absent cause

While reading Reynold Humphries’ excellent book, The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931-1941: Madness in a Social Landscape, I became fascinated by the formulation of history as the “absent cause” under capitalism – the “Real” that cannot be acknowledged, especially in the U.S., at the cost of exposing to the working class the exploitative (and unnecessary) nature of the whole system.

It is a great description of a phenomenon that every politically aware person has experienced: the disavowal and ridiculing of the impact of slavery on people of color; the training by which the population "forgets" the lies that were used to start the last war, just in time to accept them for the next one; the phenomenon of otherwise sensible, progressive people being sucked into voting for the "lesser evil" every election cycle; and so on, and so on.

The absent cause also jibes perfectly with an understanding of the gothic as "primarily a symbol of pastness, and pastness that is in the process of returning." (Catherine Spooner)

Maybe students of the Western Marxists Althusser and Jameson (and the Freudians, who originated the phrase in relation to the "maternal phallus" concept) will see this as a vulgar understanding of the “absent cause” by a vulgar Marxist-Leninist like me, but I don’t mind.

Absent cause (the blog)

www.absent-cause.blogspot.com

Who is redguard?

Bolshevik, worker, revenant.

Deal with it.