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.