Author: boundary2

by Tanya Agathocleous

A work of the political imagination rhetorically designed to reach beyond its local context and history, Jyotirao Phule’s anti-caste pamphlet “Slavery” might be seen as an ideal test-case for the strategic presentism of V21 methodology, insofar as this aims to draw formal connections across historical contexts and national traditions while highlighting the political urgencies that connect past and present.

Phule, a reformer who campaigned for lower caste and women’s rights, first published “Slavery” in 1873 in Marathi, along with an English preface that highlighted its central argument. Now considered a foundational text of the Dalit movement, “Slavery” was impactful because of its revisionist understanding of caste as a system of exploitation rather than religion or biology, and the ways it used this insight to lay the groundwork for transnational solidarities by drawing connections among caste in the Indian context, British colonialism, and American slavery.

The pamphlet’s use of two languages underscores its desire to speak across national contexts. Its full title, “Slavery (in the Civilized British Government under the Cloak of Brahminism),” links the caste system to colonial exploitation, while a dedication on the title page makes a further connection to America’s recent civil war and abolitionism: “To the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thralldom” (Phule, 1873: 25).

The success of its strategy of linking these different contexts is evidenced by the enduring appeal of this type of rhetorical gesture and of the pamphlet itself.  On the occasion of his 2010 visit to India, for example, U.S. President Barack Obama was presented with a copy of Phule’s influential work. The politician who bestowed it upon him, Chhagan Bhujbal, was at the time Minister of Public Works for the state of Maharashtra and an activist in the Dalit movement. His act was one of the more direct appeals to the U.S. President made in Phule’s name during his Indian visit, but there were more indirect and informal ones as well, in the form of “open letters” and appeals posted on Indian blogs and social media sites. One of these, a Facebook page named “Mahatma Jyotirao Phule hardcore fans,” displayed a letter to Obama that asked him to give a biography of Lincoln to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a preemptive response to Modi’s habit of bestowing the Bhagavad Gita upon visiting dignitaries. Labeling themselves victims of the Hindu religious text, historically used as a rationale for caste hierarchies, the authors of the open letter call upon Obama to enlighten Modi via Lincoln, and to look upon both the Bhagavad Gita and Modi’s politics with suspicion (see https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=604902749582245&story_fbid=796515553754296).

While Obama might seem an unexpected addressee for a local group of Dalit activists in India, their gambit in posting the letter makes sense in light of the historical import of Phule’s pamphlet. Though separated in time by almost a century and a half, Phule’s work and the Phule fans Facebook page operate similarly, for both address the U.S. in order to “jump scale” from the national to the international stage with the goal of embarrassing local leadership and drawing wider attention to the inequities of India’s caste system.[i] Both denaturalize this system by associating it with racial injustice in a starkly different national context while creating a narrative of progress in which this injustice might be defeated: the North’s victory in the Civil War and Obama’s victory against American racism as the first black president are invoked as signs that the U.S. might serve as a model for overcoming structural inequity in India. In these parallel examples of Afro-Asian solidarity, transnational comparison is used both to suggest new forms of alliance across national and historical contexts and to undermine essentialist understandings of race and caste.

In recent work on the history of pre- and post-Bandung politics, critics have argued that this type of transnational comparative move relies on an over-simplification and idealization of one context in order to advocate for change in the other; in both these cases, for example, U.S. racism post-Civil War to the present is overlooked by the Indian writers so that American racial history might be seen as exemplary.[ii] I suggest, however, that we might think differently of the form and function of this kind of comparison. Rather than seeing Phule and the Facebook page authors as naïve interpreters of American history, which they were unlikely to be given their respective contexts, we might see them as canny authors of a kind of counterfactual history. In reading the outcome of the Civil War and Obama’s presidency as if they might serve as unmitigated instances of racial justice, they create a utopian narrative paradoxically rooted in the real world, albeit at a hazy distance—a new American past that might serve as inspiration for a new Indian future.

Bringing to light what Lisa Lowe calls “the intimacy of four continents” in its linking of slavery, empire, and caste across space and time, Phule’s text travels from nineteenth-century Maharashtra through the twentieth century—inflecting the vocabulary and goals of Afro-Asian political alliances along the way—to be put directly into the hands of its ideal interlocutor as an uncanny object: one that throws into relief the twisted historical logic that made Obama, in 2010, at once a metonym for the history and transcendence of American slavery and for the neoimperial world order.

References

Burton, Antoinette. 2012. Brown Over Black: Race and the Politics of Political Citation. Delhi: Three Essays Collective.

Phule, Jotirao. 1873. “Slavery” In Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, edited by G.P. Deshpande. Delhi: LeftWord Books (2002).

Slate, Nico. 2012. Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United State and India. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Notes

[i] The idea of “jumping scale” is taken from Neil Smith’s essay, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographic Scale” Social Text 33 (1992): 54-81. Smith defines “jumping scale” as the practice of dissolving “spatial boundaries that are largely imposed from above and that contain rather than facilitate (the) production and reproduction of everyday life” (60). I are grateful to Stéphane Robolin for drawing our attention to the usefulness of the term for describing the interventions of colonial subjects at events like the URC through his analysis of John Tengo Jabavu’s work there in a paper given at the Universal Races Congress of 1911 Symposium at Rutgers University in 2015.

[ii] See, for example, Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism and Antoinette Burton, Brown Over Black: Race and the Politics of Political.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Tanya Agathocleous is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY.  She is the author of Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2011), and is currently editing the new Penguin edition of Great Expectations.

 

by Caroline Levine

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

V21 invites us to take stock of historicism and its aspirations. The original manifesto singles out “positivist historicism”—that is, one particular version of historicism. Positivism assumes that genuine knowledge can come only through observation. It puts its emphasis on accuracy and data collection. A positivist epistemology assumes a separation of the knower from the known—a distance or gap between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. A definition of a positivist historicism, then, might characterize it as the joint insistence on the observable data of the historical past—its objects, its records, its surfaces, its articulations—and a steadfast effort to separate that past from the interests and values of the present.

While it does not capture all historicisms, this definition does seem to me to describe many historicists at work today: those who labor to set the self aside in order to “speak with the dead,” to gain some understanding of the radical otherness of past through a careful attention to artifacts and documents. The positivist historicist understands presentism as not only an epistemological but also an ethical error: refusing grand theories and universalizing starting points, it encourages humility in and through specific observations of the dense alterity of the past.

It might of course seem ungenerous to single out this well-meaning approach, which is respectful to its core, but it is precisely positivism’s very pairing of obviousness and generosity that makes it difficult to defamiliarize. And yet, many of us who participate in the V21 Collective agree that the assumptions of positivist historicism have come to dominate literary scholarship as unquestioned norms, and have foreclosed other potentially valuable alternatives.

The conversation gathered here in boundary 2 explores one of the most foundational positivist assumptions. The effort to capture the specificity of the Victorians requires us twenty-first century scholars to recognize them as other and therefore to see them as belonging to a time cleanly distinct from our own. Broken into periods and nations, moments and regions, history looks like a sequence of delimited boxes, each to be understood separately and on its own terms. One crucial organizing principle for positivism, then, is its insistence on separability—subject from object, one culture from another, Victorians from the twenty-first century. This principle immediately raises all kinds of new questions: where do we locate the breaks; how do we know them as breaks; and how are they generated? And even more importantly, perhaps, what do the separable units of positivist historicism enable and what do they foreclose? What alternative forms of thought, knowledge, and historical relationship might open up other possibilities?

Deliberately refusing the strict separation between past and present, the V21 contributors here offer up deliberately strange and experimental chronologies: the not-yet, the thought that can take shape across texts from more than one historical moment, the knowledge of the past that we produce in order to produce ourselves, the past literally compressed into the present, the creative anachronism that could help us to reinvent ourselves. For Jesse Taylor and Jesse Rosenthal, history takes place in recursive and compressed forms, the past folded in on the present, the present flipped back into the past. Ellis Hanson and Anna Kornbluh do not presuppose humility and accuracy as primary values, but explore instead pleasure and utopian possibility—in place of a documentary looking backward, they invite a scholarly making with its eye always on the future.

What if history were not carved into separable units but understood to curl or bend? Hanson invites us to think with kink. Drawn from a Dutch word meaning a twist or curl in a rope, kink offers us history as a strange looping, where sudden hitches—kinks in the timeline—twist  presents into pasts and vice versa. Kink does not lend itself to moralizing; it does not pathologize. Most of all, kink is all about reveling in a vast and creative range of erotic pleasures: delirious, exploratory pleasures. It relies not on the longing that comes with separation but on twists, intensifications, reverberations.

In short, kink is not only an appealing way to imagine an erotics of art; it also implies a set of possibilities for approaching the past. Where desire is teleological, seeking to cross the boundaries of distance to reach the other, the tempos of kink can be repetitive, recursive, and interruptive. And where queer sets itself against a dominant other, taking “homophobia as its epistemological center of gravity,” kink pluralizes, travels across sites, revels in creativity and expansive fantasy.

Kinky historicism brings with it not only strange tempos but also strange materialisms: the planet’s atmosphere warmed into the future by ancient fossil fuels activated by industrial capitalism; the transhistorical necessity of built structuring artifices to enable human life—the recurring built environments of the zoon politikon; and the body as capable of present intensities not inevitably tied back to a primal scene or oppressive status quo.

Kink also calls into question the politics of resistance, which typically relies on the chronology of the break rather than the loop. In the present, so the story goes, the critic sees how oppressive structures, invented in the past, have now become so settled into place that they seem almost effortlessly to dominate us—they have that feeling of inevitability to them. It is only by puncturing or toppling them that we critics can create the promise of a better future. And so the three-part chronology goes: first, at some particular past moment, a structure emerged; then it got so established that it can now operate its oppressive force almost invisibly; next it must be revealed and then broken for the sake of progress into the future.

But what if, as Rosenthal argues, we scholars are producing the very past against which we imagine our own capacity for freedom—can we really understand ourselves as engaged in the labor of rupture and resistance? And what if, as Kornbluh insists, there is no social life without structure—law, architecture—which means that structure is not there to be smashed but will ongoingly organize us, endlessly made and remade?

In this iteration of a collecting thinking, V21 seeks to put kinks in the straight line of historical periodization that relies on the separation between then and now, between self and other. We ask whether we might not gain from setting aside the chronology of the unit in favor of the politics of the not yet, the kink in the timeline, the repetitive, recursive patterning of a history that does not make the cut.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University.  She is the author of The Serious Pleasures of Suspense (University of Virginia, 2003), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (Blackwell, 2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton UP, 2015).   

by Jesse Oak Taylor

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

One of the questions that arose at the V21 Symposium on “Presentism, Form, and the Future of History” was what the “V” actually means. What, if anything is distinctive about the “Victorian” era, especially if one expands the purview beyond the literary and historical culture of a single nation? With this question in mind, the stratigraphic debate over the Anthropocene makes interesting reading because it opens into a world of planetary synchronization in which the Victorian past becomes not merely proximate but densely, literally, atmospherically, and combustively present in the substance of a shared geological moment.

The Anthropocene concept has generated a great deal of discussion in the humanities, much of it around the definition of its titular agent, though scholars have also taken up the implications of different proposed dates: 1784, with James Watt’s steam engine and the shift to fossil fuels; 1945, with the nuclear tests and beginning of the “Great Acceleration” in population growth and fossil fuel use; 1610, with the conquest of the Americas and the “Columbian Exchange” of biota between the Old World and the New, coupled with the deaths of 50 million Native Americans in a dying so great it is legible in polar ice core data—just to name the most prominent candidates (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Lewis and Maslin 2015; Zalasiewicz et al 2015).

The dating question may be particularly compelling to humanists because of the way that it echoes debates about periodization within our own disciplines while at the same time reinvigorating and reanimating contemporary interest in particular historical moments. For example, Steve Mentz (2015) notes, “the earlier date catches this Shakespeare professor’s eye: 1610 is three years after the founding of the Jamestown colony and one year before the first staging of The Tempest. Amid the glories of the English Renaissance sits an ecological spike. When Sir Walter Raleigh graced Queen Elizabeth’s court and Shakespeare’s dramas were first played, our Anthropocene nightmare began.” Such intersections reveal a widespread pattern of coincidence in Anthropocene history. The invention of the steam engine coincides with the formulation of the geologic record and the science of stratigraphy itself in the work of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, Thus, dating the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution means that there has never been a scientifically articulated geologic record without the human species operating as an agent within that record. In other words, the science of stratigraphy itself becomes coincident with the Anthropocene. These alignments are so pervasive in Anthropocene history that I am increasingly unsatisfied with viewing them as coincidences, but rather suggest that they be read as symptoms, subjective, partial glimpses into the Anthropocene’s emergence.

In this brief paper, I hypothesize that these points of coincidence, or systemic convergence, between the Anthropocene as material condition and the epistemological categories within which it registers, are manifestations of the global synchrony that is an integral feature of the Anthropocene as an enfolding of human history within geophysical processes. The Anthropocene challenges us to track such moments of synchronization, situating acts of interpretation within myriad, intersecting Earth Systems from the biosphere and atmosphere to global capitalism and world literature. The Anthropocene concept is rooted in Earth Systems science, which is to say the study of the Earth as a whole, as single system. This feature is sometimes elided in the Anthropocene concept’s transfer to the humanities, where “geologic agency” or “species being” have attracted more commentary than questions of scale and system (for example, see the emphasis on geologic agency in Chakrabarty 2009). In the stratigraphic debate, the question of planetary scale surfaces in the requirement that the trace marking the entrance to the Anthropocene must be globally synchronous. As the members of the Anthropocene Working Group responsible for proposing a formal designation for the epoch explain, “In defining any unit within the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, perhaps the most important single aspect is the fixing of its boundary (by convention, its lower boundary within strata, or its beginning within time) so that it provides, as far as is possible, a synchronous and effectively correlatable level within strata worldwide” (Zalasiewicz et al 197). To qualify for a GSSP (Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point), or “Golden Spike,” the trace in question must speak to a shift in the Earth System that is true everywhere, rather than occurring at a single point and then spreading outward. This stipulation is counterintuitive because it seems to redefine the very notion of an “event,” which is usually locatable by it specificity in time and space. How can something occur everywhere at once?

One answer is atmospheric. The Anthropocene is a lithic inscription, a tale of stone combusted into atmosphere and atmosphere condensed back into stone. The dispersive, circulatory quality of the atmosphere, coupled with the fact that there is only one (since its earliest usage the term has referred to the gaseous envelope surrounding a planet or other heavenly body) mean that atmospheric dispersal becomes the vehicle for an event’s global reach. The eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815 ostensibly occurred in Indonesia, but it also occurred everywhere and remains inscribed in such works as Byron’s “Darkness” and Shelley’s Frankenstein (Wood 2014). The volcanoes of industrial production first erupted in Northern England in the 18^th century, but their traces are also legible in Antarctic ice cores. The vaporous quality of industrial capitalism as it annihilates space and transforms solidity into air also entwines it within planetary processes from the moment of its inception (Menely 2014; Moore 2015 169-92; Taylor 2016).

Another answer is compression. The Anthropocene is a lithic inscription, a tale of life compressed into stone, combusted into atmosphere, and then re-compressed into the stratigraphic record where it becomes a trace legible only in distinction from the strata that surround it. Despite the fact that the Anthropocene working group is struggling to follow standard stratigraphic procedure in weighing the evidence of the Anthropocene against that of other epochs, a crucial difference remains: the duration of the “event” itself. Part of what enables global synchrony within the stratigraphic record is the vast timescales compressed therein. As the Working Group notes,  “in the Cambrian example, there was a wide choice of candidate indicators spanning a range of ~15 million years” (Zalasiewicz et al 198). To distinguish between 1784 and 1945 in stratigraphic terms is thus to parse a difference so infinitesimal that it would not ordinarily register as a difference at all. It may well be true that “it was from the mid-20th century that the worldwide impact of the accelerating Industrial Revolution became both global and near-synchronous” (Zalasiewicz et al 201). However, rather than attempting to decide between the Industrial Revolution and the Great Acceleration, it seems to me more productive to consider both within a single, synchronous event that marks the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene based a sudden, unprecedented vaporization of subterranean carbon stores into Earth’s atmosphere.

Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, the stratigraphers of the distant future might well perceive the fossil fuel era as a single catastrophic stratum rather than a string of discernable events. This is a profoundly anti-humanist vision of history, perhaps even more so than the stratigraphic debate itself acknowledges, in because the anthropos in question is not exclusively “human” but rather a vast, multi-species, multi-substance assemblage made up of coal, capital, human labor, atmospheric dynamics, and sedimentary processes. Even more troublingly, the timescales on which it operates obliterate not only individual humans but also the kinds of social, national, and class differences that are usually the stuff of historical inquiry. However, it also potentially unleashes a different way of thinking about our relation to the past, or at least to certain parts of it—say, the “V” in V21—because in a profoundly literal sense they cease to be past, but are instead compressed into the present, much the way fossil fuel combustion lies at the prehistoric heart of modernity. In the Anthropocene, we and the Victorians become contemporaries. As Jeffery Jerome Cohen argues, “the lithic thickens time into multiple, densely sedimented, and combustively coincident temporalities” (78). Events that seem isolated from one another because they are occurring in different realms of inquiry or action—geology and the steam engine; the Columbian Exchange and The Tempest; nuclear testing and The Lord of the Rings; cybernetics and climate modeling—are in fact bound up in the same processes, inhabiting the same atmosphere, mining the same rocks and ultimately inscribed within the same globally synchronous event that we now know as the emergence of the Anthropocene.

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 no., 2: 197-222. 

Cohen, Jeffery Jerome. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Crutzen, Paul and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene” IGBP Newsletter 41: 17-18.

Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519: 171-180.

Menely, Tobias. 2014. “Anthropocene Air.” the minnesota review 83: 93-101.

Mentz, Steve. 2015. “Enter the Anthropocene, c. 1610.” Glasgow Review of Books, 27 Sept. Online. https://glasgowreviewofbooks.com/2015/09/27/enter-anthropocene-c-1610/

Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life. New York: Verso.

Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from   Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Wood, Gillen D’Arcy. 2014. Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zalasiewicz
 et al, Jan. 2015. “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid Twentieth Century Boundary is Stratigraphically Optimal” Quaternary International 383: 196-203

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Jesse Oak Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington, and the author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016). He is currently at work on a book on the Anthropocene as a challenge to the humanities, as well as co-editing (with Tobias Menely) a collection of essays under the title Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (forthcoming 2017).

 

by Jesse Rosenthal

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

What do we write about? What do we produce? Literary criticism has done pretty well for itself, so far, without having particularly precise answers to these questions. In light of the methodological tussles that have occasioned this symposium, though, I would like to take a (possibly hubristic) stab at an answer. What we write about, and what we produce, are two parts of the larger activity of the discipline: the maintenance of tradition. We are tasked with selecting and interpreting those works of the past which seem to explain the present. We produce, in other words, the past which seems to produce us. In so doing we—and here I mean Victorianists specifically—actually implicitly reiterate the most privileged story of our field’s tradition: development through the recognition of the self in the past.

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Suppose I tell you that I have a Victorian novel for you to read. I have not yet told you its author, or what it’s about. But if you have some familiarity with the field, with the meanings attached to the “Victorian novel,” then you likely know quite a bit about it. It will be long—probably five hundred pages or more in a modern Penguin edition. It will not offer much in the way of sex scenes. Its hero will probably be young, and not yet set in life. There will be some maturation, most likely some carriages or railroad, a career for a hero or a marriage for a heroine, and a polite degree of anxiety about industrialization and commodity culture. But here’s something else you will probably know: the novel that I’m going to give you will not be particularly difficult to read. It may take you a while—but it will seem more familiar, more like a novel than the work of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Austen, as always, conspicuously excepted); and it will require a good deal less aesthetic sophistication and effort against the grain than a modernist novel. When we talk about the “Victorian novel,” one of the principal things we are referring to is a certain sweet spot in relation the post-World-War-II reader: modern enough to be recognizable, not so modern as to be obscure. And for this reason it does not need to be taught to competent contemporary readers—at least not at the level of basic textual comprehension. More precisely, we can say that Victorian novels are those novels that do not need to be mediated by historians or interpreters. They might benefit from such mediation, as those who have taught them know, but that is only because students are only too eager to find themselves in them. Teachers and critics have to assert the need for historical or formal mediation precisely because the novels do not seem like they need it: because they seem im-mediate.

I would like to propose that it is this immediacy—this felt proximity over a temporal divide—that is the defining principle of the Victorian novel. Let me be clear, though: I certainly do not mean that this is some property shared by every British novel written between Oliver Twist and Jude the Obscure. When critics refer to “the Victorian novel,” they are generally applying some criterion of readability to separate out the texts from the context. Lots of people wrote books in the nineteenth century, but, if our shared field of reference is any indication, only about twenty-five or so of them wrote Victorian novels.[1] It’s not the case, though, that these particular writers were possessed of some particular timeless, or classic, quality. Designating a text as a classic in this fashion is something that can only be done from the perspective of the future. This is all to say, then, that a sense of familiarity is not something that we happen to encounter in the works we study, but rather the means by which we choose which works to study in the first place.

“Choose” is probably the wrong word here; we don’t freely choose which works make up the field. In part this is because of obvious institutional pressures. But a much more significant reason is that the felt proximity of Victorian novels tends to be a fundamental axiom for the field. In spite of the fact that we’re talking about works from another century, and another country, most of the critical apparatus built around the field depend on the notion that, in talking about the nineteenth century, we are talking about ourselves. Most forms of critical historicism—whether they tell time by a Marxist or Foucauldian clock—take this for granted: Victorian novels fall within the bourgeois epoch or the modern episteme. They describe a time that reflects meaningfully on our own time, but with enough temporal distance to allow us to recognize things about our society more effectively. We know ourselves better when we are placed, or so the story goes, when we can recognize ourselves in the past. If historicism shows a preference for denaturalizing certain texts, then along with this comes a preference for texts which seem natural in the first place. This isn’t only a point about historicism; formalism in general, and narratology more specifically, usually takes a certain coherence and legibility as a given. To the extent that nineteenthcentury realism becomes a key site for formal narrative analysis, it does so because it most fits the model of a story that makes sense, that works according to a narrative grammar that we understand.

For myself—and I think the same might be true for many at this symposium—this presentist heritage is one not that I would be anxious to divorce myself from. It seems to be an open secret among Victorianists that many of us are not primarily invested in either England or the nineteenth century. Speaking personally, I came to the field less because of a deep sense of attachment to either the time or the place, and more out of a desire to work within the closest thing the English language seemed to have to a realist tradition—and to work with the formalist and historical-materialist critical traditions that implies. I wasn’t interested, and am still not overwhelmingly interested, in “speak[ing] with the dead,” to use Stephen Greenblatt’s (1989, 1) famous phrase. I am more interested in talking to myself: the way I thought about my role in society, the way I encounter the fraught pleasures of reading. Not just talking to myself, actually; the choice of texts is not an individual one, so we are talking to ourselves.

I’ve been talking about Victorian novels here—and I’ll come back to that discussion again soon—but the points that I’m making are part of a larger argument about the nature of literary studies itself. If I had to try to pinpoint what it is exactly that literary studies actually studies, it wouldn’t be literary texts themselves. In fact, I wouldn’t say that it studies a separate object at all; rather it’s involved in the perpetuation and amendment of tradition. I don’t mean “canon” here: a tradition is not just the collection of works that we read. Rather, it is both the set of works that seem to us to explain us, and the body of discussion that looking backwards, institutes and interprets them. I’m borrowing liberally here from Hans-Georg Gadamer, much of whose work is devoted to the “interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter”:

The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to the tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence it further determine it ourselves. (Gadamer 2004, 293)

We choose the works we study based on present concerns, while doing so on the basis that these works are representative of the source of those concerns. Engaging with tradition is something like finding oneself in a Heinlein-esque time-travel paradox, in which we become our own grandparents. Here we produce the tradition that produces us. Furthermore, the teaching and publishing work we do—and the social importance we attribute to that work—is a constant implicit argument about the importance of both tradition and the perpetuation of tradition. It seems that what we are involved in is some sort of traditionary maintenance: in the automotive sense that we both keep something running and keep repairing it, adding or replacing parts when necessary, so that it continues to run.

Thinking about literary criticism, and perhaps the humanities more generally, as a traditionary practice helps to address some of the methodological concerns that have been part of the field at least since I. A. Richards—many of the same concerns, in fact, that seem to have motivated this symposium. For one thing, it seems evident to me that the project of contemporary literary criticism is not really the complete understanding of any particular text. You don’t need to justify writing a detailed analysis of, say, The Mill on the Floss. It is already taken for granted that it is of interest to modern readers. If you write on a novel outside the tradition, you need to justify yourself—usually be pointing out how it is in fact an overlooked part of the tradition. At the same time, literary studies is also not an explicit diagnosis of present social concerns; this begs the question by assuming that the appropriate medium for discussing the present is past literary and critical works. The point is that we are not looking at either the present or the past, so much as the relation of the two, through the medium of tradition. Texts are judged for their inclusion in the tradition—to exclude them would be to make them context—through their relevance to to present concerns. But present concerns are understood as being more readily understood through their instantiation in past texts.

The key point here is that if literary criticism is a traditionary discipline, it is not so much looking at the raw objects or data for empirical proof, as it is looking at what has already been said. Skeptical interventions in literary criticism—history of the book, say—usually point out the seeming divide between literary studies and the material and evidence of the empirical world. Fair enough, perhaps—there is a difference between traditionary methods and scientific methods, and a fair amount of difference within those two groups as well. This is not the place to consider the different forms that that claims to truth take in different disciplines—logical proof, falsifiable experiment, double-blind study—but it is worth reminding ourselves that one discipline is not just another discipline done poorly. If certain forms of material history or quantitative analysis stake their claim to truth on an elision of tradition through contact with the raw data or object that makes them a different, perhaps congenial, sort of analysis. Though I do wonder how much they continue to lean on tradition to justify studying these particular objects in the first place.[2] I think most people involved in literary studies would agree that our assertions are different from those in the natural sciences. We state our claims with more confidence (no p-values here), but we tend not to expect the claims to hold true for quite as long. I have only encountered a few critics who would look back on a first book or article and claim that they would change nothing. Scientific truth is falsifiable; humanistic truth is developmental. It’s more important to get it productively wrong—“rightly wrong,” in Beckett’s words—than to get it dully right. Gadamer again:

… the great experiences in the human sciences almost never become outdated…. the subject presents itself at different times or from different standpoints. We accept the fact that these aspects do not simply cancel one another out as research proceeds, but are like mutually exclusive conditions that exist by themselves and combine only in us. Our historical consciousness is always filled with a variety of voices in which the past is heard. Only in the multifariousness of such voices does it exist: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part. Modern historical research itself is not only research, but the handing down of tradition. We do not see it only in terms of progress and verified results; in it we have, as it were, a new experience of history whenever the past resounds with a new voice. (285)

The form that evidence and argumentation takes in literary criticism is based on composing the right selection of prior voices, whether or not we agree with them. We know this, of course: anyone who has received an anonymous reader’s report knows the importance of correctly reciting the proper account of past opinions. The method of argumentation is always in some way developed around a reinterpretation of our shared past that will lead to a set of given present conclusions. And those present conclusions will, if we are lucky, become part of another’s recited tradition. If we are going to engage in methodological tussles, it seems important to have some firm grasp on what our traditionary methods entail, and the differences between them and other methods.

At this point, I’d like to return to the topic of the Victorian novel. I had mentioned earlier that the field seems to reiterate the tenets of a traditionary practice, not just in the way in studies, but in what it studies. That is, it seems to define its object of study as those past works in which we can recognize ourselves. But I think we can be a bit more specific now about what form that recognition takes. Recall earlier when I pointed out how traditionary arguments—based on ambitious errors and conversation with previous sources—could be understood as “developmental.” So are the novels we tend to read: the Bildungsroman has come, in most cases, to stand in as the model of British realist fiction. Even David Masson (1859, 266), in his 1859 British Novelists and Their Styles, gives the “art and culture novel,” in which “the design is to represent a mind of the thoughtful order, struggling through doubt and error toward certainty and truth,” a special pride of place as “the highest class of recent novels.” For Masson this sort of focus on character development also has the effect of elevating novels of other varieties (he lists thirteen in all). If we look now at which novels we read as primary examples of traditional subgenres—Oliver Twist as Newgate novel, Mary Barton as industrial— we see that the specific concerns get reinterpreted as stories of a character’s development and maturation. We do not only engage in a developmental traditionary practice: we do so by focusing on stories that are themselves celebrations of development (often, as with criticism, at the expense of any strong connection to the objects and data of the material world).

We can take it a step further, though: the form of development that these novels take is one which is dependent on recognizing yourself in the past. This is slightly different take on the way these novels are usually read: as a reintegration of an individual into a community. Only slightly different because such a reintegration is implicitly dependent on a community which pre-exists the novel’s protagonist. In other words, the emphasis in these novels is not so much on finding an entirely new place in a society as it is in recognizing the commonality between yourself and the others around you. It lies, in other words, in a reinterpretation of the past. Moretti (2000, 70) points to the moment in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth reconsiders Darcy’s proposal: “the facts have not changed, but their value…has. On second reading, the past is permeated with a new meaning.” This, for Moretti, is something like making the best of a bad situation; given unchangeable necessity, we can reinterpret it to call it “freedom.” Given the sort of dialectical relationships I’ve been describing with the past though—a constant creation of that which determines us—I would be hesitant to call it just a rationalization or compromise. In fact, I think we can see a closer connection between these temporal dynamics and the social dynamics we usually associate with the form. One of the distinctive quirks of the nineteenth century was to offer temporal solutions to social problems; the most familiar example is probably Scrooge’s promise that he would “live in the Past, the Present, and the Future” as a means of addressing the problems of unequal distribution spread spacially around him (Dickens 2003, 110). We can also look to the late nineteenth-century shift in the representation of utopian and dystopian imagination: from no-place to a future time. When it comes to the Bildungsroman, the classic form of the genre doesn’t just require that we become part of a community; it rather requires a recognition of yourself as having already been in a community without having realized it.

The claim that Bildungsromane make is that we do not only come to discover ourselves as part of a social whole; we come to discover instead that we have always been part of a social whole, and that our development lies in recognizing this fact. So, to take one central example from Wilhelm Meister, Wilhelm’s apprenticeship—his development, broadly speaking—begins to come to an end with his discovery that he is a father: “His apprenticeship was therefore completed in one sense, for along with the feeling of a father, he had acquired the virtues of a solid citizen” (Goethe 1989, 307). From paternity, then, comes citizenship, and the resolution of development. What makes this moment particularly notable though, is that the son that Wilhelm discovers, Felix, is not a stranger; Wilhelm has been caring for him for some time. So the moment that that Goethe highlights as the culmination of Wilhelm’s development is one in which, practically, very little changes. He had been taking care of Felix before, and would, presumably, continue to take care of him after. What changes is not the practical arrangement, but rather the character’s disposition toward it. Wilhelm does not become a citizen automatically as a result of paternity; he has to claim it.[3] The key difference here is one of will: Wilhelm is a biological father either way. The distinction is not between being something and being something else. Instead, it is a choice between, on the one hand, being something unknowingly and passively, and, on the other, asserting it as an act of will.

We see this active, willing dimension of development ephasized in a debate between Wilhelm’s mentor Lothario, and his petit-bourgeois friend Werner. Where Wilhelm and Werner’s disagreements had previously resolved around the role of art in society, or Wilhelm’s desire to “develop [him]self fully” (174), this conversation centers on the quite practical issue of paying taxes:

“I can assure you,” said Werner, “that in all my life I have never thought about the State, and only paid my dues and taxes because that was customary.”

“Well,” said Lothario, “I hope to be able to make a good patriot out of you. A good father is one who at mealtimes serves his children first; and a good citizen is one who pays what he owes to the State before dealing with everything else.” (311)

The exchange not only hammers home the citizen-as-father figure, but underlines one of its trickier implications. If, choosing to care for one’s children corresponds to choosing citizenship, then, carrying the metaphor in the opposite direction, civic society would seem to play the role not of a protector, disciplinarian, or enabler—it would instead play the role of a dependent. As if to ward off any confusion, Goethe has Lothario connect paying the state taxes to serving food to your children. Now, the question here is not whether Werner will pay his taxes, or even should pay his taxes. He already does so, and does so without question. By choosing actively to pay his taxes, though—by choosing to do what he already does—he switches the order of the parental metaphor around. No longer just a child of his community, he could come to see himself as the community as his own child: something that he has made as much as it has made him. This is the story that I’ve been discussing in my discussion of tradition, the developmental grandfather-paradox of self and community: we come to find ourselves in our current place by producing the past which produces us.

To close: Any argument about the possibilities of our field seems to me to require that we be clear about the unspoken assumptions of our field, the conditions of possibility for literary studies as we understand them. In the case of the Victorian novel, my sense is that we are dealing a set of interpretations that reiterate the form of the narratives they analyze. Through a traditionary practice that finds more truth about the present in the past, we produce a past that tells us the same story. Is this productive or is it deflating? I’m not sure. It certainly has a conservative ring to it. To refer to literary criticism as a traditionary practice might well seem at odds with the general assumption of progressive politics that most associate with the field. Leaning heavily on Gadamer doesn’t help the matter; his prima-facie conservative relation to tradition is evident in the quotes I offer above, and it has been one of the most consistently critiqued elements of his philosophy. It is difficult to read Gadamer’s account with tradition and not come away feeling like a Northern status-quo has been mixed up with primitive ontology. I think the advantage that literary criticism has in this regard—and perhaps particularly Victorian studies, the field that studies the conditions that allowed modern literary criticism to exist—is that it isn’t ontology; it’s an institutional practice that puts us in a prized place to understand the possibilities and limitations of tradition. Simon During’s (2012) recent work seems the best attempt I’ve seen to deal with these problems. Describing the academic humanities as “organized sites where groups of people gather collectively to examine, discuss, conserve, and transmit the past as it exists in texts, archives, images, and so on,” During turns to the possibility of a “resistance [from] out of conservatism” (56–57). It’s not an entirely happy thought. But During’s positioning of literary criticism in dialogue with conservatism does seem like an important first step in understanding the potential of literary studies. Our training, I think, gives us a certain privileged relationship with tradition. It’s what we already do; if we wish to make progressive defenses—whether of the academic humanities, or of speculative literary criticism—I think we have to figure out what we can do with it.

References

Dickens, Charles. 2003. A Christmas Carol, and Other Christmas Writings. Edited by Michael Slater. New York: Penguin.

During, Simon. 2012. Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations. New York: Fordham University Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd ed. London: Continuum Books.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1989. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Translated by Eric A. Blackall. Princenton: Princeton University Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1989. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Masson, David. 1859. British Novelists and Their Styles. London: MacMillan and Co.

Moretti, Franco. 2000. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. New York: Verso.

Slaughter, Joseph R. 2007. Human Rights, Inc. New York: Fordham University Press.

Notes

[1] Twenty-six, actually, by my count. Start with a big eleven: all of Austen (not, it bears repeating, a Victorian), all of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, some of Collins, all of Dickens, all of Eliot, most of Gaskell, some of Gissing, all of Hardy, a bit of Thackeray, and as much Trollope as you can bear. Add two more to the count if we include James and Wilde. Then another thirteen, mainly for specialists, bringing us to twenty-six: Ainsworth, Bradden, Anne Brontë, Samuel Butler, Bulwer-Lytton, Carlyle (for Sartor Resartus), Disraeli, H. Martineau, Meredith, Oliphant, Shriner, Stevenson, and Stoker. Maybe Bradden and Meredith are in the first set now. I’m sure a few are missing, but beyond this set, I think the expectations of shared reference fall off sharply.

[2] On the flipside, I also think that literary critics would profit from remembering the limits of their own sorts of arguments. To take one piece of exceedingly lowhanging fruit: Freud’s place in the tradition says little about his medical reliability.

[3] “In Goethe’s novel, citizenship names the categorical distinction between ignorant subjection (the father as hapless sperm donor) and the conscious affirmation of social relations (the father as willing foster to his own child).” Slaughter (2007, 99).

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Jesse Rosenthal is Assistant Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.  His book Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel is forthcoming from Princeton UP.

by Ellis Hanson

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

Has there ever been an erotics of art?  Susan Sontag, in full manifesto mode, ended her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation” with the challenge, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (1966:10).  The power of her provocation is undiminished for me by the fact that she never in that essay or anywhere else in her work explains what exactly an erotics of art might entail or demonstrates how she herself would perform it.  She valorizes a certain mode of aesthetic formalism, and yet it is not just the aesthetic she seeks ultimately to grasp in this phrase, but the erotic, some specifically sensual experience of art, some intimate relation between the erotic and the aesthetic, for which even her own vocabulary fails her.  Where would we look for an erotics of art, or for that matter an erotics of anything, including an erotics of sexuality, of the emotions, or of the body?  By “erotics,” I mean a sexual formalism distinct from the history of sexuality or the politics of sexuality, however difficult or specious or abstract we may find the effort to disentangle an erotics from these various lively traditions of inquiry into sexual discourse.  Since Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are paramount on Sontag’s list of hermeneuts performing interpretive violence on art, I suspect she would not have found them the ideal practitioners of any erotics she might propose, but the academic critique of sexuality at least since the Frankfurt School has usually served up a potent methodological cocktail whose basic ingredients have been Marxian and Freudian in varying degrees of conceptual purity — and here I include the feminist, queer, deconstructive, and of course psychoanalytic approaches that are most likely now to take seriously any call for an “erotics of art.”  Even Roland Barthes, whose work Sontag appears to be channeling in this remark and whose work best exemplifies for me the erotics she seeks to name, turned to Freud and Marx by way of the Frankfurt School and Lacan to lend theoretical rigor to his understanding of the psyche and politics.

Aristotle never wrote a treatise called Ars Erotica.  We have Ars Poetica and Ars Rhetorica.  We have treatises entitled Physics, Metaphysics, Economics, and a few different versions of Ethics, but no Erotics of any kind, apart from The Generation of Animals, which is not quite what I have in mind here.  Academia still follows suit.  One may still publish a treatise called simply Aesthetics or Politics — there have been several in the past century, in fact — but the title Erotics gives pause to the philosophical mind, which prefers to name it only in passing toward something else, something presumably more important, something quite possibly its opposite, such as historiographics, politics, ethics, aesthetics, hygienics, or therapeutics.  Plato’s Symposium is the philosophical text that most resonates as a classical touchstone for the erotic throughout modern thought, but it is less an erotics or an ars erotica than a metaphysics of eros.  Freud would appear to be the true progenitor of any rigorous “erotics of art” in the 20th century, or for that matter the 21st, since psychoanalysis remains the single most elaborate, coherent, and influential theory of the erotic despite a vigorous tradition of debunking Freud.  Psychoanalysis has also offered the most compelling and productive account of the agency of the image and the signifier in erotic desire, a point that has made it especially appealing for criticism in the arts.  There is certainly no shortage of psychoanalytic criticism of literature in general and Victorian literature in particular.  It is difficult, however, to claim psychoanalysis as an ars erotica or an erotics of art after Michel Foucault’s insightful distinction (1976: 58) between ars erotica and scientia sexualis and his relegation of psychoanalysis to an exemplary and politically dubious instance of the latter, a deployment of “sexuality” as a modern discursive practice of social surveillance and management.  The project of radical or queer psychoanalysis has often been an effort to loosen Freudian theory from its medicalizing imperatives and its moralizing overtones in order to redeploy it for projects of social justice and sexual liberation, but this is precisely the challenge of Foucault’s distinction:  hermeneutics as social engineering by other means.  Arguably, much of Foucault’s own work could easily be categorized as a scientia sexualis busily turning sex into a discourse of knowledge with a political and epistemological agenda, albeit one fascinated with “reverse” discourse and a meta-analysis of its own operations that was deeply suspicious of the modern pathologization of sex.  Much of what we call queer theory has taken Foucault’s introductory volume of The History of Sexuality as a foundational text and taught itself to historicize — always historicize! — sexuality as a more or less institutionalized set of social practices; in doing so, it may also have reproduced Foucault’s paradox of being itself a scientia sexualis continually calling for the sort of ars erotica that it finds itself fundamentally, institutionally, intellectually incapable of becoming.

Whither erotics in the wake of queer theory?  Since I am one of those critics who experienced the term “queer theory” in 1990 as the perfect storm for my adventurous little craft, a sexual reconfiguration of all the poststructural and historicist trends that most stimulated my thinking, I am not sure whether in 2016 my previous work should be deemed part of the solution or part of the problem when I try to consider a history, or a present, or a future for an erotics of art.  Queer theory became my methodology of choice even before there was a word for it, before the word queer was even used in the criticism it now claims as foundational, and I rather unadvisedly hazarded a definition of it in print after its death had already been announced prematurely several times (Hanson 2005).  I also became a Victorianist in part because it was clear that queer studies and Victorian studies were profoundly energizing each other after Foucault’s satirical description of himself and his readers as “We ‘Other Victorians’” (1976:1-13).  Queer theory might find itself calling again for that ever elusive erotics of art, though the terms of our failure to find it have certainly changed.

“Always historicize,” yes, but as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003:125) once suggested, the authoritarian ring of this imperative makes it seem rather paranoid, even if it were possible to obey.  I would test this phrase against the imperative to “always eroticize,” but it may be even more difficult to imagine failing to do that one than to imagine doing it well.  One distinctive initiative in queer theory in the 21st century has been to call this historicizing imperative into question, despite the powerful queer investment in Marx and Foucault.  The impetus comes in part from queer psychoanalysis, which has a sometimes ambivalent or resistant relationship to queer social constructionism and identity politics, and here I mean the work of critics such as Lee Edelman, Carla Freccero, Leo Bersani, and Tim Dean, among others:  the historicizing imperative is itself an erotic function, a paradox or conundrum, deeply invested in fantasy and an unconscious drive to represent or even narrate a fundamentally inaccessible Real or historical origin.  Lee Edelman and Madhavi Menon are especially articulate in drawing out the deconstructive dimension of queer theory along similar lines to expose the essential fantasy of any historicist project as a relentless, seemingly urgent figural deferral, an archival mise en abîme:  if the text can be understood only in reference to a historical context, how can we in turn understand that historical context if not in reference to still more historical context ad infinitum.  The result would appear now to be, in the rather dismissive words of the “Manifesto of the V21 Collective” (2015), a “fetishization of the archival” — a phrase that makes archival work sound sexier than it usually is.

Fetishization?  If only!  The term suffers, needlessly perhaps, from its Marxian and Freudian deployments, such that in academic discourse it has served mostly as a derogatory epithet among intellectuals eager to question or disavow some of their dearest pleasures as the symptoms of either a cultural or personal malady of desire.  In the Marxian sense, we might derogate archival fetishism as having only a dubious exchange value (in a decidedly rarified academic economy!) bereft of any use value, or in more Nietzschean terms as a decadent historicism that has lost sight of any utility in imagining a future.  Or in the Freudian sense of the fetish as a perverse delusion of erotic plenitude projected onto an object that could not possibly embody it, a definition that makes the archival fetishist a compulsive figure given to “an endless accumulation of mere information” for its own sake or an “antiquarianism” whose irrational pleasure in collecting may well strike us as “bland” in that it seems pathologically private and incommunicable to others (V21 Collective 2015).  One might ask, however, if there is an economy without fetishism, or even an erotics without fetishism, since by any definition the fetish sounds like a mere tautology for desire.  The subjectivity that can survive without fetishism of this sort would seem impossibly inert.  Could we theorize a less phobic erotics of the archival?

Much recent queer theory on temporality has sought to mine this erotic dimension of the historical and explore its more subjective roots in fantasy as a resistance to more conventional understandings of historiography as the linear representation of origins and causal relations — a resistance to the straight, very straight strawman of a historiography that philosophers long ago debunked.   In this way, queer temporality speaks of specifically queer historical connections, queer developmental trajectories, queer rhythms and returns, all of which take their conceptual coherence and sense of political urgency from a mostly stereotyped understanding of an antinormative homosexuality.  It is certainly historiography as a “useable past” — useable to expand a livable queer present and a more or less utopian queer future — but we might also consider it a mode of fantasy, of eroticism, even of pleasure for its own sake, a fetishization of the archival as a delirium of exploration and self-reinvention.  I find it so whether it is deployed for the fantasy of a definitive “history of sexuality” or for a more playful “presentist” fantasy of creative anachronism that would help us resist the ruling ideologies of the present moment and expand our consciousness.

Perhaps it might be helpful, one might even say urgently useful, to set aside, even if only temporarily, the Marxian and Freudian definitions of fetishism to anatomize its pleasures in less paranoid, more reparative terms as a source of sustenance rather than merely exploitation, pathology, or tedium.  We might even set aside, if only temporarily, the term queer, since it certainly has its limitations.  Queer takes anti-homophobic critique as its epistemological center of gravity and must necessarily be preoccupied with gender in either an illicit object choice or an illicit aim.  It is also fundamentally a theory of antinormativity, what we might call a fetishization of resistance for its own sake, which — taken to its logical extreme, as Lee Edelman (2004) has most rigorously attempted — may seem a nihilistic and robotic procedure for the deconstruction of any possible position, since any position could recontextualize itself as the norm to be challenged.  As Edelman has argued, a queer identity or a queer political position is a contradiction in terms, and so it follows that his argument gives us a queer theory with “no future,” a queer theory in the service of the death drive.  Queer theory is less an erotics than a deconstructive analytics of gender, one whose only reliable pleasure is this fetishization of resistance.

What if all those years we spoke about queer theory, we had spoken with the same urgency about kink?  Not to replace queer theory — I feel I have much more to accomplish with that term! — but to reawaken its erotic and formalist potential.  Although there is much that is queer about kink, and occasionally something kinky about queerness, an emphasis on kink (as opposed to the more medicalized “masochism”) would certainly have shifted the problematic of queer theory and rendered the discourse of fetishism much more inviting.  I have increasingly warmed to the word kink not the least because it appears in no scholarly book titles that I know of and can only be spoken in academia with defensive irony, preferably with what is referred to in the V21 manifesto as an “amused chuckle,” though a naughty titter would be my preference.  In other words, it has now more or less the same status in this regard that queer had before 1990.  You don’t want kink on your cv yet, you don’t expect to teach a course on kink yet, you don’t yet expect to interview at MLA for a roster of kinky positions.  In or about 1990, or maybe it was 1995, queer paradoxically became normal, but kink did not.  Instead, we had a flood of typically moralizing or pastoralizing academic books about “masochism” or “fetishism” as a cultural phenomenon to be either pathologized or historicized or radicalized, but rarely proposed as an occasion for an erotics of art.  There is, however, on the margins of academia but more often quite distant from it, a lively ars erotica unperturbed by the term kink, though still gravitating around an attempt to depathologize terms like sadomasochism, masochism, s/m, S & M, BDSM, and fetishism and disalign them from their history as scapegoats in 19th and 20th century pathology or political theory.  Kink lets one stop thinking about Marx and Freud for a while.  It also shifts the emphasis in one’s reading of Foucault, who did indeed claim, “On the face of it, our civilization possesses no ars erotica” (1976:58) but nevertheless, in his interviews late in life, appeared to have found precisely that in the “S & M” subculture of New York and San Francisco:  those practitioners of kink who he claimed are clearly not in the throes of the death drive, but who are rather “inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body — through the eroticization of the body” (1997:165).  They answer to his earlier definition of an ars erotica in that “pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul” (1976:57).  Like queer, there is an element of strangeness in kink, yes, and resistance to the status quo, but it is more engaging I think as a theory of the intensification and pluralization of pleasures for their own sake, even pleasure to the point of suffering and suffering to the point of pleasure.  Kink also has a more pronounced investment in the elaboration, celebration, and anatomization of fantasy, such that it offers us less a theory of resistance to the norm than a theory of ecstatic dialectical tensions between a norm and its reversals:  its queerness is always a paradoxical celebration of the straightness, the norm, the vanilla, against which its taste for fantasy and the exotic can perform itself.  It does not just resist, it cultivates, it multiplies, it juxtaposes incommensurate worlds for no deeper purpose than the pleasure in their tensions.  Though it aestheticizes gender and aestheticizes sexuality as an erotic game, it is not preoccupied with either:  unlike queerness, kink is embraced by hetero and homo both and can depart from the erotics of gender politics altogether to explore the sensual appeal of the nonsexual or even the nonhuman — of objects, of animals, of abstractions, of unsexed activities and unsexed anatomies, of textures and contexts, of contracts and entanglements, of surfaces and scenes.  We might also speak of a kink temporality, of kinks in the timeline, which might richly serve the purposes of those theorists of queer temporality who valorize what appears, after all, to be a queer kink in the straight timeline of historicism.  The first kink we find in the Oxford English Dictionary refers to that curl or loop in the the rope, thread, hair, or wire, that causes a hitch in business as usual, and if we think of that rope as an all too linear timeline with a very rigid sense of its own purpose and utility, we see how troublesome and fun a kink can be.  It would also serve to figure that strange looping backward, that getting caught or suspended or tied up in knots, that doubling back of what we call fantasy through what we call reality, that so delights a queer theory that seeks to deconstruct any neat opposition between subjective and objective time.  The same dictionary also notes there is a kinkiness specific to hair, which we might take as a sidelong hint that there are broader applications of the term kink to our usual erotic geographies and temporalities of ethnicity and race, especially perhaps to a more reparative reconsideration of what critics have come to call “racial fetishism,” though rarely with any great enthusiasm for its practice.  Can that book even be written today?

Finally, I would argue that kink, unlike queer, offers us a deeper investment in formalism, in art for art’s sake, in sex for art’s sake, or for the sake of the pleasure we take in its intensities.  This phrasing sounds virtually Paterian in its aestheticism, and certainly Walter Pater is for me one of the great unsung theorists of Victorian kink.  I have been writing a book called Exquisite Pain on the status of suffering in aesthetics, and as one might have guessed, certain Victorian or otherwise 19th-century aesthetes surrender themselves effortlessly to a theory of kink:  yes, I have been writing about Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rachilde, and Renée Vivien, but I have also found the term kink equally revealing for less obvious candidates such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and any great writer with the name Brontë, Rossetti, or Browning.  Where the psychoanalytic criticism of these writers ends, an erotics of their kink might begin.  I sense a movement toward this kind of erotics of art in the largely 21st-century project of “queer formalism,” the value of which has been, for me, its intensive focus on the erotics of style.  The best examples I could cite of this method would include Yopie Prins on Swinburne and Michael Field, and by Kevin Ohi on Pater, Wilde, and James.  The fact that this criticism should gravitate around Victorian aestheticism comes as no surprise.  Kink would also be an occasion to rethink the specifically formal aesthetic dimension even of great psychoanalytic theorists of masochism such as Theodor Reik (1949), whose vocabulary is so aesthetic, so flexible, so un-Oedipal at times, that even the supremely anti-oedipal theorist Gilles Deleuze (1971) could repurpose Reik’s work for a critique of Freud.  A theorization of kink might take Deleuze even farther from psychoanalysis, farther from his close readings of Sade and Sacher-Masoch (as if those writers were adequately paradigmatic), farther from the practices of the particular sexual subculture that intrigued Foucault.  For kink to work as a critical term, it needs to travel where queer generally does not.  It needs to get out more and start enjoying itself.

References

Deleuze, Gilles.  1971.  Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil.  New York:  George          Brazilier.

Edelman, Lee.  2004.  No Future:  Queer Theory and the Death Drive.  Durham, NC:         Duke University Press.

Foucault, Michel.  1976.  The History of Sexuality, vol. 1:  An Introduction.  Translated       by Robert Hurley.  New York:  Vintage Books.

Foucault, Michel.  1997.  “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” interview by B.            Gallagher and A. Wilson, June 1982.  In Ethics:  Subjectivity and Truth.  Vol. 1 of        The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, edited by Paul Rabinow, 163-173.  New York:  The New Press.

Hanson, Ellis.  2005.  “Queer Theory.”  In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory    and Criticism, edited by Imre Szeman.  2nd ed.  Baltimore, MD:  The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Reik, Theodor.  1949.  Masochism in Modern Man, translated by Margaret H. Beigel and   Gertrud M. Kurth.  New York:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.  2003.  “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re    So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.”  In Touching     Feeling:  Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123-51.  Durham, NC:  Duke University Press.

Sontag, Susan.  1966.  “Against Interpretation.”  In Against Interpretation, and Other         Essays, 1-10.  New York:  Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

V21 Collective.  2015.  “Manifesto of the V21 Collective.”  V21:  Victorian Studies in         the 21st Century.  http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten- theses/

 

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Ellis Hanson is Professor of English at Cornell University.  He is the author of Decadence and Catholocism (Duke UP, 1997) and currently working on two manuscripts, Knowing Children: Cinema and the Sexual Child and Exquisite Pain: Aestheticism and Suffering.

 

 

by Anna Kornbluh

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

Between two novels, a thought.  A thought they each think, but a thought whose thinking appears more forceful by the shade of their juxtaposition.  Reading for this contiguity necessitates looking awry at the obvious distance between the two: one 2005, the other 1853.  Two novels, one hundred and fifty-two years apart, nonetheless conceptually close; historically divergent but intellectually congruent.  Both routinely heralded by critics as emblematic of paths for the novel form, high social realism and avant-garde experimentalism.  Both in their own right institutions in the history of the novel, and both demonstrably novels of institutions.[1] Both unfold along central axes of settlements to cases of grave legal and financial complexity.  Both drive their action with architectural repetition, assembling a succession of spaces that double or foil one another, and climaxing in the construction of architectural replicas.  Both systematically perform and probe copying and repetition.  Both take the dynamic overlaying of these topoi, the law, architecture, and repetition, as a commanding impetus for the novel form.  Repeating law, repeating architecture, the architecture of the novel, the law of the novel, the architecture of the law, the law of architecture.  A hypothesis: Bleak House and Remainder together novelly conceive a political formalism, a commitment to the architectural constitution of lived social space.

This is a thought whose repetition between two novels belies its novelty.  Amidst today’s hegemonic vitalism – so many tomes of 20^th and 21^st century critical theory directed to the anatomy of governmentality and the excision of the state, law, and form itself; the practical lament of sovereignty, suspicion of organization, encomium of anarchy, ecstasy of life; the historicization of the Victorian age as the origin of the species of modern domination; the hypostasization of freedom as a messianic sublime beyond every institution, beyond every state, “beyond every idea of law”[2] – amidst and against these theoretical and practical orthodoxies of the contemporary, with Remainder and Bleak House we can think another, rarer kind of thought, a thought out of time yet all too timely.  In the lavishness of their repetitive thought of law, architecture, and repetition, these novels ratify shaping, sheltering, formalizing as insuperable, indispensable, and inventable.  Human is zoon politikon, the political animal, the animal whose very life is owing to the house of arbitrarily formalized collectivities; the prevalent post-political fantasies in the post-human era repress this material fact and suppress practices and theories that might build entirely new kinds of houses.  Affirming radically ungrounded acts of house fabrication, showcasing the artifice without which there is nothing, fathoming the instituting of a minimal socius as a process both legal and architectural, plumbing the infrastructures of existence, opposing vitalist orthodoxy – this is the thought of Bleak House and Remainder.

It is a thought whose transtemporality or acontextuality is integral, a thought that gains gravity precisely by virtue of its repetition in history, in these two such differently situated and differently styled projects, a thought requiring repeated, apposite clauses.   A thought about the enduring repetition of intricate legal negotiation as reduplicative construction of lived space, a thought not of a historical particular, not issuing from or caused by a historical situation, but of history, mediating a universal.  It is a thought of the history of sociality and social formalization in modernity, a thought of the history of the novel as the art form uniquely addressed to such history.  Not to say that the thought is unthought in Bleak House before Remainder, nor that Remainder merely repeats or rethinks – remainders – Bleak House (One could ask Tom McCarthy if he’s read Bleak House; I didn’t).  Rather to say that what Susan Stanford Friedman has called “cultural parataxis,” the radical collage of texts from different geohistorical coordinates, can produce new textual insights and new theoretical insights (2013, 42).  Knowing things in their place is obligatory, but taking things out of place might help us appreciate here how much displacement orients both of these texts: in their procedures of replicating place and of auditing the lack of an authentic place, lack of a functioning place, lack of an immanent scheme for the placing of place, both of these novels function as theories of displacement, and demand therefore to be read displacedly, out of context.

Thus, I take the fact of repetition – of recurrent tropes and recurrent combination of tropes that amount to recurrent thought – as sufficient authorization for reading these texts together, for committing a certain presentism in celebrating reverberation and hearing there a resource for contemporary theoretical debates.  The repetition between Bleak House and Remainder transpires in history, but stakes no roots in that repetition Giovanni Arrighi (2010) finds in the long centuries of capital’s cycles; nor in the repetition as discontinuous intensification that Walter Benjamin (1968) finds in nonlinear philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic trajectories.[3] Let’s guess instead that the repetition is its own pattern, not governed by other patterns – simply a recurrence with neither linear cause nor intensifying arc, a recurrence of a thought, a thought that is less discursive (anecdotally characteristic of a particular society at a particular moment) and more generic (sociality as such entails the reiterative delineation of social space itself, the reiterative contrivance of formalized shelter and formalized relation, the reiterative production of worldliness which animates “the novel” art).  A thought that repeats because, indeed, it is a thought of repetition, a thought of the reiterative, redoubling, reformative ungroundedness of form.

Arguing then that the repetition signals the resonance, the import, the portability of the thought across context.  That what is common to the form of these two texts (where form is genre, theme, plot, and above all the engineered, dynamic collision of multiple topoi) is an illumination of common form, of the forms that structure being-in-common.  This would therefore be an abstract thought, and thus a thought abstractly broaching other idioms, in contemporary work on the aesthetic caliber of politics and the political by Jacques Rancière (2006) and Caroline Levine (2015) – even as it is a thought that largely countermands the consensus in much contemporary theory, and even as it is a thought concretely enunciated by the form of the novel in each text and by the form of repetition across the two texts.  Superposing tropes of displacement, replication, inauthenticity onto tropes of architecture and housing onto tropes of legal suits and legal regulations, Remainder and Bleak House highlight the aesthetic facets of social structuration: the art, the artful, the artless, the arbitrary formalizations of social relations.

An abstract thought, but one best legible in the concrete affinities between two novels.   Try to take both novels as the subject of claims and sentences, to hold two novels in single (dilated, ungainly) sentences, to contrive a grammar of resonance, to suspend privileging one over the other.  Both Bleak House and Remainder derive their premises from the law, from civil proceedings and settlement negotiations, from legal intricacies in process after other legal instances before them (Jarndyce & Jardynce, Dickens carefully points out, has no exact referent but extrapolates from cases regulating compound interest accumulation in estates and on cases whose contestation costs absorbed entire estates; a “remainder” is first and foremost (in the OED) a successive property interest, possessable only when prior interests granted simultaneously end, as in “die”).  Both begin in medias res (in Bleak House the case has been on for decades and “has in the course of time become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means”; in Remainder the offer of a settlement for a never specified matter begins the action on the very first page and the dispensing of funds fuels the events in the narrative).  Both also begin in a present tense that heralds its own limits: “About the accident itself I can say very little.”  “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever.”  “London.”  Present tense, ongoing verbs, first person split from itself, single-word sentence, dual-beginning, incapacity to narrate at the inauguration of the narration.  Both refuse any standard plotting around their central legal conceits: there is no origin of the legal story (in Bleak House no flashback to the legator’s intent nor rival versions of the will; in Remainder no account of the accident prompting, nor parties to, the settlement), and there is no resolution of the legal story (in Bleak House the estate consumes itself in court costs, rendering irrelevant the determinations of who the true beneficiaries are; in Remainder the settlement funds may or may not be consuming themselves in risky investments and the narrator may or may not have worse injuries than the settlement covers).  Both novels further refuse resolution at the concluding moment of their final sentences, the 1^st Person narrator of Bleak House notoriously ending the 1000 page novel with a sentence fragment (“even supposing…”), and the narrator of Remainder ending his adventures at their height, in an airplane he has hijacked, up in the air, flying in loops, with neither plan nor indefinite fuel (“just keep on.  The same pattern…the weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again.”)  Both novels conduce to end where they begin, “closing the loop, so to speak” (R, 4):  Remainder’s narrator makes loops in a plane in the sky in his final phrases, loops from which the third sentence opening the book might follow (“It involved something falling from the sky.  Technology.  Parts, bits.  That’s it really.”) – the narrator chronically tastes and smells cordite, a substance used in ejector seats from planes -; while Esther is restored to her origins and installed at the replica Bleak House.  Both novels emphatically underscore copying – technologies of copying, from handwriting to mimicry to cinema to reconstruction, and ontologies of copying, from missing originals and obscured origins to imprecise rendering and unreliable narration.

Between the two novels, and common to the two novels, is a certain shared thought about the structuring force of the law accompanied by the irrelevant content of the law: law is premise, law is impetus, law is tautology, law is originless, law is repetitive; law is not plot.  Legal absolutism: there are settlements, there are cases, the law is the origin of all plots – even as there is also a profound indifference to the law’s particulars.  In the repetition between the two novels, such absolutism appears much less as judgments of laws in their particular instance and context and more more as meditations on the universal character of law as organizing form.  Such transtemporality is also formally inscribed in both novels’ refusal of resolution, refusal of origin, ongoingness, concluding gerunds: a persistence, a perdurance, a transcendence of this character of the law.  Bleak House and Remainder are projects in world-making that both fundamentally exalt manifold constructions and manifold replications, and grant the groundlessness of any construction.

Both Remainder and Bleak House mobilize these formalist reflections on the law in the context of their manifest absorption with architecture and architectural repetition.  Bleak House, to state the obvious, is about a house, about the house, once “The Peaks,” then “Bleak” (dark), then “Bleak” (light), replicated in London, and replicated in New Bleak House, about houses of law, of aristocracy, of debt, of orphans (Chancery, Chesney Wold, Coavinses, Krook’s, boarding), about houses as buildings, dwellings, shelters, about clusters of buildings (Tom All Alone’s), about contradictions at the heart of houses, about the insufficiency and ill-fabrication of every house, and, for an ostensibly urban novel, its action markedly takes the form of procession through a series of houses (take just one strata of this about-ness: when Esther learns of her mother’s identity from Lady Dedlock, her narrative dispatches with the climactic dialogue in two paragraphs of retrospective summary, but then immediately lingers for pages of description of Chesney Wold, a better evocation of her “place” than any personal melodrama; the preferred mode of characterization throughout is to describe a character’s house).  Remainder is about a crack, a wall, a bathroom, a building, a courtyard, a cluster of buildings, a space and the protagonist’s drive to effect the space’s meticulous, minute (re)construction, about plaster, wood, glass, about the pursuit of a nonexistent original, about finance, coordination, about the large scale industry of building and “reenacting” a milieu, about construction work repetitively undertaken, workers humming “History Repeating.”  Both novels foreground the labor of all this repetitive constitutive construction, especially in figures of clerks (Nemo the law copier, Snagsby the stationer, Guppy the uppity clerk, Krook the document collector, Tulkinghorn the portmanteau pilferer, and the countless clerks in Chancery are resounded in Remainder’s Nazrul Vyas the TimeControl™ “facilitator,” from “a long line of scribes, recorders, clerks” (77), Annie the submanager/designer, and the countless subcontractors they coordinate). The law and architecture, repeated, and the labor and craft and writing of repeating them.  Repetition of the law, repetition of architecture, repeated.  In the lamination of law and architecture, of inscription, institution, repetition, and the built form, both of these novels give us to think the structuration of social space.

In their manifold affinities, these two novels of course manifestly differ, but  formulate the difference in terms other than context: each text uniquely approaches its cast, the marriage plot, multiplotting, mystery, money, empire, perpetuity.  For the sake of brevity, focus on the most crucial difference: systematicity.  Bleak House effectuates the repetitive assembly of houses as its objective core (the novel studies the ways of the world, the repeated instituting of social space, the manifold failures that drive these repetitions), whereas Remainder expressly subjectivizes this project (the novel presents itself as the study of one man’s drive).  Remainder fittingly enacts this subjectivism in its narration, a 1^st person narrator eschewing any reliability pretensions; Bleak House objectifies unreliability in the split between its 1^st and 3rd person, not only by alternating chunks of chapters and differentiating tenses, but by lapsing each narrative mode into the purview of the other, frequently styling Esther as an omniscient observer and frequently styling the 3^rd person as a partial, 1^st person plural.  Bleak House, one might say, is more systematic in its political purview, percussing the dynamics of social formalization more widely (in different kinds of institutions, in different kinds of people, in different registers of consciousness), while Remainder hones the narrow point of political ontology, the remaining fundament that ligates life to social forms.  This difference has little to do with the nineteenth century novel’s reputed referentiality and representational naiveté, little to do with the twenty-first century novel’s reputed robust irony, and much to do with varieties of repetition: Bleak House repeats its insights at scale, contemplating “the whole framework of society,” while Remainder thematizes repetition with centripetal force.

Remainder perhaps appears then as a minimalist, bleaker Bleak House, an attenuated vastness, distillate of a gurgling solution.  It zeroes in on money as predominant institution, it takes replication without referent as its single plot, it individualizes and delimits world-building, since the replicas originate in personal trauma and drive towards larger-scale violent destruction, and since it seemingly dispenses with the very possibility of 3^rd person narrativity.  But if it is thus a kind of crystallization of Bleak House, Remainder also thereby refracts Bleak House’s own limits: the novel we are so accustomed to lauding above all for its largeness, is in so many ways, a small novel, a novel devoted to limning the limits of novel worlds and of worlds outside.  From its principles of spatial contiguity to its admonition against telescopic philanthropy to Esther’s self-deprecation to its oscillating, mutually delimiting narration, Bleak House enshrines limits even while it criticizes the limits of institutions.  Each of these novels function with different syntaxes for the same questions about limits as enabling constraints, about the very installation of the law as a necessary outlining of sociality.[4]

If Remainder punctuates Bleak House’s own punctual, liminal, aesthetic contemplation of limits, they share most intimately a project to deploy the form of the novel as a laboratory for constructing forms of social space, for world-making, building possible and foreign worlds, rather than recording this world.  Dickens (1854) professed of his craft that he had “systematically tried to turn fiction to the good account of showing the preventable wretchedness and misery in which the mass of the people dwell”; McCarthy (2011) hypothesizes that “literature can be understood as a process of producing space, and spaces, whether they be urban or domestic spaces, or political spaces, or metaphysical spaces.” The fictive production of social space, in accordance with limits –finitude and mortality, available materials, temporal linearity and corporeal indivisibility, structural integrity – this is a plausible definition of one abiding modality of the novel (the modality we could call, in want of distinction from its foremost antipode, science fiction, “realist”).[5] Both of these novels achieve less an instantiation of this modality than a theory of it, Bleak House in so robustly underlining the limits to its own breathtaking breadth; Remainder in framing meticulous replication as an utterly fictive enterprise, and both novels reifying nothing other than the inauthenticity of reality.

A long tradition finds in Bleak House an archive of pernicious totalizations about which the novel can, at least, cheer, and, at most, despair, and a shorter tradition finds in Remainder a Nietzschean indictment of the inauthenticity of all things.  But the sheer fact that both of these novels build themselves out of repeated scenes of repetitive constitution of social spaces invites us, as readers of the history of the novel genre and as readers of a contemporary present over-determined by the poles of lamentation and resignation, to behold another thought, resurgent in Rancière and Levine’s theorizations of redistributions of the sensible and repetitive enactments of forms: the made world is only made and can therefore be remade, though no building project will not repeat the ungroundedness of every social structuration.  Novels in general uniquely ramify this made-ness of the world, this poetics of worldmaking; the particular novels Bleak House and Remainder actively theorize not only the artifice of any socius, but the freedoms that surprisingly inhere in political forms.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998.  Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Arrighi, Giovanni.  2010.  The Long Twentieth Century.  London: Verso.

Benjamin, Walter.  1968.  “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Illuminations New York: Schocken Books.

Brennan, Tim.  2007.  Wars of Position.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Dean, Jodi.  2009.  Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham: Duke University Press.

Derrida, Jacques.  1992. “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Acts of Literature.  London: Routledge.

Dickens, Charles.  1854.  “To Working Men” Household Words 7 October.

Hensley, Nathan.  2012.  “Allegories of the Contemporary” Novel 45:2.

Kornbluh, Anna.  2015.  “The Realist Blueprint,” Henry James Review 36.

Levine, Caroline.  2015.  Forms.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

McCarthy, Tom.  2011.  “Interview with Tom McCarthy” The White Review 1.  http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-tom-mccarthy-2/

McNulty, Tracy.  2014. Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Ranciere, Jacques.  2006.  The Politics of Aesthetics London: Bloomsbury.

–––. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury.

Stanford Friedman, Susan.  2013.  Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses.  Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Notes

[1] I mean this claim with respect to critical reception, and to these novels’ manifest interest in organizations and constructions, but I also mean it more pointedly in Jacques Derrida’s (1992, 72) sense of a literature of institution, “which consists in…producing discursive forms, works and event sin which the very possibility of a fundamental constitution is at least fictionally contested, threatened, deconstructed, presented in its very precariousness.”

[2] Agamben (1998, 59) belongs to an arc along which I would also situate not only Foucault and Judith Butler, but also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and “the new materialisms.”  For helpful overviews of aspects of these trends in critical theory, see Brennan (2007) Dean (2009).

[3] Hensley (2012) makes robust use of Arrighi in an essay making similar transtemporal comparison that I found inspirational here.

[4] For the Jewish and psychoanalytic origins of this concept of law as enabling constraint, in contrast to a prevailing Pauline view of law as tyrannical letter, see McNulty (2014).

[5] I argue elsewhere (Kornbluh 2015) for this understanding of realism, rooted in its affinities with architecture, but that is only a different repetition of the thought between Bleak House and Remainder.  Also note McCarthy’s (2011) insistence that “realism is a construction…it’s about the constructedness of the natural and how everything that we take to be natural is in fact artificial.  Nineteenth-century realists knew what they were doing was a convention.  To lose sight of that is catastrophic.  It’s crazy.”

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  She is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP, 2014) and is currently completing a manuscript The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space.

 

by Carolyn Betensky

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

In Fire in the Ashes:  Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America, Jonathan Kozol recounts a scene that took place repeatedly in New York in the mid-1980s:   theatergoers exiting the Broadway musical Les Misérables kept being solicited for money by groups of children from a nearby homeless shelter that was notorious for its squalid conditions.   The NYPD did their best to chase the children away, but eventually the theater owners and other businesses adopted more elaborate measures to keep the groups apart – including hiring other homeless people to “cleanse” the theater district (2012; 3-6).

Beyond its presentation of the theatergoers’ exquisitely ironic plight – they had just finished being moved by the trials of nineteenth-century Parisian street urchins when they were forced to contend with the demands of flesh-and-blood poor children — Kozol’s anecdote offers us an especially vivid tableau of contrasts:  the rich (with money to spend on entertainment) and the poor (whose basic needs are not being met), the genteel and the unruly, the happy few and the miserable.  In many respects, his tableau replicates the troping of social problems in nineteenth-century novels (including Hugo’s).  Victorian readers would have been familiar with every element in it — from the high irony and the contrasts, to the presumed obliviousness of the well-heeled theatergoers, to the banding together of the business owners, to the calling in of the authorities.  They would even have been familiar with its representation of art’s failure to elicit sympathy for the poor within a work that aimed, itself, to elicit such sympathy.

We produce, learn, adapt, repeat, and perpetuate ways not to have to think or to act consistently, from one context to the next.  New York’s “stop and frisk policy,” which regularly subjected minorities to arbitrary humiliation and abuse in the name of public safety, was considered reasonable until very recently, not only by the Bloomberg mayoral administration but also by many white people who felt “safer” because of it.  The Black Lives Matter movement has had to insist on the value of black lives, as opposed to “all” lives, because black lives have not registered as valuable, in the manner of “all” lives, to the white majority.  When I taught at a large, private, urban university, all of the food court workers in the student union building and all of their student clientele were in their late teens and twenties; strikingly, and yet somehow invisibly, all of the food servers were black, and most of the students were white.  Closer to home, most of the universities I know of, including my own, rely on the labor of adjunct professors whose names we never learn because they are not “really” our colleagues.

We are incredibly good at not knowing what we know, and so were the Victorians.  The same culture that developed and embraced modes for representing inequality and injustice could be horribly blind to its own oppressive practices.  The same Dickens who wrote humanitarian epics wrote deeply racist essays.  The same narrator in Jane Eyre who famously makes common cause with slaves describes Bertha in stock racist terms.  Elizabeth Gaskell undercuts her representation of the suffering working classes in Mary Barton with caveats about the “dumb and inarticulate” masses. There are many, many examples any of us here could cite of Victorian disjointedness – so many that we tend to expect them.  “Blind spots” like these are so normal that they themselves have become easy to ignore.[i]

The book project I’m developing considers the active production and naturalization of such blind spots in Victorian texts.  Unlike historicist analyses that contend that we cannot fault the Victorians for not knowing what we know, I am arguing explicitly that they did know – and did not know – what we both know and do not know.  My purpose, however, is not to fault the Victorians but rather to understand the ways Victorian culture created pathways of non-cognition that enabled them, and us, NOT to have to bring contradictory ideas and feelings into conversation with each other.

Contemporary relational and interpersonal psychoanalysts see “the” self as a compendium of self-states – distinct ways of being, feeling, and understanding that are called up and activated within different sorts of contexts – as opposed to the unitary, essential, continuous “self” of the depth model.[ii]  According to theorists such as the late Stephen Mitchell, Philip Bromberg, and Donnel Stern, who are themselves working in traditions established by Harry Stack Sullivan, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Melanie Klein, dissociation is in some sense a normal state of affairs.  Because different self-states kick in at different moments – depending on what we’re trying to avoid or accomplish, depending on who we’re with and the histories our interpersonal configurations evoke – “we” often don’t experience what “we” experience.  Different self-states get excluded in a process that works much like what Sullivan (1953; 319) called “selective inattention”:  “the classic means by which we do not profit from experience which falls within the areas of our particular handicap.  We don’t have the experience from which we might profit – that is, although it occurs, we never notice what it must mean; in fact we never notice that a good deal of it has occurred at all.”

With some exceptions, the implications of these theories have not been considered beyond the clinic.  Yet it seems to me that the concepts of the self-state and dissociation, understood as normative cultural mechanisms, have much to contribute to our understanding of texts and other cultural practices.  The discontinuity of self-states offers us a way to comprehend the disconnects within texts without explaining them away:  incompatibilities, disconnects, and blind spots may be seen less as contradictions (sutured or not) than as the adaptation of culturally sanctioned ways of not thinking things together.  The blind spots, disconnects, and disjointed thinking we see so clearly in Victorian texts are heritage behaviors that are passed down, pre-approved and systematically naturalized; they are cultural patterns that endorse and enshrine gaps between discordant ways of thinking and thereby keep them from contaminating or challenging each other.

The therapeutic goal of clinicians working with dissociation is to get the patient to “stand in the spaces,” as Bromberg (1998; 274) puts it – to become capable of acknowledging and tolerating these dissonant selves.[iii]  The aim of these clinicians is not to “unify” the selves in some way, in other words; rather, it is to help the patient to bring the conflicting demands and expectations of the different selves to the fore.   More than standing in the spaces between discordant self-states in Victorian novels, my own goal in this project is to note the cultural production of the spaces themselves.   At this early stage, I anticipate writing a metacritical chapter, a chapter on the contributions of form and genre to cultural practices of dissociation, and a chapter on the implications of dissociated self-states for the notion that literature can change “the” reader.

Obviously, this project is unapologetically presentist, as any attempt to differentiate Victorians’ not knowing from our knowing (as in, “the Victorians didn’t think about racism/anti-Semitism/classism/sexism, etc. the way we do now”) serves to help us lie about our own cultural moment in the manner of Michel Foucault’s (1990; 6) “speaker’s benefit.”[iv]  Treating the Victorians as other in this regard suggests that we have achieved mastery over familiar kinds of injustice, a manifestly specious notion.  And further, when twenty-first century scholars insist on a constitutive difference between Victorians’ uninformed or undeveloped sensibilities and our own, we lose track of the cumulative development of a technology that assists us in not knowing what we know.  I would add that the regularity and unguardedness of nineteenth-century inscriptions of racism, misogyny, contempt for the poor, etc. offer twenty-first-century educators abundant opportunities to discuss less visible (to us) dissociative cultural logics in our own midst – if we dare to treat Victorian literature as an occasion for encouraging our students to think critically about their own world.

References

Bromberg, Phillip M. 1998. Standing in the Spaces:  Essays on Clinical Process, Trauma, and Dissociation.  Hillsdale, NJ:  Analytic Press.

Foucault, Michel.  1990.  The History of Sexuality. Volume 1:  An Introduction.  Translated by Robert Hurley.  New York:  Vintage. Foucault, Michel.

Hacking, Ian. 1995.  Rewriting the Soul:  Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Kozol, Jonathan.  2012.  Fire in the Ashes:  Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America. New York:  Broadway Books.

Sullivan, Harry Stack. 1953. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York:  W.W. Norton.

Notes

[i] Critics have paid abundant attention to these discrepancies – sometimes arguing that they are not in fact discrepancies if considered in historical context, sometimes arguing that what appear to be discrepancies are continuities, etc., etc.  I can’t attend to this point in any detail here but want to acknowledge that apparent contradictions such as these are far from new objects of critical analysis.

[ii] Ironically, nineteenth-century psychologists such as Pierre Janet and William James had developed discontinuous conceptions of the self that, respectively, preceded and rivaled Freud’s depth model.  See Hacking 1995 for a historical account of the rise, fall, and resurgence of psychiatric theories of multiplicity. I’m hoping this study will provide another perspective on the consuming interest in dissociation and dissociative phenomena among nineteenth-century writers more generally.

[iii] “‘Standing in the spaces’ is a shorthand way of describing a person’s relative capacity to make room at any given moment for subjective reality that is not readily containable by the self he experiences as ‘me’ at that moment.’”  Bromberg (1998; 274).

[iv] Foucault writes of the self-serving tendency of post-Victorians/post-Freudians to call out the Victorians for being “repressed,” thereby establishing themselves as “liberated” (1990; 6).

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Carolyn Betensky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island.  She is the author of Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel (Virginia UP, 2010), and the co-author and translator of Eugène Sue’s 1843 blockbuster Les Mystères de Paris (Penguin, 2015).

by Matthew Sussman

This essay was peer-reviewed by the editorial board of b2o: an online journal.

In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” the second of his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche argues that we should use history for the sake of “life,” a concept that is obscure but central to his argument.[1] The idea of life is obscure because rather than give it specific positive content—suggested vaguely by words such as “action” (59) and “health” (63)—Nietzsche defines it largely through negation, emphasizing what corrupts or inhibits it. But despite this ambiguity life remains central because it provides the essay’s ultimate moral principle, the summum bonum against which the value of all other things must be measured. If something furthers the interests of life, then it is good, and conversely, that which gets in the way of life must be eliminated. This means that for Nietzsche, methodological questions in the study of history are ultimately moral ones, and disciplinary practices need to be evaluated pragmatically, insofar as they promote these moral ends.

We can see an example of this approach in the way Nietzsche attacks the idea of historical objectivity (88-95). For many of his contemporaries, objectivity was appealing precisely because it called for historical data to be treated in a morally neutral way, unaffected by the subjective prejudices of the historian. But, according to Nietzsche, this denial of moral interest itself expresses a norm of “justice” (88) that prohibits the historian from distinguishing between the meaningful and the trivial. Hence, a certain amount of injustice to the historical record is required if historians are to avoid the pitfalls of a bland and morally deficient antiquarianism that reduces every past event to a meaningless expression of flux. As in other works, Nietzsche calls for the revaluation of values not as an attack on the idea of value per se but rather to force us to ask what our ultimate values are and whether our methods serve them.

There, I think, lies the lesson of Nietzsche’s essay for contemporary literary criticism. In scientific endeavors, objectivity will always be an epistemic virtue because the basic purpose of such disciplines is to distinguish opinion from fact. What we do with the facts is a matter of opinion, but the need for facts remains. However, humanistic disciplines such as literary studies are not quite so obligated. For one, the status of a fact in our discipline is much more ontologically doubtful and the utility of facts once we know them is also limited. For example, the kind of historical knowledge that Nietzsche alludes to may enrich our reading of a text, but that sort of enrichment is just one interpretive possibility among many, a possibility whose hegemony Nietzsche helps us question. Furthermore, as Jesse Rosenthal suggests in his contribution to this symposium, the kind of historical record or tradition produced by literary critics—and in this way we resemble philosophers—is for the most part an invented one, determined less by material circumstances than by atemporal conventions of intersubjective agreement. These conventions may have a basis in historical reality, but their ultimate goal is to float free from that reality, allowing us to involve ourselves and our subjects in “conversations” that are consciously, often quite deliberately, unrestricted by the circumstances of time or place.

The title of Nietzsche’s essay advances this view. The meditation is untimely not simply because it goes against the grain of its period, but because it does so by reviving a Hellenic moral framework over two thousand years old whose bearing on the present is a matter of opinion: “What I mean by this—and it is all I mean—is that the thought of being epigones, which can often be a painful thought, is also capable of evoking great effects and grand hopes…provided we regard ourselves as the heirs and successors of the astonishing powers of antiquity and see in this our honour and our spur” (103). Unlike material history, which is successful only insofar as it conforms to reality, aesthetic or intellectual history seeks to create a parallel reality whose greatest virtue may be its very freedom from excessive facticity. In this light, it is helpful to remember that one of Nietzsche’s greatest contributions to culture—his distinction in The Birth of Tragedy between the spirits of Apollo and Dionysus—was criticized when it first appeared for lacking a credible basis in the texts and culture from which Nietzsche purported to draw it. A more “objective” nineteenth-century historian might never have had Nietzsche’s insight—or, as we may more accurately say, have invented his compelling idea.

Of course, there are many risks associated with an outright denial of historicist values, and Nietzsche carefully argues that knowledge of the historical origins of our values is imperative if we are to assume the superior perspective that is necessary for intellectual and artistic freedom (102-3). However, this concession still suggests that the preeminent value in knowing our history is the subsequent ability to set it aside—as long as we remain creative enough to substitute some other criterion of value in its place, and bold enough to convince others of its merit.

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007). This edition is hereafter cited parenthetically.

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Matthew Sussman is lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia.  His articles have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Studies in English Literature, Victorian Studies, and Arizona Quarterly.