{ c a s t r o v a l v a 4.0 } :: Notes from the Underground

I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

The End of History

Posted in Literature on December 19th, 2011 by Richard

Historical fiction may well be described as the predominant genre of the day, given the surplus of novels like Wolf Hall, The True History of the Kelly Gang, The Ghost Road, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, The Hare with the Amber Eyes or The Children’s Book that appear to be published each year. This article sheds some light on the question:

"Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukacs’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose lives are reshaped by sweeping social forces. Famous historical figures will feature among the dramatis personae, but their roles in the tale will be oblique or marginal. Narratives will centre instead on middling characters, of no great distinction, whose function is to offer an individual focus for the dramatic collision of opposing extremes between whom they stand, or more often waver. What Scott’s novels then stage is a tragic contest between declining and ascending forms of social life, in a vision of the past that honours the losers but upholds the historical necessity of the winners. The classic historical novel, inaugurated by Waverley, is an affirmation of human progress, in and through the conflicts that divide societies and the individuals within them….

In societies more advanced than Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had by this time pitted a revolutionary working class against a bourgeoisie that no longer believed it bore the future within it, and was intent on crushing any sign of an alternative to its rule. In this quite different – but after 1848 much more typical – situation, the connections of the past with the present were cut in European fiction, and the historical novel gradually became a dead antiquarian genre, specialising in more or less decadent representations of a remote past with no living connection to contemporary existence, but functioning rather as a rejection and escape from them. Such was, archetypically, the fantasy of ancient Carthage constructed by Flaubert in Salammbo.

The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jokai, Sienkiewicz or so many others… On the one hand, there is the heroic story of the emergence of English national identity, as it first took shape in the struggle of democratic Saxons against aristocratic Normans in the early Middle Ages – Ivanhoe – and then deepened and developed through the early modern Tudor and Stuart periods. Here romantic medievalism was given full rein, in fictions rife with melodramatic contrasts and moralising stereotypes of the kind that rightly draw Jameson’s strictures. In European terms, this was probably the most influential side of Scott’s work. On the other hand, Scott was also the chronicler of the peculiar trajectory of his native Scotland, a quite distinct society, within this larger story. Here a completely different vision was at work, formed not so much by Romantic Schwarmerei, as by the Scottish Enlightenment, whose theories of historical development as a universal succession of stages, passing from hunter-gatherer to pastoral to agricultural to commercial forms of society, Scott absorbed from Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart and mapped onto his re-creation of the conflicts between Highlands and Lowlands, clan and capital, in Waverley and its sequels. It was Scott’s capacity to represent the tragic collision between historically distinct times and their characteristic social forms – what Bloch would later call Ungleichzeitigkeit – that commanded Lukacs’s special admiration, and lifts this part of Scott’s fiction above the moralisms of the costume drama. In Tolstoy’s case, we can find a very similar sense of the tragic collision of non-synchronous worlds in his tales of tsarist penetration of the Caucasus, above all in his last writing, Hadji Murad, the masterpiece of his historical fiction. There we are shown, with an impassive, laconic tautness closer to Babel or Hemingway than to any writer of his own time, the utterly contrasting worlds of Russian imperialism and Chechen and Avar clan and religious resistance to it, with their own divisions – each side fully realised, with a magnificent economy of means, in a tale as modern as the carnage in Chechnya today.

In Northern Italy, where French rule was often more appreciated than detested, there was no national reaction against the First Empire, so Manzoni – author of a famous ode to Napoleon – had to situate I Promessi Sposi much further back in time, during Spanish rule over Milan in the 17th century, avoiding any too remote antiquarianism while offering a parable of popular life to stir patriotic feeling against Austrian dominion in the time of the Holy Alliance. The logic of this international pattern can be seen a contrario from the case of France, where for obvious reasons no comparable historical narrative could be constructed. Strictly construed, the nearest equivalent – noted by Lukacs – would be the regional drama of Balzac’s Chouans, a Vendeen version of Scott’s Highlanders. But the centrepiece of romantic historical fiction in France was, of course, Notre Dame de Paris, whose medieval phantasmagoria, free-floating sentimentalism and detective story motifs place it completely outside the ranks of the classic historical novel as Lukacs defined it. Yet this oddity presaged a more pregnant multiplication of the genre….

By the interwar period, the historical novel had become déclassé, falling precipitously out of the ranks of serious fiction….that an older realist tradition was not extinguished, but still capable of a remarkable reassertion, was shown by Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March, which appeared in 1932. This great novel, which Lukacs came to admire, answers to all his criteria save one, which it pointedly reverses. Lukacs believed that the true historical novel was carried by a sense of progress, such as had carried Scott. Once this disappeared after 1848, decline to a vitiated antiquarianism set in. The Radetzky March demonstrated the opposite. For Roth’s epic traces the decay of the multinational Habsburg Empire and its dominant class with a clarity and artistry equal, if not superior, to any progressivist 19th-century forebear. A deep historical pessimism proved no bar to a magisterial representation of the totality of objects. Simply, in this reversal the nation-state that was once the ideal horizon of the classical historical novel figures in the novel’s sequel, The Emperor’s Tomb, as the end point of a social and moral collapse – the shrunken, riven Austria of the Depression and the Heimwehr when these works were composed… what Lampedusa had done was to take the same theme as Roth – the fate of an aristocracy in a dying absolutist order, amid the rise of romantic nationalism – to yet grander conclusions, in a verdict of pitiless detachment on the nation-building process in Italy, the adjustments of the old order in Sicily to it, and the fate of individuals at the crossroads between them, viewed in the light of eternity. Here, the interlocking of historical and existential registers that for Lukacs and Jameson defines this form, found supreme expression in the counterpointing of the futile survival of a class and the cosmic extinction of an individual embodying it. Far from being a throwback to Victorian models, the sudden elongation of the novel’s conclusion, jumping 20 years forward to the final disintegration of the taxidermic familiar of the prince, marks The Leopard as a distinctively modern masterpiece."

Today, the historical novel has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more widespread than it was even at the height of its classical period in the early 19th century. This resurrection has also famously been a mutation. The new forms signal the arrival of the postmodern. To discuss these with due amplitude would require another occasion. The postmodern turn has, of course, extended across virtually all the arts, with local effects distinctive to each of them. But if we consider its morphology in the literary field, there seems little doubt that the most striking single change it has wrought in fiction is the pervasive recasting of it around the past. Since postmodernism was famously defined, by Jameson himself, as the aesthetic regime of an ‘age that has forgotten how to think historically’, the resurrection of the historical novel might seem paradoxical. But this is a second coming with a difference. Now, virtually every rule of the classical canon, as spelled out by Lukacs, is flouted or reversed."

It’s easy to see how such an account might apply; a novel like Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet has a historical setting it is reasonably faithful to, but the novel focuses on isolated communities like a monastery or the Dutch trading outpost rather than the large canvases previously preferred for historical novels. Equally, it is not afraid to introduce elements of Borgesian fantasy, as with the plot relating to the Abbot’s cult.

However, I’m still not quite so sure that postmodernism is necessarily so intrinsic to the modern historical novel as that; something like The Line of Beauty exactly matches the nineteenth century notion of a novel where social and personal evolution proceed hand in hand, with the fate of the central characters exemplifying that of society at large as much as would be the case for Nana. The distinction from a novel like Little Dorrit is obviously that any sense of progress has been erased; the arc depicted is one of downfall as much as in The Emperor’s Tomb. Nonetheless, the corollary of Fukuyama’s belief that liberal democracy represented the "end point of mankind’s ideological evolution" and as such constituted the "end of history" was that it did imply a postmodernist assumption that the individual self could step outside any great historical meta-narratives, with individual self-actualisation as the only implicit narrative remaining. In the case of a novel Byatt’s Angels and Insects, much of the novel follows familiar nineteenth century themes such as suppressed sexuality and evolution, but the depiction of themes like incest hints at the sort of themes that could not be voiced at the time. Equally though, its ending dwells on a narrative of female emancipation that would exceptional for its time rather than representative.

Historical novels Arnott’s He Kills Coppers or McEwan’s On Chesil Beach follow a similar line; although both are grimily realistic in tone and could hardly be accused of escapism, both dwell on characters and events that were atypical for their time and would remain so today. Indeed, in the case of McEwan in particular, his central thesis is to depict a character utterly at odds with the prevailing ethos of the sixties; where Byatt depicts nineteenth century sexuality, McEwan emphasises twentieth century frigidity. The tendency in the historical novel for the personal to serve as a metonym for the social is utterly refuted. In each case, the individual self proves of rather more importance that the historical setting. The past turns out not to be much of a foreign country at all, more like a cover version of the present, something that this article argues is pretty much the defining characteristic of the age:

"Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new… Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it.

Look at people on the street and in malls—jeans and sneakers remain the standard uniform for all ages, as they were in 2002, 1992, and 1982. Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier. (The first time I heard a Josh Ritter song a few years ago, I actually thought it was Bob Dylan.) In our Been There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good…. rather than a temporary cultural glitch, these stagnant last couple of decades may be a secular rather than cyclical trend, the beginning of American civilization’s new chronic condition, a permanent loss of appetite for innovation and the shockingly new. After all, such a sensibility shift has happened again and again over the last several thousand years, that moment when all great cultures—Egyptian, Roman, Mayan, Islamic, French, Ottoman, British—slide irrevocably into an enervated late middle age. "

Competing Conservatisms

Posted in Architecture on February 5th, 2011 by Richard

A defence of modernism against the heritage industry:

"The relevance of Ypres and Warsaw escapes me. Rather than being a purely symbolic propylaeum, they were functional city centres. They had to be rebuilt. As I said in the piece, an act of reconstruction is also an act of erasure: it wipes away the circumstances of the destruction. When the destruction was the result of a vast national trauma like a war, one can understand the desire to promptly rebuild things as they were, as part of a national recovery process that is as much psychological as it is to do with restoring buildings. But the Euston Arch was not the result of a war or invasion, and its loss – whatever the Euston Arch Trust might say – was not a comparable national trauma. Was the Euston Arch such a “great architectural monument”? Maybe if it had not been demolished it would have continued to mean something to subsequent generations. However, it was demolished, and I would contend that it was less than a generation away from being almost entirely forgotten. It means almost nothing to my generation, and I can’t imagine it mattering any more to the next.

The Frauenkirche in Dresden is an interesting case. Again, the loss of the arch is in no way comparable – the Frauenkirche was the linchpin of Dresden’s skyline. And its restoration was not only aimed at undoing the damage caused by the Allied bombs in 1945, it was also part of the process of symbolically undoing Dresden’s more recent history as part of the DDR. Germany’s present enthusiasm for restoration and reconstruction is very relelvant here – presented as a harmless antiquarian endeavour, it has the covert goal of wiping out DDR-era landmarks such as Berlin’s Palast der Republik. It’s an act of erasure.

To restate what I said in the piece, the destruction of the arch was a symbolic defeat for the forces of conservation and traditionalist architecture in this country – and its symbolism has grown steadily over the years, judging from the melodramatic prose used to describe the demolition. The campaign to rebuild is about undoing a defeat more than any other consideration – any other rationales are simply convenient cover for this prime objective. It’s part of a broader cultural effort to discourage the modernisation of the UK in the later 20th century, and to present post-war modernist construction as a malign mistake to be rectified.

Central to this heritage-militancy is a national loss of nerve about the New. In the minds of the likes of Jenkins, the New was a modernist invention, but in fact centuries of British architects and city-builders had faith in the New over the Old. The Georgians swept away medieval cities and the Victorians swept away Georgian cities, and hundreds of good and tens of thousands of indifferent buildings were destroyed and places changed their character for better and worse long before the modernists appeared on the scene. The idea – often repeated by the Prince of Wales and others – that previous generations tended their cities bonsai-like, with nailclippers and tweezers, is a myth. And because there aren’t photographs of those pre-existing eras, just unfamiliar paintings and drawings, we don’t grieve all that much. And Stamp, to his credit, sees this, acknowledging in his introduction that the railways (for instance) were terrifically destructive…. The wholesale rejection of the New has completely failed, giving us only amnesia and routine philistinism. In distrusting development we have, as a country, not stopped development but ceded our ability to shape it and even plan it."

It seems a trifle disingenuous to say that any desire for cultural continuity has to be validated under the extreme circumstance of erasing the memory of a war or foreign occupation, and even then has to be at least partially dismissed as being in some way suspect and infantile. It also seems the wrong way round to blame the desire for the conservation and even reconstruction of historical structures as being to blame for the contemporary lack of will to create a meaningful built environment; people cling to the old because of the mediocrity of the new, not the other way round. Modernism has only itself to blame for having failed to blaze a trail towards the future and can’t really look around for scapegoats. It’s also important to remember in this context that we are often only speaking of a contest between two conservatisms; on in favour of ‘traditional’ architecture and one in favour of ‘modernist’ architecture; in practice, neither often seem to like contemporary architecture very much; the former category is at least honest in its conservatism.

The end of politics

Posted in Politics on January 19th, 2011 by Richard

An interview with Eric Hobshawm:

"What happened from the 1970s on, first in the universities, in Chicago and elsewhere and, eventually, from 1980 with Thatcher and Reagan was, I suppose, a pathological deformation of the free-market principle behind capitalism: the pure market economy and rejection of state and public action that I don’t think any economy in the 19th century actually practised, not even the USA. And it was in conflict with, among other things, the way in which capitalism had actually worked in its most successful era, between 1945 and the early 1970s…. successful in that it both made profits and ensured something like a politically stable and socially relatively contented population. It wasn’t ideal, but it was, shall we say, capitalism with a human face.

The new situation in the new globalised economy eventually killed off not only Marxist-Leninism but also social democratic reformism – which was essentially the working class putting pressure on their nation states. But with globalisation, the capacity of the states to respond to this pressure effectively diminished. And so the left retreated to suggest: ‘Look, the capitalists are doing all right, all we need to do is let them make as much profit and see that we get our share.’

That worked when part of that share took the form of creating welfare states, but from the 1970s on, this no longer worked and what you had to do then was, in effect, what Blair and Brown did: let them make as much money as possible and hope that enough of it will trickle down to make our people better off… now that we’re going the other way with western countries, where economic growth is relatively static, even declining, then the question of reforms becomes much more urgent again."

I tend to agree with the broad thrust of the analysis, but not the conclusions. The financial crisis certainly discredited free-market economics, in the sense that deregulation produced an economic monoculture that was only capable of generating economic growth through what were effectively acts of self-cannibalisation. It equally discredited third way politics that theoretically relied on deregulated markets to fund public services, while in practice being reluctant to impair that growth through taxation and turning to borrowing instead; thereby exacerbating the overall levels of debt in the economy. Neither model seems feasible at present, neither seem to have a feasible alternative. The phrase ‘there is no alternative’ acquires a somewhat depressing new meaning. As this article puts it:

"The problem is the same one that has plagued the left for 30 years: Nationalization and wealth redistribution vanished from the intellectual climate, leaving free-market thinking to dominate the unspoken assumptions which are the foundation of political debates…. British historian David Kynaston noted that even if Winston Churchill’s Conservatives had won the election of 1945, ‘they almost certainly would have created a welfare state not unrecognizably different from the one that Labour actually did create.’ That was the intellectual paradigm of the day. There was no escaping it. The free-market paradigm was rattled in 2008, but it still stands. If the left steps outside the paradigm, it makes itself unelectable."

The History of Philosophy

Posted in Philosophy, Science on January 19th, 2011 by Richard

Justin Smith writes on the history of philosophy:

"I’ve argued before that in their floundering around the question as to whether there is such a thing as non-Western philosophy, academic philosophers in the English-speaking world appear unable to decide whether their activity should be understood more on the model of a tradition of, say, dance (e.g., ballet) or, instead, on the model of a technology (e.g., the military use of gunpowder)…

If philosophy were like gunpowder, there would be no question as to its reach: everyone would share in it equally. If philosophy were like ballet, there would also be no question as to why everyone does not share in it equally. My own strong suspicion is that philosophy is rather more like ballet, but perhaps a better comparison, one that keeps the example of military technology in view, would be to say that philosophy is not like the technology itself of war, but more like a particular military tradition that grows up around the use of weapons and the preparation for war, and involves the pinning of medals, the reference to great battles and strategies of the past, and so on.

In the case of martial pageantry, it is clear what the more basic thing is around which the tradition springs up (in the case of ballet, there is also clearly a more basic thing, dance, which in turn appears to be something humans qua humans do, about which see Ezra Zubow and Elizabeth C. Blake, “The Origin of Music and Rhythm” in Archaeoacoustics, ed. Chris Scarre and Graeme Lawson, Cambridge, 2006, 117-126). But what would that more basic thing be, in the case of philosophy? I suspect it is what is often called bean-counting: the tallying of exchanges (of cattle, grain, etc.) by use of pebbles in bowls, of marks on clay tablets, and so on. Wherever we have traces of this sort of activity, we have concrete evidence of a sort of representational thinking (one pebble stands for one cow, etc.) that we can rightly suppose to be just the small report of a more elaborate system of classifications, of setting up correspondences, and of seeking adequate definitions.

Wherever you have people keeping track of things in this way, I mean, you probably have people trying to come to terms with the nature of the things they are keeping track of. A charitable assessment of what the ancients were up to would have us suppose that wherever there is a trace of a culture trying to keep track of the world for practical purposes (navigation, calendry, etc.), there is something like a ’science’, however different from our own: a theoretical elaboration of the grounds of the practice. And I really don’t know what philosophy could be other than the very most theoretical reach of this elaboration…

Recent work by Michael Friedman –who represents par excellence the sort of orientation with which I am sympathizing here– has made a convincing case, in more steps than I am able to mention, for tracing the Kantian theory of space and time as pure forms of intuition back to certain exigencies of medieval astronomy, which in the final analysis existed for the sake of calendry, which in turn had as its principal purpose the determination of the proper date of Easter and similar exigencies of culture."

I wonder if this doesn’t rather oversimplify matters. A lot of Greek philosophy could certainly be described as an attempt to analyse matters in terms that are quasi-scientific, with Aristotle as an obvious example. Equally, a lot of Greek philosophy (and certainly Indian and Chinese also) suggests an origin in theology and, as in the case of Plato, may very be hostile to empirical scientific investigation to some extent.

Hyper-Realism in Pre Raphaelite Art

Posted in Art, Victorian on January 17th, 2011 by Richard

Morgan Meis writes about the parallels between Pre Raphaelite mediaevalism and its pre-occupation with photographic accuracy:

"Raphael made a painting that showed the kingdom of theology presided over by Christ on one wall, and the kingdom of poetry presided over by Apollo on the other. The implication, as Ruskin saw it, was that Christ is but one truth among many. And so, thought Ruskin, all that was holy was profaned and mankind experienced a second fall from grace. Ruskin was thus quite enthusiastic about the Pre-Raphaelite rejection of everything post-Raphael, of the entirety of the ‘modern world’ from the early-15th century onward…. The real world, the one we inhabit in a day-to-day manner, has been banished altogether.

As an excellent show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (’The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875′) makes clear, the Pre-Raphaelites were, in fact, heavily influenced by what was at that time the newest of technologies. They loved photography. Specifically, they loved the way photographs captured elements of nature and human beings in such realistic detail. Often, the Pre-Raphaelites tried to make their paintings look like photographs, carefully painting every blade of grass, every fleck of color. One of the paintings in the show, John William Inchbold’s ‘Anstey’s Cove,’ looks as if it might be a touched-up photograph in the way that the shrubs and the water and the birds are so painstakingly rendered. And the photographs Pre-Raphaelites took—like Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley’s ‘The Clouds Are Broken in the Sky’ — have a distinct painterly feel as well….

We are thus left with something of a dilemma. We have an artistic movement with a professed desire to escape from modern times and return to a medieval aesthetic on the one hand, and a commitment to extreme realism and immediacy on the other. The house of Pre-Raphaelitism, divided against itself, cannot stand. Unless, of course, those two impulses can go together."

Certainly Pre-Raphaelite can be realist in a conventional sense (as with the contemporary reaction to Rossetti’s depiction of the infant christ), I wonder if the division is actually quite that marked. As Sontag observed, the assumption that photography is a medium of detail and painting a medium of impressions seems a rather anachronistic one. The photography of Frank Meadows Sutcliffe and Julia Margaret Cameron is often blurred and indistinct, while Pre-Raphaelite art is often hyper-realist. The level of detail in an Inchbold painting is impossible even with digital photography, with the amount of detail defying perspective as objects near and far are rendered in intense detail. The effect is rather more reminiscent of Hopkin’s concepts of instress and inscape than of photography.

Criticism and Culture

Posted in Literature on January 17th, 2011 by Richard

Two versions of literary criticism, the first from Pankaj Mishra:

"I don’t think of myself as a literary critic. I write about novels and short stories. But I am reluctant to describe what I do as ‘literary criticism,’ as I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text — whether narrative techniques or quality of prose — and its aesthetic pleasures, to engage with the author’s worldview, implied or otherwise, and his or her location in history (of nation-states and empires, as well as of literary forms).

This kind of reading came naturally to me in the new, very poor and relatively inchoate Asian society in which I grew up. When I first began to read literary fiction I could assume neither a clear backdrop of political and social stability, nor a confident knowledge of the world and assumptions of national power. Everything had to be figured out, and literature was the primary means of clarifying a bewilderingly large universe of meanings and contexts.

Much of my self-education was assisted by American writers like Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, F.?W. Dupee and Irving Howe… Coming of age during and after the progressive era, when intellectual argument and political activism promised to reshape America’s future, these critics took it for granted that literature was among the main signs of the times, and subject to the inquiring gaze of history and politics. In this presumption, they were supported not so much by the Marxian ideologues of the 1930s as by the great realist novelists, from Stendhal to Tolstoy and Mann, who could not have written their most mature works without grappling with the political and moral challenges of their day. Ideas possessed a real urgency for these writers. It helped, too, that their societies were in ferment; that the bourgeois class, to which most writers and readers of literary fiction belonged, was deeply involved or implicated in major socioeconomic conflicts; and that politics wasn’t something elected politicians and unelected corporate elites settled among themselves…

Literary criticism, in its recent American incarnation at least, has faithfully reflected the general writerly retreat from the public sphere, turning into a private language devised to yield a particular knowledge about a self-contained realm of elegant consumption…. Deprived of a whole vocabulary of moral concern, which traditionally enlisted it into a humanistic culture, literary criticism was always destined to turn into a kind of competitive connoisseurship — a parlor game for the increasingly professional producers as well as the passive consumers of literature.

Literatures elsewhere still offer a capacious mode of intellectual inquiry, one that can seamlessly accommodate the insights into human lives offered by history, philosophy and ethnography. To examine the work of Lu Xun, China’s foremost modern writer, is to be taken through his anguish deep into Chinese self-perceptions, from the long Confucian past to the weirdly hybrid capitalist-Communist present. It is to understand not only his experiments with many different aesthetic forms and genres, but also his country’s tormented recent history, not to mention the implications these developments hold for the rest of the world. "

There are two reasons why I might agree with this. Growing up in a part of the country that felt that brunt of Thatcherite economics, it’s difficult not to grow up with a sense of how the individual life is intractably bound up with its surroundings. Inevitably, I tended to gravitate towards writers with a similar set of pre-occupations, like Eliot, Hardy and Turgenev. As with Pankraj, reading literature was a process of self definition through engagement with a writer’s worldview. What that background did tend to lack was a sense of self determination; political change was a capricious concept imposed from afar, which fitted more readily into a narrative of decline than of progress. Equally, growing up gay created a sense of falling out of society and never quite working out how to scramble back in again, something that left me with an instinctive dislike of received opinion and authority’ which might be why my preferences in criticism failed to match my preferences in literature and I instinctively disliked the patrician Leavisite attempt to mandate standards as much as I dislike even more futile attempts to do the same by Gabriel Josipovici now. Which may be why, I find this concept of criticism from Morgan Meis rather more appealing:

"For what purpose is the lonely judgment of our critic, our petulant voice from a lost time? She is, increasingly, a voice shouting in the wilderness, except that the wilderness is fully peopled, the wilderness is cacophonous with voices that utterly drown her out, our little critic from another age… Some lament this situation; they rail against the coming darkness. That is a legitimate option. Others, though, take a different approach. They face the oblivion with joy, knowing that with death comes freedom. Some critics seem to know instinctively, to feel it in their very critical bones, that the death of the critic-as-authority is the birth of another kind of criticism.

I call that other kind of criticism, the kind that doesn’t rely on authority and judgement, Romantic criticism. I call it that because of what I learned, long ago, from that melancholic and suicidal German, Walter Benjamin. Early in his career, Benjamin wrote a typically esoteric and maddeningly impenetrable essay called ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’… criticism does not stand outside the work of art, but stands alongside, maybe even inside, the work of art, participating in the work in order to further express and tease out what the artist already put there. In this theory of criticism, we don’t need the critic to tell us what is good or bad, to tell us what to like and dislike. We need the critic, instead, to help us experience. We need the critic in the way that we need a friend or a lover. We need the critic as a companion on a journey that is a love affair with the things of the world. Benjamin once referred to this form of criticism as ‘the first form of criticism that refuses to judge.’ The primary virtue of this kind of criticism is its inherent generosity. It wants to make experience bigger, it wants to make each work of art as rich as it can possibly be. Its sole medium, as Benjamin put it, is ‘the life, the ongoing life, of the works themselves.’"

The Coming Insurrection?

Posted in Communism, Fascism, Nature on December 5th, 2010 by Richard

Signandsight seems somewhat unamused by a pamphlet that goes by the name of the The Coming Insurrection:

"The text is a form of re-import. Much of it stems directly – not from Houellebecq – as Rühle and Minkmar blindly copy from the France correspondent of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, but from the Nazi-tainted theorists Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.

These influences are also present through their most zealous imitator, Giorgio Agamben, in the explicit reference to his book "The Coming Community". Agamben and the two Germans are held in unquestioning veneration as father figures in the world of coming insurrections.

In this intellectual milieu it is commonplace to interpret the everyday life, and especially the everyday technological life of western democracy as totalitarian; it is the principle rhetorical device of this text and one to which the SZ article unwittingly alludes. In 1948 Heidegger raged: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps." And in 1995, the Heidegger student Agamben wrote in his magnum opus "Homo sacer": "In modern democracies it is possible to state in public what Nazi biopoliticians did not dare to say. " With the help of Carl Schmitt’s theories on the "state of emergency" and Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, he places human rights and race laws, intensive care units and concentration camps on a par.

It is not only Agamben’s friendship with Julian Coupat, the likely author of "The Coming Insurrection" that locates it within this school of thought. The book is a practical – and alarmingly naive – translation of Agamben’s theories. The way to combat the so-called “normalisation of life” in modern societies, is to seek out invigorating salvation in a "state of emergency", a far cry from democracy, rule of law and the market economy – this idea of a better age minus all coordinates of the present day comes from Schmitt and Heidegger, as does the search for hidden totalitarianism within democracy. The latter was a strategical necessity for both Nazi theorists, in order retroactively to relativise their collaboration. No one can seriously claim these are "left-wing" ideas."

The parallels to Heidegger aren’t without merit, but the problem is that the text does read as far-left (its condemnation of democracy being largely predicated on describing it as an incubator for fascism). While Heidegger did dislike modern technological and industrial societies, that dislike did not manifest in Nazism itself, while Heidegger was far from calling for the establishment of communes. If there are parallels to far-right ideas, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that there differences were overstated in the first place. The attitude to violence in the text is Zizekian, the attitude to power and the self Foucauldean and the attitude towards revolution recalls Deleuze. Here’s a summary of what the text actually says:

"The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys… Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No "problems" framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of "pensions," of "job security," of "young people" and their "violence" can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs of further unrest… As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens, together with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify.

The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness… France wouldn’t be the land of anxiety pills that it’s become, the paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca of neurosis, if it weren’t also the European champion of hourly productivity. Sickness, fatigue, depression, can be seen as the individual symptoms of what needs to be cured.

In reality, the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities. The famous "parental resignation" has imposed on us a confrontation with the world that demands a precocious lucidity, and foreshadows lovely revolts to come. In the death of the couple, we see the birth of troubling forms of collective affectivity, now that sex is all used up and masculinity and femininity parade around in such moth-eaten clothes, now that three decades of non-stop pornographic innovation have exhausted all the allure of transgression and liberation.

Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product. In corporations, work is divided in an increasingly visible way into highly skilled positions of research, conception, control, coordination and communication which deploy all the knowledge necessary for the new, cybernetic production process, and unskilled positions for the maintenance and surveillance of this process. The first are few in number, very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority who occupy these positions will do anything to avoid losing them. They and their work are effectively bound in one anguished embrace.

Thirty years of "crisis," mass unemployment and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. We have to see that the economy is not "in" crisis, the economy is itself the crisis. Nobody respects money anymore, neither those who have it nor those who don’t. When asked what they want to be some day, twenty percent of young Germans answer "artist." Work is no longer endured as a given of the human condition. The accounting departments of corporations confess that they have no idea where value comes from. The market’s bad reputation would have done it in a decade ago if not for the bluster and fury, not to mention the deep pockets, of its apologists. It is common sense now to see progress as synonymous with disaster.

There is no "clash of civilizations." There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own "values", and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the "it all depends on your point of view." No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing is true.
"

Non-Propositional Religion

Posted in Religion on December 5th, 2010 by Richard

My attitude towards religion has always been a predominantly adversarial one, viewing the central tenets of the major monotheisms as repressive and authoritarian, something to be consigned to history and forgotten. However, I’ve never had any particular view about the existence of any deity; I was more concerned with the doctrinal content of the various religions. I shared with Nietzsche the assumption that any deity was unlikely to exist in any form that could be intelligible to us, which left his representations as dangerous fictions. The problem lies with what remains after the doctrinal elements have been dismissed:

"Every age has to redefine what is the essence of Christianity. Asking the question, can you follow Christ and give up being a Christian, strikes a chord with those of us who do take Christ seriously but don’t want to be branded with other people’s ideas of how a ‘Christian’ is defined… The question being asked by many of those stepping back from organised religion is perhaps more radical. Is Christian life essentially a religion at all? Jesus was critical of formal religion that was only for show. St Paul’s passionate teaching, following his conversion, is centred on a personal relationship with Christ – we take on ‘the mind of Christ’ not a dress code or rule book. For centuries the Christian mystical tradition has mapped the interior journey as a way to uncover the ‘inward eye’ that Jesus insisted we need in order to perceive his truth.

Much of the teaching of Jesus is about being open to a new way of seeing reality – being somehow more radically ‘awake’. His questions, like those of the Zen masters, shock us into a new level of consciousness. He is more concerned with how we find self-knowledge and inner transformation than fulfilling the letter of the law… Anne Rice is serious enough about her personal relationship with Christ to feel impelled to detach herself from the public face of religion. No doubt it is her own conscience speaking. Perhaps we just need to acknowledge that we need a new container for the shift in consciousness that is present in the Christian mind as well as in the minds of those outside the church searching for spiritual values and meaning."

Part of the reason for this discussion lies with Karen Armstrong’s account of religion:

"Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.

This is religion as it should be, and, according to Armstrong, as it once was in all the world’s best traditions. However, there is a serpent in this paradise, as in others. Or rather, several serpents, but the worst is the folly of intellectualising the practice. This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can’t you fail. This is Armstrong’s principal target. With the scientific triumphs of the 17th century, religion stopped being a practice and started to become a theory – in particular the theory of the divine architect… So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the ‘apophatic’ tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words. Armstrong firmly recommends silence, having written at least 15 books on the topic."

The problem is that Armstrong’s account does to a large extent seem like an exercise in misdirection, defending religion against accurate criticisms by redefining it in a form that bears no resemblance to what is commonly practised. Armstrong’s Durkheimite argument about religion being an essentially social construct seems correct to me, but a large part of that communal aspect is concerned with the authoritarian enforcement of collective norms. In other words, doctrine, quite the opposite of any form of negative theology. In historical terms, Luther’s invocation of Sola fide shifted religion from the social sphere to the personal one, something rather more compatible with Armstrong’s negative theology than medieval Catholicism, even if it weakened the emphasis on practice. The Durkheimite aspect of Armstrong’s thesis also works against her broader argument in other respects; adherents of her negative theology have little reason to follow church ceremonies and institutions, leaving behind those who represent everything Dawkins has been criticising. As the Church of England gradually modernises its believers have no real need for it, either drifting into the secular life it has become indistinguishable from or joining other more reactionary and repressive sects, such as the Catholic church.

Ballardian and Fascism

Posted in Ballard on August 16th, 2010 by Richard

An article from Ballardian examines the thesis in Ballard’s last novel correlating fascism and consumerism:

"Beyond the details, there seems to be a conspicuous problem with the novel’s underlying theme, since fascism was always anti-consumerist in its temperament. As Peter N Stearns puts it in his review of Consumerism in World History: ‘For fascist leaders, modern society had become too disunited and individualistic. Consumerism was a fundamental part of modern degeneracy’…

Ballard has drawn attention to the way in which moral structures and decision-making powers have been externalized out into the environment by technology – from traffic lights to CCTV cameras – providing us with a safe passage through our lives, and in like manner we may find it psychologically easier to decline the freedom to utilize the imagination that comes with a safe and prosperous, but individualistic, society…. Peter Stearns points out that the growth of consumer behaviour was closely connected with the decline of long-established social structures under the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. In earlier times, social hierarchies were much more rigidly observed, and any crossing of social boundaries or individualistic behaviour tended to be viewed negatively, especially by the upper-classes. The latter had luxury, i.e. their wealth was displayed, rather than consumed, and in standard formats with an absence of individuality or any concern about fashion. However, once this social edifice began to lose its grip, consumer behaviour helped people cope with the resulting uncertainty and insecurity about social status, and with the disruption to established patterns of behaviour, by providing alternative ways of fulfillment and by enabling an individual to demonstrate personal achievement, no matter how limited. This was particularly the case in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the growth of large firms meant that many in the middle-classes found themselves working for others rather than themselves and in jobs with a high degree of routine: satisfaction and success were no longer an integral element of their occupation, and had to be sought elsewhere.

But there is a malign dialectic at work here. I buy things in order to try and reassert my identity, but as the marketplace grows I am offered an increasing variety of goods and services, and associated ways of living, from which to choose. Now my identity is even more in question, because it is something that I myself have to select and realize. The impact is heightened as the material prosperity of society increases – even something as basic as food becomes no longer a matter of survival and physical well-being, but a decision about life-style… To make matters worse, the psychological support that might have been available from kinship ties, the local community, religion, voluntary organizations, and such like, is now much weaker – in fact, involvement in these is as much a life-style choice as everything else. Yet the evidence is that people with a rich variety of social connections are less likely to suffer depression and anxiety than those without. Without a traditional social fabric around me, I live in a world of endless possibilities but any failure to find fulfillment in my life must somehow reflect my own inadequacies. Hence, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, we are nowadays more likely to suffer from depression, caused by the fear of inadequacy in the face of endless possibilities, than from neurosis arising from guilt caused by the transgression of prohibitions.

The risk is that the erasure of meaning in modern societies produces boredom and emptiness, a gap which a dormant psychopathology can readily fill, fuelled by a preference for emotion over cognition. Hence Ballard frequently links boredom and psychopathic behaviour in his later books and interviews."

One thing that struck me about this is that this is in many ways a rather conservative account of fascism, which makes me one wonder about one of the more interesting and more unremarked aspects of Ballard’s work, namely the question of whether his critique of modern society can be ascribed as originating from the political left or right, given that the mere fact of Ballard’s fiction having a decidedly transgressive is hardly enough to label him as leftwing. Some elements of his fiction would qualify in that regard; his embrace of modernism and dislike of tradition, for example. Criticism of consumerism and consumption certainly does, with Veblen coming to mind immediately as a comparison, while Peter Sloterdijk’s recent account of the repression of anger in capitalist societies also has some parallels with Ballard. However, many of his ideas can be described as conservative in various ways; his emphasis on our innate repressed psychopathy is something one can see conservatives from Hobbes to Scruton agreeing with, while much of his work does tend to suggest socially conservative attitudes. The prototypical Ballard protagonist is a middle aged male usually accompanied by a woman firmly in a supporting role. Rushing to Paradise is one of his few works to represent a powerful woman and the results do tend to suggest a rather extreme fear of the feminine. More common is for the powerful figure to be male, with a relationship with the protagonist that can easily be read as homoerotic, but his characters, as in Hello America, can as equally be homophobic. Certainly, Ballard’s work has more in common with Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents than with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation

Whatever Happened to Modernism?

Posted in Literature, Modernism on August 4th, 2010 by Richard

John Sutherland reviews Gabriel Josipovici in the Literary Review:

"Widely as Josipovici has read, why has he not, one may ask, engaged at any length with critics who have defended unregenerate ‘Englishness’? Donald Davie, for example, who eloquently argued that the main strand in our national poetry is not Eliot, or Pound, but Thomas Hardy (a naif on whom Josipovici will not waste a single sentence). Or AS Byatt, a novelist and critic who leapfrogs over Modernism back to the sustaining realisms of George Eliot. The English, this is to protest, may not be benighted – or, as he likes to put it, shrouded in the ‘fog’ of their provincialism. They may merely be of a different mind from Gabriel Josipovici.

Josipovici takes his analysis back to the Reformation and Protestantism. Together with the concurrent rise of capitalism, Josipovici presents this as the emergence of individualism. It’s a variant of the Max Weber thesis familiar from Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, in which Watt argues that the novel is the literary form that accommodated post-Reformation individualism. As individualism rose the ‘numinous’ disappeared – along with the Pope, the priests, feudalism, the divine right of kings, and leprosy. It meant freedom, but also the downside of freedom, loneliness. ‘When in the sixteenth-century’, Josipovici records, ‘religion takes its inward turn … the world becomes a colder space.’ And a smaller space.

Modernism, as Josipovici understands, doesn’t mend things – but it is honest about the unmendability. Modernism rejects the ‘bad faith’ of Romanticism and Realism – the two great movements on which traditional English literature and art rest. Modernism is cosmically ‘disenchanted’ (Josipovici borrows this key term from Max Weber). But it is not frightened to look, even if what it looks at is as paralysing as Medusa’s head. Josipovici takes as axiomatic Beckett’s proclamation that the Modernist writer has ‘nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’ It is despairing but brave – and, more importantly, true to the human condition."

I often find it wearying in arguments of this kind that culture is invariably described in terms that are prescriptive rather than descriptive, with the usual result that the prescription largely disregards its actual subject. As a riposte, I’m a little reminded of Camille Paglia’s equally prejudiced view that modernism sent literature into a cul de sac while film was allowed to emerge as the primary cultural form, or (once more) Tom Wolfe’s view that realism of the sort practised by Dickens and Thackeray had always been demeaned as vulgar populism before it became canonical, and that realism was as important to the development of the novel as electricity was to modern technology. All of these views tell you something about their originator, little about their subject.

There are probably two meaningful two ways to address Josipovici’s argument; firstly by a descriptive analysis of English literature and secondly by a descriptive analysis of modernism. To begin with modernism itself, one of my complaints about Josipovci’s description of modernism is that it’s so porous that it could easily be viewed as a description of European culture in general. The fact that this article attributes the rise of modernism to the Reformation, whereas Josipovici had previously pinned it to the French revolution, does little to suggest that a scalpel is being wielded rather than a cudgel. By contrast, JG Ballard described English modernism as a thin veneer of techniques like stream of consciousness over a narrative form that was quite recognisably a development of the nineteenth century novel. Look behind Lawrence and Hardy and Eliot can be seen. Looking behind Woolf and Forster reveals Austen and James. With the collapse of Freudian ideas, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that the novel might at least partially revert to a pre-modernist form; in any case, Ballard saw surrealism rather than modernism as the principal movement of the twentieth century.

To proceed onto the former, Josipovici is correct to note that the emergence of individualism and capitalism were central to the literature of the country that birthed the industrial revolution and the modern metropolis alike, but he seems to ignore the fact that this inevitably meant the rise of the urban middle class that Josipovici spends so much of his time sneering at. That class provided both the principal personae and the principal audience for literature from the eighteenth century onwards. As Lukacs put it, the novel is the bourgoeis epic. As such, it can hardly be surprising if England produced novels like Middlemarch while America produced Huckleberry Finn. The difficulty for the contemporary English novel is that where Eliot and Dickens envisaged society as an organic whole with each part interconnected, modern atomised society affords rather less scope for such a project. To take two obvious examples, Arnott’s He Kills Coppers and McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are both historical novels in much the same way as Felix Holt or Barnaby Rudge, but where Eliot and Dickens portray their characters as exemplars of those times, Arnott and McEwans portray their characters as aberrations, that are no more representative of those times than of any other. The conventions of the nineteenth century continue to be used, but seem vestigial rather than central to those books.

Update:A related critique:

"As such it expands a remark once dropped by the novelist Eva Figes, to the effect that ‘the horrors of her lifetime’ could not be accommodated by the English social-realist tradition… There are some very similar moments in A S Byatt’s Still Life (1985), which features an émigré Cambridge don named Raphael Faber, who rails against ’stories with character, against whining, against insularity, against verbal sluggishness’. Most of Faber’s family have been killed by the Nazis, and his response is a ‘difficult’ poem called ‘Lübeck Bells’ which contains no direct reference to the Holocaust. Faced with a Raphael Faber, Bradbury’s Katya Princip or even Josipovici, the specimen English novelist is entitled to protest that it isn’t his fault he wasn’t born with their disadvantages and that, in however general a way, a cultural tradition is only as good as the sum of its historical parts. There could never be an English Beckett, and most English novelists who have tried to follow the Beckett line have fallen flat on their face."