’s daughter, as the Durham Anonymous notes.  Now Siward, father of Waltheof, also happens to have killed Eadwulf, half-brother of Ealdred, in 1041.  No feud appears to have ensued between Eadwulf’s family and Siward’s.  This poses huge problems for the reconstruction of the De Obsessione’s story as a feud.  It makes Waltheof switch sides – at best.  The Durham Anonymous could say that when Waltheof had the sons of Carl killed at Settrington, he avenged his grandfather.  From his point of view, as he told his story, it looked like that.  It’s a nice narrative turn.  But, firstly, it only looked like Waltheof had avenged his grandfather because the writer chose to forget that Waltheof’s own father had killed Waltheof’s great uncle, the brother of the man he was supposed to be avenging.  And secondly, however the Anonymous saw it, it does not have any implications for what motivated Waltheof in 1073/74. 

There was other murderous violence.  The third son of Uhtred, Gospatric, was, like his father and elder brother, killed at court on the orders of Tostig, Siward’s successor as earl of Northumbria, in 1063.  Gospatric’s son Oswulf killed Tostig’s crony Copsig in 1067 but no ‘feud’ between Uhtred’s family and the Godwinesons is mentioned.  Oswulf was himself murdered by a robber, later in 1067.  More to the point, when Uhtred was killed in 1015 by Thurbrand Hold, he was killed alongside forty other leading men.  Why was it only his family that ‘feuded’ with Thurbrand’s?  And, finally, note that neither Uhtred’s brother Eadwulf Cudel, nor either of Ealdred’s brothers appear to have done anything at all to avenge their murders.  The Anonymous said that Eadwulf Cudel was a lazy cowardly man but not because he didn’t avenge his brother, but because he was afraid of the Scots.  There seems to be a lot of selection from the evidence, selection from a sea of violence and killing, going on here in order to make this into a long, unilinear saga of murder and revenge.  Like all historians, the Durham Anonymous chose how to emplot his story, and he did so in the tragic mode.

An alternative explanation has been proposed.  The admittedly patchy sources for Northumbrian politics at this time allow the suggestion that the families of Thurbrand and Uhtred were on different sides during the turbulent early decades of the eleventh century.  Uhtred’s family had control of the earldom of Bamburgh, or Bernicia, and appears to have been loyal to the old English royal dynasty.  Thurbrand’s family, on the other hand, seems to be counted amongst the supporters of Cnut, and perhaps at the head of a Danish faction in Yorkshire.  The first recorded action in the hostility between the two groups was Thurbrand’s slaughter of Uhtred and other English leaders.  However, as has been pointed out, even by proponents of the feud interpretation, to have slain forty-one men must have required a substantial armed force.  Indeed the sources say the first massacre was on King Cnut’s orders and that the milites who did the killing were his troops.  In the broader English context of the events of 1016, and Charles Insley has correctly pointed out that we cannot see episodes like this in purely local light, Cnut was following a policy of the eradication of the principal supporters of his erstwhile enemy and rival for the kingship, Æthelræd II ‘Unræd’.  Siward’s murder of Ealdred’s brother Eadwulf – unavenged, remember – was carried out in similar fashion, and so were other killings at the royal court (like that of the third brother, Gospatric), none of which appears to have provoked feud.  Kapelle has suggested that the family of the Bernician earls was in revolt against the crown for a while.  Carl on the other hand appears to have been an important royal official in Yorkshire, supporting the Danish royal house.  The reconstruction is plausible and gives us a reason to see how the two could have spent some time campaigning against each other even without the blood that lay between them.

Carl’s eventual murder of Ealdred might have been part of politics on the wider stage.  Another royal official in York, Siward, after all did away with Ealdred’s brother, apparently on royal orders.  But it is equally possible that – at the same time – his actions might have been motivated, and justified, by Ealdred’s killing of Carl’s father.  Finally, Waltheof sent his lads to slaughter Carl’s sons and grandsons.  It is very unlikely indeed, for reasons touched upon above, that this should be seen as an act of feud.  Again, national politics play a part.  Waltheof and the sons of Carl had both found themselves in revolt against William I in 1069-70.  Waltheof, however, had charmed William into forgiving him and even giving him his father’s earldom.  This might not have gone down well with other former rebels.  Possibly trouble was brewing again.  Either way, it seems unlikely that we have to go back further than 1069 to understand the reasons for the Settrington massacre of 1073/4.  Whether, like the Durham Anonymous, Waltheof justified his action as revenge for his grandfather, whether he added it as an afterthought, as icing on the justificatory cake, we shall never know.

The two motives – political expediency (or orders) and personal revenge – are not necessarily clearly separable.  That is the essence of the argument against the ‘politics, not feud’ position.  It is here, however, that we run into the really intractable issues.  Even if we knew how Carl justified his killing of Ealdred, and the cross erected on the site suggests atonement, the past is always made in the present.  Individuals select aspects from their knowledge of the past to justify their deeds in the present.  Carl and Ealdred had been engaged in some sort of a struggle; Carl’s father had killed Ealdred’s father twenty years before, and ten years ago (let’s say) Ealdred had killed Carl’s father.  These were all aspects that would make close friendship between the two unlikely in any society, feuding or otherwise.  Yet they had chosen at one point to forget these past events and become sworn brothers.  There was a choice.  This choice lies at the heart of what Wallace-Hadrill called the ‘dormant feud’.  Yet I think that the concept of a dormant feud is, analytically, deeply problematic.

In 1998 I wrote:

‘if, rather than having a continuous state of violence and enmity, we have a series of independent incidents taking place to solve immediate problems and the contingent selection from the past of particular episodes to justify or explain them, it does not seem analytically useful to link them into a spuriously continuous ‘chain’ of events and call that feud.’

But that, essentially, was what the Durham Anonymous did.  It is what many another individual has done in the aftermath of some event.  It is true of many another feud but, unless there is some conscious relationship, some conscious awareness of a feuding relationship, in the periods between the violence, then do we have a feud?  It seems to me that if the answer is yes, then there can be feuds that were entirely made with hindsight, and never existed in the present.  That does not seem to me to be useful.  Of course this is a question that it is usually impossible to answer in the early Middle Ages.  In his recent book on the hostility between Uhtred and Thurbrand’s families, emotively called Bloodfeud, Richard Fletcher tries out two possibilities.

In the first, Fletcher draws attention to the cross erected on the site of Ealdred’s murder.  Ealdred left only daughters, three of whom, imaginatively, he called Aelfflaed.  It was one of these that married Siward.  Now, says Fletcher, anthropological and ethnographic as well as historical parallels show that women often play a part in keeping a feuding relationship going, goading their men-folk, producing artefacts associated with the murdered victims, singing songs about the wrongs done, and so on.  The daughters, suggests Fletcher, erected the cross to remind their kin of the wrong done, which required vengeance.  He uses that as a springboard for a nice discussion of female status and power in eleventh-century England.  This is an interesting idea but it is not convincing.  Firstly, if it was the daughters of Ealdred that erected the cross (no source says as much) and if it was their intention to keep the feud alive in their menfolk’s mind, it was both spectacularly ill-advised and astonishingly unsuccessful.  As mentioned, neither of Ealdred’s brothers is recorded as lifting a finger to avenge him, and nor did either of his nephews, or his brother-in-law, or his son-in-law.  If their memory of the feud was dependent on the Risewood cross then this is hardly surprising.  It was erected in the middle of their enemy’s estates.  One might suggest that it is unlikely that the relatives of Ealdred were permitted to make regular pilgrimages to a cross on the estate of their relative’s killer in order to whip the men of the party up into a vengeful frenzy.  It seems to me far more likely that, unless Carl erected the cross in an act of penance, the cross was part of the settlement.  Not only would it have cost money – a sort of compensation payment – if it was the sort of elaborate stone monument well enough known from that part of the world.  It would also have been a permanent reminder to Carl and his family of his perfidy and wrong-doing.  This might have been punishment enough.  In any case, if feud there had been up to that point, this seems to have ended it. 

Fletcher’s is a good try but unfortunately it doesn’t work.  And alas there are precious few better examples of the maintenance of a feuding relationship.  The Merovingian Queen Chlothild’s urging her sons to avenge her father by attacking the Burgundians is sometimes cited as an instance but, as Ian Wood has pointed out, there are huge problems with the story, not the least being the thirty years it apparently took Chlothild to realise that her parents needed avenging.  Now there are references to similar mechanisms at work in the early Middle Ages, but they all concern hostility between larger groups – warfare between peoples.  Frankish washerwomen are said to have sung songs commemorating past wars against the Saxons, for example.  Now, you could assume that if these mechanisms were known at that level then they might have been known at other levels of violence in early medieval society.  But that would be precisely that: an assumption.  There’s no evidence.  This is what lies behind the rest of Fletcher’s analysis (like that of many another commentator), an assumption that feud, as we understand it, was central to early medieval life and thought. 

Briefly, we need to remember that the old idea that the extended family, or clan, was an essential feature of early medieval social organisation has been under attack for some time.  Practical kin-groups were small.  Furthermore, in spite of decades of detailed research into the reconstruction of early medieval aristocratic Sippe, there is little or no evidence that they acted as unified groups in politics.  They fought each other and changed sides in entirely understandable ways, but ways which render the assumptions about early medieval people’s supposed subjection to the demands of feud entirely questionable. 

Fletcher’s other approach, in arguing that the selected and scattered episodes of violence were a bloodfeud, is to argue that medieval texts, laws, show that feuding was a common feature of Anglo-Saxon life.  If it shows nothing else, the story of Thurbrand, Uhtred and their descendants shows that these people had a concept of vengeance.  But many, probably all, societies have a concept of revenge.  To early medieval people God took revenge – ultio – vengeance was, after all, his – but the Lord did not, I suggest, feud.  That would suggest an altogether heretical view of the Almighty.  And the texts cited as showing the centrality of feuding are, as I have argued before and as I have suggested above, about vengeance, not about feud as in modern understanding. 

There is only time for brief points.  Essentially, early medieval law permitted vengeance.  Even law codes like that of King Edmund of England, permitted vengeance, but, and here they drew upon a tradition that went back to the very last Roman laws in the west.  They made precise grants, in specified circumstances, of the state’s right to vengeance.  Only exceptionally energetic and powerful rulers believed they could prevent all acts of vindicatory violence and say that all punishment would be done by their officers.  The early medieval Latin and vernacular words for feud meant the threat to take revenge.  This threat was strategic.  It brought in external parties to mediate.  Specifically, for much of the period, it brought in the king’s officers.  Thus, as I have argued before, ‘feud’ (in early medieval terms) was not a sign of absent state power and nor was its appearance in law a sort of abject admission of this fact, a weary acceptance of the fact that the only way to keep the peace was through a system of deterrence, of mutually assured destruction.  Because the system brought in royal officers to adjudicate, it was a means of enhancing royal presence in the localities.  This vengeance was structurally and analytically different from feuding.  For one thing, it seems to have been the threat of violence that was used strategically to draw attention to the dispute and bring in third parties in an attempt to resolve it.  If compensation was not paid and an agreement or consensus was reached that vengeance was justified, then a revenge killing was seen as punishment, and to have ended the dispute.  It seems to me that this is importantly different from feud, where killing rarely ends the dispute, except perhaps where the whole of the opposing party is wiped out.  Thus to suggest that ideas of feud permeated society, or that feud, as a threat of mutually assured destruction was used to keep the peace in a stateless society, badly misrepresent the early medieval evidence.

The conflict between Uhtred’s family and Thurbrand’s was, to use Paul Hyams’ phrase, feud-like behaviour.  There were certainly elements about it that look like feud.  They were, however, only parts of a complex mix and probably not the most important ones.  Feuds make good stories and the Durham Anonymous wrote this one up into a gripping tale.  But a hugely misleading one.  He made a selection to emplot his narrative as a tale of feud.  The actors in his story might themselves have selected events from the past to justify their deeds.  The point is however that they had a choice.  When other considerations made violence necessary and actions from the past helped to justify this, they chose these justifications.  Most of the time, however, it seems that they chose not to make past violent acts the basis for present or future actions.  These people were not imprisoned within a feuding culture, or bound by the demands of feud.  To emplot the Northumbrian story as a feud masks the complexity of the situation.  More importantly it denies the actors in the story the historical choices that they clearly had and the freedom to act that they evidently enjoyed.

Gaps, Ghosts and Dice: More inchoate musings on the nature of history (in which Julius Caesar meets Stéphane Mallarmé): Part 1

[Brace yourself for more ill-informed, half-thought-through pseudo-philosophical waffling about what history really is.  Ill-informed, etc., yes - but serious and heart-felt, too.  

What I am going to explore here might possibly be considered under the general headings of change, narrative, causation.  Those of you who have read Barbarian Migrations will know from the middle section (theoretically and methodologically, the most important bit - although Stuart Airlie seems to be the only person to have spotted this) that I have been interested in the inescapably ironic nature of history.  That's to say that the outcomes of decisions are very often entirely unintended by historical actors.  I've been carting it about with me for days but I've still not read Benjamin on History, so I'm aware that I'm probably re-inventing a wheel he already invented.  This, incidentally, explains some of the thinking behind my miniature manifesto; for some of the rest, check out the posts with the tag 'The Unbearable Weight']

Here are a couple of minor issues: what is the past?  What is history?  Let’s be basic and uncontroversial.  The past, we can all agree, is simply enough all that ‘stuff’ that happened before now, whenever ‘now’ might happen to be – such as me writing the beginning of this sentence.  Or – now – writing the end of it.  But how do we make sense of that?  Surely by selecting particular elements from all those past events and placing them in a sequence, rightly or wrongly.  (I used to keep a diary and, although I have a pretty good memory, I confess that I often had difficulty remembering the exact order in which things had happened, even if they’d only happened the /previous day.)  That sequencing inevitably involves a process of winnowing; you can’t remember everything (unless you’re Funes the Memorious in Borges’ story).  And then we might process that information to involve an element of causation.  X happened – we think – because of Y and if only I/they hadn’t done A then (we like to think) B might not have happened; etc.  It’d be uncontroversial to say that we can’t even imagine the past in any meaningful way without this sort of process happening first.  We can imagine all that protean mass of ‘stuff what happened’ but we can’t access any of it without selecting from it, placing those selections in sequence, evaluating them and having some idea of their meaning; in other words without placing it within the symbolic order.  Only then can we really imagine the past.  Thus, ironically, it is true to say that memory happens before the past.  By the same token, then, we could also say that ‘History’ happens before ‘the past’.

       Digression

In the 1990s people started talking about history as memory.  Cultures in many ways create, deploy and access history in the same way as individuals create, deploy and access memory.  As a result, every bandwagon-chaser in the land began to write articles (sometimes spectacularly impenetrable and yet still somehow meaningless) about ‘cultural memory’.  Yet, I’ve never been very sure what this really added to our understanding of history, other than a new metaphor: memory.  I once quipped sarcastically that the only meaningful interaction between ‘memory, literacy and orality’ in the Carolingian world was when one monk told another monk that he had forgotten what he was going to write…  All this does not seem to me to have added any fundamentally new or different ways of understanding the way that history is used; it does, by contrast, seem unhelpfully to have blurred the useful distinction between how people make and access memories of the personal, lived past and how people and societies construct and access their collective past, especially before that experienced by those alive in the present.  It seemed to me that we already had perfectly good words for the latter, in ‘tradition’ and ‘history’.  But there we are; this is how disciplinary trends and paradigms work…

So, none of those opening comments are startling, new or profound.  At its most basic, essential but initial level, history is the process of symbolising the past.  Only then can we begin to imagine it.  It is here, I think, that things (possibly) get interesting.  Someone said that history was a seamless web; what they meant was that time as it is lived and experienced is a seamless web.  History is surely the inescapable and absolutely essential process of making seams in that web; folding it up into the manageable sections that we call periodization.  Everyone who has ever lectured to first-year history students about the perils of periodization knows that historical periods are, fundamentally, simply units of convenience that mask certain continuities by fastening upon other pre-determined aspects of change.  But the problem reaches down much further than that into the very way in which we write the narratives (I like to call this stage ‘chronicling’ rather than ‘history’) that we then analyse and explain (this, in my view, is ‘history’ properly defined).

Historical narrative is structured like a language.  Events gain their meaning within sequences from their juxtaposition with other events, before and after.  Like words.   These juxtapositions allow us to write history as tragedy or as heroic epic, or in an ironic mode, or however.  Events – types of events or specific events – have different meanings according to the way they are emplotted within a narrative.  OK: this is old news.  What I want to explore is what is implicit in that potential difference.  History does not simply put seams in the seamless cloth of time.  What it does is to fold that cloth and stitch it tightly together – over and over again.  To pursue that metaphor, what the temporal cloth looks like after the process of historical narrative is, from the front, a narrow, densely stitched-together mass of neatly creased folds.  Out behind that, invisible from our perspective, are acres of billowing cloth: time that has escaped symbolisation.  Now, you can unpick a seam and look at the cloth opened up, but to understand it you still need to make it into a sequence of smaller folds; open up one of them and look at a smaller piece of time but have to stitch that into smaller folds still, and so on.  Or you can unpick all of the seams and behold the whole cloth opened up but, equally inevitably, you will only be able to make sense of it by stitching it together again, even if in a new way, with different bits of cloth (time) concealed in the folds.  You can argue that the latter is what happened when historians stopped thinking that their subject was simply the chronicling of high politics, kings and wars, and started thinking about social history, or women’s history, or when historians unpicked the great seam that lay at 476 and the End of the Roman Empire and made a new fold, called Late Antiquity. 

All that folding and stitching, though happens after the event.  The decision of what constitutes an event that marks the edges of a fold, how we write about them in purely descriptive terms, and so on.  It’s a truism that very rarely (outside the obvious limit cases) do people see the events through which they’re living in the same way as later historians will.  Between 1914 and 1918, for example, we could say that people were experiencing the horrors not of a ‘war to end wars’, as they (or some of them) thought, but of a curtain raiser for an even more horrible war.

It’s these folds, these billows of cloth behind the stitches, which I want to think about.  These spaces or gaps are where history happens.  They are the spaces – as I will return to discuss – where nothing is decided and where history has not yet been symbolised in any way.  In that sense I like to think of them as the spaces of The Real in a way that is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis.  The historical ‘temporal’ Real, here, is that space where things happen without us yet being able to understand or place them in any sort of symbolic order.  Encountering this Real can (as in Lacanian theory) be a terrible thing.  To take the usual limit case, the Shoah, who can have taken part in that (whether as victim or camp guard or executioner) without being aware of experiencing terrible history as it was being made? 

      Clarification

I’m not – let me make crystal clear – making any sort of equation between the perpetrators and the victims of this crime in terms of the trauma of this experience; just that neither can have occupied this temporal space without knowing that something of immense, unprecedented historical importance was happening – whether you were seeing thousands of your fellows butchered and thinking that your race was going to be wiped from the face of the earth, or whether you were a Nazi thinking you were carrying out some terrible, avenging, messianic task.

So, the spaces closed up, represented metaphorically by my ‘billows’ represent the temporal Real of lived experience.  This can only be folded and seamed after the event, thus symbolising and historicising it.  This process only (as we’ve seen) creates further billows (unless one were to write in spaces that took as long – relatively – to navigate as lived time) and so it can never be grasped.  Yet it is always there, always in the same temporal place.  In grasping it you pass through it; it is like a ghost (though this isn’t the ghost of my title), a spectre.

        Digression

 In his most famous poem, 'Un Coup de dés', Stéphane Mallarmé set out his poem with long spaces and different strands within the work indicated by font-size and their place within the two page spread - a type-setter's nightmare!  I often wonder about writing history like this, with long spaces indicating the time past, and different fonts and font-sizes representing the different threads within the story.  It'd be a huge task and a real work of art, and would sell about 3 copies even if someone took it on.  But it'd be interesting.

If we were to think some more about these spaces we’d see that they are zones of infinite possibility. Let us assume we can somehow open up the temporal space closed up by the ‘and’ of the sentence ‘Napoleon’s army met Wellington’s south of Brussels and was decisively defeated in the battle of Waterloo’.  This space – the morning of 18 June 1815 – is inhabited by about 150,000 men and women.  French and allied armies are deployed but not engaged.  Blue-clad troops swarming over the horizon to the east are Prussians.  At this point anything is possible.  Napoleon can disengage; he can fight and win (or lose).  He (and the other 149,999) can yet survive the day or be killed.  The day can turn out to be the battle (allied victory) of Waterloo, or the battle (French victory) of La Belle Alliance, or an insignificant encounter some days before the great Battle of Somewhere Else, that no one other than Napoleonic military history buffs have ever heard of.  It could be the day that Wellington died heroically, trying to stem the rout of his army, or the day of infamy when Gneisenau inexplicably stopped the march of the Prussian army, leaving Wellington to be defeated.  Or the day the Emperor’s head was knocked clean off by a Prussian canon-ball at the moment of his greatest triumph.  Or whatever.

This does not simply mean that ‘what happened’ was different, but also that the whole way in which we symbolise and understand it differs – and that symbolization is ever shifting as the narrative lengthens in time.  It means, then, that the symbolization of an historical event is never fixed.  What it also means is that our temporal Real – lived time – is a true zone of Derridean ‘differance’.  That is to say that its meaning derives from difference from other signifiers and that any ‘true’ meaning is endlessly deferred.  ‘Differance’, says Leslie Hill in the Cambridge Companion to Derrida, ‘is the beginning space of time and the beginning time of space.’  No, I have no idea what that means either, but it sounds good (and the ‘beginning space of time’ fits what I’m talking about anyway).

Let’s have an example.  Let’s consider the history of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War.  If we were writing in 1946, say, we would doubtless see ourselves in a space of triumph after a terrible ordeal; although the future would seem very uncertain, there would be grounds for hope that a new and better world was coming into existence after the horrors of Nazism.  If we were writing in 1982, though, the picture of these events would look very different, a melancholy exchange of one tyranny for another with no sign of anything getting any better any time soon. Even respected professors of modern history could see no prospect of the Fall of the Wall; one predicted confidently over his beer that the Iron Curtain would not be lifted in his lifetime (to much later ribbing from his colleagues) – a good example of why you should never ask a historian to predict the future.  If we wrote that history now, the Soviet occupation would look like an interlude, and the analysis, not just the narrative, changes.  The future looks different from the way it looked in the ‘80s but it is no less unpredictable.  I don’t like to quote Donald Rumsfeld but the old b*st*rd did come out with some memorable sayings, one of which is that the future is no less predictable than the past; the past wasn’t predictable when it happened.

       Digression

There’s nostalgia here and in the link between time and place.  For example, I recently went for a new job – a job I really wanted and I could have done well – but I didn’t pull it off.  I’m quite depressed and angry about it, but let’s not go into that.  So I just went through Sheffield station and I remembered changing trains there on my way to the job presentation.  It was a lovely morning, I felt confident that I’d written a good talk, the sun was shining and I still had everything to play for – it was still a zone of pure possibility.  Isn’t that what nostalgia is about?

There’s no statute of limitations here.  The holocaust is cast as the terrible tragedy that it was, but one that passed, produced the Israeli state (whatever one might think of that) and an awareness of the horrors of genocide, of where antisemitism could lead, and widespread feeling that both were things to be fought against.  But what if…?  What if ultra-right-wingers sweep to power in a post-banking-crisis melt-down across Europe and pogroms begin again?  Would our own time be closed up as a simple interlude between the First and Second Holocausts (or between the Jewish and Muslim Holocausts)?

A history that stops in c.500 finishes with the end of the Roman Empire (Good Thing/Bad Thing/Supreme Irony/whatever) but a cultural history of the period c.300-c.700 can pass through the period as though, in most meaningful terms, the Empire didn’t end at all (as in some works within the Late Antique paradigm).  And a political history that continued to 814 would end with the revival of the Western Empire under Charlemagne – so it hadn’t really ended after all.  And what if, in our unpredictable future in post-banking-crisis Europe, something very odd happens to the EU, with it becoming a pan-European dictatorship renamed as a revival of the Roman Empire?  Do the 207 years since Francis I’s deposition as Holy Roman Empire become an interval or blip, like the 324 years between Romulus Augustulus and Charlemagne?  You see, even the history of the Roman Empire hasn’t necessarily ended yet…  What was the significance of 476?  It’s too soon to say. 

The Temporal Real is also the zone of pure chance and encounter.  As in my Waterloo scenario, it’s not just the relative skill in generalship of Wellington and Napoleon (and Blücher/Gneisenau), nor the bravery and skill of their troops, nor any combination of those that determines the signification of the event. As I mooted earlier, it is just as possible that Napoleon could have his head knocked off at the moment of victory or that Wellington stop one of the canon-balls, bullets or canister fragments that killed or wounded almost every member of his staff (while leaving him unscathed) that day.

I am by no means interested in this as the ‘What If…’ history beloved of right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson (Virtual History) and his ilk.  Or Cowley's What If? Military Historians Ponder What Might Have Been. In this type of history, the absurd premise is that if one thing happened differently, the whole of European or world history would unfold in a quite different way.  This is logical nonsense.  In the poem, referred to earlier, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote ‘a throw of the dice does not abolish chance’.  Quite so, but for Ferguson and co. a different throw does.  What if Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo?  Well, what if he did?  What if he fell off his horse and broke his neck the next day – with his son and heir still in Austrian captivity?  Or, alternatively, what might have happened if Napoleon had lost the Battle of Waterloo?  What if the allies fell out and took to fighting each other at the Congress of Vienna, in the course of which one party backed a Napoleonic restoration against Louis XVIII (Louis ‘the Inevitable’: perhaps my favourite royal epithet in French history)?  Not very likely, you might say, but – hey – by 1848 both branches of the Bourbons had been deposed anyway and by 1851 Napoleon’s nephew was ruling France.  Different outcomes are always possible – they’re still possible.  Vive l’Empereur!  There are no endings in history, but many fictional explorations of the possibilities I am discussing in the oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges.  Take Julius Caesar, declaring the die to have been cast when he crossed the Rubicon.  He must have thought he’d rolled high, too.  Until he got stabbed to death by Brutus and the rest, having ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time after all.  The throw of the dice did not abolish chance, Julius.  Watch out for my forthcoming Airport history paperback blockbuster, So What? Historians Ponder How Things Could Have Worked Out Exactly the Same…

Political Implications

Now, since my theme in this Blog is very often the relationship between the study of the past and political engagement in the present, you won’t be surprised to learn that I think that there are some political implications in all this.  On the one hand, there is always hope, because the narrative is never closed – maybe it’ll take time, maybe beyond our lifetimes, but if we don’t lose hope and stop fighting, maybe things will change for the better.  After all, only we can do that.  The equal implication, though, implicit in my discussion of The Shoah, is vigilance – because the narrative is never closed.  New Labour was not vigilant.  It assumed that the battle had been won, and it stopped fighting – and look what happened: the battle had not been won at all.  Even the narratives that seem to have come to a happy conclusion require us to keep fighting.  Hope and Vigilance: a committed historian’s watchwords.

Quite apart from the competitive interplay of actors’ intentions (which side ‘wins’) or the intervention of chance, the outcome of actions can be quite unintended by anyone.  I’ve written about the end of the Roman Empire as an ‘accidental suicide’, the ironic result of actions aimed not at destroying the Empire at all, but at dominating it in the tradition of more traditional fourth-century politics.  The intervention of chance and the fact that the outcomes of actions are not (usually teleologically, as in the oeuvre of Gussie Finknottle) reducible to the achievement or frustration of particular actors’ aims is a major problem with many models of social interaction (in my understanding of it, it’s a big problem with Heidegger’s, for example).  My way of seeing might be a good way of avoiding the totalising tendencies of such approaches.

In the next part of these musings, I’ll return to the folds of the cloth, and more on social interaction.  This is where we'll meet the ghosts.

Graves and Sexuality: Multiple readings

[I was inspired by a critical discussion by Karl Steel here, of an attempt to project same-sex marriage into the past, to post my (I think only) discussion of sexuality and queer readings of archaeology, for your thoughts/comments, especially form those of you who are more literate in theory than I am.  The quote comes from pp.347-9 of Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian Gaul, in a chapter (9) which contains other thoughts about archaeologists' and historians' fear of including same-sex love/emotional attraction within their range of interpretive options.]

Ennery (Lorraine) 'Graves' 6 and 8

Finally in this section I should like to draw attention to the double burials of young males that are known in Merovingian archaeology.  In the cemeteries in Lorraine which I studied the best examples were ‘graves’ 6 and 8 at Ennery (dating to the sixth century), and grave 103 at Audun-le-Tiche, from about a century later.  Logically, the subjects of the graves must have succumbed close in time.  What seem at first sight to be linked arms are on closer inspection no such thing; the arms of the subjects of the Ennery double grave simply lie on top of each other.  This might have been deliberate or it might not.[1]  There is a wide range of possibilities behind these double graves.  They might be those of relatives, perhaps most plausibly those of brothers.  There were a number of other social ties in Merovingian society that might equally have led the community to join two young males in death.  For instance, the male child of the foster father or god-parent of another young man would be regarded as that young man’s brother.  The son of one family, serving as an apprentice in another might have been regarded as, effectively, kin – a surrogate brother – to the sons of that household.  Two young men serving together in a household could have been regarded as sharing a bond.  In all such cases the families of the deceased and perhaps that of the head of the household might, following the interpretation of furnished burial proposed above, have come together in funerary ritual to ease the rupture in relations between the families produced by the deaths in question.  Alternatively, as will be discussed below, young males might have bonded in age groups.  The deaths of two such men might have united their families in grief and led them to create links between them through involvement in a joint funeral.  Lastly it is possible that a joint interment might have been a means of smoothing over tensions created by killing and vengeance.  Nevertheless, we probably ought not to apply a single explanation to all of the instances of such burials.  Double graves might well represent different aspects of society from those manifested by occasional triple burials, such as at Niederstotzingen.[2]

My purpose in mentioning these graves in this chapter is simply to consider a further issue raised by the possibility that the occupants of such graves were united other than by close kinship.  The close homosocial bonds between young men serving together in various contexts (from the monastic to the military) are well known throughout history, as is the frequency with which these bonds encompass homosexual love and sex.  In spite of this, as in other periods of history, accusations of anal sex with men were nevertheless regarded as serious slurs on a man’s standing or honour.  Interestingly, the other bases for insult were cowardice and unreliability in battle.[3]  As has been long debated, such homosexual love is usually not commensurate with a self-consciously gay identity, seen as different from or antagonistic to normative heterosexuality: this seems to be the product of more modern sexual classifications.  It is nevertheless surely a mistake either to deny that such emotional and sexual relations existed (in the latter case – sexual relations – the concern of monastic regulators and authors of penitentials with sodomy ought to be proof enough to the contrary[4]) or that the classifications of sexual behaviour and the views of male homosexual relationships held by medieval people were automatically similar to those of modern observers.  This matters because it presents two possibilities (they are not more than that) to the reading of double burials like Ennery 6 and 8 or Audun-le-Tiche 103.  One is that such emotional bonds were given sufficient recognition to result in shared inhumation.  The other, possibly the more interesting, perhaps the more likely, takes us to the issue of the polysemy of burial display.[5]  The ‘dominant’ reading intended by the creators of a funerary monument like this might to have been to stress the social relations between the two families, or to have valorised the comradeship, trust and fidelity of shared military service, traditionally ‘honourable’ within masculine culture.  Other readings open to contemporaries at the graveside, however, might have dwelt on different issues, such as real or suspected sexual or emotional relationships between the two men.  These might have involved no particular value judgement, simply being alternative.  They might also have been subversive, and they might have been derogatory (as in the insults referred to above).  The latter could be open to members of rival families or to those men barred from participation in what was becoming the normative, military form of masculinity, as discussed in the next chapter.

---

[1] See below, pp.357-60

[2] R. Christlein, Die Alamannen: Archäologie eines lebendigen Volkes (3^rd edition, Stuttgart, 1991), p.89.

[3] PLS [Pactus Legis Salicae] 30, using the translation I proposed in W&S [Warfare and Society], p.11.

[4] Although what, precisely, was meant by the term sodomy is usually vague; many non-procreative forms of sexual encounter could be bracketed under the heading.  Nevertheless, in the context of penitentials I assume it means some form of sexual, physical contact between males.

[5] BW ['Burial Writes'], pp.64-65 (above, pp.219-20).

History and Commitment: A Miniature Manifesto

[I went to the International Congress on Medieval studies at the University of Western Michigan, Kalamazoo ('The 'Zoo' to its afficionados) last week where I participated in a session entitled  Burn After Reading: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval Studies (A Roundtable).  You can read the full line-up here and another of the Manifestos (the other history one) here.  Here is perhaps the most inspiring of all.  Below is my own effort.  Thanks to Eileen Joy for inviting me to take part in a very interesting and enthusing session.]

                       Item: Rankean History is dead.  

No one will pretend it is possible to tell history as it really was

But no one has seized the implication of that

Its empirical ghost remains, although simple factual accuracy sets the bar pretty low for a historical project

Is the cry ‘Rankean History is dead: long live Rankean history’?

Or is it time to explore again the pre-Rankean idea of history as philosophy teaching by example?

Item: History is not ‘relevant’

History does not tell us ‘how we got here’

History’s value lies in:

                                             i.            not believing what you’re told;

                                           ii.            understanding that the world didn’t – and doesn’t – have to be like this: there are other ways of doing things

                                          iii.            Ethical and political stances are implicit in both; to which we must be committed

History has no monopoly on these; what sets it apart from other arts, humanities and social sciences might uncontroversially be said to be its focus upon concrete situations and completed actions

And yet it is there that lies the aporia we must explore
      Fuck reality; fuck endings

Item: Historical narrative is a series of temporal spaces defined after the event, enfolded, closed up, by the process of narration – of completion – of concretion

These spaces are the un- or pre-symbolised pre-historicised temporal Real

History must open up these spaces, not just to look at the causation of the event that marks its closure

History must open them to a more attentive - yet critical - listening, which is a listening to our writing of the past as well as to the voices of the past 

Such listening avoids subordination to the usual demands of historical narrative

It escapes the inevitability - the contingent necessity in Zizek's words - of history; where every letter really does arrive at its destination

In these spaces everything was still to play for

because people frequently didn’t know what they were playing for – they were usually doing something else
         History is what happens while you're making other plans

These are the spaces of the radically undecided

Here, the aims of the actors do not necessarily decide the outcome,

Here, things no longer possible remain possible

These are zones of pure chance and encounter

Item: Opening up these spaces makes us rethink historical narrative

                              This makes the historical narrative inescapably ironic

                             It is not the ‘what if’ history beloved of the Right, where a different throw of the dice does abolish chance

                              It understands what happened by exploring what didn’t

We furnish a better guide to ethical and politically committed action in the present by restoring to the past its once possible impossibilities

Foching the Tories (more vague musing on how History might help us think about what to do in the present)

[I mentioned recently a blogging crise de confiance.  Who cares what I think?  And what do I know?  Fair questions.  I often blog about things I'm no expert in, like philosophy and politics.  But then again I do care about these issues.  Then I read these blogs in national newspapers here and here and I thought that, whatever I think or write it's no crazier than these opinions (Cameron's government is socialist?  Hard right Tory policies will win Labour voters over by producing social mobility?  Hell, at least I haven't taken the quantities of Class As that would give me those ideas).  So, no I'm not a politician (and could never be) or political theorist but maybe these musings will spark or feed into some better ideas by someone who is.]

A year ago – and more – I penned a piece called ‘So that’s it: we lost?’ at the start of the Coalition’s assault on what is left of the Welfare State, the NHS and so on.  Certainly, the defenders of the State, the Public Sector, the NHS &c., did not give up without a fight.   And they still haven’t.   But we still lost in the end.  The NHS reforms – a charter to sell off what is left of the National Health Service to Cameron’s friends and backers – went through in the end. 

Digression

It’s worth, at this point, contrasting the sheer lack of real achievement, of any dismantling of the results of the Thatcherite attack on the State sector, or even the bulwarking of what remained, by a Labour party with a huge mandate for change – a mandate still reinforced in 2001, when people continued to vote tactically  (in a low turn-out, admittedly) to keep the Tories out – with the revolutionary (or, better, counter-revolutionary) excesses of the current Tory government with (let’s remember) no mandate at all: typically arrogant public school boys who have simply steamed full ahead regardless of pre-election promises, parroting their hollow ideological nonsense about The Market, secure in the knowledge that they are, by virtue of their education, social class and money, bound to be right, whatever anyone else might think.  It’s also worth noting just how small a role has really been played by the Labour Party in opposing Cameron and his millionaire cronies.  No attempt has been made by the Labour Party to challenge the narrative (no surprise there: no attempt was made when they were in power).  All the radical information about the Tory donors and their links with private health care providers etc., has been deployed by political bloggers, web-sites, ‘popular’ resistance movements like 38 Degrees and so on.  Meanwhile, the Labour Party continues to waffle about fiscal responsibility, Blue Labour and the rest.  No change there.

So, in the short term anyway, we have lost: there are no two ways about that.  In late 2010 I mused about how this might look to historians of centuries to come, wondering how it was that the achievements of the war generation, the post-’45 settlement etc could have been thrown away (I continued to ponder that scenario after last summer’s Riots).  But the importance of History – I increasingly think – is in showing that things don’t have to go in a particular way, or lead to a particular outcome.  This is, perhaps, a novel (or at least a minority) view of History.  History has tended to derive its shape from end-points.  In Žižek this is called ‘contingent necessity’: a series of contingent choices and events/results of choices is portrayed, teleologically, as necessary by the end-result.  This is a type of history we must reject.

Rejecting contingent necessity, it seems to me, suggests a way forward and an opportunity to build a socialist/radical Left alternative out of the wreckage of Cameron’s Britain.  What the ConDem wreckers have achieved is the final unpicking of the last of the key co-ordinates of the ’45 Settlement.  Now, this might look like a disaster – and in the short term at least it certainly is.  It will make life much worse for a lot of people while cementing the ‘haves’ in their position of dominance.  But, it seems to me, the sheer extent of Cameron’s success could hand those of us on the Left with a real opportunity – by which I don’t mean a cynical, passive Leninist ‘the worse, the better’ stance. 

It must be responded to in the right fashion, and while the iron is still at least fairly hot.  At the moment, as I see it, the fractured Left (or pseudo-Left) offers us a series of limited options:

1: Accommodation.  The classic New Labour option.  In this view, as always, the Labour Party dances to the Tory/Tory Media tune.  The usual gutless triangulation will lead to an acceptance of the Tory narrative of fiscal irresponsibility, austerity, and a vapid promise simply to manage the situation bequeathed to any future Labour government by Cameron and co, not to make matters any worse.  Mistakes will be admitted, in spite of the deficit lies, the continuing refusal to deal with the bankers, Osborne’s manifest incompetence, the corruption of the government, its dealings with Murdoch, Brooks and the rest, and so on and so forth.  You could say that there was never a better time, while the Murdocracy is in such low esteem with the public, to launch an attack without fear of the Sun’s front page.

2: Nostalgia.  This is classic melancholy in the focussing on something lost.  But that cannot radically challenge the Tory narrative, precisely because of ‘contingent necessity’.  The NHS failed and therefore ‘had to be’ changed’.  Thus anyone holding a simple ‘revivalist’ position will be able to be portrayed as arguing against the lessons of history, the weight of history, or the logic of history.  Variants of the nostalgic revivalist position will be found in old-style Unionism and in the Old Left: the Marxists, the SWP, Old Labour.  None of these will be able to mount an effective challenge.  They are too easily countered – indeed disposed of – by populist right-wing propaganda.  In this sense they are as locked within the Tory narrative as the accommodationists of Blue Labour.   The signifying system of the Tory narrative portray them highly effectively as far-left dinosaurs, the Loony Left, as adherents of systems that ‘history shows’ failed (contingent necessity again), as threatening ordinary, decent people.

3: Oh, and then there’s Occupy.  Not that Occupy sees itself as part of the Left, anyway.  Occupy has nothing to say to anyone about anything.  More to the point it doesn’t want to.  It likes to see itself as above such things: as ‘Punk Politics’, as one can see from Occupy commenters on blogs etc.  It presents itself simply as ‘the young people’ doing something new (regardless of the fact that simple occupation is about as old-style a form of protest as there is).  It has no programme (in the UK anyway).  In the UK it seems largely politically illiterate (for example, one Occupy commenter on a blog-post said Occupy ‘transcended Left and Right’ – how is that even possible?).  It’s not interested in thinking about the crucial terms of the debate.  It has, if anything, allowed itself to be demonised by the media, weakening support for whatever it is that it is trying to do.

What we need to do, counter-intuitively perhaps, is embrace the extent of Cameron’s mandate-less successes and excesses.  The very extent of dismantling the state can be a way of breaking free of the Tory narrative.  It cuts the Left free from the hulk of the ’45 Settlement and its attendant baggage.  It is, I suggest, possible to appropriate and thereby to subvert, the Tory master-narrative.  The post-45 Welfare State failed – but do you know why it failed?  A new narrative could be based on Tory Story, one which can put the neo-liberals on the back foot.  Let us negate the negation.  There are multiple new narratives that can be constructed around the failure of the Welfare State in the face of capitalist assault – which dwell, for example upon the way in which privatisation has not been a success, except in increasing the gap between the wealthy and the poor.  How it shows that private companies driven by the profit motive are not more efficient than state operations (indeed how most privatised areas are still propped up by government subsidy, whereas workers and consumers have lost out – how the old nationalised industries are still nationalised, except – farcically – that the nation that owns them isn’t theUK…). 

Foch 'em!

And there would be many others (here is a nice example).  The point is that the programmes should be to create something new; not simply (or overtly) to preserve or revive.  To quote Beckett (not Brecht: thanks 'James'): Try again; fail again; fail better.  The more the neo-liberals dismantle the post-45 settlement, the more they unpick the coordinates of their own ideology.  (More to the point, perhaps, to adopt an analogy from the historiography of the Carolingian Empire, the more they sell off to their chums, the less booty they have to distribute to their followers…)  We should embrace the space opened up by this in the creation of new radical left-wing ideas, to build a better version of the Welfare State, a more effective one, probably using a different name.  This is where my title comes in with its allusion to Maréchal Ferdinand Foch and his famous ‘toujours l’attaque’ quote: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack."

This might have unexpected results.  It might, if even partially successful, compel the neo-liberals to back-track.  After all they need their ‘other’ – their ‘bloated’, ‘failed’, ‘something for nothing’ post-45 welfare state.  This would be a partial success in itself but it should not be seen as sufficient.  Rather than accepting such a result, the project of a new and better Welfare State 2.0 ought to be pushed and pursued with the support of health and education workers, pushing the Right further into the position of defending what it itself claims to have failed, whilst still maintaining their policies of social division and inequality.  The ground of the debate that is opened up by Cameron’s success should be seized, and this is one way of doing so.  This is the opportunity offered by the debacle of Lansley’s health care Bill.  The question is whether the Left has the political will and imagination to take it.

New Page

I have added a new, 'under-construction' page of more overtly political content, subtly entitled 'Crap Government Watch', as I thought it'd be worth compiling and keeping a kind of chronicle - fact (or at least statistics)-based - of our current government's obnoxious policies and general incompetence.  Lest, as it were, we forget.  I was hoping it'd be possible to keep a post 'sticky' at the top of the page, but evidently it isn't so you'll have to click on the link to the right of this post.

In the meantime, try this.

Apologies

For the extended radio silence.  I have been a: busy (no, really, I have); b: having something of a blogging 'crise de confiance'.  A couple of posts have been drafted but never finished.  I hope to have something that may be of interest posted in a few days.  In the meantime, thanks for your patience! And happy International Jazz Day (regardless of what that grumpy Steve Sarson might say).