by Zachary Samalin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

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

by Anna Kornbluh and Benjamin Morgan

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

In the spring of 2015, the V21 Collective launched with a collectively authored manifesto, signed by twenty-two affiliates, which called for the field of Victorian Studies to intensify inquiries into method, aesthetic form, and the contemporary purchase of nineteenth-century thought. The manifesto garnered many responses within and beyond the field, responses that explored the validity of “presentism” as a scholarly ethos; ongoing renovations of formalism as interpretive method; and the continued predominance of historicism within literary and cultural studies of the British nineteenth century. These conversations became the basis for a community of V21 affiliates, which held its first meeting in Chicago in Fall 2015. Twenty-nine mostly early-career Victorianists spoke at the conference, which was anchored by four established scholars within the field: Isabel Hofmyer, Caroline Levine, Bruce Robbins, and Alex Woloch. The event, comprised of workshops, roundtables, and extended periods of open discussion, was attended by over 100 participants from around the country. This special issue represents the collaborative efforts of that community to move forward the conversations and questions catalyzed by V21’s initial intervention. We are honored to partner with boundary 2 Online to bring our experimental symposium format to their experimental publication platform.  The questions that came to organize the symposium and that organize this special issue are unapologetically large: Why read canonical novels today? What ongoing and unmet challenges to conventional disciplinary configurations and field methodologies are posed by the conceptual and political problem of the enormity and persistence of empire? What role can philosophies of history play in invigorating historiographic methodologies?  How can we return major 19^th-century theorists including Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud to the center of Victorian Studies?  What are best practices of engaged, consequential, and political literary and cultural criticism today?  For each workshop, shared texts played a central role, foregrounding questions of canonicity, close reading, philosophical commentary, and imperial print culture; the event was thus structured around a project of collective reading that provided a starting point for hypotheses, interventions, and experimental thought. This issue presents in an online print format the spurs toward thought that ignited the symposium, with the hope of stimulating further debate and engagement.

The conference theme–“Presentism, Form, and the Future of History”–will call to mind some of the liveliest debates in literary studies today: debates about how we read now, about the resurgence of form and formalism, about claims for and against posthistorical and postcritical interpretation, about the viability of the literary-historical period in the context of queer time or deep time. If the stakes of these conversations subtend work in many fields in literary studies, they are especially acute for those whose academic work touches on the nineteenth century. This is a period that is distant enough that it takes some pedagogical work to help students imaginatively inhabit a world where you got your novels in bits and pieces over the course of a year, but close enough that these same students often find great readerly pleasure in minimally annotated Penguin editions. There is something uncanny in this simultaneous proximity and distance which extends to Victorian forms and institutions beyond the novel. To study the nineteenth century is to be struck almost daily by the sense that it never really went away: ours is also a gilded age of income inequality, of financial speculation, of de facto debtor’s prisons, of capitalist exploitation, of global inequity, of misplaced faith in evolutionary psychology, of widespread reliance on coal-based energy. It is strange but true that the best novel about the 2008 financial crisis was written by Anthony Trollope in 1875. And it is equally strange but true that some of the best contemporary writing on television is done by experts on nineteenth-century narrative. The acronym “V21” represents an aspiration to notice these resonances and theorize them more robustly. Victorian studies for the twenty first century, one imagines, would require close attention to the Victorian qualities of the twenty-first century.

But it is precisely because this is easier said than done, an easy gesture to make in the epilogue of a book or in the opening remarks for a symposium, that the V21 collective decided to make questions about historical consciousness and its unpredictable relationships with literary form central to our first meeting. To begin: what if were were to understand “presentism” not as an error, but as a robust interpretive mode? This is deeply counterintuitive: presentism usually designates a lack of historical consciousness, not a variety of it. Presentism commonly names the deformation of our objects of study in our own image, a failure to live up to the alien historical specificity of past documents and things and ideas. But addressing presentism as a strategy rather than as a mistake allows us to ask whether the reasonable distrust of underdeveloped historical awareness may lead us to retrench too readily in notions of historical difference. We might wonder, with Caroline Levine, whether even those critics most avowedly committed to historicism don’t in fact arrive at their objects of study out of an interest in how those objects, as she puts it, have “implications beyond [their] own time” (Levine 2015: xii). We might also wonder whether some kind of presentism isn’t what has made it possible for Bruce Robbins to bring literary criticism to bear acutely on the social and political matters that concern us most, whether these are cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization or upward mobility in an era when it has become increasingly scarce.

This was, in part, Foucault’s point when he said that Discipline and Punish aspired to give not a “history of the past” but a “history of the present,” a present then most prominently marked for Foucault by the prison riots of the early 1970s (Foucault 1995: 31). We know what that genealogical project looks like—but what does it mean to speak about “the future of history”? If this phrase might at first sound like nothing more than an unnecessarily convoluted way of saying “now,” it might also begin to remind us of the many theories and philosophies of the temporal strangeness of the contemporary: Benjamin’s angel of history; Jameson’s “always historicize”; Gadamer’s fusion of horizons; Nietzsche’s ruminating cows. Each of these tropes involves an awareness that what it is to think historically cannot be predetermined. V21 has occasionally been labeled “anti-historicist” or slotted into one side of a tired and tiresome history-versus-theory binary, but this strikes us as possible only if one forgets that pastness must always be theorized. What responsible historian or historicist has ever thought of history simply as “the things that happened”? “The future of history” is an invitation to think anew about how our scholarship might resituate and reinterpret the status of the historical. What if, for instance, with Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, one were to come at the history of empire from the seemingly oblique angle of the history of the book? One might arrive not only at a more historically accurate account of empire as a “slow burn” rather than a rise and fall; one might also encounter new models to think with: empire as assemblage; book not as an object but as a dispersed and dispersing event (Burton and Hofmeyr 2014: 23).

Within a certain idiom, one could rephrase Burton and Hofmeyr’s important point by saying that the British empire and the physical book share the “form” of an assemblage. The stakes of putting it this way would be to make both book and empire disciplinarily available to those whose arena of intellectual expertise is the analysis of form. One name for such people is literary scholars. If we are often seen as disciplinary vagrants with no real home—and even if we often welcome this characterization—it is worth asking who else could conceptualize the inner workings of character space and character systems with the nuance of someone like Alex Woloch: the fine modulations of attention demanded by overpopulated narratives; the structural and syntactical qualities of textual mediations of the real. The analysis of form, as it tarries with internal complexity and structure, can easily become a suspect practice when the term “formalism” is seen as just a shade of meaning away from aestheticism—forgetting the real rather than studying its mediation. But it is exactly for this reason that it is worth reclaiming the value of a way of knowing that has often been understood as the distinctive disciplinary marker of literary studies.

The first cluster of interventions presented here, under the rubric “Bleak House Today,” addresses the fundamental question of what Victorian literature has to offer the present. The roundtable considers how the novel’s formalizations of temporal dissonance, sound and sonance, virtuality, presence and contemporaneity immanently theorize the historicism-presentism continuum.  The second cluster, “Theorizing the Present,” turns to one of the nineteenth century’s most complex and intriguing treatments of historical consciousness, Nietzsche’s essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Across the six pieces published here, Nietzsche comes into view as a writer who both reveals dispositions toward the past to be attachments or passions and, simultaneously, stylistically evades containment within linear history. “The Way We Write Now” presents five short essays that were workshopped by attendees, which share an aspiration to find indirect, utopian, kinky, or recursive paths joining the Victorian and the contemporary. Such paths are found in explorations of the archive as fetish, of the immediacies and repetitions of literary tradition, and of the ecological persistence of the nineteenth century. “Empire and Unfielding” underscores the tension between conventional scholarly fields and the study of empire, staking out experimental field-syntheses and field-traversals through the nexus of book history, close reading, comparative literature, discourse analysis, political theory,  and speaking truth to imperial brutality.  Interventions in this cluster underscore the necessity for juxtaposing the canonical and the marginal, the historical and the literary, the past and the present. Returning to a more familiar academic genre with a keynote lecture, Bruce Robbins offers one model of the very consequentialism missing in the current vogue for factism.  “On the Non-representation of Atrocity” articulates enlarged time scales, comparative criticism, and the social impact of aesthetic representation with situated critique of violence and the ideologies that suborn it; for Robbins, studying representation in the past must conduce to fresh queries of how the present comparably distributes the avowable and the unsayable.  The end of the symposium pivots toward diverse future trajectories of reflection on presentism, form, and the future of history, illuminated by Elaine Hadley.  We hope that this special issue will itself serve as another exhortation to future engagement, as its own opening of speculative possibilities. V21, which welcomes new affiliates, currently facilitates a series of international reading groups, publication clusters, conference streams, syllabus sharing, and book roundtables, and is eager for new debates. We tweet @v21collective.

References

Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.

Burton, Antoinette M., and Isabel Hofmeyr. 2014. “Introduction: The Spine of Empire? Books and the Making of an Imperial Commons.” In Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, edited by Antoinette M. Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, 1-28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Benjamin Morgan is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.  His book The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  She is the author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP, 2014) and is currently completing a manuscript The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space.