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"