Wolf Solent

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

Religion

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

Aidan Higgins and the sixties

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

Rancière's Hatred of Democracy

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

Enlightenment and doublethink

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

Religious kitsch

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

After the new left

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

LIfe of the mind

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

Coleridge's Constitution of Church and State

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

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civic republicanism and Victorian character

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

Political history and the history of the novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From polity to society

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

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

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

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

Fascism

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

Anglicanism

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

Rewards

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

Spoilation of the contemplatives

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

Murderous capitalism: Schmitt, Ranciere, Agamben, Derrida

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

The state, the workers and the history of theory

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

Famines Communism Slaughter

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