Reactionaries Like Us, By DC Miller
DC Miller responds to Adam Lehrer's essay "A Marxist Defends the Great Reactionaries"
Political language is entangled with political reality, shaping it, and also being shaped by it.
In an ideal society, words correspond to things, directly – and things are called by their true names. But in a deteriorating situation, language loses the ability to confront the issues which concern it. Discourse degenerates into jargon and pathology and ceases to describe reality.
The urge develops to find a language capable of restoring a world of meaning to coherence. Escaping or expelled from institutions for refusing or rejecting (or simply questioning) their authority, these people now search for terms which better capture their true feelings.
Adam Lehrer’s article for American Greatness in January takes the term reactionary as a placeholder to classify a number of ambiguously schismatic contemporary figures. What unifies this chess set of reactionaries is a heterogeneous, subversive attitude.
The term itself has previously been recently applied to the “Neo-Reactionary” or NRx phenomenon. Hosting a conference on this crypto-heretical discourse was among the sins of LD50, the cancelled London art gallery that I was cancelled for defending in 2017, whatever cancelled and defending mean. In a ricochet effect, Lehrer himself was later cancelled for defending me (how many people have been cancelled now? Five thousand?)
NRx is a political language connecting information, attitudes, and thoughts together to construct ideas. NRx is also antithetical to the spirit of reactionary traditionalism in search of hypermodern visions. But because heterodoxy for institutional “coordination" narratives today is already heretical, the phenomenon reactivates a reactionary attitude and fuses with it strangely. “The exile was at first a heretic,” remarks Henry Corbin, “but when the criteria are secularized and become social criteria he is no more than a madman, a misfit.”
NRx appeals to readers who reject the global social propaganda, but do not oppose exactly the global power which creates it. For this reason Alexander Dugin has connected NRx with Satanism. Land, the most influential theorist of NRx along with Yarvin, has previously defined himself as a “liberal of the extreme right” and his thought as “right-wing Marxism.” Lehrer still calls himself a Marxist in a society in which Marxism has liquidated, and synthesized with global capital; the term reactionary as traditionally employed to castigate opponents in the path of progress has ironically itself become archaic.
Lehrer evokes this in his essay on the black pill where he speaks of “a hopelessly reactionary culture war.” The culture war itself is now reactionary. The text describes “collective actions manifest as the aestheticized alienation of people who know there is somethingwrong, but who lack the means and methods to express their dissent in ways that might actually challenge the power they intuitively oppose.” The confusion of this sentence testifies to the essential problem. What is missing is a concept of this power one might intuitively oppose. And how one might oppose it?
The final witness is Heinrich Blücher. Hired in 1951 by the President of Bard to teach a Common Course to freshmen, Blücher “set-out to restore philosophy to her ancient role as queen of the sciences.” Towards this end he assembled a line-up of “great thinkers” including Abraham, Jesus, Zarathustra, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Homer, Solon, Heraclitus and Socrates: the “arch-fathers of the free personality.” You can listen to these courses on the internet. According to librarian Betsey Cawley, “Nearly 12 years ago now, while moving into my office in the Kellogg Library, I discovered a box of audio cassettes marked only - ominously - "Sources of Creative Power," - nothing else. It was like finding a bottle on the beach…”
Blucher’s identity parade concludes with Jesus. “Jesus of Nazareth,” he began, “was not a God… He may even have been an idiot.” But “Jesus knew, that at any moment there might be only seven just men alive unknown to anyone else on earth and that is the only reason why God does not destroy the world.” The last line of defense is seven unknown men.
Illustrations
1. Henry Corbin
2. Deanna Havas Magic Weapon from her 2016 exhibition at ld50
3. Alexander Dugin
4. Heinrich Blücher
DC (Daniel) Miller is a critic, writer and philosopher. After losing much of his status within the art world following his heroic defense of the LD50 Gallery in response to the vicious assaults it endured at the hands of Antifa protests, Miller has emerged once more as an utterly insightful critic of the contemporary world. Read his work at his Substack, The Conservative Woman, IM—1776. Miller is also the guest on the most recent episode of System of Systems.
great essay ty