Mar 26, 2009

Disraeli's Trilogy

Theopolitics lie at the core of Disraeli's trilogy, and they provide the only way that one can make sense of Tancred's otherwise rather puzzingly relation to Sybil and Coningsby. This theopolitics involve a search for Christian origins which will legitimate Anglican Catholicism while displacing Roman Catholicism. That's what Newman is involved in the 1830s too (The Arians of the Fourth Century) and in the Apologia he cites George Bull (1634-1710) and his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) as one of his sources. And of course it's important to Disraeli's (romantic) project of revivivifying old-school Toryism against Peel's "conservatism".

Mar 25, 2009

The literary humanities versus the managed university

I've been thinking about writing a talk which I'd call something like: The literary humanities versus the managed university: some consequences for theory.

Basically the argument would be that the literary humanities have succumbed to the managed university without being able to engage in any meaningful resistance or even productive dialogue. Why? The answer must mainly lie in the imbalance of institutional power (and the deeper causes for that imbalance, which include radical social/cultural democratization), but there's also a case to be made that Arnoldian project came to an end with left Leavism around 1968. This meant that by the time the new managerialism appeared on the scene (use Boltanski's history for this, supplemented by Marginson's The Enterprise University etc) there was no literary humanities project that could talk back to the new controllers of the academic system.
If this is so, then 1) left Leavism is the moment we need to return to if we are to even begin to try to reinvigorate the Arnoldian humanities, and 2) we need to go elsewhere to think about what the humanities is now. That elsewhere includes the Leo Strauss of "The liberal arts and responsibility" which articulates the post-dialogic relations between an esoteric intellectual and cultural elite (for him "philosophers") and a state-democratic society. Strauss is important because he concedes the beleagured and powerless nature of the humanities, as well as the limited nature of their appeal. And he helps us understand why in the US the liberal humanities have a kind of vitality they lack in state-run university systems. Of course, it is only too easy to glamorous the US humanities: they have little truck with the left-Leavisite (or even its opposite, the Straussian) promise.

Mar 13, 2009

British Cultural Studies all over again

A first attempt at a succinct summary of the conditions under which British Cultural Studies (BCS) appeared. This for my review of the recent volume of conference papers on Hoggart.

BCS belongs to the moment when a fraction of the working class/lower middle class gain entry into the university system. This part of the larger process across which , after 1945 and to use a Straussianism, the working class enter society. Established in 1964, BCS's primary program was to secure the terms in which a collapsing corporate working class (a new participatory 'affluent' or 'classless' working class) can join the received British cultural tradition. To achieve this, it brings to bear two disciplines: literary criticism (mainly of left-Leavisite kind) and sociology (mainly of a Marxian-Weberian kind).

This moment is best expressed in Hoggart's book on Auden, his Uses of Literacy (a nostalgic mythologizing of the interwar corporate working class); and Williams's Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Border Country. But BCS's project fails almost immediately as the implicit political identity and program behind it, roughly the social democratic policies attached to the Labour party, falters with Harold Wilson's first government which also took power in 1964 and which committed itself not to an extension of state participation in the economy and civil society but to "modernization".

At any rate, by 1964 intellectual leadership of the new left had already passed to Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn at the New Left Review: Stuart Hall took up his position at Birmingham as Hoggart's assistant after having been deposed as editor of the New Left Review. Anderson and Nairn, insisting on a return to Marxian theory, will introduce the Contintental theorists (Gramsci and Althusser but also the Frankfurt School) to a wider audience in terms which break with the failed literary critical/sociology merger. Birmingham goes into abeyance from which it never fully recovers: its core concept: the materiality of cultural agency in riposte to a base/superstructure model is a failure because it can't account either for "culture's" various internal modes and genres or for its complex external relations to social formations. But with the emergence of identity politics and with the resistance to those forms of governmentality that will become neo-liberalism, it has something of a resurgence after, say, the publication of Policing the Crisis in 1978, the year Thatcher is elected.

Why then has BCS remained a kind of weathervane for so many of us (including me)? Because cultural studies becomes a (admittedly always marginal) post-discipline in a new managed and functionalized university system, and does so quite globally. And cultural studies remains the only place within the academy where a political engagement with contemporary cultural and social formations seems possible. In effect the story of BCS's beginnings, almost wholly irrelevant to actual intellectual work, has become the epic (the song of origination) of a post-discipline which has no methodological or even in the end political or cultural unity. We tell it to ourselves because without it where is our identity?

This is not to say that early works in BCS are irrelevant to us today. Hoggart's work is especially pertinant because it deals with a topic that later disappeared, namely what kind of knowledge and what kind of judgement can literature and literary criticism bring to the table for cultural studies. The claim he makes (and in his way Raymond Williams makes it too) is that literature has a powerful capacity to reveal contemporary experience (or, to speak more accurately of Williams's account, the gap between experience and ideology) in such a way as to expose social forms to critique and praxis. One example: we can learn more about the British working class from Raymond Williams's first novel than from Uses of Literacy.

Hoggart's neglected first book, Auden: an Introduction (none of these papers deals with it), offers one way into this issue. It describes Auden's project begins by clearing the successful from the unsuccessful elements in Auden's poetry. But it claims that Auden is able to "fix in communicable form" (23) the tenor and problems of a society which has become disjointed and incoherent, which no longer knows itself as a community: his poetry is a form of "sociological reporting" (46). For Auden, according to Hoggart, a disintegrated society causes "inner sickness" in individuals, a sickness that in turn intensifies social pathologies. His use of technical language, his difficulty, his modernism, his use of fragments and details, are required since he cannot call upon a received abstract discourse for diagnosis: suggestion, invocation is all he has got.

Mar 7, 2009

Postwar British Literature

1. It's important that no character in Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954) has a backstory involving the war. None seem to have been soldiers or otherwise employed by the services. Given the novel's date this seems improbable but it is worth recalling that the central character, Jake (who's 34) is, I think, Irish (and Ireland was neutral of course) and more to the point that the characters don't have much backstory at all. After all, back story (and the kind of naturalist explanations that comes with it) don't suit what we might call Murdoch's caper Wittgensteinean and socialist existentialism.

2. What's the best literary description of being very drunk? The one in the last few pages of chapter five in Lucky Jim?

Mar 3, 2009

More Schmitt

The methodological sections of Political Theology seem to look forward to Althusser and the concept of structural causality—as does indeed the notion that the modern state is based on displaced theological concepts. Schmitt is concerned to show that democracy is a political concept which has the same structure as the metaphysics of immanence, which in turn is an expression a general de-transcendentalizing of what is in effect the dominant ideology. These relations are not causal in a base-superstructure way, they are serialised structural effects.
The more interesting question then: is what is precisely at stake in this echo from Schmitt to structural marxism?

Schmitt and social democracy

Schmitt wants to strengthen the state in ways that liberalism does not allow against Bolshevism. That's clear. But he is also interested in resisting Boleshevism's enemy and shadow, social democracy? But how much traction did social democracy have in Weimar?