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.

Some brief notes on my belief paper for Rutgers, while waiting to get on the plane (dont they now just say 'plane' or is it only 'deplane') to go to Montreal

Three theories of belief's relation to modernity.
1. modernity involves an incremental loss of belief. A zero-degree of belief would enable a society based on truth.
2. modernity involves transferences of belief from supernature (God) to other formations such as liberalism. This line of thought can involve the claim that belief is universal: all knowledge is constituted by belief: this view is shared by neo-Kantianism and pragmatism. It implies a dehistoricisation of the question concerning belief
3. Modernity involves a new kind of play with belief through the increasing social and cultural importance of its willing suspension.

I am interested in relations between 1 and 3 and I want to think them through in considering the relation between Godwin as social theorist and Godwin as novelist, especially in Caleb Williams. The original interest comes from this question: how is it that Godwin rationalises the narratology of suspension of belief at the same time that he creates a theory on the basis of a society committed to truth thought of as a zero-degree of (mere) belief?

The last couple of days there has been lots of to and froing with Meaghan over what I should or should not present at Hong Kong. Finally settled on this as an abstact
Hong Kong paper
Beyond a boundary: theorising cultural institutions in cultural studies.
This paper analyses some of the possibilities for theorising cultural institutions within cultural studies by examining C.L.R. James's pioneering account of cricket in relation to the work of two more recent theorists, Jacques Ranciere and Bruno Latour. The problems the paper addresses are these: 1) to what degree to cultural instiutions (in this case Trinidadian cricket) expressive of political communiies and to what degree are they constitutive of them, and 2) what's at stake when cultural theorists give up on strong forms of collectivity for thinking communal institutions like Trinidadian cricket a la James.

This is too abstract, I know.

Feeling that I am inhabiting intellectual worlds that are just too distant: on the one side I am reading a very conservative, fuddy-duddy history of eightneeth-century religiion, Gordon Rupp's Religion in England 1685-1791 and falling under the spell of his account of people like William Law, the mystical non-juror. And on the other trying to figure out conference papers that wont completely alienate Hong Kong cultural studies folk. And on yet another orientating to the North American literary theory crowd for the School of Criticism seminar here. And so on. I actually think there are possibilities for connecting these interests and orientations in relation to one another, but it would not be easy, and I think a paper on William Law and Ranciere for instance would not find much of a readership.

Been a bit of a funk over how much I need to do in the next little while, that is basically until Nell arrives. (By the way we have a baby blog for her now over at Typepad, the yuppie's blog provider: http://cornelia.typepad.com/cornelia_josephines_first/). These anxiety seizures are periodic: if I went back over the blog I'd probably find reference to funks past.

So what's the to do list looking like:
1. Finish paper for ASECS conference in Montreal next week. It's nearly there but not quite.
2. Get the copyrights and contents sorted for The Cultural Studies Reader 3. (And then rewrite the introduction at some point).
3. Revise the paper on 'is cultural studies a discipline?' for Ryan and Cultural Politics. This is due by the end of the month.
4. Restructure my paper on Beckford for the Huntington seminar on the Constable painting: it's called 'Sensation' I think. This is happening about April 7.
5. Revise the paper on the history of theory for the Cornell School of Criticism/Hopkins seminar at the Humanities Centre here at Hopkins
6. Revise my book proposal on the literary world for Lindsay at Harvard University Press by de-alphabetising the sequence so we can sign the contract.
7. Prepare my paper for the belief conference at Rutgers later in the summer.
8. Get all my unpublished essays into their book forms.
All this in Lise's last month of pregnancy and the workmen are in and I am teaching two new courses.....
Just be disciplined, mate!!!!

So what's with Ranciere's notion 'distribution of the sensible' which seems to be getting some academic attention currently. It seems as if Ranciere is arguing that our bodily senses provide individuals with a world they can share, and hence provide the foundations of community. This realm of the sensible, held in common, is then divided and segmented by processes
that are properly called political.

Democracy is a form of politics which imposes a equality to individuals and a regularity to communal life outside and in violation of the commons of the sensible. So there is a tension between democracy as we know it and a communal distribution of the sensible

Because the capacity to aestheticise the sensible is not evenly distributed it also divides and segments the originary sharedness of the perceptible world. On these terms, it too is a form of politics with political agency and potential.

What I like about this is that the capacity to engage the world aesthetically is figured as a political stake.

But Ranciere's readings, even the best like the one of Wordsworth, seem to me to lack something. More on this one day I hope?

More art shows.

This weekend we (Lisa and I) went to DC to check out three exhibitions at the National Gallery: the Franz van Mieris, the Cezanne in Provence and the Dada shows, the two last expensive and 'major' shows by any standards. It was rather too much for one day, and we both flagged towards the end...in the Dada show, which began to feel claustrophic.... But it was an amazing day for all that. What seeing all three together, one after another, bam, bam, bam thank you mam, did was to make us think about the coherence of the post-Renaissance art tradition.

What connected these three moments so radically different from one another?

Van Mieris was, apparently, the darling of the seventeenth-century Dutch bourgeoisie at a period when Amsterdam was the centre of global trade and finance, and in which the modern bourgeiois world is, more or less, being invented. His works are extraordinarily carefully crafted: many of them genre scenes of the kind we are familiar with from his contemporaries: girls reading love letters, a fortune teller duping a peasant crowd, courtship scenes and so on. They are small, often painted on copper (he was originally a goldsmith) and present virtuoso light and surface effects; van Mieris seems to be an expert in the painting of the skin on the human leg under brightish light...but also, again like many of his contemporaries, of velvet. But this skill is in the service of an art that seems to be under quotation marks, constantly crossing the line into kitsch: they often look more like nineteenth-century imitations of the late-Renaissance dutch style than the style itself. In fact they seem to point to the impossibility of a certain kind of privatised, bourgeois art: an art in the interests of 'I know what I like' money: an art disconnected from art-historical memories and anticipations, from Christian spirituality or doctrine, from efforts to aggrandise its patrons in the wider public sphere.....it just becomes small in the evaluative sense of the term, sentimental, wedded to familiar and the banal, a fetishisation of sheer technique...

In a sense it is all this that Cezanne is trying to resist. What's really informative about this exhibition is that it places Cezanne's work into his Provence setting (though I would have liked to learn a lot more about the Cezanne family's relation to local Provencal society: where did they get their money from?, how they were networked into the local social associations?...those kinds of questions are pretty relevant to understanding these paintings....)...but we did learn that Cezanne spent his early days in Provence living in his father's grand mansion, not having to earn money, painting, painting, painting mainly whatever was at hand. What was at hand was the landscape, and then the peasantry and ordinary household objects: all three treated with pretty much the same indifferent obejctification. Of course what interested Cezanne was not the emotions or interiority or spiritual or social value of the things and people he painted but their capacity to be represented in the interests of a particular painterly project: that is, the play between colour and geometrical line on the painted surface, a play governed by a principle of reduction: simplify the geometry of the image, reduce the palette while maximising and educating aesthetic pleasure. That project refers back to the metropolitan art world, which meant for Cezanne, Paris. In effect his technical discoveries which do indeed lead to images of a quite ravishing beauty but which have nothing to say about and no interest in the Provence he inhabited rest upon 1) his economic independence and 2) the prestige of the art-world-centre which is the real destination of his work, and which has developed its own criteria of value. In this Cezanne is operating in completely different relations to his social setting than van Mieris, who was painting for his middle-class patrons seemingly without any concept of an art-world, an avant-garde, an art-historical future, the 'advancement' of style. And whatever the wider politics of dissent that help Cezanne make the turn he did (and the show has almost nothing to say about this, except to note that his father was a conservative and that he wasnt), it does seem that the Cezanne project is energised by an effort to avoid the kind of besetting failures of which van Mieris stands as an instance.

Dada is something else again. The most famous account of the Dada revolution is Peter Burger's. He argues that you cant think of Dada as just another school from within the history of the art tradition because it is in fact a rejection of the aesthetic and of the art work. But this show reveals that Burger's account is plain wrong. Dada too is a form of art, particularly in figures like Sophie Tauber (the real revelation here), Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters (the second revelation for me, though those who know his work already, which I didnt, wont be suprised by its carefulness and glamour). The curatorial information on the walls here analyse Dada as a reaction to World War One: a rebellious cocking of Europe's snook in the face of mechanised self-genocide. But that's not how it really quite was given that many of the elements of Dada are already apparent in Paris well before the war: I am thinking of the les incoherents movement, cubism (with its joky, anti-art, anti-patriot underpinnings) the cabarets in Montmartre. In a sense Dada can be understood as: les incoherents meets anarchism meets Nietzsche on a social scene upset and mobilised by the massified European war. And what Dada, a product of nineteenth century nihilism and individualism, looks like here is less an accomplishment than a promise: it spells out the alphabet for the styles that will dominate the art world when that world gathers itself it together and stengthens itself after this war and across the next, given that after Dada the power of the art world cannot be separated from its tendencies to negate itself from within (to be more than art, or less than art almost indifferently).

All this doesnt really help me see the three different shows under one head: they look like three different stones on a string, the string being (this is not a metaphor that is really working) the relations between art and society. What I mean to say is that the coherency of art from the seventeenth to the twentieth century is not be found in a development of painterly technique or form or even of rhetoric (a movement from theatricality to absorption or something) but in a social narrative that is external to it. What that doesn't help us understand is the kind of aesthetic ravishment Cezanne and Schwitters can provide but van Mieris cannot, but which is (I would argue) not purely aesthetic at all since it too draws upon some kind of appreciation of modern art's social emplotment.

Goya

Spent last weekend in Manhattan, first at the Milburn on the upper West Side (our usual hotel there) and then for a couple of nights in my brother's apartment on 57 st and 11th avenue. I'm not sure what this extreme west midtown neighbourhood is called: it's too far north for Hell's Kitchen I think. At anyrate we were there to dogsit: a little pocket dog and a pitbull, though a sweet and docile pitbull. Highlight of the visit (other than seeing Nicholas (my 22 yr old son)) was the Goya exhibition at the Frick. It's quite extraordinary: especially the miniature drawings on ivory he produced at the end of his life. One of the view moments in art where an artist really does present a different way of looking at the world which combines a politics and a sense of design and an urging towards a particular kind of visual pleasure. So the viewer can say, 'this is what it means to see the world like that, from that point of view' where that point of view is aesthetic and political in a broad sense. This politics is not the politics quite of sympathy and a solidarity with the oppressed and the damaged but rather a capacity to treat the outsiders, the battered, the monstrous and grotesque as belonging to the same community as the viewer and of course the artist. This means that there is no sentimentalism in Goya nor any voyeurism—the besetting sins I think of post-revolutionary liberal art.

Beyond a boundary

My grad seminar ("postcolonialism') this week was on C.L.R. James's Beyond a boundary. Since none of the students wanted to present on this particular text (too much cricket and for some, not enough feminism), it was my turn as presenter. (This semester we are circulating papers in advance so people come to class prepared to ask questions: it's a new teaching technique for me but it's working well.) And so I needed to write a few pages on the James text.

Here they are:

Beyond a boundary poses certain problems for contemporary humanities scholarship. The most obvious no doubt is the familiarity with the game of cricket which it assumes of its readers. Perhaps the next most obvious concerns the question of genre: does the text belong to the lineage of criticism itself (which would mean that it is available to forms of critique that might seek to diminish it or render it obsolete) or is it, rather, to be treated as a member of a literary, or quasi-literary canon, criticism of which is always in support of the survival, if not the celebration, of its object.
This problem opens out to two others:
1. if Beyond a boundary is to be treated as part of the genealogy of contemporary academic disciplined knowledge, which discipline precisely does it connect to? Postcolonialism? (and is that in fact a discipline?) Cultural studies? Aesthetics? Sport history? It seems somewhat difficult to know what to do with it because it does not easily fall into the divisions or value-assumptions of established academic divisions of knowledge.
2. How will or ought the distance (or rather the various distances) between James and the contemporary, professional white critic touch or shape our (this ‘our’ presupposes that I’m speaking as a white professional critic) reading of him? James was a black anti-colonialist thinker, involved in revolutionary politics through most of his career. Should either his racial, ethnic identity or his revolutionary politics play a role in our relation to his writing or not? (And if we think the answer to this is ‘no’ then we have to be careful to avoid the bad faith of in fact organizing our reading of his work around his identity while denying that that this is indeed what we are doing. And if we think the answer is ‘yes’ then, at least in relation to his politics we are committed to engaging those politics, treating James as a live rather than as a canonized or archivised thinker.)
Let me leave these problems aside for now and try to clarify Beyond the boundary’s project.
James’s key move is to detach questions of cultural/racial/ethnic identity from the realm of cultural politics at the same time that relations between ‘culture’ (in this case, cricket) and politics are very tightly drawn together. More specifically: James regards cultural formations (in this case styles and practices within the history of cricket) and cultural monuments (in this case a relatively small number of outstanding cricketers) as expressions of social totalities thought of, from within the Marxian tradition, as modes of production which organize particular relations of production. But these cultural formations are not mere instruments in the reproduction of hegemonic relations of production, they form terrains which nurture pleasure, knowledge, pride, identity and resistance across communities. That certainly is the case for cricket in the British empire.
One obvious and important implication of this line of thought is that there is no hard division between colonizer and colonized cultures or even, at the level of at least certain cultural formations (cricket, literature) between colonizer and colonized interests and stakes.
The second key move is to undo the division between high and low, or popular and elite culture, not against the concept of the aesthetic but on the basis of (a reformulation of) it. Cricket for James is an art form of similar status to any other. It has a deep and long history in the transmission of ancient Greek athleticism into modern Europe and is linked to more established genres of aesthetic culture: literature and sculpture, even if its primary modern impetus is the working-class leisure enabled by industrialism and labour agitation (the 1847 Factory Act). ‘Literature’ because each game involves heroic narrative, ‘sculpture’ because cricket style contains ‘tactile values’ a la Bernard Berenson (in a line of thought about sculpture and movement and empathy that can be traced back to Lessing and Herder although James does not go there). One of the rather odd features of James’s account of this history and its connections in the mid 19th century to a particular ethos is that he praises or seems to praise Thomas Arnold, the influential Victorian educationalist, who was in fact a key disseminator of British nineteenth-century racism and colonialism, and whose educational practices, including his absorption of sport into official school life, can be seen as an instrument for British global dominance.
Yet cricket also requires modes of social organization that are open to political action. In particular, for Trinidadian cricket the question of whether black players were permitted to captain sides became a key political question, and one which helped enflame legitimate nationalist and anti-colonialist passions, which James as a journalist encouraged. James implies, although he does not explicitly declare, that the social organization of other forms of aesthetic production are also open to political intervention although clearly the more popular an art form is the more effective and important such intervention might be. This is not to say that James is interested in the politics of literary canonicity for instance, since he treats the canon not so much as a domain in which various identities should find themselves represented as a collection of consensually-agreed important works available to all (more like a cricket team than a democratically elected political body).
Let’s return to certain of the questions I began by making. Where does James fit into the methods of contemporary academic thought? It seems to me that he belongs most closely to those forms of cultural studies that emerged out the 1968 revolutions, and in particular to Communist dissident figures like Jacques Ranciere who attempt to combine a materialist analysist with a populist argument that the wide distribution of aesthetic and sensory pleasures (Ranciere calls this ‘the distribution of the sensible’) can form a grounds for a genuinely egalatarian (if not formally democratic) political practice. (It is worth noting that James did influence Cornelius Castoriadis, the social/political theorist and founder of the sixties PCF left-break-away ‘Socialism or Babarism’ group which played an important role in the 1968 May revolution and with which Lyotard, for instance, was associated.)
But James offers a particularly concrete and detailed account of the dynamic interaction between popular aesthetics and politics through his thick autobiographical relation to cricket. Beyond a boundary is only secondarily a postcolonial text: it’s true that the politics that it describes are those of anti-racism and anti-colonialism but what it is ultimately more interested in at the level of theory is a generalisable relation between sport aesthetics and community political action and will. It would not be hard to imagine a similar articulation between sport and politics concerning not race and cricket but class and football in a Raymond Williams-ish Welsh border town, for instance.
If then we are to regard James here as providing a case for a more general account of relations between politics and art then what (at the level of theory once more) are the problems he faces? The most obvious one is, I think, that he is still operating within the terms of a Luckacian model of (what Althusser called) expressive totality. That is to say, cricket expresses the totality of social relations in which it is embedded. It has no politically significant autonomy within that totality (which, if it had, would become an assemblage rather than a totality) even if it does possess aesthetic autonomy (its own specific rules, styles, skills, grace and so on). It is in these terms that, for James, the post 1929 ruin of cricket as a British and colonial ethos and, more concretely, of the styles of play pioneered by W.G. Grace is an expression of the crisis and expansion of capitalism at that time, while 1950s risk-averse cricket instantiates the welfare state. My sense is that even if this is illuminating about cricket but it is not a generalisable method of cultural analysis. (It is also worth noting that James expresses some nostalgia for the period of immediate post 1789 British radicalism in his praise of Hazlitt and of the contemporary (imaginary?) organic community which he thinks nurtured W.G. Grace and enabled Grace to bridge one epoch (pre-Victorian Britian) with another (industrial Victorian Britain).)
Perhaps the other most obvious difficulty posed by the text is its displacement of the question of difference from theory into the reading experience itself. Beyond a boundary finds and invests its own specificity in its detailed account of cricket, an account which is precisely ‘other to’ all of its readers who don’t know and love the game. Almost every page defies readers to come to terms with James’s cricket obsession as the text’s detailed descriptions of particular cricketers (Learie Constantine and W.G. Grace) and of specific games and series are used to adduce cricket’s charm. The cramming of cricket detail challenges readers not just to take the game seriously as a form of aestheticised, politicisable culture but to learn more about it. That detail ceases to pose an insuperable barrier to readers who know little or nothing about cricket to the degree that the text’s mix of autobiography, history and theory simultaneously engages their literary and intellectual interests (that is, an interest in the narrator’s account of himself and his world and an interest in conceptual questions like those I have just been outlining). These different classes of interest are not separable here—this one of the text’s triumphs. More particularly, Beyond a boundary’s very artful formal organization (in particular the order in which it sequences its sections) is, I’d suggest, designed to test a culturally distant readership’s resistance to massed cricket lore against that readership’s engagement with politics and theory as well as its seduction by the memoirs of a man who is constructing himself—not without good reason— as a cultural/national hero within anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggle.
In terms of poscolonialism: the book offers (at least in hindsight) a rebuke to what we might call ‘vulgar postcolonialism’’s politics of identity and rejection of cultural transmissions from metropole to colony as well as (perhaps) of the thematics of subalterneity, since James’s cricket gives a vocabulary to everyone or at least to all men. (We might want to think harder about James’s treatment of gender.) However the question of whether his account from below of Trinidadian society and culture (so different from Forster and Kipling’s India and Conrad’s Costaguana) is too critical of hard localisms and the incommensurability of colonizer/colonized cultures, remains a live one.

Bibliographic note
For reasons that should by now be apparent, James has not been carefully absorbed by contemporary postcolonialism. His legacy is of more account in radical, not always academic Marxist and post-Marxist circles. Despite that and leaving aside the Tim Brennan essay in At Home in the world, I would recommend Ian Baucom’s chapter “Put a little English on it: C.L.R. James and the field of play,’ in Out of place (Princeton 1999). You might also look at Neil Lazarus’s Nationalism and cultural practice in the postcolonial world which mentions James throughout and has an excellent brief account of Beyond a boundary. Grant Farred has an essay on James’s major work his history of slave rebellion, The Black Jacobins in The politics of culture in the shadow of capital, eds Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd. Duke 1997 might also be worth looking into.

WW2 versus WW1

It is beginning to seem to me that WW2 had greater impact on British society and culture than WW1. In the end, fifties Britain was less like twenties or thirties Britain than twenties Britain was like 1890s Britain: at least for the population at large. This isn’t how it is usually seen, of course. Is the same true for the US, Australia and NZ??

Kipling's Kim

These comments come from my teaching note for a graduate seminar on Kipling's Kim that I taught yesterday. Didn't actually get to say any of this (these kind of summary and ambitious position-taking declarations aren't actually appropriate to a grad seminar), but they push in a direction I want to consider further.

For me ‘interpretation’ and close reading not the focus of professional literary studies in regard to individual texts. Nor taking philosophical or political meanings from them, nor primarily assessing them morally or politically. I'm interested, rather, in describing a text’s project from within the thickness of its historical moment, which includes the terms on which it chooses genre and form, attaches to (the history of) the literary world, and the ways it relates to a writer’s life and career. (After all, the larger interest of literature, looked at backwards, consists largely of that last.) And then, if possible, relating that project to a contemporary problematic: thus for instance, Conrad's Nostromo in relation to finance capitalism as a motor of contemporary globalization.

The vehicle for this kind of criticism is usually the paratactical essay: doesn’t involve a centralized argument necessarily.

And so more particularly to Kim
1. the novel represents a quite specific fantasy of India (a rich, magical, free, cross-cultural everyday life crammed with ‘sentimental journeys’) basically to resist liberal utilitarian modernity on one side; Schopenhaurian ‘pessimism’ on another, missionary imperialism on yet another (it’s a secular and effectively anti-Christian novel) and various forms of native anti-colonialist stuggle on the last. The space that remains for Kipling is the secular and sacrifical ‘white man’s burden’ (really the British burden with racist underpinnings) and a metaphysico-literary engagement with empire, that is to say, empire as a theme and setting for questionings about Being enabling and enabled by experiments and triumphs of literary style and form.
2. At one level, the novel's problematic is the limitations that racism entails for sympathetic imagination. At another level it is the politico-cultural predicament of the Indian settler colonial, understood and invested in from within.
3. The Orient for Kipling is both eternally deceitful and undisciplined (which is why it requires the white man’s burden) but it also provides a strengthening riposte to Western state-formation. One of the novel’s lessons is that to govern India in British terms requires law breaking, going native etc simultaneously to the utmost respect for the law and for whiteness.
4. Empire also a theatre of intelligence to which, in end, the novel belongs alongside the surveying, ethnography, and spying that it describes. It is in these terms that the ethnographer and spymaster, Creighton is closest to ‘us’ and yet almost absent from the narrative.
5. The novel is written in a particular moment in book history, namely the globalizing of the peripheries through thickly descriptive forms of journalism and short fiction mainly designed for periodicals, often to be read in new kinds of times and spaces (especially the rail trip). This involves a masculinising of the fiction reader (decline of the marriage plot). Hart Crane, Brett Hart, Mark Twain, Henry Lawson, Rolf Boldrewood, Blackwoods Magazine. Clearly Kipling is not writing ‘art-literature’ like James Joyce or Henry James, or Flaubert, or Virginia Woolf , and this allows him to amalgamate genres: Bildungsroman, imperial romance, sentimental journey, spiritual quest story, even naturalism (relation between characters and narration is ‘naturalistic’ in so far as no real possibilities for emulation by readers of characters). And certainly not written for the anti and now postcolonial ‘native’ reader, that is doesn’t imply that reader.
6. For all that Kim has a short story’s ‘gimmicky’ closure. What its famous, unresolved (or partly resolved) ending means is that Kim is finally sacrificable. He wont necessarily become an agent; he will never grow into ‘one of us’, he is too marked by his origins.
7. And yet in his capacity to lose identity, to go with the flow, he is a mimesis of a form of modern literary subjectivity. After all, his lived relation to India is the reader’s to the fiction.

Under the net

Taught Iris Murdoch's Under the Net in my undergraduate class on postwar British literary culture. As far as I am concerned at least, it worked surprisingly well. I was a little apprehensive since I'd never taught it (or any other Murdoch novel) before, and had no idea how her sensibility and style would strike 20 something young Americans. But they liked it. And from a teacherly point of view what's great about teaching this book is that it's not so much a novel of ideas as a novel about theory in something like the current sense. It sets into play the choice: Wittgenstein or the New Left (before that term was current of course).

As I have said elsewhere, Murdoch is the new-left intellectual who first makes the call for 'theory' to invigorate socialism in the mid-fifties but I hadn't realised that the background for that call is spelled out in her first novel. In a sense Under the net is a novel which argues for theory against spectacle (which it sees like the Situationists as colonising public life). But this only pushes the problem away a remove since Murdoch also recognises that politics are always involved in spectacle and that to enter politics requires a certain break with theory. The novel does begin to make the case for 'theoretical practice' (that is, the binding of politics to theory) but the hero doesn't abide by it. In the end what's celebrated here is literary practice: writing, living, reading literature.

The difficulty with Murdoch (of this period) is that she's a light novelist of serious intent. Like most of her contemporaries, who were formed in the depression and the war, she turns her back on modernism and the Bloomsbury cult of aestheticism, sensitivity and 'personal relationships'. Her optimism about Britain and its promise after 1945 means that she wants to connect to the population at large, which prevents her from any kind of hermeticism. But hermeticism is the lifeblood of academicisable literature, and she loses out. Certainly she does not offer the same kind of literary pleasures as does Elizabeth Bowen for instance (at her best), of a slightly different generation, and a much more traditional, Jamesian fictionalist as well as a more challenging or at least suprising one.

Then too Murdoch's own writing practices change from the late fifties taking something of a 'Shakespearean' or baroque turn (this is a topic I should explore since I really don't know her oeuvre well at all) and she becomes (regarded as) as a serious and overly established middlebrow writer, outside the currents of cultural politics or the development of novel form and style.

An idea: perhaps the modern concept of the aesthetic predates and forms the precondition for the modern concept of culture. Let us assume that Lessing's Laocoon is a foundational text for modern aestheticism with its argument that each sense takes its own autonomous pleasure and finds its own capacity for cognition in different and heteronomous forms of art linked to the body through that sense (sculpture, painting, poetry, music). (Winkelmann is important here too no doubt especially his then famous description of the Apollo Belvedere, dripping with gayness). Then it is clear that Lessing's argument is analagous to the culturalist argument that each society has its own not wholly comensurable meaning system in and through which it expresses itself, that is, its own culture. The key text which joins these two modes of thought might be Herder's essay on Sculpture. (And behind Lessing's move ultimately lies Locke and the Molyneaux debate?)

Another idea: literature in 18thc Britain undergoes a transformation in its social functions. The most important moments or expressions of this transformation can be taken to be: Richardson's Pamela, Sterne's Tristam Shandy and Lyrical Ballads. What 'literature' means for a figure like John Nichols or to the Gentleman's Magazine comes to an end by about 1800: literature by then is predominantly 'interesting', increasingly fictional and involved in disseminating and taking advantage of the power of sympathetic imagination and a certain democratisation both of reception and topoi (Ranciere). It would be usual to connect this transformation to the increasing exposure of literature to the market over the period but that isn't the whole story. It is also a response to the legitimation crisis involved in the separation of church from state after 1688, a separation which involves some separation of the economy from society more generally (though this is really a post-1815 development). But at any rate the new literary function is based in the new formal social state relations of the post 1745 era. The real difficulty, though, is that the old literary formation also develops during the eighteenth-century: producing new kinds of literary knowedge and new literary forms, notably the Magazine itself. It might be possible to argue, I think, that the developed form of literary knowledge and the new post-sentimental literature join in poets like Keats and Browning.

Have been idly reading the Penguin edition of Coleridge's Complete Poems edited by Bill Keach. It's been something of a relevation. Coleridge wrote all kinds of verse on all kinds of occasions (a translation of a 'Hebrew Dirge' as 'chaunted' at London's Great Synagogue on the day of Princess Charlotte's funeral (1817), for example, or a translation from a print on the Virgin found during his walking tour of Germany) as well as many, many short unfinished lines in his notebook. The thing is that they are all compulsively readable, even if they don’t always quite rise to poetry in the most sanctified sense of the word.
I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish
Than if 'twere Truth. It has been often so
Must I die under it? Is no one near?
Will no one hear these stifled groans, & wake me?
Part of the interest of this is its being more a diary entry than a poem, or something in between. Its very unpoeticness (compared to say Keats) is part of its effectiveness.
Or:
As some vast tropic Tree, itself a Wood
That crests its Head with clouds, beneath the flood
Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank
Of its wide Base controlls the fronting bank,
(By the slant current's pressure scoop'd away
The fronting Bank becoms a foam-piled Bay)
High in its Fork the uncouth Idol knits
His channel'd Brows: low murmurs stir by fits:
And dark below the horrid Faquir sits;
An Horror from its broad Head's branching Wreath
Broods o'er the rude Idolatry beneath.
Admittedly this is creepy not just because it’s trying to be but because it represents Coleridge’s complete failure to get the point of cultural relativism, or religious toleration but it is also fascinatingly weird (why does he need that longish description of the ‘flood’ to make his point, why is the tree on a river bank in other words?) and also, in context, Coleridege’s xenophobia seems an expression of the kind of depression and anxiety expressed in the first lines cited. It’s these kinds of connections that make the book so good.

Back from NZ somewhat the worse for wear. Seeing my mother becoming frailer was very depressing: her mind is pretty much what it ever was but her body is beginning to go, and dragging her capacity (and her will?) to enjoy life with it. And of course it's so hard to be close to this not just because you begin to share mum's suffering but because that suffering carries with it the message: this is likely to happen to you too.
It's nice to be back in Baltimore: I found Auckland restricted, it is stunningly beautiful and the day I spent at the Gow's sculpture park on Waiheke Island was glorious, but the place is culturally and socially so bland: the opportunities to catch complex social self-reflections and commentary in the public sphere at least (and truth to say in the private sphere too) are so rare, and everyday encounters with a range of different peoples and values barely happen, even if Maori and the new migrant communities are very present too. Maybe what I am really trying to say is that the country's imagination of itself is trapped in self-satisfaction.
But for all that I totally understand why a certain kind of American dreams of migrating there.

It turns out that mum is on broadband (though she hardly uses it). So here I am.
Auckland doesn't change. Or rather my Auckland doesn't change. My first response, getting off the plane about 6.30 in the morning, jet lagged but not crippinglingly, was how dazzling it is: literarily (the sunlight on the blue sea is blinding) and metaphorically.
Despite the fact that house prices have gone through the roof, that people endlessly complain about traffic jams, overpopulation, despoilation of the natural environment and so on (which may all be fair enough) it still feels raffish, incomplete, relaxed and charming to me. Yesterday I walked down to Cockle Beach about ten minutes down the hill to the north from my mother's house. There must have been about 200 Cook Islanders there, almost no Maori or Pakeha. Some wore tiaras of flowers around their head (I am sure there is a technical name for these but I dont know it); young men strummed guitars; families were collecting shell fish; old people asleep under blankets; small children everywhere and only they spoke English. It was a scene from Gauguin, even if they were clearly all from a very intact Christian denomination since there was no drink anywhere. And its that mix of the rather proper white suburbia with various alternatives (islander, maori, diasporic chinese) set into this extraordinarily benign natural setting which characterises the place.
The flipside is that Auckland is more langorous than any other city I know. The air is seeded with boredom and indifference: it possesses a thickness that keeps all intensities at bay.
Auckland in summer: dazzling langour.
In spite of that I have to work: my book proposal and a revision of my essay on Milton.

Am off to Auckland New Zealand for ten days or so to visit my mother, who is thinking of selling up her house and moving into some kind of retirement village. So I won't be blogging for a couple of weeks. In fact I'll be off line completely, which comes as a kind of relief.
My feelings about the trip are mixed: once baby comes I wont have a chance to spend time alone with my mother and in my old Auckland hangouts, so this visit is kind of valedictory, or feels like that. And it will be summer in Auckland, and I am looking to walking down to the Howick beaches for swims. My mother's garden will be glorious: it is large, private and on the cliffface directly fronting the Harbour. It is a pity that the child-to-come will be unlikely ever to enjoy it. On the other hand I have so much work here, and the trip itself is so uncomfortable, expecially given that now United don't fly the LAX-Auckland route I can't upgrade to business class. And I will miss being around Lisa whose pregnancy I am enjoying: it's a process of discovery.
Yesterday two emails from colleague-friends about my impending fatherhood. One from a man who has himself had a baby in a second marriage at roughly my age. Here it is: "CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! It is a fantastic gift from the gods, these creatures, early or late in one's life." And the other, from a friend who has also recently married a younger woman but whose son in his first marriage turned out to be schizophrenic (this became clear in the boy's adolescence) saying, painfully, that he couldn't face parenthood again. A very sad message, which cast a gloom over the day.
Watched the second installment of the PBS doco 'Country Boys' last night. It's about a couple of young men approaching their high-school graduation, who live in Appalachian East Kentucky, not far from where Lisa and I visited a couple of months ago. (They live near Prestonburg, we visited just north of Harlan and south of Boonesville). Mixed feelings about this: at one level, these kids and their families and society are being presented as freaks to the liberal bourgeois audience who mainly watch PBS. And the show's narrative mode: reality-TV presentation of everyday life, coupled with retrospective voice-over by the boys and some of those close to them creates weird frictions and gaps: it is clear that we are not getting the whole story—which becomes very clear, for instance, when one of the boys (Chris) is almost expelled from school for supposedly supplying a girl with speed, an incident to whose background we are given no access at all. It comes as a shock, or did to me. This means that in the end we don't actually know the boy's characters, what they are really like, for all the hours that they're on screen. Yet the program does present the material and social setting of the boys' lives with real vividness and force, and in such a way that may remind us viewers that poverty curtails opportunity at all kinds of levels, a message which has political charge, hopefully.

After midnight on Sunday morning, several bursts of what sounded like loud fireworks amidst laughter by a crowd of people on the street and square that our apartment overlooks. The next morning some friends who were staying over and sleeping in the front room (on the square) wondered whether what they'd heard was gunfire. I had to go out early to check the car and there was a posse of cops hanging out on the square. And then on Sunday night a heavy presence of police helicopters overhead. Welcome to inner city life: Baltimore USA. (And not only Baltimore) The friend staying over said she'd heard similar sounds in NYC some years back, assumed it was firecrackers....but it turned out to be gunfire then too. Lisa had gotten up to see what was going on and had begun to peer out of the windows to check the street out, and then figured that mightn't be such a great idea.

One of my tasks before teaching starts is to get through the pile of TLS's that have grown under my study coffee table over the past year or so. So as I read reviews or notions sparked by reviews that might be useful someday, I will list them here as a kind of memorandum.
1. Pierre Rosanvallon. Apparently in the school of François Furet and at one time linked to the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) a left-Catholic group. Any his argument is that an effective civil society has not been established in France because all sides (Liberals, Communists and even the Right) have, since the Jacobin moment, agreed on an ideology of universalism and a strong state as its bearer which have crowded out the kind of civil society that developed in Anglophone nation-states. This has meant that the official French discourses of republicanism: democratic and egalatarian have actually been supported by an autoritarian and anti-pluralist state.
(This came home to me today: the New York Times reports that the French government (Chirac) is thinking of rescinding a quite recent decree that made it illegal to teach negative views of the French colonialist legacy!)
Anyway according to the reviewer, Sudhir Hazaareesingh (TLS Sept 24 2004), Rosanvallon's best books are Le sacred du citoyen, Le Peuple introuvable and La Démocratie inachevée as well as his new one (in 2004!) Le modèle politique français.
This is interesting to me since I am thinking about the displacements involved in the translation of 'theory' from France to Britain and the US, and this background makes some sense of the specificity of figures like Barthes, Deleuze and Foucault who just dont have the kind of framework of thick liberal civil institutions to mediate between the state and the individual in their thinking.
The difficulty is: I really don't like the kind of revisionism that Furet in particular stood for. The French Revolution needs our support: at least from afar.

Recently I have been thinking fairly often about Babar the Elephant. What with a child on its way and what with the 'Book People' project (more on this one day: it's the next serious project I intend to do about the history of the 'literary world'), I guess it's natural enough that my own favorite books when I was very young often come to mind. I have acquired a few early Babar editions over the years, including my favorite, a first French edition of Le voyage de Babar published by Conde Nast (under the wonderfully named 'Le Jardin des modes' imprint) in folio size in 1932. It's a marvel of style: a combination of cutting edge chic, popular visual modernism and just faintly ironic narrative aimed at children of about five I guess. The first Babar book appeared in 1931, two years after the crash and just before the World Depression really took hold but there's no trace here of anything like slump realism or leftism. Not a sliver. And what's really marvellous is the combination of text and print: the print is in some font that imitates handwriting (I remember finding it difficult to read as a kid) and is usually but not always placed at the bottom of the page in chunks of about 3 or 4 lines. But sometimes the print floats above the illustrations, offering a kind of rhythm to the reading sequence. The images themselves owe something to Matisse I think and the school of illustration he helped establish: they are strikingly pleasurable: simple, not carefully perspectivilised, not aimed at the kind of sentimental, detail-packed 'beauty' of much current art-children's-book-illustration, instead mainly relying on line, but occasionally, especially in images of night's darkness that most of the books, including this one, contain, turning to a sophisticated form of cross-hatching.
But of course from a political and maybe moral point of view there are problems. The representations of Africans belong to the conventionalism racism of the time, there's little doubt about that. And Babar himself is the kind of native colonial ruler that metropolitan colonial powers dream of: more interested in shopping for designer clothes in Paris and having fun than in independence and resistance. Is this a barrier, when it comes to reading Babar to children? To what extent, and how, does it damage the glamour and beauty of these books? I want to write about this one day, in an essay in which I will describe the rather different American and British Babars (the books were translated by different folk in each place) and the fate of the luxury children's book in general as well as the relation between reading as a child and reading as a parent to a child and, probably, after Walter Benjamin, on collecting children's books in more general terms. There's already stuff on at least some of this, a good essay by Alison Lurie published in the New York Review of Books a few years back when some kind of Babar exhibition toured the States (I think), and a book I haven't seen dedicated to praising Jean de Brunhoff, his son Laurent (who continued the franchise) and Babar too.

US on the way down

At the gym on the stepper the guy next to me gave a 20 minute long hate speech against the neo-cons and George W. Nothing much to disagree with there.
But it came to me that the real difficulty the US now faces is that the institutions and ideology that were developed here after the successful 1776 Revolution (which was really not a revolution but an irredentist struggle) and which basically have served it very well during two centuries and more of continually increasing power and wealth are not going to serve it so well over the next two centuries as its power and wealth decline, at least comparatively.
What worked on the way up needn't work on the way down.
It's not just that 'founding' institutions and ideology did not emphasise efficiency or community support: they emphasised 'freedom,' constitutionalism and individualism. It's that the US has never really be able to affirm the role of the state as the administrative expression of society. In times when all social resources have to managed tightly both because the market cant achieve largescale improvements in individual lives and because other nations are gaining power and influence and, presumably, because natural resources are becoming more expensive, then a wholly legitimated state becomes crucial
Yet I suspect that these are not values that help most when there's a need to confront serious limits and competition in relation to growth. This is a scary thought, since, if accepted, it would lead to a stronger state here, and while a stronger state could certainly implement more egalitarianism and more environmental sanity, for instance, it could also reduce the kind of chaos that means that America can't actually win wars like those against Vietnam and Iraq. And America, like most continental nations, does not really have much experience in building an effective and responsive strong state.

Back from the MLA at DC. A nice old (indeed historical) hotel, the Wardman Park Marriott. We stayed a day after the conference actually ended since the doorman here had warned us about a noisy party down on the third floor (we're on 5) this Friday (Dec 30). It turned out the party was actually on New Year's Eve (of course) and turned out to be pretty quiet....the conference itself was fine: I gave a paper and attended some (the one I got most out of was on Byron and Byronism) but most of the time was spent meeting up with Australian friends and colleagues, and with publishers. I went to the party in honour of Hillis Miller and it was good to be able to catch up briefly with him and congratulate him on his award. I was devestated to hear that Routledge had sacked Bill Germano: that kind of news is really shaking. Bill has been important to academic publishing for the past 15 years or so. And then of course Routledge forgot to bring copies of Cultural Studies: a critical introduction to their stand! God only knows what that outfit think they are doing.
It looks as though my proposal for a book on the literary world is at long last taking shape since both the publishers I talked to are interested in giving me a contract. For some weird reason I'd like a contract rather than just writing it and sending it out when done which is what most people at my stage in their careers do, I think. Having a contract in hand just gives me a sense of more security and urgency too, although I know that the contract doesnt mean a great deal, since it doesnt compel publishers to actually publish the book.
And so now the work is really piling up. And what with baby coming late April (I dont think the blog officially knows: but we are expecting a little girl circa April 24) I'm not sure how I am going to get everything done.
A to do list:
1. a short essay for a catalogue to a young Australian and New Zealand art exhibition which will tour Eastern Europe. I have a week to write this, which is being done strictly for the money.
2. a revision to my essay on Milton and visual culture which is already late for the proposed volume by Brewer and McCalman.
3. tidying up my paper on colonialism and irreligion (which I gave at the MLA) so that it at least looks like a draft for a chapter or journal essay.
4. more work on my ASECS paper on 18thc literary institutions. Part of this paper will probably have to be used for the 'belief' talk I am to give at Rutgers next year too.
5. in theory more urgent than anything: the ms etc for the 3rd ed of The Cultural Studies Reader. I havent even decided what essays to include: since Rebecca left Routledge, my heart isnt really in it, though it does make money.
6. Reworking actually what I want my book of my own essays contracted with Routledge to look like. This problem hasn't yet been solved. I now have way too many unpublished papers/essays.
7. Getting on with the big book, and, quite urgently, preparing the materials to allow my putative publishers to go to their boards for a contract. (And then I will have to decide which publisher actually to go with once that's all done.)
8. (And all this doesnt deal with various lectures I have to give this year most of which hopefully can be versions of material in place.)
And there's probably more I have forgotten about.
So you can see I am kind of petrified about all this: I have a big teaching semester coming up, we will be in Florence for Fall semester 2006 and once baby comes what will happen???

Another long hiatus with this blogging thing, even though I am on leave and back in Baltimore. I've got to get my act together.
Instead of blogging, I've been spending my time reading for a paper on William Beckford and another, further down the road, on something I am calling to myself the "the 18thc literary institution' and which involves reading through John Nichols 14 vol Literary Anecdotesand trying to figure out relations between the various authors and figures mentioned there. (Basically the Nichols work is a record of books that the Bowyer firm of printers printed from the end of the 17thc to the end of the 18thc.)
And then I have gotten into Library Thing, with the idea of having a list of my books available for insurance purposes (except that, as it turns out, it looks as if it will be too expensive to insure them properly). Listing your books on this site takes a long time, and is, for someone like me, addictive.
Just today too, I signed up for Fox Soccer with Comcast which means that watching the English Premier League will be taking up a fair bit of time. (Caught a great game between Tottenham and Arsenal this morning.)
I also think the whole Australian cultural studies fracas that happened just as I was leaving Canberra didnt endear me to the blogging world. (The short version: I stupidly (and no doubt reductively) criticised australian cultural studies for being too tied to the cultural industries approach and marginalising critique and theory, which sparked off really personal attacks on me, basically I think out of some weird kind of envy, a let's-fuck-over-the tall-poppy-thing). And when I got back here from Australia and New Zealand I was really busy writing an application for a Fed Fellowship. My chances for that aren't good I suspect.
Tomorrow I go for a couple of days to New Haven: to read some comments that William Beckford made in his copy of Cowper's Memoirs which is held at the Beinecke, and, more to the point, to see Nick at Wesleyan who's just got his driving licence.
Been buying tons of books. Most recently: Derlugian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Causcasus and an old book on English scholars circa 1700 for my 18thc lit institution thing.

Kauderstuff
Well it's nice to be back blogging, in my rather lackadaisical fashion. In fact I'm in Australia now: at the HRC in Canberra on a Fellowship. And since leaving Baltimore we (Lisa and I) were in China, first at a conference on the canons at Beijing and then holidaying in Shanghai. The China trip was amazing as usual. I'd vowed not to go back there since my previous academic trips had been so frustrating and weird, but I gave in this time partly so that Lisa who had never visited the PRC could see it. The difficulties in China are twofold: first barely anyone speaks English well enough for us to sustain a useful or at least satisfying academic conversation and then, second, the rules and conventions there are so different from those in the West, and can involve simple and obvious repression and censorship, that again real dialogue and exchange becomes impossible and, more than that, one can feel implicated in oppression, expecially when some of these events are organised by Chinese academics who are cynically and opportunistically using them for their own career advancement. This kind of response, of course, doesn't allow for the usefulness of encounters with Westerners for at least some Chinese. And this time that was more apparent. To begin with: the conference was organised by Tao Dongfeng, for whom I have a great deal of respect, and then the usual kind of events happened: we were drawn aside by Chinese participants who wanted to make sure that we were aware of the limits, injustices and censorships under which they worked. These meetings are, for me, the real point of the trip and I think this time we met and talked to people for whom our conversations mattered—I certainly learnt a lot. And there were real indications that the scene is opening up: there was a feminist protest at the conferences domination by men, which was not only absolutely justified but was also paid attention to by Tao, and then there was a real debate about the political charge of disrepectful popular culture within the repressive State, even if Tao had finally, at least formally and rhetorically, to concede. The politics of this are difficult since, Tao was arguing that youth culture, which mocks the civilisational canons, is the sign of a resistance which cant take stronger, more political forms and this argument was closed down upon by the man he called his 'boss' (that is, his mentor and teacher) on grounds that could have been simply culturally traditionalist. For him, this kind of popular culture does not deserve serious academic attention, since that in itself ratifies it. Is this a political line (in the sense of being an expression of the Party's point of view), or rather simply a kind of Chinese Arnoldianism? I dont know.
And the other thing that made this conference worthwhile was where it was. We were taken to a resort East of Beijing, beyond the city limits, owned by Capital Normal and Beijing Normal Universities jointly. It was perched above a hydro-lake, miles from the nearest shops or town. A few peasants fished the lake or looked after chickens there, that was it. The landscape had some of the classical features of Taoist landscape, if not so dramatically as the landscapes around Guilin for instance. But still: the very essence of peace.

Nick's rugby team: Wesleyan April 23 2005

IMG_0034
Originally uploaded by Kauders.

Note the rain drop on the lens. Atmospheric uh? Not exactly rugby as I knew it in New Zealand circa 1960...far far more fun...

The whole blogging world seems to have been transformed since I last posted. Now the blog is in the culture; not an intriguing new thing, mainly of interest to geeks and sub-cultures and specialised political niches, but central to the communications machine, which it has transformed. We have a new form of social communication. Amazing. It's happened so quickly. What impact will it have?
For blogging itself, this involves a loss I think. As blogging moves into the centre, it becomes organized, professionalised, written for knowable readerships, taken over by the big money or those who can give it real time and energy. Amateurish pages loose their edge and interest. It's harder to strike that odd note between public and private, between the report and the diary, the trivial and the engaging that used to belong just to it and was so striking and fresh.
Me. If I am a blogger (and really I'm not), I'm old school.
Anyways.....just back from New Haven, where we went for the weekend to watch Nicholas play rugby at Wesleyan. In the pouring rain as it turned out, but fun. Not rugby as I knew it in NZ as a kid, a norm, a national obsession, but marginal, a kind of mild resistance to college liberalism.
And the New Haven I knew in 1976 has pretty much disappeared, at least down town, as I found out my last couple of times there. It's been bourgeoisified....bookshop cafes, gleaming restaurants, boutiques, the lot.
Even the Yale Centre for British Art seems to have joined the new exhibition world: not one but two shops, busy with gift-buyers. For all that its shows are wonderful: the Hodges show (the over exoticised images from Cook's voyages are less compelling than the Indian images, more sober, more tied to governmentality) and for me a more interesting one still on the British eighteenth-century landscape painter Richard Wilson. He, it turns out, combined 'historical' and topographical painting, to create a new genre which was badly received by the art establishment (mainly Reynolds) but pointed the way to the British romantic treatment of landscape in artists like Turner. What's interesting is that they display an unimaginable England; a cosmpolitan landscape that England never became.
Books bought
William Gardner Smith The Stone Face which I first read about in Kirsten Ross's imformative book on Paris 1968. Smith was an African American in Paris and the novel contains an account of the almost forgotten massacre of Algerian immigrants by the police there apparantly.
Auden's The Prolific and the Devourer, a document on his Christian-conservative turn which I hope will be instructive.
CD bought
John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith and Susie Ibarra Live

Sent this email to Labyrinth Books in response to a request from them to itemise some books of the year. Why I do this, I don't know

A list of favorite books, 2004.
1. Alan Hollingworth's A Sense of Beauty. In the great tradition of the British novel of manners with oodles of sex thrown in. What I liked in particular: it's carefully and beautifully written; it doesnt rush to judgment, and with one exception (let's pass over it in silence) it doesn't peddle obvious stereotypes.
2. Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire. Hope this counts as a 2004 book. A historical novel mainly set in mid nineteenth-century Afghanstan, as the British scheme to take the place over. Another beautifully crafted work which isn't going to help you shore up your prejudices.
3. Christine Gerrard's Aaron Hill. A specialist's choice admittedly. But few books take one further into the emergence of modern British culture than this scholarly biography of an early eighteenth century entrepreneur, man of letters, patron, philanthropist, eccentric.
4. William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Detailed account of readerships and the book trade in Britain circa 1800. Necessary reading for anyone interested in the emergence of the British literary sensibility.
5. C;A. Bailey, The Birth of the Modern World. The latest 'global history' school comes of an age in this volume. Accessible, formidably learned, and understands that the West isnt the centre of the world, though it could go still further in this direction. For instance, the cover is dominated by a portrait of Toussaint L'Overture, but his slave-revolution, a world-historical event if there ever was one, is covered in all of two sentences.
6. Daniel Tanguay. Leo Strauss, une biographie intellectuelle. Know your enemy: a lucid account of Strauss's intellectual contribution and can be rewardingly read alongside Anne Norton's rather sensationalist Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. It's a pity Tanguay doesnt historicise Strauss, but that wouldnt be a Straussian thing to do, would it?
7. Gilles Kepel The War for Muslim Minds. Kepel's probably the West's best commentator on the US's stupid war against Sunni extremists. There wasn't a book out by Tariq Ali this year, otherwise I'd probably have added that too.
8. W.H. Auden's The sea and the mirror. In these bad times I have found myself reading more poetry than usual. And strangely enough, few books of poems with more pleasure and admiration than this new edition of Auden's long and hybrid work which riffes off The Tempest.
9. Alexander Kluge, The Devil's Blind Spot. Great to have an excellent translation of a selection of Kluge's groundbreaking fictions.
10. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévi, Capital Resurgent. Arguably the best book of marxist economics of the past few years. It's analysis of US neo-liberalism, which prefers to think of history as continuous than as marked by breaks and transformations, is sobering.
11. Doris Sommer's Bilingual Aesthetics. This was not a good year for books in cultural and literary studies and theory, unless I missed something (which is more than possible). But I liked this book on the virtues of bilingualism a great deal, as I did the somewhat similar book: Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien's Weird English.

A couple of books I haven't read but am looking forward to:
Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbeme, Johannesburg: the elusive metropolis
Ron Padgett, Remembering Joe Brainard

It's been a busy time, speaking as a cultural consumer. First we watched (as a netflix dvd) the Aussie movie Praise. It's set in Brisbane, about an aimless slacker guy who gets involved with an extraordinarily energetic and demanding (most of all sexually) good time girl, Cynthia, who ends up by completely exhausting him before he manages to extricate himself. Sacha Horler who plays Cynthia gives an amazing performance of a kind of Aussie femininity which is both deeply familiar and unfamiliar: no babe, no bourgeois subject; unaffected and unselfconscious, without an ounce of introspection; she's utterly direct, into pleasure and at home with her body and appetites and yet for all that not quite at ease in the world. She's crippled most of all because she can't actually a form a relationship with the man whom she's dependent on: she doesn't have enough deliberation and reflection for that. At one level the movie's another representation of the Aussie grotesque (the grotesque is a Australian film genre all of its own whose brightest light is probably Jane Campion's Sweetie) but at another level it really does have something to say about a particular generation and class (the lower middle class who haven't gone into tertiary education) and their particular form of what would once have been called their social 'lostness' in the gap between school and 'settling down'.
And then we watched Lars von Trier's Dogville, about which more later.

Some books that ought to be published:
a history of british reception of american jazz 1920-1970
a history of 'the shakespeare really was x' craze
a history of sports clothing
a biography of elizabeth smart
a work in praise of 'assimilation' focussing on german jewish assimilation

Trying to use blogthis: some new labour saving device...apparently. Not sure if it is working. After a hard day reading Keats's Letters I'm feeling about as practical as a princess.

Six months later. Summer in Baltimore, steamy, dull, undemanding, trying to write two papers, one on charlatanism and 18th C literature, another on cultural studies as a discipline. The first is not going well: I dont feel I kinow enough to do it properly (though I am getting into Oliver Goldsmith and Christopher Smart) and the second I haven't started. But at least I sent off a manuscript for my cs textbook, which in th end I was less unhappy with than looked likely earlier on. It will be interesting to see how it will do: it is out of genre. But this note is just a taste, to get me back into the whole blogging thing. If I knew why I blog maybe I'd write more. I have been on my own which strangely makes me less likely to write, now Lisa's back I feel more communicative, have a a more concrete sense of the strange, empty blogging public: attractive because it doesnt exist except as possibility.

On Wednesday I have to get on the plane to Brisbane and before then?....finish up the 'interesting' article for CI and, if possible, the one on Milton's illustrations for the visual culture conference website...sending both off....the Milton one is basically not capable of being made presentable, but I dont want to do the work it would require for it really to work....so fuck it...and then I need to prepare for the theory orals on Tuesday: this seems as hard on me as on the students since I haven't read most of this stuff for what must it be? 15 yrs?...and in most cases my sympathy for it has long since gone gone gone...Paul de Man?...there's a grotesque discrepancy between the ambition of his arguments and his capacity to make his case stick...there are occasional glimmers I guess but for the most part the essays I am reading are embarrassing: the famous essay on the 'rhetoric of temporality' finally rests on a piece of (someone else's) influence scholarship which declares that Julie's garden in La Nouvelle Heloise is a version of an allegorised medieval garden ...what??...and Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka arent much better: this isnt Kafka, its an exemplification of where D&G had got to theoretically circa 1980 or whenever they wrote it, though I have more sympathy for them politically than for de Man...whose real enemy over and over again is Rousseau as it has been for counter-revolutionary thinkers since about 1792....I really dont know why we ask students to read this stuff; at best it's symptomatic of its historical moment;

that's work: at home, pay the xmas bonuses to the doormen, not as easy as it sounds since there are nine or so of them, and I have to hand each his envelope (doorwomen dont seem to exist, not in this building anyway); get dad's autobiographical ms copied to take back to my mother and the girls; figure out if and what to pay Lisa's dentist, since we're in dispute with him; print out the ms of cultural studies book so I can work at it over Xmas; begin to figure out a paper to give in Dunedin (I have forgotten about that one, and its urgentest of all I guess); get John organised so he can stay here and cat sit...etc, etc...

reading: late at night (ie. about 10 pm) instead of watching tv, which I can no longer do (really: have never been able to do, it's too boring): Joe La Sueur on Frank O'Hara...a form of literary criticism I really like: these poems spark off these memories in me (i.e. Joe La Sueur) of the times they were written, this against the backdrop of my (ie Joe's) going to live with O'Hara and then being kicked out....it seems a very open and unegotistical book, with only a few moments of (rather self-conscious) bitchiness....you get to think the reason Frank liked Joe so much was not because he was so fucking gorgeous which he so obviously was (and which of course he knows and lets us know) but because he was so nice... not stupid either...if that's not the case, Joe's an exceedingly clever self-publicist....Frank's particular presence in the world doesnt really come out in the book though: it's clear by the end that in his social circle he's a kind of star, but is that because of his work (and his fame) or because of his personal charm?...about this, the photos are ambiguous: they look like photos of a charismatic person, but not necessarily so...there's an element of feyness or something there which hints at something else...and then the poems themselves dont seem written by a real social presence: they're too inward and self-involved for that...for all their bright exteriority...
reading other than that: issues of the Believer which I really like...an new idea for a periodical (and new ideas in that world are rare), which mightnt wear well but while it's fresh it's great...it's a new kind of middlebrown literary magazine, or rather here the middlebrow has become another specialised market, taste-culture niche....I will have to settle into some more solid reading soon, when I get a moment...but when?...not over xmas I think...but I am looking forward to the sun, and to Melbourne coffee shops, and my old haunts...readings, joe's pizza shop, smith st, even the university campus, site of dread and failure though it basically is....and to Otago and its great pinots..and what I imagine to be beautiful open spaces

A long time since I did this, mainly because I have been crazy busy but also I guess because I dont much like the writing I do as a blogger...it reminds me of the diary I wrote years ago (whatever happened to it?) when I was in prison....I couldnt believe that this priggish, self-conscious person had anything to do with me, but even so could never change the tone...it's funny I dont do this with emailing or even I think with letters (not that I ever write any anymore)...then I know who I'm talking to, now I am mainly talking to myself which is silly because it's unnecessary and affected and so I lose touch with myself....but really I am writing to a future self who might be interested in what I was doing in the past but that doesnt seem to help me with these problems of address unfortunately...T.S. Eliot said of writing if you only you get the tone right then everything else follows...
Reading: Stefan Collini's English Pasts (nicely written, I like his resistance to populisms, but why doesnt he get it at all about what drives cultural studies which he thinks is all down to a bunch of louche individuals' 'dissatisfaction'.
Also (for my paper in Otago) Thomas Arnold's Letters, which I'm getting into.

Logging on from the Starbucks opposite the British Library again...taking time out from an orgy of newspaper reading (and from the library itself, where I am trying to figure out a line on illustrations of Milton during the eighteenth century, not going anywere at the moment sadly)...whenever I'm in Britain I find myself immersed in the dailies, this time the Guardian and the Independent...the press here creates a whole world of its own....mainly it's a soap-opera created by beat-up after beat-up (at the moment the Dr Kelly versus Alistair Campbell versus BBC embroglio)...but there's also a sense in which the culture is being created in continual commentary on itself, a process doesnt exist quite in this way anywhere else...much of the commentary is forced and silly (the demands of continual journalist production are unmeetable)...but none the less it adds up to something: a thereness (a phantasmal thereness) which doesnt exist in Australia or the States....there are good material reasons for this of course...the press here is national and manically competitive, a majority of the population adheres to more or less traditional British identities, and and the middle-class at least need constant reinforcement of their class difference....
The Guardian has gone off though...like all the papers it carves out its own audience, partly a real one partly one that it imagines for itself and conjures up rhetorically....but it's become complacent...it addresses its readers as a bunch of liberal consumers...intelligent, hip, socially concerned, affluent...in a word, self-satisfied...and the real heart of modern culture is lost...its self-loathing, its longing for something else...which you wouldnt expect to catch sight in a newspaper, except this one takes itself so fucking seriously....
Another thing: why isnt the criticism of the politicans who led us into the Iraq war going anywhere in Australia?...it as if the political culture there has a double-layer of cynicism...nobody cares because everyone knows the Howard government is a US lapdog (cynicism layer one), and nobody cares because nobody believes what the Bush administration say anyway, their real motives aren't expressible in the public sphere (cynicism layer two)...so shameful (and I guess in some places, ashamed) silence...

Am sitting in the Starbucks across the road from the British Library connected to the web wirelessly and feeling very amazed, cool and complacent....my love affair with London isn't over....only real time in the States can make you really appreciate Britian...here people assume that they belong to single society, in the US the terms under which people will participate socially seem always under negotiation: that's the basic difference....it's true that capitalism there is more efficient and has, as they say, colonised more of the life-world so that money rules everyday life to a greater degree than it does here, and it's true that, for instance, over there blacks have their own culture and dont connect to whites in ways which are just not the case here so that whenever a white man (or even more woman) meets a young black man walking towards him on a lonely street late at night there's trepidation..but all that's secondary: it's the relations between individuals and community which is key to differences between the places...of course in the end there are benefits to the US's individualism too, especially for loners....but here in London (as against NYC) it's nice to bathe in at any rate the perpetual promise of a collectivity we all share...even if most people on the streets are transients...tourists, students whatever... and what about Australia????...why have I always been so indifferent to it???

A long blogging absence. Its strange how this desire for self-expression, or at anyrate for self-recording, waxes and wanes. Partly because it's not focussed I guess: it doesnt have an obvious point, in the way that writers diaries usually do for instance—they record usable material, even a weirdly inexpressive one like Evelyn Waugh's. And then I leave for London next Monday and won't be doing much blogging there I guess. Probably the real diary writer writes to find, which must also mean to invent, themselves too. I'd like to do that, but maybe I'm too much here already. Or there's not enough of me for it work like that.
But then the original idea of this was to record consumption, as a kind of corrective or penace for consuming. And I have bought an ipod this week (useful when travelling??), spending much of the last couple of days transferring music onto it...and a bunch of books at Strands...the last time I was in NYC I avoided it, and it's really not a shop I like, there are so many books there, and so many books no-one really wants, that literature itself seems to lose some of its value, but this time, with an afternoon to kill in the Village found myself there and none the less bought about three hundred dollars worth of books almostnone of which are necessary to anything I want to think or do, at least right now. Yet I was delighted to find a volume of Bishop Warburton's letters to his publishers and other literary figures...who's Bishop Warburton???...the mid eighteenth-century divine who dominated the establishment intellectual life of his time, an overbearing, pompous man, who sucked up to Alexander Pope, edited his work argubly against its true spirit, and a polemicist for the confessional state. As I argue in an academic essay, he helped produce sentimentalism or at least Sternean sentimentalism in reaction to him....he's important because he represents a way that modernity did not proceed....the other books more for collecting: and one time in this space I'd like to try to figure out

Went to the launch of Iain McCalman's book on Cagliostro at the Australian Ambassodor's very grand house at DC the other day, after an afternoon spent shopping in Dupont Circle. (Books, records including three of those amazing Proper/JSP box sets: but are ten cds worth of the Carter Family in the thirties too much of a good thing???) It was fun: I only met one other academic there, otherwise mainly Embassy staff and an assortment of the rich and connected. Had a brief conversation about Rupert Murdoch's brilliance with a Murdoch fan (who turned out to be the Australian's Washington correspondant, a bitter-sweet admiration) , and another more contentious conversation about the costs to New Zealand of its anti-US (or, rather, its less than totally enthusiastically US) foreign policy. This with a very smooth expat (he left NZ in the early seventies) who, so his card says, heads up an international investment firm.
In the world of the liberal-arts academy views like this have become impossible: our world is more or less defined against the hegemony of the market, and of the US's global power. Partly this division has to be structural: an effort by the weak and beleagured humanities to define a territory and a project for itself. But it's not only structural. If the contents of the humanities canon contain any kind of purposiveful ethical charge, it's an anti-populist one. And it stands for the autonomy and self-sufficiency of cultures. Or seems to. Didn't the humanities by and large support imperialism? And fit in easily with racism? As the conservatives like to remind us, there's a generational thing going here too: the humanities are now dominated by people who were young in the sixties and seventies, when youth culture had almost no connection to policy-makers (except in attempts to reform or resist them), and pretty much rejected the terms in which formal government and business proceeded. Liberal obsolence before our time.

At any rate it's refreshing to talk to people coming from somewhere else, and hear frank and innocent expressions of something like the conservative, establishment point of view. And why exactly are they wrong? I guess at the heart of at all, and past all questions of social justice and rights and diversity and so on, I'd say that they lack guts and imagination.

Have been reading Nirad Chaudhuri's The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. A strangely compelling book: Chaudhuri's an anglophile Indian, writing about his Bengali family in the twenties and thirties, intersparsed with philosophical and historical reflections. He attempts a rigorous objectivity, writes in a neutral, rather charmless, resolutely grammatical style, and because he has not a cultural nationalist bone in him presents a very different India than the one that we have become accustomed to in the post-Rushdie moment: violent, litigious, money-grubbing, unsentimental. Indeed by comparison with Chaudhuri, it becomes clear how Rushdie, for all his political dissent, is in the business of magicing and sentimentalising the sub-continent. But Chaudhuri cant maintain his 'objectivity' of course: his conservativism and fuddy duddyness, a kind of imitation of an imaginery 'civilised' Englishman seeps through it. And because the India that he comes from is in many ways so awful, and his family so unnurturing—his descriptions of his mother's regular fits of what he calls 'hysteria' are particularly horrific— the stiff-upper-lip stance comes to seem like a flight from chaos. Maybe thing will change in the book, I'm only about half way through.
Reading this while listening to the Blue Note cds of Grant Green with Sonny Clark, recorded in the early (?) sixties but only released in the eighties (I have a pirated copy of the cds, bought I think in Beijing so I'm not to clear of its history). Anyway it's wonderful music, made before 'funk' became reified but headed in that direction, and made before the guitar sound went fuzzy and chordal: clean pure music. Its chastening to think what Chaudhuri would have thought of it: the problem with him (and the education into the West that he received) is that he obviously couldn't have listened to it at all.

Writing this section of my book on the web makes me think about my own use of it. What did I do on it today? Partly it depends I guess what you call the "web": at one time it meant the world wide web which was just one service on the Net, the easy one. Today it seems to mean the whole thing. And the web isnt just a service it absorbs and transforms most of the old communication technologies: telephony, broadcasting, mail, publishing, and adds some new ones: audio downloading, linking, info-tracking (or whatever its capacity to record and publish usage immediately is called). To use the old Hegelian lingo: it sublates the old media.

Me on the web today: check my email first thing after breakfast and then once every couple of hours or so till now before going to bed; order some books (a nice fat check has come in) and fiddle with my want lists on Amazon and ABE; open up at&t news site a couple of times during the day to make sure no big disaster has hit the world while I was doing something else; go on to Limewire and try mainly unsuccessfully to download some Son Volt tracks, because I came across a reference to them somewhere or other (I think reading the paper this morning) which seemed intriguing; randomly checking out some blogs and bookmark one's I might one look at again (Lessig's Blog looks definitely promising) and then just before the day comes to end spend some time on Apple Music downloading 30 second samples of a bunch of pop albums, following the trail of "people who bought this also bought this' leads....

If this is at all typical of net usage, what might it mean? More time available for consumption; things that one used to do out there in the world (mainly in shops) you now can do at home; more cultural fragmentation which means more choices (Lisa is watching tv, I am reading and then webbing). Not much else? Certainly no victory of dematerialisation or virtuality, those catchcries of technoculture theory. The whole 'virtual' thing was a red herring. And if everyone moves onto the Web like this the social effects will likely be profound: less culture in public more cultural consumption in domestic space (withdrawing some of the movement between neighbourhoods that came in with the car); the emergence of new domain between the public and the private—the domain of this blog, which is not just for me but not really for anyone else either, its neither secret nor public, its not signed but not quite anonymous. Lost in the vastness of the web's chatter, and enabled by that.
But of course no one knows where the web is going, what it will deliver. So predictions are all the more tempting and all the more useless. One day it will just form the armature of the culture and society we have: like electricity or the car or the telephone, whose impacts were probably no less profound (what does it mean to say that?)