TWILIGHT OF REVOLUTION
Paz, Octavio
The following essay is from Conjunctions and Disjunctions, by Octavio Paz. English language translation copyright © 1974 by The Viking Press, Inc. A Richard Seaver book to be published by The...
...But its prostration is not a consequence of the intolerant rigidity of a system but of the promiscuity of its various tendencies and manners...
...Therefore it has had to accept the iron law of development: the storing up, the accumulation of capital (modestly called "the accumulation of Socialist capital...
...I see in their conjunction the possibility of the return of the sign body: the incarnation of images, the return of the human figure, radiant and radiating symbols...
...What might be called the inversion of historic causality has its counterpart in the breaks in the linear order...
...The literalness of the rite—the reality of the sacrifice— emphasized in a hideous way the unreal and expiatory nature of the repression: the Mexican powers-that-be punished their own revolutionary past by punishing these young people...
...I do not know, and I do not believe anybody knows...
...it is also a point of departure leading, beyond the body, to the Other...
...It is the Festival of the goddess Reason—without Robespierre and without the guillotine but with tear gas and television...
...In the garden of paradise, a present without a single flaw shone brightly...
...They write another text, or rather invent one...
...This is the end of discourse and rational legibility...
...Translated by HELEN R. LANE 62 OCTAVIO PAZ...
...like Romanticism, with which it has more 'than one similarity, their rebellion is not so much intellectual dissidence as a passionate, vital, libertarian heresy...
...It is true that we have never had so many...
...How can we touch it, how can we penetrate inside its transparent heart...
...As for sexuality and time: the body has never believed in progress...
...the other is Festival and evokes the circular time of myth...
...The extreme form of modernity in art is the destruction of the object...
...This is a search for the sign body, not as a cipher of pleasure (although we must not be afraid of the word pleasure: it is beautiful in every language), but as a magnet that attracts all the contradictory forces that haunt us...
...But Festival is a manifestation of the cyclical time of myth...
...And, finally: history, reason, and morality became one with progress...
...Perhaps the alliance of poetry and rebellion will give us a vision of it...
...I have written elsewhere of what must be called "the end of the revolutionary period in the West...
...But they do not really return: it is all pantomine, and on another day fasting and penitence...
...The fundamental opposition was: industrial production/private capitalist ownership...
...the difference between capitalist and "Socialist" accumulation has been that in the first case the workers could group together and defend their interests, and in the second, because of the absence of democratic institutions, they were (and are) exploited by their "representatives...
...What excites me about the rebellion of youth even more than their generous but nebulous politics is the reappearance of passion as a magnetic reality...
...By doing away with the stage of free competition, unemployment, monopolies, and other disasters of capitalism were avoided...
...In them is the secret of our resurrection...
...the struggle for a democratic society against the oppression of Communist bureaucracies and against Soviet interference in the "Socialist" countries of Eastern Europe...
...This abundance turns into another abundance: that of styles that die aborning...
...If this second phase of Western civilization comes to an end, as many people believe and as the reality that we all live tells us, the clearest sign that the end is approaching will be what Ortega y Gasset prophetically called "the twilight of revolutions...
...Both the events and the actors betray the text of the play...
...its religion is not the future but the present...
...The ceremony commemorates an absence, or more precisely, it at once convokes, exorcises, and punishes an Absent Guest...
...Whatever their ultimate meaning may be, these events give the lie to the linear idea of history, the notion of the human course oftime as a process possessed of a logic, in other words, a genuine discourse...
...it is also true that none of them fits the Western conception of what a revolution is...
...We are witnessing the denouement today: revolution against revolution...
...Not the eternity of religions but the incandescence of the instant: a consummation and an abolition of dates...
...Any accumulation brings on the expropriation of plus-value and an exploitation of the workers...
...Young people are discovering values that excited figures as different as Blake and Rousseau, Novalis and Breton—spontaneity, the negation of artificial society and its hierarchies, fraternity not only with men but with nature, the ability to be enthusiastic and also to be indignant, and the amazing ability to be amazed...
...In Russia there was a leap from an incipient industrial capitalism to the system of state ownership...
...In this sense the rebellion of youth is different from those that preceded it in this century, with TWILIGHT OF REVOLUTION 59 the exception of that of the Surrealists...
...The idea of revolution was the great invention of the West in its second phase...
...if the recrudescence of these struggles does not coincide with an economic crisis but rather with a period of abundance...
...it is a present that returns, whereas we live in the linear and profane time of progress and history...
...Modern thought secularized Christian time and from among the temporal triad—past, present, and future— it crowned the latter the ruling power of our lives and of history...
...Although democracy— because of the bureaucratic nature of TWILIGHT OF REVOLUTION 61 political parties, economic monopolies, and the manipulation of the means of information— has become a method of a few to control and garner power, we are haunted by the phantoms of the principles, beliefs, ideas, and forms of living and feeling that gave rise to our world...
...Their rejection does not come from the past but from the present...
...I believe that we are entering another time, a time that has not yet revealed its form and about which we can say nothing except that it will be neither linear time nor cyclical time...
...There is no art that does not create a style and there is no style that does not eventually kill art...
...the aesthetic of novelty, surprise, and change turns into imitation, tedium, and repetition...
...The idea that intellectuals and technicians constitute the new class is more interesting, but unfortunately it has the defect that those groups are neither homogeneous nor can they be considered as a real proletariat—they are not a universal, exploited class...
...moreover, these countries do not constitute a class because of their social, economic, and historical heterogeneity...
...And a nostalgia for Festival...
...Embracing "Chinese Marxism" as a political philosophy and attempting to apply it to industrial societies of the West is at once grotesque and disheartening...
...Apart from these changes, they experienced profound transformations: births, deaths, and resurrections of religions...
...The results of these movements were also paradoxical...
...From the viewpoint of revolutionary doctrines, what is really almost beyond explanation is the attitude of young people: they have nothing to gain, no philosophy has named them -agents of history and they embody no universal historical principle...
...We can still begin over again...
...But it no longer seems strange if we observe that, like the rite as a whole, the victim is a representation, or, more precisely, a hypostasis of the revolutionary classes of the past...
...No longer a consequence of development, socialism has been a method of fostering it...
...If contemporary rebellion (and I am not thinking only of that of young people) is not dissipated in a succession of raucous cries and does not degenerate into closed, authoritarian systems, if it articulates its passionthrough poetic imagination, in the widest and freest sense of the word poetry, our incredulous eyes may behold the awakening and the return to our abject world of that corporeal and spiritual reality that we call the presence of the beloved...
...History is a discourse...
...Or is the rebellion of youth yet another sign that we are living an end of time...
...Societies of the past did not have real revolutions...
...Or, better: a variation of the myth of linear time...
...The revolts and rebellions of the 20th century have demonstrated that the subject of history is multiple and that it is irreducible to the notion of class struggle as well as to the progressive and linear succession of civilizations (the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, etc...
...It is therefore an error to consider contemporary social upheavals as expressions of the (supposed) revolutionary process which history has been said to consist of...
...History is envisioned as a continuous, neverending colonization of the future...
...It has lost its philosophical dignity and its moral halo...
...But these differences do not blur the most decisive fact: the style of the rebellion of youth rejecting the institutions and the moral and social systems that hold sway in the West...
...But there comes a time when people cease believing in the speculations of theologians...
...Something still without form, like a world dawning...
...Hearing any participant or eyewitness of the rebellion of young people in Paris in May 1968 is an experience that puts our ability to judge things objectively to the test...
...There is a plurality of personages and a plurality of times on the march toward many wheres, not all of them situated in a future that vanishes the instant we touch it...
...Possessed by the memory of its future or of its past, by what it was or what it could have been—no, not possessed but rather deserted, empty, the orphan of its origin and its future —society mimics them...
...Reality is perverse and stubborn: these changes have occurred in different places, among different classes, and with different results...
...This sacred cannot emerge from anything but the depths of a collective experience...
...All these institutions and systems go to make up what is called modernity, in contrast to the medieval world...
...The plurality of protagonists has also demonstrated that the leading thread of history is also multiple: it is not a single strand but many, and not all of them are straight ones...
...Nostalgia and remorse— this is probably why society indulges in costly and sometimes bloody revolutionary rituals...
...what is happening is that the prince (concrete revolution) is unworthy of the mandate...
...The idea of process implies thatthings happen one after the other, either in the form of sudden leaps and bounds (revolution) or in the form of gradual changes (evolution) . Progress is a synonym of process because it is thought that every change results sooner or later in an advance...
...A carnal time, a mortal time: the present is not unreachable, the present is not forbidden territory...
...The rationality inherent in the historical process has proven to be merely one more myth...
...What is left for us...
...It was a discovery of the power of language: my words are yours...
...this tendency, which began as a criticism of the notion of the "work of art," has now culminated in a negation of the very notion of art...
...If the rebellion of the underdeveloped countries denies the pre58 OCTAVIO PAZ dictions of revolutionary thought iabout the logic of history and the universal historical subject of our time (the proletariat), the rebellion of youth dethrones the primacy of the future and discredits the suppositions of revolutionary messianism and of liberal evolutionism: what excites young people is not the progress of the entelechy called humanity but the realization of each concrete human vocation, here and now...
...At least this is what contemporary rebellions are confusedly demanding...
...This appears to be a strange situation: they are outside the real drama of history in the same way that the Biblical lamb was outside of the dialogue between Jehovah and Abraham...
...There are those who will tell me that the underdeveloped countries are the new proletariat...
...In this respect, too, our era is unique: no other society has ever made revolution its central idea...
...they had changes of mandate and dynasty...
...I shall merely repeat here that the idea of revolution—in the strict sense of that word, such as it has been defined by modern thought—is undergoing a crisis because its very root, its foundation, the linear conception of time and history, is also undergoing a crisis...
...Revolt as the path to Illumination...
...This way of thinking is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and its mythical counterpart is the expulsion from Eden...
...It is a negation of the sign non-body in all its Western versions: religious or atheist, philosophical or political, materialist or idealist...
...The tradition ofthese young people is more poetic and religious than philosophical and political...
...We are not just witnessing another rebellion of the senses: we are confronting an explosion of emotions and feelings...
...Although these disturbances have been unusually violent and will probably be even more violent in the future, they in no way correspond to the ideas concerning what a revolution is or should be that Tyrians and Trojans, 56 from Chateaubriand to Trotsky, had worked out...
...The secret of the fascination thatthis movement exercised on all those (including the spectators) who were present at its demonstrations lay in its attempt to unite politics, art, and eroticism...
...Both history and reason were identified with morality: socialism was justice...
...The decline of the future is a phenomenon that manifests itself, naturally, in the very place where it shone like 'a real sun: modern Western society...
...Both modes of succession, the revolutionary and the evolutionary, correspond to a vision of history as a march toward something—we are not exactly certain where this something is, except that this where is better than the situation today, and that it lies in the future...
...In both cases the id: a of revolution has been attacked in its very center, as much as or more than the conservative idea of order...
...The modern world was born with the democratic revolution of the bourgeoisie which, so to speak, nationalized and collectivized politics...
...Nor do art and poetry seek anything different, although artists and poets sometimes do not know this...
...speaking with you is speaking with myself...
...Socialism, which had ceased being synonymous with historical reason, has also ceased being synonymous with justice...
...I shall cite an example...
...Perhaps the revolt of youth is an empty festival, the summons, the invocation of an event that will always be a future event and never a present one, that never will simply be...
...What is the way to enter such a present...
...Second, there must be only one leading thread: universal history must be considered to be the manifestation of the Absolute in time, the expression of the class struggle, or some other similar hypothesis...
...By injecting the idea of revolution into art, our era has created a plurality of styles and pseudostyles...
...The so-called "historical laws" have disappeared completely...
...In all the accounts I have heard there is one surprising note: the tone of the revolt, at once passionate and disinterested, as if action had been confused with representation: it was like a mutiny that turned into a Festival and a polio ical discussion that turned into a ceremony...
...These two explanations are really one and the same: if the working class is no longer revolutionary, and if social conflicts and struggles become more acute instead of dying out...
...We can sneer at death and thus exorcise it...
...Reprinted with the publishers' permission...
...the philosophy of progress is really a theory of the condemnation of man, who is doomed perpetually to move forward, knowing that he will never arrive at his final destination...
...This real, material opposition could be expressed in terms of a logical dichotomy between reason (industrial production) and unreason (private capitalist ownership...
...It used to be supposed that revolution would be the consequence of the contradiction between the forces of production created by capitalism and the system of capitalist ownership...
...We have unforeseen irruptions that disturb the linear nature of history: what should have happened has not occurred and what should have happened later happens now...
...A mimetic magic...
...The third requirement is the continuous action of a protagonist who is also unique: humanity and its successive transitory masks...
...Today this idea of time is coming to an end: we are living the decadence of the future...
...Like the first Christians waiting for the Apocalypse, modern society has been waiting for the arrival of the Revolution since 1840...
...epic theater and at the same time public confession...
...The systematic spirit has infected many groups that arrogantly advocate authoritarian and obscurantist programs, such as Maoism and other theological fanaticisms...
...The future has reigned in the West since the 18th century...
...They are one and the same: the return of Revolution is Festival, the recurring principle of principles...
...But the rebellions of the 20th century have violated both the rules of dramatic action and those of representation...
...at the same time it would be the triumph of reason over the TWILIGHT OF REVOLUTION 57 irrationality of the capitalist system...
...As the subject of history, "humanity" lacks substance...
...In either case, it is not here, but there, always beyond our reach...
...the opposition to Yankee imperialism and local oppressors in Latin America...
...Schools proliferate and propagate like mushrooms until their very abundance finally erases the differences between one tendency and another...
...I believe that in them and through themanother possibility for the West is opening up, if only obscurely and confusedly as yet, something that has not been foreseen by ideologists and that only a handful of poets has glimpsed...
...Nonetheless, it is most clearly seen in the youth movement...
...movements live about as long as insects do, a few short hours...
...It projects us into the medulla, the invisible center of time: the here and now...
...None of these revolts broke out because there was an irreconcilable contradiction between the system of industrial production and the system of capitalist ownership...
...It is the Return as a verbal orgy, a saturnalia of commonplaces...
...The ideology of the young is often a simplification and an acritical reduction of the revolutionary tradition of the West, which itself was scholastic and intolerant...
...There was a fusion of private and collective passion, a continuous ebb and flow between the marvelous and the everyday, the lived act as an aesthetic representation, a conjunction of action and its celebration...
...On the contrary: in these countries the contradiction went through an initial phase and was therefore socially and historically productive...
...The universality of the rebellion of youth is the real sign of the times: the signal of a change of time...
...They were the seed of the West, the origin of our art and of our poetry...
...It is not the ideology of youth but their attitude, their sensibility more than their thought, that is really new...
...There is something infernal about this optimistic vision of history...
...It is a point of reconciliation of man with others and with himself...
...This indifference is difficult to explain unless we accept one of the two following hypotheses: either the working class is not a revolutionary class or the revolt of youth does not fit within the classical framework of the class struggle...
...I need hardly point out in reply that the phenomenon of colonial dependence is not new (Marx was familiar with it...
...Faced with this unexpected reality which cheats us, theologians speculate and try to prove, like Confucian mandarins, that the mandate of heaven (the idea of revolution) is the same...
...First of all, there must be only one time: a present continually impelled toward the future...
...Or isthis only an illusion of ours and are these disturbances the last sparks of a dying hope...
...It was a reappearance of everything (communion, transfiguration, the transformation of water into wine and of words into a body) that religions claim as their own though it is anterior to them and constitutes the other dimension of man, his other half and his lost kingdom—man perpetually expelled and torn away from time, in search of another time, a prohibited, inaccessible time: the present moment...
...It was a return to the source, to the principle of principles: being oneself by being with everyone...
...The double crisis of Marxism and the ideology of liberal and democratic capitalism has the same meaning as the rebellion of the underdeveloped world and the rebellion of youth: they are the expressions of the end of linear time...
...On the contrary, all these changes, beginning with that in Russia and not excluding the ones that have taken place in China and Cuba, have failed to confirm the theoreticians' predictions: none of them has occurred where it should have and none of the classes and social forces in the forefront of these changes have been what they should have been...
...The word presence and the word love have appeared in these reflections for the first and the last time...
...It is not a reactionary movement, nor is it inspired by Washington: it is the revolt of the underdeveloped peoples and the rebellion of the young in the developed countries...
...As for young people: no dialectical skill and no trick of the imagination can transform them into a social class...
...By opening to the collectivity a sphere that up until thattime had been the closed preserve of a few, it was thought that general politicization (democracy) would immediately result in the distribution of power among everyone...
...It is not that it is entirely false: it is inadequate, and we must seek another principle, another explanation...
...There was a reuniting of man with his image: mirror reflections focused in another luminous body...
...The twilight of the idea of revolution corresponds to the rapidity with which revolutionary movements are being transformed into rigid systems...
...I will give two examples of its decline: the crisis of the notion of an avant-garde in the realm of art, and the violent irruption of sexuality...
...History becomes improvisation...
...Persepolis, Rome, or New York, the monarchy or the proletariat, any one represents humanity at one moment or another of history as a member of the legislature represents his electors, and as an actor represents the character he is playing...
...As the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh said to the doctor paying him a visit: "I'm afraid I'm not going to die...
...in the deserts of history, the only sun that guides us is the fleeting future...
...This is what has begun to happen in the second half of our century...
...The Absent Guest has a public name and another secret name: the first is Revolution and refers to the linear time of history...
...The incoherent shouting of all these voices turns into a rational dialogue and this dialogue into a philosophical monologue...
...For this reason they do not have and cannot set up programs and universal plans as an international class, a party, or a church can...
...All of them are the offspring of linear time and all of them are being rejected today...
...In brief: they are discovering the heart...
...A Richard Seaver book to be published by The Viking Press, Inc...
...The return of the present: the time that is coming is defined by a here and a now...
...Here and now: a leap to the other shore...
...It was a true conversion: not only -a change of ideas but of sensibility...
...The best definition I know of this process came from a guerrilla in Michoacan: "All revolutions degenerate into governments...
...I have already expressed my belief: modern time—linear time, the homologue of the ideas of progress and history, ever propelled into the future, the time of the sign nonbody, of the fierce will to dominate nature and tame instincts, the time of sublimation, aggression, and self-mutilation—is coming to an end...
...The situation of the other heir of Christianity, art, is no better...
...Society must manifest it, incarnate it, live it, and thus live and consume itself...
...The time that is coming, if we really are living a change at times, a general revolt and not linear revolution, will be neither a future nor a past, but a present...
...Andre Breton once spoke of the possibility of incorporating an extra-religious sense of the sacred, made up of the triangle of love, poetry, and rebellion, in modern life...
...It is a symbolic profanation and castigation and at the same time a representation...
...the nauseathat Festival brings...
...more than a change of being, it was a return to being, a social and psychic revelation that fora few days broadened the limits of reality and extended the realm of the possible...
...Things have come around full circle: art ceases to be "modern": it is an instantaneous present...
...I n every case and in every country workers have participated in the movement only as unwilling and temporary allies...
...And revolution is coming: not the one that we have been waiting for, but another one, each time another one...
...At the same time, the political and social counterpart of capitalism—free labor unions and democracy— was literally ignored...
...History is a theater in which a single person, humanity, becomes many: servants, masters, bourgeois, mandarins, clergymen, peasants, workers...
...First, the weapon of dying mortals: humor...
...And by mimicking them it exorcises them: for a few weeks it denies itself through the blasphemies and the sacrilege of its young people and then affirms itself more completely and more perfectly in the ensuing repression...
...Neither history nor myth...
...A victim anointed by the ambiguous fascination of profanation, youth is the sacrificial lamb of the ceremony: after having profaned itself through it, society punishes itself...
...This universality must not cause us to forget that the movement of youth has a different meaning in each country: negation of the society of abundance and opposition to imperialism, to racial discrimination and war, in the United States and in Western Europe...
...and if a new world class of the exploited has not appeared to take the place of the proletariat in its revolutionary mission, then it is obvious that the theory of class struggle cannot account for contemporary phenomena...
...Socialism would be the result of economic development...
...If Chinese peasants or Latin-American revolutionaries are today the representatives of the subject "humanity," who or what do American and European workers, not to mention the Russian proletariat, represent...
...The events on October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de Tlatelolco in Mexico City evoked (repeated) the Aztec rites: several hundred boys and girls sacrificed, on the ruins of a pyramid, by the army and the police...
...Or perhaps it is a commemoration: the revolution no longer appears to be the elusive imminence of the future but rather something like a past to 60 OCTAVIO PAZ which we cannot return—yet which we cannot abandon either...
...Then love will cease to be the isolated experience of an individual or a couple, an exception or a scandal...
...The present does not project us into any place beyond, any motley, otherworldly eternities or abstract paradises at the end of history...
...But modern revolts, including the Russian one, have not been the consequence of economic development, but of the absence of development...
...The linear conception of history makes three things necessary...
...it was reason incarnate...
...The subject of this continual pilgrimage is not a nation, a class, or a civilization, but an abstract entity: humanity...
...it is never present in person: it acts by means of its representatives, this people or that, this class or that...
...Necessity (history) possessed the rigor of logic...
...The emergence of the present as the central value is visible in many areas of contemporary sensibility: it is a ubiquitous phenomenon...
Vol. 21 • January 1974 • No. 1
