Walter Benjamin

On the mortal soul

/ Simon / 1 Comment

When I published my recent piece Toward the Butlerian Jihad one of the concepts I brought in was the mortal soul. This was largely in service, as others have noted, of a secularization of the concept of the Butlerian Jihad – a holy war against “thinking machines” that occupies the position of a considerable historical event in the background of the science fiction novel Dune and its sequels.

However, as has been rightly pointed out by others, playing around with the idea of a soul which could be disfigured raises the risk of reintroducing natural law into our metaphysics. This is, of course, something we should avoid. I had been thinking about expanding on the concept of the mortal soul regardless as a part of my overall project on materialism and magic however, in light of this well-received response, I thought it’d be a good idea to get this explanation out a bit faster than I otherwise might have.

A brief genealogy might be a good place to start. The idea of the mortal soul is something most directly encountered in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil where he says, “Let it be permitted to designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon: this belief ought to be expelled from science! Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of “the soul” thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest and most venerated hypotheses—as happens frequently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as ‘mortal soul,’ and ‘soul of subjective multiplicity,’ and ‘soul as social structure of the instincts and passions,’ want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science.”

Nietzsche attempts to walk a razor’s edge here between a materialist account of the world which abandons the concept of the soul and what he describes as the Christian atomism of the soul which he treats as the last vestiges of a belief in a rigid substance.

Nietzsch’s soul of subjective multiplicity is, instead, a process of transformation that occurs within a person. We cannot treat a mortal soul as a substantial object: a ghost within a shell. Instead it represents the ever-transforming flow of subjectivities, affects and material effects created by a person. However this psychological frame does not discount a theological reading as we can find reflections of this in the far-older concept of Anattā.

This is a thorny issue within Buddhism so I will provide my interpretation which is largely drawn from the Chán school however I do anticipate lively disagreement here. At an etymological level, Anattā means no-self. This is a challenging concept because Buddhism upholds reincarnation as a part of its metaphysical universe and if there is, in fact, no self then what is there to reincarnate?

There are two possible solutions here. The first is to suggest that there is no unchanging self while there may be a continuous stream of being, a flow of moral development and consequence, we cannot point to it as an eternal and unchanging self. After all, how could a person develop toward Nirvāna if change was impossible? As such we see a soul that exists but is, much as Nietzsche would later propose, a “soul of subjective multiplicity.” From this sense it doesn’t matter much if the soul passing between bodies is substantial because it will be caught in a constant transformation brought about by the accumulated weight of its past lives and the condition of its latest birth.

Another solution would be to treat a soul much as a candle flame used to light a second candle. In this case the original flame will eventually burn out but the new flame will remain. The origin of this new flame carries from the extinguished flame before but it is not of a substance at all. Rather it is a spark, a blend of flow and event, which ignites a novel being. The treatment of a soul as a flame is valuable here for creating an account of soul as process. A flame is never still, never static, it consumes fuel it produces waste. Early metaphysicians such as the stoics also associated fire with an elementary vital principle throughout the universe. In this sense fire stands as a form of life and even now that we understand these phenomena to be separate from each other fire remans a valuable metaphor for describing the process of a life as process, as flow and event.

And so what is a mortal soul but the account of the changes brought about through a life. As such the soul extends past the body of any given subject and into the socius that forms around them. A subject is a process of transformation. I am, at 44, not the same person I was at 22 or at 11. And tomorrow I will be somebody different still. The very act of putting pen to paper on this essay transforms me in that it will change, subtly or suddenly, how others see me. This act dissolves the body of the subject into the field of being because it is equally true that subjective changes within me – the idea of what I, as a subject, am is constantly reassessed. Being is contingent and there is no essential character to a being.

This is ultimately my interpretation of Anattā: a being that exists as process and absent substance, absent essence. This, then, gets to my later criticism regarding AI and death. These necromantic objects operate from the assumption of an essence. In order for a podcast with Plato to have any meaning whatsoever there must be an essential Plato who can be conjured back out of his texts.

That the idea of Plato, the soul of the man, is entirely different now as he has become the commentaries of philosophy and counter-philosophy passing through Aristotle and Plotinus, a worm through time all the way to Kant, Hegel and all the rest, makes the idea of a podcast that returns him to a single essential figure who could be interrogated or who could interrogate in some meaningful way absurd.

It is disfiguring of the soul because it wants to fix this process of transformation back into a substance. In the Jean Leflambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi we see such a mission taken to its absolute extreme as the Sobornost seek to do away with death itself. Their mission, to roll back time and do what Benjamin’s angel of history could not, restoring all the dead souls lost to history is a threat to others in this book’s universe precisely because of the terrifying impact such a deed would have on the ability of (post)humanity to continue to change.

Growth and change depends on the elimination of essence. Once we allow essence into our metaphysics we are trapped by the idea of Platonic remembrance and everything becomes nothing but an emanation of an essential elsewhere.

In the Theses on the Philosophy of History Walther Benjamin describes Historical Materialism as a Mechanical Turk (not unlike these “AI” tools) which must be animated by a hidden theology to become puissant. Atheist Marxists often interpret this as a critique of the failures of Marxism, like Marxism in the 1930s was insufficiently anti-theological, but this depends, to a certain extent of continuing the mistaken reading of “opiate of the masses” to mean “drug, bad, avoid” rather than historicizing it as meaning, “something to ease pain.” If we read the first thesis in a straightforward way we can instead suggest that a theology (I hesitate to say secular theology here as Benjamin was not a person of secular spirit) is needed. Regardless Benjamin’s theological interpretation of Marxism serves to target the very idea of history as a process of progress. Instead history is the wind which blows Angelus Novus into the future as the debris and dead of past eras heap up at his feet. AI technologies then attempt to do what the angel of history cannot and return these dead to us in some essential form.

I know it is a frightening concept to deny that the unknown future will be redemptive and then to insist we must fight to go there anyway. This is why I briefly invoked Kierkegaard at the end of my piece on the Butlerian Jihad because embracing the danger of an irredemptive and unknown future requires a leap past extreme anxiety. We do not leap toward God for his throne is, by now, thoroughly vacated but this increases the urgency by which we must strike down those people who would raise up a mechanical god to redeem the dead of history.

“It was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement,” Benjamin says and I see a similar critique in those who say that “AI” is necessarily a tool that could be meaningfully wielded by a leftist project. When I say that “AI” must be stolen from the Bourgeoisie what I mean to say is that it is insufficient that Proletarian hands wield this technology for Proletarian aims. This is falling for the same progressivist view of history Benjamin rightly criticizes. Rather I am saying that it is a technology that must be denied from the Bourgeoisie. We don’t take it like Prometheus taking fire from the gods but rather to deny other hands the use of it. I see this as a moral imperative because the resurrection of an essential and immortal soul clogs the path to an open and liberatory future. Effectively the leftist project we can trace through Spinoza and Marx to Beauvoir and others depends on us disregarding the rubble of the past. We cannot redeem the dead. There is no past to return to. If we are to be free we must be mortal: we must be subject to absolute contingency and transformation. Meillassoux describes contingency as being necessary if we are to “get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not,” and, again, this circles back to the anti-facial consciousness raising of Fisher and Foucault. I raise up this spontaneously insurrectionary desire against specters of the social democrats of the Second Internationale as they were the self-same people Benjamin critiqued for mistaking change for progress. Certainly AI tools represent a change; it does not follow they represent a progression.

Unlike Marx I do call for a revolution with a specific moral character – one which I think is clear from the citations of Deleuze and Guattari, Beauvoir, Benjamin and Kierkegaard. This moral universe is one that is necessarily toward spontaneous liberation, the potential of which is as evident as the spontaneous enlightenment of Chán Buddhism. As such its character is necessarily a mass character but one that will not allow for the possibility of redemption. It is, however, still a (secular) theological proposition. We must overcome an overwhelming anxiety that we will not bring about a future that is free and act a if that liberation were assured. In this regard, by putting the debris of history before us, “AI” is an obstacle at best. While contingency allows that a tactical use of “AI” might be valuable in this or that moment we must recognize that any such tactic will be counter to our own ethics; only holding up contingency as the supreme absolute opens the door at all to wielding such a tool.

I do want to temper this statement a bit to suggest I am not making of “AI” a Ruling Ring. This would depend on an absolute and essential understanding of evil which would go against all the contingent and transformative metaphysics I champion. But we should recognize that these uses, even if effective, are not moral. This is not because it violates some natural law. If we follow Meillassoux on contingency then we must vacate every absolute and this includes the absoluteness of laws as fundamental as the Planck Length (as Rajaniemi speculated). If we cannot even say with certainty that:

represents a limit in all places and in all times then how could we possibly say with certainty that there is any sort of social absolute? We must vacate any natural law and treat law with as much contempt as Benjamin did in the Critique of Violence. But we should also accept that even contingency is contingent and that this may lead to the creation of (contingent) fields of consistency. In such a case we can say, barring some transformation heretofore unseen, it’s right for us to do away with these tools as serving only our enemy.

Gothic anti-realism: art for the unsatisfied

/ Simon / 3 Comments
Angelus Novus by Paul Klee

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.“

— Walter Benjamin

We are being crushed under realism.

We are all living in a world after the age of no alternative. We are all cursed to see ourselves as survivors of a failed apocalypse: the so-called end of history. But in the absence of the end of history communicating anything truly revelatory we all seem trapped, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is, in brief, the ontological condition of capitalist realism. Believing that nothing can possibly create a real transformative change in the world order we are confined to what Fisher called “reflexive impotence.” We, “know things are bad, but more than that, {we} know {we} can’t do anything about it.” After all, history is over. All we can do now is accept that this is the final form of the world, the final and eternal order. Of course Fisher described this not as “a passive knowledge of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self fulfilling prophesy.”

Looking then at how this paradoxical apocalypse without an eschaton has affected the arts we can understand quite clearly how this realism leads to a few different strands:

  1. A prioritization of comfort as a response to absurdity
  2. A reification of normalcy onto those things that do not fit
  3. A fear and suspicion toward transformative change

These three threads run through quite a few liberal-progressive arguments with regard to art. For instance comfortcore, hopepunk and other proposed subgenres of fiction have attempted to carve out a moral imperative to tell people that it’s OK. The world already ended and you’re still here so you might as well get used to it and find your joy where you can.

We see a huge focus on the valor behind “found family” as the entirety of social life is re-enscribed into the domestic, familial, and (as such) patriarchal sphere. In fact we are told this is good, it’s progress that now, too, people who might have been excluded by their old patriarch can create a family of their own. There are, after all, as the prophet of the end of history, Margaret Thatcher said, “only individuals and their families. There is no alternative.”

And we see, in general, a lot of media that is focused on making the status quo nicer. We want everyone to have a seat at the table to the end of the world, every person should find a family with whom they can enjoy the endless grey suffocation of all this forevermore.

Because the vicissitudes of power have made it so that almost no art has a chance except for the broad, the corporate, the four-quadrant, the comfortable, we see a host of artists, fans and critics justifying that this is actually a good state of affairs. It’s right to engage mostly with children’s media. It’s suspicious to want art that is cynical, cruel or angry, Only reactionaries show wrath in public and you wouldn’t want to be one of them.

We want heroes who have fun adventures, find a family, and who demonstrate that even if they are something a little strange, like a sentient gemstone or a gay person, they’re actually Just Like You: a normal citizen of the end of the world.

But if all there is are individuals and their families then we can, as Deleuze says, “no longer form a unified subject able to act.” We aren’t a people. We aren’t a community. We’re individuals and their (found families) living in the ruins of ended time in suspension. So what is to be done? We can’t cozy our way out of the endless grey suffocation of capitalist realism. But likewise I doubt anyone would find that the equally stultifying (socialist) realism of the Stalinists and their descendants is any more comforting to the spirit.

In the end realism is, itself, the enemy. This idea that art must be applicable to this historical moment is itself an enemy. We don’t need a children’s cartoon to tell us how queer love is just the same as the heterosexual family. Instead we need a subtle knife that can cut time itself and kill even God. The art that this moment demands must reveal the rot of the end of history.

Shirley Jackson famously wrote, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone,” and I think this is a strong way to begin approaching the demands of art to break realism. And just as no live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute realism. This stultifying sense of being at the end, at the final form, in the best possible fallen world, is maddening. Is it any wonder so many people want to retreat into nostalgia and childhood?

The gothic has always been an enemy of realism because the gothic recognizes first and foremost the impermanence of all things. The House of Usher exists to fall. Heathcliff cannot ultimately survive the death of Catherine. The damned immortality of Dorian Grey and of Count Dracula exists to be torn down.

The gothic is, as such, an historicizing form of fiction, it is one that places its subjects into a flow of history in which they are temporary and contingent. Not without consequence, of course, you cannot be a part of history while being entirely insubstantial. But the gothic does not exist in a world suffocated under a grey blanket of the real. The gothic treats the current moment as a dying and diseased thing that will be replaced in its turn by something else, something new.

It is important to note that new does not mean better. We cannot know, when we shatter the real of today, what the world of tomorrow will truly be like. It might be a horror show. But the time of monsters is birthed, per Gramsci because the old world is dying but the new one cannot be born. The refuse and ruin of the old world clogs the path. The grey blanket of “no alternative” forestalls the birth of the new.

It must be burned away.

And so I want art that is a torch touched to dry kindling.

I want art that is a knife that cuts that is a gun fired into a crowd.

I want art that leaves the audience uncomfortable and disturbed, that shows the crumbling foundations of the real and takes a sledgehammer to them. I don’t want a found family; I want to see other, novel, social formations that we might assume and I want artists to have the courage to say that, for instance, a sensate cluster isn’t a family at all. I want art to be the sharp knife that cuts the fetters on time and frees the angel of history from its shackles. I want art that maddens and confuses.

Not children’s cartoons but the avant garde. Not the MCU but Sion Sono. In order to cut away the fetters on history we must unmoor ourselves from nostalgia and the reflexive recreation of the past into the present and the future. Art like this does exist, of course. The directorial work of Julia Ducournau and Sion Sono, particularly their recent films, Titane and Prisoners of the Ghostland respectively, are key figures for such an art. In literature we can see this anti-realism and reactivation of history in the work of Tamsyn Muir (particularly her second book, Harrow the Ninth) and Jeff Vandermeer such as in the Southern Reach trilogy. In visual art, the work of Jessi Sheron, particularly her “Other Happy Place” project reflects many of these aesthetic values.

Many of these artists are grim. And the gothic will never be anything but dark. However you will never free the angel of history with hugs.

Truck Nuts

/ Simon
Truck nuts are just that — nuts

Throughout the month of February, Canada has been gripped in a slow-moving crisis involving a group that calls itself the Freedom Convoy occupying Ottawa with a loud and often threatening assortment of tactics, blocking international crossings such as the Ambassador Bridge and generally being a nuisance on the roads.

The claim of this group is that their principal motivation is that they are protesting against a vaccine mandate for truckers who cross the border between Canada and the United States. Presently such mandates for COVID-19 vaccination are required by both Canada and the United States. Also presently compliance among truckers is over 90% within Canada. Furthermore this convoy is not supported by the labour movement that represents Canadian truckers with Teamsters Canada, calling the convoy a “despicable display of hate lead by the political Right and shamefully encouraged by elected conservative politicians.”

This convoy is principally composed not of long-haul truckers but rather of private citizens most of whom drive pickup trucks or SUVs. This is categorically not a protest of truckers nor for truckers. However, thanks to a leak of donation data from Give Send Go we can see certain things about the composition of the active supporters therein.

The largest single named donor to this convoy was an American billionaire. The largest Canadian donor is a New Brunswick small business owner. Within the PEI data, which I have reviewed with some level of detail, approximately half of those donors who could be identified at any level of support were entrepreneurs or small business owners. The largest PEI donation (listed at $700) was paid directly by an eavestrough business. This convoy is not in support of truck drivers but rather of small and medium business owners with the explicit financial backing of American billionaires and crypto investors. The majority of donations (roughly 56% of recorded donations) came from donors in the United States. (Before anyone brings it up, 12 of the nearly 93,000 donations came from Russia.) So this is who this convoy serves: Canadian and American Petit-Bourgeois entrepreneurs. Mostly Americans.

The stated goals of the convoy are to ease restrictions related to COVID-19 however most of these restrictions are time-limited and set to expire in coming months. This was already known in late January when these protests began. So if the convoy could achieve their goals in a reasonable timeframe doing nothing why did they bother to come out and protest?

Well it’s because their goals aren’t really to have COVID restrictions eased.

Frankly the convoy is not a protest. It is a show of force. And so far it has been stunningly successful.

Here’s what it has accomplished:

  • The ouster of the vaguely moderate federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole
  • The revelation that the police cannot be trusted to protect Canadians against the threat of far-right violence and that organized labour is too weak in this country to confront them directly
  • Free harassment of the citizens of the national capital
  • Airtime from news media outlets
  • A lot of money funneled to far-right figures in Canada from far-right figures in the United States; much of this money is being transmitted not via operational fundraisers like Give Send Go but rather via distribution of cryptocurrencies.

About the only thing this convoy has been unsuccessful in doing is ousting the Trudeau government – but the have struck a blow to his governance which has been weak, indecisive and overly-cautious throughout the crisis.

So what we have is a show of political force being put forward with the explicit backing of the petit bourgeois in defense of capitalist interests and in the face of crisis. As early as 1931 Leon Trotsky had that clocked as the material basis of a fascist movement. Despite his criticisms of Marx’s definition of the proletariat this is a point that Reich agreed with in The Mass Psychology of Fascism when he said, “As is done in every reactionary movement, Hitler relied upon the various strata of the lower middle class for his support. National Socialism exposes all the contradictions that characterize the mass psychology of the petty bourgeois”

We know this dance.

Communists, anarchists and other anti-fascists have spent the last two years trying to warn anyone who would listen about how the far-right, all these modern by-blows of fascism, have integrated into the anti-vax movement and how they’ve used this alliance to position themselves with increasing power. We explained anti-masking when the mainstream were bewildered by it. We explained how naturopathic concepts of cleanliness and purity fed into fascist fear of the other and everybody thought we were being hyperbolic.

Well now they’re here in force. Journalists are peeling the decals off their vans because they’re afraid of being identified. Tow truck operators are standing aside because they’re afraid of retaliatory violence. And the police don’t have the will to stop these neo-fascists from doing whatever the fuck they want. Don’t dare try and say we didn’t warn you.

But this presents us with a problem. Because, quoting Beauvoir, “When a young sixteen-year old Nazi died crying, “Heil Hitler!” he was not guilty, and it was not he whom we hated but his masters. The desirable thing would be to re-educate this misled youth; it would be necessary to expose the mystification and to put the men who are its victims in the presence of their freedom. But the urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. We are obliged to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do so out of ignorance or out of constraint.” You don’t surrender public squares to fascism. A response is required and the desire for the government to do something is fully justified. But part of the problem here is the complete abdication of responsibility by an intransigent police force that seems very supportive of these far-right figures. Our supposed political leaders seem unable to command police to deal with fascists as they would with First Nations activists. As such, new laws prohibiting vehicular blockades and occupations or categorizing these economic actions as terrorism are undesirable. There’s plenty of existing law that could be used against these fascists. The police are demurring from doing so. New laws just give the police-allies of fascism new tools to oppress enemies of fascism.

One of the principal preoccupations of Marcello Tari’s very challenging eschatological work, There is no unhappy revolution. is the position of the strike in modern revolutionary praxis:

“{In the new form of strike} there is no classic demand of future closure – something that became even more explicit during the revolt against the French labor laws – but expresses itself instead through the blockages of normal social functioning on the one hand, and the immediate material transformation of life and how we think about life on the other. The more intense the form of the strike, the more intense becomes the ungovernable nature of the form of life that expresses it.”

Simply put, in 2017, Marcello Tari was telling communists that they should be occupying cities and disrupting metropolitan economies. The problem is not that disruption has occurred but rather the who and the why of the matter. A fascist revolution will not create those new and ungovernable forms of life that represent the eschatological beyond of the revolution on the threshold Tari wants to prophecy. The real desire of these movements is to put things back to how they were in 2019. Just with a little bit more death. So we cannot use these movements. We must remove them. But we must do so in a manner that will not foreclose upon the left or our allies making use of similar tactics in the future.

An ideal solution would be for organized labour to remove these occupiers. The streets they honk their horns down do not belong to them and there is justice in removing them. If police will not do so citizens should. But if labour is unable to accomplish this task we still must remove these people from our streets and we must do so without the police as the police have made it entirely clear they intend to do nothing at all. This means that a critical thing we can do is to give support to Ottawa area resistance to these demonstrators.

I know some socialists have declared the convoy “a distraction” from the real work of dismantling capitalism but I have to take issue here. Fascism is the old enemy in its most visible form. It is the mobilization of capitalist violence without pretense. This is why the police sit back and do nothing. The leaders of the police will say the rank and file are afraid to act. The rank and file will say the brass is restraining them but the truth is far simpler: the convoy are adjuncts of the police establishment. They want an end to mask wearing for precisely the same reason the police do. They feel entitled to see your face and confirm you are allowed. They want an end to biopolitical regulations such as social distancing, reduced capacity at restaurants and other venues, vaccine passes and the like because these measures interfere with the free flow of capital and this is the freedom this “freedom convoy” really cares about. Just like police.

I know this rhetoric, calling for direct action on the part of labour from outside the strictures of law, explicitly criticizing policing as a solution to fascist social disorder, will probably leave NDP-type social democrats feeling very uncomfortable. And that’s good. I’m not comfortable with anything going on in this country right now, are you? Should you be?

Ultimately what we need is a renunciation. There’s no prelapsarian past to return to. COVID has arrived and the epoch has turned. That’s it. We must renounce the very idea that there’s a normal to return to or that we would even want it. I mean were you satisfied with life in this country in 2019?

One more reflection on Tari. I have to admit I am still reading There is no unhappy revolution. It’s not an easy book, dipping heavily from Walter Benjamin‘s Marxist and rabbinical thought, Catholic eschatology and the poststructuralist formations of Deleuze, Guattari and Agamben. But I’ve got far enough into it to put forward an hypothesis about what the book is saying.

In his formation of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche effectively asks us the question, “would you say yes if you had to say yes to absolutely everything?” There is no unhappy revolution. is an inversion of this, asking, “would you say no if you had to say no to absolutely everything?” There are fascists occupying Ottawa and at time of publication the police have done nothing to oppose them. How much are we willing to refuse to remove them?

The (un)reality of fiction

/ Simon

This year has seen a lot of discussion of the nature of fiction within genre communities. There is a tread that has run through conversations related to what enjoyment of certain media might say about an audience’s moral character, the justification for artists to explore difficult topics and the question of what information should be made available to an audience prior to engaging with an artwork.

A lot of this discussion has largely fallen into two apparently opposed camps: on one side are those who make the argument that fiction can engender real harm and as such must be treated through a lens of moral instruction. An audience’s selection of media is a window into their soul and an author has a moral duty not to harm their audience through exposure to information hazards. Opposing this is the argument that fiction isn’t real. The events contained within a fictional work have not occurred and nobody has been harmed in creating it; an audience can just put the work down if it discomforts them.

Recently Old Stock: A Refugee Love Story came to the Confederation Center for the Arts. The show’s authors state that the musical / concert hybrid is inspired by the true story of two Jewish Romanian refugees who came to Canada in 1908. The story focuses on the chance meeting and subsequent marriage between a young man whose family was killed in a pogrom and an older woman whose husband died of disease and whose child died of malnutrition while escaping Romania for Russia during the winter. They meet at a screening point in Halifax and meet again in Montreal at which point they begin courting.

The show is narrated by Caplan’s character, “the Wanderer,” a figure who is simultaneously a nod to the anti-Semitic stereotype of the wandering Jew, a metaphor for the refugee experience and the difficulties of cultural and linguistic integration, a rabbi to Chaim and Chaya and a fourth-wall breaking interlocutor who teases and challenges the audience directly. At a point near the climax of the show, during a dramatic shift from the ribald humour that preceded it to a dark and somber reflection on mortality and trauma, the Wanderer confronts the audience and asks them if they regret coming to the show. Are they upset to learn that they were given something unexpected with this sudden shift to somber reflection? This fourth wall break is meant to cut the tension, of course, and to reassure the audience that the light-hearted musical about love and sex will come back from its dark night of the soul. But, of course, what he says is the opposite. As the Wanderer is fond of saying throughout the show, “that’s a lie.”

There’s an existentialist thread running through Old Stock. In his essay, Return to Tipasa, Camus says, “In the difficult hour we are living, what else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point.” This interpretation of amor fati informs the central theme of Old Stock that requires that the audience take the good and the bad together. You can have a song about the Talmudic “minimum intervals” that a husband must offer his wife between carnal encounters and also a tableau about his failure to save his younger brother’s life during the aftermath of the pogrom, how his father committed suicide rather than carry on in its wake, leaving him alone. Chaim’s life, and his love for Chaya comes from both – he is both – and a clear understanding of his truth isn’t possible without recognizing both the lovesick young man anxious about pleasing his more experienced wife and the haunted victim of genocide.

Old Stock is based on a true story. But is it real? Is truth more real than a lie?

Certainly if we look at the material impact of a statement, its veracity has little impact on its materiality. A politician can put forward the most ridiculous fabrications and yet people will act upon those statements, share his lies, denounce them, split hairs about whether this or that statemen is truly a lie. They might even take more concrete action – hurt someone, other a group of people, engage in genocide.

It’s self-evident that lies are very real; there is a historically visible material impact to deception. People have been killed because of untruth. The concept of the blood libel underpinned many pogroms. Jewish people were massacred because of the story that they killed children. These stories still crop up in the present day via conspiracy theories such as the pizzagate conspiracy theory or the ravings of Qanon. But these conspiracy theories and the harm they cause are separated from unambiguous fictions because their truth is disputed. Nobody believes you can date an anthropomorphized sword but there are people who sincerely believe that Democrats are secretly assaulting children in the secret basement of a Washington DC pizzeria. So this gives rise to another question: is belief a vital force? Do we make stories real in the act of believing them. Terry Pratchett confronted this question directly in Small Gods. In it the last true believer in a god (Om) carries his object of worship on a quest to revitalize his faith and, in the process, to create a new covenant with the god – one which was more in keeping with Pratchett’s humanist sensibilities than the blood and thunder of the old way. Pratchett carefully divides the trappings of religion from that of belief. Vorbis and the Quisition are quite willing to use the story of Om for their own material interests – to maintain their position of power in their society and to project force into the world. But this materialist relationship to the divine doesn’t nurture the god. There’s no vital spark to it. Brutha, on the other hand, has given himself wholly over to Om. In fact Om has difficulty persuading Brutha that he is who he says he is specifically because Brutha is so completely given over to his belief that the disparity between Om’s material condition and the god that lives in Brutha’s head is almost irreconcilable.

By undergoing a process of education Brutha and Om learn to reconcile the material conditions of the faith with the authentic interiority of the faith – that subject of the leap that Kierkegaard deemed essential to true belief – and in doing so revitalize the god. In this case we’re presented with a kind of dialectical vitalism. Reality can be granted or withdrawn from Om through the power of authentic belief assigned to him. Om is a kind of fiction. Pratchett makes the fictive nature of the gods increasingly clear in later books such as Thud! in which a mine sign is presented as being simultaneously a kind of minor god and also a word in a language. The power of the Summoning Dark is a linguistic one. It presents itself as a message and what it does to dwarfs who believe in it is as much a function of their belief that those words have power as it is any sort of supernatural activity. But for Pratchett that belief which nourishes and empowers a fiction can be withdrawn. It’s only real when it’s believed. What then if we choose to take reality as immanent?

In a way, Pratchett’s gods are immanent – they are active in the world and accessible to the people therein. Om can appear to Brutha as a tortoise, the Summoning Dark rides as a mark on Vime’s arm and as a thought within his mind. The ultimate victory of Vimes’ own Watching Dark over the Summoning Dark doesn’t withdraw the power and belief that the Summoning Dark has but rather demonstrates how Vimes too can manifest that aspect of belief, his belief in his own self-policing, in a manner that allows him power akin to that of the gods. Vimes’ fiction of the Watching Dark is no more nor less real than the Summoning Dark. That’s how they are able to contend. And yet, the material effect of this fictive struggle is visible in the story as he thrashes through the dark fighting with the dwarfs whose conspiracy he interrupted. The dialectical sense of a divide between the real and the story collapses in much the same way that Walter Benjamin described the motivations of André Breton to break, “with a praxis that presents the public with the literary precipitate of a certain form of existence while withholding that existence itself.” The stories are real, all of them, they broadcast their own immanent being. Or, as Garak from Star Trek Deep Space Nine might say, “They’re all true, especially the lies.”

Returning to Old Stock we can then look at the Wanderer’s frequent asides of “that’s a lie” as communicating a form of truth. He’s highlighting the contradiction between a proposed fiction and the materiality of a situation specifically to highlight the reality of the former. The lies are true and fiction is very real. But if fiction is real, and if fiction has a material impact on the world, what of the artist’s moral responsibility? Can an artist do harm to a person through their work?

The answer is both yes and no.

An oft-presented example of harmful art is The Turner Diaries. This racist novel, written by an avowed Nazi, is a favourite of notorious terrorists. It has been read, shared and used as a basis for the formation of tactics and plans by some of the most vile people in the United States during the half-century since its publication. If you consider how it might have inspired Timothy McVeigh with regard to specific tactics one could very well say that it is harmful. Except the book didn’t blow up a building – a man did who enjoyed that book. As for the idea that the book created the man the counter-question could be raised of how anybody who didn’t already have a germ of belief in the ideas within that book might be influenced by it to do harmful things. If we treat the Turner Diaries like the summoning dark, an immanent demon able to, through the manipulation of language, manipulate people into doing terrible things then we, each of us, have a Watching Dark too. We are each able to look at the contents of that book and go, “this is awful, cruel and I don’t like it,” and we can then discard of it into the trash, where it belongs. The investment of desire into the artwork allows it to channel the harm a person might do along specific paths but the desire to do harm still belongs with the person who does it. In the case of the Turner Diaries we can certainly look at the harm William Luther Pierce has wrought. He was a politically active Nazi who deliberately used his fiction to distribute thoughts on tactics and strategy to other Nazis. But this is hardly a normal case. Most artworks are not created explicitly to allow terrorists to clandestinely share tactics. And in the case of Boyfriend Dungeon that’s not the nature of the harm proposed. Rather the complaints there were that the artist had a moral duty to inform the audience about certain themes that might cause them discomfort.

And here we return back to Pratchett’s dialectic of the Summoning Dark and the Watching Dark. Art is akin to language in that it is explicitly communicative. And language has an immanent power; there is a vitality that arises out of a person’s belief in the art. Furthermore, much like in the case of Vimes this isn’t an either / or situation. He doesn’t have to fully believe in the Summoning Dark to be influenced by it, especially when other people, the audience of the Summoning Dark believe in it. But that vitality isn’t confined only to that one mark and Vimes does not need to be beholden to an idea. He has the ability to self-police, to employ the Watching Dark to say, “this idea isn’t right for me.”

Nobody is going to force you to play Boyfriend Dungeon, to read Manhunt or to watch Old Stock. In each case you have the ability to say, “I don’t want to braid with these threads,” and to set aside the art, to go about your life. Perhaps this artwork will haunt you. Vimes doesn’t jail the Summoning Dark in his soul without challenge. But he is ultimately the captain of his own ship and able to make the choice to be affected by this word or that. If an artist has imbued their art with sufficient vitality to haunt a person this is to be lauded, not decried as a moral hazard and it is the responsibility of an audience to choose whether to engage with the artwork or to set it aside. Old Stock is an excellent musical, an excellent work of art, because it recognizes that the being of art needs to take in the good and the bad – universally cozy art is dull. Universally miserable art is, at best, off-putting. Writing a story in either of those modes is akin to painting with just one colour.

Art is very real. There is a vital materiality to art that cannot be denied because it is a part of the world, and the world is itself a material, real, place. Nietzsche councils us to be only a “yea sayer,” and this may, in fact, be the best thing he ever said in that it gives us a frame to deny nothing: neither the ability of art to affect the world nor the power of an audience to overcome the effect of an artwork within them. The duty of an artist is to create something that communicates powerfully and sometimes what is communicated will not be fully pleasant. Most good art, let alone great art, braids with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point. The Wanderer in Old Stock reminds us that Chaim and Chaya’s life is made true because it isn’t just the happy bits. It isn’t the duty of the artist to warn an audience that there might be uncomfortable themes in their work any more than it’s the duty of a painter to warn an audience their painting will contain both red and yellow pigment. This doesn’t absolve an author of all moral responsibility. Clearly attempting to create a manual for white supremacist terrorists disguised as a novel is a morally repugnant act. But I think some clarity on the part of critics and audiences is necessary in recognizing that this is a rare exception and not a universal rule. Even art that takes on morally repugnant themes, such as Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card or The Horror at Red Hook by H.P. Lovecraft don’t harm the audience directly. Nobody says, “I’m going to go out and conscript child soldiers,” because they read Ender’s Game, and it’s likely only a bigot would look at a Lovecraft work and see permission for their bigotry. What many of these controversies about the moral duty of the author are, in fact, doing is attempting to absolve the audience of their moral responsibility. These claims on the duty of the author want the work to be like the conception of the Summoning Dark as this all-powerful linguistic demon that bends minds to its will but, as Pratchett makes clear, this isn’t all. The power of communication exists between parties and each audience member has their own Watching Dark. The moral duty of an audience to be alert to the effect of fiction upon them cannot be withdrawn.