Amir Khusraw's Khamsa poem

The Walters Art Gallery, almost next door to our apartment, owns an extraordinary illustrated manuscript produced in the Mughal court during the reign of Akbar in the last decades of the sixteenth century CE. It's a copy of Amir Khusraw's Khamsa poem illustrated by Akbar's court artists. In one of its books, Khamsa describe the adventures of Alexander the Great, many of which are illustrated. We see Alexander visiting Plato; receiving homage from the defeated ruler of China; constructing a mirror which allows him to have surveillance of the high seas, etc.

My favorite illustration has Alexander descending into the ocean in a diving bell 'to seek truth and to demonstrate his faith in God' as the title has it.

It's a wonderful image for all kind of painterly reasons (the waves and sea colour are quite amazing: browny white rather than blue) but what I like most about it is that it presents most of the sailors doing the manual labourers as Europeans (wearing European hats), while the South Asians watch Alexander's devout feat of science with a lordly, relaxed air.

It's a reminder of a pre-modern globalisation, centred in Islam, in which the European's status was something like the opposite to that which it is today. Certainly it's a culturally and geographically more inclusive image than was being produced in Italy or Northern Europe at the time.

Cultural studies and the radical left

Notes for my paper in Hong Kong. Very rough at the moment. I'll revise them as I go.

The question it asks is: What would be at stake if we were to consider cultural studies to be an academic arm of the radical left? By radical left I mean that political stream that seeks not just the reform of the current political system or further emancipatory capacities within the current political system but the restructuring of the system.

This question is here treated as a thought experiment: I am not committed to thinking that cultural studies ought to belong to the radical left, I am trying to think what it would like if that were the case.
Indeed I am merely analsysing the conditions for and consequences of posing such a question.

Several reasons pose it:
1. cultural studies emerges from out of the particular forms of revolutionary desire expressed in "1968" (One instance: the importance of Maoism to Althusser and to Tel Quel in the sixties and also to figures like Ranciere.)
2. there are signs that the intersection of global governmentality and global capitalism is unstable, particularily in relation to the environment, in relation to militarization and in relation to unevenness of distribution of wealth.
3. the fact that so little work has been done from the radical-left perspective over the past thirty years, since the collapse in the socialist ideal. One important reason for this has been that post-left radical politics (the new social movements) has been so suspicious of institutionalisation: movements of resistance mobilize around specific events or legislations and then dissolve. A politics without a transmissible collective identity, without formal institutions, which belongs more to the anarchist than to left tradition as I understand the latter. This seems to me related in the failure of radical cultural studies to deal with the question of governmentality, which has been in the hands of the Foucauldians.


To ask this question involves theorising the concept of the left, and to imagine the forms that a restructured political order might take. It could also analyse the possibilities for working towards such an order.
I am here only concerned, and very briefly, with the first.
The radical left cannot be thought of as realist: it is not simply a participant in the 'acutally existing' political scene, but rather as motivated by a mix of fantasy and detachment within a particular psycho-moral and intellectual tradition.

In the broadest terms: the left (whether radical or reformist) is based on the following commitments:
1. to the secularization of the lifeworld and the understanding that private goods and opportunities are socially produced [intellectual framework]
3. to political action which is not simply an expression of given interests or identities [psycho-moral framework]
It usually also involves:
3. a trust in the capacity of political systems to deliver significant social change and a commitment to distributing power, freedom, happiness evenly across society by distributing the capacity to participate in society evenly.
4. a faith that disinterested intersubjective deliberation and knowledge production will help legitimate its project

In our academic context to begin to imagine a radical left cultural studies has various obvious problems:
1. how to legitimate a discipline based on a particular politics within the formally politically neutral academic system, and, if it comes to that, which in social-democratic states is increasingly coming under state control
2. cultural studies, which involves a restricted range of skill and interests, is not capable of imagining a restructured governmentality, not least because of the historical failure of the left project fully to account for cultural agency in social formation.
3. The problematic relation between state bureaucracies and left political project.

Living Theory

The "Living Theory" conference hosted by the Cornell School of Critical Theory is over. My paper didn't go down too well, partly because of the way I presented it. I seem to have various moods or modes of presentation, ranging from the confident, taking-control-of-the audience through to the withdrawn and standoffish. This talk headed too far in the latter direction, partly because I was a little uncertain of myself (not nervous, uncertain) in relation to the content and partly because it turned out I had dressed down too far. (Everyone was in jackets and mainly ties, I was in jeans...go figure...) But actually I think the topic and its implications just didnt suit this audience, who consisted largely of literary theorists and very successful academics now in their fifties and sixties. The argument I made— that revolutionary will and hope was transferred from radical politics to the the politics of 'word' after 1968 (especially in Tel Quel) and that revolutionary will was lost in the professionalisation of theory in the US academy isn't the kind of thing they wanted to hear. And the background I offered for the demand for theory: Perry Anderson, Iris Murdoch and the British New Left means little in the US.
My real sense of frustration, though, over the two days was just how absent the question of the social value of the knowledge produced by literary criticism was from our deliberations. By social value, I mean value to society from a consensual, state perspective but also critical value: value from perspectives that are not imbricated into actually existing social/political structures.
But there were some excellent papers: Michael Warner's on belief (indeed I directly followed him and that increased the diffidence of my presentation: it's hard to follow stellar performances) and Amanda Anderson's ion George Eliot in particular.

William Beckford and abolitionism

The paper on Beckford at the Huntington went very well I think. I gave it once before at Columbia and it was successful there too. Both times people remarked that my argument about the relation between slavery and libertine aestheticism was new (basically I suggest that Beckford internalises the aboltionist critique of slaveholding which attacked the slave trade as demonic and satanic by taking on board a certain demonism at the same time as he rejects the abolitionist ethic of sympathy etc). It's interesting when a paper goes really well: audience affirmation is articulated pretty clearly. This hasnt been the case for my papers on Disraeli and Conrad which I have to rethink. In the first case I am trying to write about Disraeli under a rubric (re-enactment) which isn't right; in the second case the argument just isn't clear and simple enough.

The paper I most enjoyed was Martin Myrone's on Fuseli (crammed with material new to me).... though I do have to say that the aestheticist and radical side of Fuseli kind of got lost in Martin's presentation. I must read the exhibition catalogue he's produced for the Tate though.

We went through the Gainsborough 'Sensation' show at the Huntington. It was better hung than at Yale, and the curator who took me through explained her choices for colour, lighting, hanging...there's a complex art to hanging an exhibtion of this kind. I knew that, but didnt know it too. The problem with the show is, of course, that it's centre pieces: Gainsborough's 'Cottage Door' painting and Sir John Leceister's tent room in which it was hung are the worst possible intersection between pastoral sentimentality and urban elite display. Nothing can change that. The interesting issue that these pictures of Gainsborough make us confront is: what is the relation between the painterly values he embraces (the play of the brushstoke) and the ideological work of the pictures themselves. Does John Barrell talk about that? (Barrell's line of thought is conspicuously absent in these (rather strange) North American quasi-academic celebrations of late 18thc british lorldly visual culture, come to think of it).

Catherine of Russia in Montreal

A very quick post since I am off to the airport. A trip to LA, there and back in 36hrs, to deliver a paper on William Beckford at the Huntington in relation to their Sensation (Constable) show. It's speedy because Lisa is due on April 25 and we dont want to risk labour beginning while I'm away.
I've been crazy busy: ASECS at Montreal went well I think. I was definitely nervous about that paper since it's my first time amongst the hard 18thc crowd, but it turned out just fine (as far as I can tell). The day I had to walk about Montreal was cold and wet so that stymied that...but I did get to the Catherine of Russia show there, with some of the original paintings by Huber in his "Voltariad" series which I had always wanted to see because of the Beckford connection. (The young William Beckford came under Huber's spell while he was in Geneva). And I had no idea they'd be there....They were rather different than I imagined them: more illustrative.