Secularism and mountaineering

Were the 19thc and early 20thc English mountaineers often programmatic humanists, climbing for secular spiritual reasons? I am thinking of Leslie Stephen and I.A. Richards. If so, do traces of this link linger? Petrarch, the great Renaissance humanist, is often thought of as the first modern (i.e. aesthetic) alpinist. Shelley's Mont Blanc is clearly another important moment in the connection between anti-religion and climbing. There are probably secondary sources on this which I'd be interested in knowing (googling doesn't reveal anything): if not there's an excellent article for someone.

After Lukács

Have been reading Karl Mannheim's Habilitationsschrift on Conservatism,one of the founding document of the sociology of knowledge. It was written under the spell of Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and is a really remarkable book, it deserves to be better known. Basically it attempts to connect different ways of thinking and experience to particular social groups and to understand the transformations and purposes of these ways of thinking and experience in relation to a Weberian/Marxian understanding of capitalist, rationalist modernity. Methodologically, it reminds me a great deal of another book written from a Lukácian perspective, Lucien Goldmann's book on Pascal, The Hidden God, which also takes the social position of particular groups (whether estates or classes or professional formations) as determinative of their mode of thinking and feeling (their ethical dispositions). Goldmann is a more sensitive analyst of actual modes of thinking than Mannheim, but he doesn't use an equivalent of Mannheim's broad stroke account of modernisation. A great deal of the Frankfurt school is already in Mannheim. I haven't read his most famous book Ideology and Utopia but apparently its English translation is a travesty because Mannheim acceeded too broadly to the requirements of the coldwar social sciences for empiricism.

Seriousness as a literary criterion.

Let say that literary criticism's most important task is to distinguish serious work from what we might call the "upper-middlebrow". But what does serious mean when it comes to literary writing? I'm wondering about this while in the middle of reading Andrew O'Hagan's Personality (2003) which I think is about as good an example of an uppermiddlebrow literary novel as you can find of its period.

Is literary criticism a failed project?

Is literary criticism a failed project? Or, more to the point, was it ever anything else?

In reading for the talk I have to give at the SCT I am thinking that it is indeed at Cambridge that modern literary criticism establishes itself. If Eliot enunciates its basic principles and I.A. Richards as it were scienticizes and academicises it, then Leavis is lit crit's St Paul, i.e. he takes responsibility for the new discipline's institutional continuation as well as its doctrinal expansion. But lit crit was always bound to fail: its core supposition, namely that experience and literary writing have an especially immediate relation to one another, is wrong. A second of its presuppositions is also very problematic, namely its historicised dehistoricisation: its sense that modernity has undone proper relationships between language, thought and feeling, and that the literature which is where, and only where, those proper relationships may survive, belongs to a sequence and path of transmission (tradition) whose temporality is not that of history itself.

So literary criticism's invention can itself only be understood in terms of certain historical events, in particular: the resistance to democratization and, then, the first world war. (It's not an accident that Leavis suffered serious war trauma).

Literary criticism's more general original conditions of possibility include (in no particular order):
1) competition between the newer provincial universities and Oxford and Cambridge
2) the link between Germany and philology (the reigning academic mode of approach to literature), which gave a fillip to the anti-philology movement before, during and after WW1 and opened up a space for the new formation;
3) the overpowering experential impact of the war
4) the need for accessible civil service exams
5) the contigency through which the leading media propreitor, Harmondsworth, endowed a chair at Cambridge in the new field (he did so presumably to stall the Literature v Journalism division which runs high culture from Forster's Howards End through to the Leavises and Thompson.
6) the linguistic turn which is apparent in Russell's paper "On Denotation" (1905) and which brings Frege's work to Britain as well as in George Moore's turn to analysis and common sense out of his moral intuititionism. Note in particular Moore's report on Wittgenstein's lectures around 1930 (in Philosophical Papers) which, where W. remarks on aesthetics, chime in with Leavis's pedagogical practice of eliciding determined consent and agreement about the seriousness and success of a literary passage.

And in response to Facebook comments 0n this (Ben Myers, Paul Bowman), I added this, which points further in the direction I'm going:

I guess I don't think English departments actually do literary criticism in the Eliot, Richards, Leavis sense nor have they done it since Leavisism failed: they do historicisms, structuralisms, political hermeneutics of one sort or another etc but not literary criticism as originally understood. They can't; it's impossible. (Which is what is good about literary criticism.)

The post-humanities novel

Both Coetzee's Disgrace and Allen Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty can be described as post-humanities novels in that both are about men whose identifications with canonical literary figures (Byron, Henry James) are not simply impractictible and idealist but expose them the more to a debased society. At the level of content, Coetzee is less bleak than Hollinghurst, since his hero David Lurie continues to dabble with his opera about Byron, even if only to express his sense of literary heroicism's failure. But Henry James offers nothing at all to Hollinghurst's hero Nick Guest who has thoroughly prostituted himself to the Thatcherites and is probably about to die. At the level of style it is rather different: Hollinghurst's prose is literary in a mode which includes James in its genealogy while Coetzee writes bare sentences which act out the literary heritage's irrelevance to post-apartheid South Africa.
Of course the concept of the post-humanities art novel, especially one that is evaluating contemporary society as debased, is paradoxical. And it's the paradox of a literature after literature from which they seem to draw their (literary) power.

After progress

Let's say: there once was historical progress and then it stopped. It did so about 1968. Since then the idea of progress continues but not the thing itself. There exist various relations to it: a melancholic one (it is preserved in order to be hated and rejected); a fantasmal one (progress's cessation is denied by imagining its continuation in denial of reality) and a celebratory one (now it's dead we can reinvent non-progessive cosmologies and epistemologies).

Two by Henry James

There are intriguing similarities between Henry James's The Princess Casamassima and 'The Beast in the Jungle.' Both are about young men who are committed to an life-altering future event which will happen in a form and at a time they cannot predict. Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima has contracted himself to a radical underground organization to carry out a terrorist act when so instructed. John Marcher in 'The Beast' privately and secretly awaits a tremendous experience (an experience which takes the form of a 'law' as he understands it) which will also happen at some moment and in some form that he can't foresee. Both characters gain distinction and singularity by their submission to a major contingency; both attract women by virtue of it. The call to violence is indeed made to Hyacinth, though, having lost his faith in revolutionary politics he commits suicide rather than carrying it out. And Marcher's experience—the Beast in the Jungle—reveals itself in a very unexpected form indeed. He realizes that it is his indifference and selfishness to May Bartram, the woman who has for years shared his secret and loved him, that has marked him out and leapt at him. He has been the "man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened:" his experience is his realizing that at last and too late.
From a certain point of view, these are stories about the possibility of experience (the constructive role of anticipation, choseness and accident in sharpening experience and in shaping individuality: there's a kind of grace at work here). And they are also stories of triumph over what Forster in Howards End called "sameness", even if that triumph, because it makes its home in the pathologies of the imagination, inhabits nullity and flight. From another point of view "The Beast in the Jungle" in particular is about the impossibility of experience when it is thought as a break from the mundane and the expected. It is important that in his Preface to The Soft Side, James talks of Marcher's assessing his experiences as they come to him, and his failure to mark out the one that counts.

My interest in this is focussed on how these fictions might be used to think about the kind of literary criticism (Leavism) that thinks of literature as assessing and expanding the experiental. What these stories tell us: is not that the capacity to have experience belongs to the imagination, whether collectively or individually. Rather the will to experience is unsatisfiable. Even so, that means that there's an important sense in which experience does not belong outside literature itself. To judge experience is to make a literary judgement.

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?