torres-saillant, pt 2

Having finished Torres-Saillant, what I can say is that I do not feel that the book is a performance of what it says ought to be done. That is, it does not, to me, demonstrate any remarkable degree of ‘epistemological independence’ from Western paradigms. Perhaps the problem is that I don’t know what these books usually look like. But it seems to me that Torres-Saillant, in the name of a practical, useful history, ties Caribbean thought entirely into reaction to European happenings. The metaphor he wishes above all the resuscitate is the link between Caliban and the ‘Caribbean mind.’ Torres-Saillant himself is tied deeply into standard Western academic discourse—even insisting on things like epistemology and ontology is already, I should think, committing oneself in this regard. Throughout he talks about the material well-being of people, economic and political dependency, this kind of thing. Yet he’s deeply concerned about what, whose, words one uses. He doesn’t, as far as I can tell, really discuss how the words fit into the material world, which is always the problem, after all.

His analysis of the fate of Caribbean-specific discourse in the academy, its subsumption into postcolonial theory, is quite interesting. But I can help finding it impressionistic and partial—in a word, under-theorized. I don’t think it’s wrong, but I would love to see a more concrete sociological analysis.

This book as anyway had the effect of getting me to sit down and start to read A Thousand Plateaus. (Torres-Saillant uses variants of ‘rhizome,’ including the hideous ‘rhizomatically’ repeatedly, despite his attacks on Deleuzianism). Having worked at ‘contemporary theory’ for a semester, I must say that at least the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus reads brilliantly. It makes Badiou seem like a dried-up old prune. I can see why so many blogs are names after deleuzianisms. Perhaps more on this later.

At any rate, An Intellectual History of the Caribbean, which ought to have been called a historiography, was frustrating and therefore stimulating. I’ll work backwards now and see what else is on offer.

torres-saillant

Here is C.A. Bayly on intellectual history, from his 2004 The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, which I have been reading at a more or less sedate pace:

“The history of political and social thought in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is an exceptionally vibrant area of study. But is suffers from two major weaknesses. First, many intellectual historians continue to equivocate on the question of how to relate intellectual history to social and political history, for the good reason that this is an enormously difficult enterprise. Secondly, the history of political thought remains resolutely centered on Europe and North America. If the rest of the world is considered at all, historians tend to assume that there occurred a relatively simple process of diffusion in which the doctrines of Western thinkers were slowly spread across the world to those elite members of non-European societies who knew European languages.” (284-5)

His criticisms are entirely just, and I think could be extended to less ‘vibrant’ areas of study. He says historians of science tend to do a better job—I wonder which ones I should be reading. I’ve been meaning to read the issue of MIH on south asia to which he contributed, perhaps I’ll get to it soon. The problem is obvious: it’s hard enough to have responsible knowledge of one small part of the world—it’s more than twice as hard for two parts of the world. This is, of course, no excuse.

So I’m making a start: the Caribbean. I’ve started my reading somewhat arbitrarily—An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (2006) by Silvio Torres-Saillant. I chose it because it was recalled, so...time to get reading. So far I’ve finished the lengthy introduction only, but it’s good to pause and reflect.

The Caribbean may be taken as an intellectual unity as well as a geographic one, Torres-Saillant asserts, and as such it ought to be regarded as a producer of theoretical, universalizable knowledge just as much as Europe. I’m not in a position to say whether or not the Caribbean presents the observer with any kind of genuine unity, but if Europe is to be taken as a unit, it’s hard to imagine that the Caribbean shouldn’t be. Similarly, when you put it the way he does, of course Caribbean intellectuals should have discursive access to the universal. Of course it seems wrong that the Caribbean may be measured by a European yard-stick, but not the other way around. Yet, I read this book, and what am I doing? I’m comparing the ideas and tropes he writes about with those that are more familiar to me. Indeed, the claim of the particular to universal validity is something I’ve been reading a great deal about this semester—for Laclau and Rancière at least it’s a crucial part of what politics is about. So already I’m measuring the non-European according to the European, but what else can I do if the European is mostly what I know?

Now, one answer to how Torres-Saillant thinks about this is suggested by which academics he castigates. He objects that Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy are insufficiently dedicated to their roots (i’m not sure I have a better name for it) as West Indians—insufficiently committed to the project of representing their homelands accurately to the rest of the world (41-42). Now, I’ll admit to not knowing that either of these scholars was ‘from’ the West Indies. I’ll also point out that in the above paragraph, I lumped together Laclau with Rancière, even though Laclau is originally ‘from’ South America. Now he’s a European, as far as his books are concerned. Isn’t this the whole problem? That it actually is possible for these people to appear, to me for instance, simply as any other academic would? This is bad, says Torres-Saillant, for the Caribbean.

Much of the argument he presents against postcolonial theory is the same as the common critique of potstructuralism that one finds many places now—see Peter Hall’s recent piece in boundary 2—which boils down to a charge of political uselessness. Which is odd for a number of reasons. Torres-Saillant’s version of this argues that in the 1960s, the Caribbean was well represented as a source of theory in the broader world, and that now Caribbean writers must subsume themselves into a postcoloniality that is dominated by French authors—they are examples of a genuine universality, nothing more. Torres-Saillant sees this coincide with the academic study of Caribbean music. He’s fairly scathing about this: music has replaced political thought because the energy for political change is gone. The ‘Musical turn’ is a sign of political hopelessness.

Torres-Saillant’s approach concerns me in that it seems actually to be moving backwards in terms of historiography. He talks about ‘the Caribbean mind,’ and justifies his project broadly as the presentation of globally useful (inspirational) knowledge in dark times. That is, he essentializes and instrumentalizes his subject. No doubt I’m being unfair, and there is an obvious polemical purpose in these strategies.

I’ve left out important parts of his argument in the above discussion, mostly because the proof of them will be in how they play out over the remaining 200 pages of the book. It’s at any rate exciting for me to plunge into relatively new topics.

le plaisir du texte

As a sort of antidote to Lukács, I plucked Le plaisir du texte off my shelf and read some choice selections. It’s quite a wonderful little book. Possibly I wanted to go back to Barthes because of an essay I read yesterday or the day before about Barthes and Richard Rorty, which I found myself disagreeing with at nearly every turn. It’s from a very recent issue of New Literary History—and it seems to me to miss several things. The argument seems to be that at the very end of his life, Barthes gave up the playful self-fashioning he’d been engaged in, and turned to a traditional account of literature and écriture as speaking to deep and enduring human questions. This means that he isn’t at all the icon of ironist self-fashioning he apparently was always thought to be, or at least that he rejected the constant play of language in the late 1970s, just before he died.

Now, there’s a reason Compagnon calls Barthes an antimoderne. We should not take his postwar Marxism as a profession of faith (or, if we do, we shouldn’t let it get to us). We should remember that the Mythologies were newspaper columns. They were fun—still are. He isn’t in any sense, I think it’s safe to say, committed to any particular politics. He is, in a certain sense, elitist. There’s plenty to say about that. I won’t go on about it all. Barthes is near to my heart, but I’d like to stay lucid about his successes and his failures.

Le plaisir du texte is from 1973—translated very quickly, in 1975. Wolfgang Iser’s The Act of Reading was translated into English in 1978. Not so long ago I read a piece, also in New Literary History, by Brook Thomas about Iser’s reception in the US, and why it hadn’t gone so well. I’ve read some of Thomas’s other stuff, and been quite impressed. I liked this article as well, but now that I think on it, I don’t remember him mentioning Barthes at all. And if I can imagine myself back in 1980, trying to find a theorist who would help me talk about the reader and the text and their relation...well, there’s no context. Barthes is much sexier. Also shorter. It seems to me that this is the sort of thing intellectual history should be able to take into account when they ask ‘why not?’ questions (which, anyway, are always dangerous to ask).

As a side note, continuing to post ideas had-too-late about the Rancière paper: Barthes loves the idea of inattentive reading, of skipping around. His model of textuality and readerly action is about as far as you can get from Jacotot. Could they talk to each other at all? Lastly, having nothing to do with Barthes: the Jacototian idea that everything is in everything, that any act of language contains all language---this is the totalizing impulse that Rancière otherwise more or less stays away from, or might be. Again, bears some more thinking.

Lukacs: The Theory of the Novel

Today I read Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel. It’s a fascinating book. I’d started it some time ago in an airport (because it’s slender and light), which was a terrible idea. I always wonder, when I like one part of a book like this better than other parts, if it’s an artifact of my attentiveness or energy while reading rather than the text itself. In this case, though, I’m fairly certain that it isn’t. I like the last chapter of the first part best. It was breathtaking—dense, energetic, captivating. The first chapters were a warm-up, and the whole last part is typological, which bores me pretty badly. Of course I’m not ready to give any kind of broad summary—I don’t think it’s that kind of book. But three things to point out.

First—in the preface, written in 1961, he talks about how his “conception of social reality was at that time [circa 1914] strongly influenced by Sorel” (18). The index (which is actually pretty good) gives this as Albert Sorel. This is obviously wrong—it’s my guy, his cousin Georges. I’ve seen this before: in Compagnon’s Brunetiere book, for instance, there was a similar mistake in the index. In that case, I think it really is minor. Compagnon certainly knows the difference, it’s just a confusion on the part of whoever did the copy-editing, the reference is anyway an aside, nothing to do with the main line of discussion. (I realize I’ve fallen to quibbling over index entries) Lukacs is different. Sorel’s influence in the period was great, and if it isn’t surprising that Marxists in the 1930s and later (Sartre, say, very influentially in 1961) want to disown him—well, it’s still a politically motivated rewriting of history. Indeed, later on in The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs says things that to me echo a Sorelian understanding of the structure of description as such: “the objectivity of the novel is the mature man’s knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality” (88). I would make the argument that this is Sorel’s understanding of the relation of social description (meaning) to social reality. Lukacs, then, is translating into the literary-philosophical sphere the epistemological moves Sorel made regarding social science. Of course, even wikipedia mentions that Lukacs knew Sorel. I should get a good secondary source on Lukacs. It’s fascinating. I’ve no choice now but to read History and Class Consciousness next.

Number two very fast: Brownstein’s argument about the novel enacting the becoming of the heroine—the convergence of realism and idealism (empirical woman and feminine ideal) in the body of the heroine—finds a real precursor here, “the inner form of the novel has been understood as the process of the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself” (80). Now, it’s quite possible that B actually cites L, or more likely, that there’s a much larger critical tradition making this observation. I’ve returned her book to the library, or I’d look. Anyway, naive me was surprised.

Last, having to do with something I wish I’d put in my paper on Ranciere. David Bell, in a recent essay on Rancière, uses the word ‘tact’ to describe his ability to balance philosophical generalization and historical specificity (or something to that effect). Lukacs uses the same word—or the translator does—to describe the novel’s balancing act between various impossible completenesses. Zizek also is obsessed with politesse, which is almost the same thing as tact. I guess it’s interesting because it is a widespread, totally common phenomenon of a code of behavior with sometimes strict enforcement methods, which absolutely cannot be expressed or codified. It’s a sub-legal legal order. I suppose Norbert Elias would have a thing or two to say about manners—but tact is a bit different. Hmm. To consider, at any rate.

Kristin Ross

In the process of getting inspired to write a paper on Jacques Rancière, I looked back at Kristin Ross’ 2002 May ’68 and its Afterlives. I read this book in French two years ago, and had a very different reaction to it then. It is much more interesting after one has actually read Rancière, and especially Badiou. The conception and construction of the book are impressive. I wish I had time to go through it more carefully.

becoming a heroine

Brownstein, Rachel. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. [1982]

Since I’m apparently engaged in trying to bring it back, I thought it would be good to read some ‘personal criticism.’ To that end: Rachel Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine which is more or less the same age as I am. Brownstein’s basic argument is that the English novel ‘in the Richardsonian tradition’ takes the form of an empirical female struggling to become the ideal woman—a heroine. In Clarissa, a foundational case for Browstein, there is a long (very long) struggle, which ends in death, sealing Clarissa into her idealized status. More often, the story ends with a perfect marriage—but it’s the same story. Brownstein’s point is that ‘we’ can learn about the crippling dynamic of ideal and reality that makes up the ideology of gender (she doesn’t put it quite like that) in the contemporary world, by indulging ourselves and reading these novels. Indeed, the point is to take seriously the desire that many women apparently have to read these ‘serious’ novels. What do these novels do? They teach the reader about how to live up to—or at least struggle toward—the ideal. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a privileged example for Brownstein because in her reading of the final lines, there is an explicit disavowal of the narrativized ideal—Dorothea does not achieve apotheosis, but rather splits like a river at its delta, and allows her influence to reach the wider social world in a thousand small ways. She escapes the fate of the heroine, suggests Brownstein, and becomes a human. Brownstein’s book is large, so I’ve just picked out a few examples. Virginia Woolf’s Ms. Dalloway also has a special status for her—the tradition meditating on itself.

I enjoyed reading Becoming a Heroine. The early 1980s really were a different time. The book should be filed under reader-response as well as personal criticism. The problem is that the reader—and I know this is a trite objection—really is only Rachel Brownstein. If we allow Brownstein’s ‘women’ any larger meaning, then to my mind it becomes essentializing and useless very quickly. (Today, it seems to me, we’re suspicious of attempts to speak for others, even housewives). However, as an analysis of a person reading, I think there’s really not a great deal to object to. In a way it’s more honest than, for instance, Iser’s phenomenological analysis. One of my colleagues has been talking a great deal recently about ‘the dialogic mode’ of criticism—it seems a perfect way of differentiating Brownstein and Iser. She is dialogic, that is, she asks: I read it like this, do you read it this way too? Iser has no such questions.

Also, and no doubt there are good ideological reasons for this, I can’t help but be surprised that Brownstein isn’t more focused on professional self-awareness. She is so careful (it’s a bit too clean for me, actually) about setting out how her father’s ideal of womanhood influenced her choice of career—why not more reflexivity about graduate school? I can see many problems there. Not least that Brownstein positions herself as non-academic.

I’m glad to have looked at this book, though I need not to get caught in the 1980s. Perhaps they could be a small specialty of mine? One of my sub-subfields?

quatrain

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

From Philip Larkin, "Money"

Compagnon on Brunetiere, pt 1

Compagnon, Antoine, Connaissez-Vous Brunetière ?: Enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis. (Seuil, 1997).

I’m still in the middle of reading this, but I wanted to pause and record some impressions. Above all, confusion about how and to what purpose Compagnon constructs his books. Compagnon is an immensely productive and interesting scholar—I’ve read various essays, most of his book on Proust, chunks of Les Antimodernes, and some of Troisième Republique des lettres (I’m going to have to go through that one with some care in the coming weeks). He seems to be interested in many of the same things I am (what hubris). For instance, since working on Maurras I’ve been impressed by Albert Thibaudet—and Compagnon has set himself the task, apparently, of sparking a renewal of interest in this interwar critic. [See the two brand-new and hefty collections, Réflections sur la littérature and Réflections sur la politique, both 2007, Gallimard Quarto and Bouquins, respectively--so it's pretty obvious which one has more prestige.] I’ve gone over what seem to be the most important texts in his polemic with Naomi Schor about the French canon—and I must say that he seems to me both conservative and correct in his opinion that the canon as manifest in coursework and publications in French studies is smaller than it should be. I’m less certain about the “shrinking” part. It’s painful to admit, but I think he gets the better of Schor.

At any rate, as I said, I’ve just begun this book. The introduction is sure-footed, and makes a case for investigating Brunetière and looking more critically at the intellectual positions which radicalized themselves into for-or-against during the Dreyfus affair. But then, and I suppose the book will be as much about her as about Brunetière, we get 40 pages on the history of the family of “Mme Alexandre Singer, née Ratisbonne.” The family is interesting (uncle Alphonse famously converted to Catholicism in Rome...Compagnon points out that William James discusses the case at some length—I’m reasonably certain that I remember this, at least, from Varieties). Indeed, the history of Jews in 19^th century France is inherently fascinating. It’s cosmopolitan, but also speaks volumes about the vicissitudes of Republican ideology. Indeed, I’ve also today just finished a relatively careful reading of Pierre Rosanvallon’s The Demands of Liberty—and admit with some chagrin that only now do I realize that he doesn’t mention (possibly even once) the case of the Jews. I know very little about it. Perhaps it isn’t relevant to the problem of intermediary organizations.

Perhaps the remainder of Compagnon’s book will justify or explain what seems now like a totally unnecessary narrative side-track.

urban revolution

Georgakas, Dan and Marvin Surkin. Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. South End Press, 1998. [2nd edition]

If through some weird turn of fate I ever end up teaching a 20th century US course, or, more likely, anything on the ideology of revolution, this book will have to be on the syllabus. I'd have to be a bit better educated about various macroeconomic history issues...

Barrow's survey

Barrow, J.W. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. Yale University Press, 2001.

It’s good to have something to read at night that, first, I can write in directly, and second, that I don’t have to pay very close attention to. I’ve decided to fill this slot with survey histories. I’ve just finished J. W. Burrow’s The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. The book was published in 2001 as part of the Yale Intellectual History of the West.

I won’t offer any kind of comprehensive evaluation—that would be a bit silly. I will say that Barrow’s takes a resolutely old-fashioned approach: ‘high’ intellectual history, supplemented only very lightly with broader cultural, social or institutional trends. Europe means England, Germany, France, Russia and Italy—pretty much in that order, though I’d have to somehow tabulate index-lines or something to be sure about ordering England and Germany. Certainly J.S. Mill popped up rather more than I’m used to. America makes brief appearances—William James, Walt Whitman, TS Eliot and Ezra Pound (the last two, I think, aren’t actually described as Americans). The ‘orient’ is mentioned in connection to certain currents of German philosophy, Joseph Conrad (gone native!) and the proliferation of occultist movements around the end of the century.

The sweep of the book is none the less extremely impressive. It contains scores of two to three page sketches of the important figures of the period, the most important of whom recur in different contexts, sometimes quite revealingly. (For instance, one knows that Herbert Spencer was important, but it’s more than a little depressing to see exactly how important.) I’m an intellectual historian, my ‘period’ overlaps substantially with what is covered here, though almost only for the French figures. Burrow seems to me to have provided fine (though necessarily reductive) treatments of those figures I know the most about first or second hand—Proust, Huysmans, Maurras. Even Sorel-as-moralist is given what seems to me an eminently fair shake, though, “set to verse we might be hearing Swinburne” (142) makes me think Barrow hasn’t been much exposed to Sorel’s own prose. Or perhaps I have been underexposured to Swinburne’s verse.

The general organization of the book is suggestive. There are six chapters: the first is about science in the strictest materialist sense of the term, and the last about spiritualist occultism. On the way, we pass (in some kind of transcendental order of operations?) through the new sociological and economic sciences; nationhood and other political communities; philosophy; and art. There is an oddly appended epilogue on avant-garde art, the point of which is that the post-1918 forms of high culture all come from before the war. Thus, perhaps, to suggest the radical autonomy of ideas from even the most traumatic of events? The last words of the book, I think, probably give the game away in this respect.

“Essentially, with some modifications in its expressive languages, the post-war avant-garde was still recognizably the pre-war one. In a sense the latter is still ours. Experiment has become the norm; its different idioms are to pre-war Modernism what schools of art in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been to the mimetic techniques established at the Renaissance: essentially variations. Post-modernism in literature, for all the critical volubility expended over it, looks more like a gloss on Modernism than its historical grave-digger. Modernism is our tradition.” (252-3)

This book could only have been written over a long period of time. Perhaps the epilogue suggests that Barrow, at Oxford, tasted the to-him bitter fruit of postmodernism late in the process of writing? At any event, it betrays a real lack of concern for the impact of context on the meaning of ideas. Put most bluntly: to stand on a street-corner and should about the sacrament of meaningless violence signified something different in 1907, when it was (for middle-class Europeans, anyway) largely a fevered dream, than it did in 1917, when it was very much their reality. Intellectual historians more than anyone should be sensitive to the shifting meanings that identical forms and words can take on as contexts change.

Still, this is a good and useful book (despite, as I have just noticed, what the Amazon.com reviewers had to say).

I already have Marcia Colish’s Medieval Foundations. I see that Ron Witt is treating the late Renaissance and Early Modern period. These are two Oberlin historians whom I failed to take classes from there. I also failed to seek out Bob Soucy, as I obviously should have done, and, for whatever reason, stayed away from the excellent Japanese history survey class. This isn’t to say that I didn’t take good classes, and learn from excellent professors. Rather, it is to admit to myself that I am already dogged by a sense of lost opportunity.

Nussbaum, animals and compassion

Last night I head Martha Nussbaum speak. The title of her talk was “Compassion: Human and Animal.” During the talk I was immensely impressed. The more I think about it, the less I think it holds together.

The general orientation was to suggest that although humans are usually rated above or equal animals in our capacity for compassion, there are certain ways in which we fail to have even the compassion of which an animal would be capable. She needs first to argue that animals do indeed display compassion. In order to do this she breaks compassion down into three component judgments: similarity, seriousness, and eudemonistic. This last is her own somewhat idiosyncratic coinage, meaning not so much happiness, as goal-oriented judgment.

She has examples, not all of which I found convincing. She argues that often, indeed most perniciously, when humans fail to be sufficiently compassionate, it is part of a refusal to admit to their own bodily nature—that is, the facts of death, aging, various forms of excretion. She calls this, I’m not sure why, ‘anthropodenial.’

Now, she seems to me fairly certain that she is a good judge of what is and is not compassionate behavior. She seems to me to have forgotten how powerful relativist critique really is. One of her examples (the novel Effi Briest) is staged more or less as a pure anti-bourgois morality play. A woman married too early, and consequently has an affair because she is unsatisfied in her marriage. She realizes the wrong she has done, breaks off the affair, and lives happily for many years. Eventually, the fact of the affair comes out, her husband and family reject her, she dies alone, mourned only by her dog. While I and no doubt practically everyone in the room agreed with Nussbaum that the other characters in this novel had failed to display compassion (that is, after all, the whole point), it seems to me awfully fast to leap to the conclusion that it is simply and everywhere true.

By making the link to the compassion of animals, and, crucially, making gender relations the paradigmatic case of anthropodenial causing human suffering, Nussbaum gestures at universality. Indeed, for her the root of our hatred and fear of our bodies seems less to be existential dread of death (if this were the case, she would have little argument against salvationist religion) than early childhood experiences, culminating in potty training. Our intelligence at an early age, coupled with our inability to do anything to assuage our own hurts, this is the human condition, which is repeated in different forms throughout our lives. For Nussbaum, this leads to the equally universal human characteristic of ‘securing’ one’s transcendence by denying it to another. By this logic, white supremacists in the 1920s ‘secured’ whiteness by equating blackness with everything sensual and shameful. Nazis did the same to Jews and—Nussbaum’s central empirical argument—so did right wing Hindu nationalists to Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

I’m not doing her argument justice here, but I think I can say that I’m very unhappy with the easy universalism, the ahistoricism, and the conceptual slippage. Her argument sounds to me to be an updated form of psychoanalysis with all the attendant traps, above all eurocentrism, but also extrapolation of ‘truth’ from symptom (Tolstoy is certainly not anything like a sexually healthy human being—‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ is not a reliable model for human relationships more generally. It isn’t even an average symptom.)

At any rate, I register objections. It would have been interesting to hear what Frans de Waal had to say in response to Nussbaum, but the fire alarm went off after her talk—I gave up waiting and came home.

--------

[added, 11/10/07]

A world full of compassionate people is actually not sufficient. That's the marxian point, mostly represented today by critical race theory and this sort of analysis of institutionalized racism. People of good will can still cause systematic discrimination and exploitation.

This is still the case even if we accept the idea that there is such a thing as a baseline 'animal' compassion that all humans ought to exhibit, which I think is a terrible idea.

Prendergast on Sainte-Beuve

C. Prendergast, The classic : Sainte-Beuve and the nineteenth-century culture wars, (Oxford ; New York, 2007).

Christopher Prendergast’s exploration of Sainte-Beuve’s defense of ‘the classic’ (le classique) meanders across the whole middle of the 19^th century in an attempt to provide a genuine multi-layered contextualization of its subject—in a certain sense a single essay from October of 1850, “Qu’est-ce qu’un classique?” Prendergast’s ‘provocations’ are first Marcel Proust, whose famous essay makes it difficult these days to take Sainte-Beuve’s side in anything, and Renée Welleck’s somewhat remarkable claim in his History of Criticism that Sainte-Beuve has a crucial position in not just the history of literary criticism, but intellectual history in general.

Prendergast takes a broadly thematic approach in his contextualization, with chapters on comparative philology, Goethean cosmopolitanism, Romantic historiography, mass culture, and then various issues around interpretations of antiquity and the middle ages in 19^th century culture. On any of these issues, he is fascinating and informative. His pages on Renan, for instance, are genuinely useful and remarkable. The scholarship is impressive and sustained, but to my eye oddly lopsided.

On the question of Proust, Prendergast is wonderful and understated. Proust’s engagement with Sainte-Beuve [which i’m tired of writing—hereafter: SB] is not the subject of the book, but by the end, I at least, came to feel that Proust’s antipathy for the earlier critic may have been the result of proximity—that is, a factional battle rather than an inter-party one. I’ll be honest and admit to having only flipped through Contre Sainte-Beuve. But I’ve heard the arguments presented several times, and the novel I know a little bit. Proust sounds just like Sainte-Beuve! Proust condemns him for his obsession with literary mediocrity, yet one of the most attractive things about Proust’s own work is the intensity with which he observes and renders metaphysical the most mundane and ordinary objects. That is, just as SB makes the médiocre the measure of a period, so for Proust the ordinary object unlocks, or triggers, the most important parts of spiritual life. Prendergast leaves all this unsaid, but I think he must be aware of it. For instance, he comes back several times to SB’s somewhat odd references to literary works and military battles as though they were both oeuvres in the same way. The narrator of the Recherche has a very similar attitude. (As an aside, I should look in Tadié and Compagnon, to see if these passages around Doncières are pre-WWI, and if this changes).

Prendergast supplements Welleck’s assertion about the importance of Sainte-Beuve in intellectual history, but specifies that it is the intellectual history of the cultural-racist right—of Barrès and Maurras, eventually T.S. Eliot and Brassillach. The afterward is concerned with this right-wing appropriation of SB’s legacy. This has a lot to do with the politics of Latin and Latinité, which I know from working on Maurras was really important. Prendergast has contextualized it nicely in terms of the nationalistic implications of the philological work coming from Germany.

From the very first pages, though, it seemed to me that Prendergast was missing a crucial contextual element. Prendergast organizes his book around the idea of ‘the classic,’ and the 1850 essay. Most of his citations come either from the 1840s, or after—indeed, it is part of the point of the argument that SB’s doctrine of the classic was a way of dealing with the social chaos (that is, democracy) apparently unleashed of 1848. This means that not much attention is paid to SB’s early years. This is important because Sainte-Beuve was associated with a group of young liberals during the Restoration who thought very hard about the relation of literary culture to politics, and what the best political forms might be.

Prendergast refers to le Globe a few times as a Saint-Simonist journal, which it was, but only after 1830. Not only does Prendergast not take the Saint-Simonists seriously, but he completely ignores the liberal, entirely non-socialist milieu in which SB moved before 1830. My knowledge about this comes largely from the massive La jeune France libérale by Jean-Jacque Goblot (1995). These people were associated loosely with some of the doctrinaires (Guizot was an actionnaire of the journal), but were less concerned with day to day politics. They were students of Cousinaian eclecticism, and for them the spiritual basis of society was a crucial literary concern. Indeed, they practiced a remarkably modern-seeming kind of cultural-literary criticism. Sainte-Beuve was there as a young man (quite young), and not a negligible member of the group. The whole story of Sainte-Beuve’s political engagements and cultural politics looks different if it is seen in this light.

It isn’t that what Prendergast says is not compatible with this, but rather that his story would have been more interesting and coherent with it. For instance, he points out that it was important that SB as a critic was a sort of popularizer, between scientific discourses of various kinds (not least literary) and a general reading public (see pg 17, for instance). This was a major characteristic of the role of le Globe in the cultural field of the Restoration. More pointedly, Prendergast is simply at a loss when SB begins to talk about a sort of correspondence or harmony between society and literature as a mark of health (64-5). To Prendergast this kind of talk rapidly becomes meaningless. Would it remain so if put next to the ideas Guizot elaborated about liberal government as not so much a direction as an expression of society? There seem to be some real rhymes here to me, but Prendergast, for whatever reason, has not explored this context.

There are other moments when I think a more broad-minded contextualization would have been useful—and by broad-minded I mean one that escapes from lettered culture as such, into politics proper (Guizot), or into contemporary historiography on the period. For instance Judith Lyon-Caen’s book on the uses of the novel in the 1830s and 1840s would have made a fascinating comparison with all the talk SB engages in about what literature, and especially classics, are supposed to do for you. For SB (and this is not something Prendergast thematizes) it seems always to have to do with making the reader feel better, more at peace with themselves and the world. Lyon-Caen makes the strong argument that many people really did use Balzac and Sue (both of whom SB railed against) to understand the rapidly changing world around them.

Most disappointing, though, is what Prendergast looses at the end of his book by not even speculating on a liberal-doctrinaire heritage for Sainte-Beuve’s cultural politics. The last chapter is on Maurras and his ilk, if it was really the case that Sainte-Beuve carried the banner of the doctrinaires into the Second Empire then his adoption by the far right during the 1880s and 1890s would suggest the need to rethink the whole dynamic of liberal cultural politics in the 19^th century.

This is all very sketchy. And I’ll say straight out that I’m not at all familiar with other scholarship on Sainte-Beuve (P seems mostly to be writing against Wolf Lepenies here). And naturally I want more context, that’s why I’m an historian. And I should say again, after the lines of objections, that the book is really quite good. I've for the most part left the central points aside here, and they're untouched by my complaints.

psychoanalysis

There must be deep psychological truth associated with the fact that we use words before we know what they mean.

Dis-agreement class discussion

Today was the class on Rancière’s Dis-agreement. We didn’t talk very much about the last two chapters of the book, which were for me some of the most interesting. For instance, I found Rancière’s discussion of the outlawing of Holocaust denial as a symptom of the contemporary situation telling about his own position. But we didn’t get to talk about it

[A note on this word, symptom: Rancière doesn’t use it, I think, but I can’t stop doing so. Even in inappropriate contexts. Perhaps I find the inexactitude of it attractive? I need to discipline myself to use it in a more precise medical or psychoanalytic sense.]

Indeed, the most interesting comments were all, for me, at the end of class. They also largely came through attempts to compare Rancière and Laclau—a necessary comparison, I think, and one that suggests what the real limits to this theoretical imagination might be. For one thing, the question of pluralism came up. This raises three cascading points/questions.

First, In light of Rancière’s articulation of politics as rising everywhere to meet police, Laclau seems to posit a convergent logic. I mean by this (I think it’s what other people meant as well), that for Laclau, politics is about building a unity, whereas unity does not seem to be necessary for Rancière. At least, it isn’t if politics is an interruption, or refiguring, of the police order of the perceptible. Even if we speak in terms of the creation of subjects, Rancière allows for a kind of multiplicity and disconnectedness between specific struggles that it is the whole point of Laclau’s project to transcend. Now—I wonder if things have changed for Rancière since 1995? The main thing here is Laclau's need to invoke one form of ego-ideal or another. Rancière doesn't feel this need.

[I’ll just say again, terminologically: I use ‘articulation’ and ‘problematic’ too often. I believe they are Althusserian technical terms which have entered common academic parlance—I should be more responsible. It makes my skin crawl when people say ‘deconstruct’ when all they mean is ‘argue against,’ or worse, ‘argue for the constructed nature of...’]

Second, on the other hand, Rancière does talk a great deal about the demos, and those of the part of no part, who must have everything or nothing. This is democratic politics. I don’t ever remember him adjudicating the relationship between politics and democracy—the two are by no means the same, though. I assume that we are to understand radical democratic politics as making totalizing claims, which would make it look very similar to Laclau’s radical democracy, or populism.

Third and finally, I wonder about the connection of this, the necessity, of the logic of equality. It is certainly the operative motor of politics for Rancière, so I suppose it cannot be excised from the system. But, if we re-orient Rancière’s chain of reasoning, what is it about subjectivization that requires equality? It seems that nothing requires this. It is just that the limit case of political subjectivization is that of the demos, which reaches this limit by radicalizing the logic of equality.

I suppose the question really is: can the Police order only be challenged qua order through the logic of equality? Rancière’s answer must be yes—to me this doesn’t make intuitive sense. I would toss in here also the problem of historicity. Again, I think the comparison between Rancière and Laclau is instructive. In some ways, Rancière is obviously the more transcendental and a-historicist of the two. The equality of speaking beings is not open, philosophically, to question. It is in the nature of speaking beings to be equal. The treatment Rancière gives to forms of government, especially republicanism, also seems very transhistorical. Republicanism goes straight from Plato and Aristotle to the French Third Republic. Yet, by the same token, history is present in the texture of Rancière’s writing—the slow evolution (this term is absolutely not teleological, and strictly speaking, means the same thing as mutation) of concepts and structures across history is very much on his mind. Laclau, for all his historical sketching of the progress of an idea, gives really the impression of creating a model which might safely be applied transcontextually.

I wish I had a better language to describe why the two writers seem so distinct to me, possibly it’s a matter of pure style. Laclau’s prose is expository: making provisional definitions, defining terms, returning to the definition; raising possible objections, dealing with them; even creating typologies of examples. Rancière demands that you follow the twisting line of his thought. There are certainly returns, spiraling redefinitions, but there is no regularity.

foucault citing

pardon the pun.

this is from a NYT op-ed on capital punishment, dateline Asheville, NC, by Mark Essig (the author of a book on Edison and the Electric Chair).

"It was only in the 1850s or so that Americans became squeamish about the pain suffered by executed prisoners. Before that, pain wasn’t a problem; it was the point. Through drawing and quartering, beheading, shooting or hanging, the state inscribed its power on the body of the convict and provided a lesson in the perils of disobedience."

medieval historiography

Yesterday I attended a talk/mini-conference on Medieval history and historiography. Fascinating stuff, pretty far outside my area of competence (not ready to speak of expertise at all yet). Gabrielle Spiegel and Rachel Fulton, respectively of Johns Hopkins and Chicago were the speakers. There was then a roundtable discussion, and later wine and sushi (also beer and cheese). I'll just say once at the outset, both these talks were immensely impressive and stimulating. Not that I haven't got some objections, especially to Fulton's talk, which I think she designed specifically to get them.

Spiegel’s talk was a lightning summary of what she considered to be the most exciting papers from a recent U Penn conference (soon to be published as a book) called “Representing Medieval History.” It was a little hard to follow, because she spoke quickly and densely. Some highlights, then, from her highlights, with no pretense to total coverage.

Historians today are interested in medieval practices of memorialization and legitimatization. They have examined and rejected the idea that genre conventions are central. Indeed, it seems that genre is important in large measure for it to be transcended as a mode of legitimization, as a way to give authority to whatever text—window, chronicle, statue.

Spiegel spoke especially about the new work on liturgical practices and their relation to the medieval historical imagination. The suggestion is that liturgy—ritualized, cyclical, saturated with symbolism—was a crucial mode of historical understanding. That is, events are linear and literal, but also cyclical and symbolic. Linked to this is the continued assertion that the today-necessary distinctions between documents (evidence) of the past, representations of events/people, and commentary on all these things, were simply not operative for medieval historians. The work on liturgy Spiegel summarized for the audience argued that, and this is a close paraphrase, liturgy was the default mode of medieval historiography. Pointing to particular kinds of chronicles (about which she wrote a book), Spiegel made the counter-assertion that medieval historians were perfectly able to default into genealogical forms—modeled on biblical ones, for instance.

Fulton’s talk was more theoretical and self-consciously provocative. The larger point seemed to be that we remain, somehow, largely trapped within what she prefers to call a Roman-Christian tradition of thought. She cites Marshal Sahlins to the effect that theological categories under-gird social science models in ways that are only just now being recognized. I wish she’d said the name of the article where Sahlins talks about this. This argument has to do, for her, with the apparently unrecognized ways in which early christian practice of worship is continuous with pagan Roman practices of worship. Indeed, the word ‘worship’ is one she we need in order to see this, so as to orient ourselves away from ‘religion’ and ‘belief.’ These are categories built by the Christians themselves in order to be distinguished (since they were so much the same) from the Roman precursors.

Now, what I do know about these centuries suggests strongly to me that there is great continuity between late antiquity and the early medieval period. Indeed, the years between 400 and 800 seem to me fascinating. Byzantine history should step in here, because these are years in which the Byzantines flourished—but for a variety of reasons, this hasn’t happened. I’ve read exactly one book of Byzantine history (John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium). It seems to me intuitive that our historiographical prejudice in favor of the north—France, England, Germany—was bequeathed to us as a profession by history-as-national-history, and is why we don’t do this. Of course, along with Byzantium we ought to get the various Muslim states after the 9^th century. Africa should not be a foreign country to European historians, but it is.

Fulton seems aware of all this, yet she’s not managed to get very far outside of it. I think the way out of the categories that she has identified as problematic is going to be a geographical/disciplinary reorientation, rather than a redoubling of reflexivity. There was some discussion in the round-table period of the ‘technical’ problems associated with what seems like an obvious disciplinary reorientation: in order to do a ‘responsible’ intellectual history of the period, one must be a classicist (Latin and several kinds of Greek), and also do Arabic and probably other languages. Geographically, the focus must be the Mediteranean, which has always been obvious, but which is none the less not recognized as a subspecialty in the way that, say, ‘France’ very much is. The national bequest again.

Fulton also talked about periodization. She is especially concerned with the ‘objectification’ of the middle ages—that is, their creation as a discrete unit of time. I must say that this concern, and the concern about periodization in general, seems a bit overblown to me. It isn’t that there aren’t real problems, or that, as one commentator put it, some questions seem valid only in certain time periods—that’s all true. It’s just that these are standard problems. They are worked out. Periods are set apart by technical difficulties as much as geographical areas are. Not all scholars are energetic enough to jump the barriers set up by the profession—but some are, and the 19^th century specialist who has the energy to take seriously the medieval period will presumably be rewarded for bringing methodological innovation or conceptual breadth across the barriers to his or her own period. That, anyway, is my utopian idea of how these things work.

During the round-table, an opinion was developed or arrived at (that’s a very passive way to say it, but I think it’s more or less what happened) about the way to mitigate the limitations of periodization that arise not just out of professional but also (and I thought this was a good point) out of narrative necessity: multiple temporalities. This is a fancy way of saying: thematize. I think it’s a sensible idea.

I’ve just started looking at J. W. Burrow’s survey The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. This seems to be his approach. I may return to his book specifically, because it’s useful for me. For the moment: six chapters, each of which roughly covers the whole period of the book, but from the point of view of a different, we might say, conceptual knot. So, the history of science has a periodization that does not match up with the periodization in the history of philosophy. They clash and contrast in interesting ways. A history of ‘high’ politics will interact in productive ways with a history of social structures. This is an old idea—and, one might point out, pretty transparently a model of how the world itself is thought to work.

Ranciere, The Hatred of Democracy

If I had more intellectual energy, I would somehow synthesize the Jacques Rancière book I’ve just put down. Here’s a half-hearted effort.

For him, democracy is the absolute principle of egalitarianism, which founds even inegalitarian systems. Democracy is the foundational meaninglessness of things, it seems. It is the essence of relativism and the blank space at the foundation of every power-structure. Equality, radical and contentless, is the transcendentally deduced starting-point for Rancière’s thought. He draws a number of consequences and makes a number of observations that I won’t discuss here. I will point to the interesting comparison with Badiou, who, we might say, puts the ontological relation of belonging in the same place as Rancière does equality.

He also, incidentally, has some interesting things to say about the Third Republic in this light. Jules Ferry is a hero, for instance, of genuine equality, whose vision was corrupted by the pressure for social reproduction.

I’m sympathetic with Rancière’s whole project, though there are points of interpretation on which I’d like to challenge him. In this particular book, there were two issues, both historico-theoretical.

The first one has to do with his discussion of J.-C. Milner’s book, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. Rancière seems to accept uncritically the idea that Europe’s ‘peace’ in the post 1945 world was somehow founded on the elimination of the cosmopolitain humanism that somehow inheres to the essence of Jewishness. I’m not at all familiar with Milner’s work, though I remember a bit of Zizek’s discussion. So I’m not sure quite what he’s up to. The argument, interspersed with Rancière’s additions, seems to be a) that the postwar ‘unification’ of Europe under abstract law is possible because the imaginary presence of ‘the Jew’ has, in fact, been successfully erased by Hitler; and so b) it is in this light that we must see European demands for ‘peace now’ in the middle east. Such demands obviously mean the end of Israel, and therefore the extension of the democratic/totalitarian project that is liberal/capitalist Europe onto a global scale. That is: European support for the Palestinians really is a new form of Nazi anti-Semitism. I won’t even begin to argue against this here—but I will point out that there is surely some theoretical interest to the empirical truth that Europe’s peace was, as Tony Judt points out, built not so much on the destruction of the Jews as on the massive scale of wartime and immediate postwar population transfers and border re-drawings, everything tamped down by Soviet control in the east.

More importantly, and in a completely different directly, it seems to me that Rancière grants capital the same transcendental status as equality (in his sense of the word, democracy). He says,

“In order for it [liberalism, which is really to say: capitalism] to function, it has no need that any constitutional order be declared for ‘deregulated competition’, that is, the free and limitless circulation of capital. It requires only that the latter be permitted to function. The mystical honeymoon between capital and the common good are needless for capital. It serves only the ends pursued by oligarchs of State: the constitution of interstate spaces liberated from the need for popular and national legitimacy.” 82

It is important that capitalism, just like everything else, is at least in part a social practice. There is an ample body of literature on the development, and lack of development, of capitalism. Capital is not a subject, though it may be useful to think of it that way. Capital is not a transcendental category. The development of something that we now call capitalism, either in the 16^th or 18^th centuries, did not in itself constitute a radical or epistemic break in world history. Capitalism may not need, as Rancière says, “any constitutional order” to support it, but it needs some kind of order. The proper institutions and infrastructure is necessary even for it to malfunction. Globalization is witness to this. Some economists say that the problem of globalization is that there isn’t enough of it—the poor states are the ones for one reason or another unconnected to the global economy. This doesn’t take the whole state of things into account, but it is none the less simply true that the system has gaps, and is sustained as a system by a huge amount of labor (and not just the sweating kind) and energy.

I’ll have to read more Rancière and see what he really thinks. This book has the feel of an occasional piece, dashed off in a hurry (again, that might be the translation). Certainly, he is in real conversation with Laclau, even Badiou, Zizek, and has some nasty (i think correct) things to say about Agamben. There will certainly be more about Rancière here later.

Bush is a Jacobin

This is the first time I've noticed Bush and the neocons (ahh...and just moments ago I mentioned neo-Kantians) compared to the Jacobins. A most-emailed-oped from the NYT. From the pen of François Furstenberg, "a professor of history at the University of Montreal."

Landy on Proust

I’ve been going through Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust [2004]. He’s a good reader, and has more interesting things to say about the Proustian sentence than anyone else I have read (impressive). He also takes seriously the simple fact that books have readers, and that it is in the reading, not the writing, that meaning is created. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that the whole project is misguided. I’ll summarize (with prejudice):

If we read Proust really carefully, and with great charity, then we discover that he puts forward a serious philosophy. He was a perspectivalist quite a bit like Nietzsche, but without any of the distasteful parts. His novel is supposed to make you a better person, or anyway a person more aware and therefore “ultimately able to pull off the act of deliberate and lucid self-delusion required to see our inner volume as a coherent whole” (143). That is, better at being a self.

There are plenty of little quibbles one can have, but mostly I just don’t agree with the project. Many critics, it is true, simply dismiss the possibility of ‘philosophical’ coherence in Proust. Landy says, more or less, that they should read and think harder. Fair enough. But Landy’s method reminds me of an old scholastic adage: when you encounter a difficulty, make a distinction (actually, some of it is very reminiscent of Iserian phenomenology of reading). He proceeds to ‘make sense’ out of Proust by making a series of distinctions (the five narrative voices, for instance), which aren’t on their own terms meaningless, but then at the end he more or less declares unilaterally that the distinctions themselves are the ‘point’ of the novel.

He certainly makes some very good critical points in the process of doing this. I’m just unconvinced that it’s the kind of exercise I am interested in. Unsurprisingly, I want him to be more historical about the philosophy Proust is putting forward. Landy takes Proust’s word that Bergson wasn’t the whole point (and we must, I think, agree), but surely there’s more interesting things to do with the connection? He asserts that Proust didn’t know Nietzsche at all—I suppose this must be the case, I’ll have to look up what Tadié says about it. If so, it’s surprising, because Proust was close, I think, to Daniel Halévy who certainly did know Nietzsche and, anyway, the syphilitic genius was hardly unknown in the decade before WWI. Landy mentions Kant a few times—his discussion would be more interesting if it wasn’t of Kant so much as of the neo-Kantianism Proust would have learned in school—ditto with Leibniz, who I think is probably more poetically than philosophically interesting for Proust. That, of course, would have been a different book.

The coda on sentences and style could usefully be put on a syllabus. I haven't read Pippin's chapter on Proust yet, but the two are in conversation, and I think could usefully be juxtaposed.

bon mot

“At its best the late nineteenth century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless joke.”

I've been typing up my notes from Art (from which comes the above, pg 181). Clive Bell is quite insufferable. Raymond Williams is too gentle by half to the whole Bloomsbury crowd, unless we assume they allowed him to hand around out of good manners. The fellow can occasionally turn a phrase, though. (unless he stole this line, which is quite possible).

Gary Wilder and "Freedom Time"

Today I went to a wonderful talk given by Gary Wilder. His book The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars [the capitalization there seems odd] was already on one of my lists. Now I’m genuinely excited about it.

He was introducing a new project, which he says will be called “Freedom Time,” and for which he’s already attended a year of law school—this, I think, is probably the best way to do legal history, if you can get someone to pay for it.

He started off with a longish quotation from an unspecified Kant text, and then a little summary of French Imperial Nation-State. His summary made the book sound quite different from what I would have imagined given the title. His point, as he explains it, is to see Negritude as more than just a nativism. It is, rather, a critical theory of modernity (that is, a Critical Theory)—attempting to revise bankrupt positivist and instrumental reason through an appeal to poetic reason. It is a working-through, dialectical overcoming, rather than simple rejection, of modernity. In this project it is hardly alone during the 1930s. I don’t know a great deal about the ideas or figures here—mostly Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor—but from what little I do know, it seems a sensible move.

The payoff for Wilder is that once we think of Negritude as committed to the dialectical overcoming of empire and the colonial situation, rather than a simplistic rejection, we are able to make sense of the political moves made by Césaire and Senghor in the postwar world. Departmentalization and then subsequent attempts to form other supra-national organizations, are not false-consciousness, not (simply) anachronistic. These policies are rather an attempt to preserve certain aspects of the imperial project and reject others. So, for instance, the departmentalization of Martinique was not supposed to be its submission to France, but was rather understood as the first step of a radical re-visioning of Frenchness. Il faut assimiler et pas être assimiler. Wilder makes this argument in large measure by pointing to the self-conscious way in which Césaire mobilized and positioned himself in terms of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher (who was behind the French 1848 abolition of slavery). The largest, and in some sense very obvious structuring observation here is that we, as historians, shouldn’t assume that just because, in the post-1945 world, anti-colonial and Third World movements tended to be nationalist, that means that anti-imperialism anti-racism had to be articulated in terms of national projects. It isn’t so. Negritude, then, shouldn’t be seen as a nativism, or an anti-racism, or anything of the sort, it is rather both genuinely anti-nationalist and anti-colonialist. Again, given what I know about the immediate postwar, it seems to me to be (oh blessed conjunction) both true and a major historiographical trend to say that this period is more radically ‘open’ and undetermined than it has often been presented as having been—this especially in reference to what the shape of Europe ended up being, the viability (meaning) of communism.

This argument is set out with copious reference above all to Walter Benjamin. Adorno, Reinhart Koselleck, Ernst Bloch and others are also mobilized, but Benjamin is the major reference. I won’t try to explain exactly what Wilder is doing, but it has to do with multiple temporalities, and ways of thinking that which didn’t happen, that which did happen (but was impossible), the concept of concrete utopia, and others.

During the talk, all kinds of parallels with what I’ve been reading of Zizek, Badiou and, to a lesser extent, Laclau, were going through my head. A major issue is that of retroaction. This seems to me to be somehow Lacanian in origin (or at least inspiration), but I’m not sure about that. Similarly, the idea that the way, the only way, to move beyond the empire (in this case, the French Empire, rather than simply ‘Empire’) is to push it to its conclusion, or to a particular conclusion, has many echoes in what I’ve been reading.

Similarly, there is clearly a place for Sorel in this discussion of the imbrications, for the thinkers of Negritude, of politics and philosophy. I don’t think Wilder has quite figured out the best way of talking about this yet. He points to the utopian socialists—especially Proudhon—as an inspiration for Senghor and Césaire, but as has been pointed out in another context, a citation isn’t an explanation.

I’m not convinced that Benjaminian temporalities are the right way to talk about what’s happening here. I guess I don’t understand how they advance the discussion beyond the terms of past(s), appropriation and re-writing of them. It is likely, though, that if I read Koselleck (as I should), and more Benjamin, I could be convinced that this terminology is useful.

At any rate, it was a good talk, with some good questions. I’m very glad to have been there.

[also, i just noticed, it should be Négritude throughout. Dunno how that accent got away.]

inside Badiou

Meditation Nine of Being and Event breaks sharply from the mathematical/ontological (and philosophical) elaboration that takes up the previous eight meditations. We turn from the state—as metastructure of situation, as, in fact, a set-theoretical notation—to the State, historically, as Marxist theory has understood it. The ontological categories normality, singularity, excrescence, are used to analyze Engel’s analysis of the State. The bourgeoisie is singular [i meant: normal], because it is presented (to step out of Badiou’s vocabulary, ‘really there’) and also re-presented by the State. The proletariat is singular, because it is presented (again, an objectively existing social group), but not re-presented in the State. The state itself, Badiou says that Engels says, is excrescence. This is wrong, though “formally correct”—I’m not sure how this works out yet. Perhaps Meditation Ten will bring enlightenment.

At the moment, it just sounds like Badiou is applying these ontological categories willy-nilly to historical situations. There has not always been a State, bourgeois or otherwise, and there isn’t one everyplace at the moment. What can he possibly mean? Surely ontology isn’t supposed to work differently if the means of production change?

outside Badiou

Having once posted about the cover of a book, rather than the inside, it is hard not to continue doing so. In this case, the next book I’m reading for the theory class: the 2005 English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (since it’s a nice indication of a book’s popularity: it is currently priced to sell at just under $15 on Amazon.com). I’m only 60 pages through this thing, so there’s not even that space to judge yet. I find Badiou’s tone in the new preface incredibly self-important and off-putting at best. Still, I’m already a bit in awe. We’ll see if it lasts.

The back cover, then. It is full of ‘significance.’ The word is used three times. Badiou is described in the 4-line bio as “one of France’s most important contemporary philosophers.” From the four blurbs, it is “most significant,” or “a significant book” which speaks to “philosophical and political debates that matter most to us.” Everywhere, it is important, significant, “tackling the whole.”

Is the insistence on significance and ‘mattering to us’ symptomatic? At the least, of extreme uncertainty on the part of the design folks over at continuum press? (which, from a brief perusal of their catalog, looks pretty interesting)

Kloppenberg on Tocqueville

Kloppenberg, James T. "The Canvas and the Color: Tocqueville's 'Philosophical History' and Why it Matters Now." Modern Intellectual History. 3,3 (2006). 495-521.

In order to get away from the madness of contemporary theory I had a nice vacation inside my discipline, with James Kloppenberg’s relatively recent piece in MIH about Tocqueville. Tocqueville is someone I should know more about; I should certainly read L’Ancien régime, and, it seems, his Recollections on 1848. Also, of course, as Kloppenberg says, “Tocqueville is hot.” (497). I sort of knew that already—but four new translations of Democracy in America since 2003? That’s crazy. There was a debate about translating Tocqueville in French Politics, Culture and Society in the Spring of 2003—Arthur Goldhammer, who made one of the new translations, sits on the editorial board of that journal. It’s a debate I should look at.

The main point of Kloppenberg’s article is that Tocqueville wrote ‘philosophical history’ that is very close to the kind of intellectual history we should be doing now. Kloppenberg says, “At his most historically sophisticated...he displayed the reflexivity associated with the approach I call pragmatic hermeneutics” (520). An approach elaborated in two previous articles that (it’s my mantra) I should really take a look at. Happily, Kloppenberg gives us, in one sentence, what this means, and what intellectual history is suppose to be:

“Only through multiple stages—first the painstaking study of texts and the meticulous reconstruction of contexts, then the systematic effort to relate the multiple meanings of the former to the multiple layers of the latter, and finally the self-conscious attempt to connect historical analysis to the aspirations of one’s own time—is it possible to produce philosophical history of the sort Tocqueville sought to write. As the endless struggles over Tocqueville illustrate, at best such texts will generate conflicts among those who approach them with an acolyte’s reverence, a vulture’s hunger, or a historian’s insatiable desire to understand more clearly phenomena that will never be understood completely” (521).

It’s a big sentence. And that second sentence feels off to me. Especially “at best...” Hermeneutic approaches can not, I think, be sustained in an academic context. It’s an artistic, religious experience. I think I’d better go find out just what he means, and then decide.

Marcuse?

I'm about halfway through The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay's classic study of the Frankfurt school (an exam-list book if there ever was one). It's a classic for a reason, so no evaluation here. The thing is 35 years old, though, and the distance tells. Particularly in the seriousness with which he takes Herbert Marcuse. I've once been asked to read Marcuse--of course I know who he is, know something about his work, but although his name is still thrown around, he doesn't seem (as it were) read anymore. He's someone I need to know a great deal more about.

Recently, I came across some sociology of knowledge work on why Erich Fromm (another figure who plays a major role in Jay's story) fell out of academic favor. From Jay's account, it seems clear why 'we' don't find Fromm useful at all these days. Marcuse, on the other hand, seems to be speaking (especially up through the 1940s--but perhaps no longer in Eros and Civilization) very much to issues current in postmarxism, especially Zizekian attempts to bring Hegel back to the table (even in his engagements with Schmitt--this is the contemporary postmarxist academic left, at least as i've so far been exposed to it). It seems to me that a more interesting and subtle problem than "why not Fromm?" is thus "why not Marcuse?" Is it just that he's embarrassingly associated with the gauche-y new left, with the painfully naive adolescence of the current generation of academics? hmmmm...

This early Martin Jay is also interesting to read in light of the two books by students of his--Moyn and Kleinberg--that i've just finished. I've got to write something about them as well. possibly i'll post it here, but i'll admit to feeling considerably more comfortable making public my thoughts about those born before 1930 than after 1960.

writing about Zizek

I am now obliged to write a paper about The Parallax View. Reading and thinking with Zizek is, I'm fairly certain, bad both for your prose and your head. So far I've written several fat paragraphs about the dust-jacket, not because I've nothing to say about the inside, but because it seems like a reasonable place to start. These paragraphs are a bit ridiculous, so I'll probably cut them from the final paper, or reduce them substantially (they'd be almost 2 1/2 pages of what can't be more than 8 or 9 total--too much). In the interests of not letting myself forget that I sometimes write this sort of stuff, I'm going to post it here, now.
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Since so much of The Parallax View is about the play of appearances, it seems to me that a prejudiced over-reading of the most superficial and transitory part of the book-as-commodity (the jacket) is in order. The front of is a painting of an empty arm-chair, wrapped in a white cloth; to the viewer’s left is a table covered with papers, which can be seen to wrap around the spine. Before following the table around the book, what is this chair? I can only see it as a reference to Magritte.[1] The folding of the white cloth is strongly reminiscent of Magritte’s series of cloth-covered heads. Further echoes immediately suggest themselves. The title of the book—in bold, empty white type, contrasting sharply with the textured, painted background—labels the empty chair. Ceci n’est pas un pipe is only the most famous of Magritte’s ‘labeled’ paintings, there is a whole series of them; always, the label is not the same as the picture. So far we have an empty chair, labeled by the title of the book, and even signed by the name of the author at the bottom. Should we then read the label as misdirection or questioning?

Following the table around to the spine of the volume, we arrive at the back cover. We see that behind the table there is a couch, only the very end of which we could see on the front, it also is empty. There is little text, only the technical information, and the barcode (I am pleased to learn that MIT Press is able so easily to categorize The Parallax View as ‘philosophy/cultural studies.’) Mostly, there is the second half of the picture: a man (bald) sitting and writing, the paper supported by his knee, which appendage almost, but not quite, touches the table. At this point: the images on the two sides of the book are connected by the table (covered in written-on paper), and behind the table, the couch. Should we see here “two sides of the same coin,” connected by, on the one hand, writing, the very image of intellection, and on the other, the couch, the emblem of psychoanalysis?

The man sitting taking analytic notes on the spectral occupant of the couch is not anonymous. It is Lenin.[2] Of course, things become more complicated when we open the back flap, and see the picture of Zizek there, in the normal spot for such images. It is a picture of a piece of installation art. An empty chair and a plant before a large mirror, in which we see Zizek, sitting, absent from ‘reality.’ (Magritte, again, has several paintings which play with the idea of the mirror.) The formal parallel between the portrait of Zizek and the painting of Lenin is unavoidable—indeed, the original painting was reversed when it was put onto the cover, perhaps just so as to make the parallelism work.[3] Zizek is thus in Lenin’s ‘place’—are we supposed to be able to apply a Lacanian grid of some sort to the cover? Would we read the empty spots of the couch and chair for subject-positions, one and two, Lenin for the analyst and then the fourth position would be we, ourselves, the viewers of the painting, possessors of the book? For Lacan, if we may hazard a generalization, what was most interesting about the Sausseurian formula of the sign was neither the signifier at the top, nor the signified on the bottom, but rather the bar separating the two. The cover of Zizek’s book, then, might also be not so much about the two sides, as about the gap of representation as such—in this case, the spine of the book. At the bottom is the publisher’s logo, out of which rises the leg of the table (a phallus?), supporting the written-on pages (phallogocentric discourse?). Hovering above this field of text is the title of the book, framed by the one of the back-cushions of the couch (psychoanalysis itself)—above this, textured nothingness. Have we yet achieved non-sense?

This is a good point to pull up out of this hermeneutic spiraling nosedive. The superficial and disposable outside of the book puts, I think, a very fine point on the game of representation, in which art, politics and psycho-analysis are all deeply involved. The relationship between Zizek and Lenin is highlighted, and by extension, the relation of psychoanalysis to politics. Similarly at play in the jacket design are the covered and the uncovered; the real and the phantasmic; the human and the inhuman.

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[1] Clearly, there are no formal similarities between Magritte’s photo-realist-surrealism and the socialist-realist painting used for the cover-art of The Parallax View. This painting is itself a copy made by Grigori Shpolyanski from an original by Isaac Brodsky. The game of political (mis)-representation is very much afoot (see note on front-flap). Although one finds things to disagree with on nearly every page of The Parallax View, there are relatively few outright errors. Interesting, then, that Zizek as a passing comparison to the self-constitution of consciousness, incorrectly attributes to Magritte the M.C. Escher picture of a hand drawing another hand, itself drawing the first hand (219). Should this be read symptomatically?

[2] I tread on thin ice here: The picture’s title is “Lenin at the Smolny Institute,” which I think means a specific time and place, December 1917, when Lenin and his cabinet agreed that Finland should be separate from Russia. I wouldn’t speculate further on this without more information.

[3] Of course, this reversal often happens—perhaps it is a technical convenience? The cover of Laclau’s On Populist Reason also reverses its painting, a detail from “The Fourth Estate” by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. What conclusion, if any, is to be drawn from the fact that this painting is also featured as the background to the opening credits of Bernardo Bertollucci’s epic film Novocento? Did either Laclau or Zizek even have a hand in the design of their books? Does the answer matter?