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.

Izenberg and Jameson

I have just read two more texts which, from very different disciplinary perspectives, explore the possibilities of psychoanalytic approaches to various ‘non-clinical’ problems. I read Frederic Jameson’s essay, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan” (1978), first, and then a methodological piece by the noted (at least where I come from) historian Gerald Izenberg, “Psychohistory and Intellectual History” (1975). I’ll talk about them in temporal order, though from the vantage point of 2007 they are nearly contemporary.

Izenberg is basically concerned to defend the use of psychoanalytic techniques in history, especially intellectual history, by setting some limits to their place and explanatory power. This involves making a distinction between rational and irrational acts, such as the signing of a treaty by a monarch and extending this to beliefs, for instance the development of Freud’s own theories. Izenberg no doubt correctly prefers rational/irrational to right/wrong, or true/false, though he treats all these as possible axes along which one might evaluate historical fact. Rational/irrational depends on what we would now call contextual factors. Ptolemaic astronomy is wrong, but it is rational. For the historian to decide if an action was rational, she needs to gather all the information that the actor had, and make an intelligent judgment. If a monarch (this is the easiest example), made a decisions against all advice, and apparently for no reason that could be explained by anyone, this may be said to be an irrational act. Then, and only then, may psychohistory enter the picture, and try thus to arrive at depth-psychological explanatory factor.

This essay is from the 1970s, and the examples before Izenberg, or, anyway, the ones he cites, are Leopold III, Luther, Hitler...we’re clearly in the realm of history-as-biography. He mentions Erich Fromm and even the Frankfurt school’s sociological psychoanalysis, but this is not his main interest. More on this from Jameson, who mentions Adorno, but of course not Erich Fromm. (See this essay about the eclipse of Fromm, which is for me in a box with other sociological treatments of intellectuals, for instance, Michele Lamont's "How to Become a Famous French Philosopher," about Derrida and Neil Gross, "Becoming a Pragmatist Philosopher").

Izenberg argues that the irrational/rational distinction can be made with belief systems as well, even of sophisticated, self-reflective intellectuals. Interestingly, his main example here is the development of psychoanalysis itself. Was Freud’s theory developed suddenly, a leap of genius? Or did it make sense as an unfolding of previous ideas and clinical results? Izenberg argues strongly that it was the latter, that Freud’s theory was rationally developed, and therefore does not, itself, call for a psychoanalytic explanation.

There are some very clear flaws here. It is perhaps safe to say that among my contemporaries irrationality is an article of faith. All systems of thought contain contradiction, rupture, whatever you like to call it. Indeed, curiously enough, Izenberg seems to feel that irrationality remains irrational in filling a social function, where I suspect that many people would proceed under the assumption that a successfully filled social function is inherently rational, even part of a definition of rationality. Similarly, Izenberg is enough of a social-scientist that, rather than seeing history as stuffed, bursting at the seams with meaning, he seeks only ‘sufficient’ cause. There is surely a tendency today to over-reading the historical record, rather than under-reading. (Ours is a hermeneutic of suspicion?)

The area in which Izenberg is most assertive about the explanatory power of psychoanalysis for intellectual history is not so much in blind-spots, repressed possibilities, and the like, as it is in originary choices. This is discussed on the final pages of the essay, taking Max Weber, but first William James as test cases. The point here is that psychoanalysis does have something to say about why some people are interested in some things and not in other things. He says, “It will always be legitimate to ask why some area was a problem or research interest for someone, and at a basic level there will almost always be an answer in terms of identity needs or basic psychic conflict” (155). This I find quite curious. Just a page earlier, Izenberg quotes Sartre from Search for a Method. Sartre’s own psychoanalytic analyses pick up the question ‘why this, and not this other?’ in a totally different fashion. For Sartre, there is always a radically contingent original choice that lies at the center of a biography—for Baudelaire or Genet, for everyone. This choice is not that which is explained by psychoanalytic investigation, but the irrationality (in the sense of senselessness) which necessarily lies at the center of all human experience. Clearly we’re talking about two different things here, but I still find Izenberg’s attitude that from the ‘seething cauldron’ of the unconscious, something may come of social-science explanatory power, frankly amazing. I’m also surprised by the similarity of his ambition to the claims Randall Collins makes for his sociology of philosophies. Collins takes almost the opposite approach—seeking explanation for intellectual choices in external, network causes, rather than individualist, even infra-individual ones.

Now, Jameson’s essay is quite different. It meanders; it does not follow an argument so much as talk around a subject. Jameson discusses Lacan, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. I will start with one fundamental difference between Jameson and Izenberg, which I suppose is what makes the latter an historian and the former not: Jameson isn’t interested in causality. Writ large, he is a Marxist, and in this sense, his causality is taken care of. Writ small, he is a literary critic, and in this sense it is taken care of also. Also interesting, at least in the texts here, Jameson is more concerned than Izenberg with tying the individual/text into the larger social world. Jameson starts with some of the same examples of psychobiography (Erikson’s treatment of Luther, mainly) as does Izenberg. He is, of course, more committed to Sartre. The psychoanalytic approach to biography (Jameson isn’t concerned, here at least, with historical understand as such) replaces the biographer’s ‘intuition’ and ‘sympathy’ with context and situation—which is of course the technical existentialist term. Useful for all the difficulties it pastes over.

After a series of apparent digressions, which, I think, have the function of getting all the pieces of the Lacanian puzzle in place, Jameson makes his central suggestion for the literary use of the Lacanian system. It is best understood as a continuation of Freud’s own practice in reading literary texts, for instance his analysis of The Sandman. The narrative, somehow, illustrates a certain ‘pre-set’ psychic drama, trauma to neurosis, crisis, and resolution (no doubt this is an unacceptable formulation of said movement). Lacan offers a more sophisticated and diversified set of such given psychic narrative structures, each with different meanings. These are represented by the four permutations of the Lacanian formula Jameson reprints for us.

Finally, though, and this was published in 1978, what Jameson really wants is to use Lacan’s framework in order to articulate a cultural and political criticism, rather than a literary one. Of the various subject positions Lacan articulates, Jameson thinks that of the analyst is most useful. I quote the bulk of the last paragraph in the essay:

The ‘discourse of the analyst,’ finally, is the subject position that our current political languages seem least qualified to articulate. Like the ‘discourse of the hysteric,’ this position also involves an absolute commitment to desire as such at the same time that it opens a certain listening distance from it and suspends the latter’s existential urgencies—the illusion of conscious experience—in a fashion dialectical rather than ironic. The ‘discourse of the analyst,’ then, which seeks to distinguish the nature of the object of desire itself from the passions and immediacies of the experience of desire’s subject, suggests a demanding and self-effacing political equivalent in which the structure of Utopian desire itself is attended to through the chaotic rhythms of collective discourse and fantasy of all kinds (including those that pass through our own heads). This is not, unlike the discourse of the master, a position of authority...rather, it is a position of articulated receptivity, of deep listening (L’écoute), of some attention beyond the self or the ego, but one that may need to use those bracketed personal functions as instruments for hearing the Other’s desire.

From where I stand, at any rate, this is certainly a recipe, in all its profundity (that is, real and imagined) for the surprisingly narrow array of individuals who have arrived at the position of academic cultural critics. Then there is the last sentence, which I know is supposed to be a rhetorical flourish, and I think may be only that:

The active and theoretical passivity, the rigorous and committed self-denial, of this final subject position, which acknowledges collective desire at the same moment that it tracks its spoors and traces, may well have lessons for cultural intellectuals as well as politicians and psychoanalysts.