The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Pollution, Contradiction, and Salvation 123
choly and that this was something more than neurotic self-indulgence.
It was an intellecting mood that was forced on one who confronted
the dialectic of freedom and necessity written into historical
materialism. One thinks here of the slogan that was advanced
against the paralyzing mysticism that is intrinsic to the Marxist
evolutionary-determinist position—Antonio Gramsci's combative
adage, "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"—as a
somewhat similar attempt to locate a stance that privileges both the
inexorable movement of history and the necessity for active human
intervention in that movement. Historical materialism is a mode of
historiography in which the painstaking scientific mind is driven by
a passion rooted in sadness to structure a conception of the world as
a self-activating totality of coherent parts. Melancholy establishes
and confirms the distance separating subject from object, a distance
that is necessary for objective analysis, while it simultaneously registers
the need to transcend that alienation, which is also the alienation
of man as created by history. Melancholy is the gaze that penetrates
the images of the past, transforming them from dead objects
into images vibrant with meaning for the revolutionary encounter
with the present, the history of which would otherwise become a
tool of the ruling class to mystify the victims of history. In every
age, Benjamin asserted, the attempt has to be made to wrest tradition
away from the conformism that is about to overpower it. Nothing
could be further from the conservative nostalgia for the past. The
issue is that a class cut off from its own history is far less able to act
as a class than one that is able to situate itself in history. Yet history
is essentially catastrophic; it triumphs at the expense of its human
agents. The claim that the past exerts on the present, Benjamin
wrote, is messianic, and cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists,
he appended, are aware of that.
Fredric Jameson describes the mood of Benjamin's searching the
past for an adequate object that will redeem the present without falling
either into fascist mythopoesis consecrating the irrational or
into the consummation of history through statistical data processing.
It is the mind of private depressions, dejection of the outsider,
and distress in the face of a political and historical nightmare (1971:
60).
To read things as though they were sacred texts, to fill them with
the penetrating sadness of the loser and dejected outsider, projecting
the distress that arises in the face of a political and historical nightmare—this
is also the dying wail of a peasant class over whom the
wave of "progress" is about to roll. As Barrington Moore suggests, it