A puzzle

One of the puzzles about life is that the rich and (mainly) comfortable and comforting interior selves that we accumulate as we go on—our memories, our understandings of ourselves, our habits and tastes, our patterns of experience—can be so disconnected from our actions especially at periods of crisis. We can find ourselves acting in ways that don't belong to the person we are. Perhaps moments when real courage is required are the clearest case. Where does that courage come from? Or what has made it disappear? Nothing in our sense of ourselves can answer such questions.

Disraeli's Trilogy

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

The literary humanities versus the managed university

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

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

British Cultural Studies all over again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postwar British Literature

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

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

More Schmitt

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

Schmitt and social democracy

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

Schmitt & the Comintern

There's an interesting paper to be written on the relation between Carl Schmitt's conception of the Catholic Church's political role in his Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form and the actual political operations of the Comintern. Political institutions (or jurisdictions) which transcend nations and hence can play dirty Machievellian games in national politics.

Democratic tragedy

It's taken me a while since I have been writing my paper on E.M. Forster's Howards End off and on for six months, but at last (after giving it at Yale) I realise that the key to the novel is a perceived opposition between the spirit and the letter of democracy, which in literary terms can be regarded as tragic. Democratic will relies on feelings and connections that political democracy undermines. In political and social terms that is the tragedy to which the fiction reverts.

Politics and the desire for literature

Is it true that the huge state investment in literary education (in all Western nation-states) from the late 19thc on can be read as part of the movement towards social democracy? And that much art-literature itself can be regarded as part of the resistance to that movement?

More Elizabeth Bowen: British literary conservatism and National Socialism

As far as I am concerned, The Heat of the Day poses a revealing interpretative challenge: what is its attitude to Robert's treachery. The novel tells a story of a woman (Stella) who is in love with an army officer (Robert) whom, as it turns out, is spying for Nazi Germany. The critics read the novel as rejecting this betrayal, almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But that's less clear to me, especially after having read Bridehead Revisted for class last week, which explicitly endorses the politics of appeasement and well into the war too. Robert's defense of his actions to Stella is not repudiated by her, and while there's no real question of actual endorsement of his giving secrets to the Germans, there is a question about whether his betrayal is actually repudiated.
In the end it may be that the novel points towards an argument that the social conditions for its own literary/ethical project (late Bloomsbury modernism with a Conservative twist) require a polity closer to National Socialism than to liberal democracy.
Of course, in France, Vichyism was regarded by many (including for a while people like Simone Weil) as necessary to protect Frenchness itself. And there were English versions of this.
I need to read Angus Calder on WW2.

Elizabeth Bowen

Heat of the Day marks an important moment in the progress of British literary modernism. It demonstrates that the Jamesian mode cannot be effectively used to describe contemporary society. It's a mode that demands a reflective sensitivity to the world that the novel is determined to show has disappeared from the world, at least (but not only?) under wartime conditions.

Neo-liberalism crashes

Back in the US after a year. It's eerie here: as far as one can see everyday life is proceeding normally in its immense inertia, but the cultural and economic atmosphere has been transformed. In December 2007 a different world existed. They can talk about the previous postwar recessions (1984, 1991 etc) as analogies but they had nothing like this psychic force. This time a providential almost vengeful disaster is proceeding.
Among academics there's endless gossip about which universities are sacking people and which ones are simply reducing pay. I'm by no means immune to the reigning mood of fearful incredulity: the childlike feeling of glee that the whole house of rampant finance capital and consumerism is going down has disappeared. Now it's: am I going to go down with it?

French versus British democratic orgins

The question of France and Britian's different routes into democratic modernity is a fascinating one. So it is interesting to note that Lucien Goldmann in The Hidden God and Marcel Gauchet in the first volume of his L'Avènement de la démocratie both make similar cases about the fate of French absolutism in the eighteenth century. Gauchet's argument is that the absolute sovereign had sufficient power to destroy the ranks below him and the organic ties between them, and in particular to marginalize the church. This meant that the social situation for the philosophes to begin to think from the point of view of the individual, that is to say in Lockean terms. Goldmann of course argues that the king sideline the old noblesse de robe in his efforts to raise taxes (he created hugely powerful tax farmers and a new oligarchy arose around them). Pascal and Racine articulate the "tragic vision" of the displaced elite class. But in both cases the absolutist monarch digs his own grave because he has sufficient power to break down the old "traditional" order.

unused notes for a book introduction: endgame capitalism again

The period in which I wrote the chapters of this book has been a trying one politically. The optimism of the post war period, which, for all its peaks and troughs, can be traced through fifties social democratic state-building, the radical new left of the sixties the civil rights movement, feminism, and postcolonialism, seemed finally to dissipate between 1989 (the fall of the Wall) and 2001 (9/11 and the beginning of the war against terror.) Perhaps for those of us in the Anglophone West, however, the key moment were the elections won by the officially ‘left’ or liberal’ side: Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in Britain. Both sides had now abandoned social democracy: neo-liberalism or the rather what Phillip Bobbitt has called the market state reigned.
So this book 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 humanitie

Contemporary democratic state capitalism is an endgame capitalism, because we can’t imagine a way out of it: it is endlessly future-directed but not a future which offers more than more accumulation, more control of nature, and (for the left) more social justice in its own terms. It’s a machine in which individual’s lack agency: or rather their collective agency has been mediated and mediatised. In effect the market-economy has taken control of the political institutions via the media, and indeed there are tendencies to politicize once neutral institutions of state in order to bring them too under the sway of the market. The mechanics of the process work like this: democratic elections require media campaigns to reach out or rather to influence the electorate since these media campaigns can in effect buy votes; since these media campaigns are themselves expensive (and under indirect control of the media owners), the money required to buy them must be donated to parties and politicians by interest-groups who often have lobbyists and intellectuals working for them on another tack. But those donations bring with them obligations to aid donors’ access to profit, prestige and power. At the same time, the periodic formal democratic vote has become swamped in continuous polling, by which various political agents seek to gauge the will of the electorate and tweak their media campaigns. The circuits between polls, media campaigns and policy, on the one side, and between donations, media campaigns and policy on the other contains little room for principled policy in terms that other than that thrown up from the circuits themselves. This is one example of a general process we can call the autonomisation of the social
At another level the integration of the global economy has created a Kantian perpetual peace. As early as the sixties it became clear that national governments had little ability to escape the logic of transnational capital: that was shown in 1964 when Harold Wilson proved incapable of implementing Labour Party policy because to do so would cause capital flight (Miliband). (Mitterand followed in a similar path in the early 1980s) This perpetual peace is secured by ever increasing tightening of immigration regimes, which are as it were nationalism’s final refuge. (John Locke still lived in a world where a child ‘was at liberty what government he put himself under’: that is impossible today, despite the societies government administer being less different from one another than in his time. 347)
The integration of economies is not merely a fact of economics: it has its military roots too. One of the key lessons to be learned from Phillip Bobbit’s The Shield of Achilles is that the market state develops from a long series of functional relationships between military and economic needs: at the beginning and still today, states encouraged markets in large part to fight wars.
The old tropes of consent and obligations do not apply to endgame capitalism: individuals do not consent to being governed and they do not have obligations (they are in something like the condition that Rousseau and Hegel posited of slaves.)
The right to strike and the effectiveness of striking has been curtailed.
The kinds of tactical resistances praised by de Certeau.
And the pluralist critique of state sovereignty which has a long (mainly ecclesiastical) history: non-jurors, Keble and the Oxford movement, the anti-Hegelians of the period around the first world war both of the right (Maitland, Figgis) and later of the left (Laski, Cole) and which reappears in the sixties (worker’s control, Paul Hirst, Rosanvallon, Michael Walzer’s Essays on Disobedience, p. 16 ff he wants “to take very seriously the possibility of joining secondary associations with limited claims to primacy”) and today in David Runciman
Endgame articulations:
Hegel after 1806.
Nietzsche’s Last Man
Kojeve’s ‘end of history’ 1946.
Lash, End of ideology
Fukayama’s End of History and the last man, after 1989

The figure of the philosopher in anti-historicist thought (the early Nietzsche, Strauss, Badiou). The philosopher in touch with wisdom, the true, an enemy of stupidity. And the figure of the critic: not wholly inside the society, a reflective alienation. And the figure of the alien: the one who simply does not belong.

Body politics

The head is on the left; the heart is on the right.

Aging and the novel

When was the first novel written in which a character ages? A novel, that is, that carefully focusses on a character who moves through youth to middle age and then into old age and finally death? This is not the Bildungsroman narrative which stops at maturity. An aging story dwells on the diminuation of power and imagination, the closing down of a personal future, the strange mix of reconciliation to, and hatred of, the world which typically comes in old age.
King Lear tells such a story perhaps. But no 18thc novel does I think. Very few, if any, 19thc novels either.
Does aging somehow fall out of the literary imagination in the epoch of realism?

Culture

In his essay, "Does culture matter?", E.M. Forster makes an important suggestion, more or less in passing. It is that to enjoy "culture" is to feel the will to transmit it. Culture is essentially a chain of communicability. Or to put this in slightly different terms: a serious engagement in culture involves a disposition to bequeath and to develop it. Without that disposition, culture is not being fully engaged.  

This need not mean that to engage culture requires participation in the formal institutions designed to pass it on. Not at all.  The disposition to develop and bequeath may take the form of performing work on oneself: reading, looking at art, listening to music in order to attune oneself imaginatively to the world in ways that will to make a difference on others (even if they may not.) 

Engaging culture is to help imagination grow in what is, for Forster, its essential impersonality.

Forster's essay worries about what happens to culture thought like this in a society which tends to marginalize and disrespect the creative imagination and culture. His answer seems to be: if you do care about culture, hang in there and don't worry too much about the others, not even the State which is structurally anti-culture.

In this light, it is worth remembering Forster's advise that one of the best things you can do for culture is just to spend money on it.

so exactly what's wrong with endgame capitalism?

The question of what is wrong with contemporary state democratic media capitalism is not as easy as it might seem, given that the system endless spills out regional injustices. But on what grounds do we look, not for reforms, but beyond the system as a whole, especially since it does indeed produce unprecedented comfort, health, and pleasure to the population?
I'd suggest beginning by thinking about capitalism's enduring unacceptable structural failures under three abstract rubrics, that is, its production of:
1) insecurity
This needs no explanation, everyone know how insecurity gnaws away our society, spoiling its benefits. It is the dark side (the 'experienced' side in Blakean terms) of opportunity, enterprise and freedom of choice. And it cannot be reformed away.
2) invisibility
The market-orientated media dazzle and blind. Whole zones of pain and neglect lie out of view for the general public. In the blindness the media cause, suffering and injustice fester without final remedy.
3) stupefaction.
This is the most problematic of these three categories. The basic thought is not just that endgame capitalism is selective in it what brings to view, but that it relies on bedazzled stupidity and ignorance to continue under its current form and that a good society must be one committed not just to justice but to intelligence.

the night of the Klimt conflagration

I don't usually latch onto ideas for tradebooks or novels... but a story in this week's Guardian Weekly struck me as irresistible for a book idea. (And not only me I reckon.)
It is a story about the Klimt exhibition at the Liverpool Tate by Jonathan Jones. Jones says (which I did not know), that a large Klimt collection was destroyed by the SS in Austria on the last day of the second world war in Austria. The SS were billeted in the Immendorf Castle, and were ordered to leave once the surrender was signed. Before moving on, they held an orgy in the Castle and then burnt it to the ground. 

This was more than innocent destruction, since the castle housed a large and important collection of Klimts. These had been collected by the Jewish industrialist, August Lederer. (Klimt was, apparently, mainly collected by Jews). This collection included the large Nietzschean allegorical paintings Klimt painted for the University of Vienna: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, which the University decided were not for them.
Some sort of book, probably fiction, around the night the Klimts burnt would seem a winner. Not least because of Klimt's own Nietzscheanism, his appeal to Jewish collectors (including the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder).