Category: The b2o Review

by Tom Eyers

The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics
New York: Fordham University Press, 2017

If there is a million dollar question in contemporary theory, it is that of materialism. To declare oneself a materialist remains an attractive proposition, and this despite the tangled confusions that have attended the term since the Ancients. There is something dashing about its implications, although any core definition, even any vaguely related set of appropriate objects or applications, remains stubbornly elusive. Materialism, especially in our flighty anxious present, promises something hard-edged, impatient of airy abstractions – the irony being, of course, that this most apparently earthy of terms seems able only to generate ever more windy attempts to pin it down. Historically, it is most often defined according to what it is not, and this is appropriate enough. There has always been something suspiciously thrusting, positive and hubristic about the idealisms, with their over-eager willingness to propose and impose system upon system, and the various materialisms have most often taken shape in flinty opposition to just such empire building.

This is not to say that materialist philosophers have lacked ambition. Karl Marx, the most recognizable and influential materialist in history, came close to proposing an all-embracing schema for interpreting the general movements of human history, scolding Hegel for downplaying the inconveniences of economy and physicality to human history-making, but reproducing the latter’s theoretical capaciousness all the same. If it is fairly easy, if not without controversy, to identify what the ‘material’ in Marxism is – in shorthand, the historically variable productive processes that shape how human beings live and labor – it is rather more difficult to imagine a ‘materialist poetics’. While poetry may aspire to capture something of the density of living matter within the looser folds of literary language – think, among many other possible examples, of the Romantics’ wrangling with the apparently imperturbable autonomy of nature, of Ponge’s poetics of mid-sized objects – it is less clear that the ‘stuff’ of poetry, figural language, can in any non-analogous sense be considered ‘material’.

Of course, materialisms have rarely been concerned only with matter understood as more or less synonymous with the physical. Materialists have more often located characteristics one usually associates with the material in domains that cannot entirely be reduced to the latter. Marx finds in the manner in which human beings perpetually become through labor a combination of historical permanence and flexibility, one that equally characterizes the physical stuff upon which they work, and through which they are able to achieve a kind of relative autonomy. Viewed from such a vantage, the elusive linguistic compressions that make up modern and contemporary poetry seem evanescent, impermanent, allusive, if not quite ‘ideal’. Nathan Brown’s superb and energizing first book is not the first to attempt to square this circle, of course. There are those for whom deconstruction at its most fastidious approached something like a literary materialism, insofar as it trained its gaze on those aspects of meaning-making in literature that seemed most intransigent, those moments of figural contradiction that refused to yield to any smooth or final translation of non-sense to sense. Marxist literary theory would seem another fruitful source. Since Althusser, and especially since Pierre Macherey provided the elaborated Althusserian literary theory that Althusser never quite did, Marxist critics have been wary of too quickly reading the sturdiness of the economic base into the apparently more ephemeral products of literary culture. Instead, and cannily, the likes of Jameson and Eagleton have found in literary form itself intimations of historical conflict that might more conventionally be sought in political-economic contextualizations of literary content. It is dismaying, given this rich history, that recent, ostensibly Marxist literary-critical readings of, say, the neoliberal, have tended toward just such vulgar historicisms, so wary of a caricatured-in-advance aestheticism that they neglect the very matter of their chosen object of study, literary language itself.

To his credit, Brown largely leaves such polemics to one side, preferring to immanently build a poetics of fabrication from the ground up, tracing suggestive parallels between 20^th and 21^st century avant-garde poetry and materials science. It would do this book a disservice to describe it as a creative reinvention and defense of close reading, not least because the latter has more often obscured the material density of the words on the page than it has illuminated it. Nonetheless, the hard theoretical labor of reading that Brown performs, sweeping from the granular to the scalar, should come to place in stark relief the reigning common sense in literature departments, where the too-easy task of doing history badly has proven far more attractive than any knotty reckoning with the density of the literary signifier. In a virtuosic account of the cross-cutting history of nanoscale carbon chemistry and Ronald Johnson’s ‘architectural’ long poem ARK, Brown quotes the following capitalized line of Johnston’s: “TO GO INTO THE WORDS AND EXPAND THEM”. (142) If a pithy summation of Brown’s practice of reading were possible, it would read something like this: ‘go into the words’, not to extract any pre-ordained ideality of sense, and neither to dwell nostalgically on their ‘literariness’, but rather to expand them, to identify their intersections with practices of fabrication that might at first blush seem entirely unrelated.  To read materially in this way is not just to recognize the constructedness of poetry, its crystals and nanotubes and grains, although this is crucial enough, but also to expand such a materiality through creative articulation with other sites of construction.

To be clear, such articulations very rarely occur in this book by means of any simple, contextualist, or symmetrical glomming of literature onto historical or scientific correlates. Instead, this is a book that takes mediation seriously, that resists the now-commonplace assumption that literary artifacts must by default have everything to do with whatever contemporaneous historical event or framework the scholar has decided to foreground. What brings Johnson and carbon chemistry into agonistic dialogue, for instance, is the ambiguous and complicating intervention of a third figure, Buckminster Fuller. Those familiar with Johnson’s poetry will recognize the affinity – the poet has described his verse as “literally an architecture…fitted together with shards of language, in a kind of cement music”. (Johnson quoted in Brown, 99) But there is more at stake here than the mere recognition of a common architecturality across science and recent avant-garde poetry. Brown is equally attuned to the evasive ideologies that couple with these constructions: “At the center of this story”, Brown writes in his chapter on Johnson, “will be the concept (the ideology, in fact) of ‘design’ and its relation to a certain idealist concept of ‘nature’ and the ‘nature poem’”. (99) While idealized conceptions of nature significantly predate even the Romantics, the adhesion of such notions to the ideologeme of ‘design’, itself a trope that in its (post)modern guise tends to be assiduously scrubbed of anything so messy as manufacture, is rather more recent. Brown locates one root of this problematic in Buckminster Fuller’s writings, where design is figured as eternal, as universal, and as exemplarily accessible. He then traces an opposing trend also emerging from Black Mountain College, that of Olson’s ‘objectism’. If Fuller understands the materials of fabrication as being “just exactly where they want to be” (112), the poet instead affirms the ‘proper confusions’ of objects, their giving out onto a fragmentation resistant to the universal. Johnson, in turn, insists on similar tensions between “whole systems and the materials of which they are composed”. (131)

If these intertwined histories of fabrication and the production of ideology are compelling in their own right, Brown is at his best when he registers the materialities of sound and inscription that are particular to poetry, the better to reveal with due emphasis what the matter of poetry does, over against other forms of materiality. There are times reading this book when the particular curvature and atomicity of poetic materiality is rather lost in the mix, as Brown offers example after example of how one practice – nanotechnology, say – accords with, or helps reorient, our understanding of another – poetry. Some of these case studies could profitably have been left in the archive. But for all that, Brown is a strikingly inventive reader, and there emerges across his book a powerful, if largely implicit, theory of materialist reading that rivals the accompanying account of materialist poetic and scientific practice. Take, for instance, the reading of Emily Dickinson that appears in the book’s Prologue. A line of Dickinson’s poem ‘I cannot live with You’ catches Brown’s eye. The line reads ‘You there – I  – here –‘.

One finds, of course, those characteristic Dickinsonian dashes, but more than this, “[the poem] is composed entirely of deictic terms, or shifters. The dash is a minimal graphemic unit – pen touching down on paper with an instant’s pressure, leaving the barest trace of furtive contact. Shifters are the piezoelectric transducers of grammar – minutely sensitive to the voltage of voice, expanding to generate an apparent fusion of body, language, world at the interface of the tongue’s tip: ‘there’”. (5).  Gradually, the substantiality of that ‘I’ and that ‘You’ seem less important than what Brown refers to as the ‘paragrammatic’, and, one might add, insistently material transformations at the level of the line:

In Dickinson’s line, the paragram operates on a scale below that of even the letter and the phoneme – indeed, below the level of the grapheme. The second half of the line, ‘-I – here – ‘, might be taken to emerge from the subgraphemic elements of ‘there’. Dickinson’s ‘t’ transforms into ‘I’ as the crossbar of the former splits in half to form dashes that both separate and conjoin the vertical stroke of ‘I’ with the remainder of this rupture, ‘there’”. (10).

Ultimately, “grasping this potential significance of the line demands that we read an invisible, subgraphemic dimension of writing operating prior to signification”. (10) These ostensibly invisible elements of transformation are what, for Brown, link materialist poetics to materials science; “to situate these at the limits of fabrication is to open a space between ‘there’ and ‘here’ in which we are approached by bodies and words, in which the poetic image gives way onto invisible structures, wherein text passes over into texture”. (10)

While Brown’s claims here have something in common with all that became bound up with the slogan ‘the materiality of the signifier’, fanning out from French theory of the 1960s, it is rare indeed to see the stakes of the claim unfolded with such finesse and to the fullest of its consequences. It is rarer still to encounter reading pitched at this level of granularity and sensitivity, impervious to the lures of over-contextualization or the widespread fetish for content over form. One wants to know, nonetheless, what the rapid zooms in and out of multiple scales here, from close-ups of the poetic line to widescreen trans-historical tracings, would look like were the question of causality explicitly asked, not at the level of shared metaphors or suggestive parallels but rather according to the very different ontological properties that inhere in the vastly divergent materials that capture Brown’s attention.

From one angle, this is the very question that animates the book, and Brown provides the reader with numerous examples of the transformations of space that the sciences and literature alike are able to induce. Moreover, the problem has an irreducibly political charge. If, as Joshua Clover has claimed, Language poetry and other recent avant-gardes bought their meticulous attention to the minutiae of language at the expense of thinking the ramifications of political totality[1], Brown is concerned to locate a poetics that would be both micro and macro, nano and cosmological. In a bravura chapter on Shanxing Wang’s 2005 collection ‘Mad Science in Imperial City’, Brown finds in its attempted “mathematical formalization of historical processes” (217) a poetic suturing of time and space, drawing together the urban imaginaries of Beijing circa Tiananmen Square and New York following 9/11. More than this, Wang’s collection takes up other oppositions that its initial concern with divergent scales opens up, most pertinently for Brown those between intellectual and manual labor, between the abstract and the concrete – these, one infers, to be understood as implicated in the contrast between the infinitesimally small and the yawningly vast that materials science is especially concerned to explore. Ultimately, Sohn-Rethel’s extension of Marx’s concept of ‘real abstraction’ provides a lens through which Brown is able to historicize the shift in spatial and material imaginaries that Wang’s history-spanning poetry pictures.

And yet, the materialities that compose urban geographies, the nanomaterial, poetry, or collectivities of labor, are anything but equivalent. If one of the characteristics that different forms of matter, in all of their variant forms, may be said to share is a certain resistance, a capacity to elude attempts at their refabrication or repurposing, it may be this most common aspect of materiality that is unwittingly minimized in Brown’s account. To fully foreground this would be to ponder just how that resistance is overcome; how it is that the very different forms of matter in question resonate upon one other or, just as likely, how they are ultimately fated not to do so. The dialectical peculiarity of this logic should not be lost: the characteristic that unites different manifestations of the material, that of resistance, is also that which singularizes, which precludes the formation in material actuality of the very totality that one is nonetheless rightfully enjoined, in theory, to map. One would, in brief, have liked at the level of this book’s concept-production a little more of the spatial noise and constitutive resistance suggested in these lines by Charles Olson, a signal source for Brown:

In the five hindrances men and angels
stay caught in the net, in the immense nets
which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets
which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels
and the demons
and men
go up and down
(‘As the Dead Prey Upon Us’ in The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the ‘Maximus’ Poems, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 389).

Leaving aside the post-theistic, ghostly metaphysic that shapes these famous lines, we find a numerical order and a structured kind of spatial disorder in combination here, such that vertical nets and horizontal ladders both enable and disable one another. The nets within which men and angels are caught are immense, and yet somehow limiting; a different order of space, the ladders upon which angels, demons and men ascend, intersects the nets while also being hampered by them. Hindrance and expansiveness; hindrance, perhaps, as expansiveness. Such limitations to possibility are also, potentially, conditions of possibility, and they are not given a sufficient shake in Brown’s otherwise capacious, sometimes too capacious, attention to the movements between various domains of material construction.

For all that, Brown’s practice of reading is tuned to detect precisely such contradictions and aporias, and he often does so beautifully at the level of the line. Nonetheless, the vaulting ambition that supercharges his historical claims occasionally renders artificially smooth what are, one suspects, rather rougher and more incomplete moments of connection and disconnection between the scientific and the poetic, between the minute and the gargantuan. At any rate, this is one of the very finest works of speculative poetics to emerge in quite some time, and one hopes that its highly creative deviations from the historicist-contextualist hegemony in literary studies will spark equally incandescent acts of theoretical disobedience in its wake.

[1] Brown cites this claim on page 222, and takes it seriously. There is certainly something to it, but the argument risks ignoring the over-determined imbrication of historical-political archival work and formal alchemy to be found, for instance, in the Language poetry of Ron Silliman, all the better to boost more recent, performatively militant verse as uniquely and purely radical. I have tried to situate the ambiguous but powerfully formalized political imaginary of Silliman and others in the fifth chapter of my Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 2017). The danger, of course, is any recrudescent nostalgia for modernist, pseudo-formalist invocations of literariness, something that the Language poets, admittedly, were often prone to.

Tom Eyers is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University.

by Dan DiPiero

Throughout the history of Western European musical aesthetics, improvisation has been largely derided or else ignored outright, enjoying “a status of literally zero value in the Western economy of musical ‘works’” (Iyer 2014).¹ In marked contrast, the emerging field of critical improvisation studies has worked not only to highlight the universal importance of improvisation in musical cultures, but also to expand what we understand by improvisation in the first place.

Improvisation and Social Aesthetics is one of the latest examples of critical scholarship on improvisation, a collection of essays that began as a 2010 conference of the same name. Both the conference and the book emerged from what was the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) research project, and which is now the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, the intellectual home of critical improvisation studies.² In general, the book interrogates a double relation between its two key terms: it argues on one hand that improvisation embodies and is reflective of social aesthetics. The latter idea is posed here as an intervention into the canonical Western understanding of aesthetics, an intervention that argues that aesthetic perception, judgment, and action is embedded in, constitutive of, affected by socio-cultural discourses, relationships, and practices. At the same time, the notion of a social aesthetics helps to understand what is at stake when thinking improvisation in a more rigorous and less colloquial usage.

In order to accomplish that, the editors– Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw– begin by demonstrating how the work in this collection operates according to a different understanding of aesthetics than those which have emerged from Western philosophy. As they write in their introduction “What is Social Aesthetics?”, the Western musical valorization of composition (as a “work” of art) over improvisation (as a real-time performance) is reflective of the broader aesthetic paradigm that the their book targets. In the same way that a composition is seen as an autonomous “object” that transcends the individual particularities of a given performance, Western aesthetic values have similarly concerned themselves with the possibility of “objective” valuations that remain true regardless of who is experiencing that art (which is another way of understanding improvisation’s low position in Western aesthetic theory). For Born, Lewis, and Straw this system of thinking

resulted in theories that are peculiarly barren of nuance, unable to understand actual aesthetic attitudes, and blind to how such social relations as those pertaining to class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, or nationality, and the histories and power relations in which they are entwined, as well as the socialites animated by art objects and events, inflect aesthetic experience–often in ways that precisely deny that they are so inflected (Born et al. 2017, 2).

In contrast to such theories, which invariably privilege atomism (individual works of art, individual auteurs, individual perceivers), “social aesthetics” is a concept intended to foreground the collective, social, and improvisatory nature of perception and pleasure. Unlike relational aesthetics, which avoids sociological questions by focusing on “sociality as an end in itself” (Born, 38), social aesthetics seeks to understand all the myriad ways in which artistic practices are already socially engaged.³ Both the people making artworks and the people perceiving them are people with particular bodies and histories, and they interact in various modalities. Even a single painter is painting with an aesthetic sensibility, artistic technique, and subjective perspective shaped in social situations; moreover, that artist will eventually engage in new socialities when her work is shown. Social aesthetics recognizes the difference between these engagements at the same time that it recognizes each of them as essential to theorizing aesthetics. Neither artworks nor our understanding of them exist in a vacuum; instead, they are situated within networks of assumptions that are shared among groups of people, which are also malleable.

This argument will be familiar to those versed in cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, or ethnomusicology, “…where there is a long tradition of viewing…music as culture…as something that people do, as opposed to being a work-based object” (Monson, 2010). What is new here is that social aesthetics makes an explicit call for perspectives from those other disciplines, and that it uses such perspectives to ask different questions. “A social aesthetics is, then, less concerned with demarcating a class of aesthetically valuable objects that it is with explaining how and why a given set of objects or experiences…is judged to be valuable…” (Born et al., 3). While the introduction to this book proposes a new understanding of aesthetics, the essays themselves demonstrate examples of where such an approach could lead. As with the notion of improvisation itself, readers should expect to find the appeal in this book in the diverse applications and understandings presented in its essays, rather than in a unified theory. Additionally, because of the focus on multiple examples of artistic production, this collection is more about nuancing the understanding of aesthetics as it relates to artistic practices than it is about exploring, returning to, or reinvigorating the original sense of aesthetics as a study of sense perception and the totality of human experience.⁴

Returning to the question of improvisation, one of the most valuable aspects of this collection is the various ways in which it foregrounds the fact that improvisation is in fact a question. In other words: “All of the contributors are aware of the dangers that arise from the very outset in discussing improvisation, whose definition and limits remain contested” (Born et al., 10). While the notion of improvisation as a line of flight in a stratified world has produced compelling work (especially in applied cases), this collection takes seriously the possibility that improvisation is no guarantee of egalitarianism or freedom of any sort, that improvisation itself is a multiple and contingent phenomenon. For instance, in her contribution, “After Relational Aesthetics,” Georgina Born argues that many of the broad theoretical statements about improvisation’s transformative potential do not take into account the full range of music’s social entanglements, and that this failure is what allows the easy association between improvisation and freedom. Born writes that such utopian arguments “invariably draw their inspiration from three sources” which, in her view, are selective in their understanding of music’s sociality: “the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz (1964); the post-Foucauldian stance of Jacques Attali’s Noise (1985)…; and the writings of Christopher Small (1998)” (44). In drawing on these texts, Born argues, one specific type of social interaction involved in improvisation–the microsocial–is elevated at the expense of others. Born argues that music, which has “no material essence but a plural and distributed material being” (44) must therefore be understood across four planes of social interaction, rather than just one. The microsocial relates to the first plane, the “most apparent,” which consists of the “immediate microsocialities of musical performance and practice and in the social relations embodied in musical ensembles and associations” (43). In other words, the microsocial consists of the social dynamics among performing musicians, or the interactions and relationships inherent to music-making. The argument that improvisation can be associated with egalitarian social practices emerges from the way in which improvisers collectively negotiate a piece of music, as opposed to classical musicians (for example), who, in the Western tradition, follow the various kinds of instructions that are laid before them (as well as the corresponding hierarchies implicit in the social arrangements between conductor, composer, and various musicians).⁵ Theoretical statements emerging from only this first plane–as if it exists in isolation–“tend to be idealized and to occlude several additional ways that music…meditate[s] and [is] mediated by social processes”(13). For instance, while it might be true that a jazz ensemble collectively negotiates an improvised musical performance, drawing emancipatory conclusions from that immediate scene does not take into account the larger structures of power that prevent women from being taken seriously as jazz musicians, that prevent women from being present in that microsocial scene in the first place. To guard against such conclusions, Born’s essay spells out a theoretical approach for doing the work that, in many ways, emerges from this collection as a whole–that is, work that seeks to understand all of the ways in which improvisation is implicated within sociality, both in how improvisation is social, and in how the social is improvisatory.

In order to situate microsocial investigations within a broader framework, Born proposes a total of four planes of musical mediation.⁶ In addition to the microsocial (the first plane), she also introduces a second plane, in which music “has the power to animate imagined communities”; a third plane, in which “music refracts wider social relations, from the most concrete to the most abstract of collectivities” (e.g. “the nation,” “social hierarchies,” “or the social relations of class, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.”); and the fourth, in which music is “bound up on the broader institutional forces that provide the basis for its production” (43). From all of these perspectives, Born hopes to “provide a measure of rigor for those concerned with theorizing art’s multiple social mediations” (57). Because music is a uniquely slippery kind of “object,” it is all too easy for writers to privilege one or more of these “social moments”–or else to glide between them–without recognizing the potential differences that such differences make. Born’s efforts to clarify and nuance what we talk about when we talk about music should prove extremely productive for future studies.

Additionally, Born’s nuanced analysis of such “moments” of improvisation reinforce the arguments in the introduction regarding the multiple understandings of improvisation itself. In other words, if the microsocially-derived and idealized characterization of improvisation remains dominant, it is still one understanding among many.⁷ Improvisation is a more complicated notion than its colloquial invocations would imply, and it cannot be reduced to a set of binaries (free vs restricted, creative vs habitual, etc.). The essays included in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics–for example Darren Wershler’s “Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Improvisation” and Winfried Siemerling’s “Social Aesthetics and Transcultural Improvisation”–take this premise seriously, and situate it squarely at the center of the questions that they pose. Improvisation, like all artistic practices, means different things to different people at different times in different places, and between those improvising as performers and those improvising as listeners.

It is, then, the differences in how the term ‘improvisation’ may be employed, and the ways in which practices, discourses, and cultures of improvisation diverge or are in tension, that are of greatest interest, since they point to the radically contingent nature of improvisation as it is understood and empractised, and as it has developed historically in relation to specific artistic media (11).

An example of such a difference is explored by Ingrid Monson in her essay “From the American Civil Rights Movement to Mali.” Here, Monson shows through her ethnographic work in Mali that while the idea of improvisation as a practice of community-making is shared between Mali and the West, there are no such parallels in terms of the West’s use of “sonic dissonance and avant-garde experimentalism as a sign of social and cultural critique” (89).  In other words, improvisation, like any artistic practice, is not a technique, method, or skill that emerges in the same way across cultures (or genres, locations, moments); rather, how it is practiced and how those practices are understood become specific to certain communities and discourses over time. By detailing and comparing the contours of these discourses, Monson is able to break away from a monolithic view of improvisation in a manner that also takes into account Born’s call to move beyond the microsocial:

My discomfort with uncritical claims for the creation of new social relations through music has led me to take the position that ensemble improvisation is not inherently egalitarian or emancipatory; instead it offers only the potential for such human interaction…Whatever microsocial claims we make for musical process as modeling the social relations we would like to achieve, in other words, need to be tempered by a larger understanding of power and social hierarchy (83).⁸

Both Born and Monson’s essays belong to the first section in this book, “The Social and the Aesthetic.” Accordingly, both essays show the diverse ways in which improvisation and social aesthetics–two seemingly unrelated concepts–are in fact deeply implicated in one another. The second section, “Genre and Definition”, shows this relation by exploring the ways in which understandings of genre both express certain social commitments and further constitute them. Genre, in other words, provides another lens through which to understand how and why improvisation comes to be understood according to the definitions particular to a generic discourse at a given moment (however unstable they may prove).

As an example of how genre figures into social aesthetics, David Brackett’s essay “The Social Aesthetics of Swing in the 1940s” identifies the different connotations improvisation contained simultaneously within a plural discursive environment. Here, Brackett uses a specific case study to show what others have also argued concerning Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory: namely, that in its focus on European high culture, it does not account for the multiple, competing, coexisting regimes of sense through which popular culture moves, nor does it account for the ways in which those works shift through such social mediation.⁹ Rather than understanding the social aesthetics of swing as situated strictly in Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art, Brackett argues that tracks like “Tuxedo Junction” operate within

simultaneous and competing artistic and aesthetic regimes that had been enshrined in music industry practice since the 1920s with three main categories: popular/mainstream (implying a white, bourgeois audience), race music (implying an African American audience), and old-time/hillbilly music (implying a white, middle-and upper-class audience) (119).

While a genre and a regime of sense are not synonymous, they are still tied up in one another, since the generic distinction shapes, at least in part, the sense according to which musical criteria are interpreted. In his essay, Brackett analyzes two interpretations of “Tuxedo Junction”–one by African American bandleader Erskine Hawkins and one by white musician Glenn Miller–to show the ways in which

differences in approaches to improvisation and other musical elements were often correlated with the social position of the recordings, the fluidity of their circulation, the size of their audience, and their access to various modes of dissemination (120).

In other words, it is not just that the different uses of improvisation affected listener’s racial perceptions of the performances, but also that these perceptions corresponded to larger generic categories (“race records” among them) that carried certain material consequences for how the music circulated. In showing how the material, ideological, and aesthetic intertwine in specific ways, Brackett demonstrates how the “large categories used by the U.S. music industry…map certain aspects of musical style onto categories of group identification” (130). The question of whether improvisation is perceived as either present or absent (where and how), as well as the question of what such absence or presence might signify, are circumscribed by the understandings these regimes permit. And, as with Eric Lewis’ examination of perceptions of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1960s Paris, the perceived significance of improvisation often bears directly on questions of racial identity, with musical and generic demarcations that were entangled with perceptions of race and of collective subjectivities. Thus, once again, improvisation is not a transcendental notion but one which is understood contingently, as it associated with other concepts from within a regime of sense. Both Lewis and Brackett’s essays demonstrate not only that this is true, but how and with what consequences.

The linkages that exist between improvisation and racial identities–one of the most central concerns in contemporary cultural studies on jazz–sets the tone for the third section in this collection, “Sociality and Identity.” Here, Lisa Barg discusses the queer sociality of Billy Strayhorn’s arranging practices; Tracey Nicholls examines improvisation in the visual art criticism of bell hooks; and Marion Froger explores how improvisation functioned as a signifier within the discourse of French New Wave cinema. The latter two essays (along with Zoë Svendsen’s “The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity”) in particular bring to the fore the “very different senses that the term [improvisation] has accrued in relation to particular media and art forms, their cultures of production, and their communities of practice” (11). For instance, where Nicholls locates improvisation in bell hooks’ aesthetics of everyday life objects, Froger details the ways in which improvisation was employed by various participants (actors and directors) and the ways in which it was perceived by various parties (audiences, tradespeople, et al.) working in film. In demonstrating the specific ways in which improvisation is understood, located, perceived, and discussed between these media, Nicholls and Froger continue the discussion from the previous section viz a viz improvisation’s multiple manifestations, at the same time that such negotiations are invoked in the service of foregrounding questions of identity. Improvisation as practiced always carries particular connotations for the performers and the perceivers; just as improvisation carries different aesthetic implications from genre to genre, it also carries different implications for the individual and collective identities of the improvisers and the audiences in question.

The final section of the collection, titled “Performance,” focuses on the myriad social relations involved in live performance, the real-time active process that distinguishes improvisation from other art objects (or at least, which allows improvisation to direct attention to the real-time active processes involved in all artistic production). In this section, to touch on one final theorization between improvisation and social aesthetics, consider Susan Kozel’s essay “Devices of Existence.”

In this essay, Kozel uses two separate dance performances–Small Acts and IntuiTweet–to show that improvisation, always occurring through the body, is social by virtue of what the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty would term inter-corporeality, where “perception, agency, and subjectivity in general take place as a body opened up to the bodies of other” (284).  Kozel draws a link between Merleau-Ponty’s notion of subjectivity as being constructed intracorporeally and improvisation as an inherently intercorporeal practice. From this, she theorizes improvisation along the lines of a Rancièrean aesthetics, as a “mode of being” rather than one of “doing.”¹⁰ Improvisation, in short, is a Merleau-Pontian mode of being in which we are connected to each other and to the world through the body. Subjectivity, for Merleau-Ponty, is constructed through this element-in-common, an opening towards the other in which we are both seeing and seen, toucher and touched, in which we experience the common world both together (in it) and separately (from our own viewpoint), self-reflexively but never omnisciently. In the same way, when we improvise, we are touching the external world, and the others who compose it; we cannot distinguish strictly where we end and the world begins, just as we cannot distinguish which of our connected hands is the toucher and which is the touched. Both improvisation and subjectivity consist in a being-with, in a connection to our element in common. When we improvise, we are touching the world through which interaction and improvisation occur. How we exist in the world is therefore “fundamentally improvisational in that I am forever acting and responding, without really having a starting point in one or the other…” (284).

This quote from Kozel is specific in its conceptualization of improvisation as an “ontological” and “experiential” mode of navigating the word; it is also general in that it reprises the central focus of this book: “Improvisation is a mode of social interaction” (285). Here, rather than focusing on the ways in which improvisation is understood discursively or practically in a given time and place, Kozel focuses on the improvisatory nature of life itself, pushing the outer limits of how we understand this multivalent practice. At the same time, this understanding still links itself with the notion of the social–that is, if improvisation is more synonymous with being as such, it is in part because being is always being-with.

Improvisation is perhaps the creative practice that most obviously demonstrates the social and collective aspects that constitute (ultimately) all artistic practices, and perhaps all experience in general. Again, improvisation both embodies (is reflective of) and elucidates (reflects back on) the social aesthetics of both art, and, in this final sense, of life itself. Improvisation and Social Aesthetics is a means of demonstrating different approaches to these various understandings of improvisation, with projects that both investigate improvisation and which use improvisation to investigate. Like the other IICSI publications, it forms an indispensable collection that cracks open a site for more rich and interdisciplinary work.

References

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. 1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Berlant, Lauren. 2017. “Big Man.” Social Text. Accessed August 10. https://socialtextjournal.org/big-man/.

Born, Georgina, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw. 2017. Improvisation and Social Aesthetics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Certeau, Michel de. 2013. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

DJ Spooky and Vijay Iyer. 2013. “Improvising Digital Culture” in People Get Ready: the Future of Jazz Is Now! edited by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, 225-243. Durham: Duke University Press.

Iyer, Vijay. “Theorizing Improvisation Syllabus.” 2017. Facebook post. Accessed August 10, 2017.

Highmore, Ben. 2011. “Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics.” in The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth, 118-137. North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Monson, Ingrid, in conversation with Georgina Born, Elizabeth Jackson, Eric Lewis, and Jason Stanyek at the “Social Aesthetics Conference,” IICSI McGill Colloquium, Montreal. 2010.

Nettl, Bruno. 1974. “Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach.” The Musical Quarterly 60 (1): 1-19.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/741663

Ranciere, Jacques. 2004. Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Rockhill, Gabriel. 2011. “Rancière’s Productive Contradictions: From the Politics of Aesthetics to the Social Policity of Artistic Practice.” Symposium 15 (2): 28-56. doi:10.5840/symposium201115227

Thompson, Scott. “The Pedagogical Imperative of Musical Improvisation”. Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 3(2).

Notes

1. This is not the same as claiming that improvisation has not been practiced or valued at any point in Western art music; improvisation clearly figured heavily in pre-Romantic musical practices, but did so in such a way that its separation from other musical activities–composition and performance–was not clear-cut. It is with the rise of Romantic conceptions of genius and the composition as a work of art that such distinctions take over. Generally speaking, insofar as such distinctions remain commonplace, this Romantic aesthetic tradition is still dominant.

2. See: http://improvisationinstitute.ca

3. Born discusses her understanding of Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics in the first chapter of this book as “engaging” but ultimately beholden to “reductive generalizations.” Moreover, relational aesthetics explicitly dismisses sociology and similar disciplines, concerning itself with one particular type of sociality generated by contemporary art, rather than the myriad ways in which social practices figure in making and experiencing artworks.

4. Although some of that work is done intermittently throughout the book. In particular, see Kozel, “Devices of Existence.” For more on the distinction between these senses of the aesthetic, see Highmore, 2011.

5. Perhaps the most well-known of these arguments is that of Jacques Attali in Noise (Attali 1985). While his argument does focus on broader societal formations, Born’s critique still holds in that Attali’s contentions on behalf of free improvisation are based on inter-group musical dynamics.

6. “Moreover, the four planes are irreducible to one another, yet they are articulated in contingent and nonlinear ways through relations of conditioning, affordance, or causality. It is precisely the mutual mediations of and complex articulations among the four planes that enable musical assemblages to engender certain kinds of socio-musical experience that are also forms of aesthetic experience, as well as offering the potential for experimentation with those diverse modes of social aesthetic experience” (43).

7. One of the more prevalent colloquial uses of improvisation is referenced by Lauren Berlant in relation to her notion of “genre flailing” (Berlant, 2017). On the 2016 Presidential election, she writes, “In a crisis we engage in genre flailing so that we don’t fall through the cracks of knowledge and noise into suicide or psychosis. In a crisis we improvise like crazy, where “like crazy” is a little too non-metaphorical. Plus, when crisis is ordinary, flailing…can be fabulously unimaginative, a litany of lists of things to do, to pay attention to, say, to stop saying, to discipline and sanction. Prefab frames are a lot of what there is to fling because as the powerful hunker down into phrases that become acts, so must the freshly vulnerable find some phrases too, anchoring and transformative.” Far from a “non-rigorous” notion of improvisation, Berlant’s usage simply points to the existence of the many understandings contained in this word. This quotation is useful in illustrating a notion of improvisation that is non-idealized in at least two senses: first, that it is “unimaginative” or repetitive (which decouples improvisation from originality) and second, that it is more reflexive or reactionary than it is the herald of newly imagined futures. In other words, we improvise when something goes wrong. This usage also has some resonances with Michel De Certeau’s use of the word (De Certeau, 2013).

8. I would also note here that even a provisional focus on the emancipatory potential of microsocial interactions is predicated on a kind of sensory consensus, one which I would argue should not in actuality be taken for granted. The ostensibly horizontal, anti-hierarchical, or smooth space of an improvising group should not, in my view, be read as fundamentally different from any other kind space of musical interaction for at least three reasons: first, because as Nicholas Cook points out in this collection (he is supported by other, earlier arguments–see Nettl 1974; Thompson 2008) the distinction between improvised and non-improvised music is far from clear or steadfast; second, because the musicians in an improvising scenario are still operating based on a set of affordances over which they have limited to no control; and third, because these musicians operate based on a kind of consensus that is assumed but is in fact radically contingent. In Rancière’s terms, those playing together are already those equals who recognize or are in a position to recognize the sounds of the others as speech, rather than noise. The utopian microcosm of musical interaction is such because it contains not a radical politics but no politics at all; it is the place of consensus, of parapolitics, an isolated community of equals operating “freely” within a police order. (For more on these terms, see Rancière 2004.)

9. Notably, see Rockhill 2011.

10. In this sense, Kozel’s understanding of improvisation resonates with one proposed by Vijay Iyer, in which improvisation is more synonymous with experience itself than it is a particular behavior. Significantly, this is an understanding that cuts against the grain of many of the most well-known claims made on behalf of improvisation. On Iyer’s view, improvisation cannot be understood as, for instance, inherently (or extrinsically) egalitarian or emancipatory unless we somehow intervene in the definition; nor would improvisation be limited to a kind of “making-do” in adverse circumstances. If life itself is improvised, then emancipatory, flailing, and also overtly evil deeds are all equally the purview of improvisation. In other words, we would have to take seriously the possibility that improvisation is a power harnessed not only by anti-capitalist humanitarians, but also by the “Dick Cheneys” and the “Haliburtons” of the world (quoted in DJ Spooky, 2013). As Iyer puts it, “they’re improvising, too” (227).

by Adrian Nathan West

Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press, 2017.

The question of Blackness, of what it might or ought to mean, lies at the fault line between timeworn notions of race as a biological destiny, rechristened for the resurgent right as “human biodiversity” or “racial realism,” and identity theory in its various permutations. If the first is generally acknowledged to lack scientific fundament, the second’s refusal to dispense entirely with race, coupled with its difficulty in establishing strict criteria as to who may and may not claim a given ethnicity, has provided fodder for advocates of dubious identitarian positions from transracialism to White Lives Matter. Yet the alternative of avowed post-racialism has frequently served as a cover for the diminishment of the historical suffering of marginalized groups or an excuse for the advocacy of policies that work to these groups’ detriment. Amid the snares of these various approaches, is a different thinking of Blackness possible?

This is the question posed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, whose impressive body of work has yet to achieve the prominence it deserves in the English-speaking world. Critique of Black Reason, his most accomplished book to date, opens by positing Blackness as a historical conception of a kind of being, neither entirely subject not object, elaborated over the course of three successive phases: first, the “organized despoliation of the Atlantic slave trade,” which transformed black flesh into “real estate,” in the words of a 1705 declaration of the Virginia Assembly, and led to the codification of racial difference following Bacon’s Rebellion in the seventeenth century; second, the birth of black writing, which Mbembe traces from the late eighteenth century, as an examination of blacks’ condition as “beings-taken-by-others” to its culmination in the dismantlement of segregation and apartheid; and third, the confluence of market globalization, economic liberalization, and technological and military innovation in the early twenty-first century (Mbembe 2017, 2-4). In this last, grim episode, the concentration of capital following the saturation of global markets, accompanied by processes of efficiency maximization, has led to the seclusion of the black subject on the irrelevant fringes of society and to a consequent “production of indifference,” or “altruicide,” that helps render this barbarity psychologically cost-efficient for the privileged (Mbembe 2017, 3). “If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital,” he states, “the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity.’ Capital hardly needs them any more to function” (Mbembe 2017, 3; 11). This novel arrangement, according to Mbembe, has given rise to “new imperial practices” that tend toward a universalization of the black condition that he refers to as the “Becoming Black of the world” (Mbembe 2017, 6).

Mbembe defines race as a system of images tailored to the demands of rapacity that forestalls any encounter with an authentic subject. The briefest glance at the early literature of African exploration, from Jobson to Olfert Dapper, shows the extent to which fantasy superseded reality and public desire for the salacious and hair-raising left little room for ethnographic rigor. These accounts dished up the archetypes of those tropes of sloth, intellectual inferiority, wiliness, and concupiscence that remain in vigor even today and that would provide eventual justification for colonialism and enslavement. “To produce Blackness is to produce a social link of subjection and a body of extraction,” Mbembe affirms, and, being constituted far in advance of any earnest investigation of African history, sociology, or folkways, these primitive notions of Black life responded less to enlightened curiosity than to the question of “how to deploy large numbers of laborers within a commercial enterprise that spanned great distances” as a “racial subsidy” to the expanding plantation system (Mbembe 2017, 20).

The question of Black reason proposed by the book pertains, first of all, to the body of knowledge concerning things and people “of African origin” that came to stand in for primary experience thereof and served as “the reservoir that provided the justifications for the arithmetic of racial domination” (Mbembe 2017, 27). Black reason categorized its more or less willfully misunderstood African subjects through a series of exemptions to normalcy that mutated in conformity with the scientific reasoning of successive eras, leaving them morally and juridically illegitimate, unfit for human endeavor, suited only to forced labor. The traces of Black reason, according to Mbembe, persist in the search for Black self-consciousness, the founding gesture of which is the question: “Am I, in truth, what people say I am?” (Mbembe 2017, 28). Against this grappling with the oppressive image of Blackness, Mbembe will propose, in the book’s later chapters, an engagement with tradition for the sake of a “truth of the self no longer outside the self,” with Aimé Césaire, Amos Tutuola, Frantz Fanon, and others as his guides (Mbembe 2017, 29).

A brief caveat concerning language is in order. Translators from French frequently grapple with the word nègre, and the results are rarely ideal. It remains common in standard French as a term for ghostwriter (nègre) and in the now off-color expression travailler comme un nègre (equivalent to the once-current work like a nigger in English), but when used disparagingly, there is no doubt as to its intent. Mbembe’s title, and his use of nègre throughout the book, are not meant to be provocative, but they do draw on a long tradition of recalcitrant self-assertion embodied in Aimé Césaire’s famous phrase, “Nègre je suis, nègre je resterais,” which has its complement in the reappropriation of the word nigger by H. Rap Brown, Dick Gregory, and others (Césaire, 28). All this is elided in Laurent Dubois’s excellent translation; in his defense, there is no happy alternative.

For Mbembe, the racialization of consciousness takes root with the legal effort to distinguish the greater rights and privileges owed to European indentured servants with respect to their African slave counterparts in America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. With the growth of scientific racism and its subsequent application to African peoples in the heyday of colonialism, which coincided with the “capitulation to racism” in the southern states as described by C. Van Woodward, Blackness was reconstituted as an Außenwelt or “World-outside” in the Schmittian sense: a zone in which enmity was paramount, rapine permissible, and the supposition of reciprocity suspended (Woodward, 67-110). Though the rationalization of scientific racism granted the field an appearance of objectivity, as an ideology racism was never independent of “the logic of profit, the politics of power, and the instinct for corruption” (Mbembe 2017, 62). This is evident from the massive wave of resettlements starting in the 1960s in South Africa, the organized attacks on Black businesses and appropriation of black-owned lands in the United States after the Civil War, and the introduction of foreign land ownership in Haiti under Roosevelt. Whether predicated on Blacks’ irreparable inferiority, in the American case, or on the civilizing mission, in the French, the principle of race, as a “distinct moral classification,” educated the populace in “behaviors aimed at the growth of economic profitability” (Mbembe 2017, 73; 81).

In the book’s second half, Mbembe turns from racism as such to an eloquent account of the development of Black self-consciousness, which necessarily takes over and diverts the discourse of race:

The latent tension that has always broadly shaped reflection on Black identity disappears in the gap of race. The tension opposes a universalizing approach, one that proclaims a co-belonging to the human condition, with a particular approach that insists on difference and the dissimilar by emphasizing not originality as such but the principle of repetition (custom) and the values of autonomy […] We rebel not against the idea that Blacks constitute a distinct race but against the prejudice of inferiority attached to the race. The specificity of so-called African culture is not placed in doubt: what is proclaimed is the relativity of cultures in general. In this context, ‘work for the universal’ consists in expanding the Western ratio of the contributions brought by Black ‘values of civilization,’ the ‘specific genius’ of the Black race, for which ‘emotion’ in particular is considered the cornerstone (Mbeme 2017, 90).

This notion of a peculiar set of Black values has informed the praxis of evocation essential to Pan-Africanist thinkers from Edward Blyden to Marcus Garvey, whose thought has special importance for Mbembe despite his own universalist principals. While praising the aptitude of what he terms “heretical genius” to promote a self-sustaining understanding of the African condition, Mbembe admits that this understanding itself is a falsification to be transcended (Mbembe 2017, 102).

For Mbembe, Blackness resides above all in the individual’s inscription in the Black text, his term for the accrual of the collective recollections and reveries of people of African descent, at the core of which lies the memory of the colony. Memory he defines as “interlaced psychic images” that “appear in the symbolic and political fields,” and in the Black text, the primordial memory is the divestment of the subjectivity of the Black self (Mbembe 2017, 103). His discussion of Black consciousness in the colonial setting leans heavily on Frantz Fanon, particularly The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. Here again, Mbembe’s dialectical proclivities show forth: while looking toward a future in which a new humanism might divest historical memory of the trappings of race, he pays homage to thinkers who insisted on the necessity of a specifically Black memory to combat colonial distortions; at the same time, without advocating violence, he quotes Fanon approvingly to the effect that violence, for the colonized, may prove the lone recourse able to establish reciprocity between oppressor and oppressed.

Since his 2006 essay Necropolitics, death has been the axis on which Mbembe’s political philosophy turns, and its invocation in Critique of Black Reason makes for some of the book’s most resonant as well as exasperating passages. Mbembe is no doubt correct in positing the border between the capacity of the sovereign to kill and that of the subject to bring his own life to an end as the furthermost border and defining conflict of the experience of subjection, and its relevance is beyond debate in the political discourse of the present day, especially as it impends upon those regions of the world where weakened civil institutions have allowed for a merging of private and public power and their subordination to moneyed interests. Yet his frequent linkage of these considerations to theoretical concepts of French coinage is at times belabored. In particular, the concept of the remainder (le reste), the heritage of which stretches from Saussure to Derrida and Badiou, and which Mbembe relates to the Black subject’s life-in-death through Bataille’s notion of the accursed share, muddies rather than illuminates Mbembe’s ordinarily lucid prose.

Mbembe concludes Critique of Black Reason with an examination of the prospects for overcoming the idea of Blackness in the service of a world freed of the burden of race, yet unbothered by difference and singularity. Considering négritude as a moment of “situated thinking,” borne of and proper to the lived experience of the racialized subject, he calls for the contextualization of Blackness within a theory of “the rise of humanity” (Mbembe 2017, 161; 156). Blackness, in the positive sense Mbembe’s favored thinkers impart to it, would then become “a metaphysical and aesthetic envelope” directed against a specific and historically bound set of degradations and toward a humanism of the future; and the question that emerges for all liberatory struggles is “how to belong fully in this world that is common to all of us” (Mbembe 2017, 176). It is curious to read his sanguine meditations on the dialectical transcendence of Blackness against the collapse of the ideal of a post-racial America, particularly toward the end of Obama’s second term, and the re-legitimation of overt racism in the Trump era. Whereas Mbembe largely dispenses with the fictions of race to conceive of Blackness in political terms, present-day racism on the right has held onto the Black person as a biological subject while discrediting the political implications of ethnicity. Mbembe is not blind to the consequences of this decoupling of ethnic origin and political status, which has given impetus both to the annulment of protections afforded to African-Americans as well as to a revival of stereotypes of thugs and welfare cheats whose alleged malfeasance is undetermined by history or circumstance: he decries post-racialism as a fiction, advocating instead for a “post-Césairian era [in which] we embrace and retain the signifier ‘Black’ not with the goal of finding solace within it but rather as a way of clouding the term in order to gain distance from it” (Mbembe 2017, 173).

Increasingly, the diffusion of Blackness into the common human heritage may devolve as much from oppression and destitution as from any humane disposition toward fraternity. In his 1999 essay “On Private Indirect Government,” Mbembe spoke ominously of the “direct relation that exists between the mercantile imperative, the upsurge in violence, and the installation of private military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional authorities” (Mbembe 1999). Mbembe was writing specifically of Africa, and well in advance of the economic crisis in the West that permitted an unheralded transfer of wealth into the hands of a minuscule proportion of the global elite. Since then, Americans have witnessed a newly militarized police force engaged in profiteering via civil asset forfeiture, the yields of which now exceed total losses from burglary; at the same time, privatization of education, public services, and infrastructure has made a growth industry of what once were thought of as human rights. The escalation process of capital mentioned by Mbembe in the book’s preface has meant that the citizens of countries that once dictated the brutal debt adjustment regimes imposed on the Third World now find themselves burdened by austerity as the global periphery expands and the core grows ever more restricted.

In the epilogue, “There is Only One World,” Mbembe characterizes the progressive devaluation of the forces of production, along with the reduction of subjectivity to neurologically fixed and algorithmically exploitable market components, recently criticized by philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han, as a not-yet complete “retreat from humanity” to which he opposes “the reservoirs of life” (Mbembe 2017, 179; 181). For Mbembe, this situation confronts the individual with the most basic existential questions: what the world is, what are the extant and ideal relations between the parts that compose it, what is its telos, how should it end, how should one live within it. To conceive of a response, it is necessary to embrace the “vocation of life” as the basis for all thinking about politics and culture (Mbembe 2017, 182). Mbembe closes with a layered reference to “the Open,” which draws on Agamben, Heidegger, and finally Rilke to specify a state of plenitude, an absence of resentment, in which a care is made possible beyond the distortions of abstraction through the acknowledgement and inclusion of the no-longer other. The “proclamation of difference,” he concludes, “is only one facet of a larger project––the project of a world that is coming” (Mbembe 2017, 183).

Adrian Nathan West is author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature.

Bibliography

Césaire, Aimé. Nègre Je Suis, Nègre Je Resterai. Entretiens avec François Vergès. Paris: Albin Michel, 2013.

Mbembe, Achille, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Mbembe, A. 1999. “Du Gouvernement Privé Indirect.” Politique Africaine, 73 (1), 103-121. doi:10.3917/polaf.073.0103.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955.

Works Consulted

Agamben, Giorgo. L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002.

Dapper, Olfert. Umbständliche und eigentliche Beschreibung von Afrika, Anno 1668. https://archive.org/details/UmbstandlicheUndEigentlicheBeschreibungVonAfrikaAnno1668

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2007.

Feldman, Ari. “Human Diversity: the Pseudoscientific Racism of the Alt-Right. Forward, 5 August 2016. http://forward.com/opinion/national/346533/human-biodiversity-the-pseudoscientific-racism-of-the-alt-right/

H. Rap Brown. Die Nigger Die. New York: Dial Press, 1969.

Han, Byung-Chul. Im Schwarm. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013.

Ingraham, Christopher. “Law Enforcement Took More Stuff from People than Burglars Last Year.” Washington Post, 23 February 2015.

Hallett, Robin. “Desolation on the Veld: Forced Removals in South Africa.” African Affairs 83, no. 332 (1984): 301-20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/722350.

Heidegger, Martin. “Wozu Dichter?” in Gesamtausgabe Band 5: Holzwege. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977.

Jobson, Richard. The Golden Trade. 1623. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/jobson/

Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duineser Elegien. Leipzig: Insel, 1923.

Rucker, Walter, and James Nathaniel Upton, eds. Encyclopedia of American Race Riots. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenfield Press, 2007.

Schmitt, Carl. Politische Romantik. Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1919.

by Martin Woessner

Review of Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2017).

Georg Simmel only began to be recognized as one of the founding figures of modern sociology shortly before his death in 1918.  The recognition came too late and generally amounted to the backhanded compliment in which scholars specialize: Simmel was brilliant, but. As an academic discipline in continental Europe and North America, sociology was still in the process of finding its methodological and institutional footing at the time.  It had neither the heritage nor the prestige of philosophy, but modernity was on its side.  It was the discipline of the future.  Sociologists were rigorous, scientific, and systematic—everything that Simmel supposedly was not.  Especially in comparison to Durkheim and Weber, Simmel’s work seemed dilettantish, more subjective and speculative than objective or empirical; more like poetry, in other words, than sociology.  It was a strange complaint to make of somebody who wrote a tome like The Philosophy of Money, which was hundreds of pages long and chock full of concrete examples. But it stuck.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, as sociology became ever more scientific, Simmel’s fame became that of the negative example.  Neither his methodological preoccupations, which were wide-ranging, nor his intellectual style, which shunned footnotes and bibliographies, fit within the narrowing confines of academic sociology. He thus had to be written into and out of the discipline simultaneously.  In a 1936 survey of social thought across the Rhine, Raymond Aron conceded that “the development of sociology as an autonomous discipline can, in fact, scarcely be explained without taking his work into account,” but then proceeded to dispatch Simmel in just a few short pages, as if he were some kind of embarrassing distant relative who had to be acknowledged, but not necessarily celebrated.[1]  Another, perhaps more poetic but no less dismissive portrait came from Jose Ortega y Gasset, who likened Simmel to a “philosophical squirrel,” more content to leap from branch to branch, indeed from tree to tree, than to harvest the insights of any one particular area of inquiry.[2]

Simmel may have ended up a squirrel by necessity rather than by choice.  Unable to secure a fully funded academic post until very late in his career, and then only in out-of-the-way Strasbourg—rather than, say, Heidelberg, where, with the help of Weber, he had hoped to obtain an appointment, or Berlin, where he lived and studied and taught as an unsalaried lecturer for most of his life—Simmel never enjoyed the academic security that might have lent itself to less squirrelish, more scientific pursuits.  His Berlin lectures were fabled performances—attended by everyone from Rainer Maria Rilke to George Santayana, who praised them to his Harvard colleague William James—but he nevertheless “remained,” as Elizabeth Goodstein argues in her new book, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, “at the margins of the academic establishment.”[3]

Goodstein revisits Simmel’s marginality because she thinks it is the key to understanding not just his career, which was simultaneously storied and tenuous, but also his curious absence from academic debates today.  Something essential about Simmel has been lost, she argues, in the narrative that transformed Simmel into a sociological ancestor, in the “decoupling” of his more sociological work from its philosophical foundations.[4]  Indeed, as David Frisby pointed out some time ago, Simmel never really thought of himself as a sociologist anyhow.[5]  There was a reason he didn’t call it The Sociology of Money.  Writing to a French colleague already in 1899, Simmel confessed that “it is altogether rather painful for me that abroad I am only known as a sociologist—whereas I am a philosopher, see my life’s vocation in philosophy, and only pursue sociology as a sideline.”[6]

Heeding this remark, Goodstein urges us to see Simmel more as he saw himself: a marginalized figure, caught between ascendant “social science” on the one hand and “a kind of philosophy that was passing away” on the other.[7]   If we do so, we might begin to appreciate how very relevant Simmel’s work is to contemporary debates not just in sociology, but also across the humanities and social sciences more generally. In the vicissitudes of Simmel’s career and legacy, in other words, Goodstein sees a parable or two for the current intellectual epoch, in which academic disciplines seem to be in the process of reforming themselves along new and sometimes competing lines of inquiry.

Instead of presenting us with Simmel as squirrel, then, Goodstein offers us a portrait of Simmel as conflicted interdisciplinarian.  It is reassuring, I suppose, to think that what our academic colleagues dismiss as our most evident weaknesses might one day be viewed as our greatest strengths, that what seems scatterbrained now may be heralded as innovative in the future.  For those of us who work in the amorphous field of interdisciplinary studies, Goodstein’s book might serve as both legitimation and justification—a defense of our squirreliness to our colleagues over in the harder sciences maybe.  Still, it is difficult to shake the idea that interdisciplinarity is, like disciplinarity was a century ago, just another fad, another way to demonstrate to society that what we academics do behind closed doors is valuable and worthy of recognition, if not also funding.

As Louis Menand and others have argued, talk of interdisciplinarity is, at root, an expression of anxiety.[8]  In the academy today there is certainly plenty to be anxious about, but, like Menand, I’m not sure that the discourse of interdisciplinarity adequately addresses any of it.  Interdisciplinarity does not address budget crises, crumbling infrastructure, or the increasingly contingent nature of academic labor.  In fact, it may even exacerbate these problems, insofar as it questions the rationale for having distinct disciplinary departments in the first place: why not collapse two or three different programs in the humanities into one, cut half their staff, and run a leaner, cheaper interdisciplinary program instead?  If we are all doing “theory” anyways, what difference does it make if we are attached to a literature department, a philosophy department, or a sociology department?

That sounds paranoid, I know.  Interdisciplinarity is not an evil conspiracy concocted by greedy administrators.  It is simply the academic buzzword of our times.  But like all buzzwords, it says a lot without saying anything of substance, really.  It repackages what we already do and sells it back to us.  Like any fashion or fad, it is unique enough to seem innovative, but not so unique as to be truly independent.  Well over a century ago Simmel suggested that fashion trends were reflections of our competing desires for both “imitation” and “differentiation.”[9]  Interdisciplinarity’s fashionable status in the contemporary academy suggests that these desires have found a home in higher education.  In an effort to differentiate ourselves from our colleagues, we try to imitate the innovators.  We buy into the trend.  Interdisciplinary programs, built around interdisciplinary pedagogy, now produce and promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship, the end results of which are interdisciplinary curricula, conferences, journals, and textbooks.  All of them come at a price.  None of them, it seems to me, are worth it.

When viewed from this perspective at least, Goodstein’s book isn’t about Simmel at all.  It is about what has been done to Simmel by the changing tides of academic fashion.  The reception of his work becomes, in Goodstein’s hands, a cautionary tale about the plight of disciplinary thinking in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.  The first section of the book, which investigates the way in which Simmel became a “(mostly) forgotten founding father” of modern sociology, shows how “Simmel’s oeuvre came to be understood as simultaneously foundational for and marginal to the modern social sciences.”[10]  Insofar as he made social types (including “the stranger” and “the adventurer”) and forms of social interaction (such as “exchange” and “conflict,” but also including “sociability” itself) topics worthy of academic scrutiny Simmel proved indispensible; insofar as he did so in an impressionistic as opposed to empirical or quantitative style he was expendable.  He was both imitated and ignored.  Simmel helped make the discipline of sociology possible, but he would remain forever a stranger to it—“a philosophical Monet,” as his student György Lukács described him, surrounded by conventional realists.[11]

Goodstein uses the Simmel case to warn against the dangers of what now gets called, in those overpriced textbooks, “disciplinary reductionism.”  She doesn’t use that term, but she is not immune to similar sounding jargon, which is part and parcel of interdisciplinary branding.  “In exploring the history of Simmel’s representation as (proto)sociologist,” she writes, “I render more visible the highly tendentious background narratives on which the plausibility of that metadisciplinary (imagined, lived) order as a whole depends—and call into question the (largely tacit) equation of the differentiation and specialization knowledge practices with intellectual progress.”[12]  An explanatory footnote tacked on to this sentence doesn’t clarify things all that much: “My purpose is not to argue against the value disciplines or to discount the modes of knowing they embody and perpetuate, but to emphasize that meta-, inter-, pre-, trans-, and even anti-disciplinary approaches are not just supplements or correctives to disciplinary knowledge practices but are themselves valuable constitutive features of a vibrant intellectual culture.”[13]  Sounds squirrely to me, and not necessarily in a good way.

If Simmel’s reception in academic sociology serves as a cautionary tale about the limits of disciplinary knowledge for Goodstein, his writings represent something else entirely: a light of inspiration at the end of the disciplinary tunnel.  They offer “an alternative vision of inquiry into human cultural or social life as a whole,” one that rejects the narrow tunnel-vision of specialized, compartmentalized, disciplinary frameworks.[14]  It is a vision that might also help us to think critically about interdisciplinarity as well, for as Goodstein points out later in the book, in a more critical voice, “the contemporary turn to interdisciplinarity remains situated in a discursive space shaped and reinforced by disciplinary divisions.”[15]

The middle section of Goodstein’s book is devoted to a close reading of The Philosophy of Money.  Its three chapters argue, each from a slightly different angle, that Simmel’s magnum opus substantiates just such an “alternative vision.”  Here Simmel is presented not as the academic as which sociologists came to portray him, but as what he so desperately wanted to be seen, namely a philosopher.  Goodstein argues that Simmel should be understood as a  “modernist philosopher,” a kind of missing link, as it were, between Nietzsche on the one side and Husserl and Heidegger on the other.  Simmel takes from Nietzsche the importance of post-Cartesian perspectivism, and, in applying it to social and cultural life, anticipates not just the phenomenology of Husserl and the existential philosophy of Heidegger, but also the critical theory of Lukács, and, later, the Frankfurt School.  This is the theory you have been waiting for, the one that brings it all together.

In Goodstein’s view, The Philosophy of Money attempts nothing less than an inquiry into all social and cultural life through the subject of money relations. As such, it is neither “inter- or transdisciplinary.”  “It is,” she writes, “metadisciplinary.”[16]  It operates at a level all its own.  It uses the phenomena associated with money—abstraction, valuation, and signification, for example—to explore larger questions associated with epistemology, ethics, and even metaphysics more generally.  It shuttles back and forth between the most concrete and immediate observations to the most far-reaching speculations.  It helps us understand how calculation, objectivity, and relativity, for example, become the defining features of modernity.  It shows us how seemingly objective social and cultural forms—from artistic styles to legal and political norms—emerge out of intimate, subjective experience.  But it also shows how these forms come to reify the forms of life out of which they initially sprang.[17]

In Simmel’s hands, money becomes a synecdoche—the “synecdoche of synecdoche” Goodstein repeats, one too many times—for social and cultural life as a whole.[18]  What Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit did for history, The Philosophy of Money does for cold, hard cash.  In this regard, at least, Goodstein’s efforts to re-categorize Simmel as a “modernist philosopher”—to put the philosophy back into the book, as it were—are insightful.  Still, as I read Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary, I couldn’t help but wonder if it might not be more valuable these days to put some of the money back into it instead.  Given all the ways in which interdisciplinarity has been sold to us, and given the neoliberal reforms that are sweeping through the academy, now might be the time to focus on money as money, and not merely as synecdoche.

The problems we face today, both within and beyond the academy, are tremendous.  We live in an age, as Goodstein puts it, of “accelerating ecological, economic, and sociopolitical crises.”[19]  No matter what its promotional materials suggest, interdisciplinarity will not rescue us from any of them.  Goodstein eventually admits as much: “the proliferation of increasingly differentiated inter-, trans-, and post-disciplinary practices reinforces rather than challenges the philosophical—ethical, but also metaphysical—insufficiencies of the modern disciplinary imaginary.”[20]  In the final section of her book she emphasizes not so much the disciplining of Simmel’s work by those narrow-minded sociologists as the liberating theoretical potential of his “practices of thought,” which “even today do not comfortably fit into existing institutional frameworks.”[21]  After depicting Simmel as a victim of academic rationalization, Goodstein now presents him as a potential savior—a way out of the mess of disciplinarity altogether.

Attractive as that sounds, I’m not sure that Simmel’s “modernist philosophy” will rescue us, either.  In fact, I’m not sure that any philosophical or theoretical framework will, by itself, give us what we need to confront the challenges we face.  Worrying about finding the right intellectual perspective may not be as important as worrying about where, in our society, the money comes from and where—and to whom—it goes at the end of the day.  We need some advocacy to go along with our philosophy, and fretting over the merits of inter-, trans-, post-, meta-, anti-disciplinarity may just get in the way of it.

Simmel predicted that he would “die without spiritual heirs,” which was, in his opinion, “a good thing.”  In a revealing quotation that serves as the guiding leitmotif of Goodstein’s book, he likened his intellectual legacy to “cold cash divided among many heirs, and each converts his portion into an enterprise of some sort that corresponds to his nature; whose provenance in that inheritance is not visible.”[22]  Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imagination goes a long way towards reestablishing that provenance.  Maybe it’s about time we start calling for an inheritance tax to be imposed upon the current practitioners and proponents of interdisciplinarity, who have turned that cold cash into gold.

Martin Woessner is Associate Professor of History & Society at The City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education.  He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge UP, 2011).

Notes

[1] Raymond Aron, German Sociology, trans. Mary and Thomas Bottomore (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), 5 n.1.  Aron’s text was first published in French in 1936.

[2] Quoted in Lewis Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, Second Edition (Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1997), 199.

[3] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 15.

[4] Ibid., 112.

[5] David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986), 64.

[6] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 41.

[7] Ibid., 29.

[8] Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010), 97.

[9] Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 296.

[10] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 106.

[11] “Introduction to the Translation,” in Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 29.

[12] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 33.

[13] Ibid., note 43.

[14] Ibid., 67.

[15] Ibid., 131.

[16] Ibid., 155.

[17] This point is emphasized in Simmel’s final work, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms, trans. John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine, with an introduction by Donald N. Levine and Daniel Silver, and an appendix, “Journal Aphorisms, with an Introduction” edited, translated, and with an introduction by John A.Y. Andrews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 351-352.

[18] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 171.

[19] Ibid., 329.

[20] Ibid., 258.

[21] Ibid., 254.

[22] Ibid., 1.