The novel of ruined life

Is there a genre that we can call the ruined-life novel? It would be the genre that describes those whose live hope-and redemption-forsaken lives of fragmentation and pain, usually from close up.
It's a twentieth-century genre, and women write it about women (for obvious reasons) more often than men write it about men. It works especially well in the first person. Some examples: Jean Rhys's fictions; Joan Didion's Play it as it lays; Mary Robison's fictions; Anne Enright's recent The Gathering.
Examples by men? I will try to think of some (Beckett in a modernist mode? not really, the metaphysical and ethical intentions of the writing itself are too apparent). Men seem to be too addicted to hope and the possibility of retrieving a redeeming heroic gloss even from the most destroyed of existences.
Why does this genre (if we allow it to exist) emerge in the middle of the 20th century? Perhaps because that's when hegemonic urbanising capitalism prised hierarchised gender relations apart not just because the economy needed more labour or because of the liberating technologisation of domestic work, but by shifting the relation between public and private lives for the bourgeoisie. Women begin to occupy the public sphere differently, including the workplace. In the logic of democratisation, they were called upon to participate in the polity; in the logic of the market, they were called upon to consume. At least after about 1956, the paradigmatic ruined life is a woman who is alienated from and stranded in domesticity under this regime.

Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders

I have been reading Richard T. Kelly's Crusaders, a very rewarding novel about England's northern cities, anglicanism and New Labour. It's set in Newcastle's lost, violent, housing projects in 1996, the year that Tony Blair's New Labour comes to power. Stylistically, it binds a thinned-out version of the classic realism of the Arnold Bennett kind to the modern thriller: its turn, increasingly as it goes on, to genre-fiction conventions and excitements provide it with formal constraint (and perhaps a readership) in lieu of more experimental or literary devices. Like many social-realist novels it needs to deal with the problem of how to represent characters and a social sector with little or no connection to the literary and intellectual world that the novel and its readers belong to. The thriller plot helps solve that problem. But the novel also belongs to the more recent genre of political novel (e.g. Alan Hollinghurst's The line of beauty) which relate the lived-in world to recent shifts in government and policy.

So Kelly is basically interested in juxtaposing Labour party policy and discourse with the lives of both the poor and the well-intentioned. It mounts a hard critique of the false promises of New Labour's simultaneous embrace of a certain christianity (even of 'christian socialism') and neo-liberalism/MBA-style managerialism. It does so by telling the (based on fact) story of an Anglican minister who sets out to establish a new Anglican church on a very run-down and demoralized state housing estate and his relation to various locals: the Labour MP, an thuggish enforcer for a local gangster; a young woman working in a massage parlour; Church volunteers. The novel is especially insightful about black-market/crim capitalism and its deep connections into the economic life of poor communities. At the end, it becomes clear that neither New Labour nor the Church have the capacity to reach into communities such as this. For these highly centralised and bureaucratised institutions poverty offers, at best, an opportunity for their own aggrandizement.

Perhaps this is not one of the great literary novels, although its dialogue is stunning and its characterization wonderfully unsentimental and finely tuned to its major argument (it's a novel which does have an argument). But then to write a great literary novel about the lives of the poor has not so far been possible in the capitalist epoch.

This novel is not available in Australian bookshops I think. A great pity.

Hope

Is it possible to have an utterly hopeless memory of hope?

Four adjectives which best describe Australia

crude, clean, stupid, democratic

Singapore

Singapore is very different than it was even six or so years ago. It has become very confident: the leading city state in a region that it is to inherit the earth.

Howards End

I read E.M. Forster's Howards End on the plane on the way back from Singapore. It's probably the third time I've read it, though the last time would be thirty or so years ago and I had lost much of my sense of it.
I found it utterly engrossing. Ultimately because it is about democratization across a triple axis: as a political, a cultural, and as an ethical process and ideal. By which I mean it is about how egalitarianism is to be lived, socially and personally (and especially between men and women).
But it is also a social allegory in which two kinds of bourgeois styles are set against one another: that of the business world (the Wilcox's) and that of the aesthetic liberal intellectuals (so to say) (the Schlegels).
In the end the liberal intellectuals (Bloomsbury) wins, and in the end egalitarianism merely shores them up.
And it is also about London's relation to the rest of England in a period in which rural England was increasingly becoming a network of transport nodes (the motor car is important to this novel) and, in many counties, a leisure resource for London.
The wonderful final sentence brings together the novel's main concerns: Helen Schlegel, the most committed of the novel's liberal free spirits, pregnant with the bank clerk Lionel Bast's child, and who with her sister Margaret has managed to tame the millionaire businessman Wilcox, runs into the country house, Howard's End, excited about the new season's hay crop being harvested in the fields.
Not much hitherto has led us to think that Helen is interested in hay. Clearly her excitement expresses her motherhood to come. But more than that: it is a turn away from the struggle for equality and the fight for the soul of the bourgeoisie to the secular (in the oldest sense) rhythms of nature. A kind of retreat into the natural mundane.

Neoliberalism

One of the more noteworthy features of neoliberalism is the way that it has de-democraticised all other spheres than formal politics (and perhaps the family?). It is not just that it leads to re-oligarichisation: it's that business enterprises and bureaucracies (including universities) become increasingly inegalitarian and administered from above. There's no real ideological support for this even from within neoliberalism itself it seems to me.

Notes from Ritter on Hegel and the French Revolution

Ritter argues that in Philosophy of Right Hegel deals with civil society as such for the first time. Hegel is inspired by reading English political economy for which he had enormous respect: he believed that writers like Adam Smith inductively demonstrated the philosophical and generalized principles that regulate the "mass of accidents" that constitute society. In effect, for Hegel, Smith is to civil society what Kepler was to astronomy. (70) And the way in which political economy can aid philosophy becomes especially apparent in Hegel's remarks on globalisation and the sea (paras 243-246 of Philosophy of Right; in the footnote Ritter also refers admiringly to Carl Schmitt's Der Nomos der Erde (1950)).
More generally, according to Ritter, 77ff , Hegel argues that the civil society which produces the modern opposition between enlightenment (objectivity) and romanticism (subjectivity) also produces the pre-conditions for man as such to emerge out of a system designed to satisfy mere needs, ie. out of civil considerations of individual and communal welfare. Out of the history of civil society, "abstract" man appears: a being who is not merely a Jew, Catholic, German, Italian etc. And this abstract man does not belong to history: he has been emancipated from it. But this abstract man is merely abstract, he exists in a certain sense nowhere.
Which is why Hegel cannot think of the division between romanticism and enlightened rationality as surpassable. Ritter 78, “Existing reason reveals itself in the present not in the inner preservation of subjectivity in its antithetical relation to social and political revolution, but in the dichotomy making it possible.” This means that there is also a ‘continuance of the substantial order of tradition within the realm of the modern world.” (78) In my own words: it seems to be the case that the human liberation which evolves mechanically from out of civil society/political economy, requires an appeal to, as well as the continuation of, the history of philosophy and of the religious passions (i.e. longing for transcendence) to be recognised as liberation.
But, more practically, philosophy also “has the methodological task of validating the historical substance of modern society, and of grasping in their concept those determinations which cannot be won from their abstract natural and emancipatory principle, without connection to the historical substance.” (80-1). Philosophy in other words judges what is emergent and what is residual
Furthermore a revolutionary materialism comes into existence in modernity that refuses to recognise the importance of the history of tradition to liberation. It is dangerous both in its social power and in its blindness to the fact that human liberation sublates rather than overcomes the dichotomy between the tradition of the (religious) spirit and welfarism (or the dynamics of needful man in civil society.)

Wolf Solent

Just back to Brisbane from a week in Auckland, where, along the line, I finished reading John Cowper Powys's Wolf Solent. The novel was something of a success when first published in 1929 and Cowper Powys still has a smallish cult following, but no real place in literary history, especially academic literary history. I read this book first when I was about fifteen and it had a visceral impact on me then: I found its grandiloquence, its intermingling of the cosmic/spiritual with the psychological/erotic imaginatively invasive, queasy making. It doesn't work like that on me anymore, but I can see why it did. It's about a youngish man, Wolf Solent, who is almost wholly committed to his interior life, which is based on his personalised and melodramatised mysticism. He has the capacity to fantasize himself as an agent in a cosmic battle between forces of good and evil. That's where the real of Wolf's life finally is: it matters more to him than relationships and experiences. But the book is about the tension between Wolf's dime-novel mysticism and his relationships with his mother and two women whom he loves, one of whom he is married to. And it turns out that the good-evil mysticism is one one level, something of a mask for a battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and on another an expression of Wolf's sensitivity to landscape, nature and place. At the end, he comes to recognise his spiritual interior life as a form of resistance to settling down with a woman, where women represent, both for author and character, the conventional, the petty, the materialistic but not wholly negatively. What's strong about the novel is the way in which its provisional commitment to the mystical, even though it takes a pulpy narrativised form, allows the novel access to modes of characterization where personalities remain undefined, mysterious, suggestive, driven by forces beyond the merely social and even beyond the sexual. A lot has been learned from Lawrence here, and it would be possible to think of the novel as a cross between Women in Love and Charles Williams (another thirties mystical-melodramatic fictionalist, and one who was unbelievably successful in the market place), but it's better than that, just because it can rescue from its critique of mysticism, mysticism's power to enrich experience.

Religion

Is religion a useless concept? Would we be better off without it?
The point is: once we subtract actual faiths or religious practices (Christianity, animism, Judaism....) from it, what's left?
The problem with maintaining the notion 'religion' outside of such institutions of religious practice is that the term becomes available too widely, meaning leaks from it. Pantheism, socialism etc can become thought of as 'religions' in some sense that is stranded between the metaphoric and the literal, and which obsfucates rather than clarifies thought.

Aidan Higgins and the sixties

Balcony of Europe, published in 1972, may be an unusual novel, and not a wholly successful one, but it is revealing about the sixties, and, not less to the point, is an intriguing sign of a literary-historical moment. It's mainly set in beach-culture Spain circa 1968 (just before the onslaught upon those beaches of the Northern European mass leisure industry), and describes a relatively brief affair between an Irish painter (a version of Higgins himself one assumes) and a young American Jewish woman who is married to a slightly older American writer. It's haunted by and dependent on a slew of masculinist modernist texts: Joyce's Portrait of an Artist most obviously, but also Malcolm Lowry, Faulkner, Hemingway, Paul Bowles and so on.
It's beautifully written, and the modernist sentence here begins to move towards autonomy in the direction later taken by Iain Sinclair. That is, the style (the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter) has become detached from any clear cut character-based project: the novel's characters don't come to life as they say, there's no real sense of what kind of person the hero (Dan Ruttles) is, and not much more of Charlotte his sexy, charismatic love object.
Yet it's not as if the gist of an authorial intention isn't apparent: the novel wants to represent this affair against the backdrop of European history (especially the Holocaust and the Cold War under US hegemony) as a kind of passive resistance to the horrors of the twentieth century. And that is where it reveals a mood we can call sixties, since the characters, all somewhat rootless international bohemians, seem to live in an atmosphere of freedom and opportunity, a lack of regard for questions of money and career and respectability, which is at least superficially is bequeathed to them by the cultural modernisms that inhabits them and that they ceaselessly discuss. They have turned an aesthetic commitment to cultural modernism as a form of resistance to bourgeois orthodoxies and norms into hedonistic, self-exploratory adventures in the private sphere (mainly sex but also alcohol and drugs), that is, into lifestyle. They exist, so to say, historically between Le Bateau-Lavoir and Benidorm.
And it's lifestyle's alienation from literary aesthetics that means that the sentence in particular breaks free from meaning and intent at the level of the text itself and that wonderfully crafted sentences, paragraphs, chapters barely invoke the fictional world they purport to describe. So, from another literary-historical perspective, this is écriture produced spontaneously, outside the world of literary theory, and perhaps all the more revealing of the historical forces that tended towards the text-fetish because of that.

Rancière's Hatred of Democracy

A quick one from Brisbane (where we're still not properly settled, though over the last day or so we have acquired a fridge, a car and broadband in that order of importance).
The last chapter of Jacques Ranciere's Hatred of Democracy is interesting because it connects neo-liberalism to the old term oligarchy, and because it seeks persistantly to defend democracy.
If I understand the argument correctly (and it's hard to pay it sufficient attention among this moving chaos), for Ranciere democracy is to be thought of the persistant demand for participation and agency by those who have 'no place' in any particular socio-political structure. We don't currently have democracy, though there is enormous pressure to imagine that we do: we have 'States of oligarchic law.' (This is not to say that democracy is attainable: it is not. There will always be those who have 'no place' and their demands will always maintain the deficit which defines democracy.)
Contemporary oligarchies direct peoples' attention "towards private pleasures" and away from the public sphere. Governing becomes adminstration by experts. (Here a certain Trotskyism/Maoism becomes apparent). And that form of government, though formally divided into opposing poltical parties, is based on a consensus: that the most important function of government is to take care of the "economy" and, more specifically, the expansion of capital. Wealth has acquired 'unlimited power'. But this does not avoid 'democratic supplementation', i.e. a division of those who who manage or own capital and those who do not (the people for Rancière). The politics of the latter, which take both left and right forms, are denounced by the former as 'populism'.
Some of the old 'new left', of May 1968, blame the whole new system of neo-liberalism on the popular consumer. This is a new form of anti-democraticism: 'democratic man' takes the guise of the 'idiotic consumer', even consumers of 'alterglobalist' illusions and who may be linked to identity politics. From this point of view it is this figure (the consumer into the politics of difference) who signals the end of the Enlightenment. This 'antidemocratic discourse of today's intellectuals adds the finishing touches to the consensual forgetting of democracy that both state and economic oligarchies strive toward." But democracy can never be forgotten, not because it exists as a potential equal society to be born out of this unequal one, but because egalitarian relations can be traced through singular and precarious acts within all unequal societies, including this current form of neo-liberal oligarchy.

Enlightenment and doublethink

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

Religious kitsch

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

After the new left

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

LIfe of the mind

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

Coleridge's Constitution of Church and State

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

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civic republicanism and Victorian character

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

Political history and the history of the novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From polity to society

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

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

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

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

Fascism

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

Anglicanism

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

Rewards

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

Spoilation of the contemplatives

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

Murderous capitalism: Schmitt, Ranciere, Agamben, Derrida

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

The state, the workers and the history of theory

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

Famines Communism Slaughter

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

The right

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

Rethinking the Right

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

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

Secularization

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

The mundane against the secular: some thoughts

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

Odo Marquard

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

Anyway: some concepts

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

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

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

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

New Zealand

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

Towards a book

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

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




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

Modernist esotericism: Neither religious nor secular

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

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

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

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

These remarks are obviously only a beginning.


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

Travels

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

Mysticism Murdoch et al

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

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!!!!