The Modern Condition

I’m in my third and last library of the day, having arrived at NYPL at 2:00, gone to Mina Rees at 5:00, and tothe Bobst basement from 8:00 to now–I’m starting this at 12:30, and I better be finishing this soon, given the above.

I wanted to write down some of my thoughts for what I think will be my opening statements. I told Talia that I wanted to say something about modernity, something about Ben Anderson, something about how that connected all three lists. She probably stifled a yawn. I reread “Can the Subaltern Speak” for the poco list, and based on GCS’s smackdown of Foucault & Deleuze, and mixed with some Arendt I’ve never read, I’m playing with this rhetorical trope, “the banality of theory.” Or–”Theory always repeats itself, first as audacity, then as banality.” So I plan to begin by rehearsing all the banalities of the modern condition, specifically the modernity post-1800, that we all know.

The modern condition was based on the idea of progress, social and individual, technological and economic. The nineteenth century was the era of secularization, of professionalization, of the silent bourgeois revolution. The Crystal Palace consecrated modernity, especially in its consecration of commerce and capitalism as war continued by other means. Communities were imagined. The novel created modern subjectivity, discipline, and imaginary solutions to real contradictions. The country moved to the city, as a result of expropriation and “primitive accumulation,” and the city nostalgically longed for the country. Victorians turned their eyes outward, seeing themselves at the apex of civilization, charged with leading the rest of the world into modernity.

How, then, can we de-banalize modernity? One starting point is an additional chapter added to the second edition of Imagined Communities. The construction of nationalism through the newspapers and novels is a modern thing, and a banality. I had originally planned by starting here, making slight elaborations. First, Bennie’s understanding of the periodical press, not surprisingly, doesn’t do justice to the complexities of the nineteenth-century periodical press. Daily newspapers were limited to a relatively small elite. Weekly newspapers and especially journals had a much, much, much wider circulation, and the debates in the public spheres took place in these periodicals which were general and miscellaneous and not requiring newspaper stamps instead of news-based, and requiring newspaper stamps. As for novels, he is onto something where he compares the development of novels providing biographical and psychological histories to the development of nationalist histories. If we consider the “Condition of England” novels as instantiating Victorian fiction, which I do, there’s more nationalism. For my poco list, I was thinking about how this nationalism relates to the colonialism/postcolonialism model, and how a world-systems/globalization model might be somewhat incommensurable with it.

This is all in the first chapter. In the appended chapter, he notes how he underread a quotation from Renan that goes something like all true French citizens must learn to forget the Albigensian Crusade and the massacre of the Huguenots. What’s curious is that true French citizens would know what Renan was talking about–so that this diagnosis of historical amnesia is in fact another construction, another imagination of a national history that’s really only possible with modernity. I like this. Historical things that are supposedly traumatic are really just banal. Condemning the “enslavement” of white kids during the Industrial Revolution, calling attention to supposedly ignored issues in need of reform constituted nationhood in its own way. We get something like this with Wide Sargasso Sea and with Clear Light of Day. Antoinette Cosway points to the forgotten Bertha Mason–but isn’t diagnosing this amnesia adding further justification of Jane Eyre as an eminently English text? Doesn’t the whole idea of post-coloniality work all to well in favour of nationalism within the neocolonialist Global North? Isn’t the reason why a novel of the Partition of South Asia, Clear Light of Day, made palatable to a Western audience because the imagined trauma of partition provides a convenient origin myth? As for the periodicals list, I’m not seeing much forgetting as remembering (the labour involved in making things was certainly not forgotten), but what I’m finding interesting is the number of times people refer to it from the perspective of the future. Even in its anticipation, it has been constituted as a world-historical event. And world-historical in this case means not just Really Important but capable of being projected into the future. One article, I remember which periodical it was from, said something like it was unfortunate that the Crystal Palace would have to be removed from Hyde Park, but in a way it was fitting to give it more the air of fixed, historically locatable event.

It’s with historicity and temporality that I’m finding out something new (to me) about modernity. Anne asked me a two weeks why I chose these four texts–Foucault’s Order of Things, Fabian’s Time and the Other, Schivelbusch’s Railway Journey, and Milo’s Trahir le Temps–as my “Temporality Theory” books. I said at the time that it was a pretty arbitrary decision, which it was, but weeks later, a better answer would start with the fact that these are all books that are particularly relevant to nineteenth-century temporality–to temporality, historically, and not ontologically understood. Rereading the “Life, Labour, Language” chapter of Foucault was loads of fun, and I was thinking why it was that Victorianists were all up in the discipline and the history of sexuality and power and knowledge, but not so much into these 3 Ls. The one thing about the Order of Things is the episteme. I guess most people give up after the first chapter. Today I found out that Catherine Gallagher does make use of this chapter–particularly its emphasis on capital L “Life.” My reading of Gallagher was pretty superficial, but I got the sense that Foucault’s historical nuance was missing. Daniel Milo has an amazing chapter on Foucault’s metaphors in D and P, (ritual, ceremony, rites, spectacle for punishment; machine, technology for discipline) and that his “anachronistic” use of metaphors is a way of introducing discontinuity into history, which is what history is all about–at least history within the modern era. So, Foucault’s use of “Life” too points at a discontinuity–at the ultimate failure of representation and taxonomization that ended the Classical Era. The intricate ballet of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, of gazes, light sources, visibilities, invisibilities, surfaces is no longer possible in the Modern Eras search for the dark, hidden depths of truth. (C. Herbert points out in Culture and Anomie, I think, that the whole privileging of depth as metaphor was a nineteenth-century innovation.) On the poco list, I’ve learned that lots of people talk about the moment in Capital when Marx tells the reader when it’s time to leave the noisy sphere of exchange and go to “the hidden abodes of production,” where capital is made. Foucault says Marx fits in the nineteenth century like a fish in water. Take the fish out, it drowns. This call for unearthing “the hidden abodes of production,” in fact, is not by any stretch of the imagination a Marxian innovation, as the practice of factory tourism and periodical articles on factory production and the Great Exhibition itself can attest. Okay, so time-in-C19-modernity involves the search for some fundamentally unrepresentable origin or force that is the condition of possibility for the historical.

Is this not just some Aristotelian return of efficient and final cause? Where it differs, on the one hand, is that in Aristotelian teleology origin and telos are representable, knowable. Not so in the nineteenth century, maybe. But there’s more. With Fabian, we’ve got another kind of discontinuity, another kind of contradiction going on. Fabian’s main idea is about the “denial of coevalness,” where with such practices as the ethnographic present, anthropologists place their subjects outside history, outside contemporaneity, when in the fact they must have been involved in intersubjective time at some time if they were participant observers. The nineteenth century, of course, is when ethnography started to take its modern discursive shape. But I think the contradiction of allochronicity could be applied on a more microcosmic scale–to issues of gender and class, for example. It would be really interesting to do a rhetorical analysis of the novels based on this–I’m thinking in particular of those chapters in David Copperfield which are written in the present tense, the marriage with Dora, for example.

I’m going to collapse Schivelbusch and Milo together because this is getting really long and it’s getting really late. I’ve talked about Milo on this blog at some point before. I’ll quote myself quoting Milo:

His argument is that the century was a relatively recent, and literally revolutionary invention, a tool created in the wake of the French Revolution. He summarizes his findings as follows:

-the century certainly exists within historical writing;

-it is of recent invention (c. 1560);

-its diffusion was more recent (Le Goff speaks of the 18th century, I will date its true launch in 1800);

-it acts as a form of classification;

-it is a form of periodization with two characteristic principals: it has a unity, and this unity is in opposition with the unities of the centuries which surround it;

-it is a very particular periodization, which rests on an arithmetic prinicipal, hence artificial, hence outside of reality: the division of history into centuries is an a priori periodization;

-nevertheless, it was an important conquest in chronology (Le Goff);

-but that it is now necessary to destroy it in order to advance knowledge of the true historical era (la véritable durée historique). (Milo 28)

The century may be an arbitrary unit, but it’s condition of possibility is modernity. And if it involves some flattening out to create a single context out of a time quite longer than most people live, that kind of corresponds with the “panoramic” mode of vision Schivelbusch says the railroad forces. Don’t look at the quickly moving, close whirr of stuff, look at the seemingly motionless distance.

Bottom line: the modern condition involves a historical temporality, but it’s a history that’s more complicated than the banalities of progress.

Okay. Time to go eat and go home.

 

Victorian Sideboob

I was reading Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader yesterday, and she mentions that people who looked for the racy, immoral fiction that working-class periodicals supposedly abounded in were usually disappointed by their propriety. I agree. But here’s a picture that’s one of the few exceptions, a woodcut illustrating “Bertha Gray, The Parish Apprentice-Girl; or, Six Illustrations of Cruelty,” serialized in six parts in Reynold’s Miscellany of 1851.

 

What is a Context?

Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a mysterious tribe called the New Critics who believed that there was something outside the text. Not only was there something outside the text, almost everything that was was outside the text, their particular object of devotion. One cannot serve two masters; from the text emanated all truth, but from outside the text illusion, with its distractions and deceptions, constantly threatened the text’s divine incarnation, the Work.

And then one day, a boy named Jackie was born.

Okay, enough. There is nothing outside the text, we get it. But what does that mean? For most of us in our tribe , the critique of positivist inquiry merely manifests itself in a common-sense credo that a text must be studied alongside its context, and this context can be understood in a bunch of different ways. It’s something I believe in, strongly, and it’s why I chose to read twenty-two different British periodicals that were published in 1851. This was the year of the Great Exhibition, and I would learn about its context. And yet, daunting as this task has been given the time my procrastination had left me with, it’s only a tiny, tiny tranche of the Mid-Victorian periodical press which, to my mind, offered the best access point to the Context of those Mid-Victorian Texts I so love to hate to love.

I’ve undoubtedly learned a lot of contextual stuff, like the fight to stop the duties excised on paper, advertising, newspapers, and windows; like the overwhelming optimism of the period; like the fascination with how things were put together and with the less tangible workings of mesmerism/electro-biology/animal magnetism/the od force; like the pervasiveness of poetic utterance; like the murmurs from America of Bloomerism and Female Emancipation; like the recent publication of a newly revised edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey with a preface by Currer Bell, authoress of Jane Eyre, relating the deaths of her sisters “Ellis” and “Acton”; like the tendency of writers to pepper their prose with pedantic displays of parallel structure.

What’s been most interesting, though, is how it’s problematized my idea of what a context is. If I started out seeking to find out more about the content of this grand context, I’ve ended up wondering more about the context of this context. Everything that I just listed is content: it’s text. There is nothing outside the text. If the context is not outside the text, it would make sense that the context too would be text. What if, though, we thought about context as something not necessarily outside the text, but not text at all? By this, I don’t mean social dispositions, or structures of feeling, or things in the air, but something quite concrete, like the price of a periodical, or its circulation, or its mode of circulation (at railway stalls, at coffeehouses, at libraries, at reading clubs), or its profit margin, or the paratexts left out at the binding stage (usually containing advertisements which are incredibly helpful in thinking about target demographics).

I mean, given a bunch of text, I might be able to infer a target readership based on certain cues, but if I knew it sold for three half-pennies once a week, or cost two shillings once a month, that context could very well give me more information than the actual content. And then, what difference does it make if each number (issue) has the price listed on the front page, or if the price is nowhere to be found. I’m particularly frustrated/intrigued by The People’s and Howitt’s Journal, a short-lived weekly periodical targeting pro-peace, anti-slavery, working-class or working-class-positive readers. In the microfilm of the bound volume, the price is not listed. In fact, it’s not even clear where one number starts and the other begins. Was this how it was sold? Is the provenance of the bound volume different from the individual numbers? I know that periodicals often came in wrappers that were discarded in the binding process.

Peter D. MacDonald in the Jan 2006 PMLA pointed out that GCS’s endlessly repeated translation of “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” is “clumsy,” since it misses the literal meaning of hors-texte, the non-paginated plates with illustrations on them which are inserted into books. The hors-texte is part of the book–a very marketable part of the book no matter what century you’re in–but, quite literally, it doesn’t count. And it’s an expensive part of the book. At MLA, I ordered Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Glassworlds, which won the big prize–big up for Victorianists!–it was OUP-pricy, but hey, I thought to myself, lots of illustrations! I wonder if it’s worth thinking about bringing back the hors-texte, in particular the context that is material and/or economic, as something that’s not part of the text or content as we usually define it, but that isn’t part of the context which we usually think of in discursive or semantic terms.

 

Reading and the Rearrangement of Desires, part 3 of 3

(Part 1, Part 2)

Now, when Spivak talks about the “uncoercive rearrangement of desires” in the boundary 2 piece, she’s opposing it most specifically to what she calls the “extreme violation of this responsibility…seen in groups such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which coercively rearrange desires until coercion seems identical with the will of the coerced” (93). But in between those two poles, there are plenty of other forms of coercion that don’t end in suicide bombing—and coercion is much easier to find than its opposite.

A less violent form of coercion might result in something like this:

…a sort of beggarly daydreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro tempore fixes, reflects, and transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrenness of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose.

This is Coleridge, in a footnote to chapter 3 of the Biographia Literaria, and he’s talking about what he calls “the devotees of the circulating libraries”—refusing to dignify their consumption of popular literature with the name of reading. Harsh? Well, yes. Compared to these “afflicted brains,” Madame Bovary looks like D. A. Miller.

Nearly two hundred years after the Biographia, the images have changed—though not as much as we might have expected. And this is, I think, part of why we need that uncoercive rearrangement of desires, even before we worry about not being suspicious enough. The affliction that Coleridge attributes to the “mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office” is, in a sense, involved in a soft—but still coercive—rearrangement of desires among those who don’t so much read as passively consume.

One potential model for the uncoercive rearrangement of desires might come as well from the Biographia—from that book’s more famous “willing suspension of disbelief.” As I’ve argued both in a conference paper (and examine at much greater length in an article that should be coming out this summer), it’s a mistake to see that “willing suspension of disbelief” as the same kind of uncritical consumption that Coleridge describes in that footnote—even though that’s what most people do with it. This is true of both popular and scholarly discourse. I came across several commentaries on Christabel, for instance, that use the “willing suspension of disbelief” as a figure for what needs to be overcome through the hermeneutics of suspicion. And I’m not sure that you can ever totally eliminate the risk that one will suspend one’s disbelief only to have one’s desires coercively rearranged. (Then again, reading like a dupe might actually be a start in the right direction.)

But a more full quotation of the passage where Coleridge introduces this phrase (and the OED gives him credit for inventing the usage, by the way) gives a more complicated picture. Coleridge’s poems of the supernatural were, in his words, an attempt “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” This isn’t critical reading as we understand it, but it’s also not fully uncritical, as suggested by Coleridge’s evocation of “human interest and a semblance of truth.” There’s a suggestion of a double movement here of receptivity and critical engagement and, I think, the implicit expectation that something will or may change as a result, that our minds will be enlarged in a way that they wouldn’t have been otherwise, that our desires have been rearranged in a way that makes us less open to coercion. In short, we end up wanting something more than a kill-time.

It’s of course an open question whether the rearrangement of desire can ever be uncoercive – even or especially within the context of humanities teaching. Ultimately, though, I don’t think our justifiable ethical concerns about the potential for coercion should mean that we simply allow our students to pass through our classes with their desires unreflected upon, as it were. We’re allowed to be right sometimes, to claim a kind of authority because of our years spent learning the craft of critical reading, of writing, of thinking, of contemplation – and, yes, because we decided to do this instead of something else. We don’t have to make a big deal about it – I do think Jean Howard was right to talk about the modest role of literature, etc. – but we’re allowed, indeed required, to value what we do

And that, ultimately, is why I’ve found this particular panel worth thinking about long after the MLA ended. It was so nice to spend an hour so in the company of people who believe that literature is important, that reading is important, that thinking is both pleasurable and powerful, that what we do is something other than “ruin” texts—and that all of this is crucially important even though we won’t agree about the details. And it makes me wonder whether we might be in a new Arnoldian moment—though it would be an Arnoldianism largely without the polarizing figure of Arnold himself. It’s not so much about going back to “the best that has been thought and said”—though I think that those who assume that “the best that has been thought and said” can only refer to a body of literature by dead, mostly male, mostly white, mostly upper-class set of authors (a kind of Harold Bloom-style western canon) betray a telling lack of imagination, the kind of complacency that Felski criticizes in her article.

I’m thinking more of the Arnold of “Literature and Science,” arguing to a group of American university students in the 1880s that they should continue to study Greek with as much urgency as science and engineering. There’s something quaint about that, of course, and, well, we kind of dropped the ball on the whole Greek thing. But it might still be worth thinking about what it might mean in 2010 to return to Arnold’s concluding words in this essay—and to interpret them as expansively, as open-endedly, as inclusively as possible:

We shall be brought back to [humane letters] by our wants and aspirations. And a poor humanist  may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their present favour with the public, to be far greater than his own, and still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science, and to give to ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and the need in him for beauty.

What would it look like to take this attitude into our work as we begin the spring semester?

 

Bhabha is my Homi

[You have no idea how long I've been waiting to be able to write that title. I fear this post, though, won't be as fun as I had hoped. Feel free to skip to Anne's posts; she's returned in style!]

 

Reading and the Rearrangement of Desires, part 2 of 3 (the short one)

(Part 1 here.)

Having some kind of term like the “uncoercive rearrangement of desires” seems to me to be a necessary antidote to the kinds of binaries that kept arising during the “WTLA?” panel. This is especially true as it relates to the panel’s discussion of Rita Felski’s 2009 Profession article, “After Suspicion.” Jonathan Culler and Jean Howard both invoked this article as an example of a kind of insufficiently critical reading, an encouragement of enchantment in the place of suspicion. Suffice it to say that Felski herself was in the audience and got the Q&A kicked off by saying, something to the effect of, “I teach literary theory. I don’t teach enchantment.” I took a look at “After Suspicion” a few days after the panel, and was surprised by how uncontroversial I found it—if anything, it seemed like a really important step in blending critical reading with what I guess we could call affective responses—while also interrogating those affective attachments to texts. I’m not yet sure I’m on board with everything she says—I admit, for instance, to feeling a certain inchoate resistance when I read about “a desire to build better bridges between theory and common sense” (31), but I think there’s something very valuable in stressing “the irreducible complexity of everyday structures of experience” (31) and I think this is what a lot of people not in literary fields would include under the rubric of “critical reading”—even though it’s not exactly what we  mean when we talk about critical reading.

The following passage from Felski gets at something important about this project:

To be sure, such approaches carry a modicum of risk. Some students will need reminding that their devotion to Jane Austen or their passion for Jonathan Frantzen [sic] is a puzzle for investigation, not a cause for self-congratulation. Phenomenology seeks to make the familiar newly surprising through the scrupulousness of its attention, exposing the strangeness of the self-evident. It calls not for complacency or confession but for strenuous reflection on how aesthetic devices speak to and help shape selves. (32)

…so, explain to me again how this isn’t critical reading, writ large? The non-complacency thing seems to be especially important here, an acknowledgement—at least an implicit one—that things change, that desires get rearranged in ways that are both coerced and uncoerced.

More broadly, though I’m not sure that we (at least those of us who don’t teach at Ivy League schools) can assume that all of our students are coming into literature classes with literary attachments in the first place—more and more I get the sense that people don’t know how to read even uncritically (or they have already chosen not to). At least in my experience, the real debate isn’t between a narrowly-defined critical reading and its others but between reading and consumption. Consumption here would designate something far less engaged than reading for the plot or reading because you identify with the main character—it’s something much more cursory, sometimes more purely utilitarian….

 

Reading and the Rearrangement of Desires: Belated Reflections on “Why Teach Literature Anyway?” (part 1 of 3)

So it turns out that – shockingly – sunshine and 85-degree temperatures are not entirely conductive to extensive nineteenth century blogging. (The fact that the only reliable internet access I had in Rincón was at bars probably didn’t help either.) And, I have to admit, that I rather enjoyed indulging in a kind of blissful nullity – at least for a few days – and letting my brain relax after the crush of the semester and the MLA whirlwind. Now, though, it’s back to work. I start teaching again on the 26^th and have a big, important fellowship application due on February 1, which I’m taking as the occasion and impetus to pretty extensively revise my original dissertation prospectus, which, though much beloved by the readers within my department, was not exactly a funding magnet last spring. On a less mercenary level, I do also think it’s time to reassess the work that I’ve been doing and to rearticulate some initial assumptions and ideas. As it turns out, some of the things that I thought were going to be super-important when I first wrote the thing in Fall ’08 turned out to be the things that were holding me back by the summer of 2009, and some of my instincts seemed to be borne out in the kinds of conversations I was having at MLA. And all of this, in my mind, is justifying the revision. But that’s actually another post (though it’s not unrelated to this one).

All of this started as an attempt to make good on my promise for a blog post-mortem on the “Why Teach Literature Anyway?” panel, a way to get down whatever thoughts I had that survived my vacation. It got a bit longer, verging on conference-paper length, even in comparison to my usually lengthy posts. But it’s not at all as coherent as a conference paper would be – a point that I want to stress before I go any further in putting all these words out into the world. I should also say that the relationship between my post and the actual panel fluctuates quite a bit here, and I may have latched onto some minor points and taken things in contexts other than the ones in which they were intended.

In the end, I decided to break this up into three not-entirely-arbitrary sections. I guess you could call this first one the overview of the issues that seemed most resonant to me. In the second, I think about the panel’s relationship to Rita Felski’s “After Suspicion” piece in Profession, and in the third section, I finally get around to talking about two of my favorite topics from the Long 19th Century. But, this should suffice for tonight.

—

One of the things I reread in the brief but heady interlude between MLA and my vacation was Gayatri Spivak’s “Terror: A Speech After 9-11” (boundary 2 31.2 [2004]). At the very beginning of that piece, Spivak defines the mission of the humanities as “a persistent attempt at an uncoercive rearrangement of desires, through teaching reading” (81). That statement has a lot of affinities with what people on the “Why Teach Literature” panel—especially Jean Howard—were saying, although I wouldn’t exactly claim they were saying the same thing. I think we all agree on the importance of critical reading, particularly at a time when there are so many incentives for uncritical reading, when the public sphere, as Howard mentioned in her talk,  has been actively manipulated to create “the conditions under which stupidity arises.” While the idea of “slow reading” as a craft comparable to the discourse of “slow food” is not entirely unproblematic, I do think it has a lot of merit, and in my short career as a teacher (not of literature per se, of course, though I’d argue that I am teaching a kind of literary relation to texts more generally), I’ve always considered it to be my responsibility to encourage my students to slow down and ask questions about how the texts they read (again, literary or not) are working to produce a certain effect – and this attitude has arisen both from a sense of present political responsibility and from the work I do in Victorian literature. So, okay, reading – critical reading, the reading we learn in the humanities, etc. – we probably have to work out the details, but we can at least agree in principle that this is a laudable goal.

This idea of “the uncoercive rearrangement of desires” seems to bear a more complicated relationship to what went on in the “WTLA?” panel. (I should be clear, by the way, that unless I completely zoned out when it happened, no one on this panel invoked Spivak’s piece – I was inspired to reread it because of a paper at a panel on ethics and aesthetics in British Romanticism.) Many different answers were proposed to the “WTLA?” question – as Mia’s description below shows, some of these answers were rather blunt. But the answers that are most resonant for me have to do with literature’s role in providing the “genetic conditions” (a term that Wai-Chee Dimock used in her talk) for broad, thoughtful critical engagement with the world even in non-literary contexts and with the idea that this kind of reading, this mental engagement, this complexity is enjoyable. All of which probably means that at some point my desires got rearranged, so that I became a subject that shared a certain set of values. In my case, then, the teaching of literature could be said to have “worked” on some level.

Or something. It’s not that easy, of course, and no one on the panel came out exactly to say that we teach literature in order to attempt to effect the uncoercive rearrangement of desire in our students or in others. There’s something disturbingly intimate, fraught, risky, about putting it in those terms—not the least because Spivak does use that word “attempt”—marking the possibility that coercion may still occur even when we’re trying not to do it. And, of course, plenty of people have made arguments over the last thirty or forty years that what we consider to be literary texts are themselves engaged in coercive or ideological projects (intentionally or otherwise)—and this is why we need something like the “hermeneutics of suspicion” to help us stay on our guard, even if it means that we have to go into the disenchantment or demolition business every now and then. (Which is no doubt why I’ve often been accused by dates of “ruining” literature simply by being in graduate school for English literature and thinking that maybe that Jacky Derrida guy wasn’t a complete charlatan.)

But I do think that idea of rearrangement is interesting – in part, because it’s been helping me think through what feels in many ways like a false assumption—the idea that “critical” and reparative or reflective reading are naturally opposed. I guess this just has almost never been my experience of reading literature.

I’ve been lucky, of course, since some of this was  undoubtedly the result of having had incredibly conscientious teachers myself. And I’m sure that to some extent I don’t feel the same tension among different kinds of reading because back in the heyday of the hermeneutics of suspicion, when we were learning about all the different ways that we had to be on guard around literature, lest it interpellate or infect us with ideology, I was roller-skating around a suburban subdivision while reading Baby-Sitters’ Club books. But maybe that’s a good image for what I’m getting at here: it’s possible to do more than one thing at once when you read. (And I still have the scars from scraped knees to prove it!)

With all that being said, one of the reasons I do what I do and have always done what I’ve done is that I really do believe that critical reading can make texts more enjoyable, sometimes even more absorbing and interesting. My time as a student of literature (or, more accurately, my time as a student of the humanities and of theory) has certainly changed the way I read texts and occasionally, I suppose, has interrupted a previously uninterrogated experience, has made a fully uncritical absorption more difficult and probably impossible at times. But that may not just be a result of critical reading—it’s also what we used to call growing up. To the extent that this has been a textual experience, I would say that the texts that matter most to me (personally, professionally, aesthetically) have stood up to whatever slings and arrows that my academic life has thrown at them. That’s not to say that they’ve remained impervious, only that the practice of critical reading has opened up the text rather than shut it down.

 

Good Grief, Pearl Buck

After therapy, I head over to Bluestockings, New York’s independent activist, feminist, queer, trans friendly bookstore for some coffee, vegan snackies, and orals list reading. There’s not much room for seating–4 tables–so most of the time you have to share your table with other like-minded people. This week, I sat down across from some Bright Sexy Asian Girl. While getting settled, I gave her book the old once-over. She was reading Chantal Mouffe. Then it struck me that the orals book I was reading was maybe the most embarrassing book imaginable in that context: Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. I couldn’t help snickering as I read about about the starving Chinese peasants.
I was going to write something about how TGE is More Complicated Than You Might Think, but I’m tired.

 

I’d Rather Be a Vulgar Marxist than a Cyborg Goddess

I really struggle and flail around a lot when I try to explain the rationale between my poco list, which encompasses globalization and the “cultural turn.” What’s this cultural turn I speak of? I guess the easy way to put it is the death of Vulgar Marxism! (Or, presumably, the nascence of Marxism as a potential vulgarity among Marxians…) VM, as I understand it, considers the economic factor as the prime determinant “in the final analysis,” as the “base” upon which the “superstructure” of all the other epiphenomena like gender relations, behaviour, religion, etc. rest. The cultural turn brought culture and language to the fore–and I guess where my weird obsession with this thing is, is that I think that in practice (as in, what do undergrads learn?) if not in theory, culture has supplanted economics as the base, and economics relegated to the superstructure, if it’s discussed at all. How does this intersect with postcolonialism? I wonder if the three Posts–postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism–are part and parcel of this perplexing passage. With postmodernism, you get cultural studies–pop culture as an object of artistic and academic exploration. With poststructuralism, you get a linguistic turn that’s more or less coextensive with the cultural turn–it’s Language constructing Culture and vice versa, rather than language as an expression of Structure. With postcolonialism, you get the powerful notion of cultural imperialism and cultural hegemony, and, at the end of the century, cultural hybridity.
Where my own interest enters the picture, is that while a vulgar culturalism (respecting other cultures, the importance of one’s roots) seems to have taken hold, nobody (i.e. students) wants to talk about economic exploitation, and we’re really lacking the really subtle class analyses of folks like C. L. R. James and Raymond Williams. To say nothing of a fairly widespread unawareness of issues of neoliberalism and financialization among humanists, and liberals in general.
So this is what’s going on in the twentieth century. What’s up with the nineteenth? That’s what Culture and Anomie and Primitive Culture and fucking Hegel are doing on my list.

 

Some Presentism

Something that’s been at the back of my mind as I’ve been going through these old periodicals is, what would a nutty academic in the year 2160 think about our world if she were to do a similar project to mine? First of all, I’m glad I’m not her! I couldn’t imagine doing a representative cross-section of non-newspaper periodicals for our current moment, let alone all the other forms of media we’ve got. Thinking about circulation numbers–what magazine would have the largest circulation today? Would the researcher include things like Maxim? Don Diva? Is Us Weekly more representative than Harper’s? Readership is a lot more fragmented and segregated in the twenty-first century, and if something’s “general-interest,” that probably means it’s something that white people are interested in.
So, basically, I’m wondering if my methodology, which has been taking circulation figures into account might be potentially misleading. Yes, tons of people read the Family Herald, but tons of people read supermarket celebrity magazines too. If our brave twenty-second century scholar were to flip through the pages of Us Weekly, would that be getting a more representative picture of our society? Yes she would–and it’s a weird feeling for me, since she might have a more comprehensive understanding of American culture in 2010 than I would. (Well, that’s not too hard to imagine, since I only find out about stuff that happens in New York City if it makes it across the pond to the Guardian.) Still, I think the boundaries were less rigid between the periodical strata. The London Journal, for example, always included bad jokes from Punch. People’s and Howitt’s Journal took stuff from Athenaeum. Eliza Cook’s Journal quotes from the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s. It’s very much a semipermeable membrane, though. The monthlies and quarterlies considered the more humble, much more widely read publications (or bought, at least) beneath their notice. I guess the analogy would be, let’s say the New York Times was widely and respectfully quoted by Fox News and talk radio. On the other hand, we might know of those more popular media outlets, but we wouldn’t even bother fighting the crap that O’Reilly and Beck and Limbaugh pollute the airwaves with. Or–it would reflect the amount of coverage of people-of-colour-targeted media within the mainstream (i.e. white) news.