Catch-up: Nine book reviews – The Orient Express

I have been on something of an informal break from blogging—something which I occasionally take to try my hand at other projects/ideas. During that time, there are quite a few things I read that I wanted to review, but a full post failed to eventuate for one reason or another. So, I had the idea of combining a bunch of shorter reviews into a single post.

Sure, I could separate these into separate posts, but I think a blog should establish some expectation for a minimum of content to expect from a post. I do not think something in the mould of quick and dirty 500-word film reviews are generally appropriate for a full post given the expectations set by the rest of the site. This kind of line of thought is more or less how this post came to be.

Given the mixed subject matter here, I will actually use the previously unused spoiler tag feature fairly liberally to ensure that nothing major is spoiled while scrolling through the post. But obviously, there will be spoilers for each thing covered in its respective section, so be warned. I am aiming for a limit of 1000 words per property, but I gave myself quite a bit more space for Danganronpa Kirigiri, since I covered all seven volumes in the same section.

Anyway, here’s something of a table of contents, for your convenience:

Another 2001 by Yukito Ayatsuji
Danganronpa Kirigiri by Takekuni Kitayama
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
À une Mendiante rousse (To an Auburn-Haired Beggar-Maid) by Charles Baudelaire
Flicker Style by Yuuya Satou
Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse by Otsuichi
A Time to Build by Yuval Levin
Political Order by Frank Fukuyama
Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin

Another 2001 by Yukito Ayatsuji

Although it may not seem like it at times, this blog theoretically has intentions beyond just rambling about my own personal taste. I want to sketch out the history and theory of mystery fiction in order to clarify an often-missed angle on the development of Japanese subculture. Mystery fiction deeply informed several of the prominent features of everything from sci-fi fiction to romantic comedies—especially in the space between the 1990s and the late 2000s. However, while horror and mystery fiction do have Important and interesting overlapping lineages, there is no doubt that the sheer number of horror-mysteries that have risen in my rankings mostly has to do with my preferences, rather than the kind of subcultural history I try to cover with this blog. (Higurashi being excepted from my admiration for already stated reasons.)

It did not take me long to fall in love with the first Another novel. While some aspects of it were no doubt overshadowed by the fact that I had read Otsuichi’s Goth not too long earlier, Another combined the feelings of my favourite horror and mystery novels in such equal portions that I was instantly engaged. After all, while it does not come up very often here, I absolutely love horror fiction. While mystery has a special place in my heart when it comes to literature, horror is my passion in matters of film. And I love the lineage of Gothic horror and ghost stories that came from authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James. Jamesian style ghost stories in particular have always stuck with me, and I happen to be old enough to have been around for the original peak in creepypasta, back in the decentralised internet where the subculture was more authentically literary and interesting. (Not that creepypasta was ever masterful or that good, mind you.)

I got a later start on J-horror and the kinds of things that more directly inspired Another, and I am still filling in the holes in my J-horror canon even now. But the point is that I was right in the strike zone to enjoy Another a lot. So, even while I would like to make strong defences of it as a matter of things like composition, characterisation, and structure, my only real qualification when it comes to this series is gushing as a natural fan of it. Even so, why is my favourite Another 2001 of all things? The original novel is generally considered to be stronger, and the seeming flaws in Another 2001 would appear to run right into tendencies that I have criticised on this blog before. So, my particular love for this novel needs some explanation, even if I do not have the guts for a more comprehensive review.

Of course, that will involve some considerable spoilers for it.

Spoilers for Another 2001

For all of the compliments I have for the first Another, its mystery structure is deceptively simple. Being the introduction to a series with a fair bit of lore and a lot of particular rules to its central ‘Phenomenon’, it is able to drop the audience into a state of ignorance along with the protagonist, Kouichi Sakakibara. The feeling of the first 60% of the story is distinctly more horror than fair-play mystery, as most of our intrigue comes from trying to piece together the arcane rules of a supernatural curse. During this chaotic state of ignorance, a relatively simple and classic aged-based narrative trick is developed, with several clues dropped precisely before the audience is equipped the tools needed to know what they are even looking for. Basically, the structure of a horror story is used to hide a bunch of clues for a mystery story, before we are even told the nature of the incident and that there is a culprit (known as the casualty).

While this is a compelling and clever use of the novelties of being the entry that sets up a new world in a supernatural horror setting, Another 2001 finds itself in precisely the opposite situation. Anyone who reads this novel, and who wants to solve it, will have a comprehensive set of advantageous rules at their disposal. Indeed, a dedicated reader might even have prepared the past class rosters as shown in the anime version of Another, and be eagerly waiting to spot the casualty within the first few pages. The nature of the premise of the first novel means that Another 2001 is not just limited in its ability to carry out the structure of that original—it is flat out impossible.

Understanding my fascination with Another 2001 has to start in the light of my expectations, as coloured by these considerations: I assumed that while the original novel had managed something unique in mixing its supernatural horror with its honkaku mystery logic, a sequel would have to use a more well established structure, developing an elaborate mystery and then its horror separately. And while there is some truth to this assumption, and one’s faith in it should have been propped by the fundamentally honkaku structure of Another Episode S, Another 2001 largely subverted my expectations and delivered several unique structural ideas, which form the core of my interest in it.

Firstly, Another 2001 is not fair. This needs to be said outright. Under conventional honkaku rules and conventions, it withholds certain crucial information in order to hide the fact that the protagonist’s narration described events that did not happen. Of course, the first Another hides similar information, but it does so in order to structure a conventional narrative trick that can be tackled within the general properties of a ‘fair’ mystery. The fundamental structure of Another 2001 is, by contrast, bizarre and unfair. It presents the seeming solution upfront. Not only that, the evidence for this solution is also indisputable. Given the rules of the Phenomenon, the list of those killed amounts to a list of all possible culprits. Once one appears in the story only a few pages later, there is no way around it: Izumi must be the casualty by the rules of the Another universe. The structure immediately shatters the central mystery of an Another story. On top of that, evidence just keeps piling up that makes it abundantly and totally certain that Izumi is the casualty. And at the end of the day, she is. There is no fake out on this regard. The story tells you who the casualty is, and she is the casualty.

However, during the brazen display of obviousness, the story has hidden a little trick. This trick is not even that impressive on its own terms, and as I have said, it is an unfair one. The reality of the situation changes at a certain point in the story. The reality from the beginning few chapters is undone, and a new reality takes shape. From that point onwards, the narration lies about the events that took place in those first few chapters, from a certain point of view. However, these lies are not random, they are strictly the consequences of the rules of the Phenomenon that have drilled into the reader’s head over the course of this whole series of novels. In the original Another, once we start the story, the trick of the phenomenon has already taken place. Reiko had already been revived, and the world was already arranged to be consistent with this fact. The fair-play of the mystery was self-contained. In Another 2001, for the first, our self-contained mystery is interrupted by reality changing in real time. As new information is presented, things that we assume to be backfill, exposition, explanations, and introductions are all the phenomenon acting in real-time to change reality. And the rules for how this would all work have been thoroughly established since the start of the story. It is a kind of narrative trick, where the late Queen problem is implemented at the start rather than the end of the story, and in a way that relies precisely on the lore and mechanics of the Another universe.

It is not groundbreaking or masterful or perfect or anything. The first novel is no doubt constructed in a better way to deliver a satisfying and exciting convention story for most people. But the trick this novel pulls off is unique in the most literal sense: It can only be carried out in an Another novel, and it can only be carried out in a sequel, using the knowledge the audience has from the original. On top of all of that, the 3 act structure and how that works with the Izumi actually-guilty-red-herring leads to this really exciting pacing quirk where you reach the end of the second act, and everything is suddenly resolved. The page count is what screams at you that something is amiss, and you must have missed something, but the actual story leaves little reason to think that. It is using the medium to communicate information that seems to contradict the narrative. That is cool on its own terms.

Given the size of the novel, there is only so far all of this can take it. These tricks are interesting for the reasons I have said, but it is really a matter of subjective preference whether they are any more interesting than the original novel or other novels. And they can in no way carry a whole novel of this length. So, loving this novel also requires loving the characters and the horror. I loved both, roughly on the same level as the first novel. But mileage may vary in this case. Anyway, I have talked about this one way longer than I promised already, so it is time to move on.

Danganronpa Kirigiri (volumes 1 to 7) by Takekuni Kitayama

(Despite the use of spoiler tags, this section is written to only cover the basic premises of each volume and be generally readable for someone who has not read the Danganronpa Kirigiri novels. I wanted to try writing some recommendation reviews for those who have not read it instead of analyses for those that have.)

Technically speaking, I read the first volume of Danganronpa Kirigiri quite some time ago. However, at that stage I was not confident enough in my Japanese skills to dive into the rest of the series, and I was also somewhat trepidatious about the likely turn that the series would take towards developing the lore of the Danganronpa universe. I do not want to hyperbolise my feelings, but I did not really care about the world that Kodaka had developed in those first two Danganronpa games and their related media. So, the prospect of lore coming to the forefront, as often is the case in spinoff novels, filled me with a tinge of despair.

That all changed with the second volume of this series. Taking the plunge and reading that thoroughly inverted my expectations and gave me the courage to read the rest in my still frustrated Japanese. Not because I suddenly cared about lore or other extended universe nonsense, but simply because Takekuni Kitayama had spun such an exceptionally characterful mystery tale in that volume that I was ready to follow him wherever he was going to take me. And I am happy that I did, because it oftentimes got better from there.

Spoilers for Danganronpa Kirigiri, volumes 1 to 7 and Zaregoto, volumes 1 to 9

A complication with Danganronpa Kirigiri, and something that separates it from our conventional idea of a mystery novel, is that even as a serial story it is not as cleanly episodic. It even goes as far as having cases developed in one novel only to receive their dénouement in the subsequent volume. I am sure for a very prim and proper mystery reader this is something of a blasphemy. However, I think the series on offer here is a very special kind of light novel experience, at least for those that accept the terms of that genre on top of their usual serving of mystery fiction goodness.

But, rather than talking in such general terms, we should go volume by volume, and do some brief reviews. Naturally, the first volume will come first. It is possible that my impressions of this volume will be slightly outdated given how long it has been since I read it, but I will try my best. Like the rest of the volumes of Danganronpa Kirigiri, the first volume is primarily narrated by Yui Samidare, a detective of 16 years of age who focuses on kidnapping cases. Her specialisation came about due to a long-standing trauma, having lost her younger sister in a kidnapping case. While this volume offers a self-contained locked room mystery, like many of the novels do, the heart and soul of what is being developed here is the beginnings of the friendship between Yui and the 13 year-old Kyouko Kirigiri—a detective specialised in murder cases whom many readers will already know from the first Danganronpa game.

The central gimmick of the Danganronpa Kirigiri series is the ‘Duel Noir’. These are a series of highly formalised challenges orchestrated by a shadowy organisation known as the ‘Victims’ Catharsis Committee’. The basic conceit is as follows: The Committee locates those wronged by someone else in society—typically such harm could not be corrected by the normal functioning of the law—and arranges exorbitant funds to allow that wronged party to murder the guilty party in some disguised manner for the sake of revenge. However, in order to justify these expenses, the Committee structures these murders as a game that is broadcast in certain corrupt circles for entertainment (think the typical setup of a gambling story like Kaiji). To give these games a sense of fair play, a detective is invited to the location of the murder, and if the detective can solve the case within 168 hours, the murderer essentially forfeits his life.

This premise replicates much of the highly formalised, game-like feeling of the original Danganronpa franchise. And this is to its benefit. Something that can be generally said about every volume of Danganronpa Kirigiri is that it feels both like a natural extension of the Danganronpa franchise and also like its own story. In that same vein, this first volume presents all of the necessary intrigue to interest the reader in these Duel Noirs while also making the immediate mystery of this volume interesting enough to satisfy them. The trick in this volume is an effective introduction to Kitayama’s elaborate physical tricks, but it is not the crowning jewel of the novel by any means. That honour belongs to how nicely the relationships and ideas that are going to carry the rest of the series are developed.

Speaking of the rest of the series, we should move on to the second volume. The story this time is once again framed around a Duel Noir. And it takes the gamification and formalisation of the previous volume up to eleven. Beyond the particularities of Kitayama as a writer, explicit gamification and formalisation are clearly identifying features of Danganronpa Kirigiri. These features were present in the original Danganronpa of course, but this series is interested in applying the same mood and ideas in an arena outside of the highly self-contained story of a death game.

However, if there is one volume that is comparable to the death game feeling of the first Danganronpa game, it is this second volume of Danganronpa Kirigiri. The novel is the longest in the series and depicts a kind of death game Duel Noir, where one member of a closed circle of cast members is arranged to die per night. In addition, the participants must use a pool of provided money strategically in a series of auditions for the nightly ‘right to be the detective’. Basically, this right grants you immunity from death, since the detective cannot be the victim in any highly formalised honkaku mystery story. It secondly grants you the effective right to investigate any crime scenes first. Both of these advantages factor into the nature of the game in interesting and unexpected ways.

As a matter of direct construction, this volume is the key achievement of the series. It is a delightfully interesting mystery novel that achieves the rare novelty of involving such an interesting gimmick in the investigation that the story becomes completely interesting even with no regard to the solution. The fact that the solution is reasonably interesting and thoroughly fair on top of all of this just makes for a novel that is excessively fun to read. Due to the particularities of my own taste, it is not quite my favourite novel in the series (the best novel rarely is with me), but it was definitely something that justified the existence of the series as soon as I read it.
The third novel, on the other hand, was something of a let down. To a large degree, it indulges in exactly what I feared from the series: Unstructured light novel style plotting and excessive interest in the lore of its setting. Despite these downsides though, the central character introduced in the novel is fun and intriguing. Basically, even while not rising to the potential demonstrated by the prior volume, this entry was good enough in a conventional light novel sense that I would have enjoyed reading it anyway. It also demonstrated an unexpected benefit of the light novel format of approaching serial narrative.

While a little over the first half of this volume covers a very light novel-esque narrative that demonstrates some of the most visible weaknesses of the series, it also contains the first story beat of the subsequent arc. Light novels, in contrast to most serial novel markets, have fairly nebulous conventions regarding when arcs should begin and end in relation to volume releases. While some authors will meticulously ensure that arcs always correspond to the beginning of one volume and the end of another, it is also not uncommon to have arcs bleed together across volumes in a freeform structure. This volume uses that convention to fit the first locked room of the Twelve Locked Rooms arc in the final act of this novel. And that variety makes for a charming reward for those that did not enjoy the first half of the story.

The fourth and fifth volumes make up the subsequent meat and bones of the Twelve Locked Rooms arc. Basically, Yui and Kyouko must participate in a twelve simultaneous Duel Noirs, all under the same parallel 168 hour time limit. This theoretically leaves 12 hours per locked room. Of course, one of the twelve was solved last volume, and due to a fun, if overpowered, other cast member, Yui and Kyouko only really need to solve five in the remaining time. In order to do this, Yui and Kyouko enlist the help of three other fun detective characters, and each take on one case. So, the essential structure of these two volumes is a series of parallel locked room short stories, told using jumps in perspectives so as to develop the cases in a non-linear fashion. Naturally, with only the word count of two relatively short light novels, these are more short story puzzlers rather than a series of fully developed cases. In addition, the parallel development of the cases and peculiar pacing of them makes for an arc that is sure to upset certain kinds of purists.

However, I personally found the arc a total delight. The frenetic pace could not be more of a contrast from the slow and methodical second volume that had defined my expectations. And yet, I had a blast reading these. The quality of the solutions is naturally varied, as some of the locked rooms had considerably more importance and development than the others. But those ones had payoffs that justified that added importance, while the lesser ones had exactly enough intrigue to sustain a very short mystery story. Another oddity of the arc is that the majority of the most exciting content is saved for fifth rather than the fourth volume, so the fourth does sometimes feel like an intermediate story. Nonetheless, I personally enjoyed the fifth volume more than even the second, so the setup was worth it.

The sixth volume of Danganronpa Kirigiri was weird. From its premise down to every aspect of its execution, it belied my expectations. In some ways, that is a good thing. Something totally surprising makes for an interesting bridge between the central arc of the story and the climactic final volume. However, I cannot say that it all worked. When push comes to shove, this occupies the same awkward position as, say, my stance on the Grave arc from Otsuichi’s Goth: So unique as to be unforgettable, but ultimately one of the weakest arcs.

The narrative this time is a sniper battle, of all things. Yui and Kyouko are battling against members of the Committee in order to prevent the crimes in a series of Duel Noirs. Basically, Yui and Kyouko have access to the basic details of a series of a Duel Noirs, and they make a bet with a pair of Committee members that they can prevent the crimes. The Committee members arrange a ‘capture the flag’ type game where Yui and Kyouko must preemptively solve the cases to such a degree that they know how to prevent them, and then act to do so. The Committee must conversely protect the crime scene from Yui and Kyouko. The snag? Both teams are prevented from ever being within 100 metres from each other. Since each and every time the Committee members occupy the location of the Duel Noir long before Yui and Kyouko can, they must prevent the crimes from greater than 100 metres away. How? Essentially, Yui and Kyouko must try to stealthily snipe the murder weapon, while the Committee members use their own sniper rifle to hit Kyouko’s hair ribbons, which both teams agree is a point for the Committee.

As I said, this is certainly a strange set up for a mystery novel series. It freely flows between the aesthetics of detectives and deduction to the stylistic trapping of a quirky action series. That much works well enough, even if I find it less interesting than most of the prior arcs. It even manages to deliver on having a central mystery to structure the story around, so it keeps the narrative surprisingly cohesive. But that mystery is probably the least satisfying of the series, and the inventiveness of this whole premise plateaus soon enough. I can at least say, with its brisk pace, that this arc does not overstay its welcome, and works as well as it needs to as a single volume experiment.

By contrast, the seventh volume is my favourite of the whole series. In a show of wisdom, it returns to basics: It is the second longest entry in the series, is structured a central locked room mystery, and focuses on the characterisation of our key characters. It is comprehensive and focuses exactly on what makes the series worth reading. It is a worthy climax to everything that came before, and delivers on several threads that have been with us since the very first novel. In contrast to the previous volumes, I am specifically not going to spoil the premise or anything else about the novel really. However, I will mention that there is a certain mainstay of mystery novel construction that Kitayama had specifically avoided in all of the prior puzzles. Given his reputation, it would be easy to even think that he is not capable of it. Therefore, the satisfying way it is used here is just one of the many things that elevates this novel into being something truly special.

While I think anyone who wants to argue that the second volume is better has some solid ground to stand on, this final entry is just another reminder that this series is absolutely worth reading.

Looking over the general idea behind each novel, there is also a rather interesting (probably coincidental) oddity. Namely, the 6 distinct arcs of Danganronpa Kirigiri parallel the 6 arcs of Nisio, Isin’s Zaregoto series (ignoring the recent anniversary revival novel) rather well. This is a cool novelty, given that Zaregoto was a key inspiration behind Danganronpa to begin with. In more detail, Both start with a self-contained, conventional locked room mystery novel that develops the main pair of characters. Both have a second novel that ups the game and establishes the tone of the series going forward. Both have a third novel that introduces more action elements and lore into the series, while telling something of a side story. Both have a fourth arc that spans two novels each and develops a mystery that is not resolved until the second of the two volumes. Both have a fifth arc that is filled with foreshadowing the final showdown and has a very unconventional pseudo-mystery. And both have a climactic sixth arc that centres on the past of the narrator. Whether or not these parallels are deliberate, I think one of the cool things about Danganronpa Kirigiri is that it really did take me back to my experience with the first time I read Zaregoto over ten years ago. Not to say it is perfect; Zaregoto is no doubt more impressive in several regards. But I loved reading this series either way.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

Considering art to be the result of individual expressions is an idea that is so intuitive that it makes it challenging to think in any other way. In prior posts on this blog, we have discussed some of the problems with such an individual centric framework, but we have not gone so far as to develop concrete alternatives. Well, that is not quite accurate. We have hinted at possible answers, but never explicitly discussed how historical and political forces are the beginnings of artistic expression, as opposed to the will of the individual artist. The Marxist philosopher and antecedent of critical theory, Walter Benjamin, offers the beginnings of such an answer. In his introduction to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (just the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, from now on, for brevity’s sake), Benjamin argues the following:

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future…

…The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. However, … theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production … [have a] dialectic [that] is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense.

Benjamin saw the traditional mode of artistic production—rooted in these concepts of creativity, genius, eternal value, and mystery—as being transformed by the arrival of new technology into the mass politics of fascism. For Benjamin, art does not begin with its artist, but with the mode of production, as extends from Marxist theory. Therefore, Benjamin’s analysis rests on two foundations of materialist cultural analysis: Firstly, on the economic (capitalist) base of artistic production, and secondly on the technological components of any artistic medium.

In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin seeks to develop a general media theory for modern art out of the economic and technological causes for its reproducibility. As he explains, capitalist production, and its associated technological developments, have untethered art from its traditionally fixed position in space and time. Essentially:

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence … The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity … The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical—reproducibility…

…The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura…

…An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.

A very memorable theme running through Benjamin’s the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is its analysis of film as a medium. Benjamin did not live to see the full scale of the Hollywood system that we have today, but even then he made many salient and compelling predictions about its development by simply reasoning from the nature of its production. As he explains:

One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.

For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else … For the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.

Benjamin’s approach captures how the particular features of film that are structured by its capitalistic production and the technology of the camera serve to integrate its use as a reproducible tool for entertainment with its critical artistic value. As we have discussed previously on this blog, many contemporary films have no interest in being assessed as isolated works of art (in Benjamin’s words, with using their originality to permeate their aura and authenticity). Instead, they transparently seek to have their technical qualities as works of entertainment compared to other films, and are meant to be interpreted as experiences or rides rather than just narrative art. Benjamin’s theories are useful for explaining how capitalism in particular contributes to these theme-park-like artworks.

Some might notice that this theory of capitalist cultural development parallels many of the ideas later championed by Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation. However, unlike Baudrillard, who locates this cultural phenomenon at its end point of culture, Benjamin analyses the loss of authenticity and uniqueness—what he calls aura—in terms of the development of capitalist production. In this sense, the later developments that corresponded to the era that we call postmodernism were actually a step backwards from the materialist analysis of Walter Benjamin.

This is the most striking feature of reading Benjamin generally: In many cases, the more prominent theorists who followed from Benjamin came to many of the same conclusions, but did so while using a less comprehensive and largely inferior framework. Benjamin’s greatest achievement is exactly in surpassing the later trends and movements that he himself helped create.

À une Mendiante rousse (To an Auburn-Haired Beggar-Maid) by Charles Baudelaire

This is an odd choice in terms of things to review, I grant that.

À une Mendiante rousse is a 56-line sociological poem written in French (ew) by Charles Baudelaire. The diegetic events depict a poet whose imagination is suddenly and violently taken over by his erotic fixation on a poor beggar-maid he sees on the streets of Paris. The structure of the poem is, more specifically, arranged in terms of 14 quatrains of verse arranged in AABB rhyming scheme. Within each quatrain, the first three lines are seven syllables, but the final line abruptly drops to only four syllables. For example, here is the third stanza of the poem with the rhymes bolded, then repeated with the syllables separated, and lastly in English translation:

Tu portes plus galamment
Qu’une reine de roman
Ses cothurnes de velours
Tes sabots lourds.

Tu | por | tes | plus | ga | lam | ment
Qu’u | ne | rei | ne | de | ro | man
Ses | co | thu | rnes | de | ve | lours
Tes | sa | bots | lourds.

Your sabots tread the roads of chance,
And not one queen of old romance
Carried her velvet shoes and lace
With half your grace.

Hopefully, the English translation will suffice to capture the essential point of this rhythm and structure. Each stanza opens with a couplet of AA where the flow between lines is balanced and lyrical. It is something of an invitation to the concept of the quatrain as a whole. Then comes the BB couplet, where the ending comes abruptly, but fundamentally in rhythm with the flow of the entire stanza. In musical terms, it is a motif of four bars, where the fourth bar ends on a consistent rest that is always placed just a beat beyond the halfway point of the bar—following an ending note that mirrors the end of the third bar. This latter couplet answers the invitation of the first couplet, producing a fully coherent structure within the stanza. In addition, the short length of each lines gives the whole poem a rather speedy tempo, making each pause at the end of the stanza flow into the subsequent stanza with a musical rapidity. Baudelaire is a famous master of combining regular poetic forms with irregular and unexpected elements, which is suitably on display here as in any of his other poems.

However, what captured my interest was the result of these aesthetic flourishes in particular combination with the content of the poem. À une Mendiante rousse comes amidst a series of poems by Baudelaire that all deal with the motif of urban existence within Paris. While these generally depict the misery of urban life without romance, À une Mendiante rousse is entirely fixated on romance. This makes it something of a clear break from its brethren. Although not entirely because, as remarked in another poem titled Les Petites Vieilles:

Dans les plis sinueux des vieilles capitales,
Où tout, même l’horreur, tourne aux enchantements,

In the sinuous folds of the old capitals,
Where all, even horror, becomes pleasant,

Such contradictions and ironies are a fundamental theme of À une Mendiante rousse. It is not the story of romance in the city, it is rather about the emptiness of art that romanticises the grim realities of human existence in the city. For that reason, the fiction of aristocratic wealth must constantly override and intrude over the reality of poverty. In the previous third stanza, the girl’s poverty is fetishised by the poet, but by the fifth stanza, the relationship has precisely inverted. The begger-maid is objectified and transported to a romantic fantasy outside of the reality of urban decay:

En place de bas troués
Que pour les yeux des roués
Sur ta jambe un poignard d’or
Reluise encor;

In place of stockings holed
A dagger made of gold,
To light the lecher’s eye,
Flash on your thigh:

It is easy enough to see the fundamental point of the poem from such straightforward juxtaposition. The emptiness of Romantic aspirations are naturally compared to the reality of proletarian existence, and an ironic point is made about the meaningless of trying to see the illusion of hypothetical wealth and opportunity past the reality of poverty.

However, the potency of the irony on display goes further than this conventional explanation. While fetishising the poor in the image of the bourgeois is an obviously empty act of Romanticism, it also echoes sincerely held ideological content. As evidenced by certain kinds of transformative literature such as the bildungsroman, Romantic narratives often involve the reconciliation of a rebellious youth with the bourgeois establishment. In the politics of imperialism and pan-nationalism that arose in the shadow of Romanticism—and in fascist ideologies that followed-on as the zombified remnants of these systems—class differences were erased in favour of the unmediated unity of the whole people of a tribe or nation.

Similar ideas can be found in Baudelaire’s poetry, as emphasised by the philosopher Walter Benjamin. For example, taking the first stanza of Le Soleil into consideration:

Le long du vieux faubourg, où pendent aux masures
Les persiennes, abri des secrètes luxures,
Quand le soleil cruel frappe à traits redoubles
Sur la ville et les champs, sur les toits et les blés,
Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

Along the outskirts where, close-sheltering
Hid lusts, dilapidated shutters swing,
When the sun strikes, redoubling waves of heat
On town, and field, and roof, and dusty street —
I prowl to air my prowess and kill time,
Stalking, in likely nooks, the odds of rhyme,
Tripping on words like cobbles as I go
And bumping into lines dreamed long ago.

For the poet here, every space where he searches for inspiration, meaning, and originality has long since been absorbed by the nameless masses of contemporary existence. For this poet, the particularity of human existence has already given way to the unmediated masses of Romantic politics.

In much the same way, the ironies of À une Mendiante rousse should not be seen as just criticising the objectification of the poor. As the image of the poor beggar-maid dances back and forth with the idea of a wealthy aristocratic woman and even a middle-class bourgeois bachelorette, the poet does not just fetishise poverty in his fixation, but he also erases the particularities of the woman in favour of the unmediated symbol of womanhood as a concept. The erotic images contained within the poem repeatedly have all of these images class give way to the classless idea of a naked woman, who could fulfill any and all of these fantasies. When the poet fixates on the holes in the woman’s stockings, he does not just fetishise poverty, but also the skin that he can see beyond those holes, and their potential meaning.

It should come as no surprise that the poem ends not on a point of her class—imagined or real. Instead, nudity is the final note. The poem echoes how, in trying to see the “naked” truth of someone, beyond their status, we fetishise their particularities and fail to see them for what they are, concluding with:

Va donc, sans autre ornement,
Parfum, perles, diamant,
Que ta maigre nudité,
Ô ma beauté!

Go then, without other ornament,
Perfume, pearls or diamonds,
Than your emaciated nudity,
O my beauty!

Flicker Style by Yuuya Satou

It almost goes without saying, but the primary reason we tend to reduce discussions of any given novel to measuring its quality is because doing so drastically simplifies the task. Doing so with Yuuya Satou’s Flicker Style would be particularly problematic: While the quality of the novel is an often-noticeable element, it is rarely an interesting one. This combination is unfortunate, because Flicker Style is definitely interesting when taken as a whole. It figures into an interesting history, attempts to do interesting things, and has left an interesting residue in its wake.

But, as is compulsory for any such review, we will briefly address the novel’s missteps—or perhaps that is the wrong label, since these attributes definitely carry an air of intentionality. It might be most accurate to call them the novel’s failed ambitions. In order to capture this, we should start with a quick synopsis of Flicker Style:

Spoilers for Flicker Style

On its surface, the novel tells the story of Kimihiko Kagami, a young university-aged man in a state of pseudo-estrangement from his exceptionally eccentric family. Despite this estrangement, Kimihiko remains heavily invested in Sana Kagami—his younger sister, and the only family member that he deeply cares for.

The inciting incident of the story is when Sana’s body is discovered, having seemingly committed suicide. This event firstly forces Kimihiko into more contact with his family than he is normally comfortable with. Subsequently, Kimihiko is prodded and manipulated by an exceptionally shady man who goes by the name of Suzuhiko Ootsuki. Ootsuki reveals Sana’s seeming motive for suicide: She was brutally and thoroughly raped by a gang of powerful and violent men. At Ootsuki’s bidding, Kimihiko embarks on a hare-brained scheme to kidnap young girls who are related to each of the perpetrators, in order to enact a vague revenge for the rape of Sana.

The novel is generally structured around the A-plot of Kimihiko gradually implementing this plan, kidnapping one girl for each of Sana’s three rapists. There is also B-plot that revolves around Asumi (no other name given), Kimihiko’s childhood friend who works as an impromptu psychic detective in order to capture a prevalent serial killer known as Jack the Stabber. Leaving aside the B-plot for the moment, the A-plot develops in an increasingly absurd (as in, philosophically) direction. Kimihiko’s indifference to the specifics of the whole affair and lack of a concrete plan become manifest. His motives are vague and nihilistic. He repeatedly cannot explain how kidnapping these girls corresponds to what happened to Sana: On the one hand, he is not exacting direct justice, as he fails to properly harm the rapists directly—there are plenty of reasons to think that the rapists are not even all that indirectly harmed by having their relatives kidnapped. Put another way, Kimihiko’s revenge is already oriented towards the wrong people and the wrong gender. But even with that granted, his revenge does not even go far enough to meet expectations in that sense. He does not match what happened to Sana by raping or brutally killing the girls, at least he does not intend to. He simply locks them up, and attempts to maintain that status quo.

The purpose of these strange developments only becomes clear with the final inversions that are revealed at the climax of the story. Kimihiko’s motives were not exactly revenge for the sake of Sana—it was more like revenge on Sana. It turns out that Kimihiko already knew about Sana’s rape from the start, because he had killed and raped her in a fit of jealous rage after she confided her ordeal with him. The disconnected M.O. of Kimihiko’s kidnappings starts to become more legible once this detail is made explicit. He was not simply implementing a cold and indifferent campaign of revenge on behalf of his sister, but also acting out his immature jealousy and sexual frustration due to Sana’s rape. He took young women who were symbolically connected to that event, isolated them from society, and tried to forcibly freeze their lives in place. His behaviour is obvious when we consider the actual target of his revenge to the be the “deflowered” Sana who replaced his image of the virginal and pure Sana. He wanted to directly control the lives of these girls, repeatedly demanding that they simply be quiet and stay as they are—he does not want any sex or other typical kidnapper activities getting in the way of this symbolic act of revenge against impure “women” instead of the “rapists” who actually caused all of this.

The development of these ideas are exactly the interesting things that Flicker Style might otherwise have to say. The problem is their mode of communication. It goes without saying that Kimihiko should not and cannot be a sympathetic character. However, looking around the cast, there is not much else to tether the audience to the events of the novel. For every advantage Asumi offers in kindness, she loses twice as much by never once having anything interesting to think or say. Most of the rest of the characters exist in a state of aloof omniscience: Since they already know most of the answers to the unsolved questions that make up the pseudo-mystery elements of the plot, they are kept at a distance from the audience.

These decisions in regard to character are not an automatic weakness for every story. Tales about unlikeable scumbags are often exactly the right environment to develop complex considerations of psychological ideas and have those relate to a general sense of intrigue developed by the whole range of content in the novel. In other words, a story about a bunch of assholes is fine, so long as what they are doing is interesting in lieu of being able to trigger the audience’s empathy. This is where the particular kind of pseudo-mystery used in Flicker Style becomes an unavoidable weakness. The novel consistently and pervasively fails to give the audience any reason whatsoever to care about the progress of its ideas from the realm of the unknown to the known. In other words, it does not structure its story with interesting questions. Much of the thematic substance of the novel can be found in its answers, but these are answers to questions which do not matter very much.

For example: Why should a reader care why Sana was raped, beyond the automatic concern we all feel for a human tragedy? We can all agree that asking the audience to care about something because it is sad is not the mark of compelling writing. Much of the climax of Flicker Style involves the unravelling of the structure of the social world of the novel, and how this informs the cult-like reasons that Sana was raped. But up to this point, what reasons were the audience given to care about this question? As a matter of Kimihiko’s revenge, the rapists’ motive is entirely tangential to his success or failure, and he himself shows little care for it. During the scene where Ootsuki shows Kimihiko a tape of the rape, the audience is kept entirely distant from Kimihiko’s interior narration for several minutes of diegetic time, while the specifics of the tape are explained in cold, indifferent, almost third-person narration. This is done chiefly to hide certain information to preserve the trick that Sana’s killer is Kimihiko, but the direct effect is a scene where Kimihiko’s interest in the rape is reduced to mere instrumentalism, or even passivity, until his emotion comes roaring back when he smashes the VCR machine. This scene is representative of two distinct but interlinked problems: The novel regularly confuses ‘things we do not know’ with ‘things that we want to know’ even when they are different concepts—the latter is something that has to be carefully crafted with composition in order to guide the audience’s care and interest. The scene is also problematically emblematic of how easily a sense of character can become weak and distant in Flicker Style.

The fundamental characters in Flicker Style are generally fine. When characterisation is the focus, they stand out and are memorable. However, as in the previously mentioned scenes, characterisation often becomes ethereally impermanent in those moments where the novel is trying to juggle other needs. To take another example, Kimihiko often makes references to games, manga, and the like as asides in his narration. However, such moments are only very weakly integrated into his overall sense of character. Flicker Style does not have much it seems to want to say about otaku-dom and how it might psychologically cohabitate with Kimihiko’s misogyny and nihilism. Instead, these moments largely exist for the purpose of reflecting Satou’s interest in contemporary pop culture and making references to those examples of pop culture that he likes. In those brief one-sentence moments, the sense of these characters as both people and symbols is basically nonexistent. The result of both these moments and many other examples is that the characters of Flicker Style are not given much in the way of the comprehensive inner psychology to work as traditionally formed characters, and yet only a very small subsection of them are distinct enough to work as contemporary symbolic characters.

All of this means that, even with the interesting concepts that lie at the foundation of Flicker Style, the novel culminates in a dénouement where a group of characters who are not very well developed stand around and exposit very lore-heavy answers to questions that are largely presented as self-evidently interesting without a thoroughly constructed sense of intrigue to them. For all of the interesting elements and ideas to be found here, this is still the kind of unbalanced moment that is only typical of a poorly composed story.

The worldbuilding even carries the promise of something interesting, even in its messy execution. To be sure, the extent to which things are explained rather than being interestingly shown is not exactly thrilling, but this world of psychic powers, robot clones (an element that figures into the themes of the story nicely, for those who are willing to see it), and clan-like families is typical of the settings of shindenki fiction, which emphasised such oddities at the exterior of society as a path to escape from the mundanity of the interior. But all of this means we can only say that Flicker Style was to some extent ahead of its time, not that it offers anything that compelling on its own terms for current readers. And even then, many of its innovations could be compared to Kouhei Kadono’s Boogiepop and Others, which dropped three years earlier with the devasting benefit of much better writing.

Anyway, I have already violated my intended word count by quite a lot. (Crazy coincidence how I covered basically all of the important ideas in the book without discussing the B-plot at all.)

Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse by Otsuichi

Even with my criticisms, Flicker Style is still the kind of novel that shows promise. In no small part, this is because it was Yuuya Satou’s debut novel. While a debut novel does not automatically qualify for a get-out-of-gaol-free card so far as quality is concerned, it is also true that a debut novel has a lot of leeway to do things other than shoot for the moon. A debut is most appropriate for something like a mission statement; in their debut novel, an author can demonstrate their particular interests and proclivities that justify their voice. Skill, as with any endeavour, should be an ever-present journey to the top. If a debut novel was their peak, that is another way of saying that the novelist’s career became a failure.

With this in mind, it is fair to say that Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse (we’ll just call it SFC from now on) by Otsuichi utterly defied my expectations. With such a short word count (novella length), and with it having been written during Otsuichi’s high school years, I came into this story with fairly low expectations. I thought it might communicate the kind of mission statement I mentioned above, and lead me to understand more of the viewpoint that led to his magnum opus of Goth. However, SFC demonstrated a remarkable ability to walk and chew gum at the same time. Sure, with such a small word count, it is ultimately an introduction to Otsuichi’s style, which can plentifully be found in other works. But it is also one of the most compelling debut novels on its own terms that I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

Spoilers for Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse

SFC inverted my expectations fairly early on. The essential synopsis seems simple enough: A small, rural Japanese town is on edge, as a serial kidnapper has terrorised the surrounding area. However, that could not matter less to Satsuki, a nine year old girl who goes about her daily life without a care in the world. Her town itself has remained unmolested, and so there is no immediate danger to her. Well, there is one crisis. Satsuki is in love with a boy named Ken Tachibana. However, this Ken is the brother of Satsuki’s best friend, Yayoi.

The direction of such a premise seems obvious enough. This idyllic story of childhood love and drama is set to be upended by the lingering danger of an unknown kidnapper. A simple and conventional story that uses the intrusion of the unknown into the known to tell a tale of mystery and horror. However, the plot goes in precisely the opposite direction. Satsuki confides the nature of her love to her friend, Yayoi. And at this moment, the audience learns that Yayoi herself carries a dark secret: Her brother is something far more than a simple filial connection. Yayoi becomes furiously jealous—and throughout the rest of the story it becomes clear that her interest in Ken even aspires towards incest. In order to defend such passions, Yayoi takes drastic actions, and murders Satsuki.

Ken, who himself is characterised as a coldly calculating and intelligent child, immediately realises the severity of the situation that Yayoi has found herself in. Therefore, he hatches a plan: Yayoi and himself will keep Satsuki’s body hidden, and attempt to frame her disappearance as the actions of the serial kidnapper. The story inverts from the simple structure of a mystery story focused on the kidnapper to a thriller mixed with dark comedy about a pair of children attempting to get away with murder.

I would not want to give away any more than that in a synopsis of the story, but that should be sufficient to demonstrate how even such a simple and well-trodden kind of setting served as the stage for a story that kept me thriller and enraptured from beginning to end.

This setting is of particular note, and it is essential to the point of the novel. Conventionally speaking, the rural town or isolated community is a type for a pure and simple existence. Stories about outsiders who complexify and corrupt this type of world are often used as a framework for discussing modernisation from a critical lens, one which emphasises the inherent good of natural man as argued by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. SFC undermines this typical structure from the outset. To put a fine point on things, the evil lurks within. The threat of the outside world is just a red herring that papers over the murder, incest, and sociopathy that is already present in the microcosm.

The ending of the novel is especially evocative on this point: It is precisely because of the threat of the outsider that Yayoi and Ken hope to get away with the murder. But this plan becomes corrupted in two interesting ways. Firstly, the kidnapper turns out to not be an outsider at all. Midori, an older girl who acts as something of a older sister figure for the children, turns out to be the kidnapper. And as a further corruption, she does not help Yayoi and Ken just by acting as a red herring, she reveals herself at the end of the story, having already deduced their guilt, and then helps them dispose of the body willingly. She does so, naturally, by taking Satsuki’s body and placing it among the corpses of her various kidnapping victims. In this final resolution, the so-called outsider threat fully loops around in terms of its metaphorical role. Yayoi and Ken succeed in turning Satsuki into a victim of the unknowable and terrifying outsider. However, it turns out that their deception had an element of truth to it. Satsuki really ended up being taken by the kidnapper. The lie was not that the kidnapper took Satsuki, it was that the kidnapper was an outsider at all.

Summarising the novel more succinctly, the story was about Yayoi and Ken attempting to frame the outside world for a murder in order to keep up the illusion of purity in their own lives. However, through the various reveals and developments, we learn that the danger of the outside world was exactly the same kind of illusion from the start. The kidnapping case and their own murder of Satsuki were the same kind of case from the start, and eventually become literally the same incident, and so their deception was something of an extension of the status quo. From the beginning, the fear of the unknown was just an ideological tool that the world uses to not address the darkness that is already known.

Being able to craft such a densely entertaining and interesting novella—while in high school, no less—completely blew me away. Great job, Otsuichi. Especially given the low barriers to entry, I really do believe this is a story that everyone should read.

A Time to Build by Yuval Levin

A conspicuous presence on my list of favourite books is The Great Debate by the same Yuval Levin. It is conspicuous because Levin is an open and unapologetic conservative. It might escape some people’s notice sometimes, given my discomfort with rabid partisanship, but I do not generally hold much in the way of respect for most conservatives. Not far below the surface, I have found an abundance of reactionary currents and cynicism to be motivating the supposed restraint of conservativism. I am, despite what I think is a healthily analytic and factual amount of both-sides-ism, a pretty far left political actor.

But this scepticism is exactly why the exceptions to the mould catch my attention. As the reactionary ex-editor-in-chief of National Review John O’Sullivan once remarked, “if the pope says he believes in God, he’s only doing his job; if he says he doesn’t believe in God, he may be on to something.” In the same manner, if a conservative says we need to protect capital and country, he’s only doing his job; if he says it is time to re-think those traditions that are not working, he may be on to something.

In this context, I have long had some admiration for the so-called “reformicons” (reform conservatives) of the American right, who have fought with their own side to promote an agenda of proactive reform that is distinct from mere centrism or mainstream liberalism—this is to say, putting forward a coherent policy agenda that is decisively from the right, but not reactionary or obstructionist. My admiration only increased as I saw most of these same names in the trenches of the right flank of the anti-Trump movement since 2015. (Of course, this is contrasted to the left flank of that same movement, since there is only so much courage in non-partisanship for a moderate.) The leading reformicons include Ramesh Ponnuru (one of the only must-read conservatives in the punditry space), who is the current editor of National Review, Ross Douthat, a long-time columnist for the New York Times, Jim Pethokoukis, an economics writer with the American Enterprise Institute, and Yuval Levin, a director at the just-mentioned AEI and the author of the book we are here to discuss.

A Time to Build is Levin’s attempt to explain Trumpism by way of a general model of American institutional rot. According to Levin, the chief problem with contemporary American politics is the degradation of formative institutions. This is framed in terms of foundational conservative political theory, such as with Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ that he expressed in his Reflections on the Revolution in France like so:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.

Typically, American conservatives have emphasised the principles of independence and self-determination to be found in such a quote. They read Burke to be framing society in terms of localism and federalism. That is, that society should be composed of various microcosms, where decisions are made within those spaces by those with ‘skin in the game’. Such an approach can be easily structured within such ideas as capitalism and freedom from big government.

Yuval Levin, however, emphasises a different dimension of thinkers such as Burke. It is not just that such microcosmic organisation is efficient or effective, as is typically argued by small government conservativism, but that these microcosmic structures shape and form people. As Burke said, they are the means by which “we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.” According to Levin, our present crisis is nothing so simple as the tangible harm wrought by an ineffective big government, as is typical in popular conservative arguments. Instead, Levin writes:

Generally speaking, this era has not been a time of cataclysm or disaster but of exhaustion and frustration. It has not been devoid of prosperity or opportunity, or of good news on many fronts; in fact, it feels peculiar in part because good news seems not to translate into confidence or hopefulness. What has really defined this twilight age has been a widespread failure to understand what is missing or what has gone wrong—a collapse of some of the preconditions for flourishing that we cannot quite explain to ourselves.

Levin locates these “preconditions for flourishing” in terms of the institutions of society. Since institutions is a fairly flexible word, Levin further defines himself as meaning “the durable forms of our common life. They [institutions] are the frameworks and structures of what we do together.” Therefore, by formative institutions, he means the collective frameworks and structures of behaviour that shape and mould individuals to change in some meaningful sense. In other words, he is making a structural—rather than cultural—argument that character formation is what is lacking in contemporary America.

Levin’s definition is compatible with the classic definition used by the grandfather of post-modernisation theory, Samuel Huntington. Huntington characterised institutions as “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour.” The key clarification that arises out of Huntington’s definition is that, while institutions need not be tangible, they do involve behaviour. They are “what we do together” rather than merely what we think or feel together, such as with ideology or culture. The police, and the variously related constituent behaviours, are an institution. How we think about the police, and how the police think about themselves, are an ideological structure that is transmitted via culture. (Culture being “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”)

In addition, the key problem that Levin locates in contemporary institutions is that they are no longer valued and have therefore ceased to be properly stable and recurring as well. According to Levin, institutions are no longer moulds that shape character, but platforms that allow individuals to become notable and powerful. Therein, paradoxically, an abundance of individualism prevents people from feeling the freedom to go out into the world as fully formed citizens. To this end, Levin quotes the noted neoconservative Irving Kristol, who argued:

The results of the political process and of the exercise of individual freedom—the distribution of power, privilege, and property—must also be seen as in some profound sense expressive of the values that govern the lives of individuals … People feel free when they subscribe to a prevailing social philosophy; they feel unfree when the prevailing social philosophy is unpersuasive; and the existence of constitutions or laws or judiciaries have precious little to do with these basic feelings.

While the book is a tight and well written summary of this particular hypothesis, it is hardly a cataclysmically thorough work of political theory as can be found in, say, Levin’s The Great Debate. To my mind, there are three dramatically important questions still left unsolved by this book. Firstly, the book focuses on the character and consequences of institutional rot, rather than its causes—in no small part so Levin can suggest conventional conservative explanations without much debate. There is no willingness to tackle with the arguments for an economic (capitalistic) cause as can be found in Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

The second problem is a more fundamental issue with any model of the role of formative institutions. More specifically, there is a chicken and egg problem. In Levin’s mind, institutions evolve in order to shape citizens to productively carry out the needs of society. But there is little reckoning with the extent to which these needs are themselves shaped by institutional behaviours and how they form ideological beliefs. No doubt, one of the chief challenges within this chicken and egg problem is how one’s answer suggests underlying principles that themselves weigh on the prior first problem; if we consider how durable (traditional) behaviours shape how humans perceive their own needs, we will also need to consider how economic behaviours and relations contribute to our presently malformed institutional environment.

The final problem is a matter of solutions: Levin suggests, as per the title, that the solution lies in a kind of conservativism that seeks to reform and rebuild institutions. That is to say, his solution is a reform agenda that affirms the purposes of traditions, modernising them as needed, without destroying them. However, for reasons following naturally from the prior two problems, such an approach can only promise to solve the current crisis without speaking to the underlying logic of the crisis. Perhaps, there is a set of reforms that would sufficiently modernise American institutions to alleviate the present panic. However, there is also something that drove the exploitative behaviours that undermined these institutions in the first place. In other words, there is some need in society for institutional hijacking that these malformed institutions arranged themselves to meet. Levin’s agenda precisely does not wish to address such a cause, it seeks to conserve it.

Political Order by Francis Fukuyama

This is a book I expect absolutely 0% of you to have read. Even if you wanted to, at 1300 pages it is an absolute behemoth. And there is no way in hell I am summarising the book in any coherent sense in 1000 words. But I will write with that in mind, so I intend for everyone to be able to follow along, with maybe the occasional help of Google. So let us briefly summarise Fukuyamaism, so that even those that have not read his books can understand the general gist.

Fukuyamaism, naturally referring to Frank Fukuyama himself, is developed in three main places: Firstly, his seminal The End of History; secondly, his Political Order that we are discussing here; thirdly, his various other works that largely clarify or expand specific details from the two other key works. This is especially the case with his recent book on the history of liberalism, that intends to update his theories for the age of Trumpist populism. I tackled these in slightly the wrong order, coming to Political Order last after already reading The End of History as well as a few of his other books. But even in The End of History, his essential viewpoint was already clear.

Fukuyama is the unofficial leader of what we should rightly be calling the Centre Hegelians—or more particularly, the Centre Kojèveans. Hegelians have traditionally been split between a core leftist group, originally known as the Young Hegelians, that had a strong influence on the lineage of Marxist thinking, and the Right Hegelians who focused their interpretations in a religious, spiritualist tradition that aligned itself with conservative politics. However, much in the spirit of the decade of Third Way politics, Fukuyama rose to prominence in the 1990s with a reading of Hegel that was neither religious nor radical; it was a fundamentally centrist defence of the status quo. Based on his work, a centre-left, highly pragmatic, Hegelian political orientation became reasonably popular among certain establishment intellectuals.

Hegelianism is typified by its historicism. Historicists emphasise the importance of history in contextualising all philosophy and art, and even science itself. According to Hegel, all ends are defined by their processes and structures. As explained by the contemporary leftist Hegelian Slavoj Žižek, by way of reference to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:

We find in Pride and Prejudice the perfect case of this dialectic of truth arising from misrecognition. Although they belong to different social classes—he is from an extremely rich aristocratic family, she from the impoverished middle classes—Elizabeth and Darcy feel a strong mutual attraction. Because of his pride, his love appears to Darcy as something unworthy; when he asks for Elizabeth’s hand he confesses openly his contempt for the world to which she belongs and expects her to accept his proposition as an unheard-of honour. But because of her prejudice, Elizabeth sees him as ostentatious, arrogant and vain: his condescending proposal humiliates her, and she refuses him …

The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure of their first encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real nature of the other, functions as a positive condition of the final outcome: we cannot go directly for the truth, we cannot say, ‘If, from the very beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story could have ended at once with their marriage.’ Let us take as a comical hypothesis that the first encounter of the future lovers was a success—that Elizabeth had accepted Darcy’s first proposal. What would happen? Instead of being bound together in true love they would become a vulgar everyday couple, a liaison of an arrogant, rich man and a pretentious, empty-minded young girl.

In other words, the same romance has a different meaning depending on its constituent processes. In the same way, the entire meaning of any concept is necessarily determined by its place in the whole structure of history that preceded it. Hegel’s phenomenology was in this sense an antecedent to Martin Heidegger’s development of contemporary phenomenology.

When discussing contemporary Hegelians, such as in the case of Žižek, there is usually a strong association with Karl Marx. Even when trying to distance themselves from Marx, such left-wing Hegelianism is nonetheless usually associated with a certain breed of aspirational or progressive politics, rather than true pragmaticism. However, when it comes to the developments that followed from Hegel apart from Marx, these took on a heavily pragmaticist leaning. We can see this in the associations between Heidegger and the American arch-pragmaticist John Dewey. However, such Continental pragmatism underwent considerable reform after the World Wars, given the associations between pragmaticism and fascistic social Darwinism. It would be slanderous to directly associate Frank Fukuyama with this lineage, but it is nonetheless important to understand this history of non-leftist Hegelian pragmaticism in order to really get the purpose of Fukuyama’s work.

The End of History is based upon Hegel’s understanding of history as a spirit (process) that is implicitly shaping the end point of society. While not strictly determinist, Hegelian theories of history apply this idea of a spirit of history to mean that history has a certain directionality to it. This is central to Marx’s reformulation of Hegelian historicism into a new historiographic process known as dialectical materialism. Rejecting dialectical materialism, Fukuyama attempts to find a different historicist explanation for the contemporaneous end that he witnessed with the end of the Cold War. With the unambiguous hegemony of American liberal democratic capitalism on display throughout the 1900s, The End of History attempts to create a theory where, even if not strictly determined, the spirit of history nonetheless has a directionality to it that explains the total victory of liberal democratic capitalism.

Political Order takes this a step further, by moving beyond the abstract philosophy of The End of History and developing a general theory of what Fukuyama openly characterises as a Darwin-like evolutionary theory of the pragmatic development of nation states from pre-history to liberal democratic capitalism. A key point of the book is to clarify the difference between historicism and determinism in the context of political history, by way of numerous examples of the varied paths of national development that can be seen in different historical circumstances. Fukuyamaism argues that liberal democratic capitalism is the end-point that best fits with the evolution-like structural process of history, not that it is inevitable or eternal. This much was explicit in The End of History, but with its length and later publication date, Political Order naturally develops many more examples and specific ideas about exceptions and contingencies in history.

A thorough analysis and critique of Fukuyamaism is beyond the scope of this quick review. But it is worth noting that, in a thoroughly Hegelian kind of victory, even Fukuyama’s critics cannot help but sound Fukuyama-esque at times. Including me, with my many criticisms of Fukuyama. After the failure of the largest totalitarian anti-American states throughout the 20^th century, it has become difficult to believe in truly alternative ends that can be removed from liberal democratic capitalism. The failure of these systems that represented both radical Marxism and reactionary racism has left us in a world where it feels like liberal democratic capitalism is natural and normal. Now, radicals and reactionaries both seek to hijack this status quo society and forcefully push it to a new endpoint, rather than present an alternative society that has nothing to do with it. In other words, it is implicit now that the spirit of history has given us liberal democratic capitalism, and both socialists and fascists have deformed themselves into trying to push with that spirit of history to give us something that comes next,rather than building an alternative historical path. They have accepted Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democratic capitalism is currently an end (result) of (the spirit of) history, they just want to find another end on the other side of it.

Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin

Earlier, when discussing Fukuyamaism, we discussed the importance of historicism in his work. Historicism is a broad concept, but every variation embodies the suggestion that present reality is the culmination of a total process. In essence, it is a broader and more flexible rendition of deterministic thinking, where ends are defined by their means—or most accurately, where means are part of their ends. Due to Fukuyama’s position as a centrist, his historicism must inevitably contend with the accusation of smuggling Whig history in through the backdoor. Whig history being the tradition of thought where British history is used as a model to explain a universal, general model of the deterministic progress of modernisation. In other words, the Whig argument is that the arc of history naturally bends towards British-style liberal democracy—the present status quo.

Frank Fukuyama, however, was not the first historicist to suffer this criticism. One of the most forceful critics of the deterministic underbelly of historicism, and its role in socialist thought, was the German-Jewish Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin. Benjamin emphasised literature and metaphor as a deliberate break from the pretence of science that was prevalent among other contemporaneous Marxists. And he most directly polemicised such frameworks in Theses on the Philosophy of History. (On the matter of its title, I have chosen to use the most popular English title. However, its original German title would be literally translated as On the Concept of History.)

Benjamin’s Theses takes the form of a series of seemingly disconnected, highly poetic historiographic arguments. Chief among these being that the false scientific pretences of historicism, characterised by the so-called materialism of scientific Marxism and the concept of ‘progress’ as employed by social democrats, disguise a fundamentally faith-based utopian vision of human history. Just as critics have attacked Fukuyama’s historicism for being a deterministic defence of the capitalist status quo, Benjamin attacked the mainstream of both revolutionary and reformist socialism for their faith in a deterministic path to a post-capitalist society. According to Benjamin:

Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.

The difficulty with Benjamin’s approach to politics is that, rather than making the clear and scientific arguments that are expected in modern discourse, he uses artful metaphors and analogies to suggest the ideological content that underlies so-called common-sense opinions. In other words, it is the kind of literary criticality expected of critical theory rather than a full-throated, wide-reaching philosophical inquiry. It does not provide much clarity in the sense of an actual alternative to conventional wisdom, it just demonstrates the contradictions and oddities with that conventional wisdom. However, such an approach is definitely useful, despite its limitations.

Rather than concerning ourselves with the top layer debates on the proper vision of the future, Benjamin’s criticisms of the nature of progress itself allow us to move to a lower foundational layer, where we can question the entire notion of politics as a vision for the future. As Benjamin explains:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger … A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past … Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle.

Here, Benjamin contrasts the visions of progress, and false ‘materialism’ typified by historicism, with his concept of a true materialist history. When we imagine history as an objective, always-in-motion, eternal force, we necessarily universalise that force (as in Hegel’s spirit of history). Politics becomes the task of imagining the ‘correct’ future, and obtaining the necessary power or reforms to place humanity on the road that is deterministically headed to that inevitable result. For Benjamin, politics must take the exact opposite form. It must freeze the present moment in place, and fight for justice in that moment, without assuming a eternal process of history.

Theses was written at the peak of Nazi power in 1940, when Hitler had a near total dominion over Europe, and was guaranteed by a mutual non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. It seemed as though democracy, with its baseless faith in the directionality of history, had surrendered to the opportunism of right-wing and left-wing totalitarians with frightening speed. The trajectory of Europe seemed thoroughly doomed. Benjamin’s pessimism in this regard informed his analysis:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule … We shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

Benjamin’s doomed Europe did not last: The continent was liberated piece by piece, with the West restored by 1945, and the East by 1991. However, his analysis of progress is still important to consider today. To what extent is contemporary politics just as fixated on the eternity of the future, as competing factions seek absolute power to implement their ideal vision of that future? And how does this vision of eternity blind us to our responsibilities in the present moment, when the ever-present ‘state of emergency’ could at any time be exploited by totalitarians in just the same way as it was in Benjamin’s time? For all of the difficulty in approaching Benjamin’s style of analysis, these questions are important, and they are not the kinds of questions which arise easily when following conventional modes of thought.

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