Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture: 28 (FlashPoints) - Softcover

Nasser Mufti (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810136023 ISBN 13: 9780810136021

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Civilizing War traces the historical transformation of civil war from a civil affair into an uncivil crisis. Civil war is today synonymous with the global refugee crisis, often serving as grounds for liberal-humanitarian intervention and nationalist protectionism.

In Civilizing War, Nasser Mufti situates this contemporary conjuncture in the long history of British imperialism, demonstrating how civil war has been and continues to be integral to the politics of empire. Through comparative readings of literature, criticism, historiography, and social analysis, Civilizing War shows how writers and intellectuals of Britain’s Anglophone empire articulated a “poetics of national rupture” that defined the metropolitan nation and its colonial others.

Mufti’s tour de force marshals a wealth of examples as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Friedrich Engels, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje to examine the variety of forms this poetics takes—metaphors, figures, tropes, puns, and plot—all of which have played a central role in Britain’s civilizing mission and its afterlife. In doing so, Civilizing War shifts the terms of Edward Said’s influential Orientalism to suggest that imperialism was not only organized around the norms of civility but also around narratives of civil war.

About this title

About the Author

NASSER MUFTI is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Civilizing War

Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture

By Nasser Mufti

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3602-1

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART I. CIVILITY, 
1. A Glimpse of Social War, 
2. A Nexus of Fratricide, 
3. The Long Civil War, 
PART II. CIVILIZING MISSION, 
4. Civil War, the Highest Stage of Civilization, 
5. Civil War, the Lowest Stage of Civilization, 
PART III. INCIVILITY, 
6. A Bend in the Historical Novel, 
7. Postcolonial Interregnum, 
Coda: Global Civil War, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A Glimpse of Social War

"The flaneur still stands on the threshold — of the metropolis as of the middle-class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd." This is Walter Benjamin's praise for Charles Baudelaire's Paris. But it is also, albeit to a lesser degree, directed toward Friedrich Engels, whom Benjamin saw as a proto-flaneur. The text Benjamin has in mind, of course, is Engels's first book, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, whose city is not Paris but England's "great towns": London and Manchester. A mixture of sociology, travelogue, city guide, and polemic on the disastrous effects of industrial capitalism on the metropolis and its inhabitants, The Conditions is best known as a text about the industrial city. As Ira Katznelson puts it, Engels's book "introduced urban space ... into the core of Marx's macroscopic historical materialism and into Marx's account of the logic of capitalist accumulation by utilizing the organization and reorganization of the urban built-form to show how city space defines a dynamic, changing terrain: the city appears at once in his work as absolute space ... , as relative space ... , and as relational space." The reason The Conditions has been so influential for Marxist thought is because rather than mere descriptions of London and Manchester, it offers what Henri Lefebvre calls a "spatial architectonics" of the industrial city. Lefebvre explains that spaces "are products of an activity which involves the economic and technical realms but which extends well beyond them, for these are also political products, and strategic spaces." "Social space" is "polyvalent" because while it is "a product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it." In a similar vein, Engels's text provides an analytic for studying how capitalist forms of production shape and organize everyday life in the industrial metropolis, but also how the city becomes a site for contesting that very order.

Engels's first impression of London is from the Thames. Staggered by the sheer number and velocity of trading vessels in the river, he calls London the "commercial capital of the world" whose "colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point has multiplied the power of this two and a half millions a hundredfold." England's imperial might is unmistakable when viewed from the Thames, which is surrounded by "masses of buildings, the wharves on both sides ... the countless ships along both shores, crowding ever closer and closer together, until, at last, only a narrow passage remains in the middle of the river, a passage through which hundreds of steamers shoot by one another" (36). So imposing is this vista that Engels admits to being "lost in the marvel of England's greatness before he sets foot upon English soil" (ibid.). Once firmly planted on London's soil, however, Engels realizes that the zenith of capitalist modernity goes hand in hand with barbaric conflict. He describes his first moments in London as stepping into a Hobbesian "war of each against all," where "people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is, that the stronger treads the weaker under foot, and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains" (37). Despite "the colossal centralization" and modernization of England's industrial cities, its populace is reduced to a primitive state of nature: "What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man's house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together" (ibid.). A barbaric war, Engels suggests, lies beneath the surface of modern civilization.

The conjuncture of industrialism and barbarism was a common trope in writings on the transformations brought on by capitalism. In his travels through England some years earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville stated that in Manchester "humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage." And Henry Mayhew's famous ethnography of the working poor opens by describing the working classes as a "wandering tribe" that feeds off the rich. Basing his claim on ethnologic studies of Southern Africa, Mayhew explains that "we, like the Kafirs, Fellahs, and Finns, are surrounded by wandering hordes — the 'Sonquas' and the 'Fingoes' of this country — paupers, beggars, and outcasts, possessing nothing but what they acquire by depredation from the industries, provident, and civilized portion of the community." Engels differs in that he sees a nonviolent war to be at the heart of this slippage from modernity to barbarity. Such "peaceful" war involves no swords or cannons, entails no bloodshed, and is fought between civilians rather than armies. This conflict is conducted "under the protection of the law," meaning the state is not the agent of warfare but its sanction. And rather than typical instruments of warfare, capital "is the weapon with which this social warfare is carried on" (37–38). As peaceful as the industrial city might seem, as civil as it might appear, Engels sees war everywhere. Seemingly banal activities in the modern city like begging and police harassment take on a bellicose hue: "armies of workers" and "armies of beggars" crowd the streets, against whom "the police carry on perpetual war" (96, 98). Civil society, by his account, is the other means of war. Paradoxically, the "openness" of this war conceals its actual bellicosity, for the conflict manifests latently in the very gestures of the unemployed masses: "The starving workmen, whose mills were idle, whose employers could give them no work, stood in the streets in all directions, begged singly or in crowds, besieged the sidewalks in armies, and appealed to the passers-by for help; they begged, not cringing like ordinary beggars, but threatening by their numbers, their gestures, and their words" (100; emphasis added). The untrained eye might see beggary, but Engels perceives an "army" laying siege. Similarly, acts of petty resistance look like organized conquest: "And he among the 'surplus' who has courage and passion enough openly to resist society, to reply with declared war upon the bourgeoisie to the disguised war which the bourgeoisie wages upon him, goes forth to rob, plunder, murder, and burn!" (98). Instead of an incursion by a foreign army, the "conquest" that saturates the city is between fellow-countrymen. Even actual instances of resistance like strikes "are the military school of the working men in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided" (232). Everyday life is but a preparation for all-out war.

If, as Katznelson argues, Engels inscribed the city into the core of Marxism, he did so by making war integral to his urban optic. War, of course, has always been an important analytic in the history of Marxist thought. The "social war" (soziale Krieg) described in The Conditions is an early iteration of concepts like "class struggle" (Klassenkampf) and "civil war" (bürgerkrieg) that entered Engels's and Marx's vocabulary later in the 1840s, all three of which are used interchangeably in the early writings. These early formulations of war don't describe a violent confrontation between two groups as much as a relation of force that is nonviolent and encodes itself into everyday life. Rather than view war as a singular and nameable historical event, early Marxist conceptions of war see it as a protracted process that gives shape to modern forms of sociality. Importantly, the idea of a latent war was not invented by Marx and Engels. As Balibar explains, "While Marxism could not invent a concept of war, it could re-create it, so to speak — that is, introduce the question of war into its own problematic." This is why Marx and Engels's analysis of class struggle is heavily indebted to the discourse of race war that was invented by the waning French nobility of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In his study of the historical imagination of nineteenth-century Europe, Lukács explains that "the working-class movement does not develop in a vacuum, but surrounded by all the ideologies of decline of bourgeois decadence," meaning histories by figures like Augustin Thierry were deeply influential to the formulation of the class struggle: "The counter-posing of the Saxons and Normans in England and of the Franks and Gauls in France forms no more than a transition to the analysis of the class struggles between the rising 'third estate' and the nobility in the history of the Middle Ages and modern times. Thierry did not succeed in unravelling the complicated tangle of national and class antagonisms during the rise of the modern nations, but his theory of the struggles of races was the first step towards a coherent and scientific history of progress." So direct was this influence that in a letter to Engels in 1854, Marx refers to Thierry as "le père of the 'class struggle.'"

The reason race war discourse was so useful for an analysis of class was because the former was at its core an analytic of power. One of Foucault's most suggestive claims in "Society Must Be Defended" is that the discourse of race war inverted Carl von Clausewitz's famous statement that "war is a continuation of politics by other means" into "politics is the continuation of war by other means." Clausewitz's insight was to revise the classical distinction between war and political peace by suggesting that the ends of politics can be pursued through war when peace is no longer an option. Because of his complete faith in the rationality of the state to utilize violence for political ends, Clausewitz conceives of war as an alternative to political peace, not its antithesis; the form changes, but the content remains the same. However, race war, as conceived by conservative historians like Guizot and Thierry and later by their radical counterparts like Marx and Engels, had no need to be violent because it saturated and energized everyday life in times of assumed peace. In race war discourse, war doesn't look like war at all but is instead a relation of force that suffuses society in peaceful conditions: "War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. ... We have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. ... A battlefront runs through the whole society, continuously and permanently." To perceive war is to engage in a kind of symptomatic reading, to look beneath the surface of civil society, and lay bare its true conditions of tumult. That is to say, war emerged as a field of intelligibility that decoded the hidden political content of social relations in everyday life.

The polemical content of race wars was to render visible that which was hidden in plain sight. In this mode of critique, "Politics in the essential sense would precisely concern the transition from one phase to the other, the becoming visible of the latent struggle (therefore also its becoming conscious, organized) — perhaps also the reverse." Thus in the Manifesto class struggle is a "more or less veiled civil war," in which "oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight." When Marx and Engels witnessed actual revolutions and counterrevolutions, specifically those of 1848, these events shaped their understanding that class struggle was not necessarily an unhindered historical force. Balibar notes how the People's Spring displayed "actual civil wars" rather than social wars, "in which the proletariat was not only defeated, but experienced the inadequacies of the relationship between crises and class politics: the polarization worked in the opposite direction of communism. It also experienced the insufficiency of its understanding of state power and the state apparatus." Indeed, in their reflections on actual violent instances of war, such as the Indian Mutiny or the American Civil War, "war" emerged as an analytic for thinking historical transition and its limits. Marx argued that the latter was a world-historical event: "The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other." In Marx's eyes, the conflict initiated a historical transition between the two economic systems of slavery and capitalism. While certainly diminished, the analytical language of civil war remains active within Marx's thought as late as Capital (1867), where in a famous passage he discusses the struggle for the working day as "a more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist and the working class."

The question concerning the role of the state in class struggle became one of Marxism's central debates at the turn of the century, most notably between Eduard Bernstein and Georges Sorel. Bernstein's The Preconditions of Socialism (1899) interpreted Engels's introduction to the 1895 edition of Marx's The Class Struggles in France (1850) as proving that the need for violent class war had passed, and advocated instead for the Left's engagement with the state through political representation. In contrast, Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1908) takes direct aim at Bernstein and argues for the importance of violence in the furthering of class struggle, specifically through the mass strike. A decade later, Rosa Luxemburg reread the general strike as a product of historically determined and identifiable forces. Her essay "The Mass Strike" (1906) characterizes seemingly isolated acts of violence, strikes, and sabotage in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution as episodes within a much longer, linear historical narrative of class struggle. The meaning of such acts of violence and resistance, she argues, is only legible when situated within the longer historical arc of class warfare. When the Russian Revolution finally erupted, V. I. Lenin embraced the category of "civil war" for the proletarian struggle, claiming it to be class war at its most developed stage. Some years later, Walter Benjamin's enigmatic essay "Critique of Violence" (1921) returned to the early Marxian analysis of politics as the continuation of violence to show how (almost) all violence is committed to either preserving the law or creating new laws, and therefore a means to the end of peace. Conversely, all conditions of peace, Benjamin argues, point to the prevalence of legal violence by other means. And some of Gramsci's most rewarding contributions to Marxism (and arguably also postcolonial historiography) can be found in his distinction between the "war of maneuver" and "war of position," wherein the former describes open class conflict, and the latter is a latent struggle often taking place within institutions. In a very different key, Mao Zedong adapted the idea of the class struggle to describe a "protracted war of partisans" in On Protracted War (1967), a text Carl Schmitt identifies as first introducing the idea of a "global civil war." At the dawn of Algeria's independence from French rule, Frantz Fanon returned again to the original Marxist notion of war as a relation of force in his studies of colonial domination in Black Skin White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Most recently, Balibar's writings on the refugee crisis and terrorist attacks in Paris argue that the world, especially Europe, is engulfed in an "international civil war" whose front lines are not conflicts in the Middle East but the borders (economic as well as territorial) between Western nation-states and the non-West. In all these cases, the category of war functions as a field in intelligibility into social and political life. As Balibar explains, "The concepts of class struggle and revolution are not political; they anticipate the 'end of the political state,' or they suppress the autonomy of the political sphere. Conversely, at the end, the combination of 'war' and 'revolution' as realizations of, and obstacles to, the class struggle appear to be profoundly unpolitical." Because of Marxism's understanding of war as a force of history, and the class struggle's inevitable telos toward revolution, Marxism's concept of war contains within it the seeds for an end to (Marxism's idea of) politics as such. This is what Balibar refers to as the "deconstructive effect" of the concept of war on the idea of politics within Marxism.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810136023
• ISBN 13: 9780810136021
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288