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.

…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.

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.

(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….

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.

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.

I’m not sure what to do about my PoCo list. I’ve been toying with the idea of titling it “Globalized Subjects, Globalized Objects.” I’m not quite sure why, so I’ll try to think aloud in this space.

First, my rationale behind the list is very much “anti-” in intention, like everything I do and am. I’m anti-colonizer/colonized binary. Mainly, this is because I don’t think China in the 19th century (or any other, for that matter) works within that model. Either you’re disciplinarily encouraged to ignore it, since only a small part of it was part of the British Empire, or you say it’s an “unofficial” colony, which, someone in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans says, means that British policy could be more cruel. I still think this is too reductionist. Focusing on antagonism between China and the British Empire threatens to obscures the antagonisms within “China,” and Victorians were far more likely to be aware of these antagonisms than we are. An example from the Ishiguro book: Britain’s role in the Chinese Opium War forms the backdrop of the book, but it’s not imperial hegemony that makes the crucial twist, but black-market deals with “China,” done as much for expediency as for profit.

I’m also anti-culture. I’m not sure why. I realized this when I saw the title of Frederic Jameson’s The Cultural Turn (1998), and I decided that “culture” had been done to death. Maybe part of the reason behind this is that I feel myself completed disaffected by whatever “culture” exists around me today. Which of course gives me the alienation that’s the ticket to white-cultural-elitism of a certain kind although I’ve yet to find a place to gain admission. Culture, too, just seems to me to be hopelessly reductionist.

I’m reading Hardt & Negri’s Empire for this nebulously conceived list right now, and I was particularly struck by one line from the preface:

We intend this shift of standpoint [from the realm of ideas to that of production] to function something like the moment in Capital when Marx invites us to leave the noisy sphere of exchange and descend into the hidden abode of production.

Maybe it’s because I’m a sucker for anything to do with Marx, but there’s something tremendously poetic, and yet mystifying (in a bad way) about this. I think in recent years, this has actually become a cliché, one which I’ve participated in as well. It goes something like this: take an everyday object around you, like the coffee you’re drinking, and trace it back to its “hidden abode of production,” become horrified by the injustice, and there’s your critique. Here’s how the NYRB review of Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker-winning The Inheritance of Loss begins:

There are certain fictions upon which fair-minded, relatively affluent citizens of good will base their lives, the first being that we are indeed people of good will. This fiction is allowed by the belief that the infrastructure that makes life possible comes at a cost that is borne mainly by us. We vote to raise taxes, send money to the less fortunate, drink fair-trade coffee, and drive hybrid cars, all in a genuine effort to do the right thing. If, as Aldous Huxley says, the only completely consistent people are dead, then we are very much alive, failing most of the time to wonder how the food got on our plate, or the shirt got on our back, or where the man on the bicycle delivering Chinese take-out lives, or how he got there, too.

Seek ye out the hidden abode of production, rather than solely making “good” consumer decisions. It’s laudable, but it’s not enough–and I realized this when I hit a part where the reviewer (whom I will not name) completely misses the point:

Here is the immigration debate summed up in two words: can’t and won’t. The economies of scale that allow a place like the Gandhi Café (or the Stars and Stripes Diner, the Baby Bistro, Le Colonial, the Queen of Tarts, and Freddy’s Wok, to name a few of Biju’s previous employers) to compete require the fugitive labor of people like Biju who are willing to work long hours for little pay no matter how miserable the conditions, and no surprise, there are no Americans among them. It is globalization in our front yard, though blessedly hidden from us by the lawn ornaments saying cheap and plentiful, no questions asked. (And anyhow, inexpensive ethnic food makes us feel like global citizens ourselves!)

It’s not just “inexpensive ethnic food” that’s produced by “fugitive labor,” as Desai shows. At one point, Biju works in an expensive French restaurant (he’s fired when he gets into a loud fight with a Pakistani employee), and wonders if in Paris, French people cook French food. No: instead of Guatamalans, Mexicans, and Dominicans, it’s Algerians, Morrocans, Lebanese. White people upstairs (no matter where); coloured people downstairs (no matter where). It’s something I  particularly appreciated. When I was 18 or 19, one summer in Montreal I was having lots of trouble finding a job–not francophone enough, not white enough, not Chinese enough, not man enough, not woman enough. The only thing I found was some dishwashing job in a huge touristy restaurant that served lots of meat. (I’m vegan now, I was vegetarian then.) Dishwashing is fucking tough work. Most of the kitchen staff was brown (the one white quebecois I remember was particularly mean to me), mostly from Arab countries. Most of the wait staff, on the other hand, was white. That’s when I realized how shitty life is for most people in this world, especially most people of colour. But there was nothing particularly “global” about that restaurant, and the food wasn’t inexpensive either. This part of the book was probably the only thing in literature that reminded me of that miserable, eye-opening three-week period of my life before I quit the job.

What’s going on here? I’ll blame the culture model. Id est, “our” culture of middle-class multiculturalism depends on the exploitation of other cultures. I’m not going to deny that, but I think the economic model is more important. Meaning, global-north consumption (whether it’s ethnic, eurotrash, or american-as-apple-pie) depends on the exploitation of global-south production (and it doesn’t really matter about which culture of the global south). If we’re going to look at the “hidden abode of production,” our scope must be as narrow as possible (looking at the hidden basement kitchen of a chichi Manhattan restaurant) and as global as possible (looking at all those hidden basements, both in the global north and the global south). And this process has no end point, unlike tracing the history of one particular product.

Globalized subjects, globalized objects. Subjects and objects, as opposed to cultures. Subjects that can only be  fucked over by culture after culture, or fuck over culture after culture, or both. An axiom, maybe: economic relations within the Hardt & Negriian Empire always far exceed cultural intelligibility. Even if you could track down the producers of your globalized objects, you’d be far from understanding the economic relations constraining all the agents involved. But even the recognition of that aporia is a cop-out. A starting point: the cultural model is apt to posit that the “relatively affluent” are free to roam between cultures, while the benighted underclass are victimized due to their cultural boundedness. No: the cultural underclass is forced to move, or to desire to move, between cultures, outside of kinship networks, outside of legal systems. Sometimes it works. Sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes hard work pays off, so you fuck other people over. Sometimes you’re not lucky.

My resolve to blog more frequently seems to have failed rather quickly. I’ll try to start back up again–I was inspired with Anne’s words on the department’s guide to the orals saying how she did a brain dump two days after finishing a book.

I spent about 6 or so hours reading the Illustrated London News in the Butler stacks at Columbia on Tuesday (you should go there just to see how spooky it is). My impressions?

1. It’s heavy. I took two volumes, for the first and second half of 1860. The issues aren’t incredibly long–it’s a weekly, and the first of each month seems to be longer, and then issues can get down to about 8 pages. But it’s bound in a folio volume. The paper’s done really well–it didn’t feel fragile, so it must be rag paper, and hence doesn’t have to suffer the “slow fire” that’s making other nineteenth-century periodicals almost literally turn to dust when handled. So yeah, heavy, especially when it’s two volumes.
2. The writing is tiny–like less than 8 point, I think. I get annoyed by small writing, but I usually have no trouble reading it–but I can imagine going blind reading this on a regular basis. I wonder–did many Victorians require a magnifying lens to read their precious periodicals? Why is the writing so small when the text in books tends to be so much bigger and spacey than current books? Is it because the rag paper was expensive and they wanted to economize? Or to make postage costs lower? The writing’s tiny, but the pictures are huge. Most issues have a centerfold (actually, it’s folded twice) with text on one side and either one big picture, or two pictures side by side, or a panorama and other pictures/texts beneath it. And these are BIG pictures–given that a single folio sheet is probably about the same size as your average Playboy centerfold. I would imagine.
3. I did get a sense of the paper’s politics. One of the things that I’ve been ashamed of from having most of my knowledge of the archive done through database searching is that I haven’t been able to appreciate individual journals’ political stances. The ILN is conservative, although very much a don’t rock the boat conservatism rather than the mindlessly indignant “conservatism” of today. They’re pretty much fine with whatever the government does, like the books reviewed, and the journals they review. Yes, there’s a section once a month reviewing the major monthlies (Blackwood, Fraser, Cornhill (started in 1860), New Monthly Review). They can be either average or good–kind of like academic book reviews these days. Very little editorializing, and a focus on reporting what other people are saying–which of course can at times be very revealing nonetheless.
4. Characteristics of supposedly postmodern features of media are in full effect. There’s one section called “Epitome of Foreign and Domestic News,” where each “story” is a maximum of two lines long. And news items in other sections can be really short too. E.g. “Mr W. Nichol, of Peckham, shot himself through the heart on Wednesday at the Lambeth Baths.” And that’s it. There’s fashion reporting once a month, with usually three dresses illustrated. They comment on the fashion of the month–and fashion these days seems to be periodized into the season at the smallest span of time.
5. When they review literature, they don’t just mean novels. I think the majority of works were non-fiction: biography, history, popular science.

I chose 1860 since I was interested in illustrations of the Second Opium War. I don’t think I’m going to incorporate those illustrations into any current project, but it definitely gave me a much better sense of the “synchronous” at 1860. I.e., instead of thinking, first Crimean War, then Sepoy Uprising, then Second Opium War, my impression was: conflict between Spain and Morocco, tension and then commercial treaty between England and France, Napoleon trying to annex Savoy and Nice, Garibaldi in Italy, and the expedition and then warfare in China, the formation of Rifle Volunteer groups across Britain, scattered mention of the controversy around Darwin (they were not impressed–only negative review I saw was of a book called Pre-Adamite Man)–all going on at the same time. The Second Opium War was a major news event, despite all this going on. It was often mentioned as the top item of concern in parliamentary discussions. It was interesting to see that there was a big build-up to it–as in, there’d be updates every week about what troops were rallied where.
And–it felt weird reading it. When’s the last time anybody read those pages? I kept on thinking about the brilliant title-screen at the end of Barry Lyndon that reminds us that the people in the story are all dead now. Who was this “Mr. W. Nichol, of Peckham”? Does he have any descendents who are alive today? Why did he kill himself, shoot himself in the heart? (Suicides, completed and attempted, were a fairly standard news item to report). It felt eerie writing down the name about somebody who will probably never be named again, and about whom we’ll probably never know anything more about. And yet–when he killed himself, could he have dreamed that almost 150 years later, some Chinese-born-Canadian queer grad student in New York would be writing about him?

I’ve been thinking about prose style a bit more recently, probably because I figure it’s something which you should have thought about by the time you do your orals. Here’s a beautiful little clunker from Charlotte Yonge:

Among the advantages of the change was the having Felix always at hand; and though she really did not see him oftener in the course of the day than at St. Oswald’s Buildings, still the knowing him to be within reach gave great contentment to Cherry.
–from The Pillars of the Family

And what better way to celebrate than with Trollope’s Barchester Towers? (And Oliver Twist, too.)
It’s actually been a few weeks since I finished reading it, but I only got around just now to taking notes on it, and it’s frightening how much I forgot in that time. I’m terrible at taking notes, and generally rely on my imperfect memory with the internet as my supplément. It works, most of the time, but probably not such a good idea for the orals!
One of the things I forgot was how much one paragraph of John Sutherland’s introduction to the OUP edition influenced my decision to switch the theme of my Victorian fiction list to Past and Present. Here’s the nicely phrased passage in question:

The cathedral–as we take our leave of it–is still ruled over by Bishop and Mrs Proudie (who, as Trollope says, wears the invisible apron). But the Dean is now an arch-Conservative and becoming , as we hurry over the last few paragraphs, higher and dryer by the minute. And deans, as Trollope stresses… have immense independence. It is, finally, stalemate: new bishop versus reactionary dean, evangelical versus Tractarian, Whig versus Tory, Present versus Past. A typical Trollopian conclusion, that is, in which much is ventilated and nothing is concluded.

For Sutherland, this ambivalence is distinctly Trollopian; he contrasts it with Dickens’ complete lack of “any nostalgia for worn-out social machinery,” for example. The larger argument, though, that I’ve been thinking of is that Trollope’s ambivalent treatment of the past and its institutions is actually foundational to the Victorian worldview, including Dickens’, of course. Not an earth-shattering hypothesis by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s interesting to think of the different ways in which this ambivalence manifests itself. In Barchester Towers, Trollope does it through bitchy satire, poking fun at both present and past. Dickens could critique old “worn-out social machinery”–recall the dummy books he had installed at Gad’s Hill Place, The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: I Ignorance, II Superstition, III The Block, IV The Stake, V The Rack, VI Dirt, and VII Disease–in addition to more contemporary phenomena, such as the 1834 Poor Law Amendment condemned in Oliver Twist (1837-1838). This latter book, which I’ve finished reading more recently, tends to conform to the straightforward trope of the corrupt city of the present and the pristine country of the past. I’m thinking in particular of a set-piece apostrophe to the countryside:

Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquillity, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green hills and rich woods, of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at last for one short glimpse of Nature’s face; and, carried far from the scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once into a new state of being. Crawling forth, from day to day, to some green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them by the sight of sky, and hill and plain, and glistening water, that the foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they have sunk into their tombs, as peacefully as the sun whose setting they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before, faded from their dim and feeble sight! The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls upon solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.

But if countryside-as-Platonic-Ideal tends to valorize the past at the expense of the “crowded, pent-up streets” of the present, it’s not like the novel’s London looks much like the industrial cities in the Condition-of-England novels of the next decade; there seems to be a conscious evocation of eighteenth-century lowlife (the subtitle “A Parish-Boy’s Progress” pays homage to Hogarth). And it’s not like the pre-Poor-Law baby farm Oliver was raised in was vastly superior to the post-Poor-Law orphanage he’s then brought to.
In my last post, I speculated on parallels between present and past of both the macrocosmic society and the microcosmic individual. In both Barchester and Oliver, amid the bitchy and social satire (respectably), there are small glimpses of an open-ended melancholy far more textured than provincial nostalgia. This is Trollope’s Arabin:

He had, as it were, proclaimed himself to be indifferent to promotion, and those who chiefly admired his talents, and would mainly have exerted themselves to secure to them their deserved reward, had taken him at his work. And now, if the truth must out, he felt himself disappointed–disappointed not by them but by himself. The daydream of his youth was over, and at the age of forty he felt that he was not fit to work in the spirit of an apostle. He had mistaken himself, and learned his mistake when it was past remedy.

And this is Dickens’ Brownlow:

After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked, with the same meditative face, into a back ante-room opening from the yard; and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind’s eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years. “No,” said the old gentleman, shaking his head; “it must be imagination.”
He wandered over them again. He had called them into view, and it was not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them. There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven.
But the old gentleman could recall no one countenance of which Oliver’s features bore a trace. So, he heaved a sigh over the recollections he had awakened; and being, happily for himself, an absent old gentleman, buried them again in the pages of the musty book.

Maybe what’s important in thinking about past and present isn’t so much which is the winner, but the linking of retrospection (individual and social) with subjectivity (or national identity). (I’m thinking of Hegel, here, but I’m too tired to work it out in more detail right now.)
Oh yes, and note that things work out well after Arabin’s mid-life crisis and for the old bachelor Brownlow. I don’t think these Trollope and Dickens would be so kind to a female character who thought these things.