by Martin Woessner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

[3] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 15.

[4] Ibid., 112.

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

[6] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 41.

[7] Ibid., 29.

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

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

[10] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 106.

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

[12] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 33.

[13] Ibid., note 43.

[14] Ibid., 67.

[15] Ibid., 131.

[16] Ibid., 155.

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

[18] Goodstein, Georg Simmel, 171.

[19] Ibid., 329.

[20] Ibid., 258.

[21] Ibid., 254.

[22] Ibid., 1.

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.