Revolution take two.

The problem the Brumiar insists is not that revolution stands upon a cusp of time. Or problem as revolutionaries is that we do not know what they ought to look lie now. If one then follows the old schemata for revolutions, then Dickens is right.

The power of the revolution is ultimately to dislocated a society into factions, factions that they play out a drama beyond reason or point.

However Marx suggests that is not all are revolution need be.

One the contrary what one needs to aim for is something far more vivid, and real. A revolution that does not relax into a language, A revolution that will have the rewored the rules of on,w a revolution needs to be thought as it occurs.A revolution that cannot then be contained within a past, and is not 'over' in its radical phaze the moment it breaks out.

Marx therefore present us with the need to rethink revolution. Or better to rethink the nature of exactly who the revolutionary is. Maybe the old profession, is not enough. One genuinely uncalled and unbidden, and yet timely, a revolt needs to come from the blue, and in the giving not merely re-throw the past, it also needs to form a radical break with it. It must then not merely be the words which force what was to appear to be that which lead one forward. It must rather be that which ends the past, and breaks with it. That change which, like industrialization makes the past utterly unthinkable.A revolt which makes words meaningless and empty, and ghosts powerless.

A revolution not then of political stridency, but one of those other revolution of technology.

That is Marx's model is surely the industrial revolution. A revolution whose time and place is impossible to pin down. A revolution that was named (or mis named) across an epoch. a revolution which sunk into the consciousness of the manufacturing peoples only after the event ( of else as a political word, a moment of policy within a number of events). The revolutions, the type of revolution, Marx really values are then the blind silent revolutions of technology: Remember when Marx wrote the term industrial revolution was not known. The changes he saw everywhere lacked cogency. They formed the a blind revolt; a sequence of nameless mythless changes.

A revolution like the one we are in at the moment(which combines; broad band; to worry about climste change and appropriate technology to bio chemistry as engineer to complexity theory, to ....,A revolution all around us, but one that not be known yet) but will surely have some kind of age at some point.

Dickens might then have revolution as event right but Marx insists, but such events do not cover all events. There are those revolts which are different from revolutions as events. There are this nameless silent sequence of interlinked changes that occur as a seed of technological change is such that humans need and use moving categories to think think (and so assume change, an thereby make it possible),. Real revolution, the final revolution will occur then when this change echoes into political language. That is when it subsumes an event within a sequence of changes, that cannot be exactly located.

Marx's gambit is then that this move, this throw of humanity into a technological type revolution is possible. Our problem then of course is simple. is this possibility like the second coming- and always possible but actual or does its very possible make political revolution powerful?

A problem to mull over.

One Solution

Dickens suggests three moments of revolution in Tale of Two cities (moments which have a power in spite of the dodgy history which surround them)

The First: The forming of the language. Before the revolt, das captial needs to be written and a language found to name the sins of the current system. This language is essential both collective and creative. It is shared by would be enemies; Defarge and Darnley, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, and Seyies. all have a hand in the developing and the using of it. But the language is also creative. In linking together passions, words, perceptions and actions it creates a real world. It makes a sin. It becomes the way that emotion is expressed, and miseries caught in truth. It becomes therfore the reality into which the mind is poured . It gives the way to understand the world, and therefore the nature of truth.

It is a language characterized by Irony and scorn. The old reality is withered and forced by laughter and mocking to concede that really it is at a loss to understand the world and name passions and worlds. Scorn therefore scours language and forces a debate elsewhere.

The second moment comes with the event itself. In the event a person or a set of circumstances becomes the dark precursor that created the lightening strike . Under their gaze everything changes. The event reached into that old (collective) language and purifies(or splits) it: words become unsayable or else cannot said in that fashion, while new forced languages are born. It reaches into the past and forces that past to become what was making it alone . It becomes then fate. Here of course is a real irony. The event itself, that is exactly what happened is contigent and often the active creation of a small number of individuals, and yet the action itself, once it happens will demand that the past warp and change in how it is viewed. The past becomes that which created what followed. it becomes the oil in which the event was sown. It becomes the pathway to it. It is forced therefore to allow or what was not in it, or not in that form, the event that happened.

The event is therefore the moment the past is bent into a certain present; it is the point at which a language is made to say only one thing : the point Mirabeau and then Seyies and then Danton fall away form the revolution that is Robespierre. It is the moment at which time is forced onwards. The terror; The point history and all its effects need to change once and for all.

The third moment, the aftermath happens as the event is itself absorbed as a fact into other lives. Those whose language is utterly changed by events have in a sense the last laugh. They must for ever allow for it, and cannot return quite to what they were. And yet they have the power in communicating and understanding the event to change how it is viewed. This change is pivotal. It is the nature of the initial event to be divide. It is after all the moment history splits. Something new occurred. Older or merely other views are then crushed or dismissed or destroyed. The event is that which divided. But the reaction to the event is somewhat different: minds which the event initially divided come together to understand their division, and so locate the event within a personal but also a wider history. The event becomes then shared in spite of itself. It becomes collective. The solitary masters who expressed it are then robbed of their power (and often their lives). They represent the split and not the reaction to the split. A world might then have changed (and it will not change back), and yet it never need change in quite the way the revolters wanted .

In a sense it cannot.

The moment the event is open to history itself (and not merely re-throwing fate), this much is clear. For exactly happened, and what should follow from that happening is always an open question in the fluxes of the world. It changes as many people inhabit and do so differently.

In a sense this difference is the events great legacy.It marks the splitting off of a language into other languages, other takes different communions, different takes on the event,. The event thereofore takes the collective talk of revival and potential enemies and transform it across a history into a set of closed affairs and defined constitutions (in nations or in families). It defines then a series of limits and creates a language for those limits.

The great events of the state become then a thing for school kids to debate over, or politicians to use as a badge of identity - until that it the process starts again.

This then for Dickens was Marx's error. He failed to realize what he was the master of. He was the master of the creation of a language for capturing the essence of a time; The problem of capitalism; He is then one of the thinkers creating out of the diverse languages the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century created a single language, in which many voices can be heard. This project is the one he shared with Dickens (but also Darwin). What Marx was not the master of was however revolution.: but then it is a role which at least half of Marx (the man of the british library would have surely relished).