James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. 1998.
The basic ideas of Seeing Like a State may be expressed in two of Scott’s favorite examples. The first, used to introduce the themes of the book, is that of scientific forestry. This is basically the practice of treating a forest like a specialized kind of farm. Rather than allowing the trees to propagate in their own way in the context of a whole ecosystem, managed timber production planted the trees in rows, and systematically cleared out underbrush and fallen deadwood. This had the effect of enormously increasing both the efficiency with which the wood was harvested and, at least as important, the predictability of production. Yet it turned out that this radical simplification of the forest was simply not sustainable. 70-80 years after the practice was first introduced, the growth rate of the trees had drastically fallen. The lesson is, for Scott, clear. The simplified point of view of the state (although this also applies to other organizations with simplified incentives, such as capitalist corporations) lead to the simplification of the environment, with catastrophic results. This is itself a simplified example, and the great bulk of Scott’s book is given over to other examples of the same phenomenon: planned cities, agriculture, economy, revolution.
The second example, almost more of an anecdote, receives less attention, but is perhaps yet more revealing of Scott’s basic worldview. It is the so-called grève du zèle, or the work-to-rule strike. In such a strike, the workers do not explicitly stop working, but they rather scrupulously follow every rule and regulation, and do precisely, exclusively, the work assigned to them in their job description. In even the most ‘scientific’ and Taylorized factory, Scott says, this has the result of drastically reducing or even entirely halting production. The point here is that even in those cases in which scientific simplification appears to have had the greatest success, it in fact requires for its survival the support of what Scott calls mētis. Or, as he puts it, rationalization is always parasitic on mētis, cunning, skill, the art of muddling through, which is practical, experiential, rigorously ‘empirical,’ and neither transparent nor democratic (as rationality strives to be).
Scott’s book is a litany of catastrophes visited upon humankind by ‘high modernist’ planning, which is essentially the drive to simplify and to codify. One of Scott’s suggestive points is that ‘high modernism’ has a strong aesthetic component, so that it is apparently unable to make the rather elementary distinction between visual and other forms of order. Thus a cityscape, from a ‘high modernist’ point of view is orderly only if it appears planned, if functions are distinguished from one another, if all the units are the same (Jane Jacobs is Scott’s reference point here). The explanations he gives for why governments and certain other forms of organizations ‘prefer’ or tend toward transparent, conceptually simple and standardized solutions, makes good sense. Why this should manifest in such a strong visual aesthetic is not so clear. Scott would probably want to argue that this drive for visually manifest order at every level is an iteration or effect of the completely practical need for agents of the state to literally see the people from whom they need to extract taxes (or who might be plotting violence, or practicing the wrong religion…). What I question is really the relation between this practical need and, for instance, Le Courbusier, who even Scott would admit is an easy target. Surely a great deal of explanation must come between the aesthetic canonization of this sort of order, and the practical need for it? This seems like a more vexed question—although, arguably, also a less important one—than that of the institutional conditions under which a bureaucracy comes to be driven by incentives that are literally counter to those of the human beings over which it rules.
Also problematic is the epistemological status of mētis. Doubtless, Scott would not want to take a very firm stand on this. It just is. Scott might point especially to the example of the doctor who is able to diagnose a disease intuitively. This intuitive capacity itself cannot be codified, but through careful study the particular cues in the patient that the doctor unconsciously used were isolated, and therefore could be codified and taught. One interesting characteristic of Scott’s position here is the inversion of what I think of (perhaps incorrectly) as the Habermasian evaluations of kinds of reason. Mētis, for Scott, is pure instrumentality. It is always intimately connected to getting things done in the chaos of the world. It is empirical and practical. And, despite Scott’s prudent cautionary notes, he certainly believes it should be more highly valued than it is. The reason of state (not Scott’s phrase—he would say the vision of the state), is conceptual and rationalistic. It is not really empirical, since it tends to shape reality to itself, rather than the other way around. Its goal in this sense, is not practical, but solipsistic. Its universalistic impulse is the opposite of critical, and if it is democratic, it is in the worst possible sense. The main epistemological point here is that the movement of the world as a whole cannot be ‘mapped’ by science (hence the invocation of Borges at the beginning of the chapter on mētis). From this derives the main political lesson of the book as a whole: the state naturally strives to simplify and to codify, this is indeed its function; very bad things can happen when civil society is weakened to the point that the state is able to do this in an unrestrained fashion.
Showing posts with label modernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modernism. Show all posts
Monday, October 25, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Modern War
Modris Eksteins' Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age begins with Sergei Diaghilev in a dreamlike and timeless Venice and ends in the bunker with Hitler in Berlin, surrounded by Soviet soldiers. Eksteins is continually overstating individual points and making questionable assertions, but the broader argument of the book is straightforward and compelling. The modernist spirit present in the pre-1914 world was intensified, broadened, and transformed by the experience of the war. The Europe that emerged in 1919 is comprehensible only in these terms. Ultimately, the Nazis are themselves to be understood as a modernist phenomena, art made life and life made art, thinkable only in a world dominated by the experience of the front and the trenches.
The final pages of Rites of Spring have troubling implications that point to my larger problem with the book. In particular the fevered passages from Goebbels' diary from the very last days of the war in which we read: “Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe...In trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone” (cited on Eksteins 329). Which makes me think of the bitter irony Tony Judt suggests in Postwar—that the post-45 national and supra-national order in Europe found its stability in the massive human suffering inflicted by Hitler and Stalin. Inconvenient populations had simply been moved or eliminated; I believe the phrase from economics is 'creative destruction.'
One might have expected a less elegant and more 'theoretical' writer than Eksteins to make heavy use of the notion of trauma. Certainly the psychoanalytic idea has often been applied to the First World War, but also to wars and conflicts in general. I suspect that, if questioned on the subject, Eksteins would say that the concept of trauma is too decontextualized for his liking. The 'experience' of war described in his book is deeply contextual, depending on the world before, the world during, and the world after. It is neither a simple product of, nor abstractable from, the technical means of making war. The obvious question, though—and this is suggested only very gently by the preface of the book—must be what came after 1945. If the trauma of 1914-1918 (in the historical sense Eksteins might give the word) shapes the decades after it, what about the manifold traumas of the Second World War? Might it be argues that the First World War had a unity of experience that its sequel and continuation lacked? After all, the French, Germans, British, and to a lesser extent Americans, all fought the same sort of war on the same ground. The human cost (a polite war of saying 'body count'?) of 1939-1945 was considerably higher, in particular among noncombatants. But the shape of the war was different everywhere. Someone like Dominic LaCapra might agree that if we take the Shoah as the originary trauma of the contemporary world, it none the less imposed itself in a way totally different from the imposition of the experience of, say, Passchendaele. In what sense are both 'traumas'? I myself as skeptical of any very technical use of the term; none the less the notion of an experience or event that is repressed, that returns repeatedly, insisting on itself, that cannot be 'gotten past' but seems to call out for a 'working through' that always recedes into the distance—this is an image with descriptive power.
Given this, I'd like to ask Eksteins the question of periodization. I like already very much his suggestion that the turn is not with the guns of August, 1914. Rather, the turn takes place deep in the war, in the dark moments of 1916 when the 'true nature' of the senselessness of the war has become plain. Where is the next turn? Perhaps 1968 is a good symbolic year. In terms of Eksteins' framework, though, I think we would be better off seeing the 'lifestyle revolution' of 1968 as something like the very last gasp of the modernist paradigm enforced by the First World World. The real turn would come some time in the 1970s, with the extinguishing of this last revolutionary dream. The 'totalitarian' experience and its broken dialectic of individual and state-enforced totality, this is clearly unimaginable without the front experience. This is probably the limit of what can usefully be said about their relationship. Still, it does seem to me that Eksteins' story demands a sequel to explain how the post-war culture of the 20s and 30s confronted the new war, and the degree to which the world that came after 1945, despite the rhetoric of stunde nul, had indeed escaped from the trenches.
Rites of Spring is a book about modernism, perhaps not modernist art as such, but certainly modernism as a way of life, as an experience. Eksteins is an historian. He uses works of art in the service of a larger argument, rather than bringing history to bear on works of art. Still, there is an implicit argument about the nature of modernism: within the avant-garde, life and art become one, the rational is made to serve the irrational. This is Dada, this is fascism. As interesting comparison might be made to Arno Mayer. At various points, Eksteins insists on the bourgeois nature of the First World War. He also insists on the bourgeois nature of Germany, the most modernist of nations. I'm not convinced that the category 'bourgois' is a very important part of his argument. I think, therefore, it might be interesting, some time in the future, to compare Rites of Spring to Arno Mayer's Peristence of the Old Regime. They disagree, no doubt, about the importance of the avant-garde as a cultural formation. But that's for another day.
The final pages of Rites of Spring have troubling implications that point to my larger problem with the book. In particular the fevered passages from Goebbels' diary from the very last days of the war in which we read: “Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe...In trying to destroy Europe's future, the enemy has succeeded in smashing its past; and with that, everything old and outworn has gone” (cited on Eksteins 329). Which makes me think of the bitter irony Tony Judt suggests in Postwar—that the post-45 national and supra-national order in Europe found its stability in the massive human suffering inflicted by Hitler and Stalin. Inconvenient populations had simply been moved or eliminated; I believe the phrase from economics is 'creative destruction.'
One might have expected a less elegant and more 'theoretical' writer than Eksteins to make heavy use of the notion of trauma. Certainly the psychoanalytic idea has often been applied to the First World War, but also to wars and conflicts in general. I suspect that, if questioned on the subject, Eksteins would say that the concept of trauma is too decontextualized for his liking. The 'experience' of war described in his book is deeply contextual, depending on the world before, the world during, and the world after. It is neither a simple product of, nor abstractable from, the technical means of making war. The obvious question, though—and this is suggested only very gently by the preface of the book—must be what came after 1945. If the trauma of 1914-1918 (in the historical sense Eksteins might give the word) shapes the decades after it, what about the manifold traumas of the Second World War? Might it be argues that the First World War had a unity of experience that its sequel and continuation lacked? After all, the French, Germans, British, and to a lesser extent Americans, all fought the same sort of war on the same ground. The human cost (a polite war of saying 'body count'?) of 1939-1945 was considerably higher, in particular among noncombatants. But the shape of the war was different everywhere. Someone like Dominic LaCapra might agree that if we take the Shoah as the originary trauma of the contemporary world, it none the less imposed itself in a way totally different from the imposition of the experience of, say, Passchendaele. In what sense are both 'traumas'? I myself as skeptical of any very technical use of the term; none the less the notion of an experience or event that is repressed, that returns repeatedly, insisting on itself, that cannot be 'gotten past' but seems to call out for a 'working through' that always recedes into the distance—this is an image with descriptive power.
Given this, I'd like to ask Eksteins the question of periodization. I like already very much his suggestion that the turn is not with the guns of August, 1914. Rather, the turn takes place deep in the war, in the dark moments of 1916 when the 'true nature' of the senselessness of the war has become plain. Where is the next turn? Perhaps 1968 is a good symbolic year. In terms of Eksteins' framework, though, I think we would be better off seeing the 'lifestyle revolution' of 1968 as something like the very last gasp of the modernist paradigm enforced by the First World World. The real turn would come some time in the 1970s, with the extinguishing of this last revolutionary dream. The 'totalitarian' experience and its broken dialectic of individual and state-enforced totality, this is clearly unimaginable without the front experience. This is probably the limit of what can usefully be said about their relationship. Still, it does seem to me that Eksteins' story demands a sequel to explain how the post-war culture of the 20s and 30s confronted the new war, and the degree to which the world that came after 1945, despite the rhetoric of stunde nul, had indeed escaped from the trenches.
Rites of Spring is a book about modernism, perhaps not modernist art as such, but certainly modernism as a way of life, as an experience. Eksteins is an historian. He uses works of art in the service of a larger argument, rather than bringing history to bear on works of art. Still, there is an implicit argument about the nature of modernism: within the avant-garde, life and art become one, the rational is made to serve the irrational. This is Dada, this is fascism. As interesting comparison might be made to Arno Mayer. At various points, Eksteins insists on the bourgeois nature of the First World War. He also insists on the bourgeois nature of Germany, the most modernist of nations. I'm not convinced that the category 'bourgois' is a very important part of his argument. I think, therefore, it might be interesting, some time in the future, to compare Rites of Spring to Arno Mayer's Peristence of the Old Regime. They disagree, no doubt, about the importance of the avant-garde as a cultural formation. But that's for another day.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
The Persistence of the Marxist Paradigm
Mayer, Arno J. The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. Pantheon Books. 1981.
The Persistence of the Old Regime is an interpretive historical essay that at its heart is an explanation for the disjunction between the promise of ‘advanced’ European civilization in the 19th century, and the 30 year war of 1914-1945 that essentially ended this civilization. Mayer’s argument, constantly reiterated, is that the aristocrats never went away. Nobilitarian structures of sociability and authority, the weight of agrarian economic power, the ‘human material’ of the aristocracy, all retained enormous importance through the 19th century. The old elite elements of the ruling classes reasserted their authority in the face of challenges in the years after 1900. In short, “the Great War was an expression of the decline and fall of the old order fighting to prolong its life rather than of the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy” (4). Historians have been wrong to see the 19th century as that of the rising bourgeoisie, “the economically radical bourgeoisie was as obsequious in cultural life as it was in social relations and political behavior” (192). This argument relies on the mobilization of a very broad range of secondary material, but a few important names are Joseph Schumpeter, Norbert Elias, and, in a more oblique manner, Carl Schorske. The argument is something like a European-wide application of the version of the German sonderweg thesis that blames Germany’s peculiar history on incomplete modernization.
I’ve run across referenced to this book in a few places, but most often in Frederic Jameson. Mayer is clearly putting forward a radical revision of the standard Marxist interpretation of the 19th century and the causes of the First World War. The question is, to my mind, then not so much what is the contemporary historiographical importance of this book—it might well have been a provocation to the ‘new social history’ of the 1980s, but the very historical categories with which it works, such as ‘bourgeoisie’ have been by now more or less run out of the field—as it is what place it has in contemporary Marxism. Probably I have already the answer to this question: it is as a foundational work for the kind of Marxist literary analysis for which Jameson is best known. The imagine Mayer gives us of the 1890s and on provides an excellent frame in which to discuss cultural modernism. It is not, I therefore think, a coincidence that France is both a problematic case for Mayer, and for ‘modernism’ as an analytic category in the history of literature.
Since I am most interested in France, I’ll talk about it, although I don’t exactly mean to criticize Mayer here, since his scope is much larger. France is problematic in obvious ways. It was the only republic among the European great powers. The monarchy and the aristocracy had been officially dissolved with great violence during the Revolution, and were then reconstituted and once again dissolved several times. In the 1870s, one of the conditions for the possibility of the Republic was that the monarchists were divided among themselves and relatively weak. The Second Empire certainly had an aristocracy, but it was much debased. The two places Mayer can with confidence say the old aristocracy retained some power were the social world—le tout Paris—and in military and foreign affairs. For Mayer, then, Proust’s novel would be read not so much for its evidence of social change and arrivisme, but rather as a portrait of the enormous influence still wielded by the aristocracy, and the desperate attempts of the upper bourgeoisie to imitate its social betters. The empire was the provenance of the nobles and therefore at the disposal of the Catholic Church. I am willing to entertain this thesis, although I think it’s hard to deny the republicanism of the empire in the 1890s and after.
Mayer also places a classical education, literary classicism, and nationalism, in the camp of the old regime. This I don’t think can really be sustained for the case of France. Certainly, all of these were claimed by the ‘conservative bloc,’ but the école normale was simply not an institution of the old regime. It was republican through and through, which is not to say that it was not conservative—in a sense it was—but this is a bourgeois institution if there ever was one. The elites it reproduced were radically separate to anything that might with plausibility be called the nobility. They were nationalist, certainly, but the Republic survived because it was able to convince so many people that it was coextensive with the nation. Literary classicism, similarly, may have been claimed by the Maurras and his fellow travelers, but it was certainly not equal to them. The literary institutions of the Third Republic were, again, in a sense conservative, but I would call this a conservatism fundamental to any institutional structure, not at all one that points back to the aristocracy. Proust is an exception here, not a rule—and of course if he was hypnotized by the aristocrats, it is just because he wasn’t one. Mayer in general is eager to read the cultural elitism of assimilated Jews all over Europe as an attempt to get as close to the aristocrats as possible, given their basic exclusion, rather than as an investment in a genuinely alternative elite. I am inclined, in France but also Germany and Austria, to take the latter perspective. Not to be picky, but my trust in Mayer (which is to say, in the secondary accounts on which he relies) is undermined by odd miss-evaluations, such as putting Alfred Fouillée into the box of academics expounding “somewhat more orderly versions of the baleful creed of permanent struggle, elitism, and unreason” (295). Fouillée is not like Renan, de Lapouge, Haeckel, or Gumplowitz. Rather than being a grand-uncle to fascism, he is the grand-father of the welfare state. The fact that he coined the phrase, used several times by Mayer, ‘idée-force,’ with its superficially Nietzschean overtones, does not stop him from being, in fact, the 19th century philosopher of conciliation and compromise.
Although I’m less knowledgeable about this than I should be, I also found that Mayer’s account of the French economy did not exactly support his thesis. In the French context, he often slides into the use of the word ‘notable,’ rather than ‘noble,’ and indeed the two are not the same. Mayer marshals the evidence that the French economy did not have a massive heavy industry sector, was not dynamic in the way Germany or Britain’s industry was. Agriculture remained important, but also undercapitalized. Evidence of the political power of the well-to-do peasant does not, it seems to me, constitute evidence that the nobles were in control. Again, it was precisely because the Third Republic was able to convince this sector of the population to support it that it was able to survive. No doubt, I should read Herman Lebovic’s The Alliance of Iron and Wheat.
I am, in general, sympathetic to Mayer’s basic point that in order to understand historical change, we must think also about what failed to change. I am also, in the end, sympathetic to the claim that the best explanatory framework for Europe’s descent into what was manifestly an insane war is the increasingly desperate series of attempts made by the old elites to retain political power. Mayer’s argument makes the least sense to me in the realm at which I think it is in the end aimed, that is, culture. He constantly explains away instances of avant-gardism by saying that they were ‘over-perceived’ at the time. I again agree with the basic criticism that art and literary histories tend to exaggerate the contemporary importance of certain innovators (generally in the service of a teleology of one sort or another), and ignore the weight of ‘academic’ work. Still, I can’t really get past Mayer’s dismissal of the radicalism of, say, The Rite of Spring. His framework, perhaps because it is Marxist, is too ready to evacuate of revolutionary content the very real formal innovations taking place at this moment. The implication that modernism, as a style, is a sort of sublimated obeisance to the ancient aristocracy simply doesn’t convince. In the end, the question I'm left with is how much explanatory power remains in the Marxist--as opposed to that derived from Weber or Elias--part of Mayer's analysis?
The Persistence of the Old Regime is an interpretive historical essay that at its heart is an explanation for the disjunction between the promise of ‘advanced’ European civilization in the 19th century, and the 30 year war of 1914-1945 that essentially ended this civilization. Mayer’s argument, constantly reiterated, is that the aristocrats never went away. Nobilitarian structures of sociability and authority, the weight of agrarian economic power, the ‘human material’ of the aristocracy, all retained enormous importance through the 19th century. The old elite elements of the ruling classes reasserted their authority in the face of challenges in the years after 1900. In short, “the Great War was an expression of the decline and fall of the old order fighting to prolong its life rather than of the explosive rise of industrial capitalism bent on imposing its primacy” (4). Historians have been wrong to see the 19th century as that of the rising bourgeoisie, “the economically radical bourgeoisie was as obsequious in cultural life as it was in social relations and political behavior” (192). This argument relies on the mobilization of a very broad range of secondary material, but a few important names are Joseph Schumpeter, Norbert Elias, and, in a more oblique manner, Carl Schorske. The argument is something like a European-wide application of the version of the German sonderweg thesis that blames Germany’s peculiar history on incomplete modernization.
I’ve run across referenced to this book in a few places, but most often in Frederic Jameson. Mayer is clearly putting forward a radical revision of the standard Marxist interpretation of the 19th century and the causes of the First World War. The question is, to my mind, then not so much what is the contemporary historiographical importance of this book—it might well have been a provocation to the ‘new social history’ of the 1980s, but the very historical categories with which it works, such as ‘bourgeoisie’ have been by now more or less run out of the field—as it is what place it has in contemporary Marxism. Probably I have already the answer to this question: it is as a foundational work for the kind of Marxist literary analysis for which Jameson is best known. The imagine Mayer gives us of the 1890s and on provides an excellent frame in which to discuss cultural modernism. It is not, I therefore think, a coincidence that France is both a problematic case for Mayer, and for ‘modernism’ as an analytic category in the history of literature.
Since I am most interested in France, I’ll talk about it, although I don’t exactly mean to criticize Mayer here, since his scope is much larger. France is problematic in obvious ways. It was the only republic among the European great powers. The monarchy and the aristocracy had been officially dissolved with great violence during the Revolution, and were then reconstituted and once again dissolved several times. In the 1870s, one of the conditions for the possibility of the Republic was that the monarchists were divided among themselves and relatively weak. The Second Empire certainly had an aristocracy, but it was much debased. The two places Mayer can with confidence say the old aristocracy retained some power were the social world—le tout Paris—and in military and foreign affairs. For Mayer, then, Proust’s novel would be read not so much for its evidence of social change and arrivisme, but rather as a portrait of the enormous influence still wielded by the aristocracy, and the desperate attempts of the upper bourgeoisie to imitate its social betters. The empire was the provenance of the nobles and therefore at the disposal of the Catholic Church. I am willing to entertain this thesis, although I think it’s hard to deny the republicanism of the empire in the 1890s and after.
Mayer also places a classical education, literary classicism, and nationalism, in the camp of the old regime. This I don’t think can really be sustained for the case of France. Certainly, all of these were claimed by the ‘conservative bloc,’ but the école normale was simply not an institution of the old regime. It was republican through and through, which is not to say that it was not conservative—in a sense it was—but this is a bourgeois institution if there ever was one. The elites it reproduced were radically separate to anything that might with plausibility be called the nobility. They were nationalist, certainly, but the Republic survived because it was able to convince so many people that it was coextensive with the nation. Literary classicism, similarly, may have been claimed by the Maurras and his fellow travelers, but it was certainly not equal to them. The literary institutions of the Third Republic were, again, in a sense conservative, but I would call this a conservatism fundamental to any institutional structure, not at all one that points back to the aristocracy. Proust is an exception here, not a rule—and of course if he was hypnotized by the aristocrats, it is just because he wasn’t one. Mayer in general is eager to read the cultural elitism of assimilated Jews all over Europe as an attempt to get as close to the aristocrats as possible, given their basic exclusion, rather than as an investment in a genuinely alternative elite. I am inclined, in France but also Germany and Austria, to take the latter perspective. Not to be picky, but my trust in Mayer (which is to say, in the secondary accounts on which he relies) is undermined by odd miss-evaluations, such as putting Alfred Fouillée into the box of academics expounding “somewhat more orderly versions of the baleful creed of permanent struggle, elitism, and unreason” (295). Fouillée is not like Renan, de Lapouge, Haeckel, or Gumplowitz. Rather than being a grand-uncle to fascism, he is the grand-father of the welfare state. The fact that he coined the phrase, used several times by Mayer, ‘idée-force,’ with its superficially Nietzschean overtones, does not stop him from being, in fact, the 19th century philosopher of conciliation and compromise.
Although I’m less knowledgeable about this than I should be, I also found that Mayer’s account of the French economy did not exactly support his thesis. In the French context, he often slides into the use of the word ‘notable,’ rather than ‘noble,’ and indeed the two are not the same. Mayer marshals the evidence that the French economy did not have a massive heavy industry sector, was not dynamic in the way Germany or Britain’s industry was. Agriculture remained important, but also undercapitalized. Evidence of the political power of the well-to-do peasant does not, it seems to me, constitute evidence that the nobles were in control. Again, it was precisely because the Third Republic was able to convince this sector of the population to support it that it was able to survive. No doubt, I should read Herman Lebovic’s The Alliance of Iron and Wheat.
I am, in general, sympathetic to Mayer’s basic point that in order to understand historical change, we must think also about what failed to change. I am also, in the end, sympathetic to the claim that the best explanatory framework for Europe’s descent into what was manifestly an insane war is the increasingly desperate series of attempts made by the old elites to retain political power. Mayer’s argument makes the least sense to me in the realm at which I think it is in the end aimed, that is, culture. He constantly explains away instances of avant-gardism by saying that they were ‘over-perceived’ at the time. I again agree with the basic criticism that art and literary histories tend to exaggerate the contemporary importance of certain innovators (generally in the service of a teleology of one sort or another), and ignore the weight of ‘academic’ work. Still, I can’t really get past Mayer’s dismissal of the radicalism of, say, The Rite of Spring. His framework, perhaps because it is Marxist, is too ready to evacuate of revolutionary content the very real formal innovations taking place at this moment. The implication that modernism, as a style, is a sort of sublimated obeisance to the ancient aristocracy simply doesn’t convince. In the end, the question I'm left with is how much explanatory power remains in the Marxist--as opposed to that derived from Weber or Elias--part of Mayer's analysis?
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Secret Agent
[I think I am obliged to say: spoilers]
The characterization, the plotting, and the prose in The Secret Agent are all slightly off—unbalanced.
There is a remarkable degree of depth in the interactions between different characters. The air fairly vibrates with code between any given characters. Even the (somewhat unbelievable) chance encounter between ‘the professor’ and Inspector Heat in a side-street is painted from, as it were, all sides. The long and excruciating scene toward the end of the novel between Verloc and Winnie, during which she is entirely quiet, is masterful (made, I think, for the stage). And yet the characters are not only more interesting interacting with one another than by themselves, they are only interesting when interacting. The criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso is mentioned by one of the characters, Ossian, at the beginning and the end of the book. The reference is more, I think, than local 1890s intellectual color. Ossian’s diagnosis of Stevie as a ‘perfect-type’ is cruel; his sudden realization that Winnie is very like her brother is, to say the least, self-serving. My knowledge of Lombroso’s work is second-hand, but it seems to me that Conrad has essentially drawn his characters from Lombroso’s types. I compare the novel with, say, Thèrese Raquin. Zola certainly made explicit use of anthropological types—but his characters are, I want to say, painted alone, while Conrad’s are always painted together.
It is hard to see by what principle, exactly, is the plot narrated. Suspense, but by no means in the usual way; the suspense is not about what will in fact happen, but about the revelation of what has happened. It is not that the whole plot is given at the beginning, but rather that we know long before we are told, that Verloc will set the bomb. We know, long before we are told, that Stevie will die—then we must wait, and wait, for this truth to come out, and its consequences to unfold. Conrad goes out of his way to telegraph the presence of the knife; but as we wait for Winnie to kill Verloc, we are really waiting for her character to reach the point at which this is possible, rather than for the deed itself. Similarly, we do not wait for Ossian to abandon Winnie, but to see what Winnie will do after. Yet I do not mean to say that the plot of the book is driven by changes in character, or that ‘plot-points’ are moments in the development of the characters.
The prose itself is playful and mocking. It is aware of the double role that each word and sentence has in moving forward the story, and also as a distinct object in a field of other objects. This, I think, is the source for the peculiar and oft-repeated double-use of words. As example drawn at random, of a whole paragraph:
This paragraph is built like some kind of sonnet. Short sentence/long sentence, the two rhymed with ‘crusade.’ The punctuation of the emptied-‘it’ that he has at heard. Long sentence/short sentence, this time rhymed with ‘walked...home.’ Then three ‘room’s in a row for no reason at all but the sentiment of circulation and the sound. Then the last sentence provides movement and contains four different people.
In other places, Conrad plays with his level of discourse. This can mean veering rapidly from over-purple to colloquial. Or in a more Auerbachian sense, it can mean mixing up mode of address and content: ‘Moreover, he was dead.’
My feeling is that these discursive and narrative peculiarities of Conrad’s will begin to make sense as an ensemble if I am able to think out more clearly the historical meaning of the text. I know relatively little about Conrad’s body of work. The Secret Agent was written in 1906, and seems to be ‘set’ in the 1890s. It has the obvious themes of farcical revolutionaries and clumsily repressive states. Various approaches to life within modernity are showcased, from the police inspector to the Nietzschean bomb-maker. Empire is present with varying levels of intensity throughout the book. There is no doubt some kind of overt anglophilia at work as well, despite the general impression that London is a swamp where it is always night. These themes are all too much on the surface. Thematic analysis and formal analysis can be, I think in this case ought to be, filled out through historical contextualization.
Although I hesitate to use the word, Conrad is standing on the brink of modernism. He is obviously more nearly modern than Zola or other French ‘naturalists,’ from whom he is borrowing. All the pieces of the narrative, I want to say, are old, but he has woven these patterns in new thread. It would be easy to go through the text and point out parallels with various forms of modern art (as people have done, I think without interesting result, for Virginia Woolf and Proust). One of the things this means is formal experimentation and self-consciousness. Conrad is certainly doing these things. Hypothesis: the level of Conrad’s experimentation and self-consciousness is the naturalist generic convention.
The characterization, the plotting, and the prose in The Secret Agent are all slightly off—unbalanced.
There is a remarkable degree of depth in the interactions between different characters. The air fairly vibrates with code between any given characters. Even the (somewhat unbelievable) chance encounter between ‘the professor’ and Inspector Heat in a side-street is painted from, as it were, all sides. The long and excruciating scene toward the end of the novel between Verloc and Winnie, during which she is entirely quiet, is masterful (made, I think, for the stage). And yet the characters are not only more interesting interacting with one another than by themselves, they are only interesting when interacting. The criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso is mentioned by one of the characters, Ossian, at the beginning and the end of the book. The reference is more, I think, than local 1890s intellectual color. Ossian’s diagnosis of Stevie as a ‘perfect-type’ is cruel; his sudden realization that Winnie is very like her brother is, to say the least, self-serving. My knowledge of Lombroso’s work is second-hand, but it seems to me that Conrad has essentially drawn his characters from Lombroso’s types. I compare the novel with, say, Thèrese Raquin. Zola certainly made explicit use of anthropological types—but his characters are, I want to say, painted alone, while Conrad’s are always painted together.
It is hard to see by what principle, exactly, is the plot narrated. Suspense, but by no means in the usual way; the suspense is not about what will in fact happen, but about the revelation of what has happened. It is not that the whole plot is given at the beginning, but rather that we know long before we are told, that Verloc will set the bomb. We know, long before we are told, that Stevie will die—then we must wait, and wait, for this truth to come out, and its consequences to unfold. Conrad goes out of his way to telegraph the presence of the knife; but as we wait for Winnie to kill Verloc, we are really waiting for her character to reach the point at which this is possible, rather than for the deed itself. Similarly, we do not wait for Ossian to abandon Winnie, but to see what Winnie will do after. Yet I do not mean to say that the plot of the book is driven by changes in character, or that ‘plot-points’ are moments in the development of the characters.
The prose itself is playful and mocking. It is aware of the double role that each word and sentence has in moving forward the story, and also as a distinct object in a field of other objects. This, I think, is the source for the peculiar and oft-repeated double-use of words. As example drawn at random, of a whole paragraph:
“He had his own crusading instincts. This affair, which, in one way or another, disgusted Chief Inspector Heat, seemed to him a providentially given starting-point for a crusade. He had it much at heart to begin. He walked slowly home, meditating that enterprise on the way, and thinking over Mr Verloc’s psychology in a composite mood of repugnance and satisfaction. He walked all the way home. Finding the drawing-room dark, he went upstairs, and spent some time between the bed-room and the dressing-room, changing his clothes, going to and fro with the air of a thoughtful somnambulist. But he shook it off before going out again to join his wife at the house of the great lady patroness of Michaelis” (pg 176).
This paragraph is built like some kind of sonnet. Short sentence/long sentence, the two rhymed with ‘crusade.’ The punctuation of the emptied-‘it’ that he has at heard. Long sentence/short sentence, this time rhymed with ‘walked...home.’ Then three ‘room’s in a row for no reason at all but the sentiment of circulation and the sound. Then the last sentence provides movement and contains four different people.
In other places, Conrad plays with his level of discourse. This can mean veering rapidly from over-purple to colloquial. Or in a more Auerbachian sense, it can mean mixing up mode of address and content: ‘Moreover, he was dead.’
My feeling is that these discursive and narrative peculiarities of Conrad’s will begin to make sense as an ensemble if I am able to think out more clearly the historical meaning of the text. I know relatively little about Conrad’s body of work. The Secret Agent was written in 1906, and seems to be ‘set’ in the 1890s. It has the obvious themes of farcical revolutionaries and clumsily repressive states. Various approaches to life within modernity are showcased, from the police inspector to the Nietzschean bomb-maker. Empire is present with varying levels of intensity throughout the book. There is no doubt some kind of overt anglophilia at work as well, despite the general impression that London is a swamp where it is always night. These themes are all too much on the surface. Thematic analysis and formal analysis can be, I think in this case ought to be, filled out through historical contextualization.
Although I hesitate to use the word, Conrad is standing on the brink of modernism. He is obviously more nearly modern than Zola or other French ‘naturalists,’ from whom he is borrowing. All the pieces of the narrative, I want to say, are old, but he has woven these patterns in new thread. It would be easy to go through the text and point out parallels with various forms of modern art (as people have done, I think without interesting result, for Virginia Woolf and Proust). One of the things this means is formal experimentation and self-consciousness. Conrad is certainly doing these things. Hypothesis: the level of Conrad’s experimentation and self-consciousness is the naturalist generic convention.
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