by Zachary Samalin

Response to Bruce Robbins: On the Non-representation of Atrocity

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

In his V21 symposium keynote lecture, “Atrocity in the Novel, Atrocity in History,” Bruce Robbins asks whether it is reasonable or instead “unacceptably presentist” to “expect the great epoch of European realism to ‘do’ atrocity in the particular, self-accusing sense” he is interested in examining, in which “‘we’ accuse ourselves of doing something outrageously cruel, collective, and indiscriminate to ‘others.’” “Arguably,” Robbins continues, “such representations only became possible after European civilization had been shocked out of its pre-Copernican complacency by the Holocaust and the rise of anti-colonial movements. In the nineteenth century, those shocks were still to come” (Robbins 2016: 4-5). Perhaps not surprisingly in a room full of Victorian literature specialists, the response to Robbins’ lecture during the question and answer session produced a long list of 19^th century works that audience members thought would complicate, enrich, trouble or outright repudiate Robbins’ hypothesis that the literature of the 19^th century had yet to achieve a certain form of critical self-consciousness, and so was incapable of indicting political brutality and violence. To the contrary, this audience response seemed to suggest, the archive of 19^th century literature is rife with examples of just what Robbins is looking for.

In the following response to Robbins’ lecture, I want to theorize more specifically the tension between these two seemingly irreconcilable positions, by examining one of Robbins’ central theses about the entwinement of politics and aesthetics—namely, that literature can and perhaps ought to lay claim to a privileged role in the articulation of “civilizational self-accusation,” especially in the context of the atrocities of modern imperialism. The notion that the literary has the capacity to register unwanted self-implication in destructive sociopolitical processes is extremely compelling; but, unlike Robbins, it is also an aesthetic innovation that I have come to associate with various currents in 19^th century literature. And yet, as half a century of postcolonial literature and theory has helped us to see, this sophisticated innovation, which allowed for the registration, in narrative form, of undesired conditions of immanence, did little to turn the critical gaze of the 19^th century novel outwards, that is, towards the ongoing atrocity of the British empire. When we read the literature of the mid- to late-19^th century—Little Dorrit (1857), Notes from Underground (1864), The Belly of Paris (1873)—we don’t find a journalistic subjectivity reporting on the turbulent decades of perpetual war in Algeria, Persia, the Crimea, India, Burma, Vietnam, and China; but we do encounter a complex structure of feeling, beginning to emerge as something articulable, that conceived of modernity as a process of regressive self-destruction and of civilization as something unwanted that would soon sour itself from the inside out. In this respect, the question that Robbins’ lecture raises is to my mind not whether it is too ‘presentist’ to expect Flaubert or Dickens to have offered a critique of atrocity, but rather the enduring, perhaps more disturbing question of what specific forms of ideological blindness kept the novel form from extending the implications of its own socially critical and ethico-political insights to the imperial context?

The first point to make is that, when it came to its atrocities, 19^th century Britain left behind an indisputably immense non-literary paper trail. Certain brutal events in the maintenance of the empire—such as the violent responses to the Morant Bay rebellion (1865) and the Indian revolt (1857-8)—were not only voluminously documented, but debated publicly and at length, and did much to bring to the fore the question of what it means to participate in a putatively modern and morally enlightened national culture. More often than not, as has been well established, such debates served to mask the violence intrinsic to imperialism and capitalism, focusing instead on the extent to which particular episodes of brutality and exploitation represented local failures and setbacks in the ongoing civilizing project of the British Empire. Thus while Governor Eyre came under fire in the aftermath of Morant Bay, the terms of public debate set by the Jamaica Committee did little to overturn the entrenched patterns of racist thought and economic opportunism which helped to prop up the central premises of imperial exploitation (see Holt 1992: 278-312). Like a good deal of the public and official reaction to the documentation of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in our own day, Morant Bay provided a space for a limited articulation of civilizational self-accusation in British public discourse—‘we don’t do that’—but only within a larger self-serving framework of disidentification, disavowal and civilizational (which is to say racial and cultural) arrogance that helped keep the inherent injustice of imperial occupation from taking center stage. Indeed, one limitation of framing critique in reference to specific atrocities made apparent through these examples is that the focus on the event of cruelty and violence runs the risk of obscuring patterns of ongoing or systemic exploitation.

Yet in their most trenchant form, 19^th century critiques of imperialist violence did approach the form of self-critique that Robbins holds up as a more modern ideal. Marx’s criticism of the 1855 Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency is exemplary in this respect (see Rao 2001). The report sought to establish the prevalence of physical torture and brutality as a systemic means of extracting tax revenue within British India for the profit of the East India Company, only to disavow responsibility for that violence and to condemn it, with characteristic outrage and condescension, in the racialized language of barbarism. “Our aim,” the report concludes, “is to guard the Natives against themselves” (Report 1855: 70). As Marx summarized the report, “The universal existence of torture as a financial institution of British India is thus officially admitted, but the admission is made in such a manner as to shield the British Government itself” (Marx [1857]1975: 66). Yet as Marx goes on to observe, “a few extracts from the evidence on which the Madras Report professes to be founded, will suffice to refute its assertion that ‘no blame is due to Englishmen,’” and to document instead the systematically exploitative nature of capitalist imperialism. Far from evidencing the need for colonial paternalism, Marx thought the report ought to raise for the “dispassionate and thoughtful men” of Europe the more self-implicating question of “whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the foreign conquerors who have so abused their subjects” (Marx 1975: 69). Marx’s indictment of the Madras Report may not be precisely what Robbins has in mind when he argues for the cosmopolitan modernity of civilizational self-accusation as a “very special subset of atrocity-response in which ‘we’ accuse ourselves of doing something outrageously cruel, collective, and indiscriminate to ‘others’” (Robbins 2016: 2)—but if not, it is certainly a close relative.

While Marx’s writings on India often lapse into a more rigidly developmental-teleological mode, according to which capitalism represents the first step necessary for Asian civilizations to catch up with world history, his observations about the Madras Report do more to highlight the complex ways that the question of identification came in this period to animate the representational dynamic of critique. The difference between the critical language of civilizational self-accusation, as Robbins formulates it, and the exculpatory language of civilizational disavowal, as exemplified by the Madras Report, hinges precisely on such vectors of identification—that is, on a speaker’s imagined participation in a particular ideological community. In this respect, while Robbins observes that “the modern weakening of membership” is a prerequisite for the distance needed to understand atrocity as such, I would argue that the unwanted (but inescapable) identification with destructive processes is in fact the crucial psychosocial component he ought to pursue, rather than the fraying of communal bonds more customarily associated with the onset of modernity (Robbins 2016: 1). Due in large part to a post-Enlightenment legacy that idealizes disinterestedness and objective distance, we have yet to provide even the basic outline of a history for this capacity for unwanted identification.

Understanding how these two opposite movements—towards a desirable disinterest and an undesired involvement—were fused to one another throughout the 19^th century is a significant and unfinished task for scholars of the period, in the first place because their fusion accounts for the antithetical attachments to the impulse to document violence and atrocity that I have been describing. The imperialist impulse to represent violence in order to disavow it as something always perpetrated by an other, or to frame it as an exceptionality that justifies rule, cannot be fully distinguished from the self-implicating impulse to expose that violence as immanent to modernity. This is in part because they share the same language, as reflected by Marx’s insistence that blue books are the only evidence of systemic violence one needs. Though we often think of Marxist thought as working to fill in the gaps in the official discourse, I am suggesting instead that we attend to what Marx presupposes is the radical transparency of the language of domination—the presupposition that violence and exploitation had become self-evident, and were written brazenly on the surface of things in the language of the perpetrators. We might therefore take Robbins’ call to place the writing of atrocity within a longue durée of moral development as an invitation to theorize this intersection of the genealogy of self-accusation and unwanted identification with the historical transformations which allowed atrocity to be written legibly and out in the open, rather than hidden or buried in secret.

At the same time that we see extensive evidence of such a complex public discourse for engaging atrocity in 19^th century Britain, we also know that in different national and cultural contexts, literary and artistic production began to develop a wide array of aesthetic strategies for representing atrocity throughout the 19^th century while simultaneously problematizing the presumed security of the disinterested observer. Goya’s Disasters of War come to mind, as does the archive of 19^th century photographs that Nathan Hensley and Zahid Chaudhary have recently written about; indeed Hensley has helped us to see precisely how these hermeneutic questions about the representation of violence and its implied spectators remain unanswered in the aftermath of empire (see Chaudhury 2012; Hensley 2013). Similarly, slave narrative and abolitionist literature in the United States—which of course tended not to focus only on specific atrocities but on the systemic and juridical nature of slavery under capitalism—bear directly on Robbins’ claims about the 19^th century’s representational capacity for moral indictment. However, I present these not so much as counter-examples, but rather as indices of the more particular absence that Robbins has helped us to identify. We know that British imperial atrocities were voluminously documented and often publicly debated as potentially undermining the civilizational project; and we know that the 19^th century saw the development of a more radical social scientific and socially critical discourse of self-accusation, that sprouted up out of an official discourse of disavowal; and, finally, we know as well that other aesthetic traditions in other cultural contexts have done a better job than the British novel at representing atrocities through some form of self-accusation or communal indictment.

So then one question: What to call this kind of ideological absence or moral-aesthetic caesura? How does it work, and how can we grasp its psychosocial dynamics? I put the question this way, since we have previously relied on the vocabulary of symptom and repression to elaborate precisely these absences. And yet it seems clear, today, as it has for some time, that the tools afforded by the vocabulary of cultural neurosis don’t quite satisfy here, given that we are not dealing with an occluded or concealed discourse of atrocity that “returns” from its repression in the interstices of the literary text, but rather with the more disjointed, more deranged fact that this proliferate and public discourse did not find its fullest expression in the exemplary aesthetic form of the period, that is, in the novel. Why not? My sense is that we still need to sharpen and refine our historical account of the ways in which representation functions vis-à-vis the intolerable, the unwanted, the atrocious, and the unrepresentable—a newly sharpened account of the writing of the disaster that takes into account the different species of blindness and specific patterns of resistance endemic to modern literary forms.

These caesuras in the political consciousness of the Victorian novel become all the more jarring when we consider that, over the 19^th century, literary texts, and perhaps the novel in particular, emerged as the cultural laboratory for testing out Enlightenment ideals and for exposing them as violent or vacuous, as cruelty in themselves—whether in the name of reactionary sentiment or liberalizing social critique or some impulses more nihilistic than either of those. I am thinking of earlier works like Juliette and Gulliver’s Travels just as much as later, increasingly socially engaged texts such as Our Mutual Friend, La Terre, Notes from Underground and Jude the Obscure. Considered from this angle, the literary domain in the 19^th century was a sophisticated and complex arena for elaborating a deeply affective experience of unwanted self-implication and inevitable participation in a destructive order, founded on tenuous, inverted values.

Even if the 19^th century did not “possess a public capable of demanding or enforcing scrutiny of ourselves from outside” (Robbins 2016: 24), it is clear to my mind that later authors as diverse as Achebe, Vallejo and Sebald returned to this more nihilistic 19^th century conception of literature as a privileged space for giving voice to an unwanted relation of immanence in the destructive processes of modernity. Indeed, the outraged self-accusation Robbins describes, in order to transcend mere bad faith or ressentiment, needs to involve a more disturbing set of identifications than simply seeing oneself as though from without. A literary genealogy of civilizational self-accusation, then, might follow unpredictable lines back through unexpected pages, from the mushroom clouds of the 20^th century Robbins begins with to the storm-clouds of the 19^th. How can we further specify and describe this negative structure of feeling in the novel, give it a longer history that doesn’t stop and start according to the arbitrary constraints of post-hoc periodization, and which attends to its ever-shifting blind spots and its insights alike?

References

Chaudhury, Zahid. 2012. Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth Century India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hensley, Nathan. 2013. “Curatorial Reading and Endless War.” Victorian Studies 56, no.1: 59-83.

Holt, Tom. 1992. The Problem of Freedom. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marx, Karl. (1857) 1975. “Investigations of Tortures in India.” Reprinted in Marx, The First Indian War of Independence, 1857-1859. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Rao, Anupama. 2001. “Problems of Violence, States of Terror: Torture in Colonial India.” Interventions 3, no. 2:186-205

Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency. 1855. Madras: Fort St. George Gazette Press.

Robbins, Bruce. “Atrocity as Self-Accusation.” 2016.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Zachary Samalin is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.  He is currently working on a manuscript, The Masses Are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Aesthetics of Disgust.

by Molly Clark Hillard

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

In a recent New York Times article, Ishiguro said “as for Brontë, well, I owe my career, and a lot else besides, to Jane Eyre and Villette” (2015). Speaking at the Seattle Public Library on his 2015 novel, The Buried Giant, Ishiguro elaborated:

I have loved Jane Eyre and Villette…for some time, but…when I re-read them about three years ago, I suddenly realized how much I had ripped off from those two books…I read [them] with the usual pleasure and admiration, but also with some kind of private embarrassment…and in particular…those two books are absolutely fantastic for that…very coy way of the first person narrator…appearing to confide, very intimately, with the reader and then you suddenly find actually that there is some huge, hugely important, thing that the narrator has just held back…and I realized that that kind of thing had influenced me greatly in the way I write….Moments where you learn that Jane Eyre is crying, not because she the narrator says “I was crying”…but because the person she is talking to…says “what’s that in your eye, Jane…” and I thought “Whoops!” Exactly the same technique. (2015)

This quote illustrates more than simple literary influence; here Ishiguro avows his interest in the relationships and power dynamics between readers and authors, in both the effect and affect of reading. He is not just aware that Victorian novelists do this too; he indicates that his technique is more than merely analogous to Victorian novelists. He owes, he says, more than just his career to Brontë.  Timothy Bewes has said that “Ishiguro offers no clues about how to read him” (2007: 205), but Ishiguro’s quote, it seems to me, suggests otherwise.  I would at least like to ask whether what happens in certain 21^st century novels is something other than, more than, postmodern pastiche.  Perhaps another way to pose the problem is this: what if periodicity becomes unimportant or secondary next to our subjectivity, our constitution of selfhood within a literary history?

Since the 2005 publications of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ian McEwan’s Saturday, we have been called to consider the network produced between 19^th and 21^st century novels.  What do 19^th-century novels do for 21^st-century readers? What do they do for 21^st-century novels? What, in turn, does juxtaposing 19^th and 21^st-century novels do for our understanding of literature itself? The V21 Collective exhorts us to just these questions; the work issuing from the group offers a collectivity of Victorian and 21^st century thinking, as much as a human collective of scholars.  In their manifesto and elsewhere, V21 asks whether Victorian literature still matters. If it does, if we have not “transcended” these plots, these characters, these ideologies and problems, then whither next?  Even more fundamentally, V21 prompts us to consider whether reading itself is still a viable technology.  The query is bound to related concerns about the future of the liberal arts university, which is based in great measure on the art and science of reading, and in corollary beliefs that reading is one thing (of many) that makes us human, and that the activity of reading bridges the division between the personal and the communal.  In light of declining English majors nationwide, such questions are neither axiomatic nor sentimental.

So, what kinds of projects might the spirit of V21 make possible?  We might, for instance, reflect on Victorian novels that offer scenes of reading and re-reading.  Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda: these are all works in which acts of reading begin or escalate the action of the novel, in which books—history books, science books, devotional books—are central to the text’s aims.  The novels feature characters whose acts of reading may make or mar them, but in one way or another seal their fates.  These characters insert themselves into a literary history—not only resonating with it or speaking back to it, but also actually taking the book as literal or real.  Frankenstein’s creature reads Paradise Lost as “a true history”(Shelley 2003: 132); Jane Eyre sees Gulliver’s Travels as “a narrative of facts” (C. Brontë 2003: 28); Maggie Tulliver and Mr. Lockwood are in thrall to found manuscripts with handwritten marginalia that directs or arrests their attention. I would argue that these characters are literary subjects; by calling attention to the books in their hands they remind us of the books in ours, and their fabrication, their materiality. Simultaneously, though, they suggest that all our lives are bound to, subject to, subjects of, the books we read.

If we were to turn, next, to Anna Kornbluh, for whom in comparative reading, “transtemporality or acontextuality is integral, a thought that gains gravity precisely by virtue of its repetition in history,” we might then look with fresh eyes at certain contemporary British novelists who make returns to Victorian literature, “going back and working on” Victorian plots, genres, and characters over the course of the narration (Ishiguro 2015: 115).  Novels like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, each in their own way, announce that it is from Victorian literature that they have learned to read.  Their authors present to us a set of palimpsested characters that demand, like their Victorian counterparts, to be read as literary subjects. We are used, perhaps, to define literary subjectivity as does Simon During: “a love of literature, more or less disjunct from explicit identification with political programmes,” the “disposition to engage intensely with [literature],” and the “production of fictions and simulacra and the provision of spaces and occasions for individuals to be communicated to” in a kind of “secular mimesis” (1996: 5).  And in doing so, we generally associate it with an embarrassing lack of critical distance.  But if we were to take literary subjectivity more literally, we might begin to see things differently. We might begin to see things like a character in a Victorian novel.

Transplanting, recycling, palimpsesting: these are activities to which I suggest we might append the common term “re-read.”  Indeed, the Ishiguro quote that begins this piece highlights re-reading as integral to his writing.  As a re-reader myself, I have begun to wonder exactly what re-reading does for us and to us.  As a Victorianist, I wonder what it did for and to Victorian readerships.  The epistemology of re-reading has gained critical attention in recent years in the fields of affect and empathy studies, educational history, book history, and reader response.[1] Yet no scholar has yet given re-reading quite the metaphoric register that I think it deserves. Re-reading is something that an individual does with a specific text, to be sure, and for many reasons: to memorize, to self-soothe, to amend misprision, to discern anew, to layer interpretations. The very term “re-read” originated in the nineteenth century, and I suspect that the word was coined because re-reading is implicitly connected with the development of the Victorian novel and techniques of reading it. For instance, free indirect discourse necessitates re-reading in order to conceive narrative double valence; and in an age of serial publication, completed novels were collected and bound, in part to be re-read.  Bearing in mind Kornbluh’s call to construct “a grammar of resonance,” I’ve begun to wonder whether “re-reading” could also express the diachronic transference of literary bodies, one into the other, as intertexts.

One possible outcome of V21’s call for presentist, formalist, and comparative interpretation is for us to recognize in certain novels from Victorian and contemporary periods a community that exists across time as well as space, in the leaves of books as well as in a timestream.  This literary community (network, as Latour would have it) is “sociable” in Rita Felski’s terms, but not homogeneous, not universal. Books do not always offer a “safe space” of warm assimilation.  In recognizing the Victorian literary and cultural material that lives on within them, contemporary novel characters also must recognize their own unoriginality. They are, in some sense, copies. Paradoxically, though, a literary community is also vitally important to constituting their personhood, and to build any kind of human belonging that matters.  These authors suggest, perversely, that we become human through the books we read and re-read, that we carry within. We are, to borrow loosely from Jane Bennett, part book in ways that are pleasurable as well as painful. 

References

Ablow, Rachel. 2009. Oscar Wilde’s Fictions of Belief. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 2: 175-182.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. 2009. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108, no. 1: 1-21.

Bewes, Timothy. 2007. “Editorial Note.” In “Ishiguro’s Unknown Communities.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 40, no. 3: 205-206.

Brontë, Charlotte.  2006.  Jane Eyre. London: Penguin.

Brontë, Emily. 2003. Wuthering Heights. London: Penguin.

During, Simon. 1996. “Literary Subjectivity.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, NV. 1-12.

Eliot, George. 1995. Mill on the Floss. London: Penguin.

Felski, Rita. 2011. “Context Stinks!” New Literary History, 42. no. 4: 573-591.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2015.  “Kazuo Ishiguro: By the Book,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, March 5.

—–. 2015. “Kazuo Ishiguro reads from his much anticipated new novel, ‘The Buried Giant’.”

Seattle Public Library, March 30.  http://www.spl.org/library-collection/podcasts/2015-podcasts.

—–. 2005. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage.

Kornbluh, Anna and Benjamin Morgan, “Manifesto of the V21 Collective.” V21: Victorian

Studies for the 21^st Century. Web. http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/. Accessed 6/2/2016.

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Moretti, Franco. 2013. Distant Reading. London: Verso.

O’Gorman, Francis. 2012. “Matthew Arnold and Re-Reading.” The Cambridge Quarterly 41, 2: 245-261.

Price, Leah. 2013. How to Do Things With Books in Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

“reread, v.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed 9/3/2016.

Shelley, Mary. 2003. Frankenstein. London: Penguin.

Notes

[1] Rachel Ablow has investigated how (for Oscar Wilde) re-reading fiction enables a kind of vicariousness through which one can “try on” the affective register of belief (2009: 179-180).  Christopher Cannon considers the history of re-reading, tracing it from the Greeks to Locke in the sense of memorization or “knowing by heart” for the educational purposes of self-improvement or the medicinal properties of habit. Similarly focused on the historical mode, Rolf Engelsing describes a late eighteenth-century shift from the “intensive” re-reading of a few prized texts to the “extensive” consumption of many ephemeral ones while Leah Price counters that “some genres—particularly the novel—appear to have elicited a newly intensive reading at precisely the historical moment to which Engelsing traces its decline” (Price 2013: 318). Francis O’Gorman investigates what Matthew Arnold had to say about the effects of returning to a single poetic text over long spans of time; he notes that the poet was conflicted as to whether the purpose of re-reading was “to counter forgetfulness,” or to “investigate new perceptions” (2012: 250).

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Molly Clark Hillard is Associate Professor of English at Seattle University.  She is the author of Spellbound: The Fairy Tale and the Victorians (Ohio State UP, 2014).

by Nathan K. Hensley

The book I’ve chosen to describe for this brief position paper is not a book at all, really, but a book in the process of becoming: call it an essay, as in a trial or experiment. It’s one of Swinburne’s notebooks from his undergraduate years at Oxford. Some of this writing would later be “upcycled” into Poems and Ballads, of 1866 (that’s Antoinette and Isabel’s great term, from Ten Books), and in Figure 2 you can see the first, respectable edition of that infamous book, put out by Richard Moxon, alongside the second, pornographic one, issued after the indecency charges, published by John Camden Hotten.

As is true of all books, the composition, compilation, and publication of Poems and Ballads left in its wake a jumbled collection of cancelled versions, outtakes, and half-formed trials: a train of loose material and juvenilia, spread now across archives in England and the US, some of it miraculously living at my own university, that would never be crystallized into any final public form at all.

The non-book depicted above is one such record of abandoned energy or thought-in-motion, a testament, I mean, to writing as a process and not a thing. Orphaned in an archive in Washington, DC, it would have been incapable of “shaping empire” in models of analysis that borrow from Foucault or Althusser or just the intellectual conventions of our field to assess how a text might (in the words of Ten Books) “influence … imperial discourse and power” (Burton and Hofmeyr 2014: 3).

In my work I’ve tried to pivot away from terms like discourse, influence, and power, and toward another set of conceptual levers — literary form and sovereign violence — to ask how nineteenth century thinkers used literary presentation to conceive their modernity’s uncanny coincidence with brute force. Part of this means expanding what it might mean for a book to be “about” empire, and could (I hope) help shift us away from the usual suspects of our “literature and empire” syllabi and toward the era’s anatomies of harm, catastrophe, and human waste: so Wuthering Heights, The Mill on the Floss, and Our Mutual Friend provisionally in place of Kipling and Conan Doyle. It also might push us to look for conceptual productivity rather than ideological inscription. The question becomes not how common sense circulates, discourses accrue, or ideologies stick, but how literary texts work to imagine the new.

Of course, one provocation of Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire is to ask whether books shape empire at all, and to answer that we would need to know what a “book” is and what “shaping” means — and the authors address these questions– but also what constitutes “the British empire.” What do we talk about when we talk about empire?  The question is more difficult than it sounds, and I think Swinburne can help.  What you see below is the first page of a never-published poem in the Oxford notebook called “The Birch.”

In it, Swinburne lovingly describes the pleasures of being beaten with a wooden rod.  He lingers on the opened flesh, the dripping fluids, the sublime pleasures of all this.  Like other of Swinburne’s Sadean flogging poems –dismissed as subliterary by Steven Marcus but expertly read by Yopie Prins– “The Birch” is a poem in praise of being beaten, and in this it well evinces what Ellis Hanson elsewhere in this series of blog posts refers to as “kink.” It is also, as Prins (2013) notes of other Swinburnean flogging poems, a poem about what poetry is and does, and is therefore, I’ll say, a poem not just about desire or violence but about form itself.

There’s no space for a real reading in this short and telegraphic blog post, but trust me that Swinburne’s speaker mocks the right-minded people who would deny the delights of what the poem with jarring fondness calls “chastise[ment].”

Taking this fondness for vexation yet further is my favorite poem and ballad in the published collection of that name, “Anactoria.” That poem places at the literal, mathematical center of its long catalogue of physical vexations what its speaker refers to as “the mystery of the cruelty of things”: the phrase comes from lines 152-154 of the 304 line poem. And like “Anactoria,” “The Birch” puts harm at the very core of its system: physical violence is the dark star around which orbit all its other affects, pleasure included. Swinburne’s early verse, I’m saying, anatomizes violence and understands somatic injury as its conceptual degree zero.

But like the other Poems and Ballads composed in this period, “The Birch” unfolds within a fantastically rigorous formal structure. Elsewhere it’s roundels and Old French verse forms; here it’s end-stopped couplets, a grid of masculine rhymes and mostly iambs that is slashed over with flaying strokes from Swinburne’s fountain pen. These marks lacerate the tight form of the poetry they overwrite but do not cancel.

In lavish, six inch strokes, Swinburne inscribes onto the manuscript of “The Birch” a tension between extravagant harm and regulative form: a co-traveling of rage and order that this manuscript presentation does not –need not– resolve.  Crucially for my sense of this as an act of materialized political thinking, physical violence is here uncannily bound up with the very regulative ensemble it seems to contravene. The physical capacities of this manuscript enable that suspension.

Since this is a short post and I discuss these questions at more length in a forthcoming book, I’ll end listwise, with three things that make this object useful to me as a kind of tactical metonymy, the crown for the king, in this conversation about critical engagements with empire now:

(1) It is singular; no other object on earth is identical with it, and as I’ve only just been able to hint at here, it is not identical with itself either.

(2) It is — and this should be obvious– material. It is a physical object whose physicality is part of its apparatus for making meaning. As this suggests this object is also highly conscious of itself as form; its effects depend on what George Saintsbury (with Swinburne as an example) understood as “the laws of meter” (1910: 25): I mean the restraining or (in the Kantian sense) regulative functions of form that Swinburne here luxuriously overcodes.

Finally (3), it is thought. Swinburne is not writing about India, not describing trade routes or troop movements or the suppressions of rebellions. He is instead writing about violence: and the point is that for an empire that routed its self understanding through the concept of law, this effort to think obscene violence and regulative form together makes “The Birch” political theory for the age of liberal empire.

In its pitiless, I will say diagnostic analysis of how legality and harm travel together, and in its marshaling of poetic form to enact this cotraveling, Swinburne’s notebook pushes us away from vestigially empiricist models of influence and toward an understanding of how literary presentation can enact thought. But this object also does something more, which is to help us know empire as what it is: the targeted application of physical violence against certain bodies for the benefit of others — the mystery of the cruelty of things. As belated readers of documents like this, our tasks might be, first, to show how the Victorian thinkers we love mediate this obscene mystery into form, and second, if we can stomach it, to use those encounters as a way to begin reconceiving the present.

References

Burton, Antoinette, and Isobel Hofmeyr, eds. 2014. Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marcus, Steven. 1975. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England. New York: Basic Books.

Prins, Yopie. 2013. “Metrical Discipline: Algernon Swinburne on ‘The Flogging Block.’” In Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate, edited by Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Saintsbury, George. 1910. A History of English Prosody: Volume III, From Blake to Mr. Swinburne. London: Macmillan & Co.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles. 1859[?] Oxford Notebook. Manuscript notebook, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Georgetown University.

—. 1866. Poems and Ballads. London: Edward Moxon.

—. 1866. Poems and Ballads. London: John Camden Hotten.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Nathan K. Hensley is assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016).

by Sebastian Lecourt

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

The complaint that the term Victorian, with its ambiguous conflation of nation, period, and personage, represents an undo stumbling block for scholars of Dickens or Eliot is hardly new. Indeed, in many ways it belongs to a wider crisis of categories instigated by postcolonial theory. One of the main lessons that figures such as Said taught us, after all, was that so many of the genre and period tags organizing our field – west and east, modern and ancient, novel and epic – are ideological projections that function to pull diverse global histories into the master narratives of western modernity. Over the past two decades, transnationally minded critics have sought to take this critique on board in a number of ways. Some have deliberately explored the ideological freight of western comparative forms through a re-politicized formalism in the tradition of Lukács (Puchner 2006; Slaughter 2007; Esty 2011). Others have embraced a new particularism that examines how individual texts, as they circulate internationally, can be taken up in surprising ways that belie their Eurocentric roots (see the essays in Burton and Hofmeyr 2014). Still other critics have looked toward the world systems that make such circulation possible (Moretti 2000).

Within Victorian studies itself, Caroline Levine and Priya Joshi have used elements of the latter two approaches to reimagine the term Victorian, not as a national or period marker, but instead as the name of a transnational media network built by Queen Victoria’s agents – a sprawling infrastructure of printing presses, railroads, telegraphs, and educational institutions that disseminated imperial media around the globe (Joshi 2002; Levine 2013). The refreshing thing about this approach is that it expands the idea of the Victorian temporally as well as geographically, opening up a kind of presentist optic that permits us to read Victorian literature beyond the horizon of its immediate historical context. Once you do the legwork of reconstructing this Victorian media network, you discover that a great deal of our contemporary information world, from the Indian public libraries that interest Joshi to the Gothic and Pre-Raphaelite affects haunting contemporary pop music, is built upon Victorian foundations. What is more, you realize that we encounter a striking amount of pre-Victorian culture as it was remediated by Victorian writers. The Oxford philologist Max Müller’s translation of the Upanishads, for example, may yet be found at major bookstores and free online in countless e-editions. Call this historicism as presentism, a historicism that treats today as a reality constituted by multiple deep pasts.

I have recently explored this critical landscape on the v21 blog and elsewhere.[i] At last October’s V21 Symposium, however, Jesse Rosenthal drew our attention to one danger in such an approach: the danger of too easily privileging those aspects of Victorian media that we fancy make the most natural precursors for ourselves. In this golden age of television, the serial publication of the Victorian novel can seem a lot more interesting than the adaptation of Victorian novels into lavish theatrical productions, a practice that resonates better with the bestseller-to-blockbuster pipeline of 1990s Hollywood. The risk of presentism, in other words, is that we might return to a kind of Whig history in which the past functions primarily to lead to ourselves.

What I want to suggest here, though, is that Joshi’s brand of diffusionary history also has resources for resisting this kind of circularity. Specifically, I have found it instructive to read Victorian literature, as she defines it, not just through its contemporary afterlives but also through its uptake by subsequent periods – in particular, to revisit nineteenth-century texts that we no longer consider important but represented seminal works to readers in the 1920s or the 1960s. Recently, for instance, I have written on The Light of Asia, an epic poem about the Buddha published by Edwin Arnold in 1879 (Lecourt 2016a; 2016b: 114). Arnold (no relation to Matthew) taught for years in India before returning to London in the seventies to work as a journalist and poet. Although The Light of Asia was but one of several adaptations of Asian religious works that he published over the following years, it would become an especially celebrated bestseller, going through dozens of editions in multiple languages and inspiring both stage and screen versions. Mahatma Gandhi credited The Light of Asia, along with Arnold’s verse translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with rekindling his interest in Indian religion, while T. S. Eliot would recall the poem fondly as something that had expanded his mental horizons as a young man (Clausen 1973; Franklin 2005). Meanwhile the poem also had a major impact upon emerging Buddhist nationalisms from Ceylon to Japan to Burma.[ii]

In both metropolitan and colonial contexts, Arnold’s poem helped promulgate a Protestantized construction of Buddhism as a religion that was about neither rituals nor doctrines but rather moral individualism (McMahan 2008). While we think of this vision of Buddhism as a phenomenon of the twentieth century – the modernist rebellion against Victorian religious morality, or postwar Baby Boomer frustrations with middle-class materialism – it might better be described as Victorian Protestant earnestness turning its righteous gaze against Protestantism itself, an evangelical anti-formalist polemic that has latched onto a non-western religion in order to chide its own culture. Recognizing it as such reveals that the line between presentism and historicism, reading the past through the lens of our priorities and assessing it on its own terms, can be quite hard to draw. Not only do we frequently receive the past as mediated by other periods, but the stances from which we criticize particular historical epochs may rest upon foundations built within them. In the case of Arnold’s poem, where once we might have seen a period and its various afterlives, we now perceive a set of constantly mutating preoccupations that are as vital in current-day America and Japan as they were in Victorian England or Ceylon. This is just standard dialectical history, of course, but it reminds us that presentism can never be completely present, and if done self-consciously can encourage a great sensitivity to the complexities of the past.

Moreover, reading Victorian texts as they influence us through intervening cultural moments can strengthen historicist practice by highlighting how, in reframing the past around our own concerns, we inevitably take part in a certain history. In her paper at last October’s V21 Symposium, Anna Kornbluh championed the power of anachronistic reading to juxtapose different texts from across literary periods and thus rescue us from the myopia of contextual interpretation. “What Susan Stanford Friedman has called ‘cultural parataxis,’ the radical collage of texts from different geohistorical coordinates,” she ventured, “can produce new textual insights and new theoretical insights” (Kornbluh 2015). Tracing the multiple afterlives of something like The Light of Asia, however, puts anachronistic reading itself into a kind of historical perspective by showing that such willful comparison of literary materials out of period is not some gesture against history but rather the latest episode in the history of what Levine calls affordances: the way in which literary forms are both in control of their own history and not, suggesting a certain set of imaginative possibilities that only others can realize for them (Levine 2014: 6-7).

Indeed, a global, cross-period historicism might actually embolden an anachronistic hermeneutic by letting us compare the ways that we reframe nineteenth-century literary materials with how other periods have done it – letting us see, that is, how our anachronistic readings take part in the ongoing process by which forms are used and reused, disseminated and appropriated. My own copy of The Light of Asia, an 1889 edition published by Roberts Brothers in Boston, belonged a professor at a small religious college in northern California where my mother works. His copy, in turn, was inscribed in pencil by a Margaret Burr back in 1890. I cannot say what either reader made of the poem, though I assume that their takes differed from mine, which is driven both by memories of a teenage interest in Buddhism and by a scholarly preoccupation with the history of religious studies. But it fascinates me that we are part of the same history, dependent in some sense upon that imperial encounter in South Asia a century and a half ago.

References

Blackburn, Anne. 2010. Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Burton, Antoinette and Isabel Hofmeyr. 2014. Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons. Durham: Duke University Press.

Clausen, Christopher. 1973. “Sir Edwin Arnold’s ‘The Light of Asia’ and its Reception.” Literature East and West 17: 174-91.

Esty, Jed. 2011. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. New York: Oxford University Press.

Franklin, J. Jeffrey. “The Life of the Buddha in Victorian England.” ELH 72 (4): 941-974.

Gombrich, Richard and Gananath Obeyesekere. 1988. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Harris, Elizabeth J. 2008. Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter. New York: Oxford University Press.

Joshi, Priya. 2002. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kornbluh, Anna. 2015. “History Repeating.” Paper presented at the V21 Colloquium, Chicago, October 9.

Lecourt, Sebastian. 2015. “Victorian Studies and the Transnational Present.” V21 blog post. http://v21collective.org/sebastian-lecourt-victorian-studies-and-the-transnational-present/

—–. 2016a. “Idylls of the Buddh’: Buddhist Modernism and Victorian Poetics in Colonial Ceylon.” PMLA 131 (3): forthcoming.

—–. 2016b. “That Untravell’d World: The Problem of Thinking Globally in Victorian Studies.” Literature Compass 13 (2): 108-17.

Levine, Caroline. 2013. “From Nation to Network.” Victorian Studies 55 (4): 647-66.

—–. 2014. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Malalgoda, Kirsiri. 1976. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society, 1750-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McMahan, David. 2008. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (January-February): 54-68.

Puchner, Martin. 2006. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rosenthal, Jesse. 2015. “Maintenance Work: On Tradition and Development.” Paper presented at the V21 Colloquium, Chicago, October 9.

Slaughter, Joseph. 2007. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press.

Notes

[i] See Lecourt 2015 and 2016b.

[ii] For overviews of the revival, consult Malalgoda 1976; Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988; Seneviratne 1999; Harris 2008; Blackburn 2010.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Sebastian Lecourt is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston.  His essays have appeared in PMLA, Victorian Studies, and Victorian Literature and Culture. 

by Joseph Lavery

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

The book I’m proposing as a resource for thinking about empire, historical attachment, and V21 method, is Freud’s late paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”[1] It’s an odd text in a lot of ways – and possibly was never, actually, a book in the usual sense of the word (oops): a return to clinical and technical questions after two decades spent exhibiting psychoanalysis as the centerpiece in a variety of theoretical tableaux; and we find Freud in Vienna, less than a year before the Anschluss would force him to flee to London, doubting at last that the utopian payoff of therapy, as he had understood it, was achievable within the analytic scene. The argument, which must be dramatically over-simplified given the time frame, is that transference, once thought by Freud to be a singular and punctual moment, proves all too often reversible; that the possibility of “terminating” an analytic procedure must be considered a practical one, rather than as an apotheosis. The metaphor to which Freud turns to describe the ongoing work of an interminable analysis is that of repairing dams built in one’s infancy; the “dams” (226) are the repressions and sublimations that protect the ego from the disorienting affects of trauma, built poorly by an as-yet-immature ego.

For all its technicality and complexity, it is a rich and richly deconstructive text that, were there time (and/or a market) for it, one could doubtless demonstrate the mutual constitution of terminable and interminable analyses. For V21, though, what strikes me is the implicit analogy (no doubt one determined in the final analysis by history: Freud’s increasing awareness of his precarity as an Austrian Jew on the verge of imperial annexation) between analytic work and traumatic repetition itself. That is, whereas analysis had initially claimed itself to be a new and distinct kind of repetition that would substitute for, and eventually displace, the symptomatization of trauma; Freud comes to doubt that this kind of repetition was essentially different at all, that the critical “working through” was potentially indistinguishable from the bad repetition against which he had always contrasted it.

This suggests to me the possibility of a further analogy – one indeed hinted by Freud in the suggestion that not just individuals, but “races and nations” (TK241 may make fit subjects for analysis – which I shall formulate in my own terms: our collective critical and ethical obligation to the past (whether figured as “reparation,” qua Sedgwick, “redemption,” qua Bersani, or as what “unexpectedly appears to man” qua Benjamin) entails, in its very insistence on historical difference, a de-historicizing of the present.[2] An interminable historicism would begin by abolishing the intrinsic distinction between past and present, and conceptualize therapy as an absolute temporality entailing future no less than past: something of this kind is articulated in Paul Saint-Amour’s Tense Future.[3] When Empire is the name we give to that temporality, we are not setting ourselves the task of fixing one or another dam: all our dams need emergency repair: a collective project.

To stand this interminable historicism on its feet, a question, and an answer to a different question, both concerning the contemporary “legacies” of British slavery: or, precisely, not “legacies,” in so far as that term assumes the death of a past of which we are legatees, but immanent effects. The question concerns Benedict Cumberbatch, and requires one to know (1) that he is arguably the most visible and fetishized standard-bearer for contemporary neo-Victorianism, through his exquisitely mannered performance as Sherlock in the contemporary-ish BBC adaptations; (2) that his ancestor Abram P. Cumberbatch was, following the 1833 Abolition Act, compensated for the loss of 232 formerly enslaved Barbadians, and a name which, to Sherlock fans connotes a gleeful English quaintness, has long served Barbadians as a synecdoche of plantation rule.[4] The question is: when I read Cumberbatch musing about moving to America because “no one minds so much [about class] over there,” and am reminded of C19 narratives of roguish men seeking their fortunes in the tropics for the same reason, is my paranoia located in the past or in the present?[5] And the answer, from Sir Hilary Beckles, publishing in the Jamaica Observer an open letter to the then Prime Minister David Cameron, himself a descendent of slave owners, on the occasion of his state visit to Jamaica:

“Dear Honourable Prime Minister,

I join with the resolute and resilient people of Jamaica and their Government in extending to you a warm and glorious welcome to our homeland. We recognise you, Prime Minister, given your family’s long and significant relationship to our country, as an internal stakeholder with historically assigned credentials.

To us, therefore, you are more than a prime minister. You are a grandson of the Jamaican soil who has been privileged and enriched by your forebears’ sins of the enslavement of our ancestors.”[6]

Notes

[1] Freud, Sigmund. 1967. ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable,’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937 – 1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psychoanalysis and Other Works. Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, in Collab. With Anna Freud, Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 209 – 253. London. The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

[2] These three modes of historicist practice nonetheless share, to some degree, a powerfully invested ambivalence concerning the ethics of historical work. See Sedgwick, Eve. ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,’ in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Bersani, Leo. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. p. 255

[3] Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford: OUP, 2015.

[4] The Cumberbatch family history was widely reported around the release of Twelve Years a Slave dir. Steve McQueen (Fox Searchlight, 2013), in which Benedict Cumberbatch played the planter William Prince Ford. See, for example, Adams, Guy. ‘How Benedict Cumberbatch’s family made a fortune from slavery (And why his roles in films like 12 Year a Slave are a bid to atone for their sins).’ Daily Mail, 31 January 2014. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2549773/How-Benedict-Cumberbatchs-family-fortune-slavery-And-roles-films-like-12-Years-A-Slave-bid-atone-sins.html

[5] Benedict Cumberbatch, quoted in Raphael, Amy. “‘I’m definitely middle class… OK maybe I’m upper middle class’: From Sherlock to Star Trek, Benedict Cumberbatch on his meteoric rise to stardom.’ The Mail on Sunday, 27 April 2013. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2314671/Star-Trek-returns-Benedict-Cumberbatch-boldly-goes-Sherlock-Trekkie.html

[6] Beckles, Sir Hilary, ‘Letter to David Cameron,’; see ‘Britain has duty to clean up monumental mess of Empire, Sir Hilary tells Cameron,’ Jamaica Observer. Monday, September 28, 2015. http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Britain-has-duty-to-clean-up-monumental-mess-of-Empire–Sir-Hilary-tells-Cameron_19230957

by Nasser Mufti

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

In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1976, Michel Foucault proclaims that the emergence of bio-politics was “one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century” because it overlaid the “sovereign’s old right—to take life or let live” with the power to “make live and let die” (Foucault 2003: 241). Bio-politics, along with its critical vocabulary of “state racism,” “regularized life” (81, 245), “fostering life” and “regulations of the population” (1990: 138, 139), have become essential to understanding what Étienne Balibar, with Foucault in mind, calls the “great ‘transition’ between the world of subjection and the world of right and discipline” (Balibar 1991: 55).

Overlooked by most students of Foucault’s critique of sovereignty is Morley Roberts’s treatise, Bio-politics: An Essay in Physiology and Politics of the Social and Somatic Organism. Written in 1912 and published in 1938, the book argues for the state’s re-invention as a biological entity. As Roberts explains in the preface, “It is not to be expected that the politician should apply himself to the study of the endocrine organs, or ductless glands of the body, but a little knowledge of them might help him understand more perfectly the nature of his own difficulties in relation with the organized bodies of any kind—from empires and nations down to the turbulent committees among his own constituents […] He might even hear of the Struggle of the Parts and might possibly learn that I had reasonably described the social life of the body as a state of hostile symbiosis” (Roberts 1938: xiii). Roberts’s idea of the state, as it turns out, is imperial through and through. And its vitalism extends from the domestic squabbles of “turbulent committees” to the imperial peripheries. This global polity is seemingly under permanent duress. For it is hard not to read what he calls the “hostile symbiosis” or the “Struggle of the Parts” as the rise of anti-colonial movements in the peripheries (Ireland, India, South Africa, for example), which in 1912 were increasingly crystalizing as nationalist projects that contested British imperial rule.

Roberts’s text is the outcome of a peculiar intellectual trajectory. He worked for the India Office in the late-1870s, and travelled through much of the British empire in the 1880s, spending much of his time in Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States. Between 1886 and 1906, Roberts published over two dozen novels, travelogues, numerous short stories, and a biography of George Gissing, who was a friend of his from college. Not unlike the imperial adventure tales of writers like H. Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty, William Henry Hudson and Robert Louis Stevenson, the colonies loom especially large in Roberts’s tales. Roberts stopped writing fiction in the 1910s, focusing instead of publishing texts like Bio-Politics, including also Warfare in the Human Body (1922) and The Behavior of Nations (1941).

Roberts’s language in Bio-Politics oscillates between the registers of biology and politics so much so that, according to him, nothing is lost in translation. Biological forms map perfectly onto geopolitical forms. The structures that organize an organism’s life, it turns out, are the same as those of politics. The effect of this formal conjuncture is borderline absurd prose. To take one example, in a chapter on “Politics and Colonial Protozoa,” Roberts makes the analogy between Proterospongia Haeckelii and imperial geopolitics. He describes Proterospongia Haeckelii as “a primitive sponge” where “there can be seen on the gelatinous surface of the colony cup-shaped flagellate cells, while, in the interior, there are only non-flagellate amoebae.” On this gelatinous continent are two types of organisms, one at the extremities of the “gelatinous surface,” and the other inside of it. “But these flagellates are not fixed,” Roberts explains, “they are capable of migrating to the surface, where they soon become cup-shaped and flagellate and take up the functions of those they displaced. These again migrate from the surface and return for a time to the primitive amoeba form” (108). Roberts uses the example to argue that the British empire not be seen as a static territory, but as a dynamic relation. The spongy gelatinous “continent” is not a fixed geographic category for Roberts, but is mobile and modular, capable of inverting its coordinates so that interiors become its exteriors, intra-national becomes extra-national, metropole becomes colony, and vice versa.

What kind of historical context makes it possible for someone like Roberts to conflate the metropolitan center with the periphery, and moreover, conflate these two radically different schemas with no limits? One answer, it seems to me, is “Greater Britain.” During the British empire’s most ambitious years towards the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was often said to have formed an imperial nation-state with its colonies. J. R. Seeley, for example, celebrated the impact of technology on the British empire in a decidedly vitalist key: “Science has given to the political organism a new circulation, which is steam, and a new nervous system, which is electricity” (Seeley 1914: 86-7). In “Saxondom,” Seeley contemplates, “Canada and Australia are to us as Kent and Cornwall,” suggesting a transformation of geographic distance into domestic proximity in a way not unlike Roberts’s Haeckelii (63). That Roberts (and to a lesser degree Seeley) make a space beyond the bounds of the empire unthinkable in the very years Britain’s colonies were first declaring their independence from Britain tells us something about why the geopolitical terrain of Bio-Politics is as mutable and elastic as it is. While Roberts’s turn to biology might seem to “de-center” the British empire (in ways not dissimilar to how scholars of empire have turned to the language of networks, webs and systems), the politics behind his biological tropes is rooted in a familiar imperial paradigm.

But one thing is certain: Roberts makes it impossible to think of bio-politics outside of an imperial milieu. Scholars like Ann Laura Stoler and Achille Mbembe have in their own ways extended, adapted and decentered Foucault’s genealogy of bio-politics from Europe to the peripheries (see Stoler 1995; Mbembe 2003). But Roberts offers another way to approach the question of bio-politics—namely, through the triumphant, jingoistic discourse of Greater Britain and its other, anti-colonial nationalism.

References

Étienne Balibar. 1991. “Citizen Subject.” In Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy. London: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-6. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador.

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

Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11-40.

Roberts, Morley. 1938. Bio-Politics: An Essay in the Physiology, Pathology and Politics of the Social and Somatic Organism. London: Dent.

Seeley, J. R. 1914. The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures London: Macmillan and Co..

Stoler, Laura Ann. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

by Mary L. Mullen

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

The V21 manifesto (V21 Collective 2015) asserts, “We must break accepted frames.” Focusing on Victorian empire raises the question, to what end?  Breaking accepted frames can spark innovation and expand the geographic and temporal scale of the field, but these innovations and expansions might reproduce the very Victorian imperial formations that we study.  As Roderick Ferguson’s recent history of the interdisciplines warns, acts of unfielding are often archived within the university in ways that obscure the “ruptural possibilities of modes of difference” (2012, 18).[1] When breaking frames or considering acts of unfielding, I suggest that we should work towards anti-colonial ends.

Turning to nineteenth-century Ireland—a place that has a complicated relationship to both empire and the field of Victorian studies—one of the “accepted frames” to consider breaking is our emphasis on the book itself.^[2]  After all, in 1841 only 27% of Ireland’s population could read and write (Graff 1987, 337). For this reason, although scholars like Kate Trumpener (1997, 16) and James Buzard (2005, 41) persuasively demonstrate the ways in which Irish literature shaped and was shaped by English fiction of the period, it is also important to remember that the book was not the primary form of Irish cultural authority or public discourse.

Charles Kickham’s immensely popular Knocknagow: Or, the Homes of Tipperary (1879) highlights the difficulty of anti-colonial unfielding even when focusing on questions of colonialism and empire. Kickham started writing novels while imprisoned for his role in the Fenian conspiracy in 1865, suggesting that his writing was intimately connected to his anti-colonial politics. Knocknagow, his most famous work, was published in serial form in periodicals in both Ireland and New York and was on Ireland’s bestseller list as recently as 1978.  But today, few Irish people or Irish studies scholars read the book.^[3] Knocknagow’s longstanding popularity resulted from the way it incorporates alternative forms of cultural authority—music, storytelling, athletic competitions, embodied memory. And yet, the ways in which Knocknagow circulates as a book shows how imperial authority reproduces itself in colonial and postcolonial states.

Making the case that Knocknagow is a “great Irish Novel”—even better than Joyce!—the Irish sportswriter, Con Houlihan, suggests that the novel doesn’t hold together as a novel (2007, 20). Houlihan (2007, 20) celebrates this “great basket” of a novel not because of its narrative unity or coherence but because it captures the contradictory experiences of everyday Irish life. Sometimes, the narrative actually gets in the way of the energy of the story. Kickham interrupts a lively description of a game of hurling to solve a mystery surrounding one of the characters.  By the time he returns to the hurling match, the reader has almost forgotten that it is taking place.  Tellingly, readers remember the description of the hurling match rather than the narrative it interrupts: the Gaelic Athletic Association later includes this description in their manual, and sportswriters like Houlihan continue to draw upon Kickham when recounting particularly exciting matches (Valente 2011, 65).

But, the circulation of this book often blunts the politics of the novel as these alternative forms of cultural authority are used to reinforce the aesthetic standards of the British colonial state instead of questioning them.  Working to unify the novel’s discordant forms, readers take up the novel’s sentimentalism as a form of nostalgia and conveniently forget its criticisms of British law and state formations. The novel’s nostalgia is actually quite complicated: it reinforces a sentimentalized pastoral ideal but also recalls graphic state violence that the community remembers but the British state has already forgotten. Staging a conflict between official state history and native Irish remembering, Knocknagow tends to be taken up in ways that allow native Irish remembering to achieve the aesthetic authority of official history.  It was celebrated for teaching Irish youth proper morality (“Charles Kickham’s Career” 1928, 5), for providing a thoroughly Irish counterpart to Dickens’s “English Christmas” (“Leader Page Parade, 1954), and as the appropriate subject matter for English classes in Ireland well into the twentieth century (Fitzpatrick 1973, 12). As a result, the music, hurling, Christmas celebrations, and storytelling that Kickham lovingly portrays become timelessly embodied in the newly independent Irish state while Kickham’s anti-colonial politics that question official state history are forgotten.^[4]

By paying attention to these contradictions—between the novel’s politics and the politics of its circulation, the novel’s competing forms and the easily portable forms that travel beyond the novel—we can recognize how empire reproduces itself, but also, the forms of difference at odds with this reproduction. Knocknagow shows that returning to what has been forgotten—in this case, the novel’s anti-colonial politics and its discordant forms—can break accepted frames by reactivating the ruptural possibilities of difference.

References

Buzard, James. 2005. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

“Charles Kickham’s Career.” 1928. Irish Independent, August 30.

Ferguson, Roderick. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fitzpatrick, Sean. 1973. “English Books for Irish Children.” Irish Independent, September 12.

Graff, Harvey J. 1987. Legacies of Literacies in Western Culture and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Houlihan, Con. 2007. “Kickham’s work up there with the great Irish novels.” Sunday Independent, October 28.

Joshi, Priya. 2011. “Globalizing Victorian Studies.” The Yearbook of English Studies, 41:2: 20-40.

Kiberd, Declan. 1995. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

“Leader Page Parade.” 1954 Irish Independent, December 22.

Martin, Amy. 2012. Alter-nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Murphy, James. H. 2011. Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nolan, Emer. 2007. Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Trumpener, Katie. 1997. Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and The British Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

V21 Collective. 2015. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective: Ten Theses.” http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/ (accessed 2/10/2016).

Valente, Joseph. 2011. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press.

Notes

[1] Priya Joshi (2011, 21) makes a similar point, arguing that transnational work in Victorian studies often “preserved the sense that the Victorian metropolis was hegemonic.”

^[2] As Declan Kiberd (1995, 5) argues, Irish people were “both exponents and victims of British imperialism.”

^[3] Emer Nolan’s (2007, 103-24) and James H. Murphy’s (2011, 119-47) work are notable exceptions.

^[4] Examining how Fenianism is remembered (and forgotten) in the twentieth century, Amy Martin (2012, 161) contends that Fenian politics “represent a loss that haunts Irish politics.” I suggest that Kickham’s forgotten anti-colonial politics is part of this larger structure of historical amnesia and remembrance.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

Mary L. Mullen is Assistant Professor of English and faculty member in the Irish Studies program at Villanova University.  Her essays have appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victoriographies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and elsewhere.

by Tanya Agathocleous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

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

by Caroline Levine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

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

by Jesse Oak Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

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

by Jesse Rosenthal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

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

by Ellis Hanson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

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