Apophatic Marxism by China Mieville

Once there had been the subterranean language with the underground forces. If speech at all then it was the spaces between words, and the echoes the words left, or what might be really meant under the surface.

     Ann Quin, ‘The Unmapped Country’

    The problem with Marxism is Marxists. Having

    discovered this world system, they are persuaded

    they have acquired a hammer-lock on infallibility.

      Jim Higgins, ‘More Years for the Locust’

A week has rarely been so long a time in politics: these are not just terrible but terribly strange times. Events deemed impossible by erudite observers, including on the left, refuse to cease to occur. Any model presuming the possibility of political certainty is a liability. The breakdown of old algorithms occasions epistemological crisis: hence liberalism’s panicked lachrymosity, the outrage of denied entitlement, conspiracism and self-righteousness. For the radical Left, the best response to the times is to replace protest-too-much business-as-usual with the perspicacity of failure. Where we can fill gaps in our understanding, we must; but perhaps we should start with the suspicion that we can’t. Political humility demands not new certainties for old, but a new, less certain way.

With such humility should come grief appropriate to the epoch. ‘Don’t mourn,’ goes the Left injunction, ‘organise.’ A bullying disavowal. How can we organise except through mourning? And in these loud days, shaking as they do with the blare of capitalism’s death drive, how could anyone consider the subtle buried tongue Quin describes and not count it among that for which we mourn?

But it is not in fact dead. It was, rather, always-already quiet and interred. Here at least our elegy is for what abides. On our submerged, resistant, tunnelling way, with those underground forces, we might encounter the subterranean language, hear it deeper than our ears, open our mouths to find it within. We might speak it to mourn it.

Marx, famously, did not describe in any detail the free, classless future for which he strove. In a preface to Capital, he announced himself disinclined to detain himself ‘writing recipes … for the cook-shops of the future’, mocking those who criticized him on this point (‘imagine!’).

When in The German Ideology, Marx insists that communism is not ‘an ideal to which reality will have to conform itself’ but ‘the real movement which abolishes the present condition’, it is precisely the immanence of a radical alterity that precludes its being spoken. Whatever Marx may at times have thought, or thought he thought, was possible, whatever passing glimmers of vision one might glean from him, it is no surprise that he never, despite Engels’ pleas, wrote ‘the famous Positive, what you “really” want’. Because ‘[w]hat we have here’, as Colin O’Connell astutely puts it in ‘Marxism and the Logic of Futural  Discourse  ‘is an image of the future primarily based on the via negativa.’

July 1917, Petrograd. The mood tense and militant. There was popular hunger for action, even insurgency. The Bolshevik leadership were more cautious. They prepared an appeal for the front page of their paper Pravda, pleading for readers not to come onto the streets. But with scant hours to go, late at night, they realized that Petrograd’s masses would not heed their injunction: the next day would bring great demonstrations. Ignored, disobeyed, the words would be an embarrassment. But there was neither time nor focus to replace it, nor any certainty of what the party line should be. The offending piece was simply cut.

Thus on 4 July 1917, when Pravda hit the streets, its front page was a masterpiece of unintended activist apophasis, rich in what Catherine Robson has said of poetry is the ‘aura of unmarked space’. In the center of the page was a white, textless hole.

From our vantage point in history, and whatever one’s view of the ‘necessity’ or otherwise of ‘the party’ for a socialist project, that silence evokes more loudly than any words humility appropriate to the twists of politics. That it was unplanned, a surrender of tactic-less comrades, does not undermine its status as apophatic Marxist declaration nonpareil . What more appropriate text could there be to inaugurate our docta ignoranta than the wordless declaration of the July Days?

It is from scraps and practices, then, from hints and intuitions, that we might construct an apophatic Marxism, certain of the indispensability of silence, and of the limits of certainty, and negate the current neon spectrum of  modern factualism .

‘I will not legitimate their issues by responding’ says the enfant terrible of French letters Édouard Louis, of the fascist Front National. ‘Silence has to be a part of our progress. We have to put silence at the center of politics today. Stop responding to the questions, stop letting them control the language, the debate, the agenda.’ An apophatic rebuke to any social-democratic utopianism of ‘dialogism’, of communicative rationality, of jaw-jaw, of the word.


A strictly cataphatic (affirmative) Marxism is, at best, in denial. A Marxism afraid of silence is a Marxism afraid of the declaratory. It is afraid of politics. It is afraid of the human, and of that fear that it perceives in itself. And it is afraid, too, of the vatic and exhortatory. Apophatic Marxism might be not only more curious and rigorous, but more subtle and effective in its interventions than any silence-less Marxism. Apophasis may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.

There are those for whom such apophatic Marxist eschatology is dereliction. On the left, some insist that blueprints for a realistic alternative, the more precise the better, will be the most effective mobilizer. And on the right, the absence thereof is grounds for scorn. ‘Get rid of capitalism’, the naughty’s  banner read, ‘and replace it with something nicer’, and critics assailed that apophatic slogan. The economist John Kay derided its ‘incoherence’, and Timothy Ash wagged a finger at activists ‘much better at pointing out the failings of global capitalism than they are at suggesting systemic alternatives’.

But such sneers redound on the sneerers. It is their imaginations that are impoverished, blind not only (in the case of anti-socialists) to the necessity of a better future, but to its sheer otherness. The request that capitalism be replaced with ‘something nicer’ should be criticized – for its tweeness, its mannered, unthreatening cuteness in place of the fire and salt the moment demands. Its apophasis, however, is by far its best element.

It is in such unsaying, rather than in anxious left assurance that the world can be said, that true radical Prometheanism inheres. What holds for the beyond, a post-capitalism of emancipation, holds too for the wrench by which it might be reached. Apophasis of communism means apophasis of revolution. The break with the social lie must contain surplus beyond expression, to be utter enough a rupture. The revolution, like its blessings, is inexpressible, and yet, tantalizingly, it is on the tip of the tongue. Such proximity, that the void out of which the rupture could emerge is the everyday world, superpositions hope and anguish. An expression of which is the lament, a recognition of catastrophe.

Catastrophe can render us speechless, can hide beyond words. Trauma, says the psychoanalyst Annie Rogers, ‘can become mixed up with something that is unthinkable, and therefore un-sayable’. According to Terry Eagleton: Money for Marx is a kind of monstrous sublimity, an infinitely spawning signifier which has severed all relation with the real, a fantastical idealism which blots out specific value as surely as those more conventional figures of sublimity – the raging ocean, the mountain crags – engulf all particular identities in their unbounded excess. The sublime, for Marx as for Kant, is Das Unform, the formless or monstrous.

To predict or hope that the numinous would disappear beyond capitalism, in a plenitudinous communism, is a faith position. That it would at the very least be utterly transformed, psychically and socially, is hardly in doubt. But even in conditions whereby the last scrap of theistic belief has ended – which eventuality, notwithstanding any bullish left faith in the Withering Away of religion, is also perfectly moot – it does not follow that the psychic surplus, the beyond, the unsayable, will become sayable. No such prediction is rigorously argued, and nor is it prima facie desirable.


https://www.patreon.com/posts/silence-in-24723065?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=postshare