Enlightenment and doublethink

What if the early-modern public/private split required esoteric practices? That is, one can only have a strong distinction between the public and the private if, in the interests of social stability, it is legitimate to say one thing publicly and think another privately.
The concept of hypocrisy is the harbinger of an Arendtean fracture of the public/private distinction in enlightened modernity.

Religious kitsch

Note the importance to religious kitsch to the late nineteenth centuries two most powerful anti-Anglican texts, Samuel Butler's The Way of all Flesh and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. In the first, the Pontifax money is made in religious publishing of a kitschy kind; in the second Sue works in a kind of religious gift shop.

After the new left

Key concepts.
The failure of Raymond Williams's detailed policy document, May Day Manifesto (1966) represents the end of the British New Left as a movement committed to a revitalized state socialism. After this the movement becomes wholly academic.
Within that academicism, 1968 marks the both the moment of the turn to theory and the transposition of the tiny Maoist movement into the kind of cultural populism that will come to dominate cultural studies. To understand this few texts are more important than Rancière's La leçon d'Althusser (1974). Its argument is that Althusser's theoretical return to Marx and anti-humanism in his hey day was a means of accomodating the PCF to an anti-colonialism that the Party had not embraced, but that, in a profound and unintended shift, after 1968 Althusserian theory came to represent the power of the academic hierarchy against the students inside of new kind of youth/student politics that May 1968 represented. It is at this level, that Althusserianism will move seamlessly into Foucauldianism.
The other side of post 1968 academic critique movement moves into identity politics: and in the global context, that move needs to be thought of as an alliance between the intellectual outcome of both the civil rights movement and feminism with the marxist anti-imperialism, not supported by the Comintern and the European communist parties, but of which Maoism was a component.
The collapse of state socialism is the condition for cultural studies' political-intellectual rudderlessness:
1. Stuart Hall: joining the trends.
2. The trajectory of the British Althusserians: Paul Hirst back into pluralism.
3. Perry Anderson

LIfe of the mind

The life of the mind is a good but it is not universalizable: it is not for everyone. Nor is it "better" than the various other available ethical orientations: the musical life, the sporting life, the business life etc. The life of the mind too is becoming increasingly professionalised, specialised, of course, and in the process, esoteric. This is true even though, paradoxically, it is largely funded through educational systems designed to disseminate it.
History plays a particular role in this life of the mind. History is not especially useful for understanding or dealing with the present. But it does lend heft to the life of the mind: it is what makes it solid, capable of drawing commitment from a few who are no longer to be conceived an elite.

Coleridge's Constitution of Church and State

Coleridge's interesting idea that the National Church provided a space for liberty and upward mobility, and thus for manageable hope. Hope an important concept in Coleridge since it is necessary for social stability. It is the ground upon which it possible to balance the various competing social forces.
How should we think about this in relation to the loss of hope in endgame capitalism?

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age

Some notes for a response to this book that I have agreed to write.

Taylor's key concepts:
Does not propose a 'subtractive' account of secularization but rather a transformative and additive one. Nor an intentional one: religious projects unexpectedly aid secularization (but not vice versa?). Three kinds of secularity:
1. the displacement of God from social life (i.e. the emergence of godless institutions and relations)
2. the loss of belief in God (partly as a result of scientific truth regimes)
3. an immanentizing of moral life (of belief, experience and search)(4) and here the recovery of 'benevolence' as a merely human capacity in the eighteenth century is key: the 'charter of modern unbelief' (257). Science and Reason don't dethrone God, humanism does.
He is most interested in the third.
In this regard he tells a not unfamiliar story.
In the pre-axial age, the world was enchanted because people were triply "embedded". They were totally embedded in social, cosmic and in the practices and terms of human flourishing (i.e. Aristotlian eudaimonia). Here no possibility for conversion, no alternatives and also no salvation.
Then the 'great disembedding' which is a slow process with certain key stages.
1. axial religions which create a distant transcendent order defined as the good and with a good will to the world
2. the Christian history in which the life of the saintly becomes massified through discipline
3. an overturning of the relation between the world and the transcendent in the process of this discipline (the cancellation of festival) as rationalization takes over and grace departs. Prime movers of this a mix of ne0-Stoicism (Lipsius) and Protestant Augustianianism. Now selves become "buffered": that is they can make autonomous decisions within an array of choices of faith, vocation, location etc, which implies a distantiation between self and society.

This against the classic enlightened account of secularization. That is: there is in fact no knowable transcendent order nor any God. Beliefs in God are false beliefs. This has been increasingly apparent and sayable, but for a long period many knew the truth but could not publicly articulate it, sometimes using beliefs in God to empower themselves (double think, esotericism). Leo Strauss. And those who now profess anti-secularism from the academy are in fact in bad faith: they tend to be secularist anti-secularists. Arguments such as secularism has been just as violent and murderous as religion are of this type since they are in effect utilitiarian.
And against the classic alternative (Edmund Law): modern truth regimes based on scepticism, rationality, empiricism and pragmatism, refine religion. They allow faith to strip off its secular baggage. There is not necessarily more religion in the world but secularization is actually an intensification and purification of faith. (E.g. Edmund Law, Pitcock on Duns Scotus)

Problems:
Leaving aside its Eurocentrism.
Leaving aside its lack of materialism: the absence of markets, classes etc as explanatory concepts.
There's a method problem: Taylor habitually classifies process and formations into discrete categories (usually in threes). These processes dont interact, don't join or mutually constitute themselves by contestation. Is reason really separable from humanism.
Also the question of omission: 'brute ease' (Wollstonecraft), distraction, fiction, culture....
The underplaying of anti-clericism, and the political and economic role of the church.
were non-axial societies in fact embedded in the way supposed: Polynesia for instance? different iwi, possibity of moving into other iwi through 'slavery'; ambiguities about magical powers of prophets;
Homer?
can one talk about a triple embeddment except nostalgically: these societies had no distinction between religion, the social, the ethical after all. (But that does not mean they were enchanted and embedded). The ultimate logic is that a wholly enchanted society is not enchanted at all at least for itself since no outside to transcendental participation. Does such a society exist? Does not this show all the signs of myth?
What is enchantment for Taylor? Not so much a matter of belief, but a particular 'cosmic imaginary': time and space and events are connected to the transcendent.
the process by which the mass sanctification/disciplining of the social order loses touch with grace and becomes immanent is actually contestatory
the importance of anti-clericism to Enlightenment.
It is also dotted with accommodation and double think. E.g. Mary Wollstonecraft's use of the concept of the divine in The Rights of Women. It is because God and virtue is universal than women have as much right to pursue virtue as men for God and immortality. But does she mean God and salvation, or immortality in the sense of contributing to a progressivist perfectioning of human history. Double talk here. This not at all embarrassing to Taylor: it describes the mechanism through which the process works.

at a level of general theory:
There never was enchantment (and if there was neither the sacred nor the secular existed for it). What is there is more secularity and more refined religion. It is addititve all the way: there are various distances between them (the myth of disenchantment marks out a large distance) but also various intimate exchanges.
secularization as a process names itself and something larger than itself, because the forces that oppose it belong to it. This is basic dialectic theory. But these forces do not disappear and are not subsumed: they may continue and become refined. Religion is itself a secularized concept as is enchantment: religion itself helped by secularization, depends on it, but there is no terminus to this process and impossible to predict winners and losers.
Religion will give up on salvation, give up 'flourishing', become a kind of worship of the mystery, with no utility, no rational legitimation, no representational or narrative content.
Particularly important:
mysticism, death, charity/sensibility/scarcity, aesthetics/secular magic/popular culture in the contemporary sense.

There never was an enchanted world or, if there was, the modern secularised world is just as enchanted if differently. What we lose in a diminishing of interactivity supernature/nature, we regain in complexity and engagement in second nature. Among the richness of contemporary second nature are (false) memories of enchantment: the bequeathing of rich experiences by the desert fathers (Helen Waddell).
The real social problems that face us are not existential but political and biopolitical: the failure of endgame capitalism to provide for hope.
Transcendental appeals did not provide "meaning" outside particular forms of social power which after about 1500 rapidly came to seem restrictive.

Some drivers of secularization he does not attend to:
the aristocratic-military distance from the church: this lies behind libertinism, which is important to secularization.

I delight in my status of cosmic and social disembededness. It offers me a lightness of being, a freedom and makes experiences, thoughts, powers and pleasures available to me that no cosmic embededness could match. For all that my disembeddness is not chosen by me: it is enjoined upon me by truth. For it is true that no knowable God exists, that supernatural agencies are not at work in the world. This is not, in any important way, a matter of belief, it is a matter of evidence (and rational thought).

Civic republicanism and Victorian character

In his Whigs and Liberals, John Burrow draws some analogies between 18th century neo-Harringtonism and the Victorian idea of character. Key to this the notion of masculinity that lies implicit in the concept of virtue. The 18thc Country Party militia member, armed, owning landed property segues into the Henleyesque imperialist. See pps 97 ff

Political history and the history of the novel

Notes towards a future essay on Fenelon, Goldsmith and Godwin, or rather Telemachus, The Vicar of Wakefield and Caleb Williams, texts which share a genealogy.

Burchell in The Vicar is a version of Fenelon's Telemachus and Mentor, a patriot king wandering around his kingdom in disguise to avoid the corrupting power of flattery and deference and court culture. Their virtues are similar, christianized civic humanism.

But The Vicar is a fictional rewriting of a life of a martyr. It is not unimportant that Goldsmith was translating The Lives of the Fathers and Martyrs for Newbery just before writing the novel. (Probably in response to the success of Alban Butler's book on the topic.) Primrose's ordeals (from the affluent domestic republic to prison) purify his Christianity, culminating in his sermon in prison, in which he rejects the world in submission to God and accepts Origen's universalism.

But this speech also has a political meaning: it makes the case that salvation evens up the division between rich and poor and compensates for the injustice of the social order.

Another important moment on this road is his Tory speech to the butler (who is impersonating his master). But that speech is odd since it presents a compact between sacred sovereignty and the people where the people are the middle ranks, or rather the independent sector within them. Much less populist than Fielding say.

And another important momement is his passive obedience speech to his flock who object to his being taken to prison.

At the end Burchall, the patriot king, puts all to rights, ambiguating the religious rejection of the world. This tension is not ironizing: it is the sign of a structural tension in the Tory theopolitics where a particular social model (a compact between a sacred sovereign and the people against the corruptive forces of oligarchism and international trade) is fused with the doctrine of passive obedience.

Caleb Williams also tells of the discrepancy between law and justice under the rule of the landed oligarchy. And Caleb is another Job figure, who at a certain point of despair is able to trigger his salvation. But this time there is no outside the corrupt system: Falkland must undo the injustice himself.

From polity to society

The switch from the notion of polity to that of society (and "manners") is an important one. With it comes the sense that political means of managing govenment and liberty (i.e. tinkering with the constitution) are less important that social means of achieving equality (i.e. forms of welfarism). In his Whigs and Liberals, John Burrow (27-28) argues that Hume is the key thinker of transition here. And that is why he is politically unclassifiable, though Burrow likes Duncan Forbes's term for him: 'sceptical Whig.' For Burrow, other important expressions of this shift are Mill's Autobiography and Morley's On Tolerance.

For Burrow, Burke does not have a strong distinction between polity and society, and his efforts to fuse them give his thought a 'mystical tinge.' (36)

It's a shift that spells the end for old-style civic humanism/republicanism. In Hume classical civic virtue is rough, exception, a case of ancient rather than modern liberty that is not open to imitation.

And because, in the 19thc, society is thought in terms of progress, it leads to the notion that change for the better will happen without conscious political conceptualization or action. Certainly thinking in terms of social progress rather than political intervention enables British Whigs and liberals to demonize the French Revolution.

Fascism

Hannah Arendt is largely responsible for a very very misleading concept: totalitarianism. Twentieth-century social science knows few worse.
And the reason it is such a bad idea is that it helps us to forget the specificity of fascism as a socio-political movement.
Instead it encourages us to compare Stalin and Hitler personally. It makes room for us to speculate about which of them was most evil? And that's a ridiculous, wholly reductive question: a sign of a significant loss of historical and political understanding.
At any rate, perhaps the largest hole in 2othc historiography is fascism itself, buried under our obsessions with the holocaust, totalitarianism, and military history, smothered under a will to aggrandize individual agency.

Anglicanism

Listening to a talk on famous philosophers' deaths by Simon Critchley this afternoon helped crystallise a thought.
Simon was unwilling to engage the question of modern disciplinarity as shaping what professionalised academic philosophy is. Yet once one thinks about that, it seems to me, his rather romantic, quasi-religious interest in philosophers' ars moriendi begins to reveal its full nostalgia.
At least the talk clarified the degree to which I am committed to the centrality of institutions both analytically and socially. This is probably a conservative commitment since it stands against liberalism and anarchism and the whole anti-state thematic. Paine was wrong radically to divide society from government in the first pages of Common Sense, since society is in fact always governmentally incorporated.
At the same time, I am also committed to historicism, which largely accounts for my beef with most contemporary 'theory' whose founding gesture is the banishment of history.
But the history of some institutions is not simply history: it is also tradition.
It is at the intersection between time and insitutionality that Anglicanism becomes fascinating. As a tradition; as a framework nestled inside both civil society and government, but with supernatural edges.
I am not a Christian, however.
So I'm interested in the articulation between the history/traditions/liturgies of the Anglican institution (the visible Church) and its credal aspects (the invisible Church (an interesting concept)) in so far as these intersect with secular and in particular literary culture and its temporalities, and especially as they, brought together, can operate as a model for an impossible unity and stability. For the socializing of the transcendent.
To take this thought into Anglicanism without believing, which is very tempting, is to play out the logics of a Straussian double truth.

Rewards

In the end, and despite a long history of schism and controversy concerning soteriology, Christianity turns on its promise of salvation: the reward of eternal life.
What happens to ethical thought when this doctrine of reward in the afterlife lose its credibility?
We can then secularize reward: utilitarianism proposes a this-worldly reward-based schema, as do all those politico-ethical programs which call upon a notion of historical progress (e.g. marxism). All of these share the structure of Christian thought. (That's true, however much I dislike the implications of this thought.)
Or we can jettison reward. For the most part this means that sanctioned end-directed activity must be performed for its own sake (i.e. Kantianism) or for ends which cannot be construed as rewards, usually because they are merely expressive, that is, they express something of value.
Two particular such expressive ethics have had wide circulation: one based on authenticity (Heidegger), the other based on style (Nietzsche).
The first of these, the turn to authenticity, tends towards nostalgia, deploring historical fragmentation or loss (a nostalgia which is also embedded in Christianity of course).
And so: within this array, Nietzsche offers the most stringently secular way.

Spoilation of the contemplatives

One historical precedent for the destruction of the pure humanities under academic managerialism and national neo-liberalism would be the National Assembly's dissolution of the monastries in the first months of the French Revolution under the widely shared belief that the so-called 'contemplatives' (as against the parish cures) were parasitical on the nation.

Murderous capitalism: Schmitt, Ranciere, Agamben, Derrida

The basic structure of Ranciere and Agamben's thought is Schmittian. This is not because they are politically on the same side as Schmitt of course but 1) because they both want to avoid historicism, 2) because they both have given up on the notions of capitalism and class struggle as key analytic categories and, yet for all that, 3) because they both wish to assert the primacy of the political over the cultural so as not to promote false consensus. In Schmitt the political is the master signifier of social existence for the reason that we live in a world where others—our enemies— wish to murder us (as Leo Strauss makes clear in his essay on The Concept of the Political), and politics are the means by which we resist death in that form. But for Ranciere and Agamben the figure who stands outside the community and around whom, hence, the political turns is an excluded victim. Homo sacer for Agamben and "the part that has no part" for Ranciere.
With that inversion everything changes, since in effect we are led back to the old social logics which connect politics to inclusion, compassion and benevolence but without any use of or for the concepts of inclusion, compassion and benevolence. The absence of channels to reach out to the excluded in postmarxist thought, is all the more strongly felt because, at least in its strongest forms (Badiou) it has also given up the concepts of difference, which lie at the heart of post-structuralism.
It is true that Derridean difference can be regarded as an allegorizing expression of a sense that violence between groups is no longer the motor of history (i.e. of the 'end of history' or the triumph of capital) just because that difference is not to be parsed as otherness or enemity but as what is neither the same nor the other (or both the same and the other: it amounts to the same thing.) But what is excommunicated or persecuted or put to death can never be just the other in a truly political sense, about that Schmitt was right.
What all these theories lack is an understanding of capitalism as murderous, or to put this more accurately and gently, that capitalism does not at all allay the species capacity for collective murder.

The state, the workers and the history of theory

Reading Polyani's remarks on how the trajectories of working class history differ in Britain from those in the continent, it is hard not to escape the sense that we have to look to the history of relations between the working class and the state for one set of conditions of possibility for the emergence of French theory in the sixties. According to The Great Transformation , those relations were especially different in the UK and in France. In the former the unions and non-political associations produced the labour party, in the latter the political system was able to incorporate working class movement from the very beginning. This is another way of thinking about the 'corporate' nature of the English working class so key to the old Anderson-Nairn thesis. But it matters in relation to the left Leavism that had such an impact on the literary academy right through until 1968, since that movement (especially in Raymond Williams) begins by affirming the ordinary life of the working class and then thinking about ways in which it can, ideologically and ethically, be protected from the culture of consumer capitalism. In France, the state always set itself the task of protecting the people from the ravages of the market and did so in rhetorics and practices of universal rationality which left no room for public working class corporatism, and underpinned the prestige of the philosopher and theorist

Famines Communism Slaughter

In judging Mao and Stalin's crimes—the numbers of people their policies condemned to death and misery—it is relevant to ask: what would have happened had the capitalist market been unleashed onto Chinese and Russian agrarian society at that time instead of state socialism? That's basically what happened in India in the nineteenth century, and it's thought tens of millions starved to death there.

The right

So if we accept that history has come to an end, what does this mean for the right? We know that it's a death sentence for socialism. But so it is, obviously, for most forms of conservatism.  And once placed in their graves, they too are available for new uses.

Rethinking the Right

First very provisional thoughts for a course at the Cornell School.
The point would be to reinterpret critiques of state sovereignty which do not appeal to popular emancipation.
Non-emancipatory critiques of state sovereignty. Traditionally these have been Catholic or Christian of course.
Here is one genealogy
Rethinking the right:
a non-juring text
de Maistre
Whately?
Coleridge?
Eliot
Benjamin's critique of violence? (Sorel, Derrida on force of law?)
Schmitt
Strauss

there are also other right wing genealogies:
Hume, Burke (this course will help us understand Burke better).
Carlyle, Nietzsche, Hulme, Heidegger

Secularization

Here's the brief response paper I gave at the secularization event.

The mundane against the secular: some thoughts

First, a simple observation about institutional position. The research university has long been at the heart of European, and thence global secularism, if we think of secularism as the progressive social/intellectual distantiation from supernaturalisms. The implications of this press on us not least because it means that academic anti-secularist arguments risk bad faith. And it means that such arguments, even if inspired by non-European situations, can’t avoid questions about their relation to European political theory and, in particular, to the tradition of counter-revolutionary critique of secular progressive modernity whose most recent manifestation has been that transnational new right which, as Jan-Werner Müller has shown, draws inspiration from Carl Schmitt. The structural link between European conservative political theology and post-colonial anti-secularism leads to strange encounters. For example: it would not be hard to deploy Carl Schmitt’s postwar affirmation of the anti-liberal, anti-democratic partisan for a sympathetic account of contemporary jihadism.
At the same time, as we know, the division between the secular and non-secular is less hard edged than it seems. To offer a well-trodden example from the US abortion debate: is ‘the right to life’ a secular or religious principle? Even ‘the right to choose’ can be regarded as religiously sanctioned if we pursue Harold Laski’s supposition that ‘the affirmation of the right of each human being to fulfill his individuality” constitutes Christianity’s best contribution to world civilization. Indeed the political cogency of abortion-debate sound-bites depends on their grounds being indeterminable in regard to secularism. Such strategic ambiguity poses difficulties for Habermas whose argument, I think, depends on a hard distinction between propositions that are amenable to ‘secular justifications’ in ‘public political debate’ and those that are not. But the abortion debate exposes the appropriateness of secular justification as such to question since secular justification for life, say, can threaten rather than supplement life’s religious sanction. In instances like this, as Charles Taylor has implied, opposing parties meet not on the basis of a Rawlsian overlapping consensus but on joint submission to an established social order, happily or not.
In modern societies one of the goods offered by this established social order (let’s call it nation-state capitalism) is what I’ll call the secular adiaphora— the world of consumption and entertainment which is equally indifferent to (if not independent from) religion, politics and enlightened knowledge. Mediatized entertainment is of special interest because, for all its indifference to religion and politics, it provides both with so many of their resources and can thus transform them, and not just in the West. Originally, before the Christian era, ‘secular’ meant “of the ages”—profane human life’s sheer duration and rhythms. The contemporary secular adiaphora—a ceaseless stream of celebrities, fictions, fashion and sport—has, for all its non-secular utilities, structural affinities to that primordial concept. For the secular adiaphora marks the persistence of the simple human capacity to live on: to inhabit continuous mundane repetition. In this case the Pascalian realm of ‘distraction’ is transubstantiated into a fundamental condition of temporal being. And this sphere binds societies today. It’s also where secular distantiations from liberal state secularity can emerge in echoes of the ethos of a secular anti-secularism given philosophic force by Nietzsche. Or as one could also say: the secular adiaphora is not just where the secular loses its ties to enlightened reason and progress but where it is absorbed by the mundane.
These remarks rub against Gil Anidjar’s fascinating paper and in particular his claim, following Ashish Nandy and T.N. Madan, that we should regard Christianity as the agent of European colonialism by recognizing that Christianity has ‘disenchanted its own world by dividing itself into private and public, politics and economics, indeed religious and secular”. In making this move, Anidjar asks us to dethrone concepts like modernity and capitalism as master signifiers of European domination. Andijar comes to his argument in rescuing Edward Said from himself by showing that Said was not the secularist he claimed to be. It’s worth recalling that Said himself often thought of his secularism as a commitment to ‘affiliation’ (against ‘filiation’) two aspects of which are pertinent here. Said was committed to associational identities and collectivities against nativist ones like race, nationality and inherited religious confession. And he was committed to an analytic method which, in the poststructuralist mode, seeks to find exchanges, flows, mutations rather than autonomies and antinomies. It may be that Said could not logically commit himself simultaneously to programmatic secularism and to affiliation to the degree that the latter breaks down the hard distinction between the secular and the Christian along the lines that Andijar proposes. From this perspective, Andijar seems right to recognise a tension between Said’s anti-orientalism and his secularism. But affiliation also breaks down the hard distinction between Christianity and other religions so as to prevent us conceiving of the history of imperial modernity as religious warfare in Andijar’s spirit or indeed in Samuel Huntington’s.
My own inclination would not be to pursue Andijar along this theoretical track but to invite him to spell out the historical evidence on which his case must ultimately rest, as well as to explore counter-instances. His argument, after all, is finally more historical than theoretical. So I’d invite him to tell us more about both non-Christian secularities and the reception of Christianity outside the boundaries of the West. (China might be an instructive case: the impact of the Jesuit mission created a stronger and codified Confucianism, a religion of empire to use Chris Bayley’s phrase, directed against Western trade and exchange while later Protestant missions sparked the millenarial offshoot of Christian soteriology that led to the bloody Taiping rebellion against both the Qing regime and the British. In both cases Christianization hardened anti-imperialist resistance in terms that complicate Andijar’s argument). But let me end these brief remarks by citing an old case of non-European secularity from the Europe-Asia trade-route. As recorded in Halycut, sometime around 1550 CE in today’s Iran, an English trader met a traveller from Gujurat. The man from Gujurat was “asked concerning his opinion in religion, what he thought of God” and replied “the three chief religions in the world be of the Christians, Jewes, and Turks, and yet but one of them true: but being in doubt which is the truest of the three, [I] will be of none”. In an ambiguously non-religious gesture he chose instead to worship the sun, that natural symbol of a life’s secular duration. Can we parse that worship of eternal return as a moment in a Nietzschean secular anti-secularism which today may take the form of non-participation in liberal progressivism, a form of non-participation most popularly available through immersion in industrialized, mediatised culture itself? An immersion in that culture which (to draw upon the rich array of Christian attitudes to the world albeit in a profoundly unchristian (and unNietzschean spirit)) at the very least does not preclude charitable contemplation of that culture by intellectuals like me.

Odo Marquard

Some concepts from Odo Marquard and in particular his collection of essays and talks, In Defense of the Accidental. Marquard is, as he says of himself, a philosophic belle-lettrist: he is not a theorist or a philosopher. But maybe we can think of him as a weak historical phenomenologist. At any rate, he's a conservative, and most of all in his refusal of any kind of materialism. This means he grants a concept like capitalism no explanatory force. But since in the end he accepts modernity, he's a rather qualified conservative by German standards anyway. He isn't engaged in commentary on other people's works, or in obvious debate with other philosophers. Although his concepts develop out of Weber, Gehlen, Schleher, Koselleck, Runge, Ritter, Heidegger, Blumenberg...he's not a disciple in the sense that Zizek is a disciple of Lacan for instance. In the end he's in Hume's tradition I suspect: a skeptic, looking for institutions and practices to control a social order that threatens to submerge us. It's a very different mode of writing than that which has currency in the anglophone academy. At its best its sparky and original, at worst its sermonic, somewhat obvious and cliched.

Anyway: some concepts

"Acceleration conformism": accommodation to the speeding up of history under modernity. The notion of acceleration is developed by Burkhardt. And acceleration conformism has some rather highly mediated consequences, and in particular a hanging on to continuities and traditions. It also produces notions like universal history in particular, which attempts to regularise acceleration. (The problem here is: what exactly accelerates?).

His defence of metaphysics: it is because metaphysics is interminably incomplete, raises more questions than it can possibly answer and so is open to ceaseless debate that we should resist the temptation to ditch it.

"Tribunalization": this is a by product of Marquard's claims about theodicy. For Marquard, theodicy is one basis for modern secular thought, a notion that spins off from Blumenberg's (rather unhistorical) ideas about gnosticism. For Marquard, around 1700, traditional justifications of God's creation (and in particular for God's tolerance of suffering and evil) mutated into a demand for justification of creation itself. The key text in this move being Leibnitz's Theodicy in which 1) God is removed as an agent upon worldly events and 2) everything that happens in the world happens for the best. This latter notion depends on what Marquard thinks of as "tribunalization of the world" (ie. a judging of it from inside it). (But note that this idea exists in a certain neo-Platonism: see Richard Hooker.) Here Leibniz also introduces a concept of compensation: the evil in the world is outweighed by, or is compensated for by, the good. This form of thought will become common in modernity. Man himself becomes the object of the tribunal or of critique and escapes by anointing himself his own redeemer through the notion of progress (which Marquard hates).

"The age of unworldliness [Weltfremdheit]": this is an expansion of the acceleration conformism notion. Because history now move too quickly to provide the terms for self-understanding and analysis, (because where we start from in a project will never provide the terms for its completion), thought is driven into strange aporias of which one of the most important is: modernisation as progress versus modernisation as fall. There is no getting beyond such aporias which constitute "unworldliness' or an estrangement from the world. But the acceleration of the world also infantalises us, since experience is replaced by information which needs to be taken on trust as our primary basis for knowledge. This infantalization, and the emphasis on life as continual learning and schooling is one of the reasons for our doubleness in relation to the world. In the age of unworldliness both fiction and scepticism become more common. Fictions because (as 'models') we increasingly needs props to simplify the conditions of existence (a version of Vaihanger' neo-Kantianism), and hence it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle the fictive from the real.

New Zealand

One of the really good things about New Zealand is that it hasn't developed a strong cultural nationalism. That's because of the Maori/Pakeha split and because it was in England's shadow for so long. Obviously there's a strong patriotism focussed on the All Blacks, the country's physical charm etc, but that falls far short of the kind of nationalist/xenophic pride of Australia or the US for instance.

Towards a book

Some ideas as I prepare to turn a bunch of articles I have written over the past few years into a book (or actually two books).

The beginning of an introduction
This book describes moments in the institutional history of literary culture, if we understand that culture to include the academic humanities. But it is motivated by a particular political fear— that the current globally hegemonic regime of democratic capitalist nation-states is impossible to replace and yet is systemically, pathologically flawed. We are stuck with national-democratic capitalism for the foreseeable future since it and it alone is the political system that rationality (as we know it) legitimates and since it provides so many goods and is so open to reform. But for all that it is destructive of human capacities. It would still be destructive were able to create a just society within its framework , since what it destroys is autonomy and the will to think and (though less so), happiness, none of which concern justice. I realize that this is an extraordinarily contentious assertion whose various premises elide a library of debate. But for me, here, it’s a question not of truth but of fear.
And that fear has led me to break with the main currents of cultural studies which, as we shall see, are embedded not in exit from the system (revolution, mysticism, quietism for instance) but in reformism. This is not to say that reformism is to be rejected in practice. That would in effect to be return to classical communism or to varieties of anti-worldly Christianity. It is to say that reformism is a secondary and profoundly limited game, which lies at the heart of our intellectual life only as a sign of the system's pathologizing march. And yet it has not led me into the arms of those who are indeed enemies of national-democratic capitalism and who do have a vital presence in the academic humanities




1. the relation between Perry Anderson's argument about the aristocracy/bourgeoisie alliance in Britain and its creation of a 'corporate' working class not able to gain hegemony and the Hopkins/Cain 'gentlemanly capitalism' account of British imperialism?
2. the strange connection between neo-Maoists like Badiou and conservatives like Leo Strauss in so far as both reject historicism in their attempt to imagine an other to or exit from democratic capitalism. Of course their form of anti-historicism differs considerably, although there's a sense in which Badiou's ontological nominalism is not so different from Strauss's embrace of ancient wisdom as might appear from their relative placing on the political map.

Modernist esotericism: Neither religious nor secular

I've been invited to a colloqium organised by the Social Science Research Council at NYU in May. It won't involve formal papers but rather short position statements circulated in advance and then discussion (a little like the Viennese event). This invite was received yesterday and it'll be useful to note my first thoughts on my contribution.

I am interested in two formations:
1 . the everyday social intersections between the secular and the religious in what we can think of as "modern" social existence. My example is John Byrom, the eighteeenth-century English Tory mystic, much influenced by Malebranche, William Law, Behmenism and the French quietist tradition who, in his commercial dealings in London and Manchester, is constantly confronted by the question of how and where to act and think religiously and how and where not to. The application of his mystic Anglicanism is a continual problem for him, which leads him to a consistent lack of transparency in his social dealings. His truer self is expressed in his diary and his poems (which were not for print).
2. the emergence of a high-cultural zone that is neither secular nor religious and that explores the everyday ethical consequence of the absence of God and cosmic telos. This zone really only comes into existence after Schopenhauer who seems to me is the philosopher who transports Humean scepticism into the heart of European theo-metaphysics. Schopenhauer's solution is to interrupt the workings of the cosmic blind will, under whose compulsions we live, by the truth of fragmented aesthetic experiences. And this solution is given literary form and expression and it ethical and political implications are explored in Joseph Conrad's early fictions as well as in his 'Preface' to Narcissus. In particular it leads to Conrad's theory of the 'sentimental lie' which binds society but which the artist and the participant in the Schopenhauerian 'neither religious nor secular' stand apart from, having a privileged and esoteric relation to truth. This can be thought of as a form of cultural modernist esotericism.

The point of placing these two formations along side one another is not to try to find analogies or similarities between them (although no doubt there are some) but to point to the ways in which the problem of everyday esotericism works outside of any model of secularisation, and does so by not having to take the religion/secular opposition as foundational. There's a genealogy of lived esotericism which intensifies under modernism.

The other interest of this line of thought would be to connect it to the role of 'transparency' both socially and politically, and the notion that the process of secularisation is also a process of extending tranparency. Here Hannah Arendt's chapter on 'The Social Question' in her book on revolutions, Leo Strauss's theory of accomodation and Starobinski on Rousseauvian transparency would all be useful reference points.

These remarks are obviously only a beginning.


What connects these two formation most interestingly it seems to me is the question of esotericism though of as secreted knowledge of the highest things.

Travels

Since the original idea of this blog was to record thoughts and events as an aid to memory (the blog is formally accessible to anyone but effectively remains unread and anonymous) it's worth noting some travels since last August. To Vienna in November for a seminar on Modern Enchantments. The city has been radically transformed since about 1980 when last I was there. Then it was a grey Eastern European city, dragged down and eviscerated by the cold war and the legacies of the nazi era. Now it's a strange reincarnation of its belle epoque self (Vienna 1900) when it was a European centre of elegance and imperial/biedermeier style. It's been reincarnated, so it seems, by money flowing in from the old Soviet bloc, much dirty (drugs, prostititution) but enough to fuel fashion, restaurants, luxury. And because many of the locals still live in state-provided housing (a legacy of old Viennese socialism) the public, street culture is vibrant and self-regarding just as it is in Italy. (Indeed the place seemed like a graft of Rome on Berlin).
And then over Xmas back home to Melbourne and Auckland. The latter in particular is ravishingly beautiful and a wonderful place to spend a couple of idle weeks. Howick where my mum lives, is changing too: Cockle Beach down the road is a hang-out for Polynesian islanders in the weekends, families come to spend the day at the beach, gathering shell fish, swimming, drinking, eating, playing as if a Tongan seaside village had been transported into suburban Auckland. (I think I blogged about this once before.) And the suburb itself is schizophrenic: it's always been sought after by migrants, mainly the Brits (a certain kind of lower-middle-class immigrant with a bit of money, not too much, not too little) who have now been joined by South Africans. (I suspect the political views of this combined group must be indescribably horrible). On the other side though it's a centre for Hong Kong and Taiwan Chinese, and in a small stripmall a mile or so from the beach we had the best chinese food I have eaten outside of China, a little hole in the wall restaurant where the brits and south africans never seem to venture.
It's certainly not the NZ of my childhood.

Mysticism Murdoch et al

It's certainly been a while since I blogged on this site and I'm uncertain as to why the inspiration came today. Probably simply because we were updating Nell's baby blog and the whole blogsphere became a little less remote and abstract as a result. Obviously the big reason for this blog drought has been Nell's existence: she basically takes up most of our lives.
Still, not everything has been babydom.
I cant say I have written much but have had three concepts floating about for future written work:
1. to examine the concept and history of what I'm thinking of as 'Tory mysticism.' This is related to the last post on passive resistance, but basically I am interested in the so-called mystical turn of some of those who stand against the secular enlightenment and its political regimes. These would include cases like William Law and Coleridge but also figures like Joseph Conrad and maybe Schopenhauer who are not religious or Christian at all. So a new genealogy might open up.
2. related to this I'd like to think about the play between the tendencies towards the institutionalisation of belief and cultural practices and tendencies towards de-institutionalisation, so as to think about the category of the aesthetics as more or less cripplingly split between the two drives. Like the first topic, this emerges from my interest in the eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The essay that will appear in Studies in the Eighteenth Century or whatever it is called is a kind of prologomena to this.
3. and something completely different: I've become interested in a project I am thinking of as 'the literary experience and the emergence of the mass-market paperback'. I had the idea for this when I went to Melbourne last year with a paperback copy of Iris Murdoch's Bruno's Dream—a US Avon book. I found reading this book completely absorbing to a degree I hardly ever experience, and I realised that the intensity of this reading experience was connected to the physical object which was its occasion, the cheapo paper edition with its lurid cover. And that that kind of book no longer exists: literary paperbacks now have other design conventions and other marketing strategies. I also realised what is fairly obvious that the UK mass-market paperback in the fifties and sixties (dominated by Penguin) was very different from that of the US and that a comparative study of book design would have something to say about the structure of both country's literary field and literary experiences. So it's along those lines that I am collecting mass-market literary paperbacks up until about 1970. Something will come of this I suspect.