Negri

Negri, Antonio. "Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes," SubStance, vol 36, no 1, 2007.

Having read neither Empire nor Multitude, nor anything else Antonio Negri ever wrote, I am not well placed to take much away from this little text, published in English only last year (2007).

I am, I hope, slowly developing a personal ‘historical sense’—otherwise said, self-knowledge. This article has the taste of something that at first I think is gassy, at once too obvious and too subtle, but that later I come to appreciate. We’ll see.

The degree to which Negri relies on conceptual forms that I identify most strongly with Leibniz (monads) and Spinoza (materialist monism, something like this) is remarkable. I understand this to be a desire to return to some kind of pre-Kantian, (and therefore pre-Hegelian?) world. Although I’m not sure, I think this is best described as being a Deleuzian world-view. Parts of it strike me as foolish, in this case the description of globalization as an elimination of the ‘outside’ (point 5). Negri seems to be suggesting that the role of the artist in the contemporary configuration (situation)—or, rather, what constitutes art—has to do with reconstructing the larger world from within the body, through flesh, itself. The argument seems to be that since we can’t go out any longer, we can only go in. The premise is wrong, in my opinion, but even given the premise, the conclusion isn’t terribly inventive. No doubt I misunderstand. The most sensible, or comprehensible to me, possibility that he invokes is that of “engaging in politics by leading all the elements of life back to a poetic reconstruction” (point 6, pg 54). And this sounds to me very like Rancière, who himself sounds not unlike certain versions of Rorty.

No doubt I’ve much misunderstood Negri. I have a copy of Multitude, and perhaps soon I’ll read it.

final words

Here are the final words of Williams' book, words which, I have to admit, shame me a little.

"The historians neither make nor guide history. Their share in such is usually so small as to be almost negligible. But if they do not learn something from history, their activities would then be cultural decoration, or a pleasant pastime, equally useless in these troubled times. " (212)

Capitalism & Slavery

Today was another classic: Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Williams. While I’ve recently started to buy and annotate for myself a number of books, there’s occasionally a certain pleasure in using a venerable old library copy. Finding annotations from other people can be irritating, but I try to imagine it as a pale successor of medieval marginal commentary. This book has notes from two clearly identifiable hands: one scrawling in Spanish, the other neat and tall in English, making careful stars and boxes, occasionally writing ‘thesis’ next to things.

I can see why people might get excited about this book. It’s a satisfyingly Marxist account of slavery without being, I think, too abstract or simplifying things. So from the right, one can object that it over-emphasizes ‘capital’ and that it denigrates the genuinely moral sources of abolitionism (I don’t think, actually, that it does either). From what I guess we should call the contemporary left, one can object that it systematically subordinates racial factors to economic ones (it does). And also that it contains sentences such as: “The ‘horrors’ of the Middle Passage have been exaggerated” (34). I myself was shocked by the degree to which Williams assimilates the indentured servitude of whites in the early phases of British colonial development and the enslavement of blacks. His argument depends on the essentially economic aspects of these two situations, which are of course juridical radically different. I doubt that today anyone would choose to compare the deceptive strategies of recruiters (spirits, they were called) in London and the slave factories of the African coast, or the poor berthing conditions of both indentured servants and slaves. I’d be better able to evaluate all this if I had more empirical knowledge. At any rate, this kind of economism (no doubt even then played up by Williams for rhetorical effect) is no longer possible now that we’ve become ‘serious’ about experience as a category of analysis.

The central argument of the book is that slavery was in every sense an essential product of the mercantilist system of the 17^th and early 18^th centuries. Slave labor was preferred to nominally free labor because in the specific place and time of the sugar islands in the later 17^th century, it turned a profit. The particular reasons are complex, and have to do with various forms of competition, but the main narrative is that these islands became, for the British, less and less profitable. Eventually, the new industrial economy developing in Britain itself came to practice and then demands the institutions of free trade. The West Indies retained great political power as a result of their spectacular wealth and so continued to enforce their monopolies long after they had ceased to be genuinely advantageous to anyone but the island planters. British capital—now invested in industry and increasingly fluid trade—attacked slavery both because this institution was more valuable to other imperial powers than to Britain, and as a way to undermine the disproportionate and anachronistic power of the West Indians. Without denying the genuine moral fervor of at least a few abolitionists, Williams can none the less assert that it was always and only when the most powerful capitalist factions found a use in it that their rhetoric had any traction in public opinion.

What is to me methodologically interesting about the way Williams put together his argument is the faith it demonstrates in the ability of larger historical trends to deliver intelligibility in the face of genuine local confusion and conflict. There is no such thing, in Williams’ book, as a single unitary ‘capital.’ There are just capitalists, all striving to make the best profit they can with whatever resources are at their disposal. That’s all the ideology anyone in his book needs. In what I suppose is classic Marxist form, the seething mess of history only takes on meaning retrospectively, and even then, much is lost or rendered insignificant. I have to wonder if there’s something about the way history is written today which simply doesn’t allow the existence of such a thing as a historiographically insignificant fact. It may be that there isn’t a place for it any particular book, but each little fragment fits, somehow, into a larger synchronic system. The message of Marxist historicism would be, then, that it’s only later on going to be possible to see what matters and what doesn’t—but that some of it will retrospectively turn out to be irrelevant. Here I wonder if I’m letting contemporary Lacanian post-Marxism sneak into my reading of the implications of Williams’ kind of work.

Greenblatt

This morning I finished Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning. I had intended to move through it fairly rapidly. Instead, I ended up reading it with some care, savoring the quotations (especially, in retrospect, Spencer) and taking way too long with the thing. The construction of the book was impressive. I suppose that it was out of the ordinary in 1980 to mention Clifford Geertz as a methodological inspiration for a book on Renaissance literature, but discounting this, Greenblatt restrains himself from ‘theory’ for the whole, wonderful, first chapter. The second chapter, ‘the word of god in the age of mechanical reproduction’ makes elegant mention of Foucault, Freud and Benjamin in the space of ten pages. (Of course, the name of the chapter is Benjamin: can it be anything but a profound coincidence that ‘word of god’ and ‘work of art’ are so sonically similar?) Later in the book we get casual references to Lacan and Deleuze. The ease of all this is pleasant. Lacan’s Rome discourse turns out to be great for reading Shakespeare, while Deleuze is only there to remind us that repetition itself is difference.

It is hard to put myself in a place where the story he tells of individuality molded and fashioned at every turn not so much by itself as by Power is a depressing or discouraging one. Perhaps it’s too familiar.

Still, the thing passes the first test for me of a good scholarly work on literature: it makes me think I should read more Elizabethan literature. Especially Spencer and Marlow. Ever since, some time ago, I read William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, I’ve had in the back of my head that Foxe and some of the other early protestants would be fascinating. No doubt a crazy idea, that the texts themselves would disabuse me of fast. At any rate, I understand now why people were excited by ‘New Historicism:’ it could claim this book as its own.

Global Declarations

Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Harvard, 2007.

This book begins in a Skinnerean mode with the original contextual goals of the US Declaration of Independence. It then traces the effects of this prototype declaration of independence immediately and over the following centuries in a global context. This is done almost entirely by comparing the original US Declaration’s goals and form with the many that have followed. The main lesson is that the Declaration of Independence was a document of 18th century political philosophy above all in the sense that it makes reference to the natural rights of states. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence as a genre has generally been used as a tool of state-creation and the affirmation of sovereignty.

States here are mainly opposed to nations. Armitage, oddly, seems to regard most people before the 18th century as stateless—as though vast, decentralized empires were somehow not states. Certainly global historians emphasize the degree to which states became more intrusive in the 18th century, but it seems to me that even most people who did not live under an empire of one sort or another might still be said to exist within a certain kind of state, however local.

Armitage writes well, and the book is a pleasure to read. It is fast, informative, and not especially complex. He gives the reader a history, from the point of view of a particular genre of political writing, that suggests the constant negotiation and ambiguity surrounding nation, state, and individual rights.

I haven’t got a great deal to say about this book. Since one of Armitage’s major goals must have been elegance, it would be a bit perverse to make methodological complaints. The goal of elegance certainly was achieved, though I’m not sure what the reader is expected to do with the compilation of declarations of independence that make up the second half of the book. Read them straight through? I was interested in seeing, for my own reasons, the Hatian declaration signed by Dessalines. Perhaps some sort of assistance could have been offered to the interested reader, since the point is clearly not to provide a scholarly edition of these documents. Perhaps some suggestions were included that I missed? (Since I’ve now returned the thing to the library)...I wish I remembered why I picked this up in the first place--it could conceivably have been mentioned in an occasional piece by Pierre Rosanvallon? Providing large quantities of original texts is very much his style.

Story of the New

Jameson, Frederic. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. Verso, 2002.

I have just finished a rather quick reading of Frederic Jameson’s A Singular Modernity (2002). Modernity and modernism aren’t terms that I’m especially committed to or that even excite me much, so it perhaps isn’t surprising that the book didn’t move me deeply. Still, it’s almost always worth reading Jameson. There are excellent commentaries here on Foucault, de Man and Althusser, as well as the relationship between Weber and Lukacs. Lots of Heidegger. Forced to summarize, I’d say that the main point of the book is that ‘modernity’ and also ‘modernism’ should be understood as narratives rather than concepts. They are also, to be sure, empirically existing historical realities. However, so many different things fall under these names that one cannot, according to Jameson, come to an empirical finding about their common traits. Rather, they are ways of narrativizing, and as such are always available. Indeed, the larger ‘political’ point seems to me that we (meaning, one supposes, progressive people of the world) should continue to fight to establish our own definitions of modernity, and consequently modernism, over and against the current hegemonic definition which revolves largely around the market.

What I appreciate about this is the effort made to conceptualize the various temporalities as mutually interdependent. The commonsense view might have it that the past determines the present to a certain degree, which itself determines the future within certain limits. Not so. Since the meaning of the past always depends on the narrative within which it is framed, and this narrative, made though it is in the present, always betrays a certain attitude towards the future, we can see that none of the temporal divisions (this can’t be the right way to say it) makes sense without the others. I find this view congenial—also, to a certain degree, commonsensical. It meshes well with the over-theorized temporalities of Gary Wilder’s talk, but seems somehow less self-concerned.

Probably this will go on my syllabus of ‘historical approaches to the literary’ because indeed it is extremely sensitive to these issues. Perhaps I’ll read some of Jameson’s more recent stuff.

stack of (mostly) caribbean books

The holidays have been a long break from writing.

I’ve completed a sort of scatter-shot primmer in Caribbean historiography. It was just as well to start with Silvio Torres-Saillant. If I’d left him for the end, I don’t think I’d ever have gotten through. After STS, I read what I should have read two years ago, C.L.R. James’ classic Black Jacobins. And I discovered that James, in 1938, said virtually every conceptually interesting thing that Torres-Saillant says in 2006. It’s true that in James they’re tucked into a page-long preface, or simply mentioned here or there. But still.

After James I sat down and read through Laurent Dubois’s A Colony of Citizens (2004), and have just now finished Gary Wilder’s The French Imperial Nation-State (2005).: two excellent and radically different books. I won’t say much here about Dubois, except that it’s basically social history. I mean by this that it is interested above all to document the lives of people-in-general, to understand the limits placed on them by their societies and times, and the possibilities they forced open. The conceptual nit-picks for me have to do with what ‘opening a possibility’ could possibly mean. If you can do something, it was possible, right? Agency is tricky. I am, broadly speaking, convinced that the French revolution would not have been the same if the slaves of San Domingue and Guadeloupe (among others) had stayed in their place. These revolutions did indeed force metropolitan politicians to take stands on racial and economic issues they’d rather have avoided. With James in 1938, with Dubois in 2004, the story of the French Revolution (here I’ll allow the majuscule) can not be told militarily, economically, politically, philosophically, without the Caribbean.

Gary Wilder’s book was not less convincing, in what I took to be its main argument. But Wilder (and this was obvious from the lecture I attended a few months ago) is a compulsive over-theorizer. He has a solid historical argument. He sets it out in a way that is recognizably ‘intellectual history’—though he rejects the term—even turning to Dominick Lacapra for what seems to me to be his most concrete and useful methodological moves. Having read the book, I’d say that my summary of his summary of it leaves out quite a lot.

The French Empire in the years after WWI had its own logic. It wasn’t a simple betrayal of some idea republicanism, rather, a complex and contradictory (but none the less functional) logic that Wilder calls colonial humanism developed as the ideology of the interwar Empire. This logic (an overused designation, I think, that almost never means more than a way of talking and explaining things to one’s self) put universalist Republicanism together with particularist ethnography. The Négritude ‘cohort’ set its cultural project in motion as an immanent critique of this discourse, and so Négritude cannot be understood apart from colonial humanism. If we see Césaire, Dumas and Senghor as (in the Lacaprian formulation) acting out and working through colonial humanism, then we can begin to asses their real failures and successes both in the interwar and after 1945. All this seems eminently reasonable to me, if a little jargon soaked.

[An aside: Clive Bell tosses off the witticism in his Proust book, that after the Great War, the Troisième République has come to seem more and more like the Troisième Empire. One of the things that bothered me the most about Wilder’s book was his assumption that some kind of specifically republican ideology must always have been governing the French during the 19^th century. Perhaps Bell’s belle-lettristic observation is not so far from the truth about the essentially imperial, rather than republican, nature of the interwar French state? At any rate, I think it would be interesting to look back at the way Sorel treats imperial holdings as a sort of exterior quarantine for metropolitan France’s old institutions—especially the church.]

I don’t especially mind cutting through the jungle of critical theory in which Wilder shrouds his actual ideas. But I’m not so happy with what kind of critical theory Négritude turns out to have been. Since it was placed in a conflicted situation, it insists on occupying various conflicting positions. Wilder argues for seeing Négritude as part of the broader trend of anti-liberal modernisms that flourishes starting in 1889—children of Bergson, really—and this seems exactly right to me. But you can’t just say that you’re going to be both universal and particular, both elite and popular, both essentialist/authentic and cosmopolitan/déraciné. It may be that individuals, historically, are forced to occupy both sides of an impossible divide. But the expression of this impossible situation does not constitute a solution, nor even a critical theory of it. I am not satisfied by saying that Césaire’s Cahier ‘enacted’ the various double-binds of the elite, educated class of ‘colonized.’ It does indeed do that, it may indeed thereby be a great poem, and may be powerful—but Wilder isn’t able, as far as I can tell, to argue that this text or any other do more than stage a certain problem. That just isn’t enough. Négritude isn’t thereby set apart from the horde of other illiberal antimodernisms that ‘solved’ the problems of modernity. It seems to me that since these problems are so great, so systemic, so integral to any posing of the question, that we’ve set the bar awfully low for solutions.

I’ve gone on long enough about this book. I’ll probably write something more substantial and official later. Before I do that, I’ll read Wilder’s article about Fanon and Césaire, in which he may talk more about this stuff. Next I think I’ll tackle another book that I’ve already read part of: Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. I only own it because I found its whole scholarly paradigm morally repugnant when I first looked at it. Books rarely make me feel like that.

Nose back to the grindstone!