Nietzsche's excerpt: The greatest weight. What, if some day or night a demon were to steal you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing more new in it, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?"
This is a great case for the futility of time machines. Further, if i were to know this recurrence but have no chance to alter, thus becoming a ghost in my own conscious, that would be both trippy and frustrating.
As for an actual corollary to this eternal recurrence, I have been present to it many times. Feeling my body begin to hit someone, feeling my thoughts work themselves up into provoking an argument, feeling myself go back on my prohibition of cigarettes and food.
At this times I am a consciousness trapped in a time loop, and at times I do feel apart from myself, alienated. I don't think this is existential however, but neurological. I have endured sufficient trauma to give my consciousness an reason to distant itself from its own process and those of my body.
And to regard the eternal recurrences of history as inevitable would be just as justified as to regard the personal type as inevitable, and for all the wars and massacres that are happening even now as 'we' think of 'ourselves' as beyond our primitive past, and for all the resignation that the brilliant and the ignorant both throw up at the disgusting things that permeate our societies, I can only reply with the sort of thing I often tell myself and my wife: It's good to know our problems and complain about them when we need to alleviate pressure, but if we are to acknowledge that it is in fact a problem, we must eventually come to the question of what to do about it.
I sometimes get the feeling that Nietzsche liked the excuse provided, by the awesome tragedy he created out of his brilliant words and ideas, not to deal with the petty problems of his common tragedies, such as poor health, rejection and shame.
For these he would have had to write a self help book, without any oppurtunity to describe things as tragic, fearsome, awesome, trembling, etc. You know Nietzsche, I too live in the land of high plateaus and caves, but, at the same time, somehow, and with fearful inexplicability, i live in a little apartment which I cannot organize, and in a body that is not tall enough, and has surplus stores of fat. I also have often feared my sexual and romantic inadequacy. I also have suffered migraines and have asthma. These are problems that do not go away with the comprehension of idolatry, the dawning of psychological genealogies, or getting at the heart of rationalism. Is it left to the future man, the being free of the chains put upon him by the apollonian moralists, to solve the very last of our problems, and has the overcoming of man in the spirit not yet surpassed the utility of cardio vascular exercise and a lesbians tips on oral sex? Whoa onto me.
Hayden White's Excerpt:
In my view, a historiographical style represents a particular combination of modes of emplotment, argument, and idelogical implication. [He then goes to describe that the elements of these categories have exclusive bondings and are imcompatible with other sets Like Romantic Mode of Emplotment implies the Formist mode of argument, and the Anarchist mode of idelogical implementation.
I like this categorical, abstract mode of theorizing, because I too have employed it. But, I think his mode of exclusion leads to an embarassing mode of consequence.
Another thing that is interesting in White's chart is that he associates comic, with organicist, and conservative. The organicist and conservative we can see in conservatives of the edmund burke or hayek variety. As for the comic, we can see it's accuracy when contrasted with what he posits for liberal, that is, contextualist and satirical. The four mode of emplotments are romantic, tragic, comic and satirical.
As a test of this, lets look at shows that are only incidentally historical.
What are the best expamples of satire in America? Real Americans know that they are the daily show, the Colbert Report, the Simpsons, and South Park.
South Park is more Libertarian, but tries to be apolitical. The Daily show and colbert report are liberal, and the Simpsons.
But why no good Conservative satire? I guess its because White's conception of Historical styel holds true for t.v. Did you see the Fox news parody of the Daily show, the half hour news hour or something, it was so sad. It made me feel shame, even though I'm an anarchist.
As for historical style, lets look at some people I'm familiar with: Vidal, Zinn, and Bakunin. Zinn and Bakunin are anarchists. Zinn I can see as Romantic, as White maintains is implied by the Anarchist Mode of Ideological Impication. Bakunin, though, seems more tragic, at least in God and the State. He doesnt spend a lot of time building dreams, and he employs a dialectical or Hegelian style of reasoning. Vidal is a liberal, and, at the same time, a Conservative. But he is rather formist in his Mode of Argument, constantly referencing the inconsistency of American history with it's original principles, but he's also supposed to be socialist. His mode of emplotment, in his historical novels, is comic, if a little satirical.
Well, the more I think about these categories, the more interesting they are to me, as possibilities of actual tendencies of correlation. But as for the general necessary combination of these forms, you will find that many will use whatever mode of emplotment they can to advocate their cause. It's often called branding or marketing today. And it is not outside historical narrative.
I have to say though that, while most contemporary anarchists are overly romantic, they are less likely to be romantic about anarchist history, and there approach is definitely organic. I think we will find that as anarchists develop more stable approaches to history, they will and (and do) find the formist mode of argument less compelling.
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