Living Theory

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have various moods or modes of presentation, ranging from the confident, taking-control-of-the audience through to the withdrawn and standoffish.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

William Beckford and abolitionism

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

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

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

Catherine of Russia in Montreal

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

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

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

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

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

This is too abstract, I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More art shows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goya

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

Beyond a boundary

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

Here they are:

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

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

WW2 versus WW1

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

Kipling's Kim

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

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

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

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

Under the net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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