More money quotes from Fred

This, from “Transformations of the Image,” a talk presented in Venezuela in 1995:

[I]n this new stage the very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leaisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the culture of the image; the utopian space of the Sartrean reversal, the Foucauldian heterotopias of the unclassed and unclassifiable, all have been triumphantly penetrated and colonized, the authentic and the unsaid, in-vu, non-dit, inexpressible, alike, fully translated into the visible and the culturally familiar. (111)

Holy magisterial prose, batman! Making such a claim in our post red-state/blue-state, Anglo-America vs. the rest of the world, Asian tiger world seems far too simplistic, but what’s interesting to me is that “culture,” understood in an aesthetic sense, becomes equated to “culture” in the anthropological sense. And–if it is “the culture of the image” which has colonized “social space” to saturation point, can the theorist’s peeking into “the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian” do anything but replicate that act of colonization? But really, I’ve a lot of sympathy with this quote.

 

Beginning to rationalize things…

Back in the day at the GC, people had to write rationales for their orals lists, a practice which has since been deprecated. Still, as Taylor recommended, it’s not a bad idea to do one for yourself to guide you through reading and notetaking (notetaking?). So I started doing one, and realized that it could be quite long, so why not brain dump a few thousand words for each list and then condense things later if need be? More bullet points will follow in the coming weeks!

(I’m making these more official orals lists into pages under my project page.)

Temporality and the Victorian Novel

In this list, I aim to explore the complex ways in which Victorians imagined their present moment, on an individual, social, national, imperial, and global scale. I’ll take the pairing of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present as a particularly relevant heuristic into Victorian temporality:

• First, it references the “Condition of England” debates which might be considered as inaugural of the Victorian period. Obviously, these debates are about sweeping socio-economic changes in the present moment, but I’d say that that present moment was more imagined as the result of past social change than ongoing social change (i.e. more like the present perfect tense than the present progressive tense). Industrial novels on my list are often set in the past: Shirley is set in 1812-1815 during the Napoleonic wars; Michael Armstrong is set in the 1820s and 1830s; Mary Barton is set in the 1830s and 1840s;  Hard Times seems to be set in a more recent past, but its full title is Hard Times for These Times, recalling Past and Present (Carlyle is the dedicatee).
• It’s because of this nearer industrializing past that the more remote past becomes a source of alterity. There’s no shortage of Victorian novels set before the birth of their authors, yet which aren’t considered historical novels : Wuthering Heights, Shirley, Adam Bede (not on list), Vanity Fair (not on list)–Little Dorrit and The Mill on the Floss are also set several decades in the past. This is a past that’s recoverable, which can be rendered in a nostalgic light, which can be posited as an origin, rendered on a continuum with the present. Beyond this is a break. The Young England movement and Victorian medievalism posited the middle ages as completely alien to Victorian modernity, and it was this rupture that provided the force of Carlyle’s critique. On the other hand, the incongruity of this more distant past is exploited for comic purposes in Barchester Towers, with Miss Thorne’s quintains and other exagerrated Toryisms.
• Perhaps this favoring of past settings is characteristic of Victorian realism. It’s only the recent-ish past that can be posited as fully known, fully knowable, capable of being made the object of an omniscient gaze. Those genres which challenge the norms of realist fiction, Sensation novels and New Woman novels, tend to be set in the present moment, after all.
• Space plays a big role in conceptualizing the past and the present, of course–the country and the city, predominantly. Raymond Williams’ point, though, is that it’s not so much that the city represents the tumultuous present and the country some untouched idealized past, and that that’s a wishful projection (duh), but that this trope that occurs throughout pretty much the entire history of English literature responds to actual historical changes at the time of writing that critics need to recover. Pastoral scenes figure prominently in industrial novels, most notoriously in the opening to Mary Barton. Michael Armstrong’s formative years after running away from Deep Valley Mill are spent in a literally pastoral environment straight out of Wordsworth. There’s less of a yearning for the country in Hard Times and Shirley–but then, there’s scarcely any “industry” in those novels either. Absent from all of those is any acknowledgment of mass migrations from the country to the city, or to the industrialization of the countryside (well, there’s some in Shirley, but it’s all to make us sympathetic to the provincial capitalist). In Oliver Twist, it’s particularly ironic when Oliver’s recovering in the countryside with the Brownlow–the orphanage was in the countryside, after all.
• It’s interesting to think about the country/city divide with reference to Fabian’s Time and the Other. On the one hand, there’s a definite sense of allochrony–the time of the city (artificial, quantified) isn’t the time of the country (natural, organic). But could you say that there’s a “denial of coevalness”? Yes, if you’re talking about the rural labourer–and when you get to Hardy, Williams points out, that temporal split is carried within the educated “rustic.” However, does not the dance between country and city make it possible to deny even the denial of coevalness between England and non-Western peoples? (I’d say “non-Western peoples” as opposed to Empire since it’s theimplication that the people from “Borrioboula-Gha” have absolutely no connection to Britain that motivates the Mrs Jellyby caricature.) In industrial novels, a common trope is saying something along the lines of how compassionate the English are for the sufferings of others (especially slaves in America) while white people in their own country are living in even worse conditions. There’s a heterogeneity of time within Britain which produces a homogeneity of time in the rest of the world.

 

More math than any sane Victorianist would ever want…

This is in response to Anne’s comment, which is one of the longest comments you’ll ever see on the interwebs. Since this will  be longer, and will involve mathematical symbols, I’ll do it in a post.
I’m not sure about the implications for the dynamical sublime vs. the mathematical sublime, or for narrative theory, but maybe if I explain the math more clearly, you’ll get some ideas, Anne?
About infinity. The infinities involved in this discussions have to with the size of a set (its cardinality, rather than an intuitive idea of infinity as a really big number. Consider the graph of the function f(x)=1/x that’s pictured at the right. Intuitively, we can say that f(x) approaches plus infinity as it approaches 0 from the right, and it approaches negative infinity as it approaches 0 from the left. There’s a way to rigorously define that notion of infinity, but that’s not the kind of infinity we’re talking about. A set is a collection of anything. You could think of the set of natural numbers ={1,2,3,…}, or some set called V that’s the set of every Victorianist that ever lived, or a set of the seven days of the week. If it’s a finite set, then its cardinality is straightforward. It would be 7 for the set of the seven days. V is a much “larger” set, but it’s still a finite number. You probably wouldn’t be able to give an exact number for its size, but you could put an upper bound on it. (It must be less than a billion, since there haven’t been a billion academic scholars of any particular variety.) You couldn’t put an upper bound on the size of , though. (Suppose you could: if somebody tells you the size of is n, you could say oh, but what about the set {1,2,3,…,n+1}, the size of that set is bigger than n, and is bigger than that.) So what do you do for talking about the size of infinite sets?

This is where Levinson’s discussion of “matching” comes into play. Mathematicians say that two sets have the same cardinality if there exists a bijection between the two sets. Here’s the definition from wiki:

In mathematics, a bijection, or a bijective function is a function f from a set X to a set Y with the property that, for every y in Y, there is exactly one x in X such that f(x) = y and no unmapped element exists in either X or Y.

As an example, say X is the set of natural numbers {1,2,3,…}, and Y is the set of even numbers {2,4,6,…}. If f is a function from X to Y is defined as f(x)=2x, f is a bijection, since for every even number (42, for example), there’s only one natural number such that f(x) is that number (21, and nothing else). In addition, every natural number can be doubled, and every even number can be halved, so there are no unmapped elements in either X or Y. In this sense, the set of natural numbers and the set of even numbers are the same “size” (i.e. cardinality). But what about the set of real numbers ?

Emily asked me what they are, and they’re incredibly hard to define. They weren’t defined rigorously until our favourite century! (The whole field of calculus wasn’t rigorously defined until C19). Intuitively, you can think of them as the set of rational numbers (any number that can be put into the form p/q, where p and q are integers) , joined up with the set of irrational numbers, which are numbers that, when you put them into decimal form, don’t repeat (the square root of 2, π [the proof that π is irrational incredibly complicated--it took three lectures after a whole year of intense math just to outline the proof]). There doesn’t exist a bijection between and . There doesn’t exist a bijection between and the set of reals between 0 and 1 either. In that sense, the infinity that’s “between 1 and 2″ is “bigger” than the set of natural numbers.

However! The set of rational numbers does have the same cardinality as . There is a bijection between the two sets. Don’t ask me what that bijection is, but you can imagine a bijection between and the rational numbers that are between 0 and 1. For example, define g which is a function that maps onto the interval of between 0 and 1 as follows:

g(1)=0
g(2)=1
g(3)=1/2
g(4)=1/3
g(5)=2/3
g(6)=1/4
g(7)=3/4
g(8)=1/5
…

Okay, so that’s not a definition of g that would make mathematicians happy, and I’m not going to prove that it’s a bijection, but you get the idea.

This is where the whole “density” thing gets weird, and why I wanted to get some real math into the picture. Because, mathematically speaking, the rational numbers between 0 and 1 (call this set R) are just as “dense” as the irrational numbers between 0 and 1 (call this set S). Both R and S are considered dense sets in X, where X are the real numbers between 0 and 1. Basically that means that, for whatever element of X that you choose, you can get as close as you would ever want to. (For example, take the square root of 1/2. If you picked some number that’s super-tiny, but not 0, no matter what, you could find a rational number [infinitely many!] between the square root of 1/2 and the square root of 1/2 plus that super-tiny number.) So if you think of S as X with infinitely many “holes” in it, that’s still uncountably infinite, so “bigger” than (i.e. there is no bijection between S and ).

Now, I think this is still in the realm of the mathematical sublime, but it’s still cool. For any set, the power set of it is the set that’s made up of all of its subsets. (For example, the power set of the set of Victorianists would include the set of myself, the set of myself plus Anne, the set of all the Victorianists at the Grad Center,the set of all Victorianists whose last name begins with Y, the set of all Victorianists who aren’t white…) If you take the power set of , denoted P(), (which would include {1,2,3}, {123}, the even numbers, the odd numbers, the prime numbers, the prime numbers which have at least 200 digits, etc.), there’s no bijection between that and . I don’t think after all those semesters of math I took I ever got there, but you can prove that P() is the same size as (i.e. there exists a bijection connecting the two). But then what about P()? That turns out to be “bigger” than . And you can take the power set of that again. And again. And again….

 

Money Quotes from Fred

Jameson, that is.
This is from “Marxism and Postmodernism,” 3rd essay in The Cultural Turn (1998):

[Mike] Featherstone [in Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique] thinks that ‘postmodernism’ on my use is a specifically cultural category: it is not, and was rather for better and for worse designed to name a ‘mode of production’ in which cultural production finds a specific functional place, and whose symptomatology is in my work mainly drawn from culture (this is no doubt the source of the confusion [!]). (44-45)

Gotcha. Postmodernism isn’t a cultural category, but its symptoms, at least in your work, are found in culture. But where else can symptoms be found?

Something is lost when an emphasis on power and domination tends to obliterate the displacement, which made up the originality of Marxism, towards the economic system, the structure of the mode of production, and exploitation as such. Once again, matters of power and domination are articulated on a different level from those systemic ones, and no advances are gained by staging the complementary analyses as an irreconcilable opposition, unless the motive is to produce a new ideology (in the tradition, it bears the time-honoured name of anarchism), in which case other kinds of lines are drawn and one argues the matter differently.

Yeah. FTW. This is one of the many reasons I’ve become fed up with the field of queer theory this decade (not that I know much about it). Of course, adherents would say that they are producing a new ideology. But can somebody please tell me how “destabilizing the gender binary” or whatever they’re calling it these days can do anything but fit snugly into the cultural logic of late capitalism?

 

Processing numbers and things

CUNY’s hosting this year’s ICR, and I was lucky enough to catch some great talks, including one by our hopefully-not-erstwhile member Leila Walker on Opium-Eater, bodies, selves, and Kant. This post will be my attempt to jot down some thoughts flowing from Marjorie Levinson’s mindblowing keynote, retitled “On Being Numerous,” from the program’s “Clouds and Crowds, Solitude and Society: Revisiting Romantic Lyric.” (Anne too has been majorly fangirling; hopefully she’ll be able to correct/expand my notes.)
Levinson’s talk was based on a reading of “I wandered as lonely as a cloud” outlining a “rabbit” interpretation against the more standard (and stronger! she admitted during Q&A) “duck” interpretation. The “duck” reading works on the model of the Classical episteme outlined by Foucault in The Order of Things, the “rabbit” reading according to the Renaissance episteme. (Or the other way round–I’m relying on my memory.) Except instead of focusing on epistemology, she focused on ontology. There followed a dizzying sequence of possible hermeneutic approaches which I won’t attempt to reproduce, but all of which work under the rabbit paradigm. Foucault’s Classical episteme operates by means of representation. Cloud, daffodils, stars, the speaker, they’re all representations.
Representation’s most “significant” (haha) function, Levinson pointed out, is not to assign a signifier to some readily cognizable signified, but to have that signifier stand for something which can only be cognized as a representation. Kant’s mathematical sublime served as one illustration, the sublime (or, in mathematics, the infinite) figuring as the representation of a failure in representation. The end-product of this representation, though, is a way of being-singular.
The regime of resemblance, on the other hand, captures an ontics of being-numerous. Nothing exists in itself, but only in resemblance to other things (an arbitrarily large set of other things)–through proximity, emulation, analogy, and something I’m not remembering. Somewhere Spinoza and Deleuze/Guattari make their way in there. Not to mention the granddaddy of modern set theory, Georg Cantor.
For me, I’m thinking about all of this in relation to postcolonialism. Namely, is there a way for postcolonial thought to escape the regime of representations? The “cultural turn” that I’m trying to track, I’ve realized, doesn’t so much take the anthropological notion of “culture” as its basis (culture as single, complex whole; works through symbols; must be analyzed through “thick description”), but emphasizes the importance of representations. Empire, colony, metropole, colonizer, colonized–hegemony, resistance, and hybridity, the mainstays of poco thought, work through representation.
What if, though, instead of thinking of the representations of beings, we thought about resemblances? I don’t, as yet, have any idea what that means or would mean. I just picked up Hardt and Negri’s Empire, looking for a Deleuzian take, and here they are on ontology:

[O]ntology is not an abstract science. It involves the conceptual recognition of the production and reproduction of being and thus the recognition that political reality is constituted by the movement of desire and the practical realization of labour as value. The spatial dimensions of ontology today is demonstrated through the multitude’s concrete processes of the globalization, or really the making common, of desire for human community.

One of my problems with Empire is that the authors’ invocation of the “multitudes” just seems so detached from the material, lived conditions of anybody who’s not a professional theorist, whether they’re subalterns, cubicle critters, adjunct labour, refugees, factory workers, whatever. Perhaps the way for me to engage with their work, is to save the concept of the multitude but to apply it to “individuals.” Thinking in terms of being-multitudinous.

 

Thomas F—ing Carlyle…

…is about as annoying as I had feared. Still, there’s an interesting bit on China in Past and Present:

Or let us give a glance at China. Our new friend, the Emperor there, is Pontiff of three hundred million men; who do all live and work, these many centuries now; authentically patronised by Heaven so far; and therefore must have some ‘religion’ of a kind. T his Emperor-Pontiff has, in fact, a religious belief of certain Laws of Heaven; observes, with a religious rigour, his ‘three thousand punctualities,’ given out by men of insight, some sixty generations since, as a legible transcript of the same,– the Heavens do seem to say, not totally an incorrect one. He has not much of a ritual, this Pontiff-Emperor; believes, it is likest, with the old Monks, that ‘Labour is Worship.’ His most public Act of Worship, it appears, is the drawing solemnly at a certain day, on the green bosom of our Mother Earth, when the Heavens, after dead black winter, have again with their vernal radiances awakened her, a distinct red Furrow with the Plough,– signal that all the Ploughs of China are to begin ploughing and worshipping! It is notable enough. He, in sight of the Seen and Unseen Powers, draws his distinct red Furrow there; saying, and praying, in mute symbolism, so many most eloquent things!

If you ask this Pontiff, “Who made him? What is to become of him and us?” he maintains a dignified reserve; waves his hand and pontiff-eyes over the unfathomable deep of Heaven, the ‘Tsien,’ the azure kingdoms of Infinitude; as if asking, “is it doubtful that we are right well made? Can aught that is wrong become of us?”–He and his three hundred millions (it is their chief ‘punctuality’) visit yearly the Tombs of their Fathers; each man the Tomb of his Father and his Mother: alone there, in silence, with what of ‘worship’ or of other thought there may be, pauses solemnly each man; the divine Skies all silent over him; the divine Graves, and this divinest Grave, all silent under him; the pulsings of his own soul, if he have any soul, alone audible. Truly it may be a kind of worship! Truly, if a man cannot get some glimpse into the Eternities, looking through this portal,– through what other need he try it?

Our friend the Pontiff-Emperor permits cheerfully, though with contempt, all manner of Buddhists, Bonzes, Talapoins and such like, to build brick Temples, on the voluntary principle; to worship with what of chantings, paper-lanterns and tumultuous brayings, pleases them; and make night hideous, since they find some comfort in so doing. Cheerfully, though with contempt. He is a wiser Pontiff than many persons think! He is as yet the one Chief Potentate or Priest in this Earth who has made a distinct systematic attempt at what we call the ultimate result of all religion, ‘Practical Hero-worship:’ he does incessantly, with true anxiety, in such way as he can, search and sift (it would appear) his whole enormous population for the Wisest born among them; by which Wisest, as by born Kings, these three hundred million men are governed. The Heavens, to a certain extent, do appear to countenance him. These three hundred millions actually make porcelain, souchong tea, with innumerable other things; and fight, under Heaven’s flag, against Necessity;–and have fewer Seven-Years Wars, Thirty-Years Wars, French-Revolution Wars, and infernal fightings with each other, than certain millions elsewhere have!

Which passage follows his advice to factory operatives to wash themselves.

 

The three before the three

Césaire, Memmi, Fanon vs. Said, Spivak, Bhabha

In my ever-shifting reframing of the po-co list, my latest title is ‘Post-colonialism, Globalization, and the Cultural Turn.’ The idea is to look at po-co theory from a kind of history of ideas perspective, thinking about postcolonial thought in terms of this decades-long ‘cultural turn’ which may, I wonder, be coming to an end? By ‘cultural turn,’ I mean work during the post-war and decolonization era that argued that politically engaged work should engage with culture at least as much as economics. And then, with the rise and declawing of cultural studies, the glossing over of class, labour, and economic issues.

I’ve only gotten through two of the three before the three, but I’ve already started to forget the first one, for which I failed to take any notes at all. Oops. I’ll only talk about C and M here.

An embarrassing admission: I hadn’t heard about Albert Memmi before noticing his name on a lot of poco lists. Rather than blaming myself though ,  I’ll blame it on an Anglo-American structural bias (i.e. limited syllabus space, disciplinary boundaries) against French work that’s not Theory with a big T. Still, though it makes a difference to think about Fanon as part of a movement, and to think of C as one of the founders of postcolonial theory instead of the negritude dude (okay, I know, I really should have known that).

Alrighty, so the cultural turn and Césaire and Memmi. Discourse on Colonialism is all about decadence. It begins,

A civilization that proves  incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

Civilization is pretty much synonymous with culture here, and there’s nothing necessarily economic about those ‘problems.’ Nevertheless, it’s clearly Marxist in orientation, with constant reference to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat:

It is a fact: the nation is a bourgeois phenomenon. (57)

There’s the by now familiar idea that colonization works by dehumanization or “thingification” (21). What’s most indicative of the cultural turn is this fantastic (and very Victorian) passage:

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies–loftily, lucidly, consistently–not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academicians, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in divers ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress–even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress–all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. (33-34)

(Of course, one of the reasons this stuck out to me is my role as an academician, while not wreathed in dollars to the extent as somebody who blows up the world economy, still gets paid in first-world currency, who is certainly quasi-functioning in the “sordid division of labor.”)

Memmi. He’s a lot more careful about the hierarchy within the colonized (in part to his own Jewish identity, as he explains). In terms of thinking about the difference between the colonial model and the globalization model, the idea of “linguistic dualism” is important:

The colonized is saved from illiteracy only to fall into linguistic dualism. This happens only if he is lucky, since most of the colonized will never have the good fortune to suffer the tortures of colonial bilingualism. They will never have anything but their native tongue; that is, a tongue which is neither written nor read, permitting only uncertain and poor oral development.

Granted, small groups of academicians persist in developing the language of their people, perpetuating it through scholarly pursuits into the splendors of the past. But its subtle forms bear no relationship to everyday life and have become obscure to the man on the street. The colonized considers those venerable scholars relics and thinks of them as sleepwalkers who are living in an old dream.

…

Possession of two languages is not merely a matter of having two tools, but actually means participation in two psychical and cultural realms. Here, the two worlds symbolized and conveyed by the two tongues are in conflict; they are those of the colonizer and the colonized. (106-107)

I don’t feel like typing up yet another huge block quote, and it’s getting late, but the part a few pages before about the “refuge value” of family and religion is really important.

 

One last (Browning-related) thing

(Yes, I know. I don’t blog for like 2 1/2 months and now I won’t shut up. But bear with me.)

To read Browning he must exert himself, but he will exert himself to some purpose. If he finds the meaning difficult of access, it is always worth his effort — if he has to dive deep, “he rises with his pearl.”

This comment comes from George Eliot’s review of Men and Women that was published in the Westminster Review. (Thanks, Norton editors!) The observation that Browning’s work is difficult but rewards thought is hardly exclusive to Eliot. In fact, it’s more or less a commonplace about Browning and, I think we could see with fairly little effort how this kind of attitude produces on the one hand the Browning Societies of the 1880s and — in a much more nuanced, scholarly context, something like Donald Hair’s discussion of emblems in Robert Browning’s Language (1999) — the idea is basically that you have to work your way through the poem to find a  meaning that could not have been directly stated otherwise, engaging in an act of interpretation that is also, Hair argues, the process of saving one’s soul as far as Browning is concerned.

I am obviously on board with the idea that careful reading of poetry (or any literary text — or not-necessarily-literary text — for that matter) should be rewarding. But that’s different, I think, than saying that careful reading should be rewarded. A hair-splitting difference? Perhaps. But it helps me express something that bothers me about Eliot’s image of the reading of poetry as diving for a pearl — and, more than that, the implication that if you apply the correct, careful reading practices, you cannot help but come back with the pearl of meaning at the center of the poem. And as with Hair’s discussion of emblems and riddles, this seems to imply that there are right answers when it comes to these kinds of poems, even if we are meant to value the dive as much as or more than the pearl or the process of working out the riddle as much as or more highly than the answer to that riddle.

And I find myself wanting more, wanting something more uncertain, more contingent. This is the approach I’ve been trying to take in my reading of “An Epistle” for the last six months, but the poem does seem kind of impervious, at a certain level, to any kind of “new” reading — whether one applies New Criticism, historicism, deconstruction, Bakhtin, the best anyone seems to be able to do is come up with a slightly different version of the same story about faith and skepticism struggling with each other. Different approaches make it possible to notice different aspects of that struggle or read it in a slightly different way, but no amount of critical theory is going to be able to make the poem not be about Jesus, for instance. And this may be why, the last time I checked the MLA database, the last time anyone published an article on “An Epistle” was 1993.

It’s not that I think “An Epistle” is somehow not about the things that it is very obviously about. But I feel like there’s more to be done, that the working out of the riddle or the canonical Victorian religious doubt narrative may not actually be the most important thing to do. I hope, of course, that I can make this case from the poem — and I’m pretty sure that I can and will by December. But I’m beginning to see that a lot of this has to do with my resistance to the pearl-diving model of reading poetry, where we work hard and are sure to find a meaning. Perhaps what really needs to be interrogated here is something about the language of reading poetry — of what it means, for example, to “get something out of” a poem. It’s a discourse that we take for granted — one that I certainly do, particularly when trying to make the case for close reading to undergraduates — but it may be more difficult to do this if we’re going to take seriously the performative aspect of Victorian poetry, the whole “poetry as constitutive cultural event” school of thought. And I don’t think it’s a matter of shifting our attention from the pearl to the dive, but rather rethinking the metaphor entirely and changing the way we think about reading poetry. Part of the reason why I keep going back to Coleridge’s “poetic faith” is that it seems to imply a certain kind of contingency — the possibility and the threat not just of something overwhelming happening, but the equally and perhaps more terrifying (if we believe Lyotard) possibility of nothing happening. (Those of you who remember my ESA paper from March may recall that Peter only starts to sink *after* his faith has carried him to Jesus….)

I don’t know where I’m going with this at the moment, except towards another ginormous blog post. But at least now you have a sense of what I’m dealing with. And I’d be interested to know if anything of the foregoing seems like it might be valuable….

 

News from Nowhere, though not in a William Morris utopian sense

Once upon a time there was a Victorianist with a dream and that dream was to selectively blog her way through The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, rescuing the obscure and occasionally poking fun at the canonical on a more or less weekly basis.

So, um…hi, blog. Sorry that I’ve been so quiet. The sad fact of the matter is that I’ve been busy, but busy mostly with being things other than a Victorianist (dream-inspired or otherwise). But I mean, it’s not like I have an MLA paper on Robert Browning to give in two months or anything….

Oh, wait. Yeah. Browning. Sigh.

I circumlocute. Among the things I’ve had the opportunity to learn about myself so far this semester is the rather dismal fact that my attention span is about 12 minutes. On a good day.

What you’re going to get from me in this post is something between an accounting of what it is I’ve been doing lately and a kind cri de coeur from the land of ABD (hence the News from a non-utopian Nowhere). All joking aside, I’m in a punishingly hard semester in terms of teaching and other work obligations — 8 a.m. classes and 12-hour days, with weeks punctuated by meetings that take me an hour to get to. Though I’m not really complaining — a lot of what I’m doing is at least intermittently satisfying, I’ve managed to take the advice my adviser gave me (in slightly stronger language) a couple of department parties ago with regards to not messing up my personal life, and I think I’ve actually managed to change some of my working and general life habits to match the reality of my work and life rather than hoping that reality will somehow bend to accommodate me. In a weird (and probably quasi-Victorian) way, I’m almost happy. And all of this is, I think, going to make me much better off in the long run, both in material terms (if nothing else, this is the first year I’ll make more  money than I did seven years ago as the office manager of a small nonprofit that shall remain nameless in Chicago) and in the lasting changes to my work habits, mindfulness, and focus.

In the meantime, though, I’ve also come to feel a definite narrowing in my intellectual life. It feels too much like my writing is being pushed to the margins, that I’m working twelve hour days on teaching and other stuff so that I can maybe sit down with my computer for two or three hours. Which is sort of a manifestation or symptom of what might be a kind of identity crisis for me — part of why I’ve been struggling lately is that I always seem to be losing my grip on my “scholarly” identity and finding myself scrambling to reassemble it. My scholarship and my teaching don’t overlap very much right now — though I am teaching a mini-unit on De Profundis, it’s still a composition course and even the way I teach Wilde is a bit of a relic from an earlier version of my scholarly self (circa 2007-08 or so) — and the same goes for my other job, which is a gig in Writing Across the Curriculum where I’m partnering with people far out of my field.

On any given day, then, my Victorianist / Long Nineteenth Century / Poetics and Theory persona isn’t the one that’s first in my mind — and if it is, I’m likely also nervous and stressed out about the tangle I’ve gotten myself into with Browning’s “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” the subject of my upcoming MLA paper and my third dissertation chapter, but OMG can I really write an entire dissertation chapter on one single relatively short Browning poem that most normal people read once to appreciate the faith / skepticism tension and nod because we know that Jesus is the answer and then move onto something really important like The Ring and the Book and does this just make me look like I’m too dumb to work on actual Browning? &c. — the italicized portions being somewhat like the last time I talked to my aforementioned adviser who, after listening to me spend 20 minutes trying to articulate the thesis of my chapter commented that my problem was that my mind was too subtle. I’m pretty sure that was a compliment and, to be fair, I did leave that meeting feeling slightly more confident that this will all, eventually, come together and also with a better sense of where I was wasting my energy.

And it’s really since that meeting that I’ve begun to be able to explore the sources of my dissatisfaction with whatever progress I am or am not making. And I’m coming to realize that when I say (as I have been since late July), “I feel like I’ve been writing and rewriting the same twelve pages on ‘An Epistle’ since June,” the part that stresses me out the most is the part where I’ve been writing about one freaking poem. I mean, again, “An Epistle” ain’t The Ring and the Book and it doesn’t take a Browning Society to see that Jesus is the answer. I do think that ultimately it is a poem worth the effort I’ve put into it, but I’ve also begun to see that there’s a danger in this being the only poem I’m ever reading ever — and it’s beginning to feel that way. I realized with a start last weekend that I simply miss reading — I spent some lovely hours with Jean-Francois Lyotard this week that felt like 2005 all over again.

And it’s these kinds of sentiments (well, and Mia’s gentle prodding) that have brought me back, humbly, to the blog. I need to find the thread again. I need to be sharing my ideas with people who aren’t college freshmen, as delightful as they are. I need to talk about my dissertation in a way that’s a bit deeper than “oh, so what are you writing about?” — I need to find my way through the field again. I hope I haven’t painted too bleak a picture in the foregoing paragraphs — I’m not unhappy about anything so much as I want to make things better, to make room in my life for the thing that brought me here in the first place, with the ideas that got me into MLA and Victorian Poetry.

So let’s see how this goes. I would like to think of my return to blogging here from ABDland as something that could be complementary to Mia’s work on her orals lists, a way of both trying out ideas and inspirations and of reflecting on the process and the life as a whole. If I’m feeling frisky I might just get crazy and pull out the OBVV again.

In the meantime, this is officially the longest post ever, so I will thank you all for indulging a post more personal than scholarly. I also think I might go reread Derrida’s “Psyche: Inventions of the Other”…or maybe some Browning that is not about Lazarus or the Bible or resurrection as troping as referential uncertainty. Just another Saturday in Paradise, yo.

 

Globalization, Post-Colonialism, and “White Culture”

Recently, I tweeted:

Katie Couric: “Ppl want to know–what is White Culture?” GB: “I– I don’t know” http://bit.ly/4SY0g #dumberthanpalin

(The GB stands for Glenn Beck.) I’ve only recently been able to force myself to watch clips of Glenn Beck, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so viscerally nauseated from hearing someone speak. All the same–I don’t know what “white culture” is either.  And I can see myself throwing down the phrase in conversation/writing. I’d use in the sense Christian Lander, of stuffwhitepeoplelike.com uses it, as a critique of upper-middle-class privilege. E.g., White Culture places a high value on “saving the earth,” and thus forms social bonds through sharing tips on recycling and on how to “fly” to far away places in the world more often for less money.

While I was running today (another ritual prevalent within White Culture), I had the idea of tentatively renaming my po-co list “Globalization, Post-Colonialism, and ‘White Culture’” (it had been previously tentatively renamed “Globalized Subjects, Globalized Objects”). Here are some possible white cultures I’ve come up with in their relation to globalization:

• OTOH, there’s the comfy globalization of the white liberal who values multiculturalism, believes “globalization” is inevitable, but in the long run will be beneficial to people both in the “First World” through access to different “cultures” and the “Third World” through economic “development.”
• OTOH, there’s the racist “White Culture” Beck appeals to for which fundamentalism is the best answer to globalization. (Sadly, it might be.)
• Overlapping with this group, though, are the white working classes, however broadly defined, who have lost out due to globalization.
• And as for the anti-globalization crowd (or alter-globalization crowd), the crowd who has heard of the “post-colonial,” isn’t that another white culture? (A recentish article in the Guardian by some Oxbridge lecturer in postcolonial studies drew some incredulous comments regarding her field.)

Here’s four white cultures in varying degrees of opposition to each other. What if it’s possible to think of all four as the same “white culture,” though, like Tyler’s definition of culture as a “complex whole”? (Although George Stocking warned us not to take that definition too seriously.)  I’m not even going to attempt to speculate on how this might be, but I suspect that a historical perspective will be useful.

Or think of it this way: is the “culture” invoked by the “cultural turn” around 2000 the same as the “culture” of post-war cultural anthropology? “Culture” in the former instance is often invoked dialectically with economics in the former instance, as in, globalization works both by cultural and economic means in a mutually reinforcing relationship. “Culture” in the latter instance is invoked in contrast to western modern “society” and nation-states. It’s past 3 am, so all I’ll say is that it’s reminding me of Hardt and Negri’s contrast between our current Empire and the imperialisms of the modern era. Maybe I’d like H and N better if the book was called capital C Culture, as opposed to modern lowercase c cultures.