On March 11, 2005, The Washington Post reported on a newly minted secret military category: “ghost detainees.” In an agreement with the CIA, intelligence officials at the Abu Ghraib prison in Guantánamo had decided to hide a number of prisoners without registering them. It was suggested that they be fingerprinted and processed under an assumed name, but the intelligence officer in charge, Thomas M. Pappas, decided against it. Locked in isolation cells on Tier 1A in the facility without an internment number and without a paper trail, the detainees’ existence was officially denied. Not prisoners of war, nor simply a specimen of the contentious category “unlawful enemy combatants,” these prisoners, hovering between biological being and symbolic non-being, had been transformed into ghosts of war. The process was named with a novel linguistic creation in the English language: the verb “ghosting” – i.e. making someone disappear at a black site often with the intent of torturing them. In 2005, according to the Department of Defense, prisons in Iraq contained in the vicinity of 100 ghosts (White 2005).
Ghosting is merely one example of the spectral nature of 21st century warfare. The development of high tech weaponry, the intermingling of warfare and digital culture, and the continued interest in obscuring the actual nature and consequences of war have given rise to various forms of invisibility that pervade modern warfare. To see without being seen, to attack without being attacked, and to wage war without waging war have been guiding principles of the US military efforts summed up in the ‘war on terror.’ Drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan planned and carried out on military sites in Nevada and Florida have created such distance between enemies that traditional notions of what constitutes a soldier, an enemy, and war itself, have been put to the test. If, some two hundred years ago, military thinker Carl von Clausewitz sought to expand our understanding of war by theorizing elements such as friction, emotions, and uncertainty, his basic model of battle was an event clearly limited in time and space: During the Napoleonic wars a battle lasted a given number of days and was fought out in a confined geographical space. On these post-Westphalian warscapes, large armies would stage grand battles whose theatrical aspect did not elude Clausewitz. The theaters of war were just that, grand spectacles to be viewed as much as won.
Contemporary warfare is very different. Tracking targets from thousands of miles away for days, weeks, or months and completely removed from the zone of danger, drone operators stretch the Clausewitzian model of battle beyond its breaking point, just as they transform what it means to be a soldier and an enemy. While the enemy is rendered hypervisible, blind, and permanently vulnerable, the drone operator has become invisible, all-seeing, and beyond reach. With drone warfare the differences in the balance of military advantage have become nearly absolute.
As the practice of ghosting reveals, the invisibilities of contemporary warfare also include a recalibration of our common language. “Black sites,” “stealth torture,” “enhanced interrogration techniques” – all appelations reveal the elaborate linguistic camouflage meant to deflect the attention of civil society from the realities they obscure. If the ‘war on terror’ puts war on display in a strategic, but peculiar and self-contradictory use of the concept, a number of inventive and at times perverse circumlocutions are at work to ensure that contemporary warfare remains out of sight and out of mind.
This is where Elisabeth Weber’s new book intervenes. In an effort to jolt the public out of its carefully induced slumber, she has gathered five previously published essays and one new one that from different angles examine the subtle processes by which war is made invisible, in particular through distortions of language. Focusing on torture, detention, and drones, she proceeds from the premise that language itself constitutes a primary battleground and that language forms a central tool for the production of a series of strategic blind spots in the general public. Weber revisits a number of canonical literary authors and makes use of their reflections on torture and war to highlight the linguistic distortions that accompany 21st century warfare. Twisting the mistreated words back into shape she tries to bring the brutalities they designate clearly into view.
Of course, such an endeavor isn’t entirely new. In 1947 Victor Klemperer documenting the language practices of the National Socialists during the Third Reich in LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii, recording the euphemisms, circumlocutions and procedures of resignification that came to shape the language of an era. In more recent times Derrida in particular wrote important essays on torture and global warfare in response to the ‘war on terror’ before his death 2004. And in a series of books W. J. T. Mitchell has complemented the examination of the language of war with illuminating analyses of the images of war and their cunning détournements by various artistic projects. Weber quotes liberally from Derrida and Mitchell throughout the book, but she also extends their insights to new material.
Two of her essays examine literary censorship at the Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp. During their incarceration, some of the prisoners have written hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of poems. In 2007 a small selection of twenty-two poems was declassified and published in translation as Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. The vast majority of the poems, however, remains under lock in a military facility in Virginia. The reason was reported in a Wall Street Journal front-page article shortly before the publication of the collection, viz. that “poetry presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language” (Dreazen 2007). Wary of secret messages hidden in the imagery, alliterations, personifications – the entire poetic dimension of language – the military refused to declassify the remaining body of literature. And because of their perceived threat to national security, the poems were translated by linguists with security clearances rather than by professional translators of poetry. Whether silenced or deformed, the Guantánamo poems make visible the degree to which fear of language and the attempt control language continue to be central elements of the war effort. As Weber rightly points out, “The silencing of legal justice goes hand in hand here with the silencing of literary justice.”
Weber’s close readings raise the larger question of method and purpose. For what is the task of the scholar and in particular the scholar with a background in literary and cultural studies living in a time of seemingly endless war? One approach would be to deploy the critical and hermeneutic apparatus of the humanities to contemporary representations of war in order to unearth the latent hypocrisies inherent to state-sponsored torture and indefinite detention. Another would be to historicize in the belief that history remains a magistra vitae and that the contemporary farce is the repetition of an instructive tragedy that can offer perspective and illumination. Weber does both, but she also combines the two approaches by way of a method of indirection. The first chapter juxtaposes the Austrian writer and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry with the recent history of US-sponsored torture, while the last chapter views drone warfare through the prism of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Many readers will probably find the connection between the scene in which Gregor Samsa is bombarded by his apple-throwing father and the victims of drone operators colloquially referred to as “bug splat” more than a tad imaginative.
The method of indirection does show its merit in the opening chapter, however.
As Weber explains, Améry’s testimony from 1966, translated as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities not only claimed that torture was the essence of National Socialism. It also prefigured the practice of “ghosting” with its account of how human beings are transformed when they are subjected to torture. For Améry, who survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, torture reduces it victims to pure flesh, rendering them into nothing but a thing writhing in pain. As he puts it, “flesh becomes a total reality in self-negation” (Weber 2017: 59). This complete transformation of the subject’s will, memories, desires, and emotions into a body in pain is, for Améry, the experience of death while still alive. Even after the torture ends, its victims inhabit an indeterminate zone between the living and the dead.
To give testimony to this experience, Améry has to reinvent the German language. Victims are “fleshifized,” and it is no longer they that scream, rather “it screams” – the grammar as distorted in German as in its English translation. To bear witness means twisting a grammar whose conventional order is incapable of depicting the experience of torture. In what is perhaps the book’s best chapter, Weber’s careful attention to the poetics of a testimony from 1966 serves as a useful counterpoint to the linguistic camouflage that pervades the official discourse on torture. As the old French term for torture “la question” reminds us, torture has long been intimately tied up with language, and it remains so today.
As so often with books compiled from individual essays, Kill Boxes suffers somewhat from both repetitions and gaps. It does, however, effectively summarize and add its own voice to recent critiques of US militarism. The guiding thread, as Weber frames it in the introduction, is the pursuit of “shocks of recognition” – be they in the images from Abu Ghraib or in the mute poetry from Guantánamo. Recognition, that is, of the torture performed by the “other” in the torture performed by oneself, as well as of common suffering and the shared vulnerability of the flesh. In her analyses of such shocks of recognition in the images and language of contemporary warfare, however, Weber’s descriptions often take the form not of a description of actual emotional responses but of an injunction: let us be shocked. As if the public has become inured to the uncomfortable truths that have flooded our news screens. In her often perceptive close readings of contemporary warfare, Weber knows that she is addressing an anaesthesized public whose sensorium has been blunted to such an extent that it no longer seems capable of experiencing the emotional state of shock. Weber must tell her readers that horrific images and testimonies are indeed horrifying. The condition that Walter Benjamin diagnosed about a hundred years ago after the First World War seems to have shifted. As he famously wrote: “Was it not evident that the people who returned from the field had fallen silent? that they were not richer in communicable experience, but poorer” (Benjamin 1977, 2:439). Today, paradoxically, it is less the soldiers who have lost the ability to narrate, than the public that has lost its ability to listen. Seventeen years into the ‘war on terror,’ the shock of war has gradually lost its force to engage let alone change the minds of a war weary nation. And with the world’s attention continuously hijacked by the histrionics of a tweeting US President, who has made shock into his preferred tactics of distraction, the public store of affect required for the experience of shock has been depleted. Weber’s exhortation to be shocked therefore reveals at once the limits of the affective strategies of persuasion she invokes, but also the importance of scholarly work like hers that make us cognizant of this state of public affairs and seeks new ways of interpretation and interpellation to make both visible and relevant the specters of war that ought to haunt society in the 21st century.
References
Benjamin, Walter. 1977. Gesammelte Schriften II, 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Dreazen, Yochi J. 2007. “The Prison Poets of Guantanamo Find a Publisher.” Wall Street Journal, June 20. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118217520339739055
Weber, Elisabeth. 2017. Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare. Goleta, CA: Punctum Books.
White, Josh. 2005. “Army, CIA Agreed on ‘Ghost’ Prisoners.” Washington Post, March 11.
This review is the first in a three-part series on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. boundary 2also published a conversation between J. Daniel Elam and Amitav Ghosh in March 2017.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
Reviewed by Jesse Oak Taylor
This article has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective.
What is the storyteller’s task in the Anthropocene? This is the question at the heart of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh’s answer is implied in his subtitle: the storyteller must render climate change thinkable, and thus, if not entirely containable, then at least survivable in a more humane manner than what Christian Parenti calls the “armed lifeboat” (qtd. on 143) scenario in which wealthy, nominally-democratic countries seal their borders against rising tides and refugees. The Great Derangement ought to be required reading for every literate citizen of the Anthropocene. It abounds with the kind of insight that is obvious only once you see it, and impossible to unsee thereafter. Whether he is pointing to the pattern of settlement in which the houses of the wealthy line the coasts, inviting the oceans’ wrath, the sheer fact that “the continent of Asia is conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming” (87), or the inversion whereby “the Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits us all” (62-63), Ghosh’s point of view is infectious and estranging in the best sense, never settled, never complacent, never boring. The Anthropocene emerges from Ghosh’s interrogation an inherently imperial condition, both in origin and consequence, one demanding new language, new forms, and new political affiliations if we are to confront it with equity and justice for all.
By contrast with many recent accounts of climate fiction, or “cli fi,” Ghosh reminds us that this predicament is not an unprecedented challenge for the narrative arts. Rather, it marks a return to the storyteller’s oldest practice: “Nowhere is the awareness of nonhuman agency more evident than in the traditions of narrative,” including religious and epic traditions from Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean (64). Ghosh is careful to note that this includes not only “systems of belief, but also to techniques of storytelling: nonhumans provide much of the momentum of the epics; they create the resolutions that allow the narrative to move forward” (64). “Even in the West,” he writes, “the earth did not come to be regarded as moderate and orderly until long after the advent of modernity” (56). Hence, Ghosh imagines, “humans of the future will surely understand that, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forbearers on Earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert” (3). However, the central irony remains that “it was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human” (66). Telling this old story, in which the Earth is alive, human and nonhuman histories entwine, and collective ecological responsibilities must be taken seriously thus also means untelling a different story, one in which all narrative agency lies with individuated human beings, aligns with the conditions of everyday life, and depends on the linear movement of modernity. The problem is that this other story is the only one we remember, the only one “serious fiction” can tell. Hence, “this era” [that is, our era] which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement” (11).
In making this case, Ghosh offers an ecological history of the modern novel that includes its “rise” alongside liberal individualism, capitalism, the mathematical theory of probability and (most importantly for his argument) European imperialism, all of which compound to render the novel complicit in our present predicament: “When we see a green lawn that has been watered with desalinated water, in Abu Dhabi or Southern California or some other environment where people had once been content to spend their water thriftily in nurturing a single vine or shrub, we are looking at an expression of a yearning that may have been midwifed in the novels of Jane Austen” (10). Similarly, he explains, “I have come to recognize that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer . . . derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the history of the earth” (7). Escaping the “great derangement” isn’t just about incorporating different subject matter into the novel, however. Instead, doing so will entail confronting the degree to which the very idea of plausibility currently rendering climate change unthinkable is both baked into and at least partly derived from the way that modern realist novels construct their worlds and hence the category of “the real” that emerges from them. For Ghosh, the problem is not simply that climate change is difficult to render realistically in fiction because it is difficult to conceive in reality, but rather that it is difficult to appreciate in reality because it violates the conditions of possibility as produced within realist fiction. Key elements of this argument include the novel’s focus on the human (as both narrative agent and scalar determinate), and its emergence alongside uniformitarian geology, industrial capitalism, and the mathematical theory of probability.
The anthropocentrism of the novel is so pervasive as to become almost invisible. It extends not only to a focus on cultivating individuality in “round” characters, but also to the scale of the narrative itself, which is usually anchored on the span of individual lives and the sensory perception of human individuals. By contrast, the Anthropocene presents a “scalar” challenge to the novel because “its essence consists of the phenomena that were long ago expelled from the territory of the novel—forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space” (63). One of the key mechanisms for that expulsion, Ghosh argues, is the realist novel’s generation of narrative interest out of everyday events in a world that accords with the mathematics of probability. He writes, “probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at about the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience” (16). This is important because it connects to the distinction (as old as Aristotle’s Poetics) between “possibility” and “plausibility” in narrative. While it seems obvious that realist novels cannot contain impossibilities, Ghosh argues that they also depend on a restricted sense of plausibility, such that the manufactured coincidences upon which many plots hinge, as when Flaubert’s Madam Bovary sees her lover at the opera. Though Ghosh doesn’t say so, this focus on probability also connects to the oversimplification on which novels depend: even sprawling works like Dickens’s Bleak House or Hugo’s Les Miserables, which seem complex and overpopulated as novels, are vastly simpler than the metropolises they depict. Hence, Ghosh concludes, “the irony of the ‘realist’ novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real” (23).
This eloquent and forceful account expands on the burgeoning discourse around “cli fi” in numerous ways, especially in expanding the purview beyond a narrow focus on the contemporary. It also suggests the degree to which climate change (and/or the Anthropocene) may be at odds with the narrative techniques associated with the novel, a point minimized in accounts of the rise of cli fi, which focus on the “cli” while leaving the relevance of the “fi” largely uninterrogated, and provides the basis for vital political interventions that follow later in the book, when Ghosh argues that “we need . . . to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped” (135). Insofar as that “individualizing imaginary” is the product of the modern novel (a point on which Ghosh’s account aligns with that of influential theorists from Ian Watt to Nancy Armstrong), then the modern novel does indeed have some explaining to do. However, this very point exposes one of the more perplexing features of Ghosh’s account: namely, his relentless focus on realism and the realist novel as the only paradigm for “serious fiction.” Ghosh suggest that to depart from this history by including “a scene in which a character is walking down a road at the precise moment when it is hit by an unheard-of-weather phenomenon” is to “court eviction from the mansion in which serious fiction has long been in residence” and “risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house—those generic outhouses that were once known by names such as ‘the Gothic,’ ‘the romance,’ or ‘the melodrama,’ and have now come to be called ‘fantasy,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘science fiction’” (24). Thus, on the one hand he critiques “the modern novel” (by which he means the realist novel) for rendering climate change unthinkable while largely refusing to countenance the very modes of fiction that seem to reject the elements of the modern novel that he takes to task for its deafness to “the archaic voice whose rumblings, once familiar, had now become inaudible to humanity: that of the earth and its atmosphere” (124).
This is particularly odd given that his primary interest is not in literary history, but literary modernity. His book is as much a call for the kinds of novels that should be written today, as it is an account of the genre to date. Thus, its primary object is the landscape of contemporary literature, an era of literary history in which the alignment between “serious fiction” and realism seems especially tenuous. On this point, Ghosh’s case is at its strongest when arguing against John Updike’s dismissal of Abdel Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt. In a review, Updike wrote that Munif is “insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like a what we call a novel” because “his voice is that of a campfire explainer” more interested in “men in the aggregate” than “individual moral adventure” (qtd. on 76-77). Ghosh responds, quite rightly, that “it is a matter of record that historically many novelists from Tolstoy and Dickens to Steinbeck and Chinua Achebe have written very effectively about ‘men in the aggregate’” and that “in many parts of the world, they continue to do so even now” (79). To these examples, one might add the example of Walter Scott and the historical novel, which is largely absent from Ghosh’s discussion (an odd elision given that his own Ibis Trilogy is a one of the most prominent recent examples of that genre). However, in pointing to such variety in the forms of serious fiction, Ghosh invites a similar rejoinder to his own case: if the modern novel is deaf to the voice of the nonhuman, then Moby Dick is surely not a novel and neither is Heart of Darkness or anything by Thomas Hardy. Turning to the late 20th and 21st centuries (the period Ghosh singles out for particular censure), what fiction can claim to be more “serious” than the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, or Toni Morrison? The same holds true for the rise of science and/or speculative fiction and fantasy in the mid-20th century with the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov or others. What about Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, and Kim Stanley Robinson? Indeed, the fact that the Anthropocene is increasingly dated to the mid-20th century Great Acceleration (its signature the residue of the nuclear bomb), suggests that speculative fiction got “serious” at precisely the moment that humanity emerged as a force within the Earth system.
Ghosh himself praises a number of these authors and laments the critical dismissal of speculative fiction, even suggesting that Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick may be remembered when other late 20th century writers “who once bestrode the literary world like colossi” are forgotten (72). However, he also participates in that very dismissal himself when he objects to magical realism or surrealism as modes for engaging today’s weird weather because “these events are neither surreal nor magical” (72). This, he suggests, not only raises “ethical difficulties” in “treating them as magical or allegorical” but also aesthetic ones, because treating them “magical surreal would rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time” (27). Ghosh levels a similar complaint against “cli fi,” which he understands to be “made up mostly of disaster stories set in the future” whereas “the Anthropocene resists science fiction” because “it is precisely not an imagined ‘other’ world apart from ours; nor is it located in another ‘time’ or another ‘dimension’” (72-73). Thus, while at times he seems to critique the literary history of exclusivity that holds realism as the canonical basis of the novel, his own criteria for what substantive engagement with climate change in fiction would look like replay that exclusion, suggesting that only realist novels set in the historical present can fulfill the obligation of rendering the crisis both present and real. And yet, his opening example of our predicament comes from Star Wars, when “Han Solo lands the Millennium Falcon on what he takes to be an asteroid . . . only to discover that he has entered the gullet of a sleeping space monster,” a moment in which “something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive” (3). Such moments belie his own grounding assumption because they show how vividly applicable and relevant a story may be, even if it takes place on a galaxy far far away. The problem, in other words, may be less that we need a realist account of the Anthropocene but rather that Anthropocene reality is simply too weird for realism.
This critique is not intended to dismiss Ghosh’s argument altogether, tossing both baby and bathwater into the runoff from a melting glacier. Ghosh’s account does far more than most to situate the history of the novel within the emergence of the Anthropocene, and its culpability therein. At the same time, this paradoxical feature of his argument raises a question about his opening premise: namely, that the future readers he imagines combing the archives of contemporary fiction for evidence of climate change might not seek in vain. Neither Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988) nor Martin Amis’s London Fields (1989), are likely appear in a genealogy of “cli fi,” and yet both explicitly feature strange weather as a signal of their historical moment, a moment that aligns with the publication of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), the first work to popularize concern about global warming. Charles Dickens’s works are obsessed with the manufactured atmosphere of mid-Victorian London. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick not only provides an extensive account of “nonhuman forces” like the whale (and the ocean) but also offers a detailed portrait of an extraction economy in its account of New Bedford. George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss situates its narrative within geological and evolutionary time and concludes (much like Ghosh’s own The Hungry Tide) with a cataclysmic flood that has been forecast throughout the book. Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ derives much of its narrative interest from the forces of wind, water, and storm. I could go on, but the key point is this: evidence of anthropogenic climate change is not absent from the history of the novel. Hence, when future readers living in “a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable” look to the literary archives of modernity I think it highly unlikely that they will find no “traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance” (11). Instead, I suspect that they will find those traces and portents everywhere. The real question is why we don’t.
If the foregoing examples highlighting the centrality of nonhuman forces within the modern novel is surprising, that is because readers approach these works with different expectations, focusing on individual characters and their domestic pursuits rather than the historical and/or geomorphological settings in which they appear. The problem, then, may not be so much with novels (or novelists) as with readers, a turn that expands culpability for the climate crisis in ways that parallel the paradoxical position of consumers and citizens enmeshed within a toxic system that exceeds us on all sides. The storyteller can only take us so far; we must also be prepared to listen. My point is thus not simply that Ghosh is insufficiently reflexive in situating his own aesthetic categories in relation to the very history he outlines, but rather that the relation between climate, atmosphere, and other nonhuman forces within the modern novel is actually reflective of the way those forces impinge upon human life itself, hovering in the background until the occasional cataclysm when they rush in and steal the show. Ghosh is right that a particular understanding of the novel (an understanding that some works of course support more fully than others), of which John Updike is an exemplar, and which emerged most distinctly in the work of Henry James. However, contrary to what its proponents have suggested, it is not and never was the only one: there are as many counterexamples to the realist-novel-as-vehicle-for-exploring-individual-consciousness as there are exemplars of it. To overplay its dominance of the novel form is thus to minimize all of these other currents swirling around in the history of the novel, currents that could well have carried us in very different directions: the might-not-have-beens of the Anthropocene.
Ghosh is a professional writer. I am a professional reader. It is thus hardly surprising that he would attend to the challenges of authorship, while I would be drawn to those of interpretation. However, livelihoods aside, there is a good reason to think more seriously about the position of the reader—and hence the capacity to reinterpret familiar works in a new way—in confronting the “great derangement.” A reader (or viewer) encountering a work of art is in a position of constrained freedom, limited not by the author’s intent but by the properties of the work itself. You can make of a work what you will, but only in terms of what the work itself affords. The same is true for the world: we cannot reinvent the Earth, even in the Anthropocene. Instead, we must make what we can of what it is, while embedded within it. Our embeddedness includes not only planetary systems, but also the webs of economics and ideology in which we are situated. We will not be given a new system, or a new story, that will make the Anthropocene easy. Instead, we must find our way, re-working the remnants left to us by the history that has brought about our present predicament. Shrugging off outmoded and toxic schemes of value, repurposing forms, genres, and histories, are all central to this work. Ghosh concludes with his hope for the future: “I would like to believe that out of this struggle will be born a generation that will be able to look upon the world with clearer eyes that those that preceded it; that they will be able to transcend the isolation in which humanity was entrapped in the time of its derangement; that they will rediscover their kinship with other beings, and that this vision, at once new and ancient, will find expression in a transformed and renewed art and literature” (162). In this, Ghosh and I are in full agreement.
“Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice, timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”
“It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
As a graduate student at Columbia in the early noughties, I attended Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminar on Poststructuralism. It was an often tense seminar, where once a week my classmates and I would flounder and generally fail to say anything illuminating about the assigned text for that session. One fraught morning, I attempted to answer a question of textual detail in Derrida to which Spivak responded, “Exactly wrong!” Lost in the rabbit hole of French theory and crazed for any crumb of comfort, I vacillated between hope and despair in my reading of Spivak’s “exactly.” Could an interpretation that was “exactly wrong” provide, through the looking glass as it were, a clue to the right reading? Was my answer so wrong that it was partially right? Or did my wrong answer, like a donut hole, merely identify where the good stuff would not be found. I found myself returning to these questions as I read Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (2017). North purports to offer a new history of literary studies, a diagnosis of its current malaise, and a prescription for where it should go from here. The book raises a number of important questions: What would a political history of literary criticism look like? What is the relationship (if any) between literary studies and politics? How is neoliberalism reshaping universities generally and literary studies in particular? North’s answers to these questions are wrong. And wrong in ways that are damaging to the discipline and give ammunition to reactionary forces within and beyond it. But my wager is that they are exactly wrong. North’s history of literary criticism—an account that is wrong from beginning to end, to quote the Caterpillar—can point us in the direction of its true history. Even, if it does so, like that donut hole, by identifying the places we need not look.
North frames his history as an overview rather than an exhaustive survey. His stated goal is to “step back from individual figures and movements in order to bring into focus the basic paradigms that have determined the development of Anglo-American literary studies throughout its history, and that therefore seem likely at least to condition its possible lines of development in the future” (2017, ix). In North’s account, two paradigms have dominated the field: the “critical” and the “scholarly.” In one of North’s many formulations, scholars are those who treat the study of literature “as a means by which to analyze culture” while critics treat the study of literature “as an opportunity to intervene in culture” (2). While scholars treat literary texts “chiefly as opportunities for producing knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read,” critics use literature as a means of enriching culture by “cultivating new ranges of sensibility, new modes of subjectivity” and “new capacities for experience” (6-7). According to North, the changing fortunes of these two paradigms have shaped the broad history of the field.
Hoping to bring the revolutionary potential of criticism into sharper focus and to explain its current institutional occlusion by the most recent scholarly turn he labels “the historicist/contextualist paradigm,” North proposes an alternative history to the “pre- and post-Theory” narrative, which he believes characterizes most accounts of literary studies. Labeling his own version rather grandly as “the new periodization,” North offers an alternative tripartite historical narrative. In the first period, I. A. Richards puts criticism on a disciplinary footing by developing an “incipiently materialist account of the aesthetic” (x). Richards’s characteristic methods of close reading and practical criticism helped readers, “each from their own specific material situations, to use the aesthetic instruments of literature to cultivate their most useful practical capabilities” (15). In the second period, the project of criticism was taken up by Leavisites and the New Critics, who transformed a materialist aesthetic into an idealist one. That is to say, they shifted the function of close reading and practical criticism from the cultivation of a reader’s aesthetic capabilities to the cultivation of aesthetic judgment. In the third period, which began in the late seventies and continues to our present, the project of criticism was rejected for historicism, reducing close reading and practical criticism to a means of producing historical and cultural knowledge about the contexts in which specific literary texts were written and received. According to North, these three periods of literary criticism map onto three moments in the history of capitalism in the twentieth century: an earlier period between the wars, where a crisis in capitalism raised the possibility of a radical break with the liberal consensus; a period of relative stability, where criticism and scholarship served “real superstructural functions within Keynesianism” (17); and lastly our own present, in which the establishment of a neoliberal order following the crisis of Keynesianism, has resulted in the “complete dominance of the ‘scholar’ model in the form of the historicist/contextualist paradigm” (17).
Perhaps the quickest way to trouble the neat binary between the critical and scholarly paradigm which this historical schema presupposes is to think about the role of close reading in so-called historicist/contextualist scholarship. North claims that historicists treat “literary texts chiefly as opportunities for producing knowledge about the cultural contexts in which they were written and read” (7). Under this paradigm, close reading entails “a focus on small units of the text for the purposes of understanding what the text has to teach us about histories and cultures” (105). In other words, historicists use literary texts as “diagnostic tools for the analysis of historical and cultural phenomena” (106). But is this actually the case? As a British Romanticist whose period interest dictates a deep engagement with historicist scholarship, I have found historically-oriented scholars do not tend to instrumentalize literary texts in order to produce knowledge about the cultural contexts in which texts were written and read. Rather, most historicist research is in the service of close reading: scholars restore the cultural archive that the work assumes, activates, challenges, and subverts. They do this out of necessity and as a matter of course. Imagine a study of American television comedy two hundred years from now. What kind of historical research would be required before future scholars could offer a “close reading” of an episode of The Simpsons or Seinfeld worthy of that name? Without reconstructing this cultural archive (always, in part, an act of imagination), we miss a text’s rich intertextuality. Historical scholarship here is not using a literary text as a diagnostic instrument to understand a historical and cultural moment; rather, it is using historical knowledge in an endeavor to make the full complexity of the text available to be read. Of course, North knows this because his entire argument is built on the premise that unless we understand the real history of literary studies, we are unable to read it correctly: “to understand the character of the neoliberal order that established within literary studies,” he notes, “we need to reconsider the history from the ground up” (14). In other words, we need to put an object of analysis in its historical context to understand it properly. North laments that the “literary disciplines’ sense of their own history is still stuck in the older two-period mode, and as a result fails to capture the quality of our present moment” (13). In short, bad historical research leads to poor reading. North’s historical corrective is a classic example of the “historicist/contextualist” paradigm in action.
And there is nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, the revisionary history he proceeds to tell is wrong. It is wrong in its facts and in its method. One example can stand synecdochically for a series of unpersuasive historical claims and moves. According to North, during the eighties and nineties, neoliberal forces within the university systematically favored the scholarly over the critical model of literary studies. In this “professionalized and scientized context, the scholarly model of intellectual inquiry—intellectual work as knowledge production” became the central task of literary study (100). It’s a compelling story. And it’s completely inaccurate. Literary Studies has benefited enormously from the disciplinary histories of Gerald Graff, Louis Menand, Chris Baldick, Bill Readings and many others. Indeed, it is a sobering fact that the accretive crisis in literary studies has stimulated brilliant scholarship in this area. North references many of these scholars. But, having read them, he should know that the disciplinary commitment to professionalism and the scientific model of knowledge production in literary studies predates neoliberalism. It stretches back to the origin of English as a discipline. At the turn of the twentieth century, the first English Departments were composed of scholars—philologists and literary historians—who emphasized the utilitarian and scientific value of their research and pedagogy. Indeed, in the fifties, the new critics successfully lobbied the MLA to add the category of criticism to the association’s mission statement arguing that close reading was a method that produced new knowledge. No matter. Let’s return to North’s convenient morality play. In the late seventies or early eighties, according to North, literary studies opted for a form of professional scholarship, one predicated on “technological expertise, much along the lines of the social sciences” (11). Here the problems with North’s historical methodology kick in. Bracketing for a moment the inaccuracy of such claims, this account begs some questions. Who enacted this shift? Was it a voluntary choice within the discipline, one that occurred outside of broader institutional concerns? Or was it a result of institutional pressure? Did it come from university administrators as a vanguard of neoliberalism? Why would the mandarins of neoliberalism within the academy view disciplinary work as valid only to the degree that it resembled the scientific production of new knowledge? North is silent on these questions of historical agency and motivation; or rather, he resurrects a reductive version of the “base/superstructure” model to account for these paradigmatic institutional changes. That is to say, in North’s mind, the discipline has moved from paradigm to paradigm in lockstep with phase shifts in the capitalist economic order. When the mythical economic base shifted to neoliberalism, the disciplines were bound to follow suit. According to this logic, which North describes, in another fit of intellectual nostalgia, as “the historical materialist line,” the future course of the discipline will depend on the nature of the subsequent phase of capital to emerge out of our current crisis (196). To paraphrase the political quietism of Karl Kautsky, we cannot prepare the coming revolution, we can merely prepare ourselves for it.
Such economic determinism, long jettisoned by Marxist cultural theory, can only lead to a very imprecise account of the current political economy of the academy. Whatever we label the new economic model that is transforming third-level education in the United States and beyond—the continued abuse of “neoliberalism” as a buzzword renders its use increasingly problematic—it has shown itself perfectly happy to accommodate both literary criticism and scholarship. As long as these pursuits generate or do not interrupt the flow of revenue, neoliberalism is content neutral. Without fear of censure, North is free to deploy close reading as a means of training the sensibilities of his students. Many of his students, on the other hand, now find themselves in a far more precarious position. While scholars ranging from David Harvey and Wendy Brown to Philip Mirowski and Angus Bergin have debated the defining characteristics of neoliberalism, all share a sense that neoliberalism involves the curtailment of the state as an instrument of social provision (even as the state’s power grows in the areas of surveillance, incarceration, and the maintenance and extension of free markets and private property rights). Accordingly, at the level of third-level education, neoliberalism manifests itself at the level of funding: funding for programs, for students, and for academic labor. As state and federal funding for third-level education have dried up, the focus of university administrations has shifted to cutting costs and generating revenues, favoring those schools and disciplines that can maximize tuition and endowments. Faculty who run programs feel neoliberalism’s effects in the institution of “true cost accounting” as the metric that decides the survival of individual classes and entire programs. For students, federal grants have been replaced by student loans. As a result, future initiates into the sensibility-expanding capacities of close reading will be increasingly burdened by massive student debt. They will already know capitalism isn’t working for them; they won’t need a close analysis of Wordsworth to tell them that. In those programs that are not generating tuition and whose alumni do not contribute to university endowments, neoliberalism is felt in the shrinking of tenure lines and the massive expansion of graduate and adjunct labor. I couldn’t help reflecting that North, like me, was a graduate student at Columbia and that while he was working on Literary Criticism, Columbia’s graduate students (as was the case while I was there) were fighting to gain recognition for their union and collectively bargain with the university. I wondered why this latest union drive had so little impact on North’s thinking about neoliberalism, literary criticism, and the political economy of universities.
North’s decision to make his history a “concise” one results in some serious and troubling exclusions. North states that his history makes “no programmatic attempt to recover the work of thinkers who have been ignored or marginalized because of their subject position” (viii). Viewing this acknowledgement as adequate restitution, North proceeds to ignore these thinkers throughout Literary Criticism, participating in their continued institutional marginalization. This omission seems particularly perverse when scholars of color historically and institutionally, have pioneered, often at considerable risk to their careers, the practice of literary criticism as political intervention. The scholarship of Edward Said, bell hooks, Spivak, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers (among many others) is invested in making literary studies and questions of aesthetics count politically in the very manner North demands. The failure to discuss these scholars in any depth seems all the more egregious when North is happy to indulge in a kind of victim blaming when assessing their broader impact on the field. The following swipe at feminism must stand in for a long list of North’s leading questions directed at the legacy of feminist, queer, and postcolonial criticism: “To what extent were second-wave feminist critiques of the welfare state likely to secure basic structural changes, and to what extent were they working to replace a material politics with a mere politics of recognition, thereby serving, albeit often inadvertently, as the hand-maidens of neoliberalism?” (58). In a historical narrative that repeatedly understands literary studies as being reshaped by economic forces outside the academy, feminist scholars are accorded a striking degree of agency here as midwives of the new neoliberal order. North’s choice of hand-maiden to characterize the work of his feminist colleagues is particularly unwelcome. At the same time, North claims their entry into the academy in the sixties and seventies had no institutional or disciplinary effects. We can only assume he believes they were too busy helping deliver neoliberalism. North complacently opines that “actual political struggle—the kind that involve a group, or class ‘forcing’ its way into something—does not take place within the world of scholarship” (88). Here as elsewhere, North’s discussion of the efforts by marginalized groups to challenge the academy’s exclusionary culture is not aided by his clubby tone, which comes off as privileged, tweedy, and smug. North goes on to suggest that “people from marginalized groups who entered the academy and became scholars were, in time, no less ‘trained specialists’ than the gentile white men who had tried to keep them out” (91). Perhaps. But in pursuing careers as ‘trained specialists’ these scholars radically transformed university cultures, helped overhaul admission policies, reshaped disciplinary scholarship, opened up the canon, and diversified campuses. As a matter of fact, their entrance into the academy corresponds with the flight of many of those “gentile white men” from the humanities, which is surely one of the factors in literary studies’ increasing institutional marginalization, the nominal focus of North’s work.
North’s ultimate goal is to recover the lost project of literary criticism and his most original and provocative claim is that the “incipient materialist aesthetic” at the root of Richards’s understanding of close reading can be harnessed as an instrument of radical politics. North sees a lot at stake politically in this project of recovery: “The incipiently materialist account of the aesthetic that lies at the root of the discipline and continues to mark its central practice of ‘close reading,’ is properly understood as part of a longer history of resistance to the economic, political, and cultural systems that prevent us from cultivating deeper modes of life” (x). Accordingly, North identifies one of his book’s desired audiences as the radical left: “the collective, or incipient collective, of those who have found themselves in the difficult and vexed position of trying to articulate and even to live a critique, not merely of the excesses of capitalism in its current form, but of capitalism itself” (ix). This is a curious formulation of the radical left, which smacks more of the romantic anti-capitalism of bohemia than the collective and organized political activism of the historical left. Be that as it may, North cites the proper goal of criticism as “a programmatic commitment to using works of literature for the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility, with the goal of more general cultural and political change” (3). In the wake of Richards, according to North, literary criticism was “an institutional program of aesthetic education—an attempt to enrich the culture directly by cultivating new ranges of sensibility, new modes of subjectivity, new capacities for experience—using works of literature as a means” (6). Once cultivated, this aesthetic sensibility demands ways of being far richer than those that can be offered by capitalism.
Here then is an attempt to articulate a political program for literary studies. Unfortunately, at the precise point where North’s argument needs to get into the details, unsupported pronouncements proliferate. The task of “higher students of literature,” writes North, is the “development of new methods for cultivating subjectivities and collectivities” (20). North never explains why and how literature is a good instrument for such work. Why would it be an effective instrument as opposed to say critical theory, cultural studies, political science, sociology, mindfulness, or yoga? He also struggles to delimit the category of literature. Conceding the sustained difficulty literary scholars have had securing a stable category of “literature,” North can still complacently ask, “Is it too naive, given our investigation of Williams’s cunning critique of the category of the literary, to object that the justification for literary studies surely has to rest, at some stage, on the concept of literature?” (108). The simple, if inconvenient, answer to this question is “yes, it is too naive.” Wanting a stable concept of literature doesn’t make one exist. The discipline has a rich body of work over the course of the twentieth century dedicated to establishing the quality of “literariness” that might distinguish literary and non-literary texts. These various projects were fascinating, but ultimately unsuccessful. Doubling down, however, North declares that “a discipline needs to justify its object of study, not just its method for studying it” (108). If that is the case, literary studies is in trouble. Even North cannot be consistent here and a supplement immediately and necessarily appears in this anxious declaration: “For of course literary and other aesthetictexts are particularly rich training grounds for all sorts of capabilities and sensibilities” (my emphasis, 109). Of course they are. And of course, we won’t ask what these “other aesthetic texts” might be. Finally, it is never made entirely clear in what manner Richards’ aesthetic is “incipiently materialist” (x). If I follow North’s argument, Richards’ aesthetic is materialist because it refuses to set up the aesthetic as “a self-sufficient category insulated from the rest of life” (30). Richards asks us to shift our focus from artworks in themselves to the relationship between artworks and their audience. The experience of art elicits a set of complex cognitive and affective processes deeply imbricated in the reader’s life world. And yet I can imagine an aesthetic theory that provides a rich account of the mental and affective nature of our encounter with art that is not materialist. I found myself wishing that North had more carefully delineated the materialism of Richards’s approach as well as explain what is at stake politically in designating it materialist in the first place.
For those of us working within the discipline who had registered a certain fatigue with the constant hand-wringing, the countless articles and conference panels diagnosing “the crisis in the humanities,” and the elegies on the demise of literary studies, the alacrity with which the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and n+1 have championed Literary Criticism is reason enough to take notice of North’s book. For the most part, reviewers have joined North in piling on the discipline and its practitioners, endorsing the book’s conclusion that literary studies is truly in a parlous state. Perhaps we literary scholars can take comfort from the fact that if we are worth kicking (even when we’re down), then we still matter. Apart from offering these dubious consolations, however, the book’s critical reception serves as an important barometer: it confirms that recent efforts to revamp the discipline (distance reading, the cognitive turn, digital and public humanities, the ecological turn) have failed to win over a skeptical public, a public that includes state legislators, university administrators, prospective students and their parents. In other words, those stakeholders who will decide whether the discipline has a future. The broad embrace of North’s old-school model of criticism suggests that many outside the discipline remain unconvinced of the value of these latest developments in literary studies. But the need for an engagement with North’s book goes beyond the fact that its reception highlights the discipline’s ongoing public relations problem. If North’s book failed to answer any of the important questions it raises, it did persuade me that our discipline could benefit from a genuine history of materialist aesthetics that might include Richards, but would stretch further back to William Hazlitt and Edmund Burke and would include figures ranging from Herbert Marcuse and Spivak to Paul de Man and Sianne Ngai. One of the goals of such a history would be to bring into sharp focus the political implications of the kinds of aesthetic education we offer our students. Now that is a hole worth filling.
Dermot Ryan is professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Technologies of Empire: Writing, Imagination and the Making of Imperial Networks, 1750-1820 (2013).
Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford University Press, 2017)
Reviewed by Laura Finch
Jasper Bernes’s The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization inherits not only its title from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) but also Benjamin’s concern with the “developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production” (Benjamin 2010 [1936]: 11). For Bernes this means tracing the dialectical relationship between poetry and labour over the course of the deindustrialisating era of post-1960s North America. One story that has been told of this relationship between art and late capital has been that of homology: the dematerialisation of both that can be seen in the correspondence between the related abstractions of the postmodern and the postindustrial. This argument has been made most famously by Fredric Jameson who depicts the post-1970s epoch of finance capital as the moment when “capital itself becomes free-floating [and] separates from the concrete context of its productive geography” (1997: 250-1), while analogously “the narrativized image fragments of a stereotypical postmodern language … suggest a new cultural realm or dimension that is independent of the former real world” (265). The converging narrative of aesthetics and labour that Bernes tells largely follows this logic of dematerialisation, where “the work of art and work in general share a common destiny” (Bernes 2017: 1, emphasis in original).
The story of deindustrialisation that Bernes narrates clearly and succinctly in his introduction describes the move from the profitable production-based economy of post-war industry towards financialisation, while automation led to a shift from a blue-collar to a white-collar workforce, a “massive demographic and occupational transformation, as workers moved away from goods-producing to service-providing sectors of the economy and as women entered the workplace in massive numbers” (179). Similarly, art turns away from making objects and in the wake of Duchamp increasingly treats its materials as things that need “rearranging, sorting, cataloguing, parsing, transcribing, excerpting” (21) such that “artwork becomes paperwork” (20).
However, where Jameson and Bernes diverge is in their analysis of the closeness of the relationship between art and capital. While for Jameson postmodern culture “cleaves almost too close to the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right,” (Jameson 1994: xv) [i], The Work of Art is interested in exactly the ways that culture and the economic inform one another. Bernes’s writing proceeds with a rigorous dialectical energy as he narrates the mutually influencing evolution of art and capital from the 1960s to the present day: that is, how does the shift in the North American economy in this period (from production and manufacturing to white-collar work) effect how labour is conceptualised, and how, in turn, does culture represent these changes? Rather than arguing that art and labour are exactly homologous or in direct opposition, The Work of Art details the convergence of art and work as a “complex set of reversible mediations” (1). Bernes works with what he terms a “loosely deterministic relationship,” where “the social and technical conditions of labor in a given society delimit a ‘horizon of possibilities’ for art” (33), an approach that “does not rely on simplistic notions of correspondence, homology or reflection” (33).
In Bernes’s account, the increasingly porous boundary between art work and work allowed the aesthetic to have agency in the transformation of the workplace. The corollary to the shift from factory production to office work also led to a change in the kind of demands workers were making on their employers: while during the first half of the twentieth century organized labour couched demands in a quantitative language, asking for better pay, shorter hours, greater job security, and safety protections, the latter half of the century brought a turn to explicitly qualitative demands such as “calls for greater participation in decision making, for a democratization of the workplace, for more varied and creative work, for greater autonomy, and even for [sic] self-management” (8).[ii] The relative difficulty of expressing a growing workplace ennui despite the quantitative gains made by the labour movement created a space for “various literary and artistic experimental cultures of the 1960s and 1970s … to articulate, though certainly not to create, these new qualitative complaints and demands” (8 italics in original), providing “tropes, motifs, and forms of articulation for [d]issatisfaction” (16) in the newly refigured workplace of deindustrialising North America.
The optimistic reading of the cultural response to the increased “alienation, monotony, and authoritarianism” (9) of the workplace is the commitment of artworks to critique the “division of labor between artist and spectator, writer and reader, which condemns the latter to inactivity” (15) by making of the art work “performances, conceptual elaborations, installations, environments, and earthworks” (11). However, this is not where Bernes’s account ends: under the pavement, the beach, but watch out for the dialectical kicker because “under the beach, the office” (130). While the turn to qualitative demands allowed for a shared vocabulary between art and work, this permeability came at a cost. While art helped to articulate problems of the workplace, these new articulations were then borrowed in turn by the workplace to further its own goals, such that “the critique of labor posed by experimental writers and artists of the postwar period became a significant force behind the restructuring of capitalism, by providing important coordinates, ideas, and images for that restructuring” (18). Here is the centre of Bernes’s argument, the case that he makes convincingly throughout the book: that, finally, “the qualitative critique of work passes into the quantitative worsening of work” ( Bernes acknowledges that he is not the first to make this claim, citing the work of Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, Alan Liu, and David Harvey (17). However, he is interested in adding granularity to this claim by showing that while some aesthetic forms are co-opted wholesale (chapter one), at other times the art world and the corporate world are fighting it out over a set of terms made available by a third discourse (in chapter three, for example, the language of cybernetics).
Chapter one opens with of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964). O’Hara is a good choice – he is the poet of feelings and personal experience and this collection in particular, written by O’Hara in his lunchbreaks, is typically read in opposition to work: the stolen moments of artistic and bodily freedom as O’Hara walked through NYC on his breaks, “a lunch-hour flâneur in an urban landscape” (39). In contrast to this reading, Bernes reorients us to the ways that the Lunch Poems intersect with a vocabulary of work. In particular, O’Hara’s poems seem to foreshadow the turn from a focus on the commodity to the focus on aestheticised experience that was to become the central ploy of advertising, where “the commodity-object itself is simply a placeholder, an empty form that facilitates experience” (43). Retrospectively, O’Hara’s commitment to experience over the object (which puts him in line with a larger movement towards event and performance that Bernes traces throughout the art of the 1960s and 70s) seems to “prefigure and perhaps even contribut[e] to, indirectly” (41) the sale of experience by advertising. Bernes clearly shows this at work in the final lines of the poem “Having a Coke with You,” where O’Hara claims that the experiences of artists in the past were impoverished by their exclusive focus on objects: “it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous / experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling / you about it.” Bernes’s sassy rejoinder to O’Hara’s call for pure experience is: “in other words: just do it,” (46) citing Nike’s ultimately motto as a bathetic reminder of the infinite recuperability of art by argument that 1960s counter-culture was swiftly recuperated by advertising is not new – in fact, Bernes gives a nice reading of how it is staged in the closing scene of Mad Men where Don Draper, with beatific smile, leverages his “proximity to liberated, bohemian spaces” (61) into Coca-Cola’s 1971 “Hilltop” commercial where the aesthetics of “perfect harmony” can be reached through “buy[ing] the world a Coke” (63). The likening of O’Hara to Nike and Mad Men works well, as do Bernes’s sharp close readings, for example when he makes the counter-intuitive claim that O’Hara is “a poet of service work as much as a poet of consumption” (39). Equally successful is the reading of O’Hara’s curatorial work at MoMA as a kind of training ground for his future shaping of New York as commodity, “cultivating an image of the worldly cultural space of New York for an equally worldly, international audience in the discursive context of the Cold War” (60).
Where I hesitate in Bernes’s reading of Lunch Poems is over the question of identity – a question that The Work of Art keeps bringing me back to. Let me pause on two readings of O’Hara mentioned by Bernes: Terrell Scott Herring’s “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet,” and José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia. Bernes turns to Herring’s theory of “impersonal intimacy” (2002: 422), a form of belonging that, Herring argues, O’Hara created as a queer counterpublic to provide (and create) sociality without the personalisation that would lead to the violence of surveillance. While Bernes recognises that O’Hara developed impersonal intimacy as a way “to solve the specific problems of queer counterpublics” (Bernes 2017: 50), his interest is in how this partial universalism made O’Hara’s work open to recuperation: for example, the creation of this affect through a circulating commodity (such as a can of Coke) was catnip to advertisers who sought exactly this kind of staged intimacy. Certainly, the tool of impersonal intimacy could, as Bernes writes, “anticipat[e] quite well the affective rhetorics that advertisers and retailers [would] use to lubricate the flow of commodities, generating rapport in the absence of familiarity” (50) (is “lubricate” being deployed by Bernes as a reminder of the queer history embedded here, or is it just a Freudian slip?). However, the too swift separation of the queer form from the content of O’Hara’s poems operates on the logic that O’Hara’s work and the history of labour are separable from O’Hara’s experience of sexuality.
We can see the consequence of this separation of queer from career in Herring and Bernes’s divergent readings of O’Hara’s “Poem”. Bernes reads the line “Lana Turner has collapsed!” as “available to us as mode and mood and model because it is not clearly addressed toward anyone or anything in particular” (53); Herring’s reading offers “Poem” as the “search [for] a localized public though it uses the techniques of mass subjectivity” (422). Further, Herring argues that “given O’Hara’s admiration for William Carlos Williams and for Williams’ belief that the poem should function as a material ‘thing’ in the social realm, it follows that individual men (or, potentially knowledgeable women) meet and attract each other through the circulation of the personal poem, a stimulant to desire akin to a tight pair of pants” (422).[iii] While for Bernes, O’Hara’s use of celebrity is an open invitation, Herring argues that Lana Turner’s position as gay icon attracts “a readership familiar with homosexual semiotic codes … the property of a mass public is now reclaimed for a particularized, more restricted audience” (422), and this audience is explicitly sexualised. Bernes’s claim to a mode, mood, and model of universalism is a move that effaces the erotic and the corporeal, both of which are necessary parts of Herring’s argument and of O’Hara’s life.
A similar move is made in relation to José Esteban Muñoz’s reading of O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You” as “signif[ying] a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality” (6). Bernes terms this reading from Muñoz “exemplary” but swiftly closes down the queer potential by stating that Muñoz’s “dereifying maneuver … is itself rather easily reified” (44). Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is exactly about the way that utopian queerness is so often silenced: “shutting down utopia is an easy move … social theory that invokes the concept of utopia has always been vulnerable to charges of naiveté, impracticality, or lack of rigor” (Muñoz 2009: 10).[iv] The thing is – Bernes is not anti-utopian. He is “not afraid to make claims for the effectivity of the aesthetic sphere” (6) and the book ends with the potential of a utopian horizon outside of work. Further, Muñoz’s reading is hardly against the history of labour: his O’Hara is a “queer cultural worke[r]” who can “detect an opening and indeterminacy in what for many people is a locked-down dead commodity” (9). I am not sure why Bernes is so quick to hand the coke bottle back to straight white masculinity, i.e. to Don Draper.[v] A queer reading is not antagonistic to a reading of the marketplace.
While Bernes is attendant to the specificities of O’Hara’s life insofar as they pertain to his work, spending a fair amount of time on O’Hara’s position as a curator at MoMA, the queer impetus that gives the poems their commercially recuperable form is quickly put to the side. This situates Bernes’s reading of O’Hara on a spectrum of criticism that separates identity politics and class criticism (whose bluntest proponent is Walter Benn Michaels and his frequently reiterated claims that identity politics are a distraction from the real work of class analysis[vi]). In the current moment, this feels like an impossible position to hold – although hasn’t it always felt impossible given the white supremacy that is the foundation and fuel for American capitalism? Bernes’s writing is not blunt; quite to the contrary, he is a generous and nuanced reader. However, this winnowing out of concerns that are outside of a very delimited idea of labour recurs throughout The Work of Art. I will return later to the epilogue of the book, titled “Overflow,” which uses the poetry of Fred Moten and Wendy Trevino to look at the relationship between race and labour. It suffices to say, for now, that the idea that a critique of wage labour could address sexuality or race only as an overflow is one that maintains the white, straight subject as the default and proper centre of labour history and separates vectors of social oppression from a class-based analysis.
Bernes is certainly aware of the problem of treating the straight white male worker as the only subject of history, and deals with this problematic universal in his second chapter. Rather than deny the central position of the white male worker to his narrative, Bernes argues instead that “such claims [to universality] derive from real features of white-collar work, since these workers were, in fact, often both bosses and employees, as well as mediators between executives and simple subordinates. This does not make their experience universal, but it does give such workers a uniquely privileged viewpoint, however full of contradictions” (66). It is through this idea of viewpoint that Bernes approaches John Ashbery’s writing. We begin with a setup: how on earth, asks Bernes, could we be expected to read Ashbery’s early work with the tools provided by poetry criticism when Ashbery’s use of proliferating points of view is more akin to that of a modernist novel? Citing a dozen lines from The Tennis Court Oath (Ashbery 1962), Bernes identifies five different viewpoints (as well as the multiple standpoints offered to the reader in the various pathways that can be taken through the poem’s exploded layout). In response to this proliferation of narrative standpoints and readerly viewpoints, Bernes suggests that free indirect discourse may be the best critical tool for navigation.
Turning to Marx’s work on commodities, Bernes reminds us that exchange occurs indirectly – we sell our time in order to make money, which we then use to buy the products of other peoples’ time. These transactions are also characterised by their appropriation by others, such that our work is not to create products for ourselves but to create products for an employer to sell. Bringing the analysis of poetic form and labour together we now see that “labor is both indirect (undertaken on behalf of others) and free (capable of being stripped from its producers and appropriated by someone else). We might say, therefore, that labor in capitalism is a form of free indirect activity, in which others act through us or we act on behalf of others” (78, italics in original). While free indirect activity is a consistent facet of capital, its formal centrality to Ashbery’s work is a sign of the newly slippery reversibility between layers of hierarchy within the corporation such that “management becomes more difficult to locate in a particular person, and the source of particular commands becomes more difficult to trace” (78). This confluence of Ashbery’s formal technique with economic theory is great: innovative and unexpected.
Bernes situates his reading of the universal voice of the white-collar worker in opposition to work such as Andrew Hoberek’s Twilight of the Middle Class: “whereas Hoberek wants to demystify white-collar pretensions to universality,” writes Bernes, “I argue that such claims derive from real features of white-collar work” (66). Again, it is unclear to me why these lines of argument have to be in opposition to each other. Both Hoberek’s and Bernes’s accounts of the formation of the white-collar worker are persuasive and accurate. Hoberek argues that the universal white white-collar subject was only made possible in its formation against a raced background of non-white blue-collar workers. Bernes’s reading of Ashbery serves to provide another dimension to the way that white privilege and capital work to prop each other up. A historical situation that presses white white-collar workers into a fractured and contradictory managerial position could certainly create a form of uniquely classed viewpoint; this managerialisation of the white-collar worker is also, as Hoberek writes, a “shift of focus from the manipulation of things to the manipulation of people[. T]he resulting, self-alienating collapse between person and thing is long established for African Americans … The white-collar class is formed in a crucible of the perceived [attack] both racially and economically” (2008: 68). Even if we set aside Hoberek’s desire to efface the universality of the white-collar worker, and accept that there was in fact a structurally new subject position open to the white managerial class, the formation of this white-collar position is created not just against blue-collar work but also against black bodies. That an argument about class feels the need to eject the specificity of certain bodies to make its argument speaks to the white elephant that isn’t in the room but is the room. As Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) writes, capital is “a structure of domination predicated on dispossession … the sum effect of the diversity of interlocking oppressive social relations that constitute it” (2014: 15).
*
The next two chapters of The Work of Art burrow further into the mutual imbrication of work and leisure as we head further through the century. Chapter three details the brief but influential obsession with cybernetics in the 1950s and 60s, a distinctly masculine-gendered managerial approach that took on the same gender inflection in culture such that “if you were a white man and interested in experimentation in prose fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, then you were probably writing about machines, entropy, and information [i.e. cybernetics]” (85). In its promise of “social self-regulation based on horizontal, and participatory relations rather than explicit hierarchies” (29) cybernetics appealed as much to artists as it did to office managers who were looking to “trim administrative bloat” (29) and ease worker dissatisfaction. Chapter four continues this discussion of the dual exigencies of promoting worker morale and increasing profits by turning to the feminisation of labour where “not only [did] large numbers of women enter the workforce but labor methods and job positions [were] themselves feminized” (122). By importing ideas associated with leisure and home life into the workplace, the office was meant to be made more tolerable (29), while the further blurring of the line between life and work led to the now-familiar situation where “the entirety of life [is subsumed] by the protocols and routines of work” (30).
Bernes gives an impressively detailed history of the battle over cybernetics’ utopian possibilities. In line with the era’s general shift from control from above to self-management, cybernetics evolved from a Fordist/ Keynesian phase (a rigid and controlled structure) to the 1970s and beyond where “productive dynamism and creative disorder are valued over stability” (100). The post-1970s model led to management that was decentralised – workers do not get commands but are given “structures, protocols, and objectives” (104). This new freedom, is of course, not uncomplicated: “cybernetics presents an image of social self-regulation based on reciprocal, horizontal, and participatory relations rather than explicit hierarchies” (29). The open potential of cybernetics made it an interesting prospect across the political spectrum, both to employers hoping to cut costs by instituting self-governing practices of work and to artists who felt that cybernetics’ claims to totality offered the possibility of a utopian “global language” (101). This chapter is cautious in its assessment of the disruptive powers of the works it attends to. The ambivalence over what kind of freedom cybernetics would actually bring is at the centre of Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems (1968), which Bernes presents as a playing out of the conflicts over cybernetic potential: her poems are either “a model of the adaptivity, mutability, and openness to contingency that employers will demand from their workers” (106) or “a critique in advance of these new participatory models, revealing the violence and disorientation inherent in them” (106).[vii]
The false freedom of permutational choice was only one way that the tedium of the workplace was addressed: chapter four turns to the feminisation of labour as another corporate tactic to make work feel less tedious and automated. Through a reading of Bernadette Mayers’ Memory (a 1976 piece that mixes photography, performance, and text) Bernes criticises the way that the merging of private and public serves only to double the amount of labour the female worker has to do. Again, Bernes excels in his close attention to the texts – there’s a great reading of a scene in Memory where the staccato rhythm of a typewriter interacts with the rhythm of dishwashing to display the collapse of the once separate spheres of domestic life and office labour.
Bernes argues that this collapse is not only spatial – as the metaphor of spheres would suggest – but also creates “forms of interconnection that are temporal” (125): women must work the “double day … of paid and unpaid labor” (126). Time is also encountered through the growing role of technology in the 1970s. Here, Bernes takes another detour through Marx, describing a “temporality where the past remains present in an objective form, in the form of material accumulation that makes demands on, limits, and fates the course of the present. This is the sense in which Marx’s project is historical materialism – an account of history and historical change as materialized force” (140). This can be seen in Mayer’s Memory where “the superabundant complexity of her documented past comes to require continuous transfusions of present attention and creates … an explicit sense of tyrannical control in her presentation of the relationship between past and present” (142). The weight of this past is what Marx calls the “general intellect,” that is the huge amounts of knowledge stored in machinery that are external to man and therefore make the past an alienated and over-determined behemouth “speed[ing] onward, relentlessly, but not toward anything” (148). Beyond the faster pace of the growth of technology in the contemporary era, it strikes me that this description of Memory where “attempting to document the past in all its fullness, continually creates new, undocumented pasts” (144) could just as well apply to, for example, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) as to the information age.
Perhaps a more surprising link not made (given the title of Bernes’s book) is to Walter Benjamin’s much theorised Angel of History, that celestial “historical materialist” who, like Mayer, “would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed” (Benjamin 2007 [1955]: 257) but cannot as the rubble piles up in front of him.[viii]
The motivation of both chapter three and four are a little less clear than the first two chapters. The readings of Weiner (chapter three) and Mayer (chapter four) interestingly flesh out histories of cybernetics and the accelerated work day. However, the conclusion that these chapters reach – that artworks have an ambivalence such that “what is potentially revolutionary in one moment can become definitively system reinforcing in another” (117) and that the past materialisation of capital makes “the present a mere adjunct to the past” (148) – are not specifically new to the deindustrialised age. Possibly this is an intentional move in order to show that there is continuity (with intensification) across the century as well as a break in the 1960s, but if so the argument is not brought out quite clearly enough for this reader to find it.
*
The final chapter of The Work of Art hops forward to the twenty-first century in order to look at the effect on art of this over-determination by the general intellect, i.e. “what happens when art confronts a workplace whose very technologies, attitudes, and structures are a materialization of its own defeated challenges?” (156)[ix] We turn first to Flarf poetry, an experimental form that emerged in 2001 that mines the internet’s propensity for ridiculous juxtapositions; as Flarf-er Mike Magee puts it: “you search Google for 2 disparate terms, like ‘anarchy + tuna melt’” and stitch the quotes captured by Google into a poem (qtd. on 157). Flarf is explicitly tied to the workplace, both by “fucking around on the man’s dime” (164) as another Flarf practitioner Drew Gardner claims, and also by re-purposing the language of technology. The anhedonic other of Flarf is conceptual poetry, which creates homologies with clerical work by framing itself, in the words of Kenneth Goldsmith, as “information management” (qtd. on 166). Bernes cites Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts – a reproduction of the briefs she wrote as a public criminal Appellate defence lawyer – as “one of the most remarkable confirmations of the thesis that work activity and nonwork activity have become nearly identical at present” (167).[x] Faced with the qualitative demands of white collar workers, capitalism takes these demands and converts them into a banalised version (156): demands for community are replaced by team work; for variety by adding more responsibilities to job descriptions; to complaints of the domination of work over life, employers responded with contingent and flexible labour; and the demand for creativity was taken in and spat back as the playful workplace that might offer you a growing wall and granola while exploiting you for longer hours.
Articulating an exitlessness that is redolent of Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of the culture industry, Bernes asks: “what possibilities for the aesthetic critique of work remain now that workplaces have been designed to anticipate and neutralize such critiques?” (156). Seeing conceptual poetry’s “emptying out of the libidinal content of the work landscape” (168) as a return to the very workplace tedium that began the narrative of his book, Bernes suggests the work of British poet Sean Bonney as a possible escape from this bind. Writing from a place of long-term unemployment, Bonney locates his critique of labour from outside the productive sphere of the gainfully employed. Of course, unemployment is bound up with precarity and “given the tendency of release from work to become a lack of work, or unwork, such joys are inextricable from agonies various and sundry” (172). (In particular, the Jobseeker’s Act of 1996 shifted the terminology in the UK from “unemployment benefits” to “Jobseeker’s Allowance” such that not working is always also a form of work.) Despite the difficulty of positioning oneself outside the labour market, it allows Bernes to find a space of possibility: “perhaps the task of the aesthetic challenge of our time is not to demand freedom in work but freedom from work” (171). No one is going to disagree with that sentiment, although whether escape from work is the most useful utopian horizon of course depends on one’s subject position. This point is briefly addressed with the inclusion of the Mexican American poet Wendy Trevino, who swats away the idea that the desire to be freed from work is anything to do with poetic freedom: “I’ve been told grant writing / Will ruin my writing. In the long list / Of reasons I wish I could quit my job / What it’s doing to my poems is absent” (196). I would have liked to see more of a critique of the demographically-limited possibility of un-work than this brief moment spent with Trevino.
This brings us to the previously mentioned Epilogue, containing the “overflow” of the book. It opens with a history of the vagabond as a way of living outside of labour, where Bernes writes that “just as literary history provides numerous examples of a poetics of labor so too there is an abundance of formal and thematic resources from which we might elaborate a poetics of wagelessness” (184), citing examples that range from broadside ballads to Wordsworth, John Dos Passos to Claude McKay. Bernes then links the “fugitivity” of the vagabond to the theorisation of fugitivity in Fred Moten’s work (189). One model of this fugitivity, Bernes suggests, is Sean Bonney’s turn away from work. The application of Moten’s terminology to the white poet Bonney is justified, for Bernes, by Moten’s statement that the use of fugitivity can “expan[d], ultimately, in the direction of anyone who wants to claim it” (qtd. on 193). This leads Bernes to write that “the African American radical tradition, both poetic and political, provides examples that will be increasingly crucial for all antagonists to capital and the state” (193). On the one hand, this desire for an all-inclusive collaboration of anti-capitalist agitators is exactly what will be necessary when we crush the state. On the other hand, the attention to emancipatory African American aesthetics arrives only when they become relevant to the increasingly precarious position of white male workers. This clarifies what has been a cumulative experience over the course of reading The Work of Art, namely that even a book that is explicitly thinking about production still manages to theorise art outside of the full conditions of its production by circumscribing “work” to the limited sphere of class.
*
Instead of moving from particular to universal, I will conclude with a little specificity by spending some time with Wendy Trevino.[xi] The work that is addressed in Bernes’s Epilogue is her 2015 piece, “Sonnets of Brass Knuckles Doodles.” This sonnet is centered on Trevino’s job at a nonprofit organization and the fraught fact that she is there working for a white female poet whom she met through poetry circles. Bernes focuses on the way that Trevino documents “the vanishing of the boundary between work and life under the force of new, social media that instrumentalize the affective languages of friendship … [and] the incorporation of artistic technologies and relationships into the work place” (195). Bernes then, importantly I think, shows how Trevino resists this encroachment of work upon her life:
According to Human Resources, I’m white.
I have been confused for other women
With dark hair. Maybe I am them sometimes.
In the elevator, taking the stairs
Walking back from lunch, saying ‘it’s not me.’ (Trevino 2015)[xii]
Of this moment, Bernes writes that “work is all-encompassing but its compulsive identifications – its identity with the self – can be resisted. For Trevino, this means refusing the identifications of poetry as well” (195). This is true – Trevino wrestles with the structural difficulty of writing in the enmeshed sites of the workplace and the institutions of poetry. But these lines are also about race and ethnicity. Her refusal of work – “it’s not me” – is a refusal of all the things Bernes lists, but also a refusal of the inadequate racial categories offered by human resources and of the fungibility created between herself and other women based on ethnic markers.
In the penultimate verse of this ten-sonnet cycle, she also writes:
Next time we talk about race & poetry
I’d be interested in talking about
How many poets of color end up
Working for their white friends, who are also
Poets & how that might affect what they
Write & publish & do & how they talk
About it – instead of talking about
How many poets of color are in
This or that anthology. We always
Talk about that. More than half the staff of
The non-profit I work for are people
Of color. For various fundraising
Materials, they tell their stories. They
All sound the same & don’t take up much space.
Certainly, the collapse of work place and art work is evident in the parallel ways that these arenas both demand the inclusion of the voices of women of colour, while simultaneously disregarding them. But there is more. The stanza opens with the conjunction “race & poetry,” and while the workplace is discussed, it is under this interpretational rubric. Having posited this dyad as the centre of the stanza, Trevino directs the reader to the more and less important ways that race and poetry can be addressed. There is a clear “we” and “I” in this stanza. The “we” talks about the number of people of colour included in poetic journals, the alliterative “this and that” pointing to the banality of an abstract inclusivity when it is reduced to a statistic. The “I” points to a different form of sociality. It is plural, linked immediately with the other people of colour that Trevino works. From this plurality, the “I” is not interested in inclusion, when this inclusion means adding a single name to the contents page of a journal while leaving the material condition of the (indistinguishable, negligible) co-workers untouched. We can see here that without an analysis of race (and at other times in “Sonnets of Brass Knuckles Doodles,” gender) the material inequities of class cannot be approached.
Part of the difficulty of writing about certain topics is the whiteness of the archive. I find Sara Ahmed’s work good to think with here, in particular her idea of building a citational house that welcomes those beyond whiteness. To this end, Ahmed has a clear policy in her book Living a Feminist Life: “to not cite any white men. By white men I am referring to an institution … Instead I cite those who have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism” (15). This is a strong policy, which makes sense in the context of Ahmed’s book, which is a (brilliant) toolkit for thinking, feeling, living feminism. Not all books need, should, can, be as trenchant as this in their citational practices. However, as Ahmed writes, “citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings. My citation policy has affected the kind of house I have built” (16).
No matter how compelling the individual readings are in Bernes’s The Work of Art, as a whole it implicitly makes the claim that “gender and race are not material while class is material, an argument articulated so often that it feels like another wall, another blockage that stops us getting through” (Ahmed 147). The experience of reading a history of deindustralisation in the U.S. that sequesters gender to one chapter and race to an Epilogue confronts the reader with the inhospitality of a white house that serves only to remind her of the ways that her gender, race, sexuality, or ethnicity are barriers to entry. As Trevino shows us, we need to think about race when we write about white poets. We also need to think about gender when we write about male poets, sexuality when we write about straight poets, disability when we write about able-bodied poets. This, and only this, will destabilise the white male as the universal category where race, gender, sexuality, and disability can be sloughed off as the concerns of others – namely the bodies that bear those categories.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2017, Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2007 [1955]. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” Trans. Harry Zohn. In Illuminations. Schocken Books: New York.
Bernes, Jasper. 2017. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Goldman, Judith. 2001. “Hannah=hannaH: Politics, Ethics, and Clairvoyance in the Work of Hannah Weiner.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 12.2: 121-168.
Hoberek, Andrew. 2005. The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. –. 1994. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
–. 1997. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24.1: 246-65.
McCarthy, Michael A. 2016. “Alternatives: Silent Compulsions: Capitalist Markets and Race.” Studies in Political Economy 97.2: 195-205.
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2016. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Picador.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
O’Hara, Frank. 1995 [1959]. “Personism: A Manifesto.” In The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Roediger, David R. 2017. Class, Race and Marxism. London and New York: Verso.
[i] Jameson uses the terms synonymously at times: for example, “the economic preparation of postmodernism or late capitalism began in the 1950s” (Jameson 1994: xx).
[ii] Of course, quantitative demands such as shorter hours hopefully lead to a qualitative improvement of work conditions, but the distinction Bernes is making here is between the language that these demands are couched in.
[iii] The image of the “tight pair of pants” is a reference to O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto,” where he celebrates poetry’s inextricable relationship with consumerism: “as for measure and other technical apparatus … if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you” (O’Hara 1995 [1959]: 498-99).
[iv] Sara Ahmed provides an invaluable defense of the intellectual rigour of hope: “I am relatively comfortable in critical theory, but I do not deposit my hope there, nor do I think this is a particularly difficult place to be: if anything, I think it is easier to do more abstract and general theoretical work … The empirical work, the world that exists, is for me where the difficulties and thus the challenges reside. Critical theory is like any language; you can learn it, and when you learn it, you begin to move around in it. Of course, it can be difficult, when you do not have the orientation tools to navigate your way around a new landscape. But explaining phenomena like racism and sexism—how they are reproduced, how they keep being reproduced – is not something we can do simply by learning a new language. It is not a difficulty that can be resolved by familiarity or repetition; in fact, familiarity and repetition are the source of difficulty; they are what need to be explained” (Ahmed 2017: 9).
[v] In fact, not even Don Draper can keep a straight face: he only becomes Don Draper by closeting his birth name Richard “Dick” Whitman.
[vi] In particular, see The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Benn Michaels 2016). For refutations of this argument see “Alternatives: Silent Compulsions: Capitalist Markets and Race” (McCarthy 2016) and Class, Race and Marxism (Roediger 2017).
[vii] While Bernes points out that cybernetics is a hyper-masculine domain, he does not make anything of the fact that Hannah Weiner is his key exemplar. For a reading of Weiner’s code in relation to gender, see Goldman, 2001. For Goldman, Weiner’s Code Poems reveal “gender [as] a code for code and additionally a code for the intrinsic failure of code to carry a stable meaning: gender as an error message” (2001: 128).
[viii] Thanks to Katy Hardy for pointing out this parallel with Benjamin, and more broadly thanks to Jessica Hurley, Isabel Gabel, and Thea Riofrancos for their comments.
[ix] A version of this chapter appeared as “Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual Poetry among the Trolls” in Critical Inquiry in 2016. A version of chapter two appeared as “John Ashbery’s Free Indirect Labor” in MLQ, 2013.
[x] It feels strange to discuss Place and Goldsmith without referring to the controversies surrounding the anti-black sentiments of their more recent work (Place’s tweeting of Gone with the Wind in its entirety; Goldsmith’s reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy) or Marjorie Perloff’s response to Place’s Statement of Facts at the 2010 Rethinking Poetics conference, where she “caused the audience to collectively gasp when she claimed that what Statement of Facts reveals to us is that the victims of rape are ‘at least as bad as or worse than the rapists’” (Zultanski 2012).
[xi] Thanks to Arne de Boever for encouraging me to write this section. (Of course, all responsibility for its content rests on my head alone.)
[xii] The title is misspelled in The Work of Art as “Sonnets of Brass Knuckle Doodles.”
This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. It is part of a dossier on Stuart Hall.
A Lost Moment
There is an intriguing quote in Kuan-Hsing Chen’s 1996 interview with Stuart Hall, in which Stuart, in response to Chen’s question/comment “But you never tried to exercise your intellectual power back home”, responds:
There have been moments when I have intervened in my home parts. At a certain point, before 1968, I was engaged with dialogue with the people I knew in that generation, principally to try to resolve the difference between a black Marxist grouping and a black nationalist tendency. I said, you ought to be talking to one another. The black Marxists were looking for the Jamaican proletariat, but there were no heavy industries in Jamaica; and they were not listening to the cultural revolutionary thrust of the black nationalists and Rastafarians, who were developing a more persuasive cultural, or subjective language. But essentially, I never tried to play a major political role there. (Morley and Chen 1996:501-2; see also MacCabe 2008:17)
He explains this through his recognition that he had found both a personal space – marriage to Catherine – and a political space, as a collaborator in the British New Left and that Jamaica herself, in the transition to independence, had become a somewhat different society, breaking with the past, making it somewhat easier for him to leave and that these were coincident with the domestic and political changes in his own life.
This conscious sense of not seeking to intervene in a changed political space with which he no longer felt intimately familiar was captured when both Tony Bogues (Bogues 2015: 177-193) and I met with Stuart separately in 2003 to encourage him to attend the Centre for Caribbean Thought’s conference that we were planning in his honor the following year. His response to both of us was that, yes, he was born in Jamaica, but it would be difficult to describe himself as a ‘Caribbean intellectual’ and therefore, was it appropriate to include him in a series of conferences honoring key contributors to Caribbean thought? In the end we managed to convince him to attend and that being from the Caribbean and with much of his critical formation occurring here, he was very much a Caribbean intellectual. The 2004 conference turned out to be a remarkable event (see Meeks 2007) in which Hall ‘came home’ and found, as it were, not only his Jamaican and Caribbean audience, but that there was already some younger scholars who were drawn to his work. On balance though, beyond the cognoscenti, Hall’s work was in the period after 1968 to which he referred – the period of the popular upsurge of radical politics in the region – right up until the moment of our conference, still largely unknown. I knew of Stuart as a brilliant Jamaican because he had been my Dad’s classmate at Jamaica College and as one of the School’s Rhodes Scholars, I recognized his name inscribed along with that of Norman Manley and others on the long blackboards outside the neo-gothic Simms building at school. But it was not until the mid-Eighties that I had heard anything about his work and I read my first Hall article long after finishing my PhD thesis in 1988.
Thus, aside from the tantalizing intervention quoted above, his name and more so his thinking, were largely unknown to the generation of Sixty-Eight, those who were tossed into politics after the infamous exclusion of Walter Rodney on his return home to Kingston from the 1968 Montreal Congress of Black Writers (see Austin 2013:22). The intense, one-day Black Power riots which followed the police tear-gassing of the student protest in support of Rodney, signaled the beginning of a decade and a half process of radicalization which led to the 1970 ‘Black Power Revolution’ in Trinidad and Tobago, the election of the Michael Manley government in Jamaica in 1972 and the Grenada Revolution of 1979-1983. (See Ryan and Stewart 1995; Quinn 2014)
The Generation of Sixty-Eight
Another famous Anglo-Caribbean expatriate thinker of the Left – C.L.R. James – was certainly better known and influenced a generation of Caribbean scholars, (Meeks and Girvan 2010:4) but in terms of a substantial impact on the theoretical orientation, form, strategy and tactics of the burgeoning movement, Jamesian ideas were, at best, marginal.[1] (Mars 1998:31-61) There was the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM) in Antigua, under the leadership of the Jamesian Tim Hector and the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in Guyana, where Rodney himself, before his assassination (in 1980), Rupert Roopnarine, Eusi Kwayana and others, sought to build a more independent left. Other Jamesian tendencies included the Revolutionary Marxist Collective (RMC) in Jamaica, the New Beginning Movement (NBM) in Trinidad and the Movement for Assemblies of the People (MAP) in Grenada. Only MAP would emerge to play a central role in the evolving political landscape, but only after its merger with JEWEL (Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education and Liberation) to form the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement (NJM), later to become the vanguard party of the Grenadian Revolution.
Thus, by the mid-Seventies, most of the independent, radical trends had either been eclipsed by or converted to one or another variant of what I refer to here as ‘Caribbean Marxism-Leninism’. I use this notion in order both to avoid a simplistic reductionism of compressing all Marxist trends and simultaneously to tease out and identify the specific characteristics of the parties and movements which came to dominate the Caribbean Left. These parties included the Cheddi Jagan-led People’s Progressive Party (PPP) of Guyana, which had held office and been excluded from power twice by the British, but remained bedeviled by the ethnic question and its partisan rootedness in the East Indian bloc; (see Palmer, 2010) the Movement for National Liberation (MONALI) in Barbados; the Youlou Liberation Movement (YULIMO) in St Vincent; the Workers Revolutionary Movement (WRM) in St Lucia and the Dominica Liberation Movement (DLM). However, the two most significant, aside from the PPP, were the Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ) and the NJM.
The WPJ, despite dominating what constituted the Jamaican Left outside of Manley’s governing People’s National Party (PNP), failed to gain any significant electoral support in the elections-driven Jamaican political system. It nonetheless accumulated significant influence through its almost hegemonic control over a generation of activist students and scholars at the University of the West Indies Mona campus, its informal linkages to the left in the PNP regime and most importantly and in the end most damagingly, its close connections and influence within the NJM. The NJM for its part, not only became part of the opposition alliance following the 1976 elections, but the leader of the Party, Maurice Bishop became the constitutional Leader of the Opposition. Three years later, with the successful overthrow of the Eric Gairy regime, Bishop would become Prime Minister of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) of Grenada for the next four and a half years. The Grenadian Revolution ended tragically with open divisions surrounding questions of leadership in the Party leading to the October 1983 arrest of Bishop, his release by an incensed crowd of supporters, his attempt to wrest control of the military fort, a clash with the military which remained loyal to the Party and his execution along with some of his closest supporters, at the hands of his own soldiers. (See Meeks 1993; Lewis 1987; Marable 1987; Puri 2011 and Scott 2014)
This tragic and unprecedented end to the Grenadian Revolution which also signaled the demise of an organized and vibrant Caribbean left, has led to heated, often recriminatory interventions seeking to explain and understand how it could have happened. Most analyses, including, I admit, my own, focus more on personalities, leadership, structures and the supporting or denying of purported conspiracies. Thus, Bobby Clarke, not untypically, blames Bernard Coard, Bishop’s Deputy Prime Minister, whom he argues, without further elaboration of this emotive notion and its applicability in this context, had been influenced by the ‘Stalinist’ Trevor Munroe (Meeks 2014:113). In one of the more thoughtful attempts to come to terms with the tragic sequence of events, G.K. Lewis, however, along with recognizing the dangers inherent in military overthrows and ‘the mixture of revolution and armed force’ (Lewis 1987:162) also raises warnings about the danger of mechanically applying Leninist approaches to party organization in entirely different historical contexts to that of Russia in 1917. (167)
It is in the spirit of Lewis’s attempt to understand the theoretical weaknesses and lacunae in the NJM and by implication in Caribbean Marxism-Leninism[2] that I want to proceed with the following hypothetical exercise, by counterpoising critical features of Caribbean Marxism-Leninism with Stuart Hall’s career-long and profoundly humanist engagement with Marxism through the avenue of the conjuncture. I want to suggest that it was precisely a perspective like Hall’s that might have provided an effective counterpoint to the damaging, authoritarian features of Caribbean Marxism-Leninism. An approach like his was missing in Jamaica and this absence contributed to the de facto emergence of particularly wooden and dogmatic theories that came to dominate the Jamaican and other critical components of the Caribbean Left and contributed in no small measure to the tragedy of the Grenada Revolution.
Hall’s Core
I begin by suggesting that unlike positions taken by Rojek and certainly Mills in his critique of Hall’s approach to race (see Rojek 2003; Meeks 2007:120-148) and despite recognizing an evolution, particularly a shift from an earlier more Gramscian inflection to a later, more discursive approach, there is an evident and consistent[3] core to Hall’s oeuvre that includes the following elements:
Unlike some post-Marxian perspectives, Hall throughout his mature writing continues to place critical importance on capital and of ‘material conditions’ generally, in the shaping of the contemporary world. Thus in his 1988 essay “The Toad in the Garden; Thatcherism Among the Theorists”, while recognizing that there is no “univocal” way in which class interests are expressed, he nonetheless underlines that “…class interest, class position, and material factors are useful, even necessary, starting points in the analysis of any ideological formation.” (Hall 1998: 45) And in his 2007 interview with Colin MacCabe, he reminds him of the importance of the tendencies in capital to concentrate wealth and shape intellectual expression: “…global capitalism is an incredibly dynamic system. And it’s capable of destroying one whole set of industries in order to create another set. Incredible. This is capitalism in its most global, dynamic form, but it is not all that secure. It’s standing on the top of huge debt and financial problems. And I can’t believe those problems won’t come eventually to find their political, critical, countercultural, intellectual expression. We’re just in the bad half of the Kondratiev cycle!” (MacCabe 2008:42)
Nonetheless, he discounts the mechanical notion of any direct cause and effect relationship between material conditions and so-called superstructural spheres. Social and cultural life, Hall has consistently argued, is not only mediated and articulated away from the ‘forces of production’, but particularly in the contemporary era of intensified media engagement, the internet and the image, this autonomy is even more enhanced. “This approach replaces the notion of fixed ideological meanings and class-ascribed ideologies with the concepts of ideological terrains of struggle and the task of ideological transformation. It is the general movement in this direction, away from an abstract general theory of ideology, and towards the more concrete analysis of how, in particular historical situations, ideas ‘organize human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle etc.” (Hall 1996: 41)
Specifically, in relation to classes and organized systems of domination, he opposes the mechanical approach inherent in certain Marxisms, which assume an automatic connection, for instance, between working classes and socialist ideas, or ruling classes and ruling ideas. Hegemony, Hall insists, emerge through complex processes of articulation and interpellation: “Ideas only become effective if they do, in the end, connect with a particular constellation of social forces. In that sense, ideological struggle is part of the general social struggle for mastery and leadership – in short for hegemony. But ‘hegemony’ in Gramsci’s sense requires, not the simple escalation of a whole class to power, with its fully formed ‘philosophy’, but the process by which a historical bloc is constructed and the ascendancy of that bloc is secured. So the way we conceptualize the relationship between ‘ruling ideas’ and ‘ruling classes’ is best thought in terms of the processes of ‘hegemonic domination’. (43-4)
He is fully appreciative of and utilizes effectively Gramsci’s notion of organic philosophy as the contradictory yet critically important way of thinking utilized by ‘ordinary’ people. This philosophy or common sense, he asserts, has within it elements of conservatism and of progress towards something new, and by implication must be engaged with from an approach of critical respect. “But what exactly is common sense? It is a form of ‘everyday thinking’ which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world. It is a form of popular, easily-available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas…It works intuitively, without forethought or reflection. It is pragmatic and empirical…” (Hall and O’Shea 2013:8) This approach, I suggest, is at the heart of Hall’s outlook, because it not only suggests his deep respect for ordinary people and their perspectives, but underwrites his open, non-hierarchical approach to politics.
Closely wedded to this and elaborated in more detail in his iconic essay ‘What is this Black in Black Popular culture’ is a consistent anti-essentialist grain. The essay is itself a paean against the elevating of racial or cultural blackness as a bulwark against racism. Hall first argues that we need to deconstruct racism itself and appreciate that it is not static in order to also appreciate that anti-racist thinking cannot afford to become a victim of the same essentialist thinking that makes racism abhorrent: “The moment the signifier ‘black’ is torn from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct”. (Morley and Chen 1996: 472)
Hall’s perspective is always elaborated through an approach that can be called ‘thinking through the conjuncture’. Again, he usefully adopts Gramsci’s notion of the social conjuncture as the array of articulated social forces, ideas and culturally tendencies in a given moment, as a particularly effective and robust lens with which to view and understand contemporary reality. It allowed him, captured most famously with Martin Jacques in his characterization of ‘New Times’ to appreciate the changing social relations in Britain in the Eighties and to theorize and predict the rise of Thatcherism and Neo-Liberalism: “If ‘post-Fordism’ exists then it is as much a description of cultural as of economic change. Indeed, that distinction is now quite useless. Culture has ceased (if ever it was-which I doubt) to be a decorative addendum to the ‘hard world’ of production and things, the icing on the cake of the material world. The word is now as ‘material’ as the world. Through design, technology and styling, ‘aesthetics’ has already penetrated the world of modern production. Through marketing, layout and style, the ‘image’ provides the mode of representation and fictional narrativization of the body on which so much of modern consumption depends. Modern culture is relentlessly material in its practices and modes of production. (233)
I end with Hall’s far less referenced perspectives on international politics, which are critically important for our purposes. These were forged at the time of the crushing by the Soviet Army of the Hungarian Revolution (see Blackburn 2014: 77; Derbyshire, 2012) and the Khrushchev revelations concerning the brutal, authoritarian nature of Stalin’s rule. These I suggest, inoculated him against any romantic view of the Soviet Union as the fountainhead of ‘really existing socialism’ and any illusion that the USSR was the automatic bulwark of defense against imperialism for the newly independent countries. It also forced him, along with many of his generation who formed the British New Left, on to the back foot in order to rethink Marxism from the ground up, without a set of already successful prescriptions just waiting to be applied and with a willing and able physician standing ready in the wings.
We can best summarize the heart and essence of Hall’s work through the words of one of his critics. Despite his expressed reservations as to whether his academic preoccupations could ever be converted into a genuine praxis, Chris Rojek nonetheless generously proposes that “Hall’s politics favors widening access, exercising compassion, encouraging collaboration and achieving social inclusion”. (Rojek 2003: 193) Many of these features were either absent or incorporated into hierarchies of authority and exclusion in both the theoretical approaches and application of 1970s Caribbean Marxism-Leninism.
Caribbean Marxism-Leninism
To begin with Hall’s international perspectives first, it is fair to say that Caribbean Marxism-Leninism, if nothing else, held a remarkably un-historic view of the Soviet Union, leaping across time from the glory moments of the 1917 October Revolution, via the Red Army’s heroic defense and victories against Nazi Germany to the contemporary (1970s-80s) period. Elided entirely is mention of the brutality of collectivization, the Stalin show trials, Trotsky’s assassination or any reference to Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin after his death. No mention, of course, is made of the Hungarian events or of the much more contemporary Czechoslovakian Spring and Soviet invasion of 1968. Two quotes from Trevor Munroe’s booklet Social Classes and National Liberation, derived from a series of ‘socialism lectures’ given to students in the early Seventies, suggests the tone and tenor of the times. In relation to the significance of the Soviet Union:
The Russian Revolution, therefore, did these three things: mash down the colonial system, mash down feudal exploitation and mash down capitalist exploitation in one-sixth of the world in October of 1917; and on those foundations began to build a new life, a new society in which no class lived on the backs of the labor of any other class…The great October Socialist Revolution broke forever and ever the monopoly of the capitalist class on power and when I say power, I mean every kind of power. (Munroe 1983: 29-30)
And on the relationship between ‘socialism’ (i.e. the Soviet Union and its allied countries) and the National Liberation Movement:
The very existence of socialism is the biggest help to the National Liberation Movement, even when the leaders of particular countries under imperialism completely reject and are totally against socialism, it is still the biggest help to the whole area of National Liberation…Therefore, we say that the alliance between socialism and National Liberation is a natural thing because socialism is the biggest force against imperialism and imperialism is the block to National Liberation. (33)
Looking back now on this simplistic, severely edited version of history to which many young, otherwise thoughtful students and young people in the Caribbean were so easily won, the search for the reasons as to why is not easily answered, but among them I suggest:
The decisive defeat of the Left in Jamaica in the Fifties with the expulsion of the four leaders of that tendency (the Four H’s) from the PNP. This effectively silenced debates around Marxism and its role in national liberation for two decades (see Bertram 2016:231-240) and particularly at a moment in the fifties when Hall and many others were forging their radical perspective, but in the full glare of Hungary and of Khrushchev’s famous speech.
The banning of Left-Wing literature in Jamaica in the Sixties, which made virtually all radical literature contraband, along with the emerging Black Power literature (and tragi-comically, Anna Sewell’s novel ‘Black Beauty’ among them!)
The re-emergence of legal Marxist literature in the Seventies, following the election of Manley to power in 1972, but with titles and ideas drawn almost exclusively from the Soviet presses, Novosti and Progress. Thus, works by Brutents, Ulyanovsky and others on national liberation and the role of the Socialist countries, which were written precisely to eliminate swathes of contemporary history, were the only easily available literature and became the dominant sources of information for this eager and thirsty generation.
The example of neighboring Cuba in which the Soviet Union had given generous support was interpreted as an exemplary instance of ‘proletarian internationalism’ and in which it was assumed that the Soviet Union would replicate this assistance in each and every instance in which there was a revolution against imperialism.
The stance of Maoist China particularly in its attitude to liberation movements in this period is also relevant. As the potential alternative pole of “really existing socialism”, China might have provided an option for radically oriented youth to coalesce around. However, on almost all the touchstone questions, whether support for North Vietnam, choice of allies in the liberation movements against Portuguese colonialism, or solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, the Chinese supported positions and movements which seemed to place them on the wrong side of history. The default position was support for the Soviets, who were solidly behind Vietnam, the Cubans, the MPLA, FRELIMO, the PAIGC and others.
The overall effect of this was the emergence of an intellectual mindset which was less concerned with the fine-grained understanding of the local situation, the broad terrains of ideological struggle and how these interacted with the international, (indeed, a Hallian, conjunctural approach,) as it was convinced that the arrow of history had already been launched and was on its straight and accurate flight. From such a vantage point, events were already overdetermined by the revealing truths of Marxism-Leninism and the social and political leaps and advances of really existing socialism. All that was required was to make the local revolution, if a revolutionary situation emerged and join the stream of the victorious worldwide socialist and national liberation movements.
In contrast to Hall’s conception of organic philosophy and the need to respectfully engage in a conversation, with the inevitable elements of give and take, Caribbean Marxism-Leninism overtly adopted the notion that the majority of the working class was backward, both culturally and ideologically and thus needed to be taught and guided by the advanced elements. So, in the WPJ booklet The Working Class Party: Principles and Standards the conclusion is drawn that:
So the first thing we need to understand about the position of the working class in capitalist society and the effects of capitalism on the working class and on the working people is that the system itself makes the vast sections of the working class backward at the same time as it makes a small section advanced. (Munroe 1983: 15)
This led inevitably to the corollary that the party, the vanguard, had to be the instrument to bring consciousness to the majority of backward workers, best exemplified in Maurice Bishop’s oft-quoted 1982 “Line of March for the Party” speech to NJM cadres:
And the fifth point, the building of the Party, because again it is the Party that has to be at the head of the process, acting as representatives of the working people and in particular, the working class. That is the only way it can be because the working class does not have the ideological development or experience to build socialism on its own. The Party has to be there to ensure that the necessary steps and measures are taken. And it is our primary responsibility to prepare and train the working class for what their historic mission will be later on down the road. That is why the Party has to be built and built rapidly, through the bringing in the first sons and daughters of the working class. (Seabury and McDougall 1984: 73)
Reading this speech again after many years, its deeply patronizing essence is even more evident. Indeed, Bishop’s invocation here goes beyond the typical vanguardist argument, in the suggestion that the party in this instance is not just the vehicle of the advanced workers, but a substitute for them, until such time as they can be brought into the organization and educated up to the required advanced standing. If there is any central feature then of Caribbean Marxism-Leninism that might be teased out for closer scrutiny, it is this hierarchical structuring of levels of consciousness with its implications of the necessity for tutelage and guidance, not only from the advanced workers – the more ‘Leninist’ formulation – but in the absence altogether of ‘advanced workers’ from the party, that is the undisguised tutelage of the intellectual stratum. Surely, this leads as night follows day, to the Grenada crisis of 1983. The Party derogated the right to modify its leadership structure at will, including the effective demoting of the leader and Prime Minister to joint leader, without any reference to the population and to what it might think. This led to a series of events which have been adequately discussed elsewhere and need not be repeated, marching in lockstep fashion, to Bishop’s death, the US-led invasion and the end of radical Caribbean politics for a generation.
What If?
As this short essay began, somewhere during the Nineteen Sixties, Stuart Hall took a decision to lay his bed permanently in the United Kingdom, where he helped to build the formidable discipline of cultural studies at Birmingham, thereby influencing a generation of scholars in the UK and contributing immeasurably to critical global political and cultural discourse in Britain, Europe, the USA and beyond. The enigmatic question of course, which can never be answered, is what would have been the outcome had he brought his formidable intellect and his remarkably fluid and democratic theoretical approaches to bear on his own Jamaica of the 1960s, the very country in which a popular upheaval with region-wide consequences was ignited in 1968. What would the radical movement of the Seventies have looked like with a Stuart Hall contending with some of the more dogmatic, hierarchical and wooden perspectives that came to dominate in the radical Jamaican space? Perhaps it might have made little difference, (as indeed was the case with CLR James and his supporters across the Anglophone Caribbean) as the international environment may well have weighed decisively in favor of the rise of pro-Soviet, Marxist-Leninist tendencies that did, in fact briefly gain momentum and enjoyed their moment in the sun. But perhaps with his prestige and fluency and his possessing the undoubted, if ironic cachet of being a Rhodes Scholar, Stuart Hall, returning from the United Kingdom, might have been taken seriously and might have influenced the emergence of a more flexible, open, radical and popular movement in Jamaica. What would this have meant for the course of events in that country and more so, for the entire Caribbean, including, most of all Grenada, where the Gairy regime had created a political opening and the groundwork had already been laid for more insurrectionary forms? History evidently didn’t follow this course, but it is worthwhile to muse about the far-reaching consequences if it had.
Brian Meeks is professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. He has published many books and edited collections on Caribbean Revolutions, Caribbean thought and questions of hegemony and power in contemporary Caribbean politics. He taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus for many years.
References
Austin, David. 2010. “Vanguards and Masses: Global lessons from the Grenadian Revolution.” In Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production edited by Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, 173-189. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Austin, David. 2013. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal. Toronto: Between the Lines.
Bertram, Arnold. 2016. N.W. Manley and the Making of Modern Jamaica. Kingston. Arawak Publications.
Bishop, Maurice. 1984. “Line of March for the Party.” In The Grenada Papers, edited by Paul Seabury and Walter A. McDougall, 59-88. San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies.
Blackburn, Robin. 2014. “Stuart Hall: 1932-2014.” New Left Review 86, March-April 75-93.
Bogues, Anthony. 2015. “Stuart Hall and the World We Live In.” Social and Economic Studies 64:2, 177-193.
Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 1996. “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 501-2. London and New York: Routledge.
Clarke, Robert. 2014. “Statement on Grenada by Robert “Bobby” Clarke October 14, 2009.” Cited in Brian Meeks Critical Interventions in Caribbean Politics and Theory, 113. Jackson. University Press of Mississippi.
Derbyshire, Jonathan. 2012. “Stuart Hall: We Need to Talk About Englishness.” New Statesman August 23 www.newstatesman.com
Girvan, Norman. 2010. “New World and its Critics.” In The Thought of New World: The Quest for Decolonisation, edited by Brian Meeks and Norman Girvan. Ian Randle Publishers: Kingston and Miami.
Hall, Stuart and Allan O’Shea. 2013. “Common Sense Neoliberalism.” Soundings, 55, Winter. 8-24.
Hall, Stuart. 1988. “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists”. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture edited by Carey Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 35-73. Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Meaning of New Times.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues. Morley and Chen eds. 225-237.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 25-46. London and New York: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “What is this Black in Black Popular Culture?” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues. Morley and Chen eds. 465-475.
Lewis, Gordon K. 1987. Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
MacCabe, Colin. 2008. “An Interview with Stuart Hall: December 2007.” Critical Quarterly 50 nos. 1-2.
Marable, Manning. 1987. African and Caribbean Politics: from Kwame Nkrumah to Maurice Bishop. London: Verso.
Mars, Perry. 1998. Ideology and Change: The Transformation of the Caribbean Left. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.
Meeks, Brian ed. 2007. Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers and London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Meeks, Brian. 1993. Caribbean Revolutions and Revolutionary Theory: An Assessment of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Caribbean.
Meeks, Brian. 1996. Radical Caribbean: from Black Power to Abu Bakr. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.
Mills, Charles. 2007. “Stuart Hall’s Changing Representation of “Race.” In Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall, edited by Brian Meeks, 120-148, Kingston: Ian Randle publishers.
Munroe, Trevor. 1983. Social Classes and National Liberation in Jamaica. Kingston: Workers Party of Jamaica.
Puri, Shalini. 2014. The Grenadian Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Quinn, Kate ed. 2014. Black Power in the Caribbean. Gainesville Fl. The University Press of Florida.
Rojek, Chris. 2003. Stuart Hall. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ryan, Selwyn and Taimoon Stewart eds. 1995. The Black Power Revolution 1970: A Retrospective. Trinidad: ISER.
Scott, David. 2014. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham: Duke University Press.
Notes
[1] James’s notions of a non-vanguardist, spontaneous movement of the people had some initial influence particularly through the Antiguan, Grenadian and Trinidadian movements, but as I have argued elsewhere, James had no developed strategy for insurrection, beyond the advocacy of popular spontaneous uprising. When an insurrectionary situation arose, as in Grenada between 1974 and 1979, the NJM therefore turned to the old playbook of the underground vanguard, which turned out to be an effective tool for overthrowing the Gairy regime, but not for popular rule in the aftermath. The other factor was the clearly compelling international situation, in which, in the seventies Cuba, based on booming sugar prices seemed to be thriving, the Vietnamese had liberated their country and the liberation movements had achieved independence through guerrilla warfare in Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique. All were led by Marxist-Leninist parties, raising significantly the cachet of this trend. See Meeks 1996: 72 ;1993: 178 and Austin 2010: 173-189)
[2] I want to nuance Perry Mars’s argument in which he suggests that the weaknesses that led to the demise of the Caribbean Left lay more in questions of leadership, than ideology. There is much truth and indeed, I am invested in the argument that it was the leadership and its failures which contributed immeasurably to the crisis in Grenada with its debilitating impact on the Left in general. However, the role of ideology has been underplayed, or presented as a stock word or phrase, such as ‘Leninism’ or sometimes even ‘Pol Potism’ which unfortunately is a lazy alternative to more careful analysis. Ideology in the end informed the leadership and shaped the framework and boundaries of their decision-making. It thus needs far more careful scrutiny in the new round of scholarship that will eventually appear on this period. (Mars 1998: 162)
[3] Both Chris Rojek and Charles Mills can be considered as among Hall’s more respectful critics, acknowledging what they consider his important theoretical advances yet remaining weary as to whether, in the case of Rojek, his emphases on difference and anti-essentialism have not undercut the ability of his project to have an impact on real political life. Rojek asks, “Can difference be the basis for effective political agency?” (Rojek 2003:187) Charles Mills’ misgivings include the suggestion that Hall’s fabled eclecticism, in seeking, for instance, to utilize both Gramscian notions of hegemony with its implications of a dominant class/bloc and Foucauldian notions of dispersed power, may in the end be incompatible. He pleads “How could it be possible to test and verify or falsify a theoretical mélange with so many conflicting components?” (Meeks 2007: 141) the detailed exploration of these genuine questions certainly remains legitimate, but go somewhat beyond the purposes of this short engagement.
This essay has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial collective. It is the first entry in a dossier on Stuart Hall.
As an itinerant Caribbean scholar, I have been profoundly shaped by Stuart Hall. Much of this is legible to me, but so much is not; Hall’s mode of intellectual practice (conjuncture, strategy, contingency, articulation) imprinted on many of us as if by osmosis. My generation of anglophone Caribbean children were taught literature of the Caribbean for O’Levels; we were introduced to Shakespeare through The Tempest, encouraged to read it from our postcolonial, national situation. Kamau Brathwaite’s nation-language informed our literary education; C. L. R. James’s “literary history” of the Haitian Revolution shaped our engagement with West Indian History; and Hall’s notion of what he has called the “cultural question” permeated our social studies. These were not the only intellectuals who shaped my generation’s schooling in the 1990s, but I name them to give some sense of the difference between the anglophone Caribbean schoolroom of my own generation from those of previous generations. We were at least a decade into independence.[i] If nothing else, Hall should live in the pantheon of anglophone Caribbean (West Indian) intellectual-activists I was taught to revere as child. When C. L. R. James passed away in 1989 I was not yet a teenager, but I remember the nation[ii] mourning. Pride seemed to burst forth from every chest about how far one of our bright boys[iii] had gone. There was a sadness that he was no longer amongst us, even if many of my generation struggled to reconcile the image of the frail man we saw on Trinidad and Tobago Television[iv] (TTT) with Pan-African revolt or the vigor of West Indian cricket at its revolutionary zenith. This kind of celebration of a local boy (or girl) who makes it overseas is not uncommon in small places, island spaces, “Caribbean Spaces” (Kincaid 1988; Boyce Davies 2013). As calypsonian David Rudder told us in his Windies anthem for the 1987 Cricket World Cup, “Rally Round the West Indies,” we live in “a divided world that don’t need islands no more”; so asserting Caribbean identity and filiality is about claiming intellectual, metaphysical, and geographic space as it shifts, translocates or erodes in our present. But if in 1989 there seemed to be ample space allotted for mourning James as a Caribbean intellectual, in 2014 the scene of mourning for Hall, a great island scholarship boy himself, was more subdued.
At the 2013 Callaloo conference (held at Oxford University, where Hall was a Rhodes Scholar in 1951) the question was posed if another C. L. R. James were possible.[v] The question, I think, was about the conditions of possibility in the Caribbean (at home and in diaspora?) for such another intellectual to emerge. The reply was no. I wondered why not. Was Stuart Hall not such a one? I remembered the Channel Four interview Hall did of James; it could be read as a kind of passing of the torch from one to the next, James to Hall. It was clearly born of more than a desire to ask a few questions of the man for a curious British public. If that imperative was there, there was also what can be understood to be the desire to talk to another son of the (anglophone) Caribbean soil, familiar with that terrain before independence and the nation-state. A profoundly, uniquely Caribbean moment.[vi] Hall after all was a radical Caribbean intellectual who was arguably Jamesian in a way—deeply knowledgeable on a range of subjects but whose breadth of inquiry is born of a “particular” Caribbean time and place.[vii] Without making this about some kind of closed monarchy with the crown passing from James to Hall to Sylvia Wynter to … I want to think about what figures such as they, but namely Hall and James, mean to the region, and the ways in which they seemed unable to find room for themselves in their island homelands, especially as intellectuals. If these island-spaces incubated their curiosity and promiscuous reading, they were also not the spaces in which they seemed to think that their radical and black radical politics could be sustained. Often this has been understood to say something about the UK and the US in the case of James, and the UK in the case of Hall. Not wrongly so; there were British anti-immigrant policies that resulted in case of the Mangrove Nine in 1970—in which nine West Indian immigrants were charged for protesting police brutality and the targeting of the West Indian restaurant, Mangrove—or the Brixton Riots of the 1980s, 1990s and most recently 2011. As part of the Windrush generation—the West Indian immigrants who moved the UK in the 1950s and ‘60s—Hall came comfortably into himself as a racialized subject alongside many of his fellow windrushers. It is not that he was unaware of racial difference before, but Hall himself acknowledged, he could not easily have been a radical black man in Jamaica. There he was brown, even if too dark for his own mother’s comfort.
Unlike Hall, Wynter and James attempted return; that is, they traveled back to the (anglophone) Caribbean to make lives for themselves, not only to visit family and friends. Born in 1901, James left Trinidad for England in 1932. Between 1958 to 1962 James resettled in Trinidad at the invitation of his then friend and former student at Queen’s Royal College (QRC), Eric Eustace Williams, author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944) and the first prime minister of independent Trinidad.[viii] he left shortly before Trinidad and Tobago gained independence as a result of their falling out, largely over the collapse of the West Indian Federation (Williams having withdrawn his support with the infamous line that primary school children of my generation had to memorize: “one from ten leaves nought”).[ix] In spite of this, James remained active in Trinidad politics until 1968 and continued to hold a place in the hearts of the people of Trinidad and Tobago, returning for a year in 1980. In the 1980s the people of Trinidad campaigned for the government to honor James with a house, and in 1989 his remains were returned to Trinidad and he was laid to rest in state in Tunapuna, the eastern corridor town where he had been born (Cudjoe 1992: 124).
Wynter and Hall are born within a few years of each other, in 1928 and 1932 respectively. In 1963, Wynter was appointed assistant lecturer in Hispanic Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona; she stayed until 1974, when she leaves for a visiting professorship at the University of California, San Diego and then a permanent post at Stanford University in Afro-American Studies and Spanish Literature from 1977. For Wynter, the growing chasm between her intellectual interest and the curricula in Spanish at UWI made staying untenable; in the US she could teach to the intellectual questions uppermost on her mind (Wynter 2000: 172 – 3).
I want use the occasion of this dossier commemorating Stuart Hall to think about his place in what we might call the canon of Caribbean thought. As I use the word “canon” in relation to Hall my mind’s eye conjures an image of the great man somewhat discomforted by the supposition that that term could have anything to do with him or his work. Though he began as a literary scholar, Hall left literary studies as a formal home for his intellectual work quite early on in his career—with something like the English literary “canon” at least one of the impetuses of such a change of course. Here I mean canon not in terms of content but a structure of relations. The word “canon” confers authority, power, hierarchy; it deems some texts valuable and worthy of scholarship (those within its borders) and others less valuable (those without its borders). In fact, it is to Hall as one of the progenitors of Cultural Studies, of course, that many of us in literary studies interested in cultural production (not accommodated by the canon, whatever that may be) are indebted. The rise of Cultural Studies helped open up space in most humanities’ disciplines to cross-pollinate our objects of study and challenge our conditions of knowledge production; one could contemplate new media and urban, street culture from literature and sociology. Without question Hall’s stint as editor of New Left Review (1960 – 1962) and authoring and editing texts such s Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972 – 79 (1980), Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1980), and others cemented his place at the heart of the global re-imagining of the university and the humanities from the 1960s – 1980s and gave us new vocabularies for social and cultural critique. Certainly there are many perspectives from which to think through Hall’s body of work and his legacy for the scholars, activists, and every-folk who read him or simply inhabit a world in which terms like “cultural identity, race, and ethnicity” are givens. That these are categories with which we work in today’s humanities, that there is something under the rubric of “cultural studies,” owes much to Hall’s labor. Yet as “cultural studies” itself seems embattled and work on identity, increasingly is denigrated as “identity politics” and even passé, I wonder what the future of such scholarship is. With Hall there was always the assumption of the incomplete work; the article, the radio interview, sites of the unfinished and the urgent, of contingency.
I am not sure it is fair of me to push the two—Hall with his commitment to the conjuncture, the contingent or “without guarantees” and canon—together. I persevere with canon though, mindful of Hall’s own claim that before Marx hated capitalism “he admired it and respected it”; it was his admiration and respect for it that got him beyond capitalism as it were (Hall 1983: 39). Hall’s admiration, love even, of canonical English literature and literary studies is central to his move beyond it into sociology of literature and cultural studies, maintaining a commitment to the “cultural questions” (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 146). I do so because at the heart of this, I think, is question of what is considered valuable to thinking Caribbean or uniquely Caribbean thought as opposed to that of an elsewhere. In other words, “to think something like ‘Caribbean studies’ is already to be inside, to be in a conversation with … what the Caribbean supposedly is, supposedly was” (Scott 2013: 1)[x] My simple premise here is that Hall is not always understood “to be inside…in conversation with” the Caribbean as such. Even when deemed “an extension of” James, Hall is never quite read as Caribbean as much or unquestioningly as the former (Hall 1997).[xi] The question I want to ask then is: what “is…was” the Caribbean of Hall’s work? In asking this question I am taking Hall at his word “that the interest never goes away, the interest in the Caribbean and the interest in race” never dissipated for him, even if it was not always “the most prominent and visible part of [his] work” (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 155). In my attempt to grapple with Hall’s Caribbean I want to explore two moments that bring the toe together. First, his participation in the conference for Rex Nettleford held in Jamaica in 1996 and his interview in the first issue of Small Axe, to which I have just referred, and immediately after his passing.
I
In March 1996 the first Conference on Caribbean Culture was hosted by the faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the university’s Mona Campus. The conference was held in honor of the choreographer, historian, and then pro vice-chancellor of UWI, Rex Nettleford.[xii] Supposedly eight leading intellectuals were invited to give plenaries, though the program only lists Kamau Brathwaite, Stuart Hall, and George Lamming. The others were: Rex Nettleford himself, Lloyd Best, Erna Brodber, Edward Seaga, and George Rohlehr (Chevannes 1997: iii; see Figure 1. “Draft Program”).
Figure 1. “Draft Program”
Michael Manley was to open the conference. The Caribbean Quarterly published their addresses in its March-June 1997 issue as “The Plenaries: Conference On Caribbean Culture In Honour Of Professor Rex Nettleford,”[xiii] with Gordon Rohlehr’s piece replaced by Michael Manley’s (Chevannes 1997: vi). Along with Barry Chevannes’s introduction are the following essays: George Lamming’s opening address, in which Lamming gave an overview of Caribbean/Antillean thought and letters and thanked Nettleford for his contribution to thinking Caribbean culture and making space for a “roots”-derived Caribbean culture; Lloyd Best’s “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Thirty Years Later”; Stuart Hall’s “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends”; Kamau Brathwaite’s “Rex Nettleford and the Renaissance of Caribbean Culture”; Erna Brodber’s “Re-engineering Blackspace”; Edward Seaga’s “The Significance of Folk Culture in the Development of National Identity”; Rex Nettleford’s “The Continuing Battle for Space—the Caribbean Challenge Final Session”; and, Michael Manley’s “Rex Nettleford: A Revolutionary Spirit.” Thus by the special issue, if not at the conference, two former prime ministers of Jamaica—Edward Seaga and Michael Manley—come together with the poet Brathwaite, the novelists Lamming and Brodber, the literary and cultural critic Rohlehr, Nettleford himself, and Hall. Who is Hall here in this milieu?
The plenary papers, as they appear in Caribbean Quarterly, make it is clear that not only was Nettleford the person that the gathering was meant to celebrate, but that “culture,” the question of culture, the Caribbean cultural question was also the star. It was the return of culture as a worthy object of study and site of intellectual discourse in the region. That unique gathering of intellectual stars each in their own right:
represented a powerful symbol of culture coming (back) in from the cold where it had been thrown out by a social science that had lost its bearing and wandered far afield in realms of vanguardism and name-calling; represented, in the thoughtful pronouncement of the Griot Kamau Brathwaite, a healing. (Chevannes 1997: iii)
The “healing” to which Chevannes referred can be understood as the denigration of the arts and culture—whether highbrow (novels, poetry, art, drama, dance not too identifiable with the laboring classes) or low (kaiso, reggae, steel drums, tassa etc)—and the concomitant valorization of economics, history (of a certain kind) and social sciences meant to credentialize the civil service. Of the eight essays only three do not specifically speak to this moment of reconciliation—Brodber’s, Seaga’s and Manley’s (iii). Seaga seems to have received a different brief from the others. Barry Chevannes, then head of sociology and the main organizer of the conference, explains in his introduction that everyone, except Seaga, was asked to speak to “any issue they felt to be of importance.” Seaga was given a strict brief as “an anthropologist” and “a promoter of native art forms…to address the question of the role of the folk in the formation of national identity” (iii). Seaga, as such, makes no reference to Nettleford or what others seem to view as the rebirth of the cultural in the Caribbean context, at least of the anglophone Caribbean context. Brodber tackles the question of completing the emancipation begun in 1834/8; so that while her interest is in the “Caribbean cultural” as it were, it is less in the study of culture in the Caribbean and the social sciences as much as the place of culture in liberating black people (Brodber 1997: 70 – 81). Manley speaks of the two groups (social scientists and cultural practioners/critics) coming together for the conference, but never mentions that they were ever divided (Manley 1997: 96 – 100); the split between the two groups features in all other submissions.
In Kamau Brathwaite’s own words, the conference was a Caribbean first:
[The] first time in our 500 yrs of post Columbian history that we have such a happenin—there was P R in 1958, Carifesta 72 in Guyana & these are LANDMARKS too, but mainly as PERFORMANCES—distillations & enactments—of the culture. This is the first time we have a concentrated comprehensive reflexion on it. Put together, the two streams strands events begin create an IMAGE of ourselves.(Brathwaithe 1997: 36)
If the conference were a ritual undertaken for healing, it was not to heal the rift between disciplines, but actual persons, namely “Nettleford & the social scientists, who, as this Conference indicates, have come the long road backround to a recognition—i hope—of the centrality of culture to our functional reality & where how why we are ourselves in the world” (50).
George Lamming explained it thus:
the West Indian historian is not an active and informing influence in the popular consciousness. The language of economic advisers conveys little or no meaning to people outside their immediate circle of colleagues. Novelists function without a substantial and continuing reading class—even among the certified graduates of the region’s university. This literature has hardly aroused the active interest of many who make up the political intelligentsia. (Lamming 1997: 12)
Social science (economists) and culture (historians or novelists) suffer from a split; the economists are incomprehensible to though who are not economists and the novelists rarely write for those at home in the region as they do not provide a reliable and regular readership.
In “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Thirty Years Later,”[xiv] Lloyd Best argued that what was needed was a turn to the creative arts, for only they “will here open up the philosophical as well as the scientific questions” (Best 1997: 24). He submitted that the crisis that beset the social sciences as the twenty-first century was to emerge was:
a failure at the bottom of which is the epistemological question. How do the Caribbean people learn about themselves and for their own purposes with the resources they now have? How does a community,a tribe, a race, a State, a nation, a people, save itself from impending damnation? How does a culture escape from itself? How does a system generate its own fertility?
The first thing would be to plumb the dimensions of our own predicament. In the case of the social sciences, had we fixed the manifestations of dislocated personality, plantation economy, segmented multi-ethnic society and submerged subversive culture in their common historical matrix, I doubt we would have had to follow the disciplinary specializations of the European tradition, multiplied the overheads, and confused the heads of the students in the bargain—by compelling them to add Marshallian or Keynesian economics to Parsonian, Weberian or Marxian sociology, to Malinovskyesque anthropology and to the Westminster political science of Mill, all of which are premised on a different set of institutions—all of which are set in a different landscape. You can see why I am advocating an extra-disciplinary approach, a Caribbean approach. (Best 1997: 24)
Best’s contention seems to be that such a split between the social sciences and the arts in the Caribbean occurred because the model of the university and knowledge production was simply transplanted from the UK, with no real consideration as to how to grow a Caribbean derived model. Attention and genuine incorporation of the creative arts and the humanities across (higher) education was his proposed solution.
But if Nettleford, culture, and a new moment of significance for cultural in the Caribbean are the chief, named protagonists, Hall seems an implied one. Lloyd Best names Hall as one of his predecessor, declaring that though
[t]he whole world knows my great teachers…to have been Gocking, Demas, Brathwaite and James…What even Stuart Hall may not know is that it all began at Richmond Road in Oxford where Demas was his [Hall’s] housemate and where Stuart’s New Left Review … I make bold to say we need other conferences mounted on the work of both William Demas and Stuart Hall … (17)
Best makes known the hitherto little known fact that his own thought is indebted to Hall. Best is, of course, one of the most widely read anglophone Caribbean scholars as knowing the Caribbean condition; and there he stood, during this quintessentially, uniquely moment in the study of culture from/in the Caribbean paying homage to Hall, calling for a similar (conference on Caribbean Culture?) in honor of Hall’s work.
Yet in his essay, “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends,” perhaps fittingly, meant to gesture at the next frontier, the next conjuncture, he seems to refuse that potential moment of canonization. By the time Hall gave his plenary, Best had already given his; this is evidenced by Hall’s assertion that he “think[s] about these questions in the context of rereading that marve[l]ous essay to which interestingly Lloyd Best referred this morning” (Hall 1997: 25). After thanking Nettleford for the invitation and his scholarship, Hall commences, telling his audience that he was “asked to say something about the future and in that context it has to be something about how Caribbean culture travels, it being itself the product of an enforced travelling, but also well travelled” (25). He stages his distance from that Caribbean scene, perhaps reminding the audience of what Best may have made them forget for the time:
I have got to figure out how to talk about that because I have lived out of the region for most of my adult life and therefore what I have observed at close hand and worked amongst our people from the Caribbean, from the African Caribbean Diaspora, especially, who helped undertake a second migration, a ‘double diasporization’, I would call it. (25)
He will not make mention of his time on Caribbean Voices, the BBC program that gave most of the writers now considered synonymous with (modern) anglophone Caribbean literature—V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Samuel Selvon, Derek Walcott, George Lamming—work for Caribbean periodicals such as Bim or Savacou. Erased are the frequent trips he made to Jamaica (home?) from the 1970s onward (after the cultural revolution of the 1960s makes brown, middle class existence no longer easy or tenable).[xv] The documentaries on the Caribbean expunged. His participation in the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM, 1966 – 1972) unmentioned (See Walmsley 1992). In fact, according to Anne Walmsley’s account of the second CAM conference (August 31 – September 2, 1968), Hall’s contribution shaped much of the rest of the conference. At least two of these show Hall thinking the Caribbean with diaspora. The first being that, “[t]he Afro-West Indian has had a kind of clarification of experience in the last decade in Britain that the West Indian at home, with the neocolonial regimes, has not had.” Secondly, his contention, following John La Rose, that “the West Indian had been obliged to define himself in global terms, in terms of movements of black peoples throughout the world” (164). Thus in 1968 we begin to hear the outlines of engagement with diaspora, race, and articulation in relation to the anglophone Caribbean community(ies) in the UK, years before Policing the Crisis or “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.”[xvi]
But in 1996, Hall refuses any of these enunciations that would give his audience definitive and consistent confirmation of his investment in the Caribbean. Instead he wants to use diaspora to problematize theorizations of Caribbean “roots” and “routes” (Hall 1997: 27). It is the “discrepancy between some of the ways in which we still think about culture and in which we still live and practise it” that Hall chooses, “want[s],” to address in his plenary (27).
He ends, provocatively, informing us that only through “retranscription (by resignification)” can diasporic culture occur and sustain itself (33). He urges his audience to hold on to
… a notion of the diasporic which lives with the notion of dissemination, of the scattering. The seed has gone out. It is not going to come back to its original ecology. It now has to learn to live in new climates in other soils. It has to learn to resist pests that it never resisted before.
The one thing you do not get in nature is a clone. It’s not given to repeat itself as it was, because to repeat itself would be to die. It’s going to use its new ecology to construct a culture of a different kind. It is going to live with dissemination. It knows that unless we have made the return to our symbolic home in our hearts and minds we will never know who we are, but it knows at the same time that you can’t go home again. (33; italics mine)
What does it mean that one “can’t go home again?” And how to apply that to the discussion of Caribbean culture that is its scene of presentation?
II
I don’t want to psychologize Hall, but I want to put in conversation his notion of being unable to “go home again” and his interview for the first issue of Small Axe that Hall would have given shortly after this address.[xvii] The interview stages a much more explicit set of interventions about the Caribbean as a formative space for Hall and an object of his study. It is possible that this is more function of genre. It allows for another kind of engagement it is by definition dialogic, two people looking for each other; the plenary on Caribbean Culture calls for a kind of declaration of a self and subjectivity that is less provisional. In another 1997 interview, Caryl Phillips asks him how he feels about the Caribbean, and Hall speaks of “home” in less definitive terms than the final lines of “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends.” “No,” he says to Phillips:
I don’t feel detachment from [the Caribbean]. I maintain that terrible ambiguity about home. I never know it. I never know what question I’m being asked when I’m asked about home. On the other hand, when I go home I know it’s not my home. And I know it’s not my home principally because it’s a small place and all the people that I was at school with are still there, and all have had a different life from mine, I can literally see the divergence. I can’t possibly recapitulate the way in which they have lived the first 30 years of independence. I didn’t live them like that. It’s not an odd question of whether you can be friends or not, it just, it’s formed us differently. (Hall 1997)
Hall here is ambiguous about the Caribbean, Jamaica, as his home. It is not simply that he is unsure of his answer; he is uncertain of what he is being asked when asked of the Caribbean as “home.”
As far as Caribbean scholarship the Small Axe interview ushers in a moment. Hall’s is the first interview of a series of interviews of Caribbean intellectuals born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s that Scott undertakes.[xviii] It appears in the first issue of a journal that has forged a frontier zone in the field over the last while (in two years it will be twenty). At its inception, this moment of birth of which Hall is made a part, the journal was meant to “fashio[n] a vernacular idiom of criticism,” taking up the charge from older outfits such as Lloyd Best’s New World Quarterly and Kamau Brathwaite’s Savacou. Interestingly, Hall was a part of each—Best claims his in this 1996 moment as a kind of third (if silent) parent; Hall attended the conferences of the Caribbean Artists Movement and wrote for Savacou; and he is chosen as the first Caribbean intellectual to be interviewed for Small Axe.
There is a fascinating elliptical moment in the interview; allow me to quote from it at length:
David Scott (DS): … Clearly there you are thinking about the Caribbean. This is the middle to late ‘70s, yes. What is prompting that rethinking of the Caribbean?
Stuart Hall (SH): Well I suppose what is prompting it is the sense that ll that was bubbling up in the ‘60s has had a very profound impact on Caribbean societies. It’s a very different place. And its a place that I can re-ground in my o[w]n mind in a way that I’d sort of decided that I couldn’t re-ground the old Caribbean like that. By the ‘70s I start to come back more often. Mainly to visit family. I don’t come back for official purposes. There is a long period in the ‘60s when having taken the decision I don’t come very much.
DS: Do you lecture here when you come back in the ‘70s?
SH: Hardly ever.
DS: Is your work known among intellectuals here?
SH: No, no. Not very much. And it doesn’t feel relevant to me to tell them about it.
DS: No, sure, that I can understand. But certainly the way . . . .
SH: They still don’t . . . .
DS: I know they still don’t . . . .
SH: I’m not complaining about it.
DS: Yes, but I am. (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 155)
Here is Hall, interviewed for the first issue of Small Axe, a journal committed to a critical tradition in Caribbean studies, largely concerned with Caribbean thought. This set of exchanges between Hall and Scott is riddled with the unsaid. Scott keeps the question of the (anglophone) Caribbean ever present; Hall seems to want this. If Hall’s address of the future of study of Caribbean Culture does not disavow that “[i]t is perhaps too little remembered … that Stuart Hall is a Jamaican and a West Indian whose work has been informed by some of the journeys and debates that constitute this region as a zone of history, culture, and politics,” he does do so in the interview (Hall, “Politics,” 1997: 141). Yet much as the interview tells us about Hall’s development as a (anglophone) Caribbean intellectual and his sustained interest in the region, the ellipses perform a withholding that makes the answer to our very question of Hall’s place in the canon of Caribbean thought, most especially the “why” of it, elusive. And, perhaps, even an acceptance of his lot as a kind of second-class citizen in the pecking order of the home-based academy. What was intended to follow “the way”? Don’t they still do? Is it the way that Hall is marginalized in the region, or the way that he is celebrated elsewhere? Is it that “intellectuals here” still don’t read him, or acknowledge him? The first suggests lack of awareness, knowledge of Hall and his work, his theoretical interventions; the latter suggests a refusal that articulates critique either of scholarly practice (either in terms of concepts or the general eclecticism of Hall’s oeuvre) or geographic location (that he never settles and works from back home and in this way in strong contrast to Lloyd Best, Rex Nettleford, Barry Chevannes and even Brathwaite and Lamming who work from ‘home’ for periods).
III
Let us leave the 1996 conference and interview for a moment and look at the ways in which Hall has been memorialized since his passing. By now it should go without saying that I am interested in the ways in which he has, or has not been, honored from the Caribbean or Caribbean-centered spaces and platforms.
In her review for the Caribbean Review of Books of John Akomfrah’s documentary, The Stuart Hall Project, Annie Paul writes:
It never fails to astonish me how little Hall and his path-breaking work are known back here in the Caribbean, where he comes from—in Jamaica, where he was born and raised, for instance, he’s a complete nonentity. For those not in the know: Hall is a globally renowned intellectual (an “intellectual rock star,” as one publication has referred to him), a founding editor of New Left Review, and more famously the main progenitor of the influential field of cultural studies. Arising in the 1960s, this interdisciplinary juggernaut that signalled the advent of postmodern scholarship rapidly gained popularity, dealing a body-blow to traditional academic disciplines from sociology to political science to literature, and completely rewriting the scope of intellectual work worldwide. That it only arrived at the University of the West Indies in the 1990s is a measure of what a well-kept secret Hall remains in these parts. (Paul 2013)
Paul, of course, is correct: Hall’s scholarship so profoundly influenced the ways in which we study human experience globally—in terms of subjectivity, power, identity formation, home and diaspora to name but a few—yet continues to be “a well-kept secret in [the Caribbean]”; and this persistent secrecy around Hall is a barometer of something. The paucity of elegies, eulogies or memorials in Caribbean or Caribbean-centric outlets since his passing continues the occlusion of Hall from the region and tells us something not only about Hall’s own sense of who he was, and where he belonged in relation to the island of his birth, but also speaks to his Caribbean legacy, his place in Caribbean thought, and what exactly the Caribbean is now, maybe what it is becoming.
By my count five pieces emerged from the Caribbean or Caribbean-focused sources after Hall’s homegoing. These were: two obituaries; an announcement by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival as well as a free screening of The Stuart Hall Project (the Tuesday after he passed);[xix] a moving, searing letter from the editor of Small Axe (Scott 2014) and a special section of that same journal titled “The Gift of Stuart Hall”; and a tribute from the Centre for Caribbean Thought. I want to focus on those that speak explicitly to Hall and the Caribbean.
In their tribute from the Centre for Caribbean Thought, Brian Meeks, Anthony Bogues and Rupert Lewis, assert:
that Hall did not return “home” like … George Lamming, or Sylvia Wynter (who returned for a while) and others did not mean that he was not Caribbean. What it meant was that the Caribbean was now working through a different geographical and cultural location. (Bogues, Lewis & Meeks 2014: 128)
This was preceded by Meeks’s singular celebration of Hall almost a week before in the Jamaica Gleaner, “Rediscovering Stuart Hall” (Meeks 2014). He tries to attend to the relatively subdued nature of the local response, or lack thereof, in the week of Hall’s passing. Meeks explains that it “should not, maybe, be surprising” that there is such quiet (it took local newspaper several days to pick up the news) as Hall had not lived in Jamaica in over six decades (Meeks 2014). But, for Meeks, Hall’s diasporic existence has little to do with Jamaicans’ ignorance of him, rather such lack of awareness “says more of national inattention to ideas and the people who generate them.” He ends with an invitation to the Hall’s alma mater, Jamaica College, or the government to honor Hall.
But in “Stuart Hall Roots an Legacy” Carolyn Cooper, professor of literary and cultural studies at UWI, Mona, goes directly to the question of Hall having never returned home. Writing in Jamaican patois, in Chaka-Chaka Spelling and again in Prapa-Prapa Spellin, she brings the question of Hall’s place of domicile to the fore. She asks:
So wa mek Stuart Hall never come back a yard? Im did visit. But im live out im life a Inglan. Inna 1997, im do one interview wid Caryl Phillips, one next Oxford man weh born a St Kitts an go a England when im a four month ‘old’. Phillips aks Hall di said same question: “The time you were leaving Oxford—1957—was exactly the same time that there was a potential for great change in the Caribbean. It was the beginning of the short-lived federation among the islands. Why did you choose not to go back?” Hall gi two answer: “There was no need to hurry back, because by then federation was a dead idea.” Dead fi true. An CARICOM no hearty to dat … See di next answer ya: “But there’s a second reason which is more personal. You see, I came from this peculiar coloured middle class in Jamaica which was oriented toward Britain … I didn’t want to go back to that. To have a job as a lawyer with my family close at hand, watching over me, I couldn’t bear it. I’d always meant to go home, but I’d always had reservations about becoming a member of that class.”
Di problem a no so-so class. Plenty colour did mix up inna it. Hall do one next interview inna 2007 wid one journalist, Tim Adams. Hear wa im seh: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born. My sister said: ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ Not black baby, you will note, but low-class Indian.” Seet deh now! Good ting Stuart Hall never bodder come back ya so. Im might as well tan a England.[xx]
For Cooper Hall’s legacy is haunted by the incomplete return. It is not that Hall’s ideas were too big for ‘home’ as Meeks hints, but rather there it is color and class questions that disrupt Hall’s return at least in 1957. In this way his not a Caribbean existence simply in another geographic location, but a flight from the color politics of Jamaica, an escape.
For his part Hall does offer several, varied reasons for his decision to settle in the UK. If Caryl Phillips is told that it had everything to do with the death of the West Indian Federation, Hall makes plain his unwillingness (like Claude McKay’s Bita Plant[xxi]) to be sucked into brown, respectable middle class society. He also speaks of the ‘problem’ of his own skin color—decidedly darker than other members of his family—in terms of having easy relations with his family (most of whom were of lighter skin color). In other words Hall might not disagree with Cooper that the question was not only one of class, but profoundly of color.
Yet it seems to me that there is also something of a discomfort, a worry in that earlier moment of the 1996 conference that may add another dimension. In other words, I want to take Hall at his word that the interest, his interest, in the Caribbean never goes away. And, if so, the seeming finality of his “Caribbean Culture: Future Trends” suggests that he can never be a Caribbean intellectual, he can never really be part of that canon. At the same time I think there is a desire (expressed in the dialogic spaces of the interviews) to suture, to make a return.
As editor of Caribbean Reasonings: Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora—The Thought of Stuart Hall and one of the organizers of the third Caribbean Reasonings conference held in 2004 in honor of Hall out of that collection emerged, Meeks has been integral in plotting Hall’s return to the intellectual terrain of contemporary Jamaica and the Caribbean academy. In his introduction to that collection, Meeks contends that it was only after giving the keynote for the conference, and receiving a standing ovation, that, Meeks writes in his introduction to the text, “Hall, after more than half a century, had at last, come home” (Meeks 2007).
If that conference was the coming to fruition of what Lloyd Best suggested in 1996, that Hall and his work be the subject of a conference meant to honor him, it was also a retake on that earlier moment in which Hall’s name was placed on the roll under Caribbean intellectual and he stayed clear of answering too loudly in the affirmative. In his talk to the 2004 conference in his honor he tells the crowd that he nearly back out; what business did he have at that point in his career to claim “to be a Caribbean intellectual?” (Hall 2007). But rather than attempt to shake off the label like so many participles of dust, Hall took hold of it, laid claim to it. I would not say that he did so at last, because I suspect in his quieter more private moments he may have accepted the label (remember his time with the Caribbean Artists Movement?). Instead I will say that this talk is the occasion for him to do so publicly, in the haloed halls of the University of the West Indies. Here Hall revises the origin myths about how Cultural Studies started; in essence he leaves literature and turns to Cultural Studies because he “had to confront the problem of trying to understand what Caribbean culture was and what my relationship” (Hall 2007). He may not have a deep investment in the postcolonial project of “nation-building,” but in that regard he is not alone—many of his generation bemoaned the nation state. It is not only that Hall becomes black in there, but he forges community with fellow West Indians he may never have doon amongst other West Indians:
London streets — one more turn in the story of the Middle Passage and a critical moment in the formation of another displaced black diaspora — I resolved to go back, to read, read about, try to understand and to make a part of me the culture which had made me and from which I could never — and no longer wished — to escape. (Hall 2007)
He speaks of himself as one of many other Jamaicans and anglophone Caribbean folk making their way in that work, rather than an isolated, rare individual. Diaspora becomes a kind of double-bind that ties on to home and the world, here and there. Diaspora here is not only that state which induces and produces a kind of homelessness, it also makes home. Diaspora not a way to disavow one home as one tries, if never succeeding valiant in the effort, to make another one’s new home. It is an uneven and imbalanced dance between the locations. It is in this understanding of diaspora Hall finds his Caribbean. Or rather lets the rest of us see it; he has been wrestling with it all the while, the interest always there. His entire career becoming in some ways “[his] very long way of trying to answer the question, in what sense can [he] be ‘a Caribbean intellectual’?” (Hall 2007).
Travel well.
Contributor’s Note
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is lecturer of African Diaspora and African literature and theory in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. Her current book project is Empire, Nation, Diaspora: The Making of Modern Black Intellectual Culture.
References
Best, Lloyd. 1997. “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom: Thirty Years Later,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 16 – 24.
__________.. 1997. “The Vocation of a Caribbean Intellectual: An Interview with Lloyd Best,” interview by David Scott. Small Axe 1: 119 – 139.
__________.. 1967. “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom,” New World Quarterly (Croptime): 13 – 35.
Bogues, Anthony, Rupert Lewis and Brian Meeks. 2014. “Stuart Hall, Caribbean Thought and the World We Live in.” Caribbean Quarterly, 60, no. 1: 128.
__________.. 2002. “Michael Manley, Equality and the Jamaican Labour Movement,” in special issue” Michael Manley: A Voice at the Workplace,” Caribbean Quarterly, 48, no. 1: 77 – 93.
Brathwaite, Kamau. 1997. “Rex Nettleford and the Renaissance of Caribbean Culture,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 34 – 69.
Brodber, Erna. 1997. “Re-engineering Blackspace,” “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford,” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 70 – 81.
Chevannes, Barry. 1997. “Introduction” to special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford,” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no.1/2: iii – vi.
Cooper, Carolyn. “Stuart Hall Roots an Legacy.” Jamaica Gleaner, jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20140216/cleisure/cleisure3.html, accessed December 20, 2014.
Cudjoe, Selwyn R. 1992. “C. L. R. James Misbound.” Transition, no. 58: 124 – 136.
Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life,” in Caribbean Reasonings: Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora—The Thought of Stuart Hall, edited by Brian Meeks, Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers. Kindle ebook.
_________. 1997. “Politics, Strategy, Contingency: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” by David Scott. Small Axe, no. 1: 141 – 159.
_________. 1997. “Caribbean a Culture: Future Trends,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference On Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 25 – 33.
_________. 1983. “For a Marxism without Guarantees.” Australian Left Review 83: 38 – 43.
_________. 1980. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO, 16–60.
Lamming, George. 1997. “Opening Address,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 1 – 15.
Manley, Michael. 1997. “Rex Nettleford: A Revolutionary Spirit,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference On Caribbean Culture In Honour Of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 96 – 100.
_________. 2007. “Introduction: Return of a Native Sun,” in Caribbean Reasonings: Culture, Politics, Race, and Diaspora—The Thought of Stuart Hall, edited by Brian Meeks, . Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers. Kindle ebook.
Walmsey, Anne. 1992. Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966 –1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2000. “The Re-enactment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” interview by David Scott. Small Axe, no. 8: 119 – 207.
Seaga, Edward. 1997. “The Significance of Folk Culture in the Development of National Identity,” in special issue “The Plenaries: Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford.” Caribbean Quarterly, 43, no. 1/2: 82 – 89.
Scott, David. 2014. “The Last Conjuncture.” Small Axe, 18, no. 2 44: vii – x.
_________. 2013. “On the Question of Caribbean Studies,” introduction to special issue on “What is Caribbean Studies?” Small Axe, Volume 17, Number 2 41: 1 – 7.
[iii] James did not win a scholarship to study in the UK as Norman Manley, Eric Williams, Stuart Hall, or many others would, but I include him in this number because he was one of those students (and then teacher) of the prestigious island schools who would have been expected to win one of the island scholarship—a middle-class/lower middle-class boy, as he describes himself in the BBC Channel Four interview he did with Stuart Hall (See James, “C. L. R. James in conversation with Stuart Hall,” Channel 4, 1983-85).
[iv] The only television station in Trinidad and Tobago until 1991.
[v] Hortense Spillers asked this of Anthony ‘Tony’ Bogues during his keynote.
[vi] They spoke of George Padmore and the work he and James did together in the African Bureau.
[vii] I use “particular” thinking of James’s invocation of the word in his history of the first Pan-African Conference of 1900 in reference to the actions and history of Henry Sylvester Williams as convenor of the conference and a Caribbean intellectual. See James 1984: 236-250.
[ix] Eric E. Williams says this after Jamaica pulls out of the West Indian Federation in order to justify Trinidad and Tobago’s withdrawal thereafter.
[x] Scott’s term of choice (represented by the ellipsis in my citation above) is “archive”; he refers to an “archive of thinking” around what Caribbean means. He writes:
I mean to press the idea, in other words, that to think something like “Caribbean studies” is already to be inside, to be in a conversation with, one dimension or another of the archive of thinking about what the Caribbean supposedly is, supposedly was. (2013: 1)
Archive, I think, does not quite get at what interests me on the question of Stuart Hall and the Caribbean because as much as archives are products of power, there is some sense that within an archive traces might exist, the archive might hold sources the value of which change over time. The canon on the other hand may change content over time, but that which is within is that which is authorized in particular ways; the archive can contain within its borders items that are not deemed valuable, but that sit there as if waiting to be discovered. In other words, Hall’s work may sit within a Caribbean archive, but it is not considered canonical in Caribbean scholarship.
[xi] In this essay, to distinguish between the two 1997 interviews I cite Hall’s interview in Small Axe as Hall, “Politics” 1997 and his interview Bomb with Caryl Phillips as Hall 1997.
[xii] Nettleford remained would become vice-chancellor of UWI (its first graduate to do so) just two years later in 1998 until 2004.
[xiii] Selected literature papers were also compiled for another special issue of Caribbean Quarterly from the conference. See Caribbean Quarterly, Volume 43, Number 4, Conference on Caribbean Culture in Honour of Professor Rex Nettleford The Literature Papers: A Selection (December 1997).
[xiv] This is Best’s return to his 1967 piece in the New World Quarterly, “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom.” See Lloyd Best, “Independent Thought and Caribbean Freedom.” New World Quarterly (Croptime 1967): 13 – 35.
[xv] Brown here refers to the mulatto elite. See Anthony Bogues, “Michael Manley, Equality and the Jamaican Labour Movement,” in special issue” Michael Manley: A Voice at the Workplace,” Caribbean Quarterly, 48, no. 1, (2002): 77–93.
[xvi] See Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (UNESCO, 1980), reprinted in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16–60.
[xvii] The interview is dated March 6, 1996. The draft program for the conference show three plenaries scheduled on: Monday, March 4; Tuesday, March 5; and Wednesday March 6 (See “Conference on Caribbean Culture Registration Brochure,” National Library of Jamaica). Hall would have given his plenary on on of those days, those most likely not in the morning slot as scheduled in the draft program since he refers to Best’s paper having been given in morning before his own.
[xviii] Lloyd Best’s interview also features in the first issue of the journal, and before Hall’s in pagination, but in conversation with Hall again in 2005, Scott says that this was the first interview he did of Hall’s generation of intellectuals for Small Axe. See David Scott, interview with Stuart Hall, Bomb: A Quarterly Arts and Culture Magazine 90 (Winter 2005), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2711/david-scott, accessed July 10, 2015.
So what made Stuart Hall never come back home? He visited. But he lived out his life in England. In 1997, he did an interview with Caryl Phillips, another Oxford man who was born in St. Kitts and went to England when he was four months ‘old.’ Phillips asked Hall the same question: “The time you were leaving Oxford—1957—was exactly the same time that there was a potential for great change in the Caribbean. It was the beginning of the short-lived federation among the islands. Why did you choose not to go back?” Hall gave two answers: “There was no need to hurry back, because by then federation was a dead idea.” Dead in truth. An CARICOM is no better … Look at the next answer: “But there’s a second reason which is more personal. You see, I came from this peculiar coloured middle class in Jamaica which was oriented toward Britain … I didn’t want to go back to that. To have a job as a lawyer with my family close at hand, watching over me, I couldn’t bear it. I’d always meant to go home, but I’d always had reservations about becoming a member of that class.”
The problem is not so much class. Plenty color issues are mixed in. Hall did another interview in 2007 with another journalist, Tim Adams. Listen to what he said: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born. My sister said: ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ Not black baby, you will note, but low-class Indian.” See there now! Good thing Stuart Hall never bothered to come back here so. He might as well tan in England.
[xxi] See Claude McKay. Banana Bottom. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933.
boundary 2 editor Nancy Condee is director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies (REES) at the University of Pittsburgh. Recently, REES announced that Sean’s Russia Blog has become a major addition to the center’s resources and electronic presence. Hosted by Sean Guillory, Digital Scholarship Curator at REES, Sean’s Russia Blog is an invaluable web source that features interviews with writers, filmmakers, academics, and policy figures from Russia, the US, and elsewhere. It joins such US web resources as NYU Jordan Center’s All the Russias blog, David Johnson’s Johnson’s Russia List at GWU’s Elliott School, or Maxim Trudolyubov’s The Russia Fileat the Kennan Institute (Wilson Center).
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Call Me Burroughs: A Life, Barry Miles’s landmark biography of William S. Burroughs, takes its name from a 1965 spoken word album, the first of many Burroughs would record over the course of his long and prolific life. Miles, then a co-owner of London’s Indica Bookshop, was in charge of the album’s UK distribution. “He made more records than most rock groups,” writes Miles (2013: 629). And later in life this “literary outlaw”[1] would become a rock star of sorts. Returning to the United States in 1974 after a quarter century of living abroad, he followed Allen Ginsberg’s example and began a “new career” of public readings (514). These engagements helped solidify Burroughs’s status as a countercultural icon; they also showcased the performative dimensions of his work. For those familiar with Burroughs’s singular drawl, which became even more pronounced onstage, it is impossible to read him without hearing that voice. It haunts the page. Burroughs is a master ventriloquist, inhabited by many personae, whose voice is best understood as a construction and, at times, a put-on. Establishing a sense of critical distance between author and performance, not easy to do when Burroughs’s performances are so incredibly convincing, is crucial for grasping his project as a writer. In a 1974 interview with David Bowie for Rolling Stone, he indicates the ultimate stakes of this project while gesturing toward a deeper performativity of writing when he says, “Writing is seeing how close you can come to making it happen, that’s the object of all art,” adding, “I think the most important thing in the world is that the artists should take over this planet because they’re the only ones who can make anything happen.”[2]
It is fitting that Miles should borrow his book’s title from Burroughs, repurposing what was already an adaptation of the most famous opening line in all of US literature. This nod to the détournement of Burroughs’s writing practices, epitomized by the “cut-up” experiments of the 1960s, is also an implicit argument for Burroughs’s place in literary history. When Beat Generation writers—and the question of whether Burroughs was a “Beat” inevitably arises—get talked about at all in relation to literary history, they are usually confined to a distinctly American tradition stemming from nineteenth-century American Renaissance writers like Melville. (Burroughs did share an appreciation for Melville with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and when the latter two were students at Columbia, the English faculty happened to include Raymond Weaver, who had discovered the unpublished manuscript of Billy Budd and helped restore Melville’s reputation.) Beat writing continues mainly to be read and studied “domestically”—that is to say, as a latter-day manifestation of Emersonian individualism, Whitmanian populism and frankness, and Thoreau’s anti-materialist gospel.
Burroughs himself consistently rejected the Beat label, but if public disavowal were enough, then one would have to exclude Kerouac and many others besides. Miles’s biography in no way privileges or gives prominence to the Beat years, treating them as one phase among many in the long, strange trajectory of Burroughs’s life. Miles does trace an evolution in the author’s thoughts regarding the Beat movement, writing that while “previously he had always distanced himself from the Beat Generation,” upon his return to the States, “He now claimed Kerouac as a friend, even though they had been estranged for the last decade of Kerouac’s life. He recognized Ginsberg’s role in shaping his career and helped him to rehabilitate the Beat Generation and give it its rightful place—as Allen saw it—in the pantheon of American letters.” Burroughs had by this time become an “elder statesman” (Miles 2013: 513) of the whole counterculture that the Beats helped launch.
One of Burroughs’s earliest sustained attempts at writing, the 1945 novella And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, he cowrote with Kerouac, and his eventual career as a writer is practically unthinkable without the support of Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs’s first agent and his most vociferous booster. In fact, most of the early work (classics like Junky and Naked Lunch) has its origins in letters to Ginsberg. Ultimately, such questions as “was Burroughs a Beat?” should be a secondary concern, although I happen to think that he can be productively read alongside Kerouac and Ginsberg, Diane di Prima and Amiri Baraka, Gregory Corso, Philip Lamantia, and a host of writers and artists called, however equivocally, “Beat.” In my own work this has meant a more careful reckoning of the transnational sources and contexts of the Beat movement as a whole.
The Beats traveled widely and produced some of their most important works abroad. (Ginsberg: Kaddish, Kerouac: Mexico City Blues, Gregory Corso: Happy Birthday of Death, which includes the epochal poem “Bomb,” Burroughs: Junky, Queer, Naked Lunch, the Nova trilogy, just to name a few). This distance from home is precisely what opens up a space for all sorts of unexpected connections and crossings to arise in their work. And it turns out that Beat writers were profoundly engaged with the world at large, particularly colonial, postcolonial, and third world. Living and writing in places like Morocco, Mali, India, and Latin America (and centers of imperial power like Paris and London) at the great moment of decolonization across the globe, the Beats were more than just tourists. They could be very attuned to the immediate and usually fraught political situations unfolding around them, although it takes a certain kind of worlded reading practice to unearth these subterranean concerns in their work. For Burroughs in particular, it seems that his calling as a writer is predicated on leaving the United States behind. He turns out to be Ahab, not Ishmael, and the quest for his white whale—the “final fix,” as he first calls it in Junky (1953)—leads him all over the world.
Accordingly, some of the best recent scholarship on writers in the Beat orbit has taken a transnationalist approach of one kind or another. This includes Timothy Gray’s (2006) Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim and Rachel Adams’s (2009) Continental Divides. Adams argues that Kerouac is a quintessentially “continental” writer, while Hassan Melehy (2016) figures Kerouac as a Deleuzian nomad of the Québécois diaspora in Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory. Todd Tietchen’s (2010) Cubalogues examines the impact that Castro’s Cuba had on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, LeRoi Jones, and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom visited the island in the years just following the revolution, and Brian Edwards’s (2005) Morocco Bound addresses the topic of Cold War orientalism in part by locating Burroughs’s Tangier writing within a persistent set of tropes surrounding Arab North Africa and demonstrating the ways in which Burroughs both exceeds and gets “trapped” by orientalist discourse. A number of related currents in Beat studies have converged in the volume The Transnational Beat Generation, edited by Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl (2012), and collectively they lead to these conclusions: the Beats represent a transnational literary and cultural movement par excellence, and the study of Beat writing can shed new light not just on the transnationalism of US literary history but on the meaning of the transnational itself.
So Miles’s title might turn out to be a red herring altogether. What if the whale in question isn’t the one who destroyed the Pequod but the one who swallowed up the prophet Jonah—the same one George Orwell invokes in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale”? Chiefly a meditation on the proper relationship between art and politics in an age of totalitarianism, Orwell’s essay singles out for praise the work of American expatriate writer Henry Miller, who stands in sharp contrast to the “committed” writers of the day. In both spirit and style, Miller is a forerunner of the Beat Generation. Fans of Kerouac’s Big Sur (where Miller lived for two decades) are likely to regard their missed dinner date (Kerouac got drunk that night and never made it out of San Francisco) as one of the great lost opportunities of American letters. Along with Howl and Naked Lunch, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer became another milestone in the fight against censorship in the United States when the US Supreme Court declared it not obscene in 1964. Because of their affinities, Miller gets read in similar, and similarly reductive, ways as the Beats, and Orwell’s essay sets the tone for these later readings. It also points beyond them, offering by extension a fresh way to look at Beat writing in general and Burroughs’s work in particular. Finally, Orwell’s whale suggests an idiosyncratic image of transnationalism as worlding and a means of navigating some of the impasses that have grown up around the so-called “transnational turn” in the humanities.
Like Miller, Orwell had lived dead broke in Paris in the early 1930s, but his description of the experience in Down and Out in Paris and London is more akin to the reportage of Orwell’s own Road to Wigan Pier than to anything in Tropic of Cancer. That notwithstanding, he admired Miller’s work and championed it at a time when Miller was known only to a cognoscenti, who, like T. S. Eliot, had gotten hold of a copy printed in France by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press. (After the war, his son Maurice Girodias changed the name to Olympia Press and would go on to publish The Naked Lunch, as the 1959 first edition of Burroughs’s novel was called.) In his essay on Miller, Orwell frames his discussion of Miller with the story of their first meeting. It was 1936, and Orwell was on his way to Spain to serve the Republican cause, which Miller bluntly told him was “the act of an idiot.” Orwell recounts, “He could understand anyone going there from purely selfish motives, out of curiosity, for instance, but to mix oneself up in such things from a sense obligation was sheer stupidity” (2009: 129-30).
After Spain, where Orwell was branded a Trotskyite and a fascist and forced to flee, he comes to agree, or at least sympathize, with Miller’s basic position. Moreover, he concludes that a literature of utter passivity and complete acceptance is far preferable, and more honest, than high-minded and resolutely political writing from the likes of Auden and Spender. In a world of such turmoil and flux, any art attaching itself to a cause, or worse yet a party, is doomed to failure. To capture the full extent of Miller’s detachment, Orwell borrows an image that Miller himself once used to describe good friend Anaïs Nin: he compares her “to Jonah in the whale’s belly.” Orwell writes:
And however it may be with Anaïs Nin, there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted—quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.
“Short of death,” Orwell calls this “the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility” (132), but the implication is that sometimes irresponsibility is more principled than its opposite. The complexity of Orwell’s figuration lies in the dialectical twist whereby Miller is trapped in the belly of the whale, but the whale is transparent. I want to formulate things slightly differently and instead say that he is inside the whale, but the whale happens to contain the entire world. Read against the grain of its original intent, the whale becomes an image not of separation but of worlded connectedness. It points to an alternative, monist strain of worlded thought that appears everywhere in Beat writing and runs counter to the Beats’ supposed isolationism and indifference to the wider world.
Ahab’s white whale as blank screen or “empty cipher” is akin to what some critics fear has become the transcendent sameness of the transnational. The prominent Americanist Donald Pease speaks for them when he remarks that in its rise to become a dominant paradigm transnationalism writ large has “exercised a monopoly of assimilative power that has enabled it to subsume and replace competing spatial and temporal orientations—including multicultural American studies, borderlands critique, and postcolonial American studies—within an encompassing geopolitics of knowledge” (2011: 1). Worse yet, this shift toward the “unmarked” space of the transnational mirrors and recapitulates the same global flows of capital and corporate power that transnationalist critics want to interrogate (10).[3] Transnationalism as worlding, however, with its counter-hegemonic animus, its emphasis on materiality, on local histories and lived experience, and its attention to the always uneven encounter between the local and the global, is particularly well-suited to retain the lessons of older critical formations, especially postcolonial theory. With roots in Spivak’s planetarity and Said’s global-materialist outlook, worlding privileges precisely those “peripheralized geographies and diasporic populations” that, for Pease, have been marked and marginalized by the transnational (10).
Miller’s whale is more like worlding’s messy immanence—its belly a subterranean space that supplies what Ginsberg has called “the bottom-up vision of society” (in Raskin 2004: xiv), or what cultural historian David Pike characterizes as “the view from below” (2005: 8-12). The world as such is an oppositional term that upholds the local and the contingent in the face of the deracinating transcendence of global space. At its core, worlding entails a dialectic of near and far; it adopts the in-between-ness of James Clifford’s “translocal” sense of cultural adaptation (see in particular 1997) and Rob Wilson’s global/local (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996; Wilson 2000). Lawrence Buell (2007) associates these shifting spatial scales with the planetary “ecoglobalism” of environmental writers and activists, for the world/planet is fundamentally an ecological vision of a world-organism: earth as ecos (“home”) and lived space. Via the Beat ecopoetics of Gary Snyder, the etymology of “eco-” as oikos (house, family) is made worldly and worlded in Earth House Hold, Snyder’s 1969 collection of “Technical Notes and Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries.” That is to say, the lived, material experience of the near-at-hand (one’s “household”) is, in Snyder’s conception, the necessary ground upon which one might imagine communal ties that run much deeper than the nation (oikos as earth/planet). The world, then, becomes a necessary “third term,” as Christopher Connery has labeled it (2007: 3), preserving the local within the global as it confronts the relentless logic of East-West, colonialism-nationalism, communist-capitalist, self-other.
Along with Spivak and Said, Immanuel Wallerstein and his pathbreaking “world-systems analysis” are part of a recognizable and increasingly consolidated canon of worlded thought. I want to hold on to their classic formulations of the worlded world even as I open up to a more expansive genealogy that comprises poetry, philosophy, and the sciences in addition to literary and cultural theory and criticism. Wallerstein makes a crucial distinction when defining “world-system.” He writes that “a world-system not is the system of the world, but a system that is a world and that can be, most often had been, located in an area less than the entire globe” (2004: 98). The world indicated by Wallerstein’s world-system is neither identical to nor coterminous with the world as empirical object (Wallerstein uses “globe” to mean the latter). It is thus a non-totalizing totality, a totality in the Marxian sense: that is to say, a critical concept that functions descriptively but also works to denaturalize what it describes. Just as our “species-being” is determined by, yet exceeds, the “totality of social relations” under the prevailing economic system. As Lukács points out, for Marx the totality itself is dialectical; it is precisely the universality of capitalism that sets the stage for the universal liberation of proletarian revolution. (Transferring things from base to superstructure, Peter Bürger will make an analogous argument when he writes that it is only after the Aestheticists declare the supremacy of “art for art’s sake” that avant-garde movements like Dada can come along and attempt to negate any distinction between art and life.) Wallerstein’s differentiation between a conceptual world and an empirical globe points to the dual nature of world as both physical and figural, topological and tropological. And the space opened up by this distinction is what makes the worlded imaginary possible.
The Marxian world-system as non-totalizing totality means that civilization progresses in dialectical fashion from one world to the next (e.g., from the feudal world to the capitalist world). But what if multiple worlds, an infinite number of worlds, can exist simultaneously? This is the conclusion to draw from the work of biologist and proto-posthumanist Jakob von Uexküll, whose concept of Umwelt (environment, life-world) posits that each species’s sensorium is fundamentally unique and constitutes a world unto itself. In Uexküll’s most enduring work, A Foray into the Worlds (Umwelten) of Animals and Humans (1934), he asks readers to take an imaginary stroll with him:
We begin such a stroll on a sunny day before a flowering meadow in which insects buzz and butterflies flutter, and we make a bubble around each of the animals living in the meadow. The bubble represents each animal’s environment and contains all the features accessible to the subject. As soon as we enter into one such bubble, the previous surroundings of the subject are completely reconfigured. Many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created. A new world arises in each bubble. (2010: 43 [emphasis added])
The author will emphasize the salutary estrangement involved in such a pursuit when he writes, “Only when we can vividly imagine this fact [of the “bubbles”] will we recognize in our own world the bubble that encloses each and every one of us on all sides” (70). Uexküll’s perspective, which radically decenters human consciousness and imagines a dense, rhizomic web of inputs and interactions among all life forms, is picked up by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and has come back to the fore in the field of animal studies and among today’s theorists of a posthuman biopolitics.
This talk of worlds and bubbles is strangely reminiscent of Leibniz even, whose rationalist abstractions seem miles away from Uexküll’s empiricist phenomenology. Yet Leibniz’s “monad” is but the metaphysical counterpart to Uexküll’s model of ecological interdependence. On the surface, the self-sufficient monad—a substance without windows or doors, as Leibniz puts it—seems to be an image of extreme isolation, but the exact opposite is true. His “monadology” only works because we live in a universe where everything is connected to everything else and everything affects everything else; transculturally speaking, it is a version of Indra’s net. The philosopher writes, “This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance [i.e., monad] has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe” (1989: 220). Leibniz also plays on the tension between singularity and multiplicity inherent in the monad, and like Uexküll he is interested in perspective, writing, “Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of view of each monad” (221).
In “Inside the Whale,” Orwell ponders the idea of “books that ‘create a world of their own,’ as the saying goes”—books that, like Tropic of Cancer, “open up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar” (2009: 11). Burroughs’s Junky presents itself as exposé of the junk world (where there are not only junky habits and junky lingo but junk time and “junk cells” with their own “junk metabolism”). Ginsberg plays up this junk world in an early preface he wrote for the novel, which he promises will reveal a “vast underground life” and a “world of horrors.” The final pages of Junky prepare readers for the yagé world, which will soon become the world of Interzone in Naked Lunch, and so on. These are all instantiations of a “world-horizon come near” that Rob Wilson writes about in The Worlding Project (2007: 212). The zero degree formulation of the world-horizon in Beat writing is Dean Moriarty’s ecstatic “It’s the world! My God! It’s the world!” near the end of Kerouac’s On the Road, uttered after Sal and Dean cross the Mexican border. Such sweeping gestures always run the risk of erasing difference in the name of an essential oneness across time and space, but their sublime expansiveness is what also leads Beat writers to a more grounded or “situated” understanding of their world-historical moment of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics. This is especially true for Burroughs, whose worlded imaginary gives rise to complex textual geographies.
Worlding Burroughs
Barry Miles has been a prolific chronicler of the counterculture. I first encountered his work when I read The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957–1963 (2000). His still authoritative account of the Beats in Paris, much of which gets reprised in the “City of Light” section of Call Me Burroughs, has proven indispensable to understanding those years of fertile experiment at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, especially Burroughs’s intense collaboration with painter and writer Brion Gysin, whom he had met in Tangier but didn’t really connect with until Paris. Despite the earlier book’s strengths, in Beat Hotel Miles makes a key claim that seems to me to encapsulate the most reductive tendencies of so much Beat scholarship. Describing Burroughs’s experience of Paris and his refusal to humor Ginsberg by joining him on trips to museums and sightseeing excursions, Miles writes that “his was more a landscape of ideas, and in many ways he could have been living anywhere” (2000: 160). A theme running through Beat Hotel figures Paris as a missed opportunity for Burroughs and the other Beat writers living there. It turns out, for example, that Burroughs was oblivious to the presence of the Lettrist/Situationist group who also made the Latin Quarter their base of operations and were engaging in similarly provocative textual experiments. The parallel evolution of the cut-up method alongside the Situationist practice of détournement is really quite remarkable, evidence that the Beats were soaking up similar energies and looking to common ancestors in Dada and Surrealism.
The “landscape of ideas” thesis becomes more problematic when applied to Burroughs’s oeuvre. It means that a prominent setting like the Interzone of Naked Lunch gets read as a nightmarish abstraction or drug-induced hallucination rather than the satirical depiction of Tangier in the years immediately preceding and following Moroccan independence that it is. Since Miles’s Beat Hotel was first published, scholarship on Burroughs has made a spatial turn mirroring the “transnational turn” in literary and cultural studies more broadly. Brian Edwards, Oliver Harris, Allen Hibbard, and others have recently sought to restore a sense of place to the study of Burroughs’s work. These developments are echoed in the structure of Call Me Burroughs, which suggests a spatial turn in Miles’s thinking as well. His biography is organized chiefly by locale, with discrete sections on St. Louis (where Burroughs was born and raised), Mexico, New York, Tangier, London, and Lawrence, Kansas (where he lived for sixteen years before his death there in 1997), making Call Me Burroughs an itinerary as much as a chronology of the author’s life and work.
Call Me Burroughs is not the first biography of the author that Miles has written. That would be William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible, a slimmer volume published in 1992 that serves as a blueprint for the later book. (Miles inherited the project to write a follow-up from Burroughs’s longtime agent and partner James Grauerholz, who had compiled a vast archive but could not complete the undertaking.) The moniker refers to the persona Burroughs acquired while strung out on opiates in Tangier. In Call Me Burroughs, Miles writes:
He was famously known as el hombre invisible to the Spanish boys in Tangier; this came from a conscious effort on his part to blend in so well that people would not see him, as well as the fact that, in his junk phase, he was gray and spectral-looking. … Bill practiced getting from the Villa Muniria to the place de France without being seen. He walked down the street, his eyes swiveling, checking everybody out. … Sometimes he could get through a whole line of guides without anyone seeing him, which in Tangier is a very good test. (2013: 296)
The invisible Burroughs is unattached, non-aligned, and where Miles might have used the image to show how it gives the author’s work from and about Tangier a greater critical purchase, which it certainly does, Miles uses it instead to paper over the complexities of Burroughs’s attitude toward the momentous events that were unfolding around him. It is odd that in a book that assumes a kind of politics on Burroughs’s part—tied to a critique of power and language (its “viral” carrier) and a sincere belief in the potential of transgressive writing practices like the cut-up method “to do something about it” (335)—mostly sidesteps the much-debated question of the author’s “Moroccan politics.” In the pages just preceding the description of Burroughs cited above, Miles quotes a long passage from Naked Lunch dealing with the rise of nationalism in Morocco; he also quotes from the complicated and richly performative “Jihad Jitters” letter to Ginsberg (dated October 29, 1956, also the date of Tangier’s integration into Morocco—i.e., the end of the International Zone). But rather than follow this up with an acknowledgement of the difficult issues being raised in these texts, Miles cuts to el hombre invisible and thus performs a disappearing act of his own.
Readers of Naked Lunch are vexed by what seems like the author’s inability or unwillingness to confront the realities of Moroccan independence and the end of the International Zone. Those who read Naked Lunch through the earlier Yage Letters, as the palimpsestic nature of both texts demands, may instead see a complex engagement with colonial legacies in the Maghreb and around the world. Initially conceived as “Naked Lunch, Book III: In Search of Yage” (Junky and Queer were books I and II), Burroughs’s epistolary account details his 1953 trek through the upper Amazon in search of the mythical hallucinogen ayahuasca, or yagé.[4] He arrived in Bogotá in the midst of Colombia’s long-simmering civil war, and Yage Letters is full of barely concealed political content. The centerpiece of Yage is Burroughs’s expansive, even utopian, ayahuasca vision of a great Composite City “where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market” (2006: 50). Language and imagery from the Composite City sequence will reappear throughout his later works, notably in Naked Lunch, where the passage is reproduced nearly verbatim; the Composite City becomes the Interzone while still retaining its earlier referents and resonances from Yage. South America becomes North Africa, and similar examples proliferate across an oeuvre that, as Burroughs once told an interviewer, is “all one book” (1989: 86). Recognizing these resonances and mapping the composite geographies and composite texts they produce just might be the key to answering some persistently thorny questions that surround Burroughs’s work.
Burroughs’s Moroccan politics are equivocal, to be sure, but in Yage Letters he displays no such ambiguity. Through Lee, his epistolary alter ego, Burroughs repeatedly expresses his solidarity with the Liberals against the Conservatives, whom he aligns with the “dead weight of Spain” (2006: 10). The predation described throughout Yage is characteristically, for Burroughs, set in sexual terms but represents world-historical forces, which appear as the not-so-hidden underbelly of Wallerstein’s world-system, or a sinister variation on Wai Chee Dimock’s “deep time.” After his first, failed trek into Colombia’s Putumayo region, Burroughs recounts:
On my way back to Bogota with nothing accomplished. I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent backwoods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oil men, a Swedish Botanist, a Dutch Ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as The Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by the Cocoa Commission and Point Four). Finally I was prostrated by malaria. (16)
Not only have the power relations between predator and prey been inverted in Burroughs’s getting ripped off by the “local hustler,” but in one long parenthetical aside he lays bare the entire colonial and postcolonial history of oppression and exploitation in the Americas: economic, political, religious, and otherwise. And by including the “Swedish Botanist” and “Dutch Ethnographer” in his litany, he even foregrounds the notion of scientific knowledge as an epistemological violence that his own narrative is attempting to circumvent. It should come as no surprise that he recasts this history in terms of sexual violation. Both as an individual—“I thought I was getting that sweet backwoods ass”—and as an American citizen, Burroughs, through the persona (Lee) that emerges in his narration of Yage, writes himself into this chronicle of domination and abuse. The force of Burroughs’s critique derives in equal measure from his complicity and from the critical distance provided by his status as an “exile.”
At one point in the narrative, prevented from leaving the town of Puerto Asís while his tourist card is set in order, Lee muses, “If I was an active Liberal what could I do … aside from taking the place over at gun point? (2006: 22-23), implying that he is one in spirit or sympathy and that it wouldn’t take much to force him over the line. Later on in Yage Burroughs writes, “What we need is a new Bolivar who will really get the job done” (38). Burroughs’s statement is echoed in a (real) letter written to Ginsberg from South America: “Wouldn’t surprise me if I ended up with the Liberal guerillas” (1994: 159) which also anticipates his “Jihad Jitters” routine. Reflecting on the possibility of rioting and revolution in the streets of Tangier in a letter to Ginsberg dated October 29, 1956, Burroughs writes, “If they stage a jihad I’m gonna wrap myself in a dirty sheet and rush out to do some jihading of my own” (339).[5] He tells him earlier in the letter, “The possibility of an all-out riot is like a tonic, like ozone in the air. … I have no nostalgia for the old days in Morocco, which I never saw. Right now is for me” (337), and in a subsequent dispatch meant to allay Kerouac’s fears about his upcoming trip to Morocco, he presses, “I will say it again and say it slow: TANGER IS AS SAFE AS ANY TOWN I EVER LIVE IN. … ARABS ARE NOT VIOLENT. … Riots are the accumulated, just resentment of a people subjected to outrageous brutalities by the French cops used to strew blood and teeth over a city block in the Southern Zone” (349). At moments like these Burroughs is clearly sympathetic to the Moroccans’ anticolonial aspirations and their right to self-determination, but he can also be cynical and mocking. In Naked Lunch he portrays imagined riots as grotesque orgies of violence, yet even here Burroughs’s kaleidoscope of obscene violence is meant, as it was for Beat hero Antonin Artaud, to shock his audience out of its moral complacency and to confront the West with its original sin of imperialism.
Thinking transnationally means thinking about and beyond borders of all kinds, and Burroughs’s work keeps transgression front and center. Transnationalism as worlding is interested in transgressive acts; at the same time, it seeks to be transgressive: counterhegemonic, reading against the grain, writing against Empire and globalization transcendent. These last are tricky business, as Pease and others have noted, and a worlded critique needs to account for its own entanglements. Where transgression is concerned, one must ask who has the privilege, authority, and power to transgress—who gets denied passage, is the crossing undertaken willingly, and to what ends? Derrida claims in Rogues that transgression and sovereignty are always linked, and Beat writers, primarily though by no means exclusively white and male and carrying US passports, were at liberty to move about in the world in a way that most others are not. But it turns out that by and large the Beats were hip to these dynamics as well, making strategic use of their privilege in order to thematize cultural difference and comment incisively on Cold War geopolitics.
The performance of transgression is a productive way to read Burroughs because for him crossing physical borders always seems to precipitate other kinds of breakthroughs. In particular, Burroughs’s “travel writing” throws into sharp relief legacies of western imperialism and the United States’ expanding postwar footprint abroad: every travelogue is also about home. Travel writing in the West came into its own during the age of discovery and is closely linked to colonialism and the modern world-system.[6] In Yage Letters, the author describes being mistaken for “a representative of the Texas Oil Company traveling incognito” and thus “treated like visiting royalty.” He explains that the “Texas Oil Company surveyed the area a few years ago, found no oil and pulled out. But everyone in the Putumayo believes the Texas Company will return. Like the second coming of Christ” (2006: 24). What reads as a statement mocking the childlike faith of the locals is in fact directed against a long history of exploitation and oppression, an unbroken chain from the Spanish missionaries to United Fruit. And while he doesn’t seem to mind the benefits his mistaken identity afford him—he fails to correct anyone, after all—he uses these instances of misprision to launch a critique of US military and economic policy in Latin America.
In Burroughs’s writing, the author’s own privilege is consistently figured in the recurring type of the “ugly American,” a stock character who first appears in the routines of Queer and manifests a particularly virulent form in Naked Lunch with the characters Clem and Jody. But even where they appear identical with the author himself, the ugly American remains a textual construction on Burroughs’s part. As Oliver Harris argues, Burroughs is playing the ugly American. It may come off all too naturally, but it is a performance nonetheless. In Call Me Burroughs Miles writes about Burroughs’s long-held belief that he was inhabited by what he called the “ugly spirit,” a malevolent force that pursued him like a ghost. Miles’s biography opens, in fact, with a sweat lodge ceremony performed late in Burroughs’s life to try to rid him of the spirit once and for all. Burroughs felt that his was an especially difficult case, as Miles recounts:
Burroughs had warned the shaman of the challenge before the ceremony: He “had to face the whole of American capitalism, Rockefeller, the CIA … all of those, particularly Hearst.” Afterward he told Ginsberg, “It’s very much related to the American Tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That’s exactly what it is.” (2013: 2)
The ugly spirit corresponds on a psychic level to an ugly nation rapaciously at work in the world. “Particularly Hearst” indicates a theme Burroughs often sounds (Henry Luce a common variation): a news monopoly made all the more insidious by his conviction that to control information is to shape reality. The force of Burroughs’s critique derives from the fact that he doesn’t hesitate to implicate himself along the way. A scion of the Burroughs family (his grandfather invented the adding machine), his monthly allowance meant that he was at liberty to pursue writing as a career. Burroughs’s maternal uncle Ivy Lee is “considered to be the founder of public relations” and counted John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Joseph Goebbels among his clients and advisees (12-13). Coming to terms with these personal histories meant grappling with the cause and effect of American power in an American century.
The most profound forms of transgression in Burroughs are textual and have to do with the denaturing of form and genre. Yage Letters is exemplary here as well: although its epistolary presentation promises a direct, unvarnished account of the author’s ordeal in the Amazon, those reading Yage for vicarious drug kicks are likely to be disappointed. The book is about much more, and the “letters” mask a fiction. Large portions of the text did originate in real missives sent to Allen Ginsberg, as did much of Burroughs’s early work—he once notably told Ginsberg, referring to Naked Lunch, “Maybe the real novel is letters to you” (1994: 217)—but by the time Yage is finally published by City Lights in 1963, the text has been thoroughly cut-up and rearranged and redacted. Like so much of the author’s corpus, it has also been marked by a good deal of contingency. Burroughs settled on the epistolary after trying out other forms and genres. One early draft resembled an ethnographic report, and the “final” version of Yage still bears the traces of ethnography, which he lampoons to great effect.
Burroughs had studied anthropology as a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s and later took classes in Mesoamerican archaeology at Mexico City College. While in South America he even accompanied renowned Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Schultes on one of his Amazon expeditions. It was with Schultes that Burroughs records his first experience taking yagé, and an early, non-epistolary draft of the Yage manuscript looks very much like ethnography. Through this lens, Junky begins to read like ethnography as well (from a participant observer, no less), this one dealing with the heroin subcultures of New York and New Orleans. And readers will recognize something of the anthropological in Burroughs’s later depictions of Interzone, in “The Mayan Caper” episode from The Soft Machine (1966) and in his catalog of The Cities of the Red Night in that later novel.
Like Junky, whose prologue declares, “There is no key, no secret someone else has that he can give you,” Yage reveals and withholds simultaneously; Burroughs “scientific” account of ayahuasca and the rituals surrounding it may be as much a fiction as the letters themselves. Its opening lines suggest as much: Lee begins, “I stopped off here [Panamá] to have my piles out. Wouldn’t do to go back among the Indians with piles I figured” (2006, 3). With this frank admission, suggests Harris, the narrator immediately relinquishes any claim to objective distance or impartiality in what follows (2006a: xxv). At a deeper level, what this too-personal tale calls into question is the entire notion of scientific objectivity and transparent ethnographic knowledge. With Yage Burroughs anticipates the breakthroughs of poststructuralist anthropology by some years, whose practitioners (e.g., James Clifford, Clifford Geertz) would seek to account for the power differential inherent in the relationship between observer and subject, questioning the ideological assumptions that shape all knowledge of the Other.[7]
For many, “Beat politics” means Allen Ginsberg chanting Hare Krishna at a Vietnam War demonstration. In this context Burroughs’s ethos appears as a non-politics of absolute rejection or disciplined disavowal—the “Absolute ZERO” ([1960] 2001: 208) of the junky that Deleuze fixates on. But, as Deleuze knows, the greatest so-called nihilists (Dostoevsky, Nietzsche come to mind) are the most profoundly affirmative, and Burroughs does not share Ahab’s will to death. His affirmation lies in the performative creation of transgressive communities like the whole “wild boys” mythology of the late 1960s and the queer utopias imagined in Cities of the Red Night (1981). In Miles’s biography, Burroughs’s project extends well beyond the written word and emerges as a transformational politics of the everyday. His remark to Bowie that “the artists should take over this planet because they’re the only ones who can make anything happen” is a version of Bürger’s “integration of art into the praxis of life”—the avant-garde attempt to redefine both art and politics simultaneously.
At the heart of Burroughs’s work is a constant vigilance against “Control” in all its aspects. Significantly, these are often figured by Burroughs as a kind of colonization, whether it be the parasite of language (his famous “word virus”), possession by the “ugly spirit,” or a more historically situated encounter. Cities of the Red Night, a beautiful and important book that Burroughs worked on through much of the 1970s, tells the story a loose confederation of sixteenth-century outlaws bent on toppling Spanish and British rule in the Americas. The novel’s layered plot unfolds in the present as well, where a shadowy organization plots world domination from its South American headquarters, and I am again reminded of Artaud, who envisioned a first production of the Theatre of Cruelty to be called The Conquest of Mexico and justified it by writing, “Ce sujet a été choisi … à cause de son actualité” (This subject has been chosen … because it is of the present moment” ([1938] 1964: 196). Poised upon the world-historical moment of decolonization—the constant “present” of Burroughs’s writing—Burroughs is perfectly positioned to launch a postcolonial critique of Empire’s new hegemony.
Miles’s biography came at a propitious moment in Burroughs and Beat studies. In 2014 Burroughs’s centennial year was marked with museum and gallery exhibitions, readings, performances, film screenings, and several major conferences, all proof of his continued relevance not just in the literary world but also among visual and performance artists, musicians, filmmakers, and troublemakers of all kinds. For scholars of Burroughs’s work, the past decade has seen a flowering of historically minded, materially grounded, and theoretically capacious criticism. This has in large measure been made possible by the assiduous research and recovery work of editors, archivists, and critics including Miles, James Grauerholz, Bill Morgan, and especially Oliver Harris, whose recent string of “redux” editions is making legible the labyrinthine textual histories of so much of what Burroughs wrote. Amid these developments, and despite some missed opportunities, Call Me Burroughs will deservedly become the standard reference on the author’s life for scholars and fans alike. Its greatest contribution lies in uncovering the experiences and above all the places that animated a body of work as significant as that of anyone writing in the latter half of the twentieth century.
* * * * *
Notes
[1] The epithet refers to Ted Morgan’s early biography, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, first published in 1988.
[2] Bowie, who based his Ziggy Stardust aesthetic in part on Burroughs’s 1969 novel The Wild Boys, is among the many musicians inspired by Burroughs.
[3] Whether one agrees with Pease’s basic contention—and more is at stake, after all, than disciplinary boundaries—probably has something to do with whether one agrees with Hardt and Negri that globalization and Empire’s new order are in fact liberatory because diffuse power engenders proliferating sites and modes of resistance while the totalizing pressure of capital’s global reach brings us that much closer to universal emancipation.
[4] “Naked Lunch, Book III” is the title Burroughs gave when he published the “Composite City” letter in Black Mountain Review in 1953. See Oliver Harris 2006b for a complete textual history.
[5] October 29, 1956, also happened to be the date of Tangier’s official reintegration into a newly independent Morocco and the end of the International Zone.
[6] It was during the Enlightenment that Denis Diderot and the philosophes began to see the critical potential of the travelogue: Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) purports to “supplement” the just-published Voyage autour du monde by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe.
[7] James Clifford has written about “ethnographic surrealism,” particularly in relation to Georges Bataille and the Documents group.
References
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Artaud, Antonin. (1938) 1964. Le théâtre et son double. Paris: Gallimard.
Buell, Lawrence. 2007. “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of US Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale.” In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 227-48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Burroughs, William. (1960) 2001. “Postscript … Wouldn’t You?” In Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, edited by James Grauerholz and Barry Miles, 207-10. New York: Grove.
——. 1994. Letters, Vol. 1: 1945-1959. Edited by Oliver Harris. New York: Penguin.
——. 1989. Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Edited by Allen Hibbard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Burroughs, William, and David Bowie. 1974. “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman.” Interview by Craig Copetas, Rolling Stone, February 28. www.rollingstone.com/music/news/beat-godfather-meets-glitter-mainman-19740228.
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Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification & The Limits of Realist Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
Peter Knight, Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
Reviewed by Matt Seybold
Matthew Arnold spends much of Civilization in the United States (1888) savaging the nation’s literary tastes. Arnold derides “the glorification of ‘the average man,’” the “addiction to ‘the funny man,’ who is a national misfortune,” and, in case it isn’t abundantly clear who he’s talking about, “the Quinionian humour of Mr. Mark Twain, so attractive to the Philistine of the more gay and light type” (Arnold 1888: 92, 177). Twain read Arnold’s book shortly after it was published and felt “a friendly word was needed in our defense” (Clemens 1888: 5). This he offered in an open letter to the President of Yale University.
The conceit of the letter is that the honorary degree Yale had recently awarded him is “sufficient” to relieve Twain of the temptation to publicly rebuke Arnold. He speculates as to what kind of immodest and unbecoming things he “might” have said, but “since you have rehabilitated us it is not necessary” (5), he writes, just before copying this “private” correspondence to his local Hartford Courant. From there the letter circulated virally through the newspapers Arnold had recently recriminated, as Twain knew it would, further feeding the native “addiction” to his sarcastic wit.
It is a master class in the art of trolling.
But the Yale letter also contains a sincere apologia for the brand of literature appearing in the U.S. periodicals Arnold denounced, like Atlantic Monthly. Twain’s letter was ingeniously designed to “remind the world that ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling” with “one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it – the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence…whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges, and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties” (5).
In the final two decades of his career, as his celebrity continued to grow, Twain pursued this singular purpose more aggressively, focusing especially on the shams and pretentions of colonialism and cultural imperialism. It was as if Matthew Arnold’s face was pasted to his dartboard. Many of his fellow novelists, some of whom he expressly trained in “this sort of warfare,” took their fight to a “kindred swindle,” and even won a few skirmishes against the likes of J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller. The concurrence of muckraking realism and progressive political economy at the turn of the twentieth century is a notable example of how “the novel has,” as Alison Shonkwiler puts it, “at various times in its history, aimed to destabilize capitalist reality” (Shonkwiler 2017: xxx).
Both Shonkwiller, in The Financial Imaginary (2017), and Peter Knight, in Reading the Market (2016), present U.S. literature engaged in a “sort of warfare” with financialization. It is not, as one might expect, a conflict driven by difference. Rather, it is a dispute over shared territory, a border war mobilized by concordances in how financiers and novelists “think,” as Shonkwiler frames it; that is, how they deal with the representational limitations imposed upon them by their prescribed mediums, their imagined audiences, and their own subjectivities. Knight shows how genres of financial capitalism, from the ticker tape itself to conspiracy theories aimed at influencing investment patterns, depend upon readers whose literacy is developed through popular forms. Financial media must, therefore, borrow liberally from familiar narratives, both fictional and factual, until the reading habits of the nation are no longer “merely a passive reflection of an existing economic reality but part of the cultural armature that helps create it” (Knight 2016: 15).
Crucial to both accounts is the inherent “fictiveness,” “fictionality,” and “fictitiousness” of finance. The imaginative and speculative pretexts to literary and financial forms create grounds for analogies between them. Both scholars explore these parallels, but are most interested in whether (and how) the mutual territory of the literary and financial imaginary endows literature, particularly realist literature, with the capacity to reveal and resist the totalizing forces of financialization. Because of the overlap between these crafts, Shonkwiler argues, critical readers of novels may be better prepared to interrogate financial forms. Knight shows that nineteenth-century fiction writers sought to create competing representations of the financial economy to expose and unsettle the “cultural armature” upon which it rests.
For Shonkwiler, it is a kamikaze “sort of warfare.” Novelists have increasingly been willing to highlight the counterfactuality and constructedness of their own works, and by doing so reveal the counterfactuality and constructedness of other mediums, like financial products, which prefer to evade such transparency. For Twain and Henry James, the demystification of British cultural imperialism was achieved in part by ridiculing the romantic precedents to their own preferred genre: the novel. In many of the “economic novels” of 1890s and 1900s, realists would exchange the romantic hero as object of demystification for what Shonkwiler calls “economic virtue,” the strained effort to “maintain the integrity of the self in the face of gambling temptations” (2). Knight traces the manufacture of such virtue through corporate publicists’ and neoclassical economists’ efforts to glorify greed with shallow appropriations of Adam Smith, efforts pilloried in Upton Sinclair’s The Moneychangers (1908) and Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901).
According to Shonkwiler, that generation of economic novels “marks the historical end of one kind of capitalist realism, where market value is grounded in character, and the beginning of another kind of capitalist realism, where character and history are both grounded in the market” (29). Most of her book focuses on this second kind. Post-45 novels may not be conventionally associated with realism, but possess “the persistence of a realist narrative impulse towards demystification” (xii). The novels of Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Jane Smiley “revive the premodernist interest in demystification” (xv) while remaining characteristically postmodern in their mimetic and metafictional disembowelings, which make them more effective “tools to critique finance and to resist the narrowings of its imaginary” (127). These novelists are experts at drawing attention to the intentional ambiguity, abstraction, arbitrariness, elusion, and contradiction in their own works. When they depict financialization, they bring that expertise to bear.
Shonkwiler and Knight agree that financialization relies on processes of mystification and abstraction which have reached an absurd precipice in recent years. “Structural pressures of abstraction…that were emergent in the nineteenth century,” Shonkwiler writes, “are now fully articulated in the twenty-first” (xx). Since 2008 finance has been an emperor with no clothes. The fictiveness of finance capital now stands so ludicrously exposed that even those who benefit from its sustained pretenses seem shocked that their imaginary wealth continues to reproduce itself and be accepted in exchange for commodities and political favors. They are reduced, as Leigh Claire la Berge has shown, to increasingly outrageous affectations of counterintuitive intelligence. If the public recognizes the financial system is as automated and autarchic as it seems in the works of contemporary muckrakers like Michael Lewis and Matt Taibbi, the persuasive illusions of economic virtue which justify their compensation and, indeed, their existence, are jeopardized. “If we’re so rich, why aren’t I smart” is the logos of 21st-century banking executives.
Knight focuses on how the elaborate representational and rhetorical architecture of finance capitalism, now crumbling, was erected. Even when reading nineteenth-century novels, Shonkwiler describes finance in the “fully articulated” terms of our late stage, with a critical eye towards how the well-intentioned efforts of earlier generations of realists failed to adequately antagonize the ascendant hegemon. Theodore Dreiser, for instance, accepts fictive finance and the rhetoric of economic virtue with an ambivalence that is easily read as endorsement. While Knight also regards texts of the Gilded Age as productively conversant with financialization in the New Gilded Age, which has “reached a level of abstraction and opacity that is hard to comprehend, let alone regulate” (255), aside from his introduction and epilogue, he remains embedded in the emergent financial culture of the nineteenth century. His hope is to support critiques of contemporary financialization by “demystify[ing] the logically prior notion of the market as an entity that is both abstract and yet curiously animated” (12). He tracks a series of market metaphors common to financial genres of the Gilded Age explicitly designed to combat the impression that financial wealth is purely imaginary.
Knight’s interpretation of familiar literary works – William Dean Howells’s Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857), Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) – would fit naturally into Shonkwiler’s account, as he shows them allegorizing the dematerialization of U.S. economic infrastructure via securitization. But Knight is more insistent on how these novels and other popular literary forms competed with a series of new mediums and genres created explicitly to depict the “financescape” (10). Several populist publications – James Gordon Bennett’s “Money Market” columns, Puck magazine’s political cartoons, and sensational memoirs of market immorality – were designed to both profit from the public fascination with finance and warn readers that finance was a rigged game. Others – counterfeit detectors, stock-picking manuals, pseudo-scientific economic pamphlets, and bucket shop advertisements – enticed amateur investors by presenting speculation as Americanization: a challenging, democratic enterprise. Becoming a market “insider,” like becoming American (at least according to Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie), was simply a matter of effort and ingenuity. Anybody could learn how to “read the market” through newspapers reports, government documents, tip sheets, and, above all, the ticker tape.
Through Knight’s account we see how the fictions of finance were perpetuated despite being persistently interrogated by literary forms, some evolving expressly to pursue that purpose. The warfare between popular literature and Wall St. has been waged in US for as long as either has been a recognizable institution. Many of the authors closely associate with US literary realism were keenly aware that they were losing ground. As Edith Wharton recalls it, even after decades exploring “the deep connection between the personal and financial realms” in the era of emerging capitalist hegemony, Henry James felt he was only scratching the surface of this “impenetrable mystery” (Knight 2016: 190). Knight argues that the elusiveness which frustrated James was produced not only by the sometimes purposeful complexity and obscurity of rapidly-developing securities markets, financial institutions, and commercial relationships, but also by finance capital’s propensity to invent and inspire new methods and mediums expressly to confuse and compete with existing modes of representation.
In the final scene of James’s “The Real Thing” (1892), a pair of penniless aristocrats, having failed as figure models for a series of dimestore novels the narrator is illustrating, beg to be kept on as hired help, replacing the housekeeper and valet who have proven superior impersonators of noble characters in spite of their rank. Pressed nearly to starvation, Major Monarch and Lady Monarch, lacking any marketable trade, are reduced to pleading for menial employment. “If my servants were my models, my models might be my servants,” the narrator muses, “They would reverse the parts” (NY Sun 1892: 2). It is an almost perfect allegory for the triumph of capitalism over the feudal system. Almost.
James expects US readers to relish the parable of a transatlantic marketplace that annihilates titles and evaluates everybody according to the exchange value of their labor. His image of high-toned Monarchs “emptying my slops” strikes a burlesque note appropriate to the U.S. newspapers in which the story was syndicated. But the triumphalism of “The Real Thing” is marred by the evident regret expressed in the story’s final lines.
As the illustrator pays the Monarchs “a sum of money to go away,” he admits that despite the expense and delay caused by their worthless attempts to serve him, he is “content to have paid the price – for the memory” (2). This narrator, like James, recognizes that the death of aristocracy is also the destruction of the patronage system that sustained literary and visual art in Europe for half a millennium. In its absence, artists will be forced to submit to the demands of the masses, demands unlikely to be aligned with the tastes and talents of the artist over the course of a long career. The narrator, for instance, would prefer to paint portraits, but can only make an adequate living by drawing and, even in this medium, is limited by the preferences of publishers rushing to satisfy U.S. consumers clamoring, ironically, for romantic tales of feudal Europe.
With this hint of nostalgic sympathy for the Monarchs, James signals both reluctant acceptance of the ascendant logic of capitalism and reticence about the future it promises. When the Monarchs initially propose that their gentility is “the real thing,” it seems a comically desperate cry of entitlement. But James does not let his readers revel in the tidy poetic justice of the Monarchs coup de grace. Instead he provokes them to submit their new world order to the same litmus test. Is exchange capital any more durably precious than hereditary titles? Is a society divided by wealth any less arbitrarily organized? When a financial oligarch claims to possess “the real thing,” does his claim have any more intrinsic merit?
The St. Louis Dispatch was apparently so frustrated by the irreconcilability of James’s remorseful final lines with the fable of American Exceptionalism promised by the preceding episode, they “corrected” the final word of the story, changing memory to money. The tautological phrase thus produced – “to have paid the price – for the money” (STL Post-Dispatch: 26) – is transactional, rather than existential. In James’s manuscript, “price” is metaphorical, referring to potential damage done to the illustrator’s marketability by subtle aesthetic alterations precipitated by sympathizing too deeply with the Monarchs. “Price” in the Post-Dispatch version asserts a strict relationship between the “sum of money” paid to get rid of the Monarchs and the profits to be generated by securing a contract for additional books in the popular series. The Post-Dispatch, in a word, rescues the narrator’s economic virtue, his native allegiance to the laissez-faire logic of neoclassical economics, a logic which insists that faith in future returns is sound justification for financial decisions, that individuals are exchangeable “human resources,” and that the correlation between private accumulation and public benefit need not be carefully interrogated.
As with Shonkwiler’s reading of “The Jolly Corner”(1909), in “The Real Thing” James “presents a problem of defining self-interest at a moment when older forms of economic selfhood appear superannuated” (Shonkwiler 2017: 13). He stood, in 1892, at the intersection of two epochs, one organized by the divine right of kings, the other by the divine justice of markets. That the delusion of the former seemed apparent and absurd did not ensure that devotion to the latter was any more rational. James was unenthusiastic about the “science” of capitalism and the society it promised, but he was appropriately awed by the popularity and persuasive power of its fictions.
Reading The Market and The Financial Imaginary are part of a subfield of post-2008 econo-literary criticism which appears, as Shonkwiler poetically puts it, “deep in the ‘autumn’ stage of the American century” (xxi). We stand, in this epochal moment, revolted by the steady march of market imperialism and its associated atrocities and hypocrisies, as apparent to us as King Leopold and Edward VII’s were to James and Twain. These scholars also provoke us, however, to turn a skeptical eye towards the Utopian promises of finance capitalism’s would-be usurpers. It remains uncertain “whether the logic of abstract value and equivalence can be coopted for less violent and antisocial ends” (xxi). What new simulacra and ideological abstractions will successfully make themselves personal and persuasive?
Knight emphasizes Wharton’s claim that James “often bewailed to me his total inability to use the ‘material,’ financial and industrial, of modern American life” (Knight 2016: 176). But James’s oeuvre shows that he did in fact mine an extraordinary amount of material from this supposedly inaccessible territory. The continuous and often comical breaches of patriarchal decorum by obscenely wealthy Americans are the means by which James shows the erosion of European class structures. That which once seemed the very essence of reality, a set of coded behaviors by which power relationships were performed and understood by the powerful, came to signify nothing except the obsolescence of those who cared about those codes.
Finance offered an alternative code. It offered an “impersonal market,” as Knight puts it, “made intelligible by concretizing its abstractions” (256). That financial representations of reality are frequently delegitimized by crises of economic confidence during which “all that had been taken as solid and dependable melt[s] so quickly into thin air” (170) does not necessarily make its claim to realism any more or less specious than what preceded it, or what follows. Or, as Shonkwiler reminds us: “It is important to forestall the conclusion that more abstract means less real” (Shonkwiler 2017: xxiv).
Matt Seybold is Assistant Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics.
Clemens, Samuel. 1888. “Mark Twain Accepts.” Hartford Courant, June 29.
James, Henry. 1892. “The Real Thing.” New York Sun, April 10.
James, Henry. 1892. “The Real Thing.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 10.
Knight, Peter. 2016. Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Gilded Age America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
Le Berge, Leigh Claire. 2014. Scandals and Abstractions: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s. New York: Oxford.
Shonkwiler, Alison. 2017. The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification & the Limits of Realist Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
This review is the first in a three-part series on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. boundary 2 also published 
Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017)
Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford University Press, 2017)
Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification & The Limits of Realist Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)