Lessing and the postwar

Here is a somewhat length passage from near the middle (269-70) of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook [1962]:

I dreamed marvellously. I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was incredibly beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the myths themselves, so that the soft glittering web was alive. There were many subtle and fantastic colours, but the overall feeling this expanse of fabric gave was of redness, a sort of variegated glowing red. In my dream I handled and felt this material and wept with joy. I looked again and saw that the material was shaped like a map of the Soviet Union. It began to grow: it spread out, lapped outwards like a soft glittering sea. It included now the countries around the Soviet Union, like Poland, Hungary, etc., but at the edges it was transparent and thin. I was still crying with joy. Also with apprehension. And now the soft red glittering mist spread over China and it deepened into a hard heavy clot of scarlet. And now I was standing out in space somewhere, keeping my position in space with an occasional down-treading movement of my feet in the air. I stood in a blue mist of space while the globe turned, wearing shades f red for the communist countries, and a patchwork of colours for the rest of the world. Africa was black, but a deep, luminous, exciting black, like a night when the moon is just below the horizon and will soon rise. Now I was very frightened and I had a sick feeling, as if I were being invaded by some feeling I didn’t want to admit. I was too sick and dizzy to look down and see the world turning. Then I look and it is like a vision – time has gone and the whole history of man, the long story of mankind, is present in what I see now, and it is like a great soaring hymn of joy and triumph in which pain is a small lively counterpoint. And I look and see that the red areas are being invaded by the bright different colours of the other parts of the world. The colours are melting and flowing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful colour, but a colour I have never seen in life. This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes – I was suddenly standing in peace, in silence. Beneath me was silence. The slowly turning world was slowly dissolving, disintegrating and flying off into fragments, all through space, so that all around me were weightless fragments drifting about, bouncing into each other and drifting away. The world had gone, and there was chaos. I was alone in chaos. And very clear in my ear a small voice said: Somebody pulled a thread of the fabric and it all dissolved. I woke up, joyful and elated. I wanted to wake Michael to tell him, but I knew of course, that I couldn’t describe the emotion of the dream in words. Almost at once the meaning of the dream began to fade; I said to myself, the meaning is going, catch it, quick; then I thought, but I don’t know what the meaning is. But the meaning had gone, leaving me indescribably happy.

I read somewhere, probably on wikipedia, that Doris Lessing is the ‘epicist of the female experience.’ I’m a little over half way through this book, which certainly is epic, and it is true that it is female, about women and Woman. And yet, I think I am more interested in it as a book about the generation in their 20s during the Second World War, and about their postwar experience. (I notice an important word: experience—this is certainly a novel about experiences of certain kinds, hence, I think, the importance of the structure of overlapping fictions telling and retelling stories sharing a few nodes of character and situation). And in particular, the communist experience in the postwar. What it was like to be a communist of a certain class (the class in which simply everyone has a novel at least in the drawer) in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Also: I can't decide how I feel about what I guess is the British-English spelling 'marvellously.'

Bergson, Izenberg, Proust

Why is it that I thought of Bergson as troubling the narrative Gerald Izenberg sets up in the aforementioned essay? At the outset, not that I disagree, exactly, with Izenberg (I am in no position to do so), but rather that I think pieces of the story are missing, and that from the perspective of my own interests, things are importantly more complicated than he makes them out to be. My own knowledge and interest are focused on France, which Izenberg doesn’t treat: he discusses authors from Britain, Italy, Germany and Austrian (or rather, Austro-Hungary)—at the most I can say that he has left France out because, perhaps, it causes problems.

It is certainly the case that Bergson’s basic framework is dualism, inasmuch as his goal is to show the falsity of certain dualisms. Bergson’s first book, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, establishes the reality and necessity of liberté by demolishing the binary of materialist mechanism and idealist will. Mind-body dualism is the explicit target of Matière et mémoire. So he fits Izenberg’s story, because after the war, the problem to overcome isn’t simple dualism, but a much more complex fragmentation.

Now, I have just finished reading Bergson’s 1903 essay “Introduction à la métaphysique.” Incidentally, this is available online in its original publication through Gallica, at the very front of volume 11 of the Revue de métaphysique et morale—which journal, together with the philosophy of the history of science presented at the end of the essay, I find extremely significant and, given Bergson’s current reputation, somewhat surprising; the new critical Worms edition of the volume containing the “Introduction” comes out in 2009—I wouldn’t wait for Matière et mémoire, but I’ll wait for this.

There is much to discuss about this justly famous essay. Suffice it to say that after reading it, both the structuralist ‘revolution’ and Deleuze’s general tone make a great deal more sense to me.

Characteristically, Bergson says that the empiricists (which is to say those philosophers who stand behind experimental psychology) and the rationalists (which is to say, I think, Hegel and the various German idealists of the first part of the 19^th century), are not so far apart. As usual, the accusation is a little too clean, rather too much in conformity with Bergson’s own ideas, for it to be taken so very seriously. None the less, I think the description he gives of the empiricists, and here he mentions John Stuart Mill and Hippolyte Taine, is significant for placing him in terms of Izenberg’s argument. These philosphers, Bergson says, juxtapose psychological states with one another, and hope that a self will emerge from a sufficient number of so-juxtaposed states. This, he says, is like seeking the meaning of the Iliad between the letters of which it is composed—“le moi leur échappe toujours, si bien qu’ils finissent par n’y plus voir qu’un vain fantôme”[13]—the target here is materialist accounts of psychology that reduce the self to, at best, an epiphenomenon. And yet the mindset that Bergson ascribes to these empiricists maps neatly onto Mansfield’s metaphor of the faceless hotel clerk that Izenberg quotes.

Bergson very often proceeds by setting up poles of extreme possibility, and claiming the territory between the two for his own method. Certainly the ‘climax’ of the “Introduction” does this. In Matière et mémoire, Bergson describes two extreme personality types, defined by their relation to memory—one which is always action oriented, and which is incapable of self-reflection, and another which is lost entirely in the shifting currents of its own memory, given over entirely to the dream life. We have here transparently tropes of what I am tempted to call a Balzacian capitalism—the man of action, always oriented towards a profit of whatever sort (so many shallow and forgotten characters), and then the dreamer (also shallow, but beloved), at the mercy of the winds of sentiment and sensation—Lucien from Illusions Perdus. Surely the example Izenberg cites from Virginia Woolf, of speed and enforced, fragmentary experience, is best read as pathological that makes no sense without the Bergsonian frame?

So this is what I mean: Izenberg’s narrative makes sense to me—at least in parts—if we start with Bergson, but not if we start with what came before Bergson.

There are lots of reasons why an intellectual historian trying to make the sort of argument that Izenberg wants to make would stay away from Proust. He is complicated and very much out of step with his time. I think, however, that Proust might be an especially useful author for Izenberg. According to Antoine Compagnon (and I think a simple reading of Contre Sainte-Beuve bears this out), the ‘programmatic’ end of the novel was planned already when Proust started writing. So it is perhaps not totally unreasonable to take the first and the last volumes as being, in an important sense, pre-war, while the intervening volumes were written during and after the war. For myself, and I agree with Compagnon here, Sodome et Gomorrhe is the best—if that even means anything—and Temps retrouvé is to be taken with a substantial amount of salt. Why, long before I read Izenberg’s article, did I think this? Because in the middle volumes more than anywhere, we and the narrator see the extent to which a person’s self is constituted by all those around them, and how the essence of an individual can change radically (since Proust, I believe, is radically perspectival—maybe this is a condition of the novel as form?) depending on what one knows about this person. I think, although this is something to be demonstrated rather than crassly suggested, that all this has to do with Leibniz. Everyone was reading Leibniz in the 1880s, there are essays about him regularly in the Revue philosophique, and the monad is, after all, a lastingly powerful metaphysical construction. So perhaps a historical reading of the sort that Compagnon’s book on Proust gives us could, in fact, show how the Proustian moi changed even against Proust’s own professed will, because of the war.

The burden of such a demonstration would be to show how something like ‘the war’ could change something like ‘the idea of the self.’ Although I find Izenberg’s argument in many ways persuasive, it seems to me that there is a sort of causal gap in it, which can only be filled or bridged by much more detailed and contextually sensitive research than, of course, his essay has any intention of providing.

War and (Cultured) Selfhood

Gerald Izenberg’s “Identity Becomes an Issue: European Literature in the 1920s,” in a recent issue of Modern Intellectual History, is a useful and erudite framing of a certain facet of European literary culture. The essentials of his argument are simple. Before the First World War, when these writers spoke about split selves, they generally did so in dualist terms (rational/sensual, spiritual/material, ect...) After the war, the self becomes fractured along multiple complex lines, the center, indeed, is empty.

I am a little uncomfortable with the way Izenberg makes the reality of the war do so much intellectual work. I want to know more about what pre-existing conditions interacted with what, exactly, about the war, to produce the phenomena he is documenting. Was it the massive and long-term propaganda effort (at every level of society) hammering home certain ideals, which were then suddenly given the lie by the generalization of bureaucracy and death on a never-before-seen scale? I guess what I don’t like about this is that it fails to take account of the many people who did not react to the war in this way. And if many people did not have such a reaction, then we need either to look to different war-time experiences (this, I think, makes no sense), or more plausibly, to different pre-war positions. Or we could throw our hands up in the air and admit that the same cause does not always lead to the same result.

Which brings me to a more substantive question. One of Henri Bergson’s little tricks to get around the various metaphysical problems (especially having to do with free will) created by experimental psychology in the 1880s speaks to this last option. Bergson says that the question is poorly posed because there can be no too exactly identical causes. Either they are distinct in space (in different places) or in time (happen at different moments in the durée).

Izenberg ends his essay by pointing to Heidegger, and Being in time. Bergson is certainly not Heidegger, but he did think famously and explicitly about selfhood and time. Gide and Woolf, at least, would have read Bergson—I don’t know about the Germans, but probably they had as well. Is it perhaps a Bergsonian—modernist—self that was exploded into little bits by the coming of the war, and the encounter with irrationality originating from outside the individual durée?

Of course it would be foolish to ask Izenberg to treat more authors--an impressive diversity of writers are discussed already--yet I wonder if he would have been able to avoid Bergson if he had looked more closely at Proust. The aside we do get on Proust does not, I think, entirely do justice to the complexity of the Proustian self, which is hardly guaranteed by recovered memory. At any rate, this article has had the effect of renewing my resolution to read both Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, and then Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self.

Renan and critique

Le premier sentiment de celui qui passe de la croyance naïve à l’examen critique, c’est le regret et presque la malédiction contre cette inflexible puissance, qui, du moment où elle l’a saisi, le force de parcourir avec elle toutes les étapes de sa marche inéluctable, jusqu’au terme final où l’on s’arrête pour pleurer.

Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science. Pgs 152-3

It has been argued by Ian Hunter [In Critical Theory in 2006 with responses more recently] that there is something like a tradition of ‘university’ metaphysics, critical in rhetoric and conservative in essence, that includes most saliently a node around Hegel. I wonder if Renan fits into this tradition. Certainly he seems to in this quote, which I think might, with a change in tone and level of irony, be put in the mouth of a 25 year old discovering ‘critique’ today, just as Renan was in 1848 when he wrote this. Although it rings of pseudo-history to me, I wonder if there is something to the psychological continuity associated with 'scientific' and 'critical' philosophy.

Du contrat social and Badiou

I put Du contrat social down, and needed a little distance. For whatever reason, I turned to Badiou’s chapter on Rousseau in L’être et l’événement for a second understanding, a second voice. Badiou, it seems to me, is remarkably effective in re-reading Rousseau in his own language. Perhaps, though, the chapter is more about Badiou than Rousseau. It reminds me the extent to which Badiou’s project is to found politics (and philosophy) in a post-foundationalist environment. I wonder if Rousseau’s original problem was not formulated in the opposite context: that is, in an environment of over-many competing and plausible foundational claims. Still, the quick reformulation is worth reciting here. The decisive observation, which makes the rest possible, seems to me to be that Rousseau does indeed see the formation of the general will, of the people, as taking place at a particular moment, but curiously out of history, since the will cannot be represented, and cannot be changed or even, in a sense, destroyed. Badiou has three points to make to begin the movement of the little essay.

First, “Le pact”—that is, the contrat social—“est l’événement qui supplémente au hasard l’état de nature.” Now, Badiou is obviously correct to point to the temporal and yet a-historical dimension of the formation of a people. I am not so certain about the rest of this clause.

Second, “le corps politique, ou peuple, est l’ultra-un événementiel qui s’interpose entre le vide (car, pour la politique, la nature est le vide) et lui-même.” Du contrat social is the only book to date, so far as I can recall, that induced me to draw diagrams in an attempt to understand just what was being said. The Souverain ended up always on the outside of my diagrams, with arrows to and from (one arrow to, and a symbolic three from, actually). The sovereign general will has a number of odd properties, and is easy to understand as ‘next to the void’ in Badiou’s sense.

Third, “la volonté générale est l’opérateur de fidélité qui commande une procédure générique.”

Badiou says that the last point is the difficult one. In fact, given my understanding what all these technical terms mean here, I do not think there is any real problem. There are some striking resemblances between the way Rousseau discusses how to follow or know the general will and Badiou’s ethics of fidelity. If we could stage one of those inane intro-level ‘conversations’ between political thinkers, it seems to me that Rousseau would, within limits, agree with Badiou’s descriptions.

My problem is not with the third, but with the first ‘translation’ of Rousseau into Badiou. For Rousseau, I would say that the ‘event’ of the social contract has a historical beginning that is not open to later re-interpretation in the same way that I understand the Badiou-ian event to be. For Rousseau, the event is not “au hasard.” Badiou’s fidelities give us a way of understanding certain forms of human action that would otherwise appear groundless, but they are not, themselves, exactly a reason for these programs. Badiou, and it is understandable, is not so much interested in why we pursue politics, love, science, art. But Rousseau is; according to Rousseau, all individuals strive to preserve themselves. This is the nature of the individual, and it is replicated in the ‘moral individuals’ of the government on one level, and the state on a higher level. Indeed, Rousseau even suggests that it is important that the government have a limited drive to self-preservation qua government. So it seems to me that if the volonté générale can be an object of the practice of fidelity, the formation of people always takes the form of the creation of a self-preserving entity, which is not at all the same thing as Badiou’s politics. There is a broader objective structure—an anthropology, however peculiar—behind Rousseau’s instantiation of politics.

At any rate, Badiou helped me to think a bit about Rousseau. Next, perhaps, I will look at what Althusser has written. The pile of books is too large not to have a principle, and Marxian readings are more sensible at the moment than other ones.

Strauss and the American Dilemma

Richard H. King’s “Rights and Slavery, Race and Racism: Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Dilemma,” appears in a recent issue of Modern Intellectual History, and is very interesting and informative. It was provocative for me on several levels. For this very reason, I have some objections to make, and some comments to note.

First of all, and perhaps this is a bit unfair, it seems to me to replicate a ‘Straussian’ method. This is to say that it isolates a tradition of texts, and reasons based on careful reading of what the texts are trying to say. Context (the civil rights movement) comes in to the picture only as an opportunity for the development of this Straussian tradition in its continued consideration of basic, foundational issues. This limitation is not a problem, exactly, except in as much as the article makes, or gestures at, claims for the importance of Straussian thinking to conservatism in America in general—in particular the conservative occupation of the territory of color-blindness.

Of course, Strauss and his ‘heirs’ have been important. But it seems to me that linking Straussian thinking to the broader context of conservative (and otherwise) political thought and cultural commentary would give us a purchase on this shift King points to in from a support in the early 1960s for black nationalist movements—essentially for separatism—and the later endorsement (in the 80s and 90s?) of color-blind policies. Does, as King suggests, this shift in the Straussian camp simply mirror a broader shift among conservative commentators and intellectuals in this period? If so, why did it take place, and was the cause the same for the conservatives of principle as it was for those of tradition? This line of questioning might, I think, trouble the relatively clean tradition of principled conservatives (Straussians) King has constructed.

At a certain point in the article, King gives us a paragraph on the anti-psychological bent of the Straussians. As a result, he says, they are essentially unable to discuss the psychological effects of slavery and racism on individuals—this comes in the context of Herbert Storing’s essays on Frederic Douglass and Booker T. Washington. I am, myself, allergic to psychological discussions of this sort. In my experience they are either reductive or novelistic. In any case I don’t trust them. But I wonder if it would be possible to link, or at least seat next to one another at the dinner table, a Straussian history of political philosophy, and some sort of cultural studies-type discursive approach to race and racialization. It seems to me that the latter approach becomes absolutely necessary once mass media are introduced, and that, in fact, tectonic shifts in modes of representation could have significant explanatory power in the slow-democratic polity of the past half-century.

One of the fascinating problems that King discusses, and that I would love to hear more about, is how one conceptualizes the relationship between the founding and the Civil War. This opens an enormous and hoary debate about narrative, which I would like to leave mostly to the side. In this particular instance, I wonder how much contingency is permissible within a Straussian telos. More concretely: of course, in a very banal sense, it is impossible to deny that the Founding and the Civil War are related. But in what way, and with what necessity? Is this kind of narrative series a place in which Straussians might be pushed on the source of meaning of texts? It has always seemed ridiculous to me—especially ridiculous—to claim any kind of transcendental status for the original constitution (even, as is more pertinent here, for the Declaration of Independence). To honor the document is to forget the nation. Or, as I imagine Rousseau would say—I have been reading Du contral social, it’s amazing, perhaps more on it later—this is to put the law which made the government in the place which can only be occupied by the sovereign, which is to say the general will, the people. I’m sure Strauss would have a devastating answer to this objection, but it seems to me clear that you cannot pretend to read the Declaration of Independence as thought the Civil War had never happened, as though Lincoln’s Gettysburg address did not reach into the older text and changed it. It follows, I think, that contemporary political meanings of this and other texts must be highly historically conditioned. It is impractical beyond conservatism to refuse to see this.