by Ben Parker

Review of Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel, translated from the Italian (2011) by Zakiya Hanafi, Harvard University Press, 2017.

Because the novel is the most important product of modernity, any theory of the novel is also a theory of modernity. That modernity has been characterized in a variety of ways: as an unremitting catastrophe of Being—Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel or René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel; as the vulnerable legacy of humanist secularism—Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis; or epistemologically—Michel Foucault’s reading of Don Quixote as a crisis of signification. As Guido Mazzoni tells the story in his Theory of the Novel, modernity has been a long process of liberation from the implicit transcendence of collective cultural projects. We have now arrived at a moment where “the particular life represents the only horizon of sacredness that modern culture still recognizes.” Modernity is therefore the disruptive entropy of “unbelonging,” the triumph of “individualistic, anarchic, dispersive, centrifugal” forces over those of “collective transcendence.” By Mazzoni’s scorekeeping, the signal accomplishments of modernity are human rights, democracy, and relativism, but above all, “the concrete capacity to construct small spheres of autonomy.” The novel therefore marks “the entrance of democracy into literature,” because it is the vehicle par excellence of particularized private experience. Mazzoni prizes the novel for “its ability to make us see the world through the eyes and conscience of someone else, its ability to allow us to step into a possible life that is not ours.”

Given this endpoint of absolute relativism—“Each person is an epicenter of absolute meaning”—Mazzoni has to construct his history of the novel retrospectively, as a gradual disburdening of the possibility of transcendence and collective horizons. He casts this ontological flattening in the light of an inner liberation of the novel form, although it could as easily be felt as a suffocating reduction. Mazzoni describes the first two centuries (1550-1750) of the novel’s history as an emancipation from the conceptual scaffolding of allegory and moral didacticism, on one hand, and from the strict delineations of classicist poetics (tragedy depicts a higher type of character, and comedy a lower) on the other. Because he was trained as a philologist, Mazzoni plunges the reader into a slough of terminological distinctions attending the birth of the novel: le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, romanice loqui, romanz, romance, novella, nouvelle, novela, novel. But his theory of genre rests upon a dubious metaphysics: rather than timeless Platonic forms, genres are “universals in re,” knots of emerging practices bound up with contemporary definitions and prescriptions. Instead of defining “the novel” retrospectively, which would mean fitting works like Tristam Shandy and The Golden Ass into the same Procrustean bed, Mazzoni sees the genre as the outcome of a complex fusion of heterogeneous conventions and literary corpuses. His approach is to “reconstruct the dialectic between the object and the words that enabled the object to be defined in the first place.” The drawback to this method is that the definition is never immanent to the novels themselves, but is derived from the belletristic scaffolding that is Mazzoni’s preferred archive. The scholarship on display—Mazzoni seems to have read every treatise and preface from the period—is unimpeachably exhaustive, even overwhelming. We learn that Don Quixote, for example, was not welcomed into the world as a novel but as a “comic romance.” But Mazzoni declines to pursue the question, what process of generic self-definition is Don Quixote itself engaged in? Nor does he see the retrospective genealogy of the novel as in large part an invention of the novel itself (as, for instance, the shelf of books in David Copperfield’s library). In any event, the upshot of this formative period is that the novel emerges as the “book of particular life,” a record of private persons, caught up in the “anarchy of the real,” rather than idealized or public figures made into abstract examples.

Once the novel has broken free from allegory (whose political dimensions, overlooked by Mazzoni, have been detailed by Fredric Jameson), and we find ourselves in the nineteenth century, the next constraint to be discarded is melodrama. Melodrama gets painted as the bad outward form of psychology, which Mazzoni contrasts to the subtle analysis of interior life that culminates in James, Proust, and Woolf.  Thus melodrama turns out to be a convenient sorting mechanism for arriving at a set of all-too familiar preferences: Austen (but not Scott), Flaubert (but not Balzac), Eliot and Tolstoy (but not Dickens or Hugo). As with allegory, melodrama is classed as a transcendental and collective schema, averse to the finer gradations of “real life.” For melodrama, we are informed, belonged to a moment where “history had become a lived experience of the masses,” though “at a certain point this paradigm proved to be unrealistic.” It was no longer “plausible to think that people, subjects, or witnesses of an unprecedented transformation were involved in absolute conflicts.” What we have instead of large-scale history is the gradual extension of “our understanding of the interior life,” an ever-refined representational accuracy comparable to “the gains made in physics, astronomy, or anatomy.”

By the time we reach the contemporary novel, the sphere of freedom that Mazzoni wants to find in the novel has been narrowed down to the horizon of sheer everydayness. We have exchanged the wild explorations of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Edward Waverley, Natty Bumppo, and Huckleberry Finn for the boredom of Emma Bovary. All we are left with is the bad infinity of “real life” in its banal givenness. Freedom is surreptitiously redefined, from the kind of “unbelonging” of the earlier mode of “lighting out for the territory,” to the unbelonging of grousing individual discontent. No surprise that the contemporary authors Mazzoni endorses are Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee (singling out Boyhood and Youth), Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles), and Jonathan Littell. He doesn’t provide a reading of any of these novels (although he does cite a negative review of Littell’s The Kindly Ones). Knausgaard’s novel is something like an empirical confirmation of Mazzoni’s thesis about the tendency of the novel towards absolutely private particularity, absent any transcendent justification. Mazzoni’s concluding observation—“Inside our small local worlds, everything at stake has an unquestionable value” —could just as easily have been written by Knausgaard as a summary of the exhausting strife of representability at the heart of his book.

In outline, then, Mazzoni’s account recapitulates the problematic of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel—“the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical  life,” the pulverization of all transcendent projects—in order to render it unproblematic. What Lukács saw as “the dissonance special to the novel” was its capturing of the devastating ironies and grotesque realizations that the transcendent ideal is exposed to. For Mazzoni, however, such dissonance is simply “implausible,” a failure of perspective insufficiently immersed in the proliferating contingencies of “real life.” So, what for Lukács was the constitutive problematic of the novel—the hard-fought contest between the ideal and an inert (but ultimately victorious) reality—here turns out to be a detachable “extra” or a historical vestige. Mazzoni sees the struggle with the ideal as something that was gradually exorcised or shed during the novel’s development, as opposed to something essential to defining the genre. His argument then turns out to be another entry in the “end of grand narratives” narrative, or an instance of what Alain Badiou calls “democratic materialism”: we no longer believe in any Truths striving to be realized in the world, only in local particulars. With oracular resignation, Mazzoni announces that, starting with some generalized metaphysical eclipse in the nineteenth century, “Universal forces were no longer revealed in the experience of private persons.” One imagines him lecturing the great characters of fiction like a stern guidance counselor, for their stubborn lack of realism, in those moments of Lukácsian “dissonance” where they confront a churning abyss of unbearable meaning underlying an ongoing and inessential life: Don Quixote for attempting to revive chivalry by mounting his gaunt nag and donning a pasteboard visor; or Catherine Earnshaw for proclaiming, “I am Heathcliff!”; or Captain Ahab for hurling himself against the whale as striking at some “inscrutable malice” behind a mask; or Marlow for detecting, in the depths of the Congo, “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

To be sure, Mazzoni’s claim that the novel has freed itself from the transcendental has the force of self-evidence, if one surveys contemporary fiction. Mazzoni’s reading of novels in English cuts off at 2002, but (in addition to Knausgaard) Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Rachel Cusk would all be pertinent here, as instances of flattened, quotidian perception, where the “microcosm” of private existence—voided of melodrama or narrative artifice—is elevated to “absolute importance.” Going further back, one could add other instances. John Updike, Frederick Exley, and Renata Adler come immediately to mind. Mazzoni doesn’t mention Norman Mailer, who is on quite another track, but whose “nonfiction novel” would be additional confirmation of the novel’s tendency to represent a reality divested of transcendent impulses. (At this point, however, one wonders whether it were not fictionality itself that represents the final burden of transcendence, whether Mazzoni’s sense of “the novel” is not just headed towards the documentary status of journalism, memoir, travel writing, etc.)

On the other hand, some of the most acclaimed novels of recent years have resuscitated either melodrama (Hana Yanagihara’s A Little Life), or transcendental (religious) preoccupations (Marilynne Robinson’s work), or allegory (Yann Martel’s Life of Pi). To remark these works are also somewhat middlebrow and embarrassing, would introduce a dimension of aesthetic evaluation that Mazzoni never broaches. It’s worth noting, too, that Mazzoni’s own examples are not unproblematic. Although Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles does duty for Mazzoni, his more recent The Possibility of an Island and Submission don’t fit the pulverization-of-collective-transcendence thesis at all. Houellebecq emerges, instead, as an (unevenly satirical) utopian thinker, closer to Jonathan Swift in the Houyhnhnms section of Gulliver’s Travels than to Roth’s Zuckerman novels. Mazzoni also cites the autobiographical novels of J.M. Coetzee, but his latest novels, The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, whatever else they may be, are obvious violations of Mazzoni’s rule against allegory.

The unbearable scene he cites from Buddenbrooks, when little Hanno draws two lines under the last entry in the family tree, muttering, “I thought… I thought… there wouldn’t be anything more,” is indeed a powerful image of finitude. But Mann then went on to write the highly allegorical The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. Dostoevsky is invoked in a number of contradictory ways—he is, on one hand, one of the first authors who is “still contemporary,” because of his techniques of characterization, but on the other hand, he presents a regrettable and lingering case of melodrama. What is never mentioned is that Dostoevsky’s oeuvre, from start to finish, is rent through with transcendental preoccupations. To take only the case of The Brothers Karamazov, what does one make of the beautiful moment in the final chapter, where the father of the slain child Ilyusha sees a flower fall on the snow, and rushes “to pick it up as though everything in the world depended on the loss of that flower”? This sense of absolute responsibility, of “everything in the world” depending on one’s posture towards salvation and loss, is the hard core of Dostoevsky’s meaning. If Mazzoni wants to insist that “we cannot go beyond” our immersion in factical being, that it is “the sole layer of existence that… distinguishes us from nothing,” then he will have to lose The Brothers Karamazov as a forward-looking work.

I wrote above that the novel is the most important product of modernity. I forgot to add that modernity is in large part the product of the novel. The novel is one of the “workshops where ideals are manufactured,” to take an image from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. For instance, the continuous and rigorous thinking of responsibility throughout the novels of the Victorian period (paradigmatically, Great Expectations, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Lord Jim) constitutes as central a development of our ethical life as the subsequent Freudian theorization of same. The self-representation of the nineteenth-century social imaginary is largely created through the ways novels develop of “giving an account of oneself,” in Judith Butler’s phrase. The ultimate trouble with Theory of the Novel is that Mazzoni oscillates between seeing the novel as a co-creator of modernity, whereby “an essential aspect of the Western form of life takes shape and becomes an object of knowledge only through mimesis and fiction,” and seeing the novel (or cultural production as a whole) as validating (or falling into line with) larger systemic results, e.g. “the disintegrative force implicit in modern individualism,” or “the relativistic deflation of collective values.” We don’t know, finally, whether the Western “crisis of transcendence”—what for Lukács was an ongoing schism constitutive of the novel form—is simply a fait accompli restricting literary possibility, or whether one might hold the history of the novel itself accountable for this disintegration. Nor does Mazzoni see the novel as a possible reflection upon these outcomes, a perspective-taking that would refuse the enforcement of deflationary relativism.

But might not the greatest novels be precisely such refusals? To return again to The Brothers Karamazov, we find there (in the remembrances of Father Zosima) a forestalling of Mazzoni’s conclusions, in almost identical language: “For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing people away from himself… He is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people or in mankind.” For Dostoevsky, at least, the novel is not a story of emancipation from transcendence. If the novel has nevertheless brought about this anomie and purgation of values, the novel goes on only in a perpetual fight against what it hath wrought.

Ben Parker is assistant professor of English at Brown University. His current research is on recognition scenes in the nineteenth-century novel. He tweets @exyoungperson.

by Sarah Brouillette

Review of Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017)

The basics of neoliberalism are by now well known. Pressured to be wary of public deficit spending, and trying to find ways to rejuvenate depressed economies, neoliberal governments cut spending on welfare and other social services, and turn the programs that do remain into job training “workfare.” Policies at the same time shift to give priority to the needs of businesses wanting to keep wages low, to offshore production, and to make few or no commitments to workers. The power of unions is undercut as a result, so it is decreasingly possible to look to that form of collectivity as a shelter.[1] Politicians, advisors, sympathetic management consultants and business professors meanwhile emphasize private initiative and personal merit as the keys to success. As a result, work has been trending toward the less regular, less routine, less secure, less protected by union membership, with wages stagnant and less likely to be supplemented by things like affordable public education, low rents, tax credits, and childcare benefit payments.

The working individual suited to this environment will naturally possess certain traits, as people are encouraged to look to themselves for more and more of what they need. Everything becomes a matter of personal responsibility: invest smartly for the future, take out a loan to pay for college, be your own brand, find your joy, “live your life.” If there is a culture of neoliberalism, it is all about interiority and the individual psychic life: therapeutic culture, because there is little state funding for mental health treatment. Find out who you really are, do what you love, look within, take your natural resilience as the base of every struggle and its overcoming; experience setbacks, Pop Idol style, as welcome occasions to overcome every hurdle. Self-improve. Self-actualize.

The causal relations are sometimes murky and eminently debatable. Don’t governments in fact fund wellness initiatives, especially targeting underprivileged communities? And what about all the counternarratives emphasizing the necessity of communities coming together – the British Tories’ “Big Society,” for instance? But the general account of neoliberalism is quite uniform. It pinpoints the force of biographization, responsibilization, individualization, self-management, a DIY ethos, and customization of personal preference as the lifeblood of the neoliberal order.[2]

Against all this, Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism argues that the key social unit of neoliberalism is not the individual but the family, and not just any family but the family in perpetual crisis. She presents the postwar Fordist family wage – basically, a state-backed wage high enough to support a family with only one parent working – as a “mechanism for the normalization of gender and sexual relationships” (8), and for this reason sees no reason to lament its demise. As an “instrument of redistribution,” she writes, it “policed the boundaries between women and men’s work and white and black men’s labor” and was “inseparable from the imperative of sexual normativity” (23). “Few African American men enjoyed the family wage privileges of the unionized industrial labor force,” and their disproportionately high unemployment is evidence of the “multiple exclusions serving to define the boundaries of state-subsidized reproduction” (35-6).

Just as the “Fordist politics of class … established white, married masculinity as point of access to full social protection” (23), the fundamental concern for neoliberals like Gary Becker was how to respond to the breakdown of this masculinity and the family built around it. “Neoliberals are particularly concerned about the enormous social costs that derive from the breakdown of the stable Fordist family,” Cooper argues. They aim “to reestablish the private family as the primary source of economic security and the comprehensive alternative to the welfare state” (9). Basically, they want the traditional family intact as a compensation for precarity.

The data show that in the neoliberal era private family wealth is increasingly decisive in “shaping and restricting social mobility” (125), and this is a result of concerted policymaking. In the 1960s, inflation eroded the wealth at the top tiers, as it translated into the deflation of financial assets. Inflation was at the time understood in precisely this way, as a redistributive tax, “intensifying progressive tendencies” of the period: “Free-market economists insinuated that inflation was a form of state-sanctioned fraud – a covert tax designed to extort wealth from investors and transfer is to the lower classes” (127). The neoliberal “paradigm shift in American fiscal and monetary policy” sets about ending this redistributive movement. If the Employment Act of 1946 wanted to “promote maximum employment, production and purchasing power,” where wage and price inflation were understood as signs of growth and as “benign trade-offs to full employment,” the neoliberals overturned all this.

Figures such as Milton Friedman and Paul Volcker “turn[ed] inflation-targeting into the prime objective of monetary policy,” thus restricting the money supply and pushing up interest rates. Whereas bondholders in the 1970s saw assets depreciate and the Federal Reserve “deferred to the interests of unionized labor and welfare constituencies,” in the new era the Fed would strive “to repress wages and consumer prices in the service of asset price appreciation.” These policies led to a sure turnaround in the distribution of national income; the “share of national income flowing to financial investors went from negative or stagnant in the 1970s to ‘substantially positive’ in the 1980s”; while “labor’s share of national income declined proportionately” (134). By 1983, Cooper writes, “wealth concentration had reverted to its 1962 level and by the end of the decade had plummeted to levels comparable to 1929” (135).

There has thus been, at the top tier, a massive “resurgence of large family fortunes” (137). Nearly everywhere else, though, with stagnant wages, unemployment, and the transfer of the costs of things like higher education and health care back to families, lack of access to familial wealth can condemn one to a lifetime of debt. Hence Cooper’s argument about the importance of the family: intergenerational familial support in the form of housing, or money, or willingness to be signatories to loans, is a neoliberal necessity for many, and the pressure to combine dependence on parents with married coupledom just compounds the effect.[3] According to statistics gathered by the Pew Research Center, 1960 was the year in which people under 25 were most likely to live independently. In more recent decades, however, young people have been exhorted to invest in the future, save for retirement, and acquire assets (houses and university degrees). At the same time, and often in relation to this, they have been forced into debt and into insecure employment. No wonder they are more inclined to live with parents or partners. Of course, there is such a thing as a non-normative family, and perhaps living independently from relatives is not something we should unduly idealize. Cooper’s interest, though, is in what sort of family arrangements government programs prefer, and how preferences shift given combined pressure from neoliberal economic policy and the new social conservativism. We will return to her idealization of independence, however.

The more common argument, of course, is that neoliberalism is destructive to family life, as it encourages workers to be “low drag,” moveable, flexible, always working, losing any sense of a private life outside of work, and also alone in leisure in front of a personally selected entertainment service displayed on a privately watched device. Yet, as Annie McClanahan has recently argued, not many people are really these footloose mobile workers.[4] For most employers, it is probably more important that those they hire be replaceable than that they be mobile. Only workers in relatively elite sectors (high tech, higher education, entertainment) are in a better position if they can move from thing to thing without worrying about family obligations.[5]

This is not to deny that there is now also a more general animus against the restrictions and burdens of family life – the boredom of marriage, and drudgery of raising children (all captured so well by a show like Mad Men, for instance, which crystalizes the individualizing ethos so perfectly). However, there is just as much pressure to maintain the bonds of coupledom, and this tension between rejection and embrace may in fact be the point worth emphasizing. It seems that people are increasingly wondering if marriage is “worth it,” while decreasingly being able to exit it, and this is a cause of general anxiety, finding outlet in things like the dating site for adulterers, Ashley Madison, which was notorious for a minute in 2016 after its user data was stolen. When it turned out that most of the male customers were at least some of the time corresponding with bots rather than real women, I couldn’t help thinking that in a way it didn’t matter: the point is that users find an outlet for their sense of being stuck in a social relation (marriage!) on which they are dependent. Indeed, the bot’s lack of reality, lack of availability, is what makes the “affair” appealingly nonthreatening to the user’s IRL relationships. Moralistic attacks on these men – the fact that some of those caught are family-values conservatives is, to be sure, a rich irony – miss the point: they are not having affairs; they are staying in unhappy marriages that they depend on in various ways.

They depend on marriage because it is still the normative standard for people (if you aren’t married there is something wrong with you; if you don’t have kids you are deviant in some way). They depend on it in that they can’t afford a house without two salaries, because for tax purposes it is better to be a legally recognized couple, because the lifestyle they aspire to requires it, because caring for children alone is very hard, because shifting work hours and temporary contracts make the second salary a necessity, even if it too is precarious. They depend on it because they are too tired and generally physically weary to try to have any other sort of relationship. Being non-normative can feel like SO. MUCH. WORK. A film like 2009’s Up in the Air makes the point very well: the protagonist is the epitome of the roving high-powered executive entrepreneur (indeed, his job is to fire people), but his story is not a celebration of the escape from normativity. It is rather a lament about the psychic misery of solitude. The message is clear: couple up!  

How did the family start to lose its normative power? For Cooper, conservatives skewering feminism, and more leftist thinkers trying to understand the foundations of neoliberalism, are in agreement about the force of 1960s and 1970s countercultural and antinormative critiques of the family. In Wolfgang Streeck’s analysis, the revolution in family law and intimate relationships – for example, the availability of no-fault divorce – destroyed the Fordist family wage because women were not stuck in the kitchen dependent on men any more. The family became a more flexible form because, in Cooper’s paraphrase of Streeck, feminists sought “an independent wage on a par with men,” eventually “transforming marriage from a long-term, noncontractual obligation into a contract that could be dissolved at will” (11). Cooper reads Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski’s argument as similar, in that they show how “the artistic left prepared the groundwork for the neoliberal assault on economic and social security by destroying its intimate foundations in the postwar family” (12). She quotes Nancy Fraser, also, who has written that “critique of the family wage … now supplies a good part of the romance that invests flexible capitalism with a higher meaning and moral point” (12). In each case, the idea is that feminism is somehow to blame for neoliberalization, because in seeking to free women from certain kinds of normative obligation and dependency they have demonized dependency in general, fetishizing independence from supports of any kind. Against these analyses, Cooper asks: what breakdown of the family, anyway? The apparent post-normativity of contemporary life is entirely compatible with the establishment of new norms. We continue to be form-determined after we no longer see social forms’ normative force. Put simply: the traditional family, which for Cooper is a family coerced into existence by exigency and normativity, is not broken enough.

The economy in depression no longer affords the state-supported Fordist wage, but the family is re-inscribed and reformulated even as it is queried and undermined by antinormative movements. If the foundations of neoliberal policy are thoroughly economic, neoconservativism enters Cooper’s account as a largely compatible reaction formation. The neoconservative agenda, formed deliberately against the liberation movements of the 1960s and their challenge to the normativity of the traditional family, served neoliberalization far more than the countercultural left’s challenges to social convention. Cooper argues that, whereas nostalgia for the Fordist wage became a “hallmark of the left,” neoconservatives, allied with thrifty neoliberals, preferred “the strategic reinvention of a much older, poor-law tradition of private family responsibility.” In a policy formation that reflected both neoliberal and neoconservative thought, social welfare was not to disappear, but instead to be made into “an immense federal apparatus for policing the private family responsibilities of the poor” (21).

As a public assistance program targeted at the noncontributing poor – workers paying into funds that would support them in the event of unemployment were always more palatable (34) – the fate of AFDC (Aid for Families with Dependent Children) is one of Cooper’s main cases. It allows her to show how social welfare extended to the poor – especially to single women, especially mothers, especially black mothers – became “associated with a general crisis of the American family” (29). As the composition of the program changed, with the number of African American women signing up outpacing that of white woman, and divorced or never-married women joined the rolls, fears were heightened. Because “racial and sexual normativities were truly foundational to the social order of American Fordism, determining just who would be included and who would be excluded from the redistributive benefits of the social wage” (36), the inclusivity evident in the 1960s in the AFDC’s provision for non-married mothers proved to be short-lived. Arguments for reinstating the stability offered by the traditional family had significant influence at this juncture.

Nor were these arguments solely made by conservatives. In the 1960s there was in fact significant leftist promotion of the African American male-breadwinner family and a related impetus against “non-normative lifestyles of unattached African American women” (37); hence the tendency to identify the AFDC as a cause of family breakdown while promoting the “male breadwinner’s wage” (41). An article by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, published in The Nation in 1966 and presented as “a strategy to end poverty,” laments that the state was “substituting check-writing machines for male wage earners,” thereby “robb[ing] men of manhood, women of husbands, and children of father.” The authors continue: “To create a stable monogamous family, we need to provide men (especially Negro men) with the opportunity to be men, and that involves enabling them to perform occupationally” (qtd. 42).

What they saw were “perverse disincentives to family formation built into the AFDC program” (43), whereas women left more to their own devices would naturally be more likely to find men to support them. With the 1970s economic downturn, and anxieties directed at inflation in particular, the program became a touchstone for debates for neoconservatives formulating their “new political philosophy of non-redistributive family values” (47). While neoliberals “called for an ongoing reduction in budget allocations dedicated to welfare—intent on undercutting any possibility that the social wage might compete with the free-market wage,” neoconservatives advocated an expanded role for state in regulating sexuality. On both fronts, the point was the urgent necessity of “reinstating the family as the foundation of social and economic order” (49).

Cooper discusses Milton Friedman’s concern that the “natural obligations” that “once compelled children to look after their parents in old age” have given way to “an impersonal system of social insurance whose long-term effect is to usurp the place of the family” (58). Friedman wrote that whereas once “Children helped their parents out of love or duty,” they now “contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear” (qtd. 58). State-based redistribution was a poor substitute for proper familial support and wealth transmission. For Gary Becker, also, the postwar welfare state destroys the “natural altruism of the family” (60). Becker’s theory of human capital is perhaps the premier theorization of individual self-management and self-appreciation. Michel Foucault treated Becker’s work as exemplary of the way that neoliberal analyses entail “replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital … a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer.”[6] Becker also featured recently in a Merriam-Webster tweet of the term “human capital” – “turning people into statistics since 1799,” the tweet quipped – which linked to the full dictionary entry, where Becker’s work is cited as “taking a holistic view of a person’s life and experiences as they can be applied within the workforce.” Becker took personal investment in one’s own human capital appreciation as preferable to state investment (the benefits of high human capital only accruing to oneself, after all), and thus supported rising tuition costs and the student loan industry as a major part of the growing importance of private credit. Yet Cooper shows that his arguments also preferred a supportive wealth-generating family: the older generations would back student loans where necessary, as they naturally want children and grandchildren to bear human capital that self-appreciates at a greater pace and with results that are more lucrative. Becker celebrated Ronald Reagan for restoring kinship bonds.

Reagan drastically cut the AFDC, before Bill Clinton eliminated it. It was replaced with the TANF program (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), whose availability was contingent on states’ willingness to track down and enforce paternity obligations. TANF’s defenders claimed it is better for a woman and her children to be reliant on alimony and child support than to turn to the government for assistance (67). Here we get to the heart of Cooper’s refutation of the idea that neoliberalism privileges the footloose free agent. In fact, in her account, neoliberalism is more likely to pressure people to sustain unhealthy and unsustainable family and intimate relationships, including tying children to fathers who do not know them or want them. Clinton’s extensive welfare reform reflected and codified what she calls “a new bipartisan consensus on the social value of monogamous, legally validated relationships.” His government reformed welfare spending while devising “initiatives to promote the moral obligations of family, including a special budget allocation to finance marriage promotion programs and … bonus funds to states that could demonstrate that they had successfully reduced illegitimate births without increasing the abortion rate” (68). Barack Obama’s “healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood” initiatives continued in this direction.

Cooper suggestively connects these initiatives to the “first experiment in federal relief ever implemented by Congress”: the 1865 creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau following the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Before 1863, slaves were precluded from legally sanctioned marriage. The Freedman’s Bureau instructed that freedom to participate in the labor market came with “the right to marry and the responsibility to support wife and child” (79). Its support for freed slaves entailed a vigorous campaign to promote marriage, with Bureau agents authorized to perform marriages and a “sustained pedagogy of domestic life, schooling men in the notion that they were to become the breadwinners of the family and women in a new kind of economic dependence” (80). There were penalties for people cohabiting without marriage; and Bureau-assigned wage scales that penalized women, precisely because of the “social costs of dependency” that fell upon the state if forced to support unmarried women and their children (81).

Like the more recent insistence that women secure alimony and child support before turning to welfare, these policies empowered men to assert rights over women and children. Indeed, the assumptions upon which they were based were not fundamentally threatened until the 1960s liberalization of family law, which made divorce easier and eased the stigmatizing of non-marital unions and cohabitation. “For an all too brief moment,” she argues, “revised AFDC rules allow divorced or never-married women and their children to live independently of a man while receiving a state-guaranteed income free of moral conditions” (97). That moment is over, however. “The modern child support system serves to demonstrate that the state is willing to enforce—indeed create—legal relationships of familial obligation and dependence where none have been established by mutual consent,” Cooper writes (105).

We should pause here now on the figure of the never-married woman living independently thanks to welfare. Cooper argues that, in a context of relatively healthy public welfare spending, and of the pressures put on states by countercultural and antinormative activisms, there was a time when social welfare was “making women independent of individual men and freeing them from the obligations of the private family” (97). Hence, the fuel for the neoconservative backlash that soon followed – a backlash that gained traction because of the failing economy to which neoliberals were also turning their attention. A perfect storm. Yet Cooper’s celebration of the period in which social welfare possibly freed women from the constraints of marriage has her falling back into the trap she dismantles elsewhere: nostalgia for state provision.

The image of the single woman with children, living with a state-based income “free of moral conditions,” reads as an idealization. Certainly, supporting children as a single parent on welfare has never been a cakewalk; and, are we meant to conclude that “freeing” men from the burdens of paternity is an unalloyed boon to women? She needs this figure, though. Cooper’s idealization of the state-supported single mother alerts us to the fact that her ultimate objection is not to social welfare but rather to the restriction of its benefits to the Fordist white male breadwinner, and to the way welfare programs get tied to normative policies and programs emphasizing the preferability of turning to family, especially marriage, to marshal the necessary resources to get by.[7] She avoids the stronger critique of social welfare, which might emphasize the global accumulative regime and resource extraction on which US prosperity was built, how nation-based welfare disperses the benefits of prosperity to some and not others, and the welfare state’s various regulatory and pacifying functions.[8]

Does neoliberalism feel different to some people simply because it follows on the moment of postwar prosperity and the relatively expansive Keynesian social welfare that flowed from it, in which there was palpable faith in the civic virtue attending government spending on social programs? Neoliberal policies have threatened protections and comforts that these programs offered to some people – people like American and British university professors, who produce the analyses of the unique wrongs of the neoliberal order. Is all the worry about neoliberalism just a symptom of the decline of the hegemony of liberal democracy?

The economy that supported the pre-neoliberal era of relatively high wages, and relatively generous public deficit spending on welfare and education, was also hugely resource extractive and suburbanizing. The capacity to redistribute wealth more evenly in the US was, in addition, contingent upon broader economic transformation that required dispossessions, expulsions, enclosures, primitive accumulations, US hegemony propped up by global wars, and the origins of the whole phenomenon of US industrial triumph after WWII in wartime accumulation and relative devastation across Europe.[9] Wherever one looks, the accumulation of wealth requires these devastations, making even the lushest times at the ADFC, and the possibility for a temporary flourishing of alternative kinds of family structures, into a troubled gain. For these reasons, it may be that work that avoids the terminology of neoliberalism, or uses it warily – work by Endnotes, by Silvia Federici, or by Robert Brenner, for instance – provides better purchase on contemporary conditions. Because when they fail to name the fundamental, global, totalizing causes of policy shifts, accounts of neoliberalism miss the ruthlessly intensifying dynamics of capital accumulation that are simply propelled onward with extended credit.[10]

Finally, if Keynesian social welfare is a wage supplement designed to encourage consumer spending, in which sense is it wise to pit it against the dominance of commerce and private interests? If extensive public deficit spending on social programs and neoliberal monetarism are just different ways of managing the economy, and if one takes the capitalist economy as fundamentally anathema to universal human flourishing, to what extent should we worry about the difference that neoliberalism makes? Family Values doesn’t quite answer these questions. However, it does do the crucially important work of historicizing the rise of private credit in relation to family-values conservativism, and dismantling the left-liberal tendency to lament neoliberalization because it clawed back the gains of the immediate postwar period. Without suggesting that no gains were made, Cooper shows how they were thoroughly mitigated by normative racial, sexual and gender ascription – ascription that determined how to divvy up Fordism’s generous provisions, and that continues to push people, especially the already suffering, into unwanted contracts in life and work.

Notes

[1] For a recent account along these lines see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).

[2] See for instance Ronen Shamir, “The age of responsibilization: on market-embedded morality,” Economy and Society (37.1: 2008): 1-19.

[3] I discuss Cooper’s blistering account of the student loan industry elsewhere.

[4] Annie McClanahan, “Becoming Non-Economic: Human Capital Theory and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos,” Theory & Event 20.2 (2017): 510-519.

[5] Even scholars suggesting that, in being less interested in keeping people in regular work, crisis-era capitalism allows for “queer liberation” from cis-hetero norms, insist in the next breath that some elements of queer life are tolerable and easy assimilated – think pink washing and gay marriage – and some are not.

[6] Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics:  Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Palgrave, 2008): 226.

[7] In an earlier work, where the figure of the state-supported single mother is absent, her take is more ambivalent. She argues that the welfare state “undertakes to protect life by redistributing the fruits of national wealth to all its citizens, even those who cannot work, but in exchange it imposes a reciprocal obligation: its contractors must in turn give their lives to the nation” (Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era [University of Washington Press, 2008]: 8).

[8] Gavin Walker has recently argued that “the function of ‘welfare’ within capitalism has never been something separate from its workings; rather, it is something co-emergent and central to the operation of the capital-relation itself”: “Rather than being a political development in which capital’s violence is ameliorated through social spending, we should rather understand the welfare state as the primary mechanism through which the process of primitive accumulation can be continuously sustained in the advanced capitalist countries” (“The ‘Ideal Total Capitalist”: On the State-Form in the Critique of Political Economy,” Crisis & Critique 3.3 [2016]: 434-455).

[9] For an account along these lines see “Misery and Debt,” Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20-51.

[10] I owe this point to discussion with Tim Kreiner.

by Naomi Waltham-Smith

Review of Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (Or, How to Listen to the World) 

What if the world had a voice? What would a world suffering under the burden of human dominance over the environment—what would that geological epoch known as the Anthropocene—say to us? Dominic Pettman asks us to imagine such a world in which not just human beings or animals but all living and inanimate objects, and even virtual technologies have voices. Sonic Intimacy invites us to tune into the seductive voice of an OS in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, the swansong of the Sirens, the meowing of a cat, the melancholy songs of a lonely whale, the wind in the trees, even “the imploring squeal of a garden gate, crying out for oil” (49). This is a world in which listening, too, is not confined to human ears. In Pettman’s book, listening is even extended beyond the animal world in a range of examples both banal and symbolic: if mothers listen to their daughters’ voices on the phone and dogs to His Master’s Voice on the gramophone, lamps also prick up their ears at the clap of a hand and microphones listen for algorithmically determined shapes in order to identity specific words or even voices.

Pettman’s call to hear those other voices and thus become those other kinds of listeners stems to no small degree from our deafness to what is arguably the greatest threat the world faces today and to the human and ecological crises that climate change is already precipitating. “Alarmed scientists try to tell us on a daily basis,” Pettman points out, “that we are not listening to the earth, which is—elliptically perhaps, and in its own cryptic way—trying to tell us that it is in trouble” (6–7). He argues that in the ongoing calamity that is the Anthropocene, it is vital that we challenge anthropocentric constructions of the voice and of the ear. If there is one main target in Sonic Intimacy, it is human exceptionalism. This critical outlook has shaped Pettman’s work in post-humanism more generally. For instance, the recent Creaturely Love observes how the images of human desire we construct tend to disavow our own animal natures.[1] Pettman’s earlier Human Error (published in 2011) explored mistaken efforts to define humanity in its opposition to machines and instead posits a cybernetic triangle of human, animal, and machine so as to decenter the human.[2] Humanity’s species-being, as he argued in that book, had become “specious-being,” not simply a mistaken identity, but the mistake of identity.

Each of Sonic Intimacy’s four chapters explores a voice that is, if not post-human, in some way more or less than human—a negation of the human. The first, devoted to the voices that speak to us from machines, centers on a discussion of Jonze’s Her, in which a heart-broken man falls in love with his operating system “Samantha.” The film illustrates that bodies do not simply produce voices; conversely, voices can also produce bodies. As an awkward scene in which Samantha ventriloquizes the body of a mute stranger shows, acousmatic voices can be more involving and erotic than actual bodies. In this way Pettman establishes the idea of a sonic intimacy that is intimate precisely in having shed its physical presence. This observation leads Pettman to seek to explain the absence of “aural porn” on the internet (yes, dear reader, such are the surprising twists and turns of this riveting book!). If the voice, untethered from the overdetermined female body, were allowed to circulate unchecked, it would threaten the entire patriarchal system—a system that depends precisely on the exclusion and capture of an inarticulate cry consistently coded as female or animal. Hence—paving the way for the next chapter on the gendered voice—there exists a voyeuristic regime of listening that “wrenches a sexual sound from the body of the other” (21) in order to gratify the male listener with an assurance of their subjective agency.

In this logic we can discern a trace of the critique of sovereignty advanced by Giorgio Agamben, a thinker whom Pettman evokes on more than one occasion and who, like Pettman, takes his inspiration from the deconstructive logic of exappropriation. Deconstructive essays such as Jacques Derrida’s “Tympan,” for example, suggest that philosophical listening does not simply exclude its outside but seeks to master it and make it its own. But Agamben’s point—as Pettman acknowledges in a note referencing the book Echolalias by Agamben’s translator Daniel Heller-Roazen (100n17)—is that what appears to be outside language is in fact its condition of possibility.[3] As Agamben argues in Language and Death, meaningful human speech can only emerge on condition that the inarticulate animal cry withdraws. Philosophy, though, has traditionally forgotten precisely this withdrawal that makes language possible (what Derrida calls the withdrawal of the withdrawal) and has imagined in its place in its place a bodily presence that appears to lie beyond the bounds of the linguistic. Agamben on the contrary argues that the apparently non-linguistic is nothing other the pure possibility of language that goes unheard in every act of speaking.[4]

That much of this theory remains in the background leaves Pettman free to write engagingly without getting mired in thorny philosophical debates. Keeping the sustained theorizing largely underground lets Pettman’s prose sparkle. Provocative ideas flow with one intriguing example after another, but this is one of the moments when I would have welcomed a more rigorous corps-à-corps confrontation with Agamben’s theory of Voice. Agamben has a lot to say about what happens when the disavowed condition of possibility begins to circulate in an autonomous sphere—something he specifically connects to analyses of the glorious body, of commodification, and of pornography. Agamben’s commodified body is detached in the pure spectacle from its sacralization, its ineffability and its legally and culturally authorized uses and hence appears as a pure potentiality for new uses. How could Pettman develop Agamben’s reflections on pornography that have always focused on the visual, shifting the focus from visibility to audibility? And how would he situate his own arguments in relation to Agamben’s efforts to dislocate the aporias of metaphysics? When at the beginning of the book, Pettman recalls the prenatal experience of sound, how does this compare with Agamben’s notion of infancy (referenced only in passing at 108n5)? There is little discussion—with the possible exception of Hedy Lamarr’s silent on-screen orgasm—of voices that hold their capacity to sound in reserve.

Pettman turns in the third chapter to the animal voice. In a chapter indebted to the late Derrida’s ideas on animality, the highlight is a scene with a cockatoo that Pettman contends “deconstructs the cherished metaphysics of (humanist) presence, far more economically and effectively than Derrida does in his writings” (62). The cockatoo was adopted by new owners after a bitter divorce but continues to reenact the no doubt traumatizing arguments it was forced to witness in its previous life with an invective of curse words hurled out with a bitter tone and even the aggravated body language of rejection and resentment. This scene illustrates the difficulty of assigning an owner to the voice: while it is on one level the bird’s voice, audible and present in the room, it also brings to life vividly the original arguing couple. This cockatoo, like the parrot that betrays its owner by reproducing the salacious sounds of the porn he secretly watches, reveals that it is not just imitative animals who are ventriloquized, but we humans too, especially “when we are in the ecstatic, agonistic throes of jouissance or fury.”

From this Pettman draws the conclusion—albeit one that is hardly new—that there is no simple hierarchy of human over animal, for humans can readily be “reduced” to the “animalistic” under the pressure of certain circumstances. The more thoroughgoing Derridean point that this scene makes—one that Pettman hints at without saying it explicitly—is not only that the human-animal opposition may be deconstructed but that this moreover hinges on a more radical deconstruction of the proper tout court. There is no proper human voice not because humans sometimes cry out in animal voices or because animals sometimes seem to speak to one another. Rather, it is impossible to decide between the two because there is no voice that belongs to any of us, whether human or animal.

Against a tradition that reserves meaningful speaking and listening as a uniquely human privilege, Pettman thus calls in the final chapter for us to lend our ears to all the voices of the earth, to the vox mundi in which all manner of creatures, entities, and phenomena are present to us. In this Pettman reveals that his concerns are not simply ecological or political but are also properly philosophical, even if he is sometimes coy about asserting this ambition. In other words, Pettman is interested in how Being is present to us as a voice—how it exists for us as we listen to those voices. To this extent, Sonic Intimacy is, despite the framing it often adopts, not chiefly about issues of technology, ecology, or desire. Rather, these themes become occasions to pursue an unashamedly philosophical project: that is, the deconstruction of the metaphysics of voice. To this extent, Pettman’s continues a sequence that extends from Heidegger through French deconstruction: philosophy as listening to Being.

The parenthetical description in the subtitle “Or, How to Listen to the World,” reveals that there is one philosophical voice in particular that commands Pettman’s attention, even if it is not given the sustained hearing that one might expect. It is Jean-Luc Nancy who tells us, in the face of a rampant globalization that renders the world uninhabitable, that, to be a part of a world and not a mere agglomeration of wealth, we must “share a part of its inner resonances.”[5] Only then can the world take place and can we inhabit it. There are tantalizing references to Nancy scattered throughout the text. There’s a brief mention of his conception of ontology as resonant referral to explain the expropriation of the voice (44–45) and later there’s an unacknowledged and undeveloped evocation of Nancy’s phrase “birth to presence” (89).

Pettman writes frequently of acousmatic voices where the actual sounding is separated from the source, like the cockatoo. It is tempting, therefore, to imagine Nancy as a kind of disavowed ventriloquist, for Sonic Intimacy—deliberately mixing metaphors here to show the contact between resonance-as-spacing and touch—has Nancy’s fingerprints all over it. The Birth to Presence begins precisely with the same question of defining the human that preoccupies Pettman. The epoch of representation, suggests Nancy, originates with human exceptionalism, with the moment at which the human species being acquired its identity by virtue of one defining characteristic or another. “There is, perhaps, no humanity (and, perhaps, no animality)” wonders Nancy, “that does not include representation.”[6] The task is to think the unraveling of this limit, to think “what, in man, passes infinitely beyond man.” So, if Nancy asks what it is in the human that exceeds the bounds of its exceptional determination, Pettman examines how the exceptional exceeds the bounds of its human definition and thus dissolves the exception. For example, if the human is defined by having a voice, there is part of the human that is not exhausted in its vocality, and there is part of vocality that is not exhausted by the category of the human. Voice and humanity do not coincide. These are two faces of a mutual contamination. Humanity is thereby liberated from its phonocentric determination and vocality spills over the edges of the human into animal cries and the sounds produced by plants, inanimate objects, and intangible algorithms—disseminated throughout the univocity of the vox mundi at large.

Nancy’s terms of “listening,” “world,” and “being” bear distinctly Heideggerian overtones. Pettman dismisses Heidegger’s suggestion that the animal is poor in world and hence poor in hearing. Adopting Agamben’s critique of what he calls the “anthropological machine” and Derrida’s notion of animot, Pettman has elsewhere not hesitated to point out that Agamben himself fails to get beyond the Heideggerian horizon when he retains boredom, for instance, “as a uniquely human curse and/or privilege.”[7] It is precisely the attunement between beings and their environment that Pettman challenges with his notion of intimacy. He suggests that a sense of self—one intimacy with one’s self if you like—is produced “through the vocal back-and-forths with others—and with the environment” (59). Although Pettman here attributes this notion of back-and-forth to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the refrain, it would surely not have escaped his attention that Nancy describes presence as a “coming and going,” a “back and forth”[8]—what he elsewhere calls a “diapason-subject.”[9]

This leaves one wondering about the nature of the back-and-forths between Pettman and deconstruction. Does Nancy provide the tools to think about the voice beyond the horizon of anthropogenesis, or are the examples of post-human and non-human voices ways to realize the full implications of Nancy’s deconstruction of sonic presence? One challenge for the reader is that Pettman tends to marginalize precisely those thinkers with whom he is most intimate. He spills more ink, for instance, critiquing Adriana Cavarero than engaging with Derrida. A discussion of the concept of intimacy comes only in the conclusion and many of Pettman’s back-and-forths with deconstruction are reserved to endnotes. One thing that the book could define more clearly is the extent to which the deconstructions of phonocentrism and logocentrism are mutually implicated. In the main body of the text, Pettman suggests that voice is the foundation of logocentrism and in the notes he specifies more precisely that “phōnē is the necessary but not sufficient condition for logos.” Citing Derrida’s claim that phonocentrism appears to be universal, while logocentrism is not, he argues that “the trick is foreground the multitude of voices, without being ‘phonocentric’” (108n8), by which Pettman seems to mean without positing the voice as transcendental.

There are two questions that remain. First, from the perspective of grammatology: why retain vocality at all even in its plurality? Derrida’s famous attack on Husserl targets the false notion that one is simultaneously present to oneself in hearing-oneself-speak. Already in Husserl the account of temporalization reveals that the supposed unity of the “now” is in fact divided from it—that is, is always already spacing. This is why Pettman insists, against Cavarero, on the significance of time-shifted contexts, in which presence is dispersed. The question remains, though: why continue to speak of a voice if one is thinking of something closely approximating Nancy’s resonant referral? One possible answer is that these voices stripped of logos and bodily presence, represent a pure intention to signify—something close to Agamben’s notion of Voice as the potentiality for language. As Nancy develops the idea that listening-as-resonance is the condition of possibility for sense, he cites a passage from Agamben in which he thinks of Voice as the rustling of animals in their retreat. It would be fascinating to see Pettman engage with this citation in order to specify more precisely the relation between voice and listening. For Pettmann, this relation is defined by the concept of intimacy, according to which a voice is what strives to make itself known to us, which calls us to pay attention to it, summons our listening and invites us to approach its “potentially enlightening alterity” (83). While Pettman is eager to distance himself from neo-Heideggerianism, what prevents this seductive allude from repeating the logic of the withdrawal of Being when the deictic voix-là that he coins, like Agamben’s Voice-as-shifter, consists in its own vanishing act (58)?

The other point to make is one that could also be leveled at deconstruction: is dispersal and dissemination really an effective way to relinquish the transcendental? Pettman is clearly with Derrida on this point, but Catherine Malabou has made a convincing argument that Derrida’s attraction to a Genetian dissemination of aurality as a means to topple the Hegelian tower of Klang is just another attempt to avoid the economy of the transcendental without abandoning it.[10] The problem with the transcendental voice, as Pettman recognizes, is that it always presupposes another excluded voice. The category of human voice presupposes the other voice of machine and animal, but, even within the category of the human, the voice is divided into noise and speech, masculine and feminine, and so forth, always partitioning itself. In the economy of the transcendental, the voice becomes a fetish—which, in Derrida’s definition, can both be detached from a chain of voices to become the privileged one and also substitute for any other one in the chain.

One can escape the contradiction by incorporating the externalized fetish into the system (the Hegelian metaphysical solution) or, as Malabou points out, you can deflate the phallus by bringing down everything around it so that nothing stands taller than anything else (the Derridean option). Pettman, for his part, challenges the privileged position of the voice and instead indulges in the substitution of one voice for another, a gradual slippage from one chapter to the next. The issue facing deconstruction applies here too, though: how to end the infinite regress of voices? In the end Pettman seems to settle for a voice of the world that is without beginning or end and that refuses to be subordinated to any totalizing project. The world is a space in which one is always listening out for another voice. One moment one hears it, the next one doesn’t.

The form and style of Pettman’s book capture the character of this roving ear, always pricking up with the possibility of another intriguing example. Pettman is a very engaging writer, and the way he traverses contexts and theoretical horizons is thrilling. Sonic Intimacy slides from one voice into another, slipping out of one body into another, all the more easily because it wears its weighty themes very lightly. Philosophy, then, becomes less an instrument by which to prosecute an argument than a playful seduction designed to lure our ears from one idea to the next. Pettman’s writing is perhaps at its most exciting when it ignores expectations to pin down the voices of interlocutors and instead revels in throwing the voice, in making it seem as if it emanates from somewhere else. Pettman himself, whose body of writing gives the impression of an insatiable curiosity, is no doubt already chasing down other voices and other worlds. I urge readers, though, to let their ear linger a little longer over this intriguing little book that promises to help us discern voices where we least expect to hear them.

Notes

[1]    Dominic Pettman, Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

[2]    Dominic Pettman, Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

[3]    Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone, 2005).

[4]    Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

[5]    Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, Or, Globalization, trans.  François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 42.

[6]    Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1

[7]    Dominic Pettman, Human Error, 237n71.

[8]    Nancy, The Birth to Presence, 5.

[9]    Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 16.

[10]   Catherine Malabou, “Philosophy in Erection,” Paragraph 39, no. 2 (2016): 238–48.

by Devin Zane Shaw

In an interview from 2012, Jacques Rancière states in response to a question about the role of dialogue in philosophy:

I don’t believe in the virtue of dialogue in the form of: here’s a thinker, here’s another thinker, they’re going to debate amongst themselves and that’s going to produce something. My idea is that it’s always books that enter into dialogue and not people….Dialogue is never, for me, what it appears to be, which is something like the lightning flash of an encounter, a live exchange.[i]

We should, then, approach the recent Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016), with a similarly circumspect attitude.

The core of the book, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty, is the debate between Rancière and Axel Honneth that took place at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in June 2009, but it also includes a supplementary text by each author and an essay from each editor. Given that the editors’ essays comprise, at eighty pages, forty-five percent of the text, one should be particularly attentive to the ways in which their interventions shape the reception of the debate that was the book’s occasion. Against the editors, I want to argue here that this debate demonstrates the incompatibility of Honneth’s and Rancière’s respective projects. Moreover, Rancière’s work cannot be reconceptualized in the terms of Honneth’s liberal iteration of critical theory without sacrificing precisely those parts of his thought that are the most inventive, interesting, and politically and intellectually subversive.

My differences with Genel and Deranty can best be summarized through our respective interpretations of Rancière’s claim that, in his critique of Honneth, he has reconstructed a “‘’ [sic] conception of the theory of recognition” (95). In my view, Rancière critically appropriates the terms of “recognition” to show what it would require to become a theory of dissensus and disagreement. Deranty outlines what he takes to be Rancière’s concern with a theory of recognition that ranges from Althusser’s Lesson to Disagreement in order to demonstrate an “in-principle agreement” between Rancière and Honneth (37). First, he argues that many of the examples from Disagreement are based on historical research that Rancière conducted in the 1970s. Then Deranty adduces passages that mention recognition, such as Alain Faure and Rancière’s “Introduction” to La parole ouvrière (1976), where they refer to political struggle as “the desire to be recognized which communicates with the refusal to be despised” (quoted on 38). He also cites an early interpretation of Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s account of the plebeian revolt on Aventine Hill (an episode which also plays a crucial role in the argument of Disagreement) where Rancière writes that the “rebellion was characterized by the fact that it recognized itself as a speaking subject and gave itself a name.”[ii] Rancière continues, though: “Roman patrician power refused to accept that the sounds uttered from the mouths of the plebeians were speech, and that the offspring of their unions should be given the name of a lineage.”[iii] This description has little to do with Honneth’s account of recognition, in which individuals recognize their freedom and the freedom of others as mediated by established social institutions. And then Deranty concedes that “Rancière just disagrees with some of the key concepts used by Honneth,” which undermines the verbal parallels that he draws upon to signal their agreement (36, my emphasis). Indeed, their principled dispute about their respective concepts undermines the very possibility of an “in-principle agreement.” Therefore, to evaluate the relationship between Rancière’s egalitarian politics and Honneth’s theory of recognition we cannot rely on verbal parallels; instead, we must address how the concepts of recognition and disagreement play out in relation to a theory of the political subject, the relation between politics and the political, and problems concerning what Rancière calls “the police” and social normativity.

To address these questions, I will begin with the final essay included in Recognition or Disagreement, Honneth’s “Of the Poverty of Our Liberty: The Greatness and Limits of Hegel’s Doctrine of Ethical Life.” Earlier in the book, Honneth claims that “all kinds of political orders have to give a certain description or legitimation for who is included in the political community,” and, indeed, political philosophy often aims to supply the legitimation for a given society’s norms that decide how and whether individuals and their practices are included or excluded from the political order (115). Hegel, on Honneth’s account, demonstrates the logical and practical coherence of the social objectivity of the various types of individual freedom, that is, how freedom relates, through recognition, to politics, work, and love.

In the book’s concluding essay, Honneth examines, first, how Hegel reconciles two common, subjective concepts of individual freedom within his account of objective freedom as it is realized in ethical life. Both subjective concepts are abstract sides of modern political freedom. For Hegel, the transition to modernity entails conceptualizing social institutions as “making possible the realization of freedom” (160). In other words, on Hegel’s account, individual freedoms are mediated through institutions—and institutions are mediated and produced through the actualization or realization of individual freedoms. Thus, when Hegel reconciles the two subjective concepts of freedom, which approximate what Isaiah Berlin calls negative and positive freedom, he demonstrates that both fail to incorporate the objectivity of freedom as it is embodied in concrete social institutions. According to the “negative” concept of freedom, an individual is free insofar as they are unhindered by the actions of others. While Hegel incorporates this incomplete concept of freedom within his system as “abstract right,” which ensures state protections of individual life, property, and freedom of contract, he faults negative freedom for lacking a positive determination of what the subject can do, socially, with freedom. According to the “positive” concept of freedom, which Hegel largely derives from Kant, the basis of morality is autonomy, the self-legislating and self-reflexive activity of the subject. While this concept of freedom gives a positive foundation to what morality is, it nonetheless remains subjective, lacking a concrete relationship to social objectivity.

These negative and positive concepts of freedom are, therefore, in Hegel’s terms, “merely” subjective, while Hegel aims to demonstrate that individual freedom is objective, that is, reflected and recognized within objective social institutions. This concept of objective freedom is not limited merely to how we understand social institutions. To say that freedom is objective delimits an important intersubjective feature of individual freedom. As Honneth points out, Hegel argues that we cannot rely on Kantian models of autonomy in friendship or love, since the self-limitation of my freedom in the experience of friendship or love is not a self-limitation; it is “precisely that the other person is a condition of realizing my own, self-chosen ends” (164). The realization of a given individual’s freedom entails concrete social situations that implicate the freedom of others, and it is because social institutions mediate our relations with others that they have objective reality. Hegel—and by extension, Honneth—maintains that institutions receive normative justification insofar as they reflect and embody the practices of individuals’ freedoms, and that social institutions, in turn, engender the emergence and expansion of individual freedoms.

Now, one can see why Honneth follows Hegel through the discussion of objective freedom in the doctrine of ethical life: what both the negative and positive subjective concepts of freedom lack is recognition. In our institutions, Honneth suggests, we should be able to recognize not only our own intentions but also the intentions of other subjects. In addition, Hegel identifies three ethical spheres in which each individual’s freedoms are realized in relation to others’: personal relationships, the market economy, and politics. For these reasons, Honneth argues that the “general structure” of Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life, despite some shortcomings, “remains sound even today,” and that this doctrine provides “us with a normative vocabulary that we can use to assess the respective value of the various freedoms we practice” (169; 167). Nonetheless, Honneth also faults Hegel for treating “as sacrosanct” three historically specific institutions as the outcome of the self-realization of objective spirit: the family—“guided by the patriarchal prejudices of his own day”—the capitalist market economy, and constitutional monarchy (171). While Hegel did not explicitly address the possibility that these institutions could be transformed to “make them more amenable to the basic demand for relations of reciprocity among equals,” Honneth contends that Hegel’s account of morality hints toward how political practice can revise social norms and reorganize social institutions to make them more democratic (172). According to Honneth’s revision of Hegel, the inclusion of liberal rights and the possibility for “moral self-positioning” allows for individuals to engage in “morally articulated protest” (174). Thus Honneth allows for a continued moral progress within societies and social institutions to a degree that was not envisioned by Hegel.

*

Despite his Hegelian framework, and despite his debts to the Frankfurt School, Honneth’s project shares some of the central concerns of mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy today: the emphasis on processes of justification and establishing conditions of justice in order to evaluate institutional and normative frameworks. By contrast, Rancière’s political thought shares neither the methods nor goals of mainstream political philosophy. Todd May has already explored in detail the differences between Rancière and mainstream political philosophy (including Rawls, Nozick, Amartya Sen and Iris Marion Young). In May’s account, these political philosophers rely, whether they are proponents or critics of distributive theories of justice, on a concept of “passive equality”: “the creation, preservation, or protection of equality by governmental institutions.”[iv] Rancière, though, makes the stronger polemical claim that political philosophy embeds itself in, and offers justification for, regimes of inequality that he calls “the police” or “policing.” One of the most striking features of Rancière’s work is his claim that what we typically call politics, even in its most democratic forms (voting, deliberation, governance, and popular legitimation), is policing. In Disagreement, Rancière defines the police as:

first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and that another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise.[v]

Since this definition of the police sounds very close to the way that Rancière often glosses his concept of “the distribution of the sensible,”[vi] we should specify that policing produces and reproduces relations of inequality, the stratification of roles within a given distribution of the sensible that partition individuals and groups according to inclusion and exclusion, such as those whose task it is to rule and those whose task it is to obey. Moreover, on Rancière’s account, politics—in May’s terms, “active equality”—is a dynamic of collective engagement and revolt that aims to subvert and resist the stratification and coercion of policing and social institutions. Given that Honneth’s account of recognition emphasizes how social institutions mediate and engender individual freedoms, it then follows that in Rancière’s terms Honneth’s theory of recognition would not be an account of politics as much as it is an account—though a progressive one at that—of policing.

And yet, in “Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition,” his critique of Honneth (and Chapter Three of the book), Rancière does not use the terms “police” or “policing.” Instead, he begins with the conditional hypothesis that his differences with Honneth are best articulated by treating their respective approaches as competing theories of recognition. At the outset, however, he signals his critical intent by suggesting that “the term ‘recognition’ might also emphasize a relationship between already existing entities,” these entities being individuals and established social institutions (83). When, then, Rancière concludes that he’s sketched, through his critique of Honneth, his own theory of recognition, he’s appropriated the language of critical theory to articulate a politics of dissensus and disagreement.

Rancière pursues this hypothesis—that he and Honneth are outlining competing theories of recognition—in order to locate their central points of disagreement. In Disagreement, Rancière defines disagreement (la mésentente) as a specific kind of political challenge to a given order of policing, “a determined kind of speech situation in which one of the interlocutors at once understands [entend] and does not understand [entend] what the other is saying.”[vii] In French, the term la mésentente plays on different connotations of the verb entendre, between “to hear” and “to understand.” On Rancière’s account, the politics of disagreement emerges when the marginalized or oppressed (what he calls “the part with no part”) within a given social order challenge the ways in which society is policed, and often these challenges are phrased in terms that have readily accepted meanings within society. However, politically contentious terms, such as equality, rights, or justice are given inventive new meanings that challenge the normative frameworks of a given regime of policing; the part with no part who are contesting injustice and the police can “hear” the same demands but “understand” entirely different things. Many political theorists lament this ambiguity and aim to define it away. However, Rancière argues that the ambiguity of our contentious terms and ideals makes dissensus possible. That is, this ambiguity makes it possible to identify how these politically contentious terms circulate between policing and politics, how they come to articulate and combat inequality and coercion. For example: justice, for some, means due process and equal consideration before the law, while justice for movements such as Black Lives Matter opens on to both a broad indictment of how so-called due process legitimates injustice against African-Americans who are victims of police violence, and a broader vision of transformative social justice.

In “Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition,” Rancière uses disagreement in a broader, dialogical sense rather than its specific, political sense. He argues that dialogue—to be truly dialogical—must be an “act of communication [which] is already an act of translation, located on a terrain that we don’t master” (84). Dialogue always involves translation, distortion, but also invention; in terms of philosophy, it means that both interlocutors must think outside of their usual terminology: distortion remains “at the heart of any mutual dialogue, at the heart of the form of universality on which dialogue relies” (84). But Rancière also suggests that dialogue, in its more specific, political sense, requires acknowledging the “asymmetry in positions” between interlocutors. This claim summarizes his differences with Habermas, which he had previously outlined in Disagreement: acknowledging how asymmetry and power distort the ideals of political dialogue entails, in Rancière’s account, a stringent form of universalism that demands philosophers to confront not just institutional barriers to democratic deliberation, but also how the processes of deliberation function to exclude certain forms of political speech and action. Thus Rancière’s critical question: to what degree does Honneth’s theory of recognition rely on the presupposition that the demands of political subjects have always already been mediated by social institutions?

To confront this question, Rancière proposes three working definitions of recognition. Two reflect common usage: on the one hand, recognition means the concurrence of a perception with prior knowledge, as when we recognize a friend, location, or information; on the other hand, recognition in the moral sense designates how we recognize other individuals as autonomous beings like ourselves. In both cases, Rancière notes, “re-cognition” functions as an act of confirmation. He then hypothesizes that recognition could also be conceptualized in the terms of what he calls a distribution of the sensible. Recognition, then, “focuses on the configuration of the field in which things, persons, situations, and arguments can be identified” (85). In this sense, recognition comes prior to any act of confirmation—and the critique of recognition entails disagreement over the conditions in which persons, things, or situations are understood as such.

We could ask, for instance, how is it that a given regime of policing frames some enunciations as political demands against injustice and others as merely subjective complaints or even noise? And we could use an analysis of this situation to attack the broader norms that legitimate this distribution of speech and noise.  While Rancière acknowledges that Honneth’s account of recognition “echoes” his own polemical account, he raises a crucial question: to what degree does Honneth’s account rely on the two connotations of the common usage, presuming a stable distribution of the sensible or normative framework that relies on an “identitarian conception of the subject” that conflicts with a “conception of social relations as mutual” or dynamically or socially constructed (85)?

First, Rancière contends that Honneth embraces an “anthropological-psychological” concept of the subject that is heavily indebted to a Hegelian “juridical definition of the person” (87). Thus Honneth’s account of the subject’s struggle for recognition emphasizes the affirmation of self-identity and self-integrity within the intersubjective structure of recognition. In other words, it’s the same integral individual subject who is seeks recognition within a multiplicity of situations related to love, work, or politics. Then, Rancière argues that this juridical model of the integral identity of the subject conflicts with its claim to articulating intersubjective social agency—a point encapsulated in Honneth’s summary of love and recognition in the book: “in friendship and love my experience is precisely that the other person is a condition of my realizing my own, self-chosen ends” (164). To say that love involves two individuals realizing their respective ends and interests through another is overly juridical. To Honneth, Rancière counterposes love as it is found in À la recherche du temps perdu, where Proust describes love as a dynamic and aesthetic construction of an other. Rancière writes:

What appears at the beginning is the confused apparition of a multiplicity, an impersonal patch on a beach. Slowly the patch appears as a group of young girls, but is still a kind of impersonal patch. There are many metamorphoses in that patch, in the multiplicity of young girls, through to the moment when the narrative personifies this impersonal multiplicity, gives it the face of one person, the object of love, Albertine. (88)

Rancière offers this counternarrative to show how our theoretical frameworks delimit the possibilities of social agency that we are able to recognize—a criticism that Honneth subsequently accepts.

Rancière’s attention to this point can perhaps explain how Rancière’s terminology can be alternately powerful and abstract. When he opposes the politics of equality to policing, it readily calls to mind clashes between protestors and cops, though politics cannot be reduced to these terms. However, when he defines those subjects who confront the established order as the part with no part, this definition is far more abstract than saying marginalized and oppressed. But Rancière relies on this level of abstraction in order to avoid delimiting conditions of political agency that could delimit who this part is because it could exclude groups who have yet to emerge and who we cannot foresee.

In general, for Rancière, political subjects are neither self-identical nor self-integral. Instead, political subjects emerge through a dynamic of what he calls disidentification, the rejection of the roles, places, and tasks assigned to bodies within a given regime of policing. We could interpret Proust’s description of love, then, as a metaphor for the dynamic of political subjectivation: political subjects emerge first as a multiplicity, at first an impersonal patch in the social field, until it takes shape through the invention of a name—for instance, #blacklivesmatter or #NoDAPL—for a collective disruption of or rebellion against the police order. Given that all regimes of policing are instantiations of social inequality and coercion, politics is, for Rancière, by definition egalitarian. It is equality, he argues, that leads to a much more exacting concept of universality than an account of politics that neglects the asymmetry between the political subjects who exist by virtue of contesting the social order and the established order of policing. Politics enacts the affirmation of “an equal capacity to discuss common affairs”; in other words, politics enacts the intellectual and political equality of anybody and everybody (93).

The task of political thought is to ascertain how politics involves a “polemical configuration of the universal” (94). The Black Lives Matter movement began with a call for justice for Mike Brown in Ferguson, but, according to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, its next stage involves both “engaging with the social forces that have the capacity to shut down sectors of work or production until our demands to stop police terrorism are met” and movement building through solidarity, which addresses how, while African-Americans “suffer most from the blunt force trauma of the American criminal justice system,” the broader normative framework of “law-and-order politics” functions to oppress the poor in general.[viii] From a standpoint informed by Rancière, the goal of political thought would be to identify the movements and practices that drive “the process of spreading the power of equality” in the here and now, to identify how specific movements involve a polemical force of universality to subvert and combat the normative frameworks of a given police order (94). Far from endorsing a theory of recognition, Rancière has redefined recognition as a politics of dissensus and disagreement.

*

Thus we have good reason to doubt Deranty’s claim of an in-principle agreement between Rancière and Honneth. Indeed, the editors and I reach very different conclusions regarding the significance of this debate because they accept Honneth’s theoretical framework to interpret it, while I refuse to subsume Rancière’s concepts under Honneth’s. The point here, though, is not establishing who has read Rancière or Honneth correctly, but to examine how these interpretations delimit what each thinker believes is politically possible and feasible.

Our first difference concerns the supposed common ground shared by Rancière and Honneth. Though Rancière explicitly chooses to oppose “politics” (la politique), rather than “the political” (le politique) to “the police”, Honneth and the editors equivocate between “politics” and “the political.” However, the terms, especially in French philosophy, are distinct—which means Rancière has made a deliberate conceptual choice.[ix] Politics, on his account, designates a dynamic activity, while “the political” carries the connotation of an original, fundamental political sphere upon which policing has supervened. For Honneth, then, when Rancière discusses equality, he’s describing either an “original definition of the political community” (115) or a political anthropology in which human beings “are constituted by a wish or a desire to be equal to all others,” and this “egalitarian desire…brings about the exceptional moment of politics” (99). In their “Critical Discussion” included in the book, Rancière rightly rebuts both of these characterizations. He holds that if politics takes place, it does so through an egalitarian praxis opposed to the police. To treat Rancière’s politics as a political anthropology, imputing particular desires or motives to political subjects, implies that the debate is about whether human beings are motivated by either a desire for recognition or for equality. We could, in that case, resolve the debate with a political anthropology of desire.

If this is not enough reason to reject Honneth’s way of framing the debate, he also characterizes recognition and disagreement as two complementary forms of struggle with different scopes—but this categorization carries with it an implicit normative claim that recognition is more practical. He argues that Rancière brusquely reduces “the political,” considered as “a stratified normative order of principles of recognition,” to policing (103). Therefore Rancière interprets this stratified normative order too rigidly, when these norms are given to conflicts over their meaning, that is, subject to reinterpretation and revision. For Honneth, the revisability of the normative order allows us to conceive of two types of political intervention: an internal struggle for recognition and an external struggle for recognition. In Honneth’s terms, Rancière focuses exclusively on the external struggle for recognition, which, while it combats the “political order as such,” ignores the “reformist” ambitions of the internal struggle for recognition that aims to reinterpret existing normative principles to make social institutions and their normative frameworks more democratic and inclusive.

But Honneth’s distinction between the internal and external struggles for recognition is not merely descriptive, but also normative: given, he claims, the difficulties in formulating injustice in revolutionary terms, it’s more important in day-to-day politics to “deal with these small projects of redefinition or of reappropriation of the existing modes of political legitimation” (106). Unlike Honneth, Rancière does not prescribe the scope of political struggle within a given situation, since such a prescription functions to legitimate or delegitimize choices we make about what is to be done. These choices cannot be evaluated outside of the context of political struggle itself. But Honneth’s normative preference is part of his philosophical framework: if the freedom of individuals is engendered and mediated by social institutions and norms, and if self-integrity is one of the primary ends of the theory of recognition, then individuals should aim to reform and reinterpret these institutions and norms incrementally.

From Rancière’s perspective, even if we grant that political freedom is sometimes engendered by existing social institutions, this does not entail that all parts of society should recognize these institutions as engendering their freedom. Those who are marginalized and oppressed could just as equally recognize how a given institution has functioned to exclude, marginalize, oppress, or immiserate them. The goal of politics for these political subjects need not or should not be—nor should we prescribe their goal to be—the reform of or formal recognition within these institutions that have historically oppressed them. From Rancière’s standpoint, it is right for the part with no part to combat and transform the very normative principles that legitimate and reinforce these institutions of inequality, and to prescribe reform rather than radical normative transvaluation serves to delegitimize the possibility of formulating and enacting broader goals of political struggle.

Thus while Recognition or Disagreement presents the debate between Rancière and Honneth, it speaks to broader issues about the scope and aims of contemporary political thought. The contrast between Honneth and Rancière ably demonstrates Rancière’s stubborn refusal to engage in the processes of justification valorized by mainstream political theory—indeed, it serves as a stark reminder of how engaging in these problems often, (and in Rancière’s view, always) entails accepting profound social inequalities. However, this book is also important because it shows that if we mainstream Rancière’s work, as Genel and Deranty attempt to do, we lose those parts of his work that are most subversive and inventive—and we are left with only Honneth.

Devin Zane Shaw teaches philosophy at Carleton University. He is the author of Egalitarian Moments: From Descartes to Rancière (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2010).

Notes

[i] Jacques Rancière, The Method of Equality: Interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan, transl. Julie Rose. Malden: Polity, 2016, p. 183.

[ii] Quoted on 38, but the reference is incomplete. See Rancière, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, transl. David Fernbach. London: Verso, 2011, p. 37.

[iii] Rancière, Staging the People, 37.

[iv] Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008, p. 3.

[v] Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, transl. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 29.

[vi] As Rancière defines it in Recognition or Disagreement, a distribution of the sensible is “a relation between occupations and equipments, between being in a specific space and time, performing specific activities, and being endowed with capacities of seeing, saying, and doing that ‘fit’ those activities. A distribution of the sensible is a set of relations between sense and sense, that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation that makes sense of it. It is a matrix that defines a whole organization of the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable” (136).

[vii] Disagreement, p. x.

[viii] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016, pp. 217, 211.

[ix] See Samuel A. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 50–57.

Aamir R. Mufti:  Forget English!  Orientalisms and World Literatures (Harvard University Press, 2016)

Reviewed by Vassilis Lambropoulos

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

Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! exposes the regulatory operations of presumably borderless world literature.  Second, it questions the cultural control of presumably egalitarian global English.  Next, it traces the Orientalist administration of presumably universal colonial knowledge.  Readers may agree with all this despite the repeated warnings that these three systems remain closely implicated not only in the objects of study but also in epistemological critique.  Mufti’s most radical proposition comes last:  The basis of the modern national and global cultural field is the institution of literature, that is, the disciplinary literary regimen that includes the askeses of composition, the exercises of pleasure, the practices of interpretation, and the technologies of education.  Mufti’s critique of critique itself as an aesthetic ethics ought to be disturbing.  In what follows, I will repurpose his project, reshuffling its case studies, to foreground its ultimate target, literary ideology, namely, the constitutive antinomies of the interpretive freedom, the self-imposed limits and controls of aesthetic understanding.  I will do that by narrating the institutional story of “literature” that underlies his anatomy of world literature.

Mufti proposes that today, as a popular project of translation, circulation, criticism, and scholarship, “world literature” turns an opaque and unequal process of violent appropriation into a supposedly transparent and equal one of free communication.  Its inviting name occludes “the ways in which contemporary critical thinking unwittingly replicates logics of a longer provenance in the colonial and postcolonial eras” (248).  This is particularly evident in multicultural celebrations of the Global South.  Mufti warns against “the triumphalist ‘We are the World’ tone so clearly discernible in the self-staging of world literature in our times.  In many ways, the rubric ‘postcolonial literature’ as used in the Global North now serves as a means of domesticating those radical energies – and not just linguistic or cultural differences – [for example, the now defunct “Bandung” internationalism] into the space of (bourgeois) world literature as varieties of local practice – as Indian, African, or Middle Eastern literary practices, for instance” (92).  Instead of liberal appeals to “diversity” and its token-like selections, what is needed is “a concept of world literature (and practices of teaching it) that work to reveal the ways in which diversity itself (national, religious, civilizational, continental) is a colonial and Orientalist problematic, one that emerges precisely on the plane of equivalence that is literature” (250).  Sensitivity to diversity and respect for difference may express noble sentiments but do nothing to question the values dominating the literary and academic market.

Studies of scholars in world literature often “are salutary in having emphasized inequality as the primary structural principle of world literary space rather than difference, which has been the dominant preoccupation in the discussion of world literature since the late eighteenth century, including in Goethe’s late-in-life elaboration of the idea of Weltliteratur.  But they give us no account whatsoever of the exact nature of these forms of inequality and the sociocultural logics through which they have historically been instituted, logics of the institution of inequality that incorporate notions and practices of ‘difference’ and proceed precisely through them” (33).  Whether they are describing a “world system” or a “republic of letters,” these scholars fail “to understand the mutual imbrication of inequality and difference” (33) in their operations, which is as short sighted as studying autopoiesis in Niklas Luhmann but not Cornelius Castoriadis.  Mufti does not elaborate a new model of doing world literature.  Instead, he examines how this comprehensive approach to culture has been devised and institutionalized for some two hundred fifty years, starting with the observation that its current resurgence is “a post-1989 development, which has appeared against the background of the larger neoliberal attempt to monopolize all possibilities of the international into the global life of capital.  This mode of appearance of the literatures of the Global South in the literary sphere of the North is thus linked to the disappearance of those varieties of internationalism that had sought in various ways to bypass the circuits of interaction, transmission, and exchange of the emergent global bourgeois order in the postwar and early postcolonial decades in the interest of the decolonizing societies of the South” (91).  Mufti seeks “to unmask and to make available for criticism and analysis” (20) world literature in the twenty first century as the main “field force” (199) of the project to subsume all centrifugal possibilities for an international literature under the monopoly of global cultural capital.  He treats it simultaneously as a “concept,” a “field of study,” and a set of “practices and institutional frameworks” (10), and uses a genealogical approach for a “critical-historical examination of a certain constellation of ideas and practices in its accretions and transformations over time” (19-20).  In what follows I discuss much less the numerous and wonderful cases to focus on the larger historical trajectory produced by this approach.

The genealogy of world literature begins with the role that “literature as national institution” (3) played “in the emergence of the hierarchies that structure relations between societies in the modern world” (97).  An international literary space first formed in Europe as a structure of rivalries among the traditions (58) emerging in the “intra-European ‘competitive’ vernacularization,” which was later followed by its “colonial absorption and transformation” (76).  The standardization of the vernaculars was a central part of “a project of ethnonational or civilizational nationalism in linguistically diverse and multicultural societies” (148).  This made possible the formation of “literature” as a separate domain of writing and reading out of diverse guild, church, local, and other traditions.  “The nationalization of languages over the past two centuries all over the world . . . transformed former extensive and dispersed cultures of writing . . . into narrowly conceived ethnonational spheres” (146).  Through an extensive philological and interpretive operation “often-overlapping bodies of writing came to acquire, through a process of historicization, distinct personalities as ‘literature’ along national lines” (97).  This is how literature achieves centrality in all constellations of national arts.  “The (now universal) category of literature itself . . . marks this process of assimilation of diverse cultures of writing” (80).  New practices of reading claim existing textual regimes for new purposes and milieus while new elites are also trained to curate them.  “In this process of the acquisition of literary history, the textual corpus acquires, first of all, the attributes of literariness.  That is to say, . . . it enters the world literary system as one among many other literatures, being subject henceforth to the requirements and measures of literariness, replacing the models and modes of evaluation internal to the textual corpus itself.  Furthermore, in the moment of its historicization, it undergoes a shift of orientation within the larger social formation, being reinscribed within a discursive system for the attribution of a literature to a language, understood as the unique possession and mode of expression of a people” (141).

A foundational act of historicization produced for the first time the terms of a distinct and independent literary history, anchoring a regional tradition in a national logic (143).  When a premodern corpus of undifferentiated writing acquired such a prestigious history, its newly self-regulating “works” entered literary modernity (38-9).   The admission of a corpus “into world literary space as a distinct literary tradition has characteristically taken place since the nineteenth century through its acquisition of a narrative of (‘national’) historical development” (131).  A literary history proper legitimized the literary modernity of a writing tradition by granting it national authority.

Thus the word “literature” in the term world literature “marks the plane of equivalence and compatibility between historically distinct and particular practices of writing” (240).  The word “world” in “world literature” is a world of nations, the new regimes of sovereignty.  “’World’ and ‘nation’ are in a determinate relationship of mutual reinforcement here, rather than simply one of contradiction or negation” (77).  When world literature is invoked, it is important to keep in mind “the forms of nationalization of language, literature, and culture installed . . . precisely in and through the world-historical process that is the emergence of world literature” (130).  Literature and nation are mutually authenticating and reinforcing:  They confirm the antiquity and autonomy of one another. “The concept and practices of world literature, far from representing the superseding of national forms of identification of language, literature, and culture, emerged for the first time precisely along the forms of . . . nation-thinking” (97).  In addition, world literature played an important role in the orientation of national literatures toward the global space to which every nation could make its own “distinct national contribution” (112).  This role ought to be placed in an even broader global context since it is important to stress that “the emergence and modes of functioning of world literature, as the space of interaction between and articulation of the ‘national’ or regional literatures, are elements of the much-wider historical process of the emergence of the modern, bourgeois state and its dissemination worldwide, under colonial and semicolonial conditions, as the normative state-form of the modern era” (98).  Literature strengthened the claim of the national state against other state forms by giving voice to its organic character.

It is in this broader context that Mufti introduces world literature as “the (bourgeois) understanding and experience of the world as an assemblage of ‘literary’ or expressive traditions, whose very ground of possibility was the Orientalist knowledge revolution” (90).  Tracing “the historical dialectic of Orientalism and/as world literature” (38) within literary studies since the late 18^th century (99), he highlights the production of entirely new objects of study and insists on the central role “that philological Orientalism played in producing and establishing a method and a system for classifying and evaluating diverse forms of textuality, now all processed and codified uniformly as literature” (80).  If national literature was from the beginning world literature too, this was based on Orientalist assumptions.  Mufti’s strong thesis is that “a genealogy of world literature . . . leads to the classical phase of modern Orientalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an enormous assemblage of projects and practices that was the ground for the emergence of the concept of world literature as for the literary and scholarly practices it originally referenced” (19).  The project of philological Orientalism, from the microscopic level of the text to the macroscopic one of the library, produces an entire hermeneutics, which “may be understood as a set of processes for the reorganization of language, literature, and culture on a planetary scale that effected the assimilation of heterogeneous and dispersed bodies of writing onto the plane of equivalence and evaluability that is (world) literature, fundamentally transforming in the process their internal distribution and coherence, their modes of authorization, and their relationship to the larger social order and social imaginaries in their place of origin” (145).  In a nutshell, this is how the colonial Orient was collected, archived, studied, and administered, and the regimes of the truth of the empire established and imposed.

Orientalism should be understood not only as the apparatus that produced the Orient as a domain of interpretation and administration but additionally as “the cultural system that for the first time articulated a concept of the world as an assemblage of ‘nations’ with distinct expressive traditions, above all ‘literary’ ones.  Orientalism thus played a crucial role in the emergence of the cultural logics of the modern bourgeois world, an element of European self-making, first of all” (35).  In this respect, as in others, the author acknowledges his predecessor, Edward Said, whose  “entire effort in Orientalism was (at one level) to argue for the centrality of Orientalism, as cultural logic and enterprise, to the emergence of modern European culture, to Europe’s self-making” (75).  Mufti illustrates his argument with a fascinating example, proposing that the “lyricization of poetry in the West,” that is, the “gradual expansion of . . . ‘lyric’ norms of expression . . .  to encompass” all practices of reading and writing poetry, is “an intercultural and worldwide process” that can be traced back to the “Orientalist ‘discovery’ of the ‘ancient’ poetic traditions of the ‘Eastern nations’” (71).   By considering the Orient/Occident interplay, a genealogy of the early concepts and practices of world literature shows how a “’lyric’ sensibility emerged in Europe at the threshold of modernity in the encounter with ‘Oriental’ verse and, having taken over the universe of poetic expression in the West, became a benchmark and a test for ‘Oriental’ writing traditions themselves, erasing in the process all memory of its intercultural origins” (74).

Together, philological Orientalism and (adopting a contrast of Erich Auerbach’s, Herder’s “Nordic” national rather than Vico’s “Latinate civilizatory”) philosophical historicism made the new concept of world literature possible.  The combined Orientalist and historicist thinking legitimized both the different manners of being human and “the same manner of being different” (77).  In addition to its contribution to European self-making, Orientalism contributed to world making as well and deserves to be studied “as an articulated and effective imperial system of cultural mapping, which produced for the first time a conception of the world as an assemblage of civilizational entities, each in possession of its own textual and/or expressive traditions” (20).  Oriental mapping structured “the cultural logic of the modern, bourgeois West in its outward orientation” (11) and facilitated the expansionist “transformation of societies on a world scale” (90).  In non-Western societies it fabricated “forms of cultural authority tied to the claim to authenticity of (religious, cultural, and national) ‘tradition’” (27).

Orientalism was first activated in the production, periodization, and territorialization of India.  “What the early generation of Orientalists encountered on the subcontinent was not one single culture of writing but rather a loose articulation of different, often overlapping but also mutually exclusive, systems based variously on Persian, Sanskrit, and a large number of the vernacular registers, often more than one in a single language, properly speaking” (104-5).  To make sense of this variety and complexity, they re-structured it completely on the basis of the only model they knew and trusted, the historicist narrative of an evolutionary national history.  “The German and eventually pan-European discourse of world literature is thus fundamentally indebted to and predicated on” (104) the British colonial project of Indological philology, launched near the end of the 18^th century.  “It is in this manner, by providing the materials and the practices of a new cosmopolitanism (as well as indigenist or particularist) conception of the world as linguistic and cultural assemblage, that English began to supplant the neoclassical order on the continent in which above all others French and France had provided the norms for literary production” (109).  Non-Western textual traditions entered the literary space as “literature” through the revolution of the philological knowledge that included the “discovery” of classical languages in the East and the invention of their family tree (58).  Eastern writing practices were absorbed into “literature” when their ancient works were classicized, that is, established as the original tradition of a civilization and arranged as its core national canon.

Mufti documents “that Orientalist theories of cultural difference are grounded in a notion of indigeneity as the condition of culture – a chronotope, properly speaking, of deep habitation in time – and that therefore nationalism is a fundamentally Orientalist cultural impulse” (37).  What he calls the “chronotope of the indigenous” (74) consists of “spatiotemporal figures of habitation” (74) deeply rooted in both place/territory and time/history (129).  Its territorially common ground validates “the authenticity of tradition” (112).  Consequently, the task of genealogical inquiry is “to give a historical account of the acquisition of literary history . . . by a vast, diffuse, and internally differentiated body of writing … a historical (and critical) account of the . . . ascription of historicality . . . structured around the chronotope of the indigenous” (143).  The Orientalist practice of indigenization standardized the pluralist logic of a pre-modern cultural space into a differentiated linguistic-literary field and ushered it into the colonial “world republic of letters.”

The “dual process of indigenization” (116) of language, literature, and culture, which incorporates of the intertwined strategies of historicism and Orientalism, consisted in classicizing (say, into Sanskrit) a civilization (say, the Indo-Persian one) and vernacularizing (say, into Urdu and Hindi) its cosmopolitanism (say, the subcontinental one).  Τhus, through indigenization, Indian writing essentialized itself into a national literature in order to be admitted to the Orientalist canon of world literature and join the global system of different and unique cultures.  The overlapping colonial cultural projects of indigenization “in the name of return to the origin” (173) and vernacularization as recovery of “authenticity” (251) are inseparable from bourgeois modernization (119).  “It is thus in English as cultural system, broadly conceived – namely, in the new Indology and its wider reception in the Euro-American world – that the subcontinent was first conceived of in the modern era as a single cultural entity, a unique civilization with its roots on the Sanskritic and more particularly Vedic texts of the Aryans. . . .  The idea that India is a unique national civilization in possession of a ‘classical’ culture was first postulated on the terrain of literature, that is, in the very invention of the idea of Indian literature in the course of the philological revolution” (109).  The encounter between Oriental philology and Occidental literature produced a national literary model that inspired the Indian national sentiment and identity (115) and created the “institution of Indian literature” (37, 73).

I have constructed here the chronological genealogy of world literature that drives Mufti’s argument, the linear story that is plotted in his book through complex discussions of practices, notions, and texts.  The “world” of world literature consists of indigenous cultures using vernaculars to sustain literature as their national institution.  Their heterogeneity is predicated on standardized difference, their cosmopolitanism is based on the nation-state, their unity guaranteed by unequal power relations, and they can all be traced to the Orientalist construction of the colonial archive, be it registry, collection, or museum.  Mufti puts into practice with great integrity and virtuosity his conviction that “the task of criticism today is at the very least the untangling and rearranging of the various elements presently congealed into seemingly distinct and autonomous objects of divergent literary histories.  The critical task of overcoming the colonial logics persistently at work in the formation of literary and linguistic identities today is thus indistinguishable from the task of pushing against the multiple identarian assumptions, colonial and Orientalist in nature, of Hindi and Urdu’s mutual and religiously marked distinctness and autonomy.  A post-colonial philology of this literary and linguistic complex can never adequately claim to be produced from a position uncontaminated by the language polemic that now constitutes it and can only proceed by working through its terms.  This secular-critical task, furthermore, corresponds not to the erection of some image of a heterogeneous past but to the elaboration of the contradictory contemporary situation of language and literature itself” (128-9).  Forgetting English is possible only in English.

He advocates resistance both to the colonial gaze and national authenticity, asking fellow scholars to “forget” (that is, learn to question by working with) not only English and the “world” in world literature but also the prefix in post-colonial.  “If, on the one hand, I urge world literature studies to take seriously the colonial origins of the very concept and practices they take as their objet of study, on the other, I hope to question the more or less tacit nationalism of many cotemporary attempts to champion the cultural products of the colonial and postcolonial world against the dominance of European and more broadly Western cultures and practices” (53).  This position exemplifies notion of a contrapuntal criticism that takes into account intertwined perspectives and discourses. “No self-described attempt to ‘return’ to tradition, religious or secular, can sustain its claim to be autonomous of ‘the West’ as Other. . . . No attempt at self-definition and self-exploration can therefore bypass a historical critique of the West and its emergence into this particular position of dominance.  And, in this sense, the critique of the West and the logics of its imperial expansion from a postcolonial location is in fact a self-critique, since this location is at least partially a product of that historical process” (153-4).

While both Orientalism and Occidentalism/Anglicism seek to capture an “one-world” reality, they are caught between the local and the cosmopolitan, the particular and the universal (3).  By consciously operating within these tensions without being at home in either of their poles, the exilic perspective introduced by Auerbach and later advocated by Said can avoid both cosmopolitan detachment and communal narcissism.  An “exilic rethinking of the philology of world literature” (41) would become the basis for a radicalized “philology as homeless practice” (200), for a “historically engaged and linguistically attuned” (241) secular criticism with a “missing homeland” (202).  Supporting neither transnational nor autochthonous social imaginaries, it can provide a dialectically alert account of concrete cultural circumstances “because it captures simultaneously the violent exclusions of the national frame, the material reality of its (physical as well as symbolic) borders, the dire need to overcome its destructive fixations, and its inescapability in the present moment” (194).

In his conclusion, addressing the central case of post-colonial subcontinent, Mufti supplements the exilic perspective with an additional one, also drawn from twentieth century experience, which promises to offer intrinsic means of study by drawing explicitly on partition as condition and modality since the “politics of linguistic and literary indigenization is a distinct element in the larger historical process that culminated in the religio-political partition of India in 1947 and is thus at the same time an important element in the history of the worldwide institution of world literature” (38).  In a manner reminiscent of the ways in which post-Heideggerian thought puts metaphysics “under erasure,” Mufti puts the subcontinent under partition.  “In light of the historical analysis of the cultural logic of Orientalism-Anglicism operating in the long, fitful, and ongoing process of bourgeois modernization in the subcontinent that I have attempted here, the task of criticism with respect to the field of culture and society in the region is therefore to adopt partition as method, to enter this field and inhabit the processes of its bifurcation, partition not merely as event, result, or outcome but rather as the very modality of culture, a political logic that inheres in the core concepts and practices of the state” (200).  Not a closed part of the past or even its living memory, partition is “the very condition of possibility of nation-statehood and therefore the ever-renewed condition of national experience in the subcontinent” (201).  The political logic of partition is inherent in the normative majoritarianism of the modern nation-state which by definition entails the minoritarization of certain groups and practices, a crisis of legitimacy leading to the partition of society (200-1).  “To argue for partition as method is, therefore, to argue for extracting submerged modes of thinking and feeling from the ongoing historical experience that is partition” (202).

Furthermore, in the twenty first century this condition operates far beyond the subcontinent.  Ours is a time of proliferating boundaries where the traditional institution of the border of the nation-state is undergoing internal and external challenges and transformations, with some of its functions “redistributed throughout social space” (7) and others globalized, turning it into a “universalized institution” (201).  What is the meaning of world literature in a world where borders are traversing urban, regional, national, and transnational environments and literature often functions as a generalized cartography?  With this question I will proceed to indicate just a few of the many fields of inquiry where this book deserves to be studied and activated.

Mufti’s notion of “partition as method,” which enriches the problematic of books like Asia as Method:  Toward Deimperialization (21010) by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s and Border as Method (2013) by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, should be of obvious interest to Border Studies, an interdisciplinary field that since the 1980s has been examining geographical, political, economic, cultural, and other boundaries primarily in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and with an emphasis on matters of migration and gender.  The field started by looking at legal, political, and lexical definitions but it has been expanding to consider how borderscapes are narrated, performed, and de-legitimized in the Global South.  An anatomy of world literature would complement current studies of the ways in which, in addition to lands, borderings distribute languages, communities, stories, signs, and jurisdictions.  The order of literature since its national and Oriental origins shows borders working as epistemological devices and markers of relations rather than lines and locations.

An adjacent and even more interdisciplinary field is the study of territories and their flux in the integrated post-industrial world.  Influenced by the work of Deleuze & Guattari (with their interests from “minor literature” to plateaus to nomadology), it has radically shifted emphasis from the structure to the flow of capital and the dominant econo-semiotic system, which Mufti too has done with literature.  The “assemblage of enunciation” might fit well with his notion of the writing corpus, and the “plane of immanence” with his “plane of equivalence.”  Most importantly, the Deleuzian “rhythm” of difference and repetition would resonate with the contrapuntal circulation of literature in the post-colonial milieu.

The sociology of culture would benefit greatly from attention to the emergence of the literary sphere and its citizenry, whose members often belong to the national intellectual aristocracy.  Given its interest in the ways in which Bourdieu’s habitus operates according to a logic of practice, it would examine the subfield of literature within the objects, norms, and practices of the cultural field.  Mufti’s work on production and appropriation, and above all domination through symbolic power, provide numerous examples of the kind of capital gained and interest served by disinterested taste as competence and distinction as performance.

The quest for cultural capital and symbolic power has been driven by the counter-political ideology of the aesthetic state, a milieu and habitus where aesthetic practices constitute the highest form of politics.  Mufti contributes greatly to an understanding of this regime, including the institutions it establishes and cherishes.  The bourgeois subject, who is the citizen of that ideal state, responds to the functional differentiation of society in distinct borderlands with the democratization of art and the sacralization of high culture. Through the proper literary education, fiction and poetry train readers to achieve a Kantian freedom of aesthetic autonomy by giving the interpretive law to themselves above the constraints of any internal or external partition.

The path from the sociology of culture to its ideology may lead next to its ethics, namely, art as a spiritual ascesis.  Mufti has discussed the political rationality of the humanities and the aesthetically administered university.  His rigorous genealogical approach may be supplemented by Ian Hunter’s interest in humanism and the pre-national state of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as the aesthetic discipline of literary cultivation that emerged with Romantic literature and philosophy.  The origins of the philological skills that mobilized Orientalism to create world literature may also lie in a combination of artistic pleasure as worldly ethical competence with literary criticism as a moral practice of the self, that is, in the aesthetico-ethical training of the self in interpretive (self-)problematization which first produced the reader of literature.

In addition to chronicling the emergence of world literature, Aamir Mufti’s Forget English! reflects on “just about the most encompassing cultural concept of our times, the notion of the systematic totality of the expressive productions of nothing less than humanity in its entirety.” (252).  Through a genealogy of literary comparison it raises the question of doing comparative humanities on a global level.  That is why it ought to have a broad scholarly and pedagogical impact.  This is not a book that scholars may read with profit, and then simply add to their bibliography and syllabus.  It invites reflection on what it means to compare at a time of universal comparability, that is, when everything is comparable (and also appears contemporary) to everything else.  Rather than seeking to add unknown or neglected materials to our canons, it challenges us to reconfigure canon making itself as well as the way we put together panels, collective volumes, or institutes.  Ultimately, Mufti is proposing that, in addition to new critiques, World Humanities needs new ways of constituting the humanities as a common.

Vassilis Lambropoulos is the C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek in the Departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature of the University of Michigan.  He is the author of Literature as National Institution (1988).