Laughed out loud when I saw this in the bookstore today. Those radical anarchocommunist dudes have gone from the sleek too-cool-for-the-canon University of Minnesota paperback that looked like a plastic deck jacked into the molar rhizome of cyberspace to a Penguin Classics edition! Fucking awesome.

(I’ve never really been able to read D&G, though I must soon for they are on my qualifying exam. Their books are fun to browse, but as a straight-through reading experience it’s like an overlong cologne ad: “Become animal! Become intense!” There is a nice reading of the old movie Willard in A Thousand Plateaus though.)

The left intellectual’s contempt for “elitism” is an inverse form of self-regard. The intellectual imagines that something we might call “knowledge justice” or “cultural justice” (that is, the equitable distribution of cultural goods to all) hinges upon her own knowledge and cultural apparatus. When she scorns the theorist, the poet, the queer, the modernist or whomever for “excluding” The People, she is unable to imagine that people pleasure themselves and each other differently.

It’s all very bourgeois and Protestant, like so much of what passes for left discourse in the US academy. Sociologists from Adorno to Bourdieu have noted that no one propounds high culture with more passion and volubility than the parvenu, the prole or petty bourgeois who has made it to the demi-monde or the schools. See, for instance, Adorno’s magnificently un-P.C. reflections in Minima Moralia on why non-westerners cannot be trusted with the revolution because they are too in (resentful) love with the various goods of the West; because the tradition is not internal to them, they cannot hate it properly, he says. But I would like to turn this dialectically back upon Adorno here: what is internal to the parvenu is the denial of difficult intellectual pleasure. The danger for the intellectual who has never known the parched cultural climate of the lower middle class is that he will not be able to hate popular culture and folk religion properly (not, of course, that Teddy had this problem).

Anyway, there is no such thing as The People. The People is an illusion created by mass culture so that power blocs forced to accountability by democratization could have an interlocutor or a proxy in order to carry out what they’ve always been doing, and this is as true of the vanguard party as of the Republican Party. There is no The People, there are only people, and people get off on all sorts of things.

I have worked alongside or otherwise known people for whom repairing air conditioners or cars, or cutting hair, was a profound pleasure, a tactile and intellectual engagement with the world.

Imagine, if you will, a plumber who loves his work. Imagine his satisfaction with the tools of his trade, imagine his sense of accomplishment at a job well done. Imagine the moral terms in which he figures his work to himself: he unclogs the world, he puts the workings of society back on track. Imagine, too, that he treasures the interactions with others brought on by his occupational itinerancy.

I do not share his knowledge, and I do not share his pleasure. If something were to go seriously wrong with my toilet, I would be utterly at his mercy. And yet no one speaks of the “elite” of plumbers who excludes poor folk like me from his hoarded knowledge of pipes and wrenches. No, we gather that the world needs plumbers, and some people like to plumb, and anyway if the job sometimes gets one down, it’s fairly well-remunerated.

No one thinks of poets or theorists this way, though; and this partially because the poets and theorists themselves think they’re better than plumbers, even when they pretend to hate themselves, especially when they get into a funk because the plumber does not share their knowledge and talents; and yet they think it unremarkable that they do not share the plumber’s knowledge and talents.

But there’s something more sinister than unacknowledged self-regard at work in the left intellectual’s anti-intellectualism. There is too a solidarity with private and public totalitarianisms. Because The People must be included in everything, their chimerical wishes must be respected; thus, state and private interests conjure those wishes out of surveys and statistics which tell one everything about people except for what one would actually like to know about them. Then state and private interests integrate all culture for The People, excluding everything that does not fall within the statistical average, and this in the name of protecting the poorest among us, even though it’s as likely as anything that the hairdresser’s daughter will love Lacan and the the aristo heir only football. That is the public totalitarianism.

The private totalitarianism occurs when The People’s wishes are so respected that actual people’s certainties are never disturbed. So, for instance, we hear from cultural studies types that family or church or Twilight or whatever is a fragile shelter for those deracinated by individualist capitalist modernity, and yet we never here that these shelters may be in their stultifications, their coercions, worse than the storm. We scorn as elite the products of a poor colonial lower-middle-class scribbler like Joyce, and celebrate as populist the extremely expensive productions of massive corporations.

Who, anyway, is the intellectual but the Jew, the queer, the hysterical woman? Anti-intellectualism is always a disavowed worship of the norm, thus a racism, sexism and homophobia. For don’t we always give the intellectual the name of the despised enemy? For McCarthyite America, the intellectual was a commie (and pervert); for communist regimes, the intellectual was an imperialist running-dog (and pervert). This goes on in persecuted communities as well as in hegemonic ones, as when feminists champion the sorority at large over the sister who wishes to go her own way, or when black nationalists accuse the black intellectual of being white. (Again, I am forced to observe the profound complicity between the identity politics of oppressor and oppressed.)

Finally, it’s not as if anti-intellectualism never killed anybody. From literature departments, you’d get the idea that “art for art’s sake” was the world’s most murderous ideology, and yet it’s exactly the kind of anti-intellectualism championed by mavens of cultural studies which enabled the various reigns of terror from Mao and Pol Pot to Reagan and Bush, all of whom legitimated themselves by abjecting the intellectual. After this, I am supposed to fear Joyce, Stein, Derrida, Woolf etc.? To the left anti-intellectual I raise my middle finger in populist salute.

Anthony Lane has, much like Alan Moore, always loved Nabokov; and his recent misreading of Watchmen (the book, not the probably meretricious film) reminds me a lot of Nabokov’s misreading of Don Quixote.

Both books, Cervantes’s and Moore’s, parody the genre of heroic romance, and both use violence in a particular way to do so: medieval romance before Cervantes and super-hero comics before Moore were violent, but in a cleaned-up way that would not disturb the binary sentiments the genre existed to inspire. Moore and Cervantes restore to the types of events these genres describe the sheer ugliness, sordidness and horror that would naturally attend them. The gore and brutality are necessary to reframe the heroic romance, to make it seem as distorting an idealization as it is.

But both works also feed on heroic romance to lend some of its idealistic colors to the oft-contemned everyday. The fat and vulgar country squire and the fat washed-up old super-hero, like those met on the Spanish road and at the corner New York newsstand, participate in a drama which really does bring ideals into conflict with what would thwart them. Neither Moore nor Cervantes are at all cynical; they merely suspect that some idealizations, closely related to murderous ideologies (the Inquisition for Cervantes, capitalism and communism for Moore), can potentially do great harm if they’re not brought into some humanizing contact with the earthly, the secular, the quotidian and plebeian. Both texts become novels in the Bakhtinian sense when they turn the romance inside out.

Lane’s worst misreading comes when he implies, possibly taking his cues from that idiot Zack Snyder’s movie, that the violence which ends the book is gratuitous—a foolish claim, since Moore and Gibbons carefully acquaint us with so many of the people who will die at the end, and this as much as anything else stands as an indictment of Ozymandias’s plan.

I can see how Watchmen would appear to someone who isn’t familiar with the state of the genre in which it intervened in 1986; to look back, after grim and gritty comics, after Fight Club and Kill Bill and Saw and everything else, might be simply to perceive to origin of mass-marketed squalor. But that’s no excuse not to read it, and I suppose I don’t understand how anyone who really read it could fail to see how humane it is, how great an effort it makes to drag its subject matter into the orbit of a humanistic dignity.

Anyway, a good feminist critique of Moore waits to be made. Lane hints at it, but not very cleverly. I think it would have to be fairly psychoanalytic, and would start here: the squid monster, edited out of the film, is the socially/industrially-constructed but still primal force that everyone in the book wants to control, starting with Moore and Gibbons and their rigid nine-panel grid and their tight recursive plot. It’s said that fans always refer to this creature as “the squid monster,” but when I was a teenager, my friends and I referred to it as “the vagina monster.” Now that’s how a feminist critique of Watchmen would begin; I suppose it would be a bit racy for The New Yorker.

(A propos of this and this.)

We’ll know we’re in a new cultural moment when we stop using this stupid word “modern” to define ourselves, even negatively.

Read Laura Miller’s review essay on Elaine Showalter’s new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, and then read the letters.

The comments are almost all terrifying examples of why contemporary American men and women are, in their culturally-produced differences, so fucking stupid. But the scariest thing is the way in which the stupidity of the men reproduces the patriarchal consensus in business and science while the stupidity of the women reproduces the institutionalized feminism of the English and history departments. In short, though I as a rule try to avoid striking the elitist note of besieged intelligence, we are ruled by, if not the foolish, then certainly the complacent.

The patriarchal complaint I have dealt with elsewhere on this blog and its shortcomings are too obvious to merit commentary: women are narrow, unambitious and stupid, Darwin and/or God said so, only men can be geniuses, etc. Boring.

The feminist complaint is more interesting because more widespread in literary circles. This says that women’s writing is neglected because women’s concerns (childrearing, domesticity, being a victim of something, etc.) are neglected. And not only this, but also that aspects of literary art such as experimentalism in structure and language, metaphysical speculation and a concern for ideas rather than plot have been concocted by some male conspiracy against women’s natural desire to read domestic romances in plain prose.

I’ve stated the case rather hyperbolically, but I do intend to reveal the egregious sexism of this “feminist” position. Indeed, how can we even distinguish it from a patriarchal argument? Duh, chicks like love stories and big ideas hurt their little brains. That’s what I hear when self-appointed academic feminists say that “women’s concerns and interests” are neglected by literary culture.

Their solution to this problem over the course of the last thirty years has been to construct the spurious category of “women’s literature” (“a literature of their own,” in the Woolf-hating Showalter’s earlier formulation), a category that mixes female geniuses like Emily Dickinson (the greatest U.S. poet of the nineteenth century) and George Eliot (the greatest British novelist of the nineteenth century) with a pack of boring hacks (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, etc.) In my darker moments, I perceive two consequences of this logic in the future: 1.) a men’s rights movement will emerge and demand on comparable terms the canonical reinstatement of bores like Longfellow and Whittier; 2.) we will eventually be congratulating ourselves on the recovery of that great neglected twentieth-century female voice, Ayn Rand.

Here’s the thing: the kind of women who are ambitious to become great writers don’t tend to share a conservative conception of “women’s interests” (dinner, diapers, the holy home) because these things are prisons to which patriarchy unjustly consigned all women by robbing them of any choice in the matter. The freedom to experiment in art, politics, philosophy, should be for everyone; not everyone can be great, but no one should be excluded from the effort. There is no “women’s literature” because Emily Dickinson and George Eliot and Colette and H.D. and Hannah Arendt and Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth Bishop and Zora Neale Hurston and Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag do not want to sit at the ladies’ table or come to a tea party. And if feminism is not about that, then what is it good for?

Two quotes to finish, first from Sontag herself:

If Rich (hardly as ferociously as some of our sisters) is going to start baiting that heavy bear, the intellect, then I feel obliged to announce that anyone with a taste for “intellectual exercise” will always find in me an ardent defender. Truth has need of all kinds of exertion. Although I defy anyone to read what I wrote and miss its personal, even autobiographical character, I much prefer that the text be judged as an argument and not as an “expression” of anything at all, my sincere feelings included.

Adrienne Rich, whom I have always admired as poet and phenomenologist of anger, is a piker compared to some self-styled radical feminists, all too eager to dump the life of reason (along with the idea of authority) into the dustbin of “patriarchal history.” Still, her well-intentioned letter does illustrate a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric: anti-intellectualism. “One imagined Sontag not to dissociate herself from feminism,” Rich observes. Right. But I do dissociate myself from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (“intellectual exercise”) and emotion (“felt reality”). For precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect (its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment) is also one of the roots of fascism—what I was trying to expose in my argument about Riefenstahl.

And the second from Marilynne Robinson’s interview in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers:

There were very great women in the nineteenth century, and I’m afraid it would be hard to come up with their equivalent in this enlightened time, which is a frightening thought. But they were women who were well and optimistically educated with the assumption that they certainly could be great. Which I think is not really by any means characteristic now. Instead I think that women are being very largely educated, frankly, to plead a case against the world at large, as if what they have to do is be fascinated by what has happened that ought to disturb or anger them, rather than by the possibility of doing something else. They’re not making the space that other women I think in another two generations will want to occupy. [...] I think that things are being ascribed to gender that are not gender determined, and it’s tending toward limiting distinctions in the same way that people were doing in 1810.

Let me repeat this quotation from a laudatory pre-election essay on Obama from The New Republic:

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right.

Note the ease with which the term “white privilege” has migrated from the discourse of a mostly oppositional university/activist identity politics into the neoconservative lexicon, where it becomes yet another militaristic synonym for limp-wristed, effete, pacifist, girly, not-ready-for-the-dangers-of-the-world, “Old Europe” etc.

American multicultural identity politics seems destined, like all identity politics that went before it, to have begun in a just defense against the threat of complete cultural or existential dissolution and to end in an imperial exercise of a power that justifies itself with reference to a no-longer operative powerlessness.

Previous examples include: American exceptionalism, begun in the Biblical universal history of the oppressed Puritans and ending in the genocide of Native Americans and the justification of slavery and American imperialism; German nationalism, which started out as a resistance against the twin Enlightenment pincers of the English market and the French state and ended in the Holocaust; and Zionism, birthed by resistance to the anti-semitism of Europe and now responsible for the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

The phrase “white privilege” already functions as a discursive power-play belying the theory that underwrites it. Typically an exchange goes like this: person A makes an claim, usually one linking a non-race-based form of oppression to a race-based one, or else asserting the non-determinate relation between race and culture; person B replies that person A could only make such a linkage or such a statement because he or she was blinded by his or her white privilege.

Now, if this argumentative move works, it’s because the protocols of discourse surrounding the conversation valorize the non-possession of white skin; in other words, the term only takes on its discursive function in an atmosphere of the privileging of the anti-white.

Person A could of course object again that his or her claim were universally or just trivially true and not conditioned by her privilege, but this would only activate the second mechanism which makes white privilege a powerful phrase: possession of it cannot be denied, because denial of it is the leading indicator of its possession. In other words, only someone with an excess of white privilege would deny possessing it.

The most amusing conversations happen when both interlocutors are persons of color, as often happens since no two people of any skin color or any “culture” (whatever that means) will agree on everything. Then one speaks of ethnic self-hatred, internalized white privilege and everything we’re primarily familiar with from the repertoire of the defender of Israel.

Aside: “People of color” is itself a mystificatory term, serving to obscure the class difference between, for instance, the right-wing racist upper-middle class non-white person and the impoverished excluded working- or underclass non-white person, to the benefit of the former. For instance, Oprah Winfrey gets to be seen as part of an internationally oppressed culture because she is a person of color, which allows her to legitimate her colonizing actions on an African continent to which identity politics grants her a proprietary claim that, from the point of view of political analysis and ordinary morality, is wholly indefensible.

“White privilege,” for all its proponents’ talk of “intersectionality,” also tends to de-legitimate or vitiate intra-cultural or pan-cultural forms of political resistance, such as feminism and gay liberation.

For instance, in the wake of the passage of Propostion 8, for which African-American voters in California cast a non-decisive but alarming 70% of their vote, defenders of the concept “white privilege” asserted that the LGBT movement was too driven by narrow middle-class white interests (true enough) and that it did not do enough to explain its cause to African-American citizens. This too would be fair enough, except that it’s identity-politics conventional wisdom that members of minority groups should not be expected to explain why their oppression is wrong or why their group does not pose a threat. Why this double-standard for people minoritzed for reasons other than race or culture? Largely, I suspect, because racial/cultural identity politics always serve to shore up conservative tendencies within a culture as a means of maintaining a cohesion that benefits the ruling class of the oppressed group. Certain strains of feminism, LGBT liberationism, Marxism and anarchism threaten to dissolve the cohesion of all cultures in favor of a more radical egalitarianism than that which can be established between stratified identity groups.

I began with a quote from The New Republic, that bastion of neoliberal imperial ideology; let me conclude with an ambivalent quotation from an essay in its slightly more moderate counterpart The Atlantic Monthly:

Zionism may actually be the most successful national liberation movement of the 20th century.

Whatever the achievements of Zionism—

(and they are real, just as American exceptionalism produced the humane culture of abolition and Transcendentalism, German nationalism gave us some of the greatest achievements in nineteenth-century European philosophy and literature, and U.S. multiculturalism built and codified a twentieth-century literary and musical canon surpassing in genius much of anything done in the white mainstream: “every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism”)

—its morally calamitous career, which I have the right to comment on since my tax dollars fund it, should warn us against any ideology which conceives of liberation in national, racial or creedal terms.

“White privilege” was a useful concept once, and in some circumstances it still is, but let us not overlook its oppressive underbelly, its capacity to provide rhetorical cover for those most intractable minoritarian privileges of class and empire.

The claim of the World-Spirit rises above all special claims.
—Hegel

I don’t know what it is that so disturbs me about the screaming crowds, the interminable TV coverage, the invocations of Lincoln and King, the full conscription of humane culture from pop star to poet. Lewis Lapham wrote a book called The Wish for Kings, and that—not hope, not change, not a new dawn or a dream come true—is what I sense here. A population so demoralized, so brutally cut off from the social, so immersed in totalizingly mediating technologies, yearns for a kind of Hegelian union in the state of subjective consciousness with world-spirit. When white conservatives do it, we know what to call it. But we knowers feel odd calling this by its right name due to its canny conflation with a certain teleogical version of the African-American experience.

Obama understands the white liberal American distaste for power as a symptom of white privilege, and he is certainly right.
—David Samuels

And this has been my qualm about “multiculturalism” in academe and popular culture, which would have been a good idea, but which has become a mere rainbow-hued reinscription of American nationalism. In university survey courses, for instance, multiculturalism means that you will read books by WASP Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino/a Americans, Arab-Americans and Native Americans, and what this boils down to is that you will have spent your undergraduate career reading books by Americans; diversity never looked so uniform. The conservative will complain that there’s no room for Shakespeare; my complaint is that there is no room for any language other than English, no matter how inflected with immigrant languages, and if you don’t make it far enough across the ocean to reach the literature of England, you can be damn sure that Russia and China and India and Nigeria and everywhere else remain a blank. American ideology, ever resourceful, has taught us to laugh at the Puritans, but, hey, when it comes to diversity we sure are a city on a hill. Even Toni Morrison, perhaps our greatest novelist, and one who seemed to know better, has caught the bug. Meanwhile the president-elect mulls intervention in Darfur and journalists wonder what our president of African descent will “do for” Africa, as if the concept of diaspora has convinced American ethnic bourgeoisies and their white missionary/NGO counterparts that they own the places they came from. The world can look forward to the “multicultural person’s burden.”

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.
—Toni Morrison

But, much as the pleasant-faced, feel-good, humanitarian imperialism that the coming years promise disgust me, I cannot pose as a Leftist purist, though I am that to a certain extent. Personally I am also disgusted by this desire of my generational cohort, black and white, to melt into the television and fuse with the state. I have an anarch taste for fragmentation and drift, mess and chaos, bohemia and poetry, and our new body politic, shorn of its mangy Bush, is altogether too clean for me. Now you will be given hard stares if you mutter darkly about the state of the world, now you will be suspect if you reject the new normal—Bono and Sanjay Gupta, Save Darfur and escalate Afghanistan. America’s back and better than ever, and they’re partying in the city on the hill, and naysayers can go to the devil. Well, I suppose my party is the devil’s after all.

The realist novel’s biggest English ancestors are Defoe (whose texts were faux-memoirs written by people who had had remarkable experiences in minutely described natural or social settings—Robinson Crusoe on his island and Moll Flanders in London and imperial environs) and Richardson (whose texts also posed as real documents—letters, this time—recording minutely the goings on in bourgeois homes). Realism’s commitment to reality, at the beginning, went all the way down; no third-person narrator obtruded on the transmission of experience. Theorists from Watt to Josipovici have convincingly linked this to the ethos of the rising middle-class, Protestantism and scientism.

However, there was another tradition co-existing with this and related to it, in which the commitment to reality gets mocked all to pieces: in this genre, whose biggest English eighteenth- century exempla are Gulliver’s Travels and Tristram Shandy, documentary records of “reality” either get put in question by the impossibility of what they describe or by the writer’s own manic linguistic proliferations which both testify to and undermine writing’s referential function. This tradition is actually the root of the novel proper, beginning as it does with Don Quixote.

(I almost made the adjective “Western” modify the noun “novel,” but it’s time to stop that: Cervantes was a prisoner in Algiers for five years, where he may or may not have read the Maqamat al-Hariri. Defoe’s inspiration for Robinson Crusoe was the Philosophus Autodidactus of Ibn Tufail, also read by Locke and Liebniz. These books, which I have not read, need to become more widely known, and Franco Moretti should put some graduate students to work seeing if their influence on western literature might not call into question some of our literary historical bromides. Generally, I’ll say this: we need to enlarge our historical.geographical parameters and stop thinking of everything in terms of “modernity”—a truly pernicious concept, I’m starting to think—and even “capitalism.” Perhaps, if we must be influenced by the Christian turn in Continental Philosophy, we might adopt something like “monotheism” as our governing abstraction, if we need one. It would at least have the effect of dissolving some of the artificial separations between national literatures, between the so-called “medieval” and the so-called “modern” and between “East” and “West.”)

Anyway, third-person narratives up until this time either had a timeless, non-omniscient, fabular register, as in epics, romances and folk-tales, or had explicitly self-aware narrators who commented on their own storytelling, as in, for instance, Tom Jones.

(Full disclosure: I have never managed to finish Tom Jones or anything by Richardson; the thought of Clarissa makes me go all clammy. I asked a professor of mine once, “Did you really read the whole thing?” “Yeah,” he said, “it was on my orals.” I asked: “How was it?” He replied, “Hard on the wrist.”)

The real nineteenth-century revolution is the invisible but omniscient third-person narrator and its attendant innovation, James Wood’s beloved free indirect discourse. This technique is already developing in Jane Austen and gets taken up and really radicalized by Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and on into the present.

(These writers, psychological realists, applied free-indirect technique systematically to social realism. In that sense, both groups are realist, but the word needs a modifier to remain intelligible.)

It’s essentially a modernist technique, from which stream of consciousness develops, not a Victorian one. The Victorian writers who tried it didn’t do it consistently, and most Victorian novels are actually participating in one or another eighteenth-century tradition. Dickens, for instance, who often gets referred to as a paradigmatic Victorian realist, uses the Fielding technique of the foregrounded, chatty narrator far more than he uses free indirect discourse; so does George Eliot, so does Thackeray. Charlotte Bronte gives us faux-memoirs, her sister Emily gives us a Sternean or Swiftian collection of nested texts that certainly don’t add up to unproblematic omniscience. The Victorians don’t disguise that they’re writing fiction, but constantly make us aware of the fact that they are; say what you like about them, but they are not epistemologically naive.

Narrative reflexivity is not postmodern, but rather as old as the hills, going back to when Homer invoked the muse. It’s narrative invisibility that is new, the production of text out of seemingly thin air, and not just text, but text that makes the entire world, inner and outer, legible. It’s not just new, it’s “modern”—or modernist, rather.

If our current bête noire is the psychological realism championed by James Wood, we should pay attention to his likes and dislikes: he more or less dislikes Dickens and loathes his influence, he seems to agree with Henry James that George Eliot’s narrators are not nearly invisible enough, and all of his favorite old writers are grouped around the modernist years, 1870-1930 (Chekhov, Woolf, Lawrence, etc.).

In other words, the popular account of the modernists against the Victorians is incorrect: what we’re actually seeing is a battle between two or maybe three different tendencies within modernism.

Okay, enough for tonight, but I hope to say more later, perhaps with reference to James Joyce…

Wow, the internet has been agreeing with me recently. First we have at n+1 (whose guiding lights I don’t much admire, but which does produce some good stuff) a review of Neil Gross’s sociological account of Richard Rorty’s career, which splendidly questions the supposed omniscience of sociologies of art and intellect:

Bourdieu and Rorty thus agreed that appeals to something more enduring than certain arrangements of contingent social practices are simply the boasts of the arrogant and the future historiography of the victors. But where Rorty saw his own task as clearing away all the junk of disciplinary arrogance to show that there is nothing that everything else is really about, Bourdieu thought that the understanding of all knowledge as social entails the revelation that everything is really about jockeying for status.

Bourdieu thus saw to it that one professorial cohort emerged from the whole thing with fancier vestments: the sociologists. Bourdieu preached a “reflexive sociology” in which sociology’s instruments were to be directed back upon itself in at attempt to show that its own techniques were so powerful that even its own techniques could not resist its own techniques. Bourdieu redrew the lines of the reality/appearance distinction such that now only the sociologists, with their knowledge of status, stood in the unfiltered light of the really real. It was an invincible status grab. It is in this context, I think, that Gross’s decision to try out his new theory on Rorty is best understood: Rorty makes it difficult to take Bourdieu quite as seriously as Bourdieu took himself.

Then, some evolutionary psychologists come out of the woodwork with a discourse on literature so extraordinarily seventh-grade that it hardly bears commentary:

Their research suggests that classic British novels from the 19th century not only reflect the values of Victorian society, they also shaped them. Archetypal novels from the period extolled the virtues of an egalitarian society and pitted cooperation and affability against individuals’ hunger for power and dominance. For example in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke turns her back on wealth to help the poor, while Bram Stoker’s nocturnal menace, Count Dracula, comes to represent the worst excesses of aristocratic dominance.

The team of evolutionary psychologists, led by Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri in St Louis, applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to literature by asking 500 academics to fill in questionnaires on characters from 201 classic Victorian novels. The respondents were asked to define characters as protagonists or antagonists, rate their personality traits, and comment on their emotional response to the characters.

They found that leading characters fell into groups that mirrored the cooperative nature of a hunter-gatherer society, where individual urges for power and wealth were suppressed for the good of the community.

The effect of such moralistic literature was to uphold and instil a sense of fairness and altruism in society at large, the researchers claim in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. “By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling ‘free riders’ or ‘cheaters’ and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group,” they write.

Jonathan Gottschall, a co-author at Washington and Jefferson College in Pennsylvania, told New Scientist magazine that in Victorian novels, dominant behaviour is stigmatised. “Bad guys and girls are just dominance machines, they are obsessed with getting ahead, they rarely have pro-social behaviours,” he said. But the more cooperative a group became, the more likely it was to survive and spread its values.

A few characters were judged to have both good and bad traits, such as Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy. The conflicts they demonstrate reflect the strains of maintaining such a cooperative social order, Carroll said.

It would be tedious to take this apart (let me direct you to Louis Menand’s immortal essay on Steven Pinker), but I’ll say that I detect one continuity between the radical demystifiers of literature who follow Bourdieu or Foucault and these plainly reactionary illiterates: both regard form, that is, literary language, as at best window dressing and at worst disguise. When you peel it away, what you find is a moral tale: it doesn’t matter that, as people point out in the comments section to the above article, George Eliot’s narrator so complicates the motivations and behaviors and thought processes of Middlemarch’s characters that it’s impossible not to see Dorothea’s idealism as naive and self-involved, or Casaubon’s arrogance and frigidity as the tragic wager against life that the would-be genius makes, or indeed the narrator’s own omniscience as fraught and uncertain in a world of ceaseless change and complication; and all this is a million miles away from something like Dracula. And Middlemarch is still at least a little bit of a moral tale…what would these people do with Bleak House or The Kreutzer Sonata or Amerika or To the Lighthouse or Sula or The Hour of the Star or Underworld or Elizabeth Costello? Language in these books doesn’t hide some “real” natural process, whether evolution or the attempt to win status. Rather, language produces sensations, induces reflection, comments upon and overrides these processes.

Scienctism will fail in the end because it refuses to recognize the autonomy of human values. I learned from Homer, not Darwin, that nature is not moral but that humans are. Our morality is a second-order process, to be sure, parasitic upon its material host, but it is not wholly determined by that host. This is what consciousness means. Scientism denies consciousness, only to bring it in through the back door of the scientist’s ability to understand it all. This is precisely what literary language, activated by consciousness and excessive of consciousness, puts in question. It doesn’t resolve the tension between the first- and second-order in our lives, but limns it.

Anyway, the headline is “Victorian novels helped us evolve into better people, say psychologists.” We’re better people? “Our” client state’s hugely powerful army just spent the last two weeks racking up a body count of 1000 in a starved, captive population made up either of non-combatants or of combatants so profoundly outnumbered and outgunned as essentially to be prisoners of war already; the political, business and intellectual class of “our” Dracula-enlightened countries mostly justified or paid for this. Hard to say that we’ve improved all that much from the time of the suppression of the Indian or Morant Bay rebellions.

What am I defending when I defend literature? (I am not, by the way, too hung up on the name: call it poetry, call it art, call it the aesthetic, whatever; nor am I hung up on any particular forms: comics can count, as can hip-hop, as can teen TV dramas, etc. etc.)

Let me quote a sentence from another contemporary academic literary critic (I don’t quote these critics by name because 1. my quibble is not with a specific argument but with a climate of opinion and 2. the “democracy” of the internet might allow the self-googling powerful to harass the powerless who wish to discuss them at a distance from the exercise of their power). At any rate, onward with my quotation: “Let’s let ‘lyric’ [i.e., lyric poetry as opposed to all other forms] dissolve into literature and ‘literature’ into culture.”

The critic here takes issue with the privileging of lyric as that genre of literature which, because it is farthest from the prosaics of social description, political declamation or philosophical system-building, can best encapsulate what differentiates literary discourse from all other types of discourse. Instead, the critic implies, discourse is discourse is discourse: all are equally socially-constructed, thus all equally express cultural solutions to cultural problems; ergo, to privilege one as somehow transcendent is to flee the cultural.

What could be wrong with this? There are mundane objections that don’t interest me (e.g., from a pedagogical perspective, it helps students arrive at an understanding of a text if they understand what tradition the text places itself in, which means that you cannot merely discard these categories as if they were last season’s fashions), but I want to focus on the claim that literature should be dissolved into culture.

This claim will be read by anyone schooled in the last thirty years of academic literary criticism as left-wing, that is, on the side of the oppressed and against constituted authority. But if literary theory has taught us anything (and I would never argue that it has not), it’s taught us that all discourses persuade by making their assumptions seem natural. The assumption underlying the claim under discussion seems to be left-wing because to privilege any discourse is 1. elitist, since not all people will, because of class or cultural barriers, have or not wish to have access to privileged discourse, and 2. conservative in that it assumes a realm apart from the cultural struggles wherein the marginalized work to gain their fair place.

We regard as natural the assumption that elevating any one discourse necessarily excludes and marginalizes and that attempting to flee from the field of the political is conservative. But these assumptions only seem natural because they conceal their dubious foundation, which is the idea that liberation is essentially collective and that it can only come about through politics (which means through the bullet and through the state, or, to reduce further, through coercion).

What does the word “culture” mean, anyway? Don’t we just use it as a polite term for religion, or, more properly, for internalized theocracy? The benighted liberal who hasn’t studied literary theory says, when confronted with a strange cultural practice, “Well, they just do that because of their culture,” i.e., they, whoever they are, have collectively chosen to submit themselves to some totalizing body of doctrine which they mindlessly enact, and so we cannot judge them for that. The wised-up liberal who has his or her Foucault by heart, knows that we, whoever we are, are no better than they, and mindlessly enact our own subjection to fictive totalities.

The purpose of coming to this realization was, initially, to distance ourselves from our “culture,” to attain mind, in the old Hegelo-Marxist logic to make of ourselves the object of our reflection and thus achieve immanent self-transcendence, which may just be a myth, but, hell, it’s a great one.

We’ve arrived now, though, at a mere conservative cynicism that still manages to disguise itself as progressive: discourse is discourse is discourse, culture is culture is culture, that’s just the way it is, some things don’t ever change. There’s no escape. And not only is there no escape, but the elaborate explanations of the logic of no-escape still called for by a quietly science-envying academic establishment will have the delightfully paradoxical effect of inviting into the socially-constructivist redoubt of the embattled English department who else but the sociobiologists and cognitive scientists. If we want to know how it all works, they will surely tell us better than a gaggle of amateur sociologists. No escape, say the social Darwinists, for race actually exists and women think math is hard; no escape, say the cognitive scientists, for the mind is an illusory projection of the cruddy grey brain. And I am sure I will live to see the historicists and the sociologists of literature agreeing with them: no escape.

And that, ultimately, is what I’m defending: escape. Literature cannot be equal to culture because culture is the totalizing system that wants to claim us, that wants to make us alike, that wants us to worship it. Culture (and here I will offend people by saying that I don’t care which culture, whether that of the oppressor or of the oppressed, who will change places in the long run anyway, which is the lesson, if we must have a lesson, of Zionism) is difference expressed collectively, over the heads and over the voices of those it would organize.

But literature, or art, or poetry, or the aesthetic, is the snake in culture’s garden. It points the way out by reminding us that difference meaningfully exists at the level of the individual, not the individual human person, for that too is a totalizing and culturally-constructed category, but of the individual word, sentence, paragraph or utterance. And liberation will consist of allowing people the means to access this difference, because literature dissolved into culture is nothing other than achieved totalitarianism, whether of a religious clerisy or a scientistic elite, literature dissolved into culture will dissolve the fragile materials by which a self, or a relationship, or a feeling is constructed.