Travels

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

Mysticism Murdoch et al

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

Passive obedience

It occurs to me that the old concept of 'passive obedience' is becoming relevant in a new form today. It was laid down by the Church of England during its split from Rome, and then became a principle of the (radical wing?) of the post 1688 Tory party up until about 1740 at least. Basically it legislated that when the sovereign issued commands against the law of god, a subject was to disobey them and suffer the consequences passively, Job like. Rebellion and revolution were forbidden.
How might this work today? My sense is that, although 'we' (educated secular intellectuals) believe neither in the divine right of kings nor in God's law, we are in a situation where the regime of capitalist democracy is legitimated through all the power of nature and history. Alternatives are unimaginable, so too is revolution. But capitalist democracy is not consistently just (by various standards of justice: Kantian, natural law, utilitarian even...). So that the split between god/absolute monarchy and sovereign is now a split between history/capitalist democracy and justice, and those who opt for justice are in a situation, necessarily, like that which the doctrine of passive obedience enjoined on subjects voluntarily.

Mirrors

Aura Satz is putting together a show at the Whitechapel Galleries whose a catalogue will include a bunch of academics and art theorists playing exquisite corpse on the theme of magic. Here’s my effort which starts from the sentence “Mirrors should reflect a little, before throwing back reflections”. It’s a kind of collage.

But mirrors twist and subvert those cultures that happen to invent them. With the arrival of mirrors, epistemologies buckle, new technologies spring into being, forms of entertainment are transformed (not least magical entertainments), the empire of illusion acquires a powerful, new weapon, a transformative metaphorics enters language with a life of its own, and the temptation to believe that the mind can mirror the real takes hold. Such drives do not work to a single end, in part because mirrors make more illusion and magic in the world at the same time as they take magic and illusion away from it (for instance as they help the category of mimesis replace that of divine inspiration). Then too: the mirror is both a real thing forming the basis for the production of other real things but also an idea, a model. No real mirror actually truly mirrors. And so mirrors lie at the epicentre of a cultural problematic: they make waves. Let's look at one especially intense moment in this history of the waves that mirrors make: the British eighteenth-century’s 'mature enlightenment'. Here's Lord Shaftesbury, the godfather of modern aesthetics and taste-cultures on magic mirrors: "And what was of singular note in these magical glasses, it would happen that, by constant and long inspection, the parties accustomed to the practice would acquire a peculiar speculative habit, so as virtually to carry about with them a sort of pocket-mirror, always ready and in use. In this, there were two faces which would naturally present themselves to our view: one of them, like the commanding genius, the leader and chief; the other like that rude, undisciplined, and headstrong creature whom we ourselves in our natural capacity most exactly resembled. Whatever we were employed in, whatever we set about, if once we had acquired the habit of this mirror we should, by virtue of the double reflection, distinguish ourselves into two different parties. And in this dramatic method, the work of self-inspection would proceed with admirable success." Here mirrors split the soul. About forty years later the French scientist Buffon thought of using mirrors with rather less subtlety: he deployed 168 mirrors to form one giant 'burning mirror' to fire up a pile of wood across the other side of the Thames. It was a notion imitated (mirrored) early in the career of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, about to become the phantasmagoria’s greatest entrepreneur. Robertson presented his burning mirror to the Academy of Sciences in Paris hoping to produce a killer weapon in the service of the Revolution’s war against Britain. His main improvement was to increase its size and set it on wheels. But the idea went nowhere and Robertson’s mirror ended up in the collection of the powerful French state scientist Jacques-Alexander Charles. Indeed across the eighteenth-century, and leaving the magic lantern aside, mirror technologies were most widely disseminated through the vues d'optique that became extremely popular across Europe. English print publishers like John Bowles and Robert Sayer made fortunes from them: they were both a technical revolution and a fashion craze. Vues d'optique created the illusion of perspective when viewed with a zograscope, deploying a series of reflecting mirrors to enhance the illusion of three-dimensional depth in the print. Most contained heavily coloured, horizontal images of cities and landscapes which, disseminated by itinerant showmen, were seen by almost the whole European population. In an inverted sense they belong to the history of mass tourism: one historian has gone so far to claim that the vue d'optique was the first medium to bring the visible appearance of distant places to a large European public, in what was in effect a new stage in the mirroring of the world. But they could have more aestheticised applications too. Around 1770 Merlin's Museum in London advertised a domestic art gallery using the technology: "A Cabinet in which several coloured Prints, by the most celebrated Artists, may be caused to pass in succession before a large concave mirror, at the pleasure of the person who views them". As the actual manufacture of mirrors became more sophisticated, and mirror surfaces truer, more high-powered magical technologies were developed. The famous London optician John Cuff was deeply involved in the invention of one such, the solar microscope, whose invention is more usually assocated with the names of the European natural philosophers Lieberkuhn and Gabriel Fahrenheit who wanted to use it for anatomical research and pedagogy. Cuff made breakthroughs in microscope development because of the way he deployed mirrors to increase the brightness of the viewed image, including the famous Lieberkuhn reflector whose curvature was optimized to focus the maximum amount of ambient light onto a specimen’s surface. But, as was often the way, solar microscopes reached their biggest audiences in Britian not through science but through stage magic, and specifically in the shows of the comic magician, marketing genius and nostrum salesman, Katterfelto, whose shows and ads were a sensation in the 1780s. In these shows, using the solar microscope he projected images of bacteria (‘maggots’) fomenting in meat and cheese. He also performed conjuring tricks, including the gun-trick, in which he would catch with his teeth a bullet shot at him by a member of the audience. And he demonstrated electrical and magnetic phenomena. Towards the end of his career his daughter (wearing a huge steel helmet) was lifted to the ceiling by means of a magnet. He also exhibited ‘air pumps,’ and a ‘perpetual motion’ machine. Flirting with demonism, he conjured up an occult world— microscopic, electrical, magnetic, and illusory—controlled by devils led by his famous black cat, and declared himself master of this dark universe. On the back of this mock diabolism and natural magic, he proffered advice on how to avoid being duped by gamesters and confidence tricksters, whose wiles he demonstrated with further conjuring tricks. Collaborators masquerading as boorish members of the audience would interrupt his performances and try to vandalise his apparatus. These mock-disturbances enabled him to erupt in mock Germanic rage; putting on his ‘terrific Death’s Head Hussar’s Cap’ and drawing an immense rusty sword (both of which supposedly had belonged to his grandfather) he would break out into a comedy routine. He also sold phosphorous matches, nostrums against influenza, and alarms. From Katterfelto it’s not such a huge leap to Monk Lewis’s fictional sensation of 1795, The Monk. Here’s that bestseller’s key mirror scene: “She [Matilda] put the Mirror into his hand. Curiosity induced him to take it, and Love, to wish that Antonia might appear. Matilda pronounced the magic words. Immediately, a thick smoke rose from the characters traced upon the borders, and spread itself over the surface. It dispersed again gradually; A confused mixture of colours and images presented themselves to the Friar's eyes, which at length arranging themselves in their proper places, He beheld in miniature Antonia's lovely form. The scene was a small closet belonging to her apartment. She was undressing to bathe herself. The long tresses of her hair were already bound up. The amorous Monk had full opportunity to observe the voluptuous contours and admirable symmetry of her person. She threw off her last garment, and advancing to the Bath prepared for her, She put her foot into the water. It struck cold, and She drew it back again. Though unconscious of being observed, an in-bred sense of modesty induced her to veil her charms; and She stood hesitating upon the brink, in the attitude of the Venus de Medicis. At this moment a tame Linnet flew towards her, nestled its head between her breasts, and nibbled them in wanton play. The smiling Antonia strove in vain to shake off the Bird, and at length raised her hands to drive it from its delightful harbour. Ambrosio could bear no more: His desires were worked up to phrenzy."I yield!" He cried, dashing the mirror to the ground: "Matilda, I follow you! Do with me what you will!" The Monk’s big mistake here is to dash the mirror to the ground, it’s all downhill for him from there. Antonia only exists as sex goddess in the magic mirror, in the real world she’s a demonic illusion. Amongst much else, in taking the mirror image as real, the Monk forgoes his chance to become an artist, since, according to Richard Hurd, a leading theorist of the day, the artist is a kind of mirror who creates a 'shadowy ideal world, though unsubstantial as the American vision of souls, yet glows with such apparent life, that it becomes, thenceforth the object of other mirrors, and is itself original to future reflexions.’ The American vision of souls?

Richard Hurd and culture

I’m preparing for an essay on the pre-history of historical reenactments in the 18thc. (Don’t ask how I got into this one...it’s way off field...but it’s turning out strangely fascinating....) And in the process I am reading Richard Hurd’s essay on imitation and also his Moral and Political Dialogues, work which is remarkably little known. Hurd was a Anglican parson, who became a bishop, but who had grasped what we might think of the sociological, historicist turn that we usually associate with Scottish enlightenment about the same time as the Edinburgh/Glasgow crowd, if not completely independently. (I’m not entirely clear about influences here.) Hurd is no proponent of sympathy and emulation though: he’s a Lockean not a Shaftesbury person. But the point is: that for him the notion that nature and in particular human nature is uniform (that is, is formed in chains of cause and effects in the same way under different environments or contexts) leads to the embrace of cultural difference rather than it’s elision. (This is to speak our academic language not his.) The reason for this is: all varieties of human society and culture belong to nature (a nature which is basically an expression of God’s will) and none can be written off or demonised as pagan. The other important consequence of this line of thought is to marginalise the classical heritage. Hurd was an associate of those like Thomas Percy, another Anglican parson, who tried to bring the primitive literatures of the world into British circulation at exactly the time he was writing.

The aesthetics of resistance

I’ve begun reading Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, a 3-vol novel, or rather essay-novel, with minimal paragraph or chapter breaks about adolescent German communist revolutionaries in the thirties and their involvement in the Spanish civil war.
1937 actually: an interesting year, the Communist party is underground and the Nazi ‘madness’ (as the characters call it) is overwhelming; their faith in the bolshevik experiment is being tested and about to be tested further. The Spanish civil war offers hope but in the main they retreat into aestheticism, wrestling with the problem of how to connect their love of art, including modernist art, to the increasingly utopian project of proletarian revolution.
It begins with a brilliant and conscious tour-de-force: a description of the Pergamon frieze in the Berlin museum, in a style which has clearly learnt much from Thomas Bernhard. And perhaps also from a nouvelle roman-ist like Claude Simon. But the difference is that the books written in the interest (or seems to be) of old-fashioned vulgar Marxism. History becomes the story of ceaseless class struggle: it looks like there’s a massive gap between the novel’s stylistic and literary sophistication and the characters’ (which may also be the author’s?) political analysis.
I’ll stay my judgment on the novel till I’ve read more, but I’m interested in it because I do have a sense that the strongest writing globally in the postwar period has been in German (Bernhard, Sebald, Grass, Jelinek, Kluge, Bachmann, Handke). The reason for this would appear to be that early twentieth-century history in Germany and Austria knocked ideologies of nationalism and progressivism off their perch, leaving writers particularly close to something we might call the real, capable of particularly hard critique and and then too attempting to rescue something of old German aestheticism out of the wreckage. (The emphasis on the Holocaust tends to miss what’s especially vital about postwar German writing.)
And of course these characters are almost of the same age as my father who was kicked out of school in Germany (Salem down south admittedly....but I think in ‘37), though god only knows my dad was no revolutionary.

The novel also speaks to two current politico-intellectual obsessions: 1) is revolution still possible? (and if so, by whom, and against and towards what?) and 2) what’s politically at stake with the aesthetic realm (an image of the good life, a critique of the bad life, or a retreat from social participation to take up just three options). The Weiss description of the Pergamon frieze is particularly apt in relation to the second of these questions since aesthetics is originally defined around sculpture in large part (Lessing, Winckelmann, Herder) since sculpture is the art of all arts in which more one sense is being appealed to (touch and vision) and in which the autonomy of each particular sense first becomes apparent to German theorists. Aesthetics is formed around the question: what’s the relation between the different senses, in terms of the pleasure and cognition they each may make available? Art is that which specialises in the communication of pleasures and cognitions stimulated by a particular sense, though it may seek to transfer these to another sense. For Weiss, his working class communists inhabit a profoundly aestheticised world, but one which speaks to them of their social oppression at the same time as it offers solace from the world organized through that oppression.

Pergamon Museum - Pergamon Frieze 3

Pergamon Museum - Pergamon Frieze 3
Originally uploaded by Jerry Wang Yu.

Let's see how this works.


This is an picture of the Pergamon frieze which is described at the beginning of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetic of Resistance and discussed in my continuation of this blog at http://web.mac.com/sduring1/and also posted here in my next post.

Harold Laski?

A thought: what's the relation between Harold Laski's theory of sovereignty (articulated around the period of WW1) and that of figures like Carl Schmitt?

I'm not going to Hong Kong: little Nell's passport cant arrive in time. Which means I wont immediately write my paper 'Can we imagine a revolutionary (in the political sense) cultural studies?" But the key to the need for revolution is not that capitalism is auto-destructive but that the contemporary military-techno-finance structure can't co-exist with the contemporary nation-state (or more accurately with contemporary 'internationalism')

Amir Khusraw's Khamsa poem

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

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

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

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

Cultural studies and the radical left

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Living Theory

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

William Beckford and abolitionism

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

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

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

Catherine of Russia in Montreal

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

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.