Abstract
In many ways, Omens of Adversity is a continuation and deepening of a line of thought that social and cultural theorist David Scott has been developing for years. In particular, it completes a certain arc initiated in his Refashioning Futures and extended in Conscripts of Modernity. 1 As the titles of these volumes themselves attest, Scott’s larger project is marked by a progressively more strident analysis, a darkening view of what he sees as our increasingly strangulated set of political possibilities. As such, Omens demands serious engagement by social and political theorists.
In Scott’s wider frame of view, the twentieth century was characterized by a great modernist politics of emancipation. Particularly in its anticolonial and socialist iterations, these projects exhibited a longing for total revolution, which expressed itself in an essentially romantic narrative form. Total revolution was envisioned as the final stage in a great drama carrying us forward from darkness to light. In Conscripts, Scott introduced the idea that this narrative structure was giving way to a tragic one. If the romantic utopian projects of the twentieth century positioned their protagonists in a space of possibility—always on the cusp, always just before the final victory—then we are locked in a perpetual dénouement. We are defined by what has come before us, not by what lies ahead. We are post- . . . modern, colonial, socialist, and so on . . .
In Omens, the story of the Grenada Revolution functions as a synecdoche for this encasement within a stalled, “end of history” time-consciousness. Chapter one introduces us to the principal historical events. In March of 1979, a Marxist-Leninist insurrectionary group known as the New Jewel Movement (NJM) managed to topple the tyrannical rule of Eric Gairy in the state of Grenada, installing a charismatic new leader in Maurice Bishop. Although initially quite successful, the movement was eventually undone by its own internal tensions. In 1983, Maurice Bishop was effectively deposed by his second in command, Bernard Coard. An armed standoff ensued, resulting in the execution of Bishop and seven of his associates. The implosion of the NJM provided the Reagan administration with an opportunity it had long sought and, in October of 1983, Grenada was invaded by approximately ten thousand US soldiers. “Operation Urgent Fury” deposed the NJM and jailed its leaders (the Grenada 17). Although these events provide the historical core of the book, they are, in fact not Scott’s primary concern. The text does not aim to return us to the era of the revolution itself, or to provide us with a new, authoritative historical account. Rather, it remains very consciously within our time-space, that is, in the aftermath of collapse, in the need to go on. The three subsequent chapters each engage different genres with which a post-revolutionary, post-colonial society may wrestle with this demand.
Chapter two engages novels by the Grenadian author Merle Collins. Scott focuses his attention on how Collins’s later works subvert the traditional romantic postcolonial Bildungsroman genre. These works are didactic, cautionary allegories more than triumphant tales of progressive development. In them, the failure of the revolution is not presented as the catastrophic end of a teleological history of continuous progress but, rather, as “merely one significant episode in a larger story . . . imagined and represented as the cyclical pattern of a general history whose generative logic is catastrophic” (74–75). Drawing from a number of theoretical sources, but especially Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological engagement with memory and time, Scott suggestively posits that we, like the characters in such works, are similarly trapped in an eternal present in which we cannot imagine things to be any different, but from which we must nevertheless still learn.
In the highly original third chapter, Scott turns to a small pamphlet written and published in 2002 by a group of secondary-school students. The booklet is the result of an investigation undertaken by teenaged boys to uncover what happened to the bodies of Maurice Bishop and his associates. What matters for Scott is less the brute empirical facts (the disappearance of the bodies remains today a mystery) than the generational shift marked by the research project itself. The pamphlet is read here as a speech act: it performs a refusal “to be complicit in the paralysis that characterizes their parent’s generation” (104), enacting a “generational intervention of reparative mourning and remembering” (117).
Focusing upon these different genres with which Grenada represents and reworks its own past also enables Scott to interrogate the question of revolution in postcolonial times, especially its entanglement with temporality. Grenada’s experience brings to light the larger failure of Third Worldism, the non-aligned movement, the Bandung project, and all that they represented. The NJM’s failure is, therefore, not merely read as the collapse of a particular project, but the beginning of the end of the very idea of revolutionary socialist possibility. According to Scott, we sit then not only in the aftermath of a failed revolution (or series of such revolutions), but in the disintegration of a modernist experience of futurity, a placement of the present in a narrative arc that leads to emancipation. If that narrative structure is now unavailable to us, it has not been replaced by an alternative however. Hence, we are stalled: “the remnant of a voile curtain over what feels uncannily like an endlessly extending present” (6).
Like Walter Benjamin before him, Scott begins therefore with collapse and catastrophe. From there, he counsels a process of sifting, filtering and gleaning, from which we can divine some lessons that might endure. “Tragedy may be the price of freedom,” Scott intones. Enlisting Arendt and Hegel, Scott develops an account of human action as the capacity to initiate, and then links this to a claim regarding the inescapable fact of contingency: “Human action consists of the initiation and conduct of activities over the course of which complete control is never possible” (38). Tragedy arises then not from any particular failed human action—which is at any rate always beyond our sovereign control— but rather from the superordinate relationship to the finitude and contingency disclosed by action. Tragedy is, for Scott, a product of our attempt to overcome the contingency of action, our unwillingness to give it its due. In short, a failure to acknowledge finitude. Tragedy thus invokes answerability and responsibility. The truly tragic figure is not one who fails to achieve her objectives, but one who does not learn from this failure, missing the lessons of fragility, receptivity, humility. From this Arendtian-Hegelian framework, Scott then locates the tragedy of the Grenada Revolution not in the suffering that flowed from it, but in “how a one-sided and exclusive attachment to positions or principles . . . effectively precluded the possibility of reconciliation or resolution” (51). The term one-sidedness appears throughout this book and, much like in Classical tragedy, is almost personified as anti-hero, endowed with an agency that is thought to steer the course of events: “Thus, the one-sidedness of one side was obliged to capitulate almost entirely to the adamant, intransigent one-sidedness of the other. In the circumstances, perhaps, it was the only solution. Yet it was quite obviously no solution at all” (59–60).
What is most striking about Scott’s thesis, then, is not that he deems the Grenada experiment a failure but that he views this failure as the (perhaps inevitable) outcome of the very logic of modern revolutionary politics in their socialist and anticolonial iterations. It is as though for Scott, by adopting a romantic revolutionary political form, such movements ensured their collapse in advance. Decisions taken in the earlier years of the revolution are read in light of this thesis: they “guaranteed the irreversible doom of the revolution” and “ensured that the conflict would end in catastrophic violence and death—as indeed it did” (60–61). Scott can backdate the tragic downfall of the movement, reading it into the very beginnings because the very form of the romantic revolution is, for him, essentially contrary to the contingency of political action. At his most stark, he writes,
Modern revolutionary movements have often sought to insulate themselves from the inherent unreliablility of human action in one or both of two ways: they have sought to bind action to abstract and invariant principles or to bind action to a single personality—which is only to say, to degrade or defeat or preclude political action, properly speaking. They are, in this sense, antipolitical. (64)
In the fourth and final chapter, Scott launches a powerful critique of the historical revisionism of contemporary neoliberalism. He tracks the juridical institutionalization of a certain liberal human rights narrative in the wake of the revolution’s end, beginning with the Grenada 17 trial itself, through the various appeals, to the contemporary Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. For Scott, this juridical apparatus accomplishes more than merely the stabilization of liberal rights regimes, however. It also re-writes the past. By drawing a line between the revolutionary past and the post-revolutionary present, this apparatus retrospectively imposes the moral framework of the latter, thereby effectively criminalizing the very form of politics associated with the former. Its aim then is “to destroy any affirmative appreciation of the revolutionary past and the political traditions out of which it came.” In this task, Scott concludes, “it succeeded” (149). In the postcolonial present then, it is not merely that (neo)liberalism parades as a triumphant politics—it assimilates the terms of the political altogether and projects this into the past, representing anticolonial socialism as a “crime against humanity” that was always already failed.
This is a powerful reading of Grenada and analysis of our present predicament, but it is possibly even more prescient than Scott allows. Reading Omens, one wonders about the conception of politics that undergirds this argument and to what extent it is an instantiation of its own central problematic. Scott does not wish to bind his evaluation of tragic politics to an individualistic morality tale, yet one struggles to avoid this conclusion. For if the very form of a collectivist, utopian revolutionary project is itself antipolitical, then it appears the best we can do is counsel and cultivate such (individual) virtues as modesty, responsibility, humility. Scott glosses these as virtues of a “political morality,” although the content of the political remains uncertain in this formulation. It is unclear what, if anything, we could enact together with these virtues in hand, since they are primarily invoked to chastise our utopian aspirations to see beyond the horizon of neoliberal capitalism, reduced here to an instantiation of a more general “hubristic confidence in our boundless capacity for mastery and self-mastery” (64). What does it mean to frame socialist, anticolonial utopianism as antipolitical as a function of its one-sidedness? Can revolution even begin without picking a side? What model of politics are we projecting onto the past, and thus foreclosing in our possible, refashioned futures? Given what Scott himself so eloquently demonstrates about a neoliberal tendency to disperse collective politics through revisionist moralizing, the veneration of contingency and humility here may sound a strained and faltering exhortation.