Class 2: War, Peace and History by Vincent Lê
In the Epilogue
to War and Peace, Tolstoy argues that
history should be a scientific study into the real causes of social formations
and transformations. Apropos traditional historicities, then, Tolstoy rejoins
that history is caused neither by the exceptional wills of great men such as Napoleon;
nor by the same great men as the singular embodiments of collective and popular
Wills; nor by the clash of these great men with equally great intellectual
productions, such as Robespierre’s reading of Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social. Such historicities are mere modernizations of
ancient theologies of God as human history’s Prime Mover. As such, all
historicities hitherto, whether ancient or supposedly modern, simplify and mask
the complex multiplicity of heterogeneous but interacting agents that assemble
together to overdetermine the totality of the causes of historical events and
situations. For instance, although Napoleon is praised as the singular driving
force of the Napoleonic Wars, Tolstoy points out that information from the
warfront was already out of date by the time it reached Napoleon’s
headquarters. Consequently, by the time Napoleon’s chain of commands got back
to the battlefield, his soldiers had been overtaken by new circumstances and
chose to ignore his orders. By undermining traditional historicities of great
men and mythic, causal Wills in this way, Tolstoy emancipates the full
multitude of actors, namely the masses of people, as the true driving force of
social morpthodynamics.
Homologously,
in ‘Tolstoy and Tahrir’, Greer demonstrates that even though the single spark
of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation did
start a prairie fire by mobilizing millions of protesting Egyptians, this
assemblage of wills ultimately forced history in directions quite different
from those Bouazizi himself had willed. For it was only the Egyptian masses,
previously reduced to the statistical turnouts of technocratic polls and rigged
elections, whom ultimately emerged as historical actors by overthrowing Hosni
Mubarak, one of history’s so-called great makers. And all without substituting
one ‘exceptional’ man with another, or a party, or a parliament, or a trade
union, or any other centralized organ to (mis)represent their will. Amidst the
Egyptian revolution’s overdetermination by the masses, it would come as little
surprise to Tolstoy that some Western historicists (read: theologians) pursued
the technocratic embodiment of the popular Egyptian will via virtual matrixes
such as Facebook and Twitter.
Tolstoy
goes even further, however, when he argues for a decentering of all humans, whether great or small, as,
not the sole entity privileged with agency, but merely one type of causal agent
upon the historical field, which is ultimately determined in the last instance
by chance and fortune. As such, it was neither Napoleon himself, nor his
people, but the tide of historical facticity that functioned as the final
determining factor in sweeping Napoleon into power in spite of the mass
republican will against him, as well as eventually ebbing him into history’s dustbins
despite his own singular will against his fate. And was it not also Bouazizi’s
circumstantial factors beyond his own choosing, such as being laid off from his
job and losing his home, when combined with his chance encounter with a female
police officer who slapped him in the face, which ultimately sparked the
Egyptian prairie fire? Whereas earlier Tolstoy established that all humans have
in themselves the freedom to make history, he now qualifies that such freedom
is always constrained and determined in the last instance by the facticity
given to us by our particular historical conjuncture. In other words, when
misfortune befell Bouazizi, he was free to choose to endure or to die, although
the facts of his situation were clearly compelling him toward the latter
possibility. As Greer explains by way of Tolstoy, man’s freedom, ‘his personal
life’, does not exist in a vacuum all by itself, but is always-already caught
up in the network of his ‘swarmlike life’ that is determined in the last
instance by the structural sea of historical necessity. In the last analysis,
what Tolstoy and Tahrir Square evince is that anyone, indeed anything, can make history, even if we do
not know that we can, and even if we may only do so out of conditions which are
not of our own choosing. …
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