Race and Language Part Two

Race and Language are to one another as Being and Waking Being, as they are to Time and Space, and so also the studies of Time and Space in their civilized and cultured forms: Politics and Religion.

To encapsulate all these meanings in terms relevant to the discussion of Race, Spengler borrows the terms “Totem” and “Taboo” from psychoanalysis. Freud published “Totem and Taboo” in 1913, so for a historiographer with an interest in group psychology, his work would have been especially on the mind of Spengler though not so much for us today.

Since Spengler doesn’t suffer us to learn about the origins of these words, only their correspondence to his growing pdf of dualisms and vague reference to aborigines, Freud himself explains that among Aboriginal Australians, they carry with them a totem, not like a native American totem, but rather some animal or force of nature, that distinguishes “septs or clans” from one another.

“The totem is hereditary either through the maternal or the paternal line; (maternal transmission probably always preceded and was only later supplanted by the paternal). The attachment to a totem is the foundation of all the social obligations of an Australian: it extends on the one hand beyond the tribal relationship, and on the other hand it supersedes consanguineous relationship.”

“Almost everywhere the totem prevails there also exists the law that the members of the same totem are not allowed to enter into sexual relations with each other; that is, that they cannot marry each other. This represents the exogamy which is associated with the totem.”

                        -Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913

This clearly aligns with Spengler’s conception of Race, the ‘primitive’ aborigines of Australia had no wider conception of biological race outside of the taboo of consanguineous relationships, and they discerned this by tribes carrying a totem and ensuring their female members married out of that totem. Totem expresses the passing on of blood from parent to child, the plantside, whilst the taboo of marrying within your totem expresses the divination of rules and causal tensions that govern your behaviour as ethics.

                “In the totemistic resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of, it is a fact, the fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is learnable and acquirable, and on that very account, guarded as a secret by cult communities, philosophers; schools, and artists’ guilds- each of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own.”

                Race can produce language, but language cannot exist without race. Language is something learnable, it is transferable in all its forms, but the language will always be possessed by some race of people, even in the city where the transference of ideas can become quite superfluous and meaningless; language is a dead stock of signs, but it is enlivened by the race that speaks it: the early modern English of Shakespeare, Milton, Locke contained nuances that have been entirely lost to historians by their speakers’ deaths despite its readability to us today. We know exactly how a whole mighty range of languages from Latin to ancient Hebrew and Sumerian sound, but the way in which they were carried between the farmlands, the town marketplaces, the temples and the halls of power are now lost. We will never know what a conversation between two fishermen, off the coast from Ilion, felt like, though their words could be in front of us today. You might even do an experiment by reading something you wrote as a child, reminiscing your thought processes and faux rationale, and comparing it with the lack of comprehension you have for some passage of another’s childhood, it appears clunky, obtuse and visibly childlike, as childlike is all you have to compare the ossature of their mindset, the ossature being all that is left in the form of language.

Once again, language is not simply word, it is all forms of symbolism, and the highest form of expression-language is art. All kinds of art from poetry to oil portrait and classical music possess a stock of rules to abide by. These are the taboos, the rules communicable indefinitely, but when it is passed down, the sureness of the art form, say painture, is degraded. Wagner, in attempt to replicate the classical of the baroque required more intellect to do so, it did not come naturally from him like it did from Bach or Mozart and the bombastic nature of his work exemplifies this. It would be for natural English speakers today to try and naturally speak Early Modern English. Race belongs to the cosmic cycles of time: birth, death, pass it on. All great works of language in history were only so because of the Race of the men who produced it, and we can see now beyond the genetic aspect of race to the spiritual and psychological part. Of Bach, Purcell and Mozart, of the Gothic architects and the Doric builders, of Cromwell, Pythagoras and Mohammad, they all had Race that they channelled into their deeds. Race of which  doesn’t exist today, exampled by no one producing classical music, grand religious temples for their own good, nor sweeping up history in their footsteps.

Race, like all plants, has a landscape it belongs to which shapes the character of it. Spengler boldly suggests that if one were to leave their landscape for another, then their race leaves them as well, for outside Europe no European can be made:

                “if in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does no migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever changing landscapes, but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans.”

The premise here is that though there are clear distinctions between groups in America, White, Black, Native, Hispanic, all bearing their own expression and communication languages, in each era they all bear similar hallmarks by operating off of the same land as each other. They may not get along, as Europeans have historically not, but as a type they are Americans and could only be found between the coasts on the plains and the Rockies. It's not the easiest thing to understand, especially with modern identity politics and our biological sense of the word “race” which can’t be discredited, but were the peoples of America of an Apollinian mindset, then perhaps their “racial” tensions would manifest as city conflicts. But as Whites they have formed a different identity to Englishmen, Irishmen and Germans and their identity should be taken as its own, as opposed to anything invoking a pan-European ideal. Of the gothic tribes that conquered rome, they had a race, but the visigoths and the vandals and Lombards, of the Angles and Saxons and Jutes, their settling of new lands invited in new senses of identity, new races rooted in the landscapes of the lands they conquered.

Language however is free to migrate as it pleases from people to people and across vast landscapes. Indo European now finds itself in the seats of all the world’s continents, spread by migrating peoples, by violence or by assimilation, occasionally a stronger people will strike awe in others who then choose to take on its language, a fact Spengler attributes to the wide reaching Normans who held territories from England to Byzantium. But when America brought English with them, they made it their own, with their own accents and subtle changes in spelling, the expression languages that were imported from across Europe with the men that brought them were adapted for the wide expanses of the plains, Neo-classical and neo-gothic are symptoms of this.

To end this post, Spengler’s view of Race is, despite being an extension of time, very momentary to each chapter of history: there was a race of the Baroque and a race of the Renaissance, of Rome and of Troy, your race will change if you migrate to a different part of the world which suggests some racey connotations such as whether the recent migration waves can be argued to become just as European as those who have continued their existence in Europe since the first Yamnaya looked West. Race is not by any means a product of culture, but rather culture is a product of race which is indefinable as it is a part of nature and only language can vainly attempt to piece together what that means with ideas of common identity.