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To Educate in the Permanent Things

In Arts & Letters, Books, Essays, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Politics, Walt Whitman, Western Philosophy, Writing on March 20, 2013 at 8:18 am

Allen Mendenhall

This article originally appeared here in The American Spectator.

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama proposed changes to preschool, high school, and college education, respectively. His proposals generated praise and condemnation from the predictable cheerleaders and naysayers. Some celebrated his efforts to expand early childhood education; others suggested that he should have focused more on the student loan crisis; still others, not to be outdone, pointed to school funding, teacher salaries, grading, standardized testing, technology, and foreign study as the pressing issues that he neglected to address with sufficient detail.

Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about how to improve American education from the top down. But positive change rarely happens through centralized design; it arises spontaneously through the interaction of human agents operating within and among social groups. The State cannot plan and then promulgate a proper education, and legislative enactments cannot reflect the mores and traditions of local groups with differing standards and expectations. The most prudent and humble proposals for improving education are not couched in statist, Platonic terms about civic education and human perfection; instead, they approach learning modestly, on the individual level. They entail the everyday interactions between teachers and students. They are not stamped with the approval of politicians, unions, think tanks, or interest groups.  They take place in the classroom, not the public square. A teacher anywhere, whatever his station, school, or background, can implement them in his course without disrupting the pace or provoking the ire of the educational establishment. The best of these, because it is so easily executed, is simply to teach what T.S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk after him, called “permanent things.”

The permanent things are the inherited principles, mores, customs, and traditions that sustain humane thinking and preserve civilized existence for future generations; their canonization in literary, philosophical, religious, and historical texts happened and is happening in slow degrees. We can trace the permanent things through curricula that emphasize the ultimate values of prosperous societies. An informed, laborious study of the perennial themes and archetypal patterns in what are variously denominated as the Great Works, the Western Canon, or the Classics can help us to organize and make sense of the permanent things. There are those who would object that this approach seems too hopeful and ideal. But no one has suggested it as a panacea, of which there are none, and anyway, is there a proposal that could be simpler, more straightforward, and more workable than assigning and discussing the Great Works?

As early as 1948, Eliot remarked that “there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture—of that part of it which is transmittable by education—are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.” It might be asked just who these barbarian nomads are and why we ought not to welcome their cultural practices and assumptions. The barbarian nomads could be, I think, any group lacking in historical perspective and mostly ignorant of the illuminating continuities that have guided our weightiest and most imaginative thinkers. The practices and assumptions of these nomads are not grounded in lived experience but aimed at utopian projects such as ensuring equality, creating fundamental rights, or eliminating poverty, and, to the extent that these practices and assumptions deviate from enduring norms, they cannot be said to have flourished ever.

To study the permanent things, on the other hand, is to consider the prevailing and profound ideas from certain times and schools in relation to other such ideas from various times and schools throughout successive eras. It is to map the course of perennial ideas to examine how they apply to different settings and generations. It is both sequential and diachronic in its approach. Its chief benefit is to put ideas into context, which is to say that it is to make us aware of our own presuppositions and perspectives that necessarily arise from our social, cultural, and historical situation.  Each thinker lives in his own specific era and place and cannot gain knowledge in a vacuum outside of time; our era and place shape the manner in which we think and restrict our ability to imagine conditions beyond our immediate and tangible experience.

This is not to submit that our ideas are determined for us, only that we enter into experience with certain perceptions that we have no control over. They are there because of the conditions present at the time and space in which we exist.  A sustained study of the permanent things will show us that our perceptions are not totally alien from those of our predecessors, although the respective perceptions are different. It also teaches us to compensate for our prejudices and to avoid thinking that our necessarily limited perspectives are unconditionally true and universally acceptable, even if they have verifiable antecedents. It reveals, as well, that schools of thought cannot simply be deemed later versions of earlier schools just because the two are in agreement about certain points. Finally, although we cannot escape those presuppositions that are embedded in our thought and culture, being alert to their probable existence can counteract their possible effect.

A rigorous study of the permanent things provides a lodestar for evaluating particular ideas against that which has been tested and tried before. Ideas that seem new always have traceable antecedents, and individuals equipped with a fundamental knowledge of the permanent things are able to situate purportedly novel ideas alongside their forerunners. These individuals recognize that change is not always progress; sometimes it is decline, deterioration, or decay. Only a sense of the continuities of history and thought can demonstrate the difference. Our political pedants in general and President Obama in particular insist on recognizing and implementing new institutions as if a radical departure from historic standards and established customs is itself the mark of good and lasting policy. Yet the permanent things show that even the most exceptional thinkers, those who represent the spirit of their age, whatever that might have been or might be, are part of a greater tradition.

It may be true that to study a particular thinker’s cultural milieu and biography is requisite to placing his ideas into their proper context and to highlighting the unacceptable premises of his philosophy; nevertheless, cautious interpreters ought to consider whether his thoughts necessarily lead to certain consequences, or whether the events that seem related to his thoughts arose accidentally, apart from his philosophy. Put another way, the cautious interpreter must carefully consider causation: whether theories actually generate particular circumstances, or whether those circumstances would have come to pass regardless of what the thinker spoke or wrote. Mussolini, for instance, praised William James, but it does not follow that anything James said or wrote endorses or enables fascism. He who would suggest otherwise betrays an ignorance of James’s work. The permanent things can help us to distinguish the true forms and implications of an individual’s thought from their appropriations by hostile forces.

By studying the permanent things, moreover, we learn that we cannot achieve the proper education through mere funding; nor does the solution to schooling gridlock and setbacks come from student aid, dress codes, student evaluations, tuition, or whatever. These issues begin to seem fleeting and trivial to one with an historical sense. They are at most temporary struggles, and although they are important, as all struggles are important, we are not to subordinate liberal learning to them. The best way to achieve the liberal learning necessary to make important and meaningful distinctions about our complex world is, as I have suggested and as it bears repeating, through a holistic, painstaking exploration of the permanent things. This means not only reading the Great Works for their content, but analyzing them in light of their place in history.

The beauty of this approach is that anyone can carry it out; the wisdom of it lies in its civilizing effects. Whether one is a homeschooling parent, a public school teacher, the leader of a local book club, or simply a curious-minded autodidact, the permanent things are available to him in texts, waiting to be sifted through and analyzed. It is true that there is disagreement as to what constitutes a Great Work and by what criteria, but it does not take more than research and commonsense empiricism to discern which pre-twentieth century texts have withstood the test of time. Teaching the permanent things does not require a large-scale, bureaucratic, administrative overhaul. It does not demand central planning or the implementation of mass, curricular programs; it can be accomplished through decentralized networks of concerned individuals. If parents would teach their children, friends their friends, colleagues their colleagues, and so on, we would in the aggregate become a more literate, astute, and informed society. And as our politicians lecture us about our duties even as they demand our money, we can take comfort in the proverb that these things too shall pass.

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Žižek and Agamben’s Homo Sacer

In Arts & Letters, Books, Humanities, Law, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodernism, Western Philosophy on March 6, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

“The problem with Rumsfeld’s blunt statement [that the American goal was to kill as many Taliban soldiers and al-Qaeda members as possible], as with other similar phenomena like the uncertain status of the Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, is that they seem to point directly to Agamben’s distinction between the full citizen and Homo sacer who, although he or she is alive as a human being, is not part of the political community.”

                   —Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Whatever else it is, Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy is anti-authoritarian and anti-totalitarianism.  Slavoj Žižek draws from Agamben to round out Welcome to the Desert of the Real.  Specifically, Žižek draws from Agamben’s theories about homo sacer and “the state of exception,” the latter of which Agamben borrows from the German jurisprudent Carl Schmitt.  In his book Homo Sacer, Agamben adopts Pompeius Festus’ definition of homo sacer as “the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime,” and the one who cannot be sacrificed, but can be killed without legal consequence.[1]

Agamben suggests that homo sacer is bound up with notions of sovereignty.  Sovereignty is determined by what is included and what is excluded from the jurisdiction of a sovereign.  Although a sovereign has the power to suspend the validity of law and, therefore, to stand outside the law, the sovereign may lose that privilege and become the sacred man who no longer has rights granted and secured by the polis, and who may be killed, but not sacrificed.  According to this paradigm, the sovereign is a man—a king or a monarch—who embodies statehood and sovereignty.  The body of this man is itself the site of law so long as the man remains the sovereign; as soon as the man is no longer sovereign, his body ceases to be the site of the law.

Žižek seems less concerned with the idea of sovereignty implicated by the term homo sacer.  He focuses, instead, on the “outsider,” “fugitive,” or “noncitizen” aspect of homo sacer.  He defines today’s homo sacer as “the privileged object of humanitarian biopolitics: the one who is deprived of his or her full humanity being taken care of in a very patronizing way.”  Žižek’s examples of today’s homo sacer include John Walker, the American who fought with the Taliban; the sans papers in France; the inhabitants of the favelas in Brazil; people in the African-American ghettos in the United States; an American war plane flying above Afghanistan; and others.  None of these examples describes groups or persons who once enjoyed the power of a sovereign.  All of these groups or persons have in common an ambiguous status in relation to the law of the polis.

Žižek shares with Agamben the notion that homo sacer is, or can be, the embodiment of the state of exception: the one who is excluded from the polis, who neither makes laws nor enjoys the protection of laws.  By sidestepping Agamben’s proposition that the sovereign body is the constitution of sovereignty—a move that might have to do with Žižek’s criticism of Agamben as wedded to the dialectics of the Enlightenment and to Foucault’s disciplinary power or biopower—Žižek is able to raise profound and troubling questions about the status of every one of us regarding homo sacer.  He asks, for instance, “What if the true problem is not the fragile status of the excluded but, rather, the fact that, on the most elementary level, we are all ‘excluded’ in the sense that our most elementary, ‘zero’ position is that of an object of biopolitics, and that possible political and citizenship rights are given to us as a secondary gesture, in accordance with biopolitical strategic considerations?”  Žižek does not answer this question, but the answer, disturbing as it is, seems implied in the question.

[1] Giorgio Agamben.  Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.  Stanford University Press, 1995.  Pg. 71.

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Cornel West’s Genealogical Approach

In Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Politics, Western Philosophy on February 27, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

“My genealogical approach subscribes to a conception of power that is neither simply based on individual subjects—e.g., heroes or great personages as in traditional historiography—nor on collective subjects—e.g., groups, elites, or classes as in revisionist and vulgar Marxist historiography.  Therefore, I do not believe that the emergence of the idea of white supremacy in the modern West can be fully accounted for in terms of the psychological needs of white individuals and groups or the political and economic interests of a ruling class.” 

                             —Cornel West, “A Genealogy of Modern Racism”

Cornel West expressly borrows from Nietzsche and Foucault when he employs the methodology of genealogy.  Genealogy documents or tracks the development of ideas and their relation to human organization.  Genealogy traces knowledge to its systemic formations across networks of discourse.  Genealogy does not recover origins because origins are not recoverable.  Instead of recovering origins, or attempting to recover origins, genealogy describes the emergence and development of social structures and attitudes based on certain conditions for knowledge construction.  Genealogy is not about using history to legislate to the present or to validate contemporary attitudes and viewpoints.  It is about analyzing ways that attitudes and viewpoints arise and function.  It is about how systems of belief inscribe and imprint themselves on the human body, and how discourse bears a direct relation to individuals and their regulation by society.  Genealogy is not prescriptive; it is descriptive.  Rejecting a telos, it seeks to understand the function and not the merits of discourse formation.

West’s genealogy focuses on the emergence of white supremacy in Western discourse.  Because genealogy is not teleological, West rejects Marxism and its variants as starting-points for explaining “the complex configuration of metaphors, notions, categories, and norms which produces and promotes [objects] of discourse.”  The tendency of Marxism toward essentialism, class dualism, human reductionism, and grand narratives simply will not do for West, who indicts “[t]raditional, revisionist, and vulgar Marxist types of historiography” for focusing “primarily on powers within nondiscursive structures” (such as powers of “kings, presidents, elites, or classes”) and for reducing the “powers within discursive structures to mere means for achieving the intentions, aims, needs, interests, and objectives of subjects in nondiscursive structures.”  In short, West indicts Marxism and its variants for simplifying social and cultural phenomena that are highly complex.

To some extent, moreover, Marxism diminishes the importance of language and rhetoric to the actions of individuals, whose motivations are contingent upon the time or circumstance in which they were produced.  Although humans are acting agents with the capacity to follow their will, they are also limited by the vocabularies and knowledge available to them.  This conception of limitation on human agency does not correspond with the Marxist conception of limitation on human agency.  The Marxist conception of limitation on human agency has to do with the reduction of individual action to some collectivist cause or linear narrative determined by class.  Rather than coming into being because groups of people desired power and suppressed or marginalized their class competition, the discourse of white supremacy emerged because of several historical and discursive accidents.  Even those eighteenth and nineteenth century writers who were antislavery unwittingly contributed to and perpetuated the discourse of white supremacy by classifying human bodies in keeping with scientific schema.  For these reasons, among others, West suggests that Marxism and its variants wrongly deny “the relative autonomy of the powers in discursive structures” and hence reduce “the complexity of cultural phenomena.”

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Žižek’s Real Desert

In America, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodernism, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on February 13, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

In short, America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation—what we are getting instead is the forceful reassertion of the exceptional role of the USA as a global policeman, as if what causes resentment against the USA is not its excess of power, but its lack of it. 

                             —Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Žižek does not overload his writing with normative statements.  Here, however, he clearly puts forth an “ought.”  He recommends that America accept its vulnerability.  What is not said in this sentence, but what is abundantly clear throughout the second chapter of Welcome to the Desert of the Real, is that accepting vulnerability represents, for Žižek, an alternate way between “the dialectical category of totality.”

Against the prevailing rhetoric that deludes Americans and other Western peoples into thinking that they have two choices—between “Them” or “Us,” “Capitalism” or “The Other,” “Inside” or “Outside,” “First World” or “Third World”—Žižek attempts more than merely to reveal a third-way between competing totalities.  He seeks instead to interrogate the competing totalities and to show how they are narrativized to mask the symptoms of our own desires.  He demonstrates that “We” have constructed our own fundamentalisms that oppose—yet mirror—the fundamentalisms of “The Other.”  There is an evil to both sides of whatever lies beneath constructed dualities; only by searching for that evil can we place 9/11 in its proper context.  The totalities of “Them” versus “Us,” for example, can be redefined such that Bush and Bin Laden “are both ‘Them’ against Us.”  The point of this recasting is to suggest that 9/11 and its aftermath do not represent grand moral narratives leading inexorably to a clear choice: for or against terrorism.  Rather, 9/11 and its aftermath are what upset America’s perception of itself as “an island exempt from this kind of violence, witnessing it only from the safe distance of the TV screen.”  9/11 was a wake-up to reality, not to morality.

For this reason, 9/11 and its aftermath ought to blur any simple claims to moral superiority as well as any ideological interpretation of the deaths of the victims.  9/11 did not bring about ethical or ideological clarity.  “Far from offering a case apropos of which we can adopt a clear ethical stance,” Žižek asserts, “we encounter here the limit of moral reasoning: from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime.”

But few people are innocent, at least if innocence means completely removed from any system that is complicit in the rise of violence and extremism; nearly everyone is implicated in some system or another that contributed (and contributes) to the rise of fundamentalism.  To construct a crude “good guy” versus “bad guy” narrative is to create a false abstraction that validates the very behavior that generated the hostility motivating the crimes to begin with.  To construct that narrative is to placate personal guilt and to shield “Us” from identification with “The Problem.”

Because of these arguments, Welcome to the Desert of the Real disrupts the apparent unity of the dialectical categories that Americans and other Western peoples accept uncritically.  It challenges the images and stories that seem to have as their goal the legitimation of violence.  Whatever one thinks of Žižek—I am, for the record, not a fan—his arguments in this book deserve careful consideration.

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The Major Move of Deconstruction

In Arts & Letters, Epistemology, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Postmodernism, Western Philosophy on January 30, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

“Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences.  Such a play, then—difference—is no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general.  […] Within a language, within the system of language, there are only differences.  A taxonomic operation can accordingly undertake its systematic, statistical, and classificatory inventory.”

—Jacques Derrida, “Differance”

The major move of deconstruction is to interrogate binary oppositions in Western thought (good/evil, man/woman, black/white, right/wrong, and so on) to determine how certain ideas have gained credence over others (by social construction).  Derrida deals with signification and the inability of the sign to signify the referent because of the constant chain of deferred meaning—that is to say, the constant slippage between articulations or representations of the thing and the thing as it exists in the phenomenal world.  Put another way, the slippage is between the production of difference without origin and the actual quality of the referent that precedes thought and articulation.  Derrida gives this slippage the name “differance,” a hybrid and invented term that implicates what he elsewhere calls “metaphysics of presence.”

Derrida draws on the dualisms of Western and Platonic philosophy to suggest that all concepts are understood by their inverse.  If all concepts are understood by their inverse, then any understanding of an inverse concept necessarily depends upon another inverse concept.  Every opposing concept is itself intelligible because of additional opposing concepts, and no concept is absolute or transcendental such that it has no inverse; therefore, the search for an origin of meaning reveals that there are only networks of differences, each of which has been produced by humans.  There is no starting or stopping point to this constant deferral of meaning, or what Derrida calls “a chain or system.”  There is, in other words, no pure present.

Meaning, although never present in the sense of being fixed in time and space, resides in whatever taxonomic operation has created and arranged signifiers that humans use to communicate and mobilize.  Language and codes constitute and utilize systems of difference, even if language and codes cannot realize some transcendental signifier.  The most that language and codes can realize is the trace of a presence.  Derrida refers to this strategic realization as, among other things, “protowriting,” an economical exercise that enables humans to convey messages, but that does not bring about an organic unity of meaning.

All positive understanding of words or things comes through negation: the devaluing of one inverse and the privileging of another.  When Derrida says (above) that the play of difference is “no longer a concept,” but the “possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general,” he is hinting at this social constitution of words and their value of exchange.  Even if “there are only differences” in a system of language or meaning, humans still harness certain concepts in the service of certain ends.  Humans are not paralyzed by difference; indeed, difference might even enable human action.  It is the aim of deconstruction—which is in principle a value neutral methodology and not a crusading ideology—to show how humans have dealt with difference and organized around (and because of) certain significations that privilege some concepts (or sets of concepts) over other concepts (or sets of concepts).

 

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Fredric Jameson and Why Postmodernism is an Enemy of Marxism

In Arts & Letters, Conservatism, Economics, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Modernism, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Western Philosophy on January 23, 2013 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

“[C]ontemporary theory […] has, among other things, been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and metaphysical.  But what is today called contemporary theory—or better still, theoretical discourse—is also, I want to argue, itself very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon.  It would therefore be inconsistent to defend the truth of its theoretical insights in a situation in which the very concept of ‘truth’ itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which postructuralism seeks to abandon.  What we can at least suggest is that the poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutic, of what I will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a very significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our subject here.”

—Fredric Jameson, from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a defining work about definition—specifically, about what “postmodernism” is.  Rather than reducing postmodernism to one quality or characteristic, Jameson lays out several qualities or characteristics as manifest in works of literature, architecture, painting, and so forth.  To say that postmodernism is a single thing is to ignore various flows, assemblages, networks, contradictions, tensions, and trajectories summoned forth by this slippery signifier.  It is, in short, to be non-postmodern.

Jameson dislikes postmodernism and does not set out to be postmodern, even if he is, or cannot help but be, postmodern; he seeks to describe postmodernism in order to generate a working, demarcating explanation.  Criticizing the “camp-following celebration” of the postmodern aesthetic, the “current fantasies about the salvational nature of high technology,” and the “vulgar apologias for postmodernism,” Jameson views the postmodern as penetrated and constituted by late capitalism.  For Jameson, the postmodern is less a political program than a moment in time with certain defining characteristics; the postmodern is not an ideological agenda, but something we are in, whether we like it or not.

The trouble with describing the postmodern, as Jameson suggests in the passage above, is that it can refer to various phenomena, from artistic and cultural developments to social and political organization.  One thing seems clear from the prefix “post”: postmodernism replaces (or displaces) the modern.  It comes after.  Therefore, postmodernism must be marked by a break from its predecessor.  What this break is, and how it materializes among social forces, determines what postmodernism means, or at least what it looks like.

“Contemporary theory” or “theoretical discourse,” which has arisen alongside mass mechanical reproductions in the arts as well as commodity culture in every realm of human experience, and which, moreover, is neither unified nor uniform, is a product of postmodernism.  This “Theory” (with a capital T) is splintered into numerous methodologies and logics, but generally holds that meaning is fluid, fragmented, and indeterminate.  That statement does not do justice to the nuance and complexity of the subject.

At any rate, one has, as Jameson points out, trouble defending the “truth” of postmodernism’s “theoretical insights” because “the very concept of ‘truth’ itself is part of the metaphysical baggage which poststructuralism seeks to abandon.”  Jameson rejects a wholesale and unquestioning commitment to poststructuralism, which he tends to conflate with postmodernism.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Jameson sees in the postmodern the propensity toward domination, a decidedly essentialized (and essentializing) category of discourse.  Too much reliance on the postmodern, according to Jameson, leads to relativism or nihilism.  Jameson does not use those terms, but he does say that if “we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable.”

Representing an arguably conservative shift away from other theorists—conservative with regard to ontology or metaphysics, not social politics—Jameson seeks to recover concepts like “dominance,” which are central to Marxist criticism, by arguing that critical theory such as poststructuralism is symptomatic of capitalism itself.  Accordingly, we ought to study postmodernism as a result of capitalism’s rise to maturity.  In this respect, Jameson revives Marxist criticism, which in many ways stands in contradistinction to postmodernism.  Marxist criticism, after all, seems to subsume and encompass other theories, especially those that purport to explode all meanings; it is overarching and paradigmatic.  It cultivates ideas about fixed categories—like dominance—that signify definite and resolved concepts.

Although what or who dominates is always changing, the idea of domination remains relatively stable.  Marxism is therefore incompatible with postmodern theories that would do away with any and all “historicity”—to say nothing of essentializing concepts such as the bourgeois or even the self.  For Jameson, Marxist theory remains useful and instructive.  It is not just the constant play of simulacra or the mere trace of signification.  Rather, it offers a viable and effective method for critiquing globalized consumer culture and ideology, both of which are evident in the frantic insistences on the superiority of the postmodern condition.

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Bloom, Poirier, Holmes: What’s the Link?

In American History, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Emerson, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, Western Philosophy on December 26, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence is of a piece with pragmatism as it is manifested in Richard Poirier’s account of poetic influence whereby a poet or writer struggles to overcome the powerful precedent of his or her forerunners.  Poirier goes to great lengths to demonstrate how Emerson’s “superfluity” has to do with Emerson’s anxiety about articulating the phenomenal world in ways that are new.  Like Emerson, Holmes distorts and recasts precedents.  Holmes uses the common law canon much as Emerson uses the literary canon, and vice versa.

Bloom and Poirier are Darwinians, as were most of the classical pragmatists, on the issue of revision and adaptation of forms to fit new social and cultural environments.  Bloom seems to suggest that there are perennial themes and tropes in the work of great poets over time, but that it is the new and creative ways in which these existing categories are expressed that make them great.  The anxiety is in finding new articulation for previously established content and methods.  The poet, then, is like the judge according Holmes: someone who must rely on precedent even as he carves out new spaces for critical inquiry.

Emerson is a milestone figure for Poirier because Emerson struggles with “linguistic skepticism.”  Emerson’s anxiety about expressing new ideas in old forms led him to embrace rhetorical superfluity as a means of compensating for the limitations of his own mind and historical moment.  Emerson was skeptical about the ability of the word or language to summon forth the meanings in his head or the sensations that he felt.  For Poirier, Emerson established what Joan Richardson calls an “aesthetic outpost” against which later writers like Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens wrote.  Emerson facilitated continuity with the past while generating his own tropes on which later American writers would themselves trope.  All of this revision and adaptation had to do with a distinctly American tradition of writing that attempted to break free of the confines of European traditions and express the attitudes and possibilities created by the New World.  Holmes himself turned away from European jurisprudence and embraced philosophical pragmatism, which led to such interpretive tendencies as judicial restraint, deference to state legislatures, rejection of abstractions, and analysis of actual experiences tested and tried in both the economic marketplace and the marketplace of ideas.

What links Bloom, Poirier, and Holmes is Emerson.

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Review of John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Southern History, Southern Literary Review, The South, Writing on October 31, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following review first appeared here in Southern Literary Review.

John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia is difficult to classify. It’s easier to say what it isn’t than to say what it is.

It isn’t biography.  It isn’t documentary.  It isn’t quite history, although it does organize and present information about a distinct class of past individuals interacting and sometimes living together in a unique, definable space.

It isn’t quite sociology either, although Reed is, by training and profession, a sociologist, and sociology does, every now and then, sneak its way into the pages.

Maybe it’s best to suggest that the book is a bit of all of these, but it’s also an annotated edition of Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.

Written and compiled by William Spratling and William Faulkner, whom Reed affectionately dubs the “Two Bills,” Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, first published in 1926,was something of a joke: its oft-rambunctious subjects weren’t really creoles, but simply friends of the authors, and most weren’t, by most measurable standards, famous.

Reed’s stated goal, one of them at least, is to provide an “introduction to a Bohemian crowd of artists, writers, journalists, musicians, poseurs, and hangers-on found in the French Quarter in the mid-1920s.”  This eclectic and creative crowd comprises what Reed calls a social circle, or, in more academic parlance, a “loose network of relationships linked by friends in common,” “by association with the same institutions,” and “by common interests.”

Reed explains that social circles, by nature, “have no formal leaders, but they may have their notables,” and they have their cores, too.  The leader of the so-called “famous Creoles” is Sherwood Anderson, and the core, as you might have guessed, is the French Quarter.

Tulane University, with all of its energy, entertainers, and eccentrics, enabled and sustained the circle that produced the local arts, literature, and culture.  The area and its residents gained a national, indeed international, reputation.  As Meigs Frost, a reporter who made the cut as a famous creole, put it, “So many of us here are internationally famous locally.”

Reed’s subtly sociological introductory chapters place his subjects, which were also the two Bills’ subjects, into their historical context—and what a wild, exotic, and at times erotic context it is.  His comprehensive research is delivered with such wit and enthusiasm that one can forget this work is scholarship written by a former professor and published by a university press.

His occasional use of the first person and confessional, qualifying asides—“as far as I know,” “Some may find it easier than I do,” “to my mind artists should not be judged on what prejudiced observers see in their work,” “It is difficult to discuss this,” “I have mentioned,” “I know of someone,” “it’s fair to say,” “It’s hard to imagine”—will let you know, or let you guess at, where he stands on an issue or acknowledges an assumption on his part.  Such delicate humility—or is it just honest colloquialism?—is rare for a person who made his career in the university, and it would be a shame if readers neglected to notice it.

Peopled with absinthe-drinking, music-loving debauchers, 1920s New Orleans was a place where madams and brothels were as common as jambalaya and gumbo; where music poured into the streets, which smelled of spices, sex, and booze; where bootleggers (this was the Prohibition Era, remember) set up shop next to cops (who were customers of the brothels and the bootleggers); where the only limit on free love, it seemed, was the stultifying effect of alcohol; where parties—especially costume balls—were considered failures if nobody got naked; and where vivacious theater, daily newspapers, and edgy literary periodicals flourished.

If this milieu seemed excessive, radical, intemperate, even libertine, it was also in a way conservative: there was among its dwellers a ubiquitous impulse to preserve and maintain.  History, both that being made and that made already, was important to the artists and writers.  The districts, the streets, the homes, the buildings, the sidewalks—all of them required and received care and protection, and all of them underwent systematic revitalization.  The literati, as conservationists, were afraid that the world they had inherited, and to some extent made, was endangered.

Fans of Reed have come to expect certain things: the informal idioms and plain speech he uses while dissecting, with surgeon-like precision, complex people and institutions; the surprising clarity he brings to understudied topics; and the delightful, conversational prose with which he arrests your attention, transports you into another world, and then releases you back into your own world.

In this, his latest, he does not disappoint.  As always, he delivers—and in so doing provides telling insights into a minor renaissance in American literary history.  His discussions of race and sexuality will inspire (or provoke) future study, but more importantly he has addressed some of the least known phases of some of the most known American litterateurs.

Reed doesn’t need my endorsement.  But he’s got it.

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Book Note: Twentieth-Century English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Britain, British Literature, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, The Novel, Western Civilization, Writing on October 24, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following excerpt first appeared as part of the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies series.

This history of twentieth-century English literature addresses a wide variety of texts produced in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.  Made up of 44 critical essays, this book is divided into four parts: 1) Writing Modernity, 2) The Emerging Avant-Garde, 3) Modernism and its Aftermath, 1918-1945, and 4) Post-War Cultures, 1945-1970.  This division is meant to read like a history and not like a companion, anthology, or compilation of essays. 

The book attempts to avoid treating “Englishness” or “English literature” as fixed or essentialized categories and, instead, to use those loaded terms as illustrative of multiple and differing conceptions of place and identity.  As with any historical account of modernism, this book explores the tensions between continuity and change, but unlike many historical accounts of modernism, this book focuses largely upon transnationalism, diaspora, postcolonialism, and dispersal. 

In an effort to complicate simplistic characterizations of time and place, this book acknowledges overlapping chronologies even as it maps out a quasi-linear study of English literature in the twentieth-century.  As an example of the editors’ resistance against oversimplified periodization, the book begins not with a set date (say, 1900) but with a section of essays exploring the lives and works of authors both before and after the close of the nineteenth-century. 

This first section of the book (“Writing Modernism”) incorporates works about major themes in literature and the role those themes play in the gradual replacement and displacement of the literature of the so-called older generation.  The second section of the book also addresses the fledgling stages of modernism, considering as it does the divide between Edwardian and Georgian writers and literature.  This section closes with an account about how the Great War influenced literary production in Britain. 

Part three is, unlike the earlier sections, rooted in a particular time frame (1918-45), and it focuses on how authors such as Joyce, Woolf, Ford, Conrad, Lawrence, and Lewis experiment with forms while investigating their and their countries’ recent (and in some cases not-so-recent) past.  This section closes with World War Two and the literary productions emanating from that event. 

The fourth section, dealing chiefly with issues of continuity and change, also deals with issues of class, education, nationalism, and internationalism, and the fifth and final section, “Towards the Millennium,” examines literature and literary culture from the last 30 years.  This final section focuses on new opportunities for writing, publication, genre, performance, and experimentation.  It undertakes to explore the vexed “postmodern” signifier while refusing reductive conclusions about that term.   

In general, the book pays particular attention to genre and the construction and representation of literary culture during eras of new technology and shifting social circumstances.  When addressing more recent phenomena of literature and literary criticism, such as anxiety over the term “postmodern,” the book’s closing essays are careful not to “take sides,” so to speak, but to register the complexity of issues and insist that all claims about the contemporary or near-contemporary are provisional and not summative, speculative and not conclusive. 

This ambitious project leaves certain loose ends, as any project of this magnitude must, but it is nevertheless an impressive and meticulous contribution to ongoing and unsettled conversations about twentieth-century British literature.  The sheer number and variety of authors contributing to and represented by this text are so bold and interesting that definitive or comprehensive statements about them are difficult to make.  Suffice it to say that the complexity of this book, and of all of the authors and essays appearing in this book, is in keeping with the complexity of a subject as expansive as twentieth-century British literature.             

 

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Article Note: “Conrad in the Computer,” by Michael Stubbs

In Arts & Letters, Essays, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Writing on October 12, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

This article uses quantitative methods of text and corpus analysis to interpret stylistic elements of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  The author carries out such method and analysis by way of computers—hence the title of the article.

A major goal of this piece is to challenge the linguistic community that is mostly skeptical of “stylistics.”  Put another way, the piece calls into question the prevailing idea that statistics is not a proper hermeneutic for interpreting literary style.

The value of computer-generated quantitative datum is its ability to clarify what is normal and predictable in texts.  The value, moreover, is to contextualize a vast amount of information by reducing it to simplified summaries.  For instance, this piece reduces Heart of Darkness to seven narrative frames within which are themes of vague impressions and unreliable knowledge (conveyed through words such as “blurred” and its variations, “dark” and its variations, “shadow” and its variations, and so forth).

The author concedes that his approach depends upon selection: which features to study and which to ignore.  But he believes his approach is valuable precisely because computers can identify features of texts that are not at first obvious to the naked eye or the pensive mind.  Humans carry with them various associative registers and preconceived notions, whereas software is a naïve reader.

One reason the author applies his quantitative method to Heart of Darkness is that this novel has not undergone rigorous explication in light of stylistics.  This method quickly provides the analyst with a concordance, and this method enables the analyst to index keywords (“Kurtz,” “seemed,” “river,” “station,” and so on) and then divide those keywords into numbers and declensions (how many nouns or adjectives, what variety of verb tenses, etc.).  This method is beneficial, furthermore, because the computer can catch allusions that the limited human mind cannot catch.  In support of this theory, the author cites to several allusions and possible allusions from the novel.

The article draws several conclusions about the novel—for one, that the novel’s phrasal patterns suggest that the narrative is tactically repetitive—but the overarching point seems to be to validate the methodology and not explicate the book.  That the author of this article has chosen Heart of Darkness (as opposed to some other novel) seems incidental.