Burn the manuscript

From the Chronicle, about the sit-ins at Columbia, and associated depredations (h/t to Cliopatria):

Like other faculty members, Ranum scrambled to stop the sit-ins. Unlike any of them, he did so in full academic regalia, climbing through the window of President Grayson Kirk's office, in Low Memorial Library, wearing, as usual, a flowing black gown.

"I did that as dramatically as I could," Ranum said. "I was in fine shape, and I was interested in the demonstrators as a political historian. To me the world is a laboratory to understand the past." Once inside Low, he concluded that Rudd, although a strong leader and a superb tactician, had only a limited grasp of issues, including the issue of whether it was legitimate to use violence to advance the radical cause.

"I explained that they should get out of there, that the possibility for their punishment would go up the longer they stayed, and, if they did get out now, this might be treated more as a prank than as a political act," Ranum told the university's oral-history project about a month later. "I held over their heads, as dramatically and forcefully as I could, the possibility of a counterrevolution at Columbia, and I said that the United States is a fundamentally liberal society but with politically conservative, authoritarian elements, and that, rather than accept a radicalized university, the society would snuff out the university—and that I for one would prefer the existing state to the totalitarian state which a counterrevolution would bring about."

Neither argument had any effect on the protesters, who believed that the people of Harlem were going to rise up and join the demonstration, turning a campus rebellion into a biracial revolt. To Ranum, that was fanciful thinking. The radicals, most of them upper-middle-class white kids, spoke a language most Harlem residents would find incomprehensible: the language of Marxism. They regarded the university as the "soft underbelly" of capitalism and believed shutting it down would provoke change. "They did not want to come out, I believe, except by the police," Ranum told the oral-history project. "They needed the issue of the police. They needed the issue of police brutality, further to radicalize the campus."

David B. Truman, the popular, energetic dean whom Kirk put in charge of handling the crisis, had come to the same conclusion. "Calling the police would have given the SDS the confrontation that for months and longer they had been seeking. It would also have activated the strong faculty aversion to having the police on campus," he wrote in his unpublished memoirs. When the police were finally called in, a week after the building occupations began, things went as disastrously as Truman had expected. More than 700 people were arrested, and nearly 150 were injured in the violence that accompanied the raid.

The raid produced an angry backlash against the university and generated enormous sympathy for the protesters. Rudd and the SDS chapter were propelled to national prominence, making them de facto leaders of the New Left. But the student members still faced suspension or expulsion for their role in the rebellion, and they had it in for Ranum, who, after meeting with them in Low Library, had put out a mimeographed statement saying that the only alternative to police action would be for the students occupying the buildings to seize control of the demonstration from SDS.

I'm interested here in the shifting emphasis and valuation of personal, in the most concrete, almost physiological sense--flowing robes, prestige--and quite abstracted political motives. Accusations of hypocrisy on one side, ambition and stupidity on the other; claims to political 'seriousness' on both. A professor getting out of place by giving political advice to students and students getting quite literally out of place (setting scholarship on fire). The soft underbelly of capitalism is at least as confused and 'ideological' an idea as the belief that reasoned discourse prevails in university administration. What a comfortingly ambiguous and meaningless footnote on the late 1960s.

squabbling children

...und die sich durch den Widerspruch mit sich selbst die Freude erkaufen, miteinander im Widerspruche zu bleiben.

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. $205

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?

International Hegel

Some questions I want to ask, in order of increasing importance about Alexandre Kojève’s reading (taken from the introductory essay, pgs 11-34 of the larger book), of the Master-Slave dialectic: translation, source, portability.

I know that in the 1860s, a first translation of various parts of Hegel’s corpus, including the Phenomenology was made into French by an Italian philosopher named Augusto Verà. It is said to be a terrible translation, and the little of it that I have looked at has lead me to think the same thing. A new translation was made by Jean Hyppolite (it was not, as Hyppolite’s wikipedia.fr entry says, in fact the first), but my understanding is that this was done after, or at least in tandem with, the seminar. What, then, is the relation of the French text we get in Kojève’s introduction to Hyppolite’s later translation? A few hours of real research (I’d look at Roth’s book, and a few others) would clear all that up. As I read through, I’d thought that I was noticing discrepancies, in particular with Kojève’s use of the phrase “la négativité-négatrice,” but looking back to the two that I noted, things are not so inconsistent as I thought—although I still don’t quite understand why, in $194, Hegel’s phrase “die absolute Negativität” (which Pinkard renders, “absolute negativity”), is given in French as “la négativité-négatrice absolu.” Going through systematically would be time-consuming and redundant. Should have done it the first time around.

Where does this way of thinking about Hegel come from? At first, I was unconvinced that Kovève’s reading had very much to do with the original text—and still I’m curious about how well it fits with the remainder of the Phenomenology—but in the end I am convinced by Kojève’s ability to make sense out of enormously obscure language that he must be onto something. I have a superficial understanding, from various reading around this famous seminar, that Kojève is in some sense using Heidegger to read Hegel as a commentator on Marx. I see quite clearly the sense in which this reading of Hegel does things to Marx. I do not yet understand precisely where Heidegger fits into things. Perhaps the terrifying passages on existential disintegration as the first step on the path to authentic human being?

Finally, portability. On the one hand, it is pretty obvious that this text from 1939 contains much that will be important for Sartre, but more interestingly, Lacan. I was in fact most surprised by the degree to which Kojève’s way of thinking about the nature of the Master authorizes what I understand of Lacan’s approach to psychoanalysis. This is entirely aside from the use of ‘jouissance’ as a technical term in Kojève, as well as the related dialectics of desire and recognition. Obviously, these are all yet more crucial for Lacan than Sartre. The idea of emancipatory totalitarianism works better as a tool to explode the clinical relationship from within than it does as, say, politics. In the end, it is very difficult to read, “c’est par le travail effectué dans l’angoisse au service du Maître que l’Esclave se libère de l’angoisse qui l’asservissait au Maître” (31) without thinking, “Arbeit macht frei.”

on the use and usury of time

E. P. Thompson, 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism', Past & Present, 38 (1967), pp 56-97.

E. P. Thompson is always worth reading. I’ve just read through the above article, and have three observations. First, in some ways we historians have progressed very little since the open Marxism of the 1960s. Cited in Thompson’s essay are, among others, Henri Lefebvre and Lucien Febvre, but also Pierre Bourdieu and Andre Gunder Frank. These authors are all still important methodological references.

Second, might we take this essay as a starting point for an anthropology, or anthropologizing, of Marx’s labor time theory of value? Is this how Thompson intended it? Were there discussions of this sort of thing any longer in the 1960s? My ignorance here is staggering. It seems to me that it would be possible to argue that although Marx’s theory of value is clearly an abstraction, it does, must, have some basis in actual practice. In tracing the history of time as a measure of work, Thompson traced the foundation of the genuinely capitalist world, since this time discipline was generated both by mechanical necessity (literally, by work with machines), but also for the effective market unification toward which capital tends. Certainly, Thompson in this article shows a complex interplay of economic and cultural forces that in part generated the economic world from which Marx’s deduced theory of value. The trick would be getting closer to an understanding of the field of historical applicability for Marx’s edifice.

Which comes to the third point. Thompson himself, in the ‘political’ epilog to the article, sounds quite dated, and reveals, perhaps, a Marxist worldview to betray his empirical sensitivity. Describing his own world, that is the 1960s, he says, “if the purposive notation of time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the barriers between work and life” (pg 95). When people talk about ‘post-industrial society,’ in particularly regarding the internet, I imagine what they want to indicate is exactly why this sentiment no longer makes any sense at all.

Reading the Phenomenology

For reasons having to do with my dissertation, the time has finally come to acquaint myself a little with Hegel. The place to begin is clearly the Phenomenology. It isn’t the first time I’ve begun this book, but the reason this time is stronger. I have the standard Miller translation, but I have decided to refer to it only secondarily. My intention is to read first from the work-in-progress translation Terry Pinkard has put online. This one has the English and German running alongside one another in facing columns—which is about right given my level of German. Hegel’s Phenomenology is precisely the kind of reading for which I first tried to get into the habit of posting notes publicly. In particular, it is a book so covered over by previous interpretation and reputation that even I, who have no particular investment in it, must work actively to read it honestly. The thought, then, is to provide here sequential reading notes, sometimes simply citations or questions.

Once upon a time, I was cautioned that the preface to this book was written last and should therefore be read last. So I have begun with the introduction. The combination of Hegel’s central position in post-Kantian philosophical modernity and the obscurity of his prose allows me to read him almost entirely out of context, as a contemporary, speaking directly to anyone undertaking philosophical reflection. It is exhilarating, as though the positions he is attacking are the very ones that I myself have moved through. This feeling is on the one hand surely something Hegel sought to evoke from the reader, and therefore makes the reading more entertaining, but is also, on the other hand, probably deceptive. The arguments are no doubt lightly coded attacks on specific doctrines, schools, individuals, texts.

Hegel begins with what will turn out to be the falsely posed problem of the ground of cognition, Erkennen, “whether it is to be viewed either as the instrument [Werkzeug] with which one takes possession of the absolute, or as the means [Mittel] by which one catches a glimpse of it” ($73). Various traps are pointed out and avoided. Among them, in a turn of phrase that one imagines was often directed at postmodernism, is a certain kind of skepticism: “The presupposition which calls itself the fear of errors thus reveals itself to be more likely the fear of truth” ($74). Later, a variety of theoretical pride that is probably, rightly explained, dear to the academic left, “The only difference between abiding by the authority of others or abiding by one’s own convictions in a system of opinions and prejudices lies solely in the vanity inherent in the latter” ($78). I take $73-78 to be essentially a trial and rejection of current and possible ways of entering into philosophy, in particular the bad forms of skepticism.

At the end of $78, then, we have, “in directing itself to the entire range of phenomenal consciousness [den ganzen Umfang des erscheinenden Bewusstseins], skepticism makes spirit for the first time competent to investigate [geschickt zu prüfen] what is the truth.” In the next paragraph, Hegel distinguishes between a skepticism that results in pure nothingness [“reine Nichts”], and one that results in determinate [“bestimmtes”] nothingness, which is to say, “the nothingness which is taken as the nothingness of that from which it emerges” ($79). This determinate nothingness, which I suspect is later on to be recovered by Marxists (Engels’ much-mocked ‘negation of the negation, and then Sartre’s (Kojevian?) rehabilitation of it), makes sense.

I’m lost, though, as to quite what is the point of the next section ($80)—I take it to be part of a polemic with one or another of the other post-Kantians. In particular, I’m mystified by the invocation of physical human finitude and its relation to consciousness, “What is limited to a natural life is not on its own capable of going beyond its immediate existence. However, it is driven out of itself by something other than itself, and this being torn out of itself is its death. However, consciousness is for itself its concept, and as a result it immediately goes beyond the restriction, and, since this restriction belongs to itself, it goes beyond itself too.” Now, here I’m already glad for the German, because both Pinkard and Miller end the sentence there, whereas Hegel breaks the thought with a semicolon, continuing, “In its own eyes, in positing the singular individual, it at the same time posits the other-worldly beyond, even if it is still only posited as it is in spatial intuition, that is, as existing only alongside the restriction.” Two things confuse me here. On the one hand, quite clearly, Hegel is putting consciousness into the physical world. Is this simply a reference to a debased form of the transcendence of consciousness, that is, religion? Consciousness goes beyond itself even in imagining that there is a heaven above, and a hell below? Are we being told here only that simple life is limited by death (which is perhaps not the other, but certainly other), whereas consciousness is sufficient unto itself, in that it contains both its limits and the overcoming of them? Are we simply being told that consciousness is somehow superior to, above, freed from, mere life? That seems simplistic.

Leaving aside the issue of finitude, the point is, “Consciousness distinguishes something from itself and at the same time it relates itself to it” ($82). This section gives us what seem to be crucial formal definitions, “There is something for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, that is, of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowledge. However, we distinguish being-in-itself from this being for another; what is related to knowledge is likewise distinguished from it and is also posited as existing external to this relation; the aspect of this in-itself is called truth.” All this is, as it were, bracketed, because “our object is phenomenal knowledge” ($82). This is one formulation of a correspondence theory of truth. Being for consciousness is distinguished from being in itself. The former is the realm of knowledge, the latter the realm of truth.

$83, then, is a statement on epistemology. In investigating the truth of knowledge, Hegel says, we do not investigate the thing in itself, but rather the nature of its being for us, “what we would assert to be its essence [that is, of knowledge] would not be its truth but rather merely our knowledge of it.” We look for a standard for the truth of knowledge, but this standard can only ever be in us, and not in the truth as it is for itself. There must be, again, layers of post-Kantian conflict here that escape me.

Consciousness does not have this problem, “Consciousness in itself provides its own standard...consciousness has the determinateness of the moments of knowledge in itself” ($84). This much, I believe makes sense to me. There then follow some sentences outlining a possible reversal of the normal scheme of knowledge-truth relations. Usually, knowledge is the concept that one seeks to make correspond to truth as an object. That is, I have a conceptual knowledge of a microwave oven, say, which either corresponds or does not to how a microwave oven in truth functions. Except Hegel is talking now not about this sort of object, but rather about consciousness; so that he is able to make a reversal—what if we take the essence of the object as the concept, and then take the concept as it is for another to be the object—“then the examination consists in our seeing whether the object corresponds to its concept.” Then, frustratingly, “one clearly sees that both are the same,” but are also both “fall within the knowledge which we are investigating” ($84).

The point of this, I understand, is that consciousness has within itself both these moments. The in-itself and the for-itself are both in consciousness. Consciousness does not need, this is to say, any kind of access to the in-itself of an object to know that the object for-consciousness is incomplete, “since it therefore finds in the object itself that its knowledge of the object is not in correspondence with it, the object itself does not persist” ($85). I take the point of this passage and those following to be that any act of knowing contains already within itself implicit criticisms of the standards and means by which one knows, of the limits of knowing. I understand this as a broadly Kantian point.

The crucial move, then, is really in $86, with the introduction of two terms, dialectic, and experience [Erfahrung – as opposed to Erlebnis]. The dissolution of the object described previously is now re-described,

“This dialectical movement is what consciousness practices on itself as well as on its knowledge and its object, and, insofar as, to consciousness, the new, true object arises out of this movement, this dialectical movement is what is genuinely called experience.”

This sentence is rendered in Miller as, “Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience.”

For completeness, here is the German: “Diese dialektische Bewegung, welche das Bewusststein an ihm selbst, sowohl an seinem Wissen als an seinem Gegenstande ausübt, insofern ihm der neue wahre Gegenstand daraus entspringt, ist eigentlich dasjenige, was Erfahrung gennant wird.”

I reproduce all three here because this is a pretty good example of how Pinkard’s translation seems to me to be closer to the German. The grammar is more elaborate (but so is Hegel’s), and so perhaps less easily readable than Miller’s, but it is also significantly more accurate. Here, for instance, ‘ausübt’ clearly takes ‘Bewusstein’ as subject and object, along with ‘Wissen’ and ‘Gegenstand.’ Miller’s translation is simply inaccurate, introducing the original verb ‘affects.’ Pinkard might be faulted for filling in Hegel’s referents, that is, replacing ‘it’ with ‘movement’ and so forth. The choice of translation for ‘ausübt’ between ‘practice’ and ‘exercise’ might be said to be purely ideological.

In the next section, this dialectical experience is distinguished from normal experience. If I understand this correctly, the point is that one’s knowledge of an object through experience is proved false normally through the addition of another object. This usually happens, in fact, fortuitously. The fortuitous nature of the normal path of consciousness is going to be abstracted from the exposition in this book, in order to give us a scientific understanding (rather than, perhaps, a novelistic one) of the development of consciousness. We get, I think, a sketch of the formal method of the book,

“In each and every case of a non-truthful knowledge, all the results which come about may not simply converge into some kind of empty nothingness; rather, each result must necessarily be apprehended as the nullity of that of which it is the result, a result which contains whatever truth the proceeding knowledge has in itself. Here it presents itself as follows. Since what at first appeared as the object for consciousness descends into a knowledge of the object, and the in-itself becomes a being-for-consciousness of the in-itself, this latter is the new object. As a result a new shape of consciousness also emerges for which the essence is something different from what was the essence for the proceeding shape. It is this circumstance which guides the whole succession of the shapes of consciousness in their necessity...For consciousness, what has emerged exists merely as the object, whereas for us, what has emerged exists at the same time as a movement and a coming-to-be.” ($87).

We might understand this as the formalization, or the becoming-science, of consciousness itself, “this path to science is itself already science” ($88). The book, which will be the exposition of the stations of consciousness, will therefore also be the essence of consciousness itself, “Finally, when consciousness itself grasps its essence, consciousness will indicate the nature of absolute knowledge itself” ($89). There’s the end of the introduction.

Brown v Agamben

V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249.

This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Patterson’s categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from new world slavery to see this.

Brown’s real goal, though, is deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reaper’s Garden, Brown wants to retell the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make this argument in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly, it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like, Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity.

One effect of Brown’s argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective such as that taken in Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. Agamben’s notion of bare life, for Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of Pattersonian social death. Brown doesn’t exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William Sewell’s recent definition of culture, commenting, “practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.”

There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulated—tools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of ‘social death’ in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct. Finally, there is the added question of Agamben. I again agree, but would like to ask how far Brown’s critique can be extended. I have read Homo Sacer, and various political-theory mobilizations of Agamben, and find the whole thing, to say the least, confused, distasteful, and not a useful way to think about politics. There are issues of disciplinary division of labor here—Brown correctly points to the differing imperatives and skill-sets of literary scholars and historians approaching this material—and perhaps one answer is that Agamben is useful for what literary scholars do, and not for what historians do. This is never a very satisfying conclusion, and all the less so in a world of perfectly transparent (but still foreboding) disciplinary fortifications. I had thought that Agamben was increasingly becoming a reference-point among historians and theorists—perhaps I can interpret Brown’s intervention as a sign that I was mistaken? I suppose there is a deep divide here, between, we might say, those who think that we humans speak language, and those who think that it speaks us. Maybe this is too much a 1975-vintage way of seeing things, or at least of expressing them, but it does seem to me that the fundamental difference between Brown and Baucom, for instance, is there. They look at the same thing, and the one sees the struggle for communities, fragile and fleeting, but real; the other sees the de-realizing force of commodity fetishism and in a tone of high moralism allows a-historical discourse to disintegrate human being.