Modernism and the culture of market society 9780521834865, 9780511227585, 0511227582, 0521834864, 9780521120111, 052112011X

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The modernist avant-garde and the culture of market society
Part I. The Posthuman Scene: 1. Approaching modernism
2. Ideology
3. Permanent revolution
4. Epistemology of the market
Part II. The Regime of Unrest: Four Precursors: 5. Bloody face
6. A variegated daguerreotype
7. The unnameable
8. Childhood as resistance
Part III. The Margin is the Mainstream: 9. Artisanal production, Ulysses and the circulation of goods
10. History and the post-psychological self in The Waste Land
11. La boheme: Lewis, Stein, Barnes
12. Bloomsbury nation
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

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M O D E R N I S M A N D T H E C U LT U R E OF MARKET SOCIETY

Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles, and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomized the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural, and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterizing techniques, styles, and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including Joyce, Eliot, Stein, and Barnes. j oh n xi ros co o per is Professor of English Literature at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of T. S. Eliot and the Politics of Voice: The Argument of The Waste Land (1987), T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets (Cambridge, 1995), and The Modern British Novel (1998).

MODERNISM AND THE C U LT U R E O F M A R K E T SOCIETY J O H N X I RO S C O O P E R

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521834865 © John Xiros Cooper 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 - -

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For Kelly, David, Alexandra, and Jack

Contents

Acknowledgements

page ix

Introduction The modernist avant-garde and the culture of market society part i the posthuman scene

1 35

1 Approaching modernism

37

2 Ideology

53

3 Permanent revolution

58

4 Epistemology of the market

76

part ii the regime of unrest: four precursors

91

5 Bloody farce

93

6 A variegated daguerreotype

112

7 The unnameable

130

8 Childhood as resistance

148

part iii the margin is the mainstream 9 Artisanal production, Ulysses, and the circulation of goods 10 History and the postpsychological self in The Waste Land vii

161 163 194

viii

Contents

11 La boh`eme: Lewis, Stein, Barnes

215

12 Bloomsbury nation

243

Notes Bibliography Index

256 268 281

Acknowledgements

No book is written without the help and encouragement of many people. Over the last thirty years I have been fortunate to have as a friend one of the most talented writers of his generation, Jack Todd. He has been a great and good comrade. Conversations with him have given me ideas that could fill a half-dozen books. I wish I had the stamina to write them all. But this book has been helped by his conversation and his encouragement after reading an early segment. To John and Linda Meletiou, my family and I owe a large debt. We have visited their home in Gloucestershire many times and I thank them for their wonderful hospitality. The many enriching conversations we have had over the years in Nailsworth and environs have helped to shape this book in many different ways. I am also grateful to many current and former colleagues in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia whose conversation, advice, and encouragement I gratefully acknowledge: Keith Alldritt, Ira Nadel, Sherrill Grace, Andrew Busza, Peter Quartermain, Jack Foster, Nick Hudson, Eva-Marie Kr¨oller, Janet Giltrow, Wilhelm Emilsson, and Mary Chapman. Beyond the boundaries of my own department, I would like to acknowledge the interest and encouragement of other colleagues in the profession: Ted Bishop, Mary Ann Gillies, Michael Coyle, David Chinitz, Scott McCracken, Sean Latham, Michael North, Tom Staley, and Paul Peppis. I’m not sure all the people named here will agree with or endorse my account of modernism. Indeed, I suspect a number of them will take issue with it. Encouragement, however, comes in many forms, including vigorous disagreement. I have also been lucky to have worked with a series of very talented and clever honours and graduate students in the last fifteen years. To the members of four graduate seminars on modernism in the 1990s at the University of British Columbia and a seminar on Modernism and Mass Media at the MSA 3 conference at Rice University, I owe a large debt of gratitude. Their questions, observations, and research helped me to clarify my ideas and arguments. I’m especially grateful to Gerry Schroeder, Noelle Gallagher, ix

x

Acknowledgements

Pamela Swanigan, Bill Friesen, Brett Grubisic, Ameen Merchant, Theo Finigan, Peter Milne, Robert Hemmings, Cynthia Maughn, Titi Adepitan, Brook Houglum, Glen Leonard, Ana Mitric, and Ide Corley-Carmody. Academic audiences in New Orleans, Tulsa, Eugene, Edmonton, Boston, Houston, and Vancouver were kind enough to listen to papers, lectures, and seminars on topics related to this book and they paid me the respect of comment and advice on what they heard. Some of the participants in those exchanges will recognize their interventions scattered throughout the text. I would like to thank the Dean of my Faculty, Nancy Gallini, for a six-month administrative leave that helped me complete the manuscript. I am grateful also to the librarians and resources of the Koerner and Main Libraries at the University of British Columbia, the W. A. C. Bennett Library at Simon Fraser University, the British Library, the Modern Archives at King’s College, Cambridge, the University of London Library, University Library at Cambridge, and the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada and the Hampton Fund in my home institution for their generous financial support. To Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press I owe much for his unstinting support and encouragement. Sue Dickinson has helped me with the manuscript and for her expert copy-editing I am deeply grateful. However, let me acknowledge that any infelicities of style or errors of fact or interpretation are entirely the product of my own ignorance or mulishness. Above all, I would like to thank my family, my wife, Kelly, and my children David and Alexandra for their understanding. It’s hard enough sometimes just carrying on, but how much easier and more pleasurable it is when it can be done in such wonderful company.

Introduction The modernist avant-garde and the culture of market society In New York in 1921, Man Ray made a short film of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, then forty, shaving her pubic hair. It was shot during the short-lived period of New York Dada and it had art written all over it.1 Exhibited exclusively to other New York boh´emiens, mainly in the Walter and Louise Arensberg circle, it was a typical product of the hothouse culture of early modernism. The luminous starkness of the woman’s careworn, but strangely vibrant, body affronted not only conventional morality, but also the conventional aesthetic academicism of, say, Adolph-William Bouguereau’s blushing, heavily fleshed but weightless, nudes. At that time, Bouguereau’s gravity-defying females appealed particularly to prosperous bankers and business tycoons. Although Man Ray’s film is about a not-very-glamorous and aging woman shaving her pubic hair, it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about defining the space between avant-garde culture and ordinary society, what Andreas Huyssens calls the Great Divide between the avant-garde and mass society. In 1921, that distance was still visible. By the end of the twentieth century, it had almost entirely disappeared. Today Dada and ordinary life have more or less converged. Just look around you. Showing a woman, or a man for that matter, shaving the pubic area is probably still not possible on the afternoon TV talk shows in the year 2004,2 but who can say with confidence that it won’t already be old hat by the centenary of Man Ray’s film in 2021? After all, the topic of shaving body hair has already been well and truly broached in the popular culture. Certainly it’s a tedious fixture among the popular pornographers. It was common or innocuous enough in the 1990s, for example, to provide the Seinfeld show with the occasional opportunity for some cheap laughs. And starting with the shaved heads, chests, and pierced body parts of our recent fin de si`ecle, how long can it be before the razor’s edge descends to the pubic sphere? Early twentieth-century literary modernism developed in small coteries of like-minded artists and their hangers-on who were acutely conscious of 1

2

Introduction

their difference from everyday society. Ezra Pound was the modernist who was perhaps most anxiously attentive to the artist’s difference: “The serious artist is usually, or is often as far from the ægrum vulgus as is the serious scientist” (Literary Essays, 47). Or, in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920): Beneath the sagging roof The stylist has taken shelter, Unpaid, uncelebrated, At last from the world’s welter (Collected Poems, lines 172–75)

This distance from the vulgar mob was not a matter of choice; it was thrust upon the serious artist by a special fate. “Artists,” Pound wrote, “are the antenae of the race” (Literary Essays, 58). He insisted again and again on the exclusiveness of both the artist’s calling and the very small number of intellectually superior people who could grasp the significance of the artist’s work. The occasional note of self-pity (“the sagging roof”) was not typical; it was always better to take the offensive, to make the detachment of the “stylist” not only a virtue, but a source of strength. The modernist bohemia adopted a trenchant, sometimes surly, policy of self-imposed apartheid when it came to the philistine public. Here is Pound’s colleague and H.D.’s husband, Richard Aldington, in 1915: The conditions of modern popular art are so degrading that no man of determined or distinguished mind can possibly adopt them. “What the public wants” are the stale ideas of twenty, or fifty, or even seventy years ago, ideas which any man of talent rejects at once as banal. It is only the clich´e, only the stale, the flat, and the profitable in art which finds ready acceptance and eager purchasers; while the exploiters at third hand of original ideas are the only innovators to secure applause . . . The arts are now divided between popular charlatans and men of talent, who, of necessity, write, think and paint only for each other, since there is no one else to understand them. (“Reflections,” 37)

This was a position Pound endorsed, regularly reminding his colleagues of the difference between what is good enough for the public, and what is “good” for the artist, whose only aim ought to be the perfection of the made artefact (Letters, 98): As for the “eyes of a too ruthless public”: damn their eyes. No art ever yet grew by looking into the eyes of the public, ruthless or otherwise. You can obliterate yourself and mirror God, Nature, or Humanity but if you try to mirror yourself in the eyes of the public, woe be unto your art. (Letters, 37)

He insisted that genuine connoisseurs of literature, capable of real discrimination, were limited to a few hundred at any one time, and that no poet

Introduction

3

whose book demanded mental attention could sell more than five hundred copies in the North Atlantic world.3 Here is the outline of the artisanal sub-culture that was later deployed to get Joyce into print and to inscribe a work’s value as a function of its singularity, newness, and rarity. But there was more to the sense of distinction than simply putting distance between the artist and the masses. There was also the desire to smash through the patina of propriety that characterized bourgeois life in the late nineteenth century. It was necessary to blast away at moribund ideas, conventions, and the strangled gentility that ended in emotional paralysis, and with the anaesthetized lyricism of Georgian poetry. The aim was a kind of creative destruction, i.e. the obliteration of a dying world and the release of creative energies from the ruins. Filippo Marinetti, the evangelical Futurist, staked out one of the more extreme positions in the field of battle: We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for . . . Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the musuems! (Selected Writings, 42)

These are the avant-gardiste polemics, then, with which modernism announced itself from about 1910 through the 1920s to an essentially indifferent Britain and America, and an openly derisive public media, and by which it drew its own boundaries tightly around itself. The combativeness compelled, in reaction, the intense face-to-face intimacies which characterized social relations within bohemia. From the soir´ees at the Stein salon, number 32 rue Fleurus in Paris, or the gatherings of Bloomsbury at number 50 Gordon Square in London, or the ‘Ezra-versity’ in Rapallo, Italy, the modernist avant-garde not only told itself the story of its own difference and superiority, but enacted it as well in the making of private communities. This difference from the masses has been at the heart of most accounts of the cultural history of modernism. Inevitably, the phenomenon has been interpreted differently by scholars of diverging political leanings. Some literary historians, like Hugh Kenner, C. K. Stead, and Christopher Butler for example, have accepted this supposed state of affairs as the inevitable fate of artists who are by definition exceptional people. Leftist or liberal scholars, like John R. Harrison, Terry Eagleton, and John Carey, have rejected this kind of argument and analyzed modernist elitism in terms of class prejudice, as one more essentially bourgeois routine for putting distance between a threatened middle class and the Sweeney-ish proletarian masses. A more recent current of opinion sees white, male modernists as racist and sexist

4

Introduction

exemplars of patriarchal, imperial, phallogocentric society. In these works, the exceptionalism of the modernists conflicts awkwardly with what seems to be their abject conformity to the cultural and political dominants of racist and sexist societies. If that’s the case, how do we make sense of the appearance of the “powerful feminist story” (Dekoven, “Modernism and Gender,” 176), “Indissoluble Matrimony” by Rebecca West, in Blast, the Vorticist periodical edited by that masculinist scoundrel, Wyndham Lewis? Let me suggest a new path to the study of modernism. The modernists have an entirely different relationship to mass society and have played another, quite different role in the making of modern times than their admirers and detractors have supposed in the past. I don’t deny that the modernists considered themselves a cultural elite. What I dispute is the historical significance of their elitism. They were neither the righteous defenders of civilized values in a destitute time, nor were they nests of political reactionaries, fascists, or misogynists in any way that counts. They played a far more important role in the evolution of the culture of capitalist society than has been acknowledged hitherto. Let me put it as baldly as I can. The modernist bohemias were the social places where an unrestrained market society first began to reveal itself in its most concrete social forms, including offering a social space in which the gender and sexual emancipation that characterizes fully developed market societies could begin. By the end of the twentieth century, the culture intrinsic to market society had spread from the avant-garde enclave to society at large, transforming, in its course, the everyday lives of the very philistine masses the early modernists haughtily kept at arm’s length. What I’m attempting is an informal anthropology of market-driven modernity that posits modernism as the culture peculiar to market society. I treat developed market society, as it is found in Europe and the United States, in the same way we might sail for the Queen Charlotte Islands in the northern Pacific to investigate the salmon-based culture of the Haida people. In trying to understand this ancient nation, we would need to investigate all aspects of their culture, namely, their material economy, centered on the profane and sacred activities of the salmon fishery, their social organization, language, literature, and religious beliefs. Take the sense of time among the Haida for example. Recall how many times you’ve read or heard about how the native American sense of time differs from the modern norm. But what is the modern norm? And why is it the standard against which the culture of an ancient people is to be measured? If the aboriginal sense of time is an integral aspect of their culture, why can’t the same point be made about the uniquely capitalist grasp and experience of time?

Introduction

5

My contention is that societies organized around the activities of exchange (rather than salmon), taking the market as the institutional embodiment of those activities, generate a distinctive culture, with its own ethos, from the organization of the self and its narratives, the unique potencies and organization of its science or magic, its visual arts, social structures, and, inevitably, its own unique senses of time and space, including specific ideas about the nature and value of history. Exchange encompasses both material and nonmaterial commodities, i.e. laser printers and the feeling of well-being you can purchase from a therapist. I take what literary and visual arts historians call “modernism” to be the intrinsic culture of market society. I use the term “exchange” to designate the practical activities of markets. Markets are the institutions of exchange. I also use the term “market-form” to refer to the structure and logic of markets. The more global term “capitalism” refers to the economic theory that has evolved over the last three centuries that provides market society with its underlying theoretical warrants. My specific argument then is simple: the culture of everyday life in the early twenty-first century has been profoundly influenced by the modernist avant-garde of the early twentieth century. That the formal arts of the late twentieth century and beyond – literature, painting, sculpture, classical music, and so forth – owe a great deal to innovations wrought by artists early in the last century is too obvious a claim to need any further comment from me. Instead, I want to argue that the culture of everyday life in our time has come to be pervaded by the culture of the early avant-garde. And not only in terms of the popular or mass arts (as does Michael North in Reading 1922) but in terms of the social life of the masses as well. This dissemination is what we sometimes mean by postmodernism. The playfulness of the postmodern, the penchant everywhere for parody and pastiche, the pervasiveness of irony, the telescoping of history into simulacra of the past, like the theme park and the heritage industry, are the result of the spreading of the word of modernism without any of its original meanings and moods to weigh it down. It was in the late twentieth century, then, that le parole were finally and truly rendered in libert´a,4 not only for the creative few, but for everyone. And this is no more visible than in the greatest of the modernist arts of the twentieth century, advertising (see Weiss, Popular Culture, 55). My question is straightforward. How have avant-garde art and styles of life – often socially marginal, countercultural, and highbrow – been acquired by the middle, the low, and every other kind of brow in capitalist society as the key cultural paradigms of the future? Historically, attempts

6

Introduction

to reduce the richness of human intercourse to utilitarian or economic models have met with varieties of resistance, countercultural expressions of dissent and defiance. The so-called counterculture of the 1960s was only one, well-publicized manifestation of a general condition of metropolitan life for the last two centuries. The avant-garde, as a dissenting community of creative individuals, has been the locus of countercultural activity from the start. But the search for an authentic community beyond the reach of cost–benefit utility and within which the richness of human contact and creativity can be amply enacted presents new ambiguities and dangers. In the case of the twentieth century, this search for a vital community engendered, inadvertently, one of the more wry ironies in a deeply ironic epoch. The attempt to ground values in dissenting social forms – like the 1960s counterculture – can sometimes function ideologically to secure and legitimize the very values the counterculture has sought to oppose. This is especially true of artistic subcultures within market society, where mobilization of the aesthetic as a site of resistance to commercial civilization is especially vulnerable. The history of the last two centuries shows us again and again how the aesthetic as a primal source of value, no matter how radically disjunctive and oppositional it seems, can be absorbed over time by the dominant economic orthodoxy and recuperated as a sustaining pillar of the very system it was invented to oppose. Many people in developed societies now live their personal lives within paradigms first explored by early twentieth-century avant-garde artistic bohemias. This is not just a feeling on my part or a hunch; it is sociological fact. In Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Anthony Giddens very clearly sets out the new patterns of interpersonal relations, constructions of the self, and other microstructures of every day life that characterize what he calls “the late modern age.” I connect Giddens’s descriptions of the ordinary lives of ordinary people today to the kind of relationships one finds in the bohemian communities of artists and intellectuals early in the century. Indeed, Giddens even borrows a term – the pure relationship – from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love as a general descriptor of personal relationships, especially in modern marriage, in our own time. Greenwich Village, Montmartre, Bloomsbury, Soho, and Chelsea were artistic and social laboratories from which characteristic styles of modernist culture invaded mainstream society in the course of the twentieth century. These now constitute the lived reality, the culture so to speak, of the everyday.5 And this is so because the nihilism intrinsic to the logic of capitalist development now pervades every province of life. It was this that Walter Benjamin

Introduction

7

was referring to when he commented in “Fourier or The Arcades” on the “amorality of the market society” (Baudelaire, 159). I intend no value judgement in using the term nihilism nor in accepting Benjamin’s term “amorality” as a synonym. Nihilism is not a synonym for chaos or anarchy. Let me quote Nietzsche on “nihilism.” “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves” (Will to Power, 9). I concur with Heidegger’s gloss, “nihilism is a process, the process of devaluation, whereby the uppermost values become valueless” (Nietzsche, iv 14). Nietzsche locates this devaluation of all values, even the highest, as part of the metaphysical destiny of Europe. More radically still, Nietzsche is not talking about nihilism as a point of view “put forward by somebody, nor is it an arbitrary historical ‘given,’ among many others, that can be historically documented” (4). Nihilism is not merely a modern idea with a history “inasmuch as it can be traced historically in its temporal course”: Nihilism is history . . . Consequently, for a comprehension of the essence of nihilism there is little to be gained by recounting the history of nihilism in different centuries and depicting it in its various forms. First of all, everything must aim at recognizing nihilism as the lawfulness of history. If one wants to consider this history a “decline”, reckoning it in terms of the devaluation of the highest values, then nihilism is not the cause of the decline, but its inner logic. (53)

As will become evident in the course of this book, I interpret Nietzsche’s astonishing general insight in a rather more limited and material way. I agree entirely with Gianni Vattimo’s assessment, “Nihilism is . . . the reduction of Being to exchange-value” (End of Modernity, 21) or, in Jacques Attali’s formulation, it is “the slow degradation of use into exchange [value]” (Noise, 19). Certainly the fixed values of the past have been devalued or degraded, that is, emptied of their transcendental significance, but the reason for this lies in the historical fact that the mandate and mechanisms for assessing value have been uprooted, or disembedded, by the practical effects of the market. The marking of value has been repositioned within the variables that provide the capitalist market with its uniquely mobile ways of ascertaining the price of commodities. Whether we like it or not, this is one of the material conditions of freedom as we know it in modern times. To be free in this new sense means the creative destruction of the vestiges of the past that limited the possibilities and potential for unlimited change and self-development. Destruction of values is achieved either by obliteration of past practices (noblesse oblige, chivalry, and the like) or by their transformation into new commodified forms (education, for example,

8

Introduction

conceived as continuous updates of the self in the remorseless pursuit of self-improvement). I give the name market society to this new kind of social order that arises when a society is organized around the activities of economic exchange. The culture of such a society has a particular physiognomy that is not entirely unfamiliar. It is, as we all know, a society of relativist values. It is a society increasingly regulated, on the work side, as a deadening prison of measured time by the industrial form of production and, on the leisure side, as an onanistic fantasia of unsatisfied desires in consumption. It is also a society in which humanist values inherited from the Renaissance and the belief in the existential truth of the human person have gradually been abandoned. We are, in the language of contemporary management discourse, human resources, investments, assets, liabilities, not human beings. As one recent economist has blithely asserted, in her advice on the in-flight business channel of a major airline, the smart citizen thinks of him- or herself as Me, Inc. nowadays. So much for four hundred years of humanist dignity. Of course, a routine humanist rhetoric lives on in a kind of perpetual vampiric torment; the discourse cannot die, yet it no longer means very much. Increasingly unrestrained by past attachments to tradition and custom, capitalist society in the last few decades, as it has devalued and destroyed the communal past, has, as a result, come more fully to view than ever before. Capitalism has entered, it seems to me, its most pronounced period. I believe we have only now, at the beginning of a new century, begun to really understand what it means to live in capitalist society. Much of the social world of the past, even if the economy was run, more or less, on market principles, was entangled in social forms, personal habits, and proprieties of feeling that derived from feudal and even ancient societies. Notions of gender difference, the generic basis of expression, the culture of heroism, honour, shame, ideas of tragedy, are only a few of the beliefs that have been entirely emptied of their ancient meanings through a process of devaluation, that in recent decades has taken us over the edge into the contemporary nihilism. So that now it is business firms, those bastions of bourgeois conformity and gray-flannel repression, who emblazon the avant-gardist line – “the only rule is that there are no rules” – across their institutional self-promotions. This has certainly happened in professional literary scholarship where post-structuralism represents the decisive incursion of the nihilist logic that marks fully capitalist societies. It is only through the erosion of past values, including literary and aesthetic ones, erosions wrought by the triumphant epistemology of the market, that make the strategies of devaluation, like post-structuralism, possible.

Introduction

9

A hundred and fifty years ago, the relatively free social space of the bohemian enclaves was the first place where this devaluation began to occur. It was there that the real capitalist social order, unencumbered by the dying vestiges of traditional culture, first came into being as forms of resistance and gave rise, consequently, to the specifically modern paradox I hope to expound. In the bohemias of the avant-garde, both a countercultural “resistance to the accomplishment of nihilism” (Vattimo, End of Modernity, 23) in capitalist society, and, ironically, the social order determined by capitalism made their earliest appearance. Not only do we bend our lives to patterns established over the last one hundred and fifty years by the avant-garde bohemias, we also surround ourselves with the styles, arts, and ideas first pioneered in those enclaves. For example, a condensed chronicle of the visual styles of avant-garde art from the Impressionists to contemporary art movements is available in the stream of commercials that flow into hundreds of millions of TV sets every night of the week. From abstract scenic designs, asymmetric typographies, expressionist camera angles, disjunctive montage, Dada performance takes, exploitation of the languageness of language, and a pervasive, smirking irony, the contemporary TV ad has abbreviated the scrupulous disciplines of modernist art to thirty-second video shots. Where the first Impressionists were forced to create their own spaces and exhibit their works in the salons des refus´es of Paris, the most creative minds in advertising and the most innovative visual artists are no longer distinguishable one from the other. Indeed, today, they are one and the same. The difference between the Saatchi & Saatchi ad firm and the avant-garde artist has all but evaporated. Today both groups are highly talented, have had the same sort of education, have had not only the same teachers but seen through them in the same way, share the same parodic attitudes towards the past, and produce their work for the same group of clients, in the first instance as businessmen, in the second as art acquirers. What I’m saying is that there is no longer any aesthetic basis for differentiating the “fine art” of a John Chamberlain sculpture made out of car parts and the “commercial art” of the ravishingly choreographed Acura TV ads that aired on network TV in America in Autumn 1999. The designer of a posh department store window is no longer distinguishable from the curator who hangs a show in your local art gallery. But before you tell me that in your town these conjunctions are not visible, just wait. Like the uneven development of capitalism itself, its culture has also evolved unevenly across complex societies. This state of affairs, of course, did not come about over night. My argument needs to be understood against the background of the extraordinary

10

Introduction

capitalist revolution of the last two hundred years. The material and moral transformation of the life-world which this revolution has wrought has been immense. From the perspective of an older moral order, the change has been seen to be disastrous. Hannah Arendt notes “the degradation of men into commodities” when they meet in the exchange market. In this formulation, she endorses Marx’s sense of the new economic man as existing in a state of “self-alienation” (Human Condition, 162). The effect on the ethical life of individuals was noted by Thorstein Veblen: “Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard for life, may, within fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the individual in the pecuniary culture” (Leisure Class, 137). By 1931, John Maynard Keynes had already come to understand the new social organization of market society: “Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers” (Essays in Persuasion, 306). More recently, social theorists and historians treat this transformation rather more neutrally as simple fact. Wolf-Dieter Narr, the German social theorist, refers to it as “an almost epochal change in motivation and behaviour” (Reflexes, 34). My view is that there was nothing “almost” about it. It was, at first, a slow process of change, quickening in tempo as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. At the turn of the last century, the modernizing energies of market-driven capitalism unleashed in the 1800s had reached explosive levels of acceleration. Advances in mechanical engineering, metallurgy, the generation of electricity, hydraulics, ballistics, photochemistry, the introduction of new communication appliances, and other areas of innovation in applied science had begun to transform not only techniques of production in the macroeconomy but in the microeconomy of everyday life as well.6 Stephen Kern estimates that Americans used the telephone 38 billion times in 1914 alone (Time and Space, 214). For Henry Adams in 1904, possession of an automobile meant the accomplishment of a new kind of historical time travel. One could speed through “a century a minute” simply by cruising the French countryside. “The centuries dropped like autumn leaves in one’s road,” he wrote, “and one was not fined for running over them too fast (Education, 470).” Adams’s irony notwithstanding, the psychological and ethical conditions necessary for the commodification of history and geography by the heritage industry and the theme park seem already well established in his mind by 1904. Adams’s irony, by the way, will be instantly recognized as the fairly typical reaction of the early modernists to two important themes: the recognition of the inevitable victory

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of techno-commercial nihilism and the need to preserve values within a comradely enclave of like-minded ironists. The destructive side of capitalist development or modernization was noticed from the start. Predictably, Marx and Engels wrote about the revolutionary fury of capitalist industrialism in the Communist Manifesto, but so did the Tory editor of John Bull thirteen years earlier in 1835. Commenting on the arrival of railways and the resulting excitement in the population, he wrote that “Railroads, if they succeed, will give an unnatural impetus to society, destroy all the relations which exist between man and man, overthrow all mercantile regulations, and create at the peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress” (Muller, Children of Frankenstein, 45). Railroads of course did succeed and he was dead right. The railway was only one instance of the industrial juggernaut that has transformed every aspect of material existence in the last two hundred years. The pace, intensity, and reach of industrial change was set by the early nineteenth century when science was brought into close contact with the vigorous growth of the market. This wedding of science and market, in the form of technology, has reached its furthest point today where the two seem hardly distinguishable from each other. The importance of the institution of the market in the last two centuries cannot be overestimated. The market-form has become, whether one likes it or not, the engine of history. Forget the class struggle, forget the ballot box, forget representative government, the market is now the drive shaft of the historical process. Although we witness around us every day the fallout of its extraordinary success, it is still rather astounding how many of us don’t actually see what’s there before our eyes. Old ideas die hard. Even harder expire the mental habits they beget. Most of us still think the market is simply a way of organizing economic life, when, in fact, it has utterly transformed the fundamental forms of our existence. Which perhaps goes to show how “thinking” alone is not always the most reliable guide to what’s happening. Let me explain what I mean. Its success is a long and complex story which I don’t propose to tell, but the market, as an historical agent, has some particular features which give it its special revolutionary character and its special kind of revolutionary power. Unlike the political revolutions during the same period, which were made, with varying degrees of success, by particular human beings with particular values, strategic aims, and tactical procedures, the capitalist revolution was the work of many, often anonymous, individuals and groups who had no explicit, coordinated masterplan for the radical transformation

12

Introduction

of society. Instead they worked from a simple, compulsory logic, namely the logic of exchange and the circulation of commodities (Foley, Understanding Capital, 12–30 and Schumpeter, Imperialism, 128).7 Changing the world according to some idealist formula was never really part of the capitalist agenda, at least in any kind of explicit form. There are no utopian or noble longings “when,” as W. H. Auden once wrote in another connection, “the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse” (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” 247). That the world has been changed is a consequence unintended by the individual capitalists and entrepreneurs who have wrought the change. This is the key to their invincibility. They were intent on more local and limited aims. If they acted politically at all, it was to win particular, local conditions (e.g. lower taxes) for the achievement of their limited goals (profit, market share, sectoral competitiveness, etc.). That the pursuit of microeconomic aims by masses of individuals, acting independently, produced the greatest sociopolitical revolution of our era underlines how early and how thoroughly the logic of exchange entered and overwrote little by little the thinking and values of the millions of actors. On each individual mind it inscribed, DNA-like, the same cost–benefit code, the same kind of calculative rationality.8 In other words, the capitalist revolution has been cellular. Each cell worked through, always on a local level, revolutionary changes without overt coordination of the whole process by a centralized steering mechanism. The dispersal of its action ensured its survivability in the same way the American military has developed network-centric forms of warfare that ensure that no one enemy blow can cripple a command structure concentrated on a single platform (see Cebrowski and Gartska, “Network-Centric Warfare”). So, unlike the French or Russian revolutions, there was no one in particular to blame for the capitalist revolution. Nor can one easily put one’s finger on the exact moment when the revolution broke out or its victory was assured. There was also no particular place where one could go (the Bastille, the Winter Palace) to help make the revolution. You were making the revolution if you were like Oscar Wilde’s Jack Worthing in the Funds, or brought a weaving machine into your textile operation in nineteenthcentury Montreal. Or, even, the day you suddenly stopped seeing your friends as friends and saw them as customers for the first time, selling them lemonade for a dime on a hot day. An older Christian code of conduct might have led you to slake their thirst by giving the lemonade away. All the local actors in this low-key revolutionary drama were able to limit their political liability for the larger consequences of their actions. They

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were able to stay on a wide course of development because they were driven by the same “practical” logic of exchange. The revolution was made in tiny increments, a dime at a time, as it were, and not, in Marx’s phrase, by a “thunderbolt from Elysium” (Eighteenth Brumaire, 226). The apt metaphor for this revolution is the coral reef, not the earthquake, or the “ten days that shook the world.” It was made in one brain at a time, over a long period. This was the real revolution about which so many have written, theorized, and practised for the last two centuries. The revolution was so powerful in its effects that it transformed thought itself. Of course the market-form which is the epistemological artefact by which this revolution has had its profoundest effects has been around for thousands of years. But until the seventeenth century in Europe it was contained within a restricted social space dominated by other more powerful religious and political forces. The resistance to the capitalist revolution lay in the inertial drag of customary forms of life that had given communal existence its prior patterns and habits. In other words, the enemy was the settledness and authority of the past. Not the cavalry and bayonets of the ancien r´egime, but the inertia of its rituals and routines. Such an enemy cannot be overthrown by one person, or a small vanguard party, nor can it, as social formation, be dismantled quickly. It can only be eaten away from within. The final tableau might require a Robespierre, a guillotine, a mob in the street, and a blood-red sunset, but by then the revolution has already come and gone. What political historians and journalists still quaintly call “revolutions” are, at the end of the day, little more than street theatre for anxious intellectuals after the grocers and small traders have moved on to the new world. The ancien r´egime, it seems, had more to fear from the information cascade generated by trade than the bloody politics of the Committee of Public Safety. My view is that early capitalism, because it originated in a context of social forms that belonged to feudalism and other precapitalist arrangements (see Macpherson, Political Theory, 49–51), adapted to these earlier social conditions in its infancy. Then, working, as it were, from the inside, it proceeded, step by step, through the keen pursuit of its own inherent, materialist logic, to progressively dismantle piece by piece the sociopolitical order in which it was born while mouthing, with a deepening sense of irony, the expected pieties of that order. By the end of the twentieth century these earlier, precapitalist forms had almost entirely disappeared. Take business for example. Like so many antiquated companies, or the white-shirt-and-tie image of the old IBM, or the banking and insurance establishments of the past, the family-owned, patriarchal, bureaucratic, and

14

Introduction

loyalty-obsessed business firm as hereditary fiefdom gave way in time to what Thomas Petzinger calls the “new pioneers” of capitalism and Gary Hamel, the new “corporate revolutionaries.” There is nothing in capitalism itself that requires kinship loyalties, patriarchy, or bureaucracy. Indeed it is these very precapitalist social forces that today’s companies have been satirizing mercilessly in their institutional ads. PSInet, for example, aired a TV commercial in the winter of 1999–2000 in which a dozen or so white, male, octogenarian board members sit around an old-fashioned conference table dementedly affirming their belief in the old ways of doing business. In another, a body-pierced, spike-haired office boy shows his aging department manager the ins and outs of day trading. As a result of the capitalist logic and the erosion of inherited values, the organizational form natural to an unrestrained capitalism has been born. Or perhaps I should say, born again. I refer to the project-oriented, “hot team” approach that defines the “new economy.” It is replacing the old firm’s hierarchical bureaucracy, its obsessive surveillance of the work process, and its sclerotic culture of obedience. The hot team is called into being when discovery, opportunity, and capital intersect for the purpose of developing a product for the marketplace. The inner culture of the team, its cohesiveness, resilience, flexibility, and its ability to recognize its own eventual irrelevance, has a pathology and a lifecycle that, oddly enough, was first pioneered, not at the Harvard Business School, but by the “hot teams” of early twentiethcentury modernism, the artistic avant-gardes of Europe and America in the first decades of the last century: the Italian Futurists, the Cubists, the Imagists, Vorticism, Dada, Surrealism. These were movements in which the “team” was project-oriented, thought outside the boundaries of “the box,” were innovation-driven, challenged conventional ideas, broke step with custom, prized “relationships” and knowledge-based networks over outdated protocol, and, aspired, in Ezra Pound’s ringing tag, to “Make it new!” If you want a longer list of these bohemian traits, just turn for a moment, not to the arts pages of your local newspaper, but to the business pages. Today it is business that proclaims the old avant-garde law, “the only rule is that there are no rules.” Eighty years ago it was Marcel Duchamp and his Dada colleagues who worked through the consequences of that idea. Now we all do, whether we like it or not. As a result of having been freed from the traditionalist entanglements of the past, capitalism in our time has stopped being an “-ism” altogether. It is now hegemonic and, therefore, out past the contestable for the most part. Capitalism has disappeared entirely as a choice for economic organization. There are no others left. For now, capitalism is simply the “world-as-weknow-it,” as undebatable and impossible to oppose as Tuesday afternoon.

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Cultural histories of the last two hundred years that do not acknowledge the power of this transformation seriously misperceive where we are. There are many examples of this kind of misperception. Let me, quickly and perhaps too broadly, consider a particularly popular one today. Take the feminist commonplace given its most trenchant formulation by Judith Butler: that capitalism is inherently patriarchal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is not gender-specific at all. Capitalism arose in a society which was patriarchal already (and class divided and racist as well) for quite different sociohistorical reasons. By adapting itself to what was already in place, i.e. taking on a patriarchal coloring for example, individual merchants and investors were able to succeed by assuming the social and political personas mandated by the conventions of traditional feudal society while pursuing their own narrowly economic goals. The effective pursuit of those goals, however, required quite practical social, political, and ideological renovations. The whole immense, layered network of social and political relations of precapitalist Europe, including its patriarchal structures, was eroded materially and intellectually. Thus, the early capitalist as liberal humanist and as noble paladin of electoral democracy was born (both defining paths of least resistance to commerce). Simply by following its own inherent logic, capitalism was able, over a long period of time, to wear away the conventional foundations of the earlier social and cultural settlements. And if men were in the vanguard, it was only because of a previously existing patriarchal social order that had nothing to do with capitalism at all. Indeed, by the ever more rigorous pursuit of the capitalist logic, the male capitalists themselves unwittingly subverted both the social power inherited by dint of gender and the very foundations of their own masculinity. The irony is delicious, isn’t it? Thus patriarchy came to be shaken early in the twentieth century when enough women (big numbers are the key here) began to acquire purchasing power and to produce wealth. The more prescient of them came to realize that control of capital was the key to a new kind of freedom: “Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important” (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 48).9 Virginia Woolf was not alone. Her contemporary Winifred Ashton (who wrote under the pseudonym Clemence Dane) wrote in 1926: For to-day’s woman, through sheer need of bread and butter, has forced her way into the world’s market where work of every kind is bought and sold, and even the most prejudiced are grudgingly admitting that it is better, morally better, economically better for men and women alike, that woman should keep herself rather than be kept, that it is a sheer matter of sense and convenience that she should support herself rather than be supported. (The Women’s Side, 123)

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Introduction

In a capitalist ethos, unbridled by obstructive vestiges of the traditional, precapitalist past, money-power allows anyone – man, woman, black, white, noble, commoner, gay, straight, and so on – to control the character of his or her life and relationships within a range of possibilities. Where this is not possible, it is not capitalism that is at fault; it is the persistence of older customs and practices. If the male traders in a stock exchange hang out together and form a kind of male club, there is nothing inherent in that quintessential capitalist activity, the buying and selling of equities, that enforces the male bond. But given enough time, as has already begun to happen even among stock traders, the old vestiges of male bonding rituals, let’s call it the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table syndrome, will wither away. The specifics of gender, ethnicity, race, color, etc. diminish the further market society travels from custom and tradition. George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1894, 1902) is a striking illustration of this thesis from early in the twentieth century. In the play, Mrs. Warren, in partnership with her primary investor, Sir George Crofts, runs a chain of successful, high-end brothels on the European continent. The irrelevance of gender and class to a capitalism unburdened by sentiment and tradition is nicely satirized by Shaw in the business synergy of Warren and Crofts, an opportunistic merger of the gutter and the garter. Mrs. Warren’s daughter Vivie, a well-educated and forthright young woman, has no idea her comfortable upbringing and her exclusive education at Cambridge were paid for by the proceeds of prostitution from which Mrs. Warren and Crofts have grown exceedingly rich. As the play opens, Mrs. Warren is considering a comfortable retirement and wants to reestablish a more conventional mother–daughter relationship with Vivie. In the course of the play, Vivie comes to know all about her mother, from whom she has been separated by the demands of Mrs. Warren’s European business. She also comes to know that her comfort and education rest on a foundation of vice and exploitation. In the end she rejects her mother, asserts her independence, and goes off to the City to work as an actuary in a brokerage firm operated by her friend Honoria. The alliance of Mrs. Warren and Sir George Crofts is symptomatic of capitalism’s moral neutrality. Kitty Warren achieves a degree of power and freedom when she sees past the conventional morality that keeps the lives of her two poor, but virtuous, sisters nasty and brutish. That her commercial enterprise involves prostitution is immaterial to her, as it is to any strict and unsentimental understanding of capitalism. What does it matter if you sell your body in the service of another’s pleasure? If your body belongs to you as an object of purely personal possession, then you have every right to put

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it to any use you want, including making it one more commodity among others. Otherwise what’s the point of the doctrine of human rights? Vivie’s commitment to use her mathematical skills in the marketplace of Honoria’s business at the end of the play reaffirms the notion that it is through participation in the market, without soggy attachments to the sentiments of the past, like the mother–daughter relationship, or the snobbish “culture” for which Praed, the limp aesthete, stands in the play, that constitutes what passes for freedom in societies organized around economic exchange. The fact that women in the early twentieth century also acquired the franchise is significant, but not decisive. Electoral democracy, where a citizen is free every few years for the five seconds it takes to mark a ballot, is a necessary step in getting women (and men) ready for the marketplace as consumers, not for participating as active citizens in the making of their own fates. Only effective and continuous collaboration in decision-making can do that. By that standard, nineteenth-century peasant councils in eastern Herzegovina were more democratic than the ballot-paper democracies of today. When women began to be perceived by commercial enterprises as producers and customers, rather than as mere domestic chattels (the patriarchal inheritance from precapitalist society), patriarchy was doomed. Thus, Rita Felski’s Gender of Modernity, which purports to analyse “the figure of woman” and its relationship to modernity, misconceives what the impact of capitalism has been on women. Rather than being one more medium for the negation of women in patriarchy, it is capitalism itself that finally opened the social space for women to undergo that process of individual and collective self-consciousness that has, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, utterly changed their position in the advanced capitalist economies. Felski cites “the dethroning of the white bourgeois male as privileged subject of history” as a crucial historical development. She seems to suggest that this astonishing event has been caused by “contemporary theory” (208). Would that mere academic chit-chat possess that kind of magical power. In fact, the change in the historical status of the “white bourgeois male” derives from precisely the same historical condition that has seen the change in the status of the white bourgeois female. And, one can add, in the status of the white working-class male, the white working-class female, and every other kind of human being of whatever color, gender, sexual orientation, and age, whose world has slipped into the capitalist sphere as it spreads across the earth via the imperatives of globalization. In fact, it is the subject as agent in history as such that has been dethroned. Felski also declares that “the history of the modern itself contains an extended tradition of questioning

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Introduction

and contesting dominant gender norms.” True. But it is not some vague and amorphous concept of the “modern” which does this. Money power and participation in the capitalist marketplace have made all the difference. How else can one explain that, by the end of the twentieth century, patriarchy was in tatters while capitalism has carried on triumphantly into its global phase? And as a result, women, to the extent that they follow through on the capitalist program around them, are, in effect, no different than men. In the droll sally of the February 2000 Report on Business, the Female Eunuch has given way to the Female Unit. This is not to repeat a sentimental commonplace of some forms of contemporary feminism, that women are now forced to be or act like men in order to make it. Women are being forced out of older identities into new ones.10 Men, too, have been forced out of old identities and are now being defined by the same genderneutral economic forces as everyone else. Outbreaks of male resentment in the period of displacement are really little more than nostalgia for the precapitalist social order, with its compulsory masculinity, male bonds, and vertical power structures. King Arthur and all the Knights of the Round Table have gone septic. Marc Lepine, the dark “knight” of the Montreal Polytechnic massacre on 7 December 1989,11 is exhibit A. What we have is a convergence of identities in market societies. The clear gender delineations of, say, feudalism have been virtually erased in our time. Crusading was man’s work in the twelfth century, if you could stomach it. Trading in futures or managing a mutual fund is anybody’s work today. Gender confusion and ambiguity, transvestitism, alternative sexualities, transgendering and all those other symptoms of the collapse of inherited sexual boundaries result from the corrosive action of a practical capitalism on the sociocultural framework that kept traditional identities in place in the past. You don’t need a literary theorist, like, for example, Colleen Lamos in Deviant Modernism (9), to tell you about it. You can see it for yourself on the trashier TV talk shows any afternoon of the week. And, mind you, the trashier the better. By the time you get up to Oprah’s mental habits, the fog has already begun to settle in again. Let me emphasize that these changes did not come about because capitalism evolved from patriarchal society. Capitalism is inimical through and through to all those older forms and conventions, both patriarchal and matriarchal ones, and any other kind of -archal there is. It is their antithesis, not their offspring. It is the negation of traditional values and bonds. It is, in fact, the macro-counterculture. The popular image of the so-called “counterculture” of the 1960s is misleading. It was in reality a conservative counter-revolution to the revolutionary advance of capitalism. This is

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perhaps why, when trying to formulate an ethics and politics to oppose capitalism in the 1960s, the more naive elements of the so-called “counterculture” looked back to precapitalist social forms, like the enlarged family, the commune, the tribe, why they delved into the spiritualism of ancient peoples, like the native American or Asian, why their favored forms of aesthetic expression were collective, uncomplicated, and ritualized. None of this could survive. The historical cultures which had given rise to the tribe or Shamanistic spiritualism were already in the process of being mangled into “heritage” packaging. The “counterculture” of the 1960s was no exception. The only point worth noting is the speed with which the more savvy hippy entrepreneurs were quickly folded into the emerging beatnik capitalism of the 1980s and 90s. Of course, the triumph of the capitalist revolution did not happen overnight and there have been outbreaks of vigorous resistance. The “tribal” side of the 1960s was only one ephemeral manifestation. The Battle in Seattle over the World Trade Organization in late 1999 and the various sequels in Washington, DC, Prague, and Turin during World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings are others. Capitalism will not, indeed cannot, blindly destroy the earth. Capitalism as a system is far too knowledge-intensive, far too shrewdly realistic. After all, doesn’t it have 90 percent of the world’s most brilliant economists and scientists on the payroll? Both the capitalist and the WTO eco-protestor believe in the same thing, conservation of the earth. The eco-protestor believes it ought to be lovingly conserved in and for itself; the capitalist believes it ought to be lovingly conserved as a sustainable apparatus for the generation of investable wealth. How we value things lies at the heart of the matter; thus: the importance of understanding how the culture of capitalism works inside each of us; how in our time its worldly voice is already inside our own heads, having silenced most of the others. Scepticism and a pervasive irony are as important to the triumph of capitalism as the division of labor. I may hold some particular thing sacred, but the capitalist logic, with all its ironic inflections intact, always brings me down to earth. The holy is inevitably laid bare by the addition of the bar code. Michel de Montaigne and Adam Smith, it seems, are on the same side of history. Hence the need to see through to capitalism’s nihilist core. The reason we don’t sell our children into slavery at the highest price lies in our powerful bioaffective attachments to traditional (i.e. precapitalist) forms of domestic bonding, not to some abstract principle of human duty or goodness anchored in some absolute imperative. No doubt we are driven to adorn our attachments as high principles, but that is simply psychological

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Introduction

camouflage. Before the immersion of all social life in exchange, the root arbitrariness of such attachments was very difficult to see. Capitalism has simply taken down the facade. Ludwig Wittgenstein got it just about right when he wrote at the end of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1918), “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same” (147), i.e. arbitrary constructions. Acknowledging the metaphysical relativity of ethics, by the way, does not deny its necessary place in any serious family and community life. Within contemporary nihilism, we now have to consciously and ever more loudly affirm the necessity of these values, rather than inherit them silently as legacies of the honoured past. Georg Luk´acs once noted “the naively cynical frankness” of German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s description of marriage: “Sexual community,” Kant wrote, “is the reciprocal use made by one person of the sexual organs and faculties of another . . . [M]arriage . . . is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other’s sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.” Luk´acs believed this way of thinking about a profoundly intimate, existential relationship between two human beings to be the typical naive cynicism of “great thinkers” (History, 100). In the 1790s, when Kant was writing, it was only the most advanced thinkers who could set aside the cultural flesh of an institution like marriage in order to offer up its devalued skeleton. In the 1990s, such “frankness” became the tedious routine of newspaper columnists and the graduate school seminar. Is this, then, the style of “great” thinking or is it simply one more step towards the unravelling of all values as psychological preparation for a future stripped of tradition? Incidentally, if you hear this as a kind of rearguard defence of “tradition”, it isn’t. Capitalism is like a very “smart” virus that, once settled in the host body, cannot be easily dislodged. As it learns slowly to overcome the body’s own immunological defences (e.g. sacred beliefs, customary practices, communal rootedness), and to overcome whatever stopgap therapies are administered (e.g. noblesse oblige, socialism, the welfare state), it eventually comes to dominate and kill it. Unlike a virus, however, capitalism is able to replace the old body with a new one. It is able to destroy almost every aspect of precapitalist society and sensibility and put in its place new modes of thought, new kinds of organization, and, of course, a whole new species of human being. If you are still situated in the old world with its old bonds, the assault on inherited values may seem, as a result, thoroughly chaotic and demoralizing. It was at the turn of the last century that the transition first becomes clearly visible. Modernism, as a new artistic discourse and new style of

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personal and communal life, is the key symptom of the transition. Inmates of the artistic bohemias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, abiding in the nooks and crannies of a moribund status culture of dying traditions, burnt-out values, and the vacant somnambulism of custom, were the first to reinvent community relationships within the new social conditions projected by market society. London’s yellow or “decadent” Nineties, with Oscar Wilde in the lead, provides a prototype of the bohemian enclave nervously lodged in a still dominant, but rapidly expiring, customary culture. The Marquess of Queensberry’s vindictive (and homophobic) legal victory over Wilde in 1895 represents the dead hand of the past raised against the social history of the life to come. Wilde may have suffered a personal tragedy, but how he lived, his lifestyle that is, trumped Queensberry’s world in spades. When, in the last year of the twentieth century, a very low-end department store was able to sell men’s sexy and revealing (in the bulging sense), bikini-style underwear at Christmas with the coy caption “Don we now our gay apparel!” you can be pretty sure capitalism is not inherently homophobic. How Wilde, vilified as a depraved sodomist in 1895, would have enjoyed the irony of this victory. James Whistler’s successful libel suit against John Ruskin nearly twenty years earlier carried the same historical message. Whistler had sued over remarks by Ruskin which suggested that the painter may have been incompetent. In the case, the court, forced to rule against its own cultural prejudices, had to find for the protomodernist Whistler against the increasingly irrelevant moralism of Ruskin, and through him, the increasingly irrelevant traditionalism of societies organized around custom and precedence. Whistler’s pittance in damages expresses perfectly the cultural impasse of the time. It would only be resolved in the next century by the advance of the market economy. And let’s not forget that Ruskin’s libellous objections to Whistler’s painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold, the “pot of paint” flung “in the public’s face,” have never been taken seriously as art criticism, and, when all is said and done, can be simply dismissed as unnecessary interference with trade. Events like these make concrete the material significance of Nietzsche’s insight about the history of the next two hundred years. A hundred years into that history, we now approach the condition of perfected nihilism he predicted.12 As artists, the early modernists were revolutionaries. I want to argue that they were also revolutionaries in the remaking of everyday life as well. In this respect they participated, often as unwilling and, possibly, even blind, social commandos and shock troops, in the making of capitalist society and culture. Obviously they were neither laissez-faire ideologues nor captains

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of industry, but in their everyday lives and in their art they showed the way forward to the kind of culture which a capitalism, liberated from the moralisms of the past, inevitably brings into existence. The Bloomsbury circle, for example (like the modularized social world formulaically depicted in late 1990s TV shows such as Friends and Sex in the City), is as much a feature of the social terrain of capitalism as monetarist fiscal policies. I call them “unwilling” and “blind” because many of the actors in this story thought they were resisting the spread of the commercial ethos, when in fact they were engaged, as a matter of survival, in its research and development in everyday life. For Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, the academic histories of art and design have already found a notable place; Omega’s chapter in the business history of niche marketing, however, remains to be written. In Reading 1922, Michael North has written persuasively about the business shrewdness pioneered by the modernist publishing firm of Boni and Liveright and others in America involved in the production and marketing of the new art. His comment that by “the 1920s the German avant-garde had extraordinarily close ties with the ‘culture industry’,” are also very apposite. Kurt Schwitters, for example, had established an advertising agency, and Hannah H¨och was working for Ullstein Verlag, publisher of Germany’s largest mass-market magazines. The way that Berlin dada posed as a business with investment strategies and advertising campaigns was meant, of course, to be a mockery of both the disengagement of traditional art and the practicality of business, and yet there was also a good deal of genuine admiration for the forms of mass marketing which seemed both untraditional and nonsectarian. (206)

There may very well have been a mocking intent and, paradoxically, “genuine admiration” in these avant-garde activities, but they were incidental affects that obscured the more fundamental issue. The new art and the new commerce were, and are, one and the same. Notwithstanding what Schwitters and H¨och believed they were doing (and whatever their attitudes towards art and commerce), what they responded to was precisely the “untraditional and nonsectarian” character of market society. As market society grows more robust, freeing its agents from past attachments and practices, the aesthetic or social distance between modernist art and commodity culture disappears. And this applies as much to the way we have come to live as it does to the making of art. It’s probably farcical to think of people like Lytton Strachey or Virginia Woolf as “commandos” in any sense of the word, but they, like many others in and beyond Bloomsbury, began to live lives cut to a different pattern and, whether they liked it or not (or even knew it), it was just the kind

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of thing that the emerging market environment, gradually freeing itself from past custom, had begun to select, from the 1850s on, as the cultural paradigm of the future. At the present time, our material lives are shaped by the flows and counterflows of capital; our spiritual and psychological lives by the culture of modernism. Modernism, to put it bluntly, is, and always has been, the culture of capitalism, even when the early capitalists were still trying to conform to the outmoded social and cultural conventions they would not begin to jettison until the 1960s. In the era of turbo-capitalism, modernism is its cultural expression more than ever before. But a word of caution: I am not arguing, like David Brooks, that market society or the capitalist order has “co-opted” modernism for its own purposes. I am not arguing that modernist styles and techniques have been carried off by unscrupulous capitalists in pursuit of their own squalid pecuniary goals under the cover of modernist camouflage. Cubism has not been abducted by the makers of beer ads on TV as one of the useful idiots of history. Far from it. Capitalism, as it is embodied in market society, emerges from the same gene pool as modernism; they are, to repeat, one and the same. This has been a difficult idea for me personally to accept because of my own previous, emotional investment in a morally and politically redemptive interpretation of the avant-garde as social formation. In the background of this affective attachment lay the great critical moralists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Leavis, and, no doubt, Cleanth Brooks. The avant-garde, at one time, represented for me the cultural resistance to rampant philistine commercialism in the same way that I adhered to the “left” in politics because it represented ethically superior resistance to the money-above-all authoritarianism of the “right.” I was wrong on both counts. Capital, not Marx, Lenin, or Mao, is the avant-garde of economic and political history. Neither the “left” nor the old traditional, Tory “right” can survive capitalism’s bracing assault on societies of custom and precedence. It puts all previous economic and political forms, first, in doubt, and, then, to flight. Even our supposedly “patriarchal” business culture has finally reached its “modernist” phase. Look, for example, at the number of TV shots for financial institutions and mutual funds that use the stereotypical doddering old fool in a gray flannel suit as a point of contrast with the hipness and flexibility in the new economy. Thomas Petzinger, in The New Pioneers (1999), also makes the connection without actually saying so. He celebrates those business enterprises which have been flouting the conventional organization and behavior more or less established by the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. He argues that the most successful companies today,

24

Introduction

those which best reflect the inner dynamic of the capitalist idea, are adopting new ways of doing business. These new ways have early twentieth-century modernism written all over them. In effect what Petzinger has noticed in his rambles across the United States is the belated arrival in the business world of the modernist social revolution from a hundred years ago. As strange as it sounds, what he’s describing (and celebrating) is the bohemianization of the business world. When he writes that the central metaphors of the older industrial model – the machine and the clock – have been replaced by notions of organicism, variable temporalities, and ecology, he is beginning to describe the character of ideas circulating in the avant-garde at the turn of the nineteenth century, ideas about time, for example, that Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust made popular in literary circles all over Europe. When he writes about how industrialism’s fetishizing of production, design uniformity, and economies of scale are being replaced by notions of alert adaptation, ingrained monitoring of process, and flexible production he is describing the compositional practices of the early modernist poets, more concerned with process, and the aesthetics of continuous collaborative revision13 (as in the famous case of Eliot and Pound) than the death-in-life of the finished product. Ford’s Model T, produced en masse, to exactly the same pattern, for the faceless masses symbolizes the old order. When he cheerfully praises the new capitalist’s love of creativity, the knowledge-based economy, and “vision”, or in the cant of the business schools, “visioning,” Petzinger is only discovering modernism’s redefining of creativity and vision as an activity of continuous inventiveness, or, in business, the regime of perpetual innovation. When Petzinger notices the rigid hierarchical organization of the antediluvian business firm, he is noticing, not so much an intrinsic quality14 of early capitalism, but a reflection of the kind of hierarchical semifeudal culture in which early capitalism had to make its way. When he describes, on the other hand, the beatnik capitalism of our own time, where hierarchy is replaced by what he cheerily calls self-organizing groups, he is describing the old bohemian circle of artistic comrades-in-arms as the creative, relatively autonomous, self-organized, constantly changing, noetic community of shared interests, shared knowledge, and common purposes. Finally, when Petzinger claims that the older emphasis on production and the producer has been replaced by the new authority of the consumer, he points to the very important, and virtually hidden role of the early modernists, in exploring consumption as the other half of the capitalist synthesis (Tranter, Deficits and Desires). The problem with the capitalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was their chronic social and domestic conservatism.

Introduction

25

Able to follow the economic logic of capitalism, they were unable to follow the logic of capitalist social and cultural development because of the outmoded moral and status loyalties which blinded them to the new kinds of freedom offered by societies energized by markets. Petzinger’s work simply promotes the kind of hip business enterprises and practices that distinguish what we now call the “new” economy. Many of his dichotomies are obviously false because they are not dichotomies at all. It is not a matter of choosing one organizational mode or another as if they can act independently of each other. You cannot have consumption of commodities, for example, without production; you cannot have selforganizing teams in the office or on the factory floor without a hierarchy of control somewhere in the background and, usually, oppressed gangs of sweated labor in Asia even further in the background. You can’t have a knowledge-based economy without the hydroelectric power dams, those prodigious emblems of titanic industrialism, that supply electricity to run the information appliances. What he’s describing, of course, is the maturing of capitalism in a nihilistic values-setting. As civil society disintegrates and serious public debate about values grows both tediously histrionic and inert,15 privately organized groups and organizations begin to dot the civil void. Bohemia is no longer the exception, it becomes the rule. As the inner logic of capitalist development wore down traditional society, devalued it, emptied it of its ancient, public meanings, new, limited forms of social organization (the street gang, the circle of friends, the teenage cyber-nazi Web ring, the corporation) took its place and with them came new meanings, new loyalties. The new corporate granules are lodged in the social world very much like the artistic bohemias of old, i.e. as enclosed havens, opaque and wary, loosely connected to a civil society growing, for them, increasingly meaningless with every passing day. Business hostility to public ownership or collective enterprise, or to any material expression of the communal will (except in the form of consumption), resembles the old hostility of bohemia to the moribund, common culture of bourgeois society. Structurally, the new social terrain approximates Eliot’s Waste Land (Collected Poems, 61–86): a wasted, disorganized, and horizontalized landscape on which there are luminous fragments, or moments of coherence and epiphany, but no general congruity. Either you take cover in a protected haven (increasingly organized around the business firm and/or the criminal gang, and in some parts of the world the difference between the two is no longer detectable) or you drift across a degraded wasteland as a homeless derelict. Eliot’s 1922 poem is not only a great modernist masterpiece, but a structural map of the future, our present.

26

Introduction

Lawrence Friedman’s The Horizontal Society (1999) argues that ties of vertical or hierarchical authority – attachment and loyalty to parents, priests, political leaders, patriarchs, matriarchs, and so on – have weakened and been replaced by a radical horizontalizing of social relations. The pull of family or clan has weakened and been replaced by new loyalties and new communities of interest. Father Knows Best gives way to the Brady Bunch which mutates, in its turn, into the Trenchcoat Mafia. Friedman believes that these “horizontal groups” are the result of modern communications technology. Assigning amazing powers to electrical appliances is a North American bias of some potency and ought to be resisted. These kinds of noetic enclaves are neither new, nor the product of television and cell phones. The artistic bohemias of old were the first “horizontal” affiliations of this kind and this was well before the arrival of even telegraphy and radio. No. The levelling, the mobility, and the buying and selling of designer selves for the masses – what Friedman calls “horizontal identity” – are the product of the long revolution that has made the market the central institution of liberal society. The market eviscerates older vertical bonds because they stand in the way of the horizontal bliss of buying and selling and of the commodification process in general. And this process takes in the self as easily as it takes in the object. The United States has gone down that road further and faster than most everyone else, which is perhaps why the United States was, all through the last century, the indispensable modernist nation. Hierarchy, ancestor worship, and vertical loyalties of blood and kinship are the enemy for this new order of things. Chosen, not inherited, attachments (once called loyalties), the new bohemias of like-minded individuals, and the fabrication of selves sketch the outlines of capitalist society and culture. Early modernist avant-garde groups revealed market society’s nature decades before it came fully into view as the living reality for us all. Of course, they did not see themselves as fulfilling this historical role. Rather than being the first cells of a new kind of social organization that would gain wide currency by century’s end, they believed they were defending truth and art against the torpid advance of a rebarbative commercialism. The full extent of that paradox has not been visible until recent times. The early modernists were, as a result, and this is perhaps the more difficult notion to grasp, conservative revolutionaries. For all their talk of renovation and change, they tried, in effect, to hold on to certain necessary ideas and values at a time when capitalist society, even when it was ruled by political formations calling themselves “conservative,” made it increasingly difficult to conserve anything. The internal life of the bohemian enclave revived, in

Introduction

27

small and in new ways, the expiring traditions and values of community. The sense of belonging to a social whole was transferred from a nation or class to the more congenial embrace of the comradely circle, organized around the creating of art and the enjoyment of intimacy. If the nation and its political institutions could no longer be taken seriously by serious artists, then perhaps the more limited, but vitally living world, of loving friends could. In that sense, the modernists were intent on conserving some version of group life in the general decline of communalist values all through the century. For an artist like William Faulkner, deeply rooted in the traditional, but expiring, culture of a particular region, modernity imposed a whole series of complex artistic and personal dilemmas. I understand that talk of the decline of community has been a familiar theme in academic and, to some extent, in popular discourse for the last couple of decades. Numerous books, articles, and the like have lamented the passage of the communal or social bond. I must say that I agree with the analytical validity of much of that work, by George Soros for example, in his recent The Crisis of Global Capitalism and Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character, both published in 1999. The discussion by century’s end was intense, explicit, and sophisticated, but in the late twentieth century the whole matter, sadly, had been reduced to discussion only. No viable program of political action to assert communalist principles could be advanced in a climate of political opinion which inevitably interpreted all serious advocacy of communalism with antiquated thinking and with the long slide into the collectivist nightmares of the twentieth century. At the same time, the word “community” and “neighborhood” and “village,” and all their other cognates, were intoned endlessly by politicians, commentators, real estate agents, corporate commissars, and the inexhaustible advertising and publicity machines of business. Even those who should know better thought it was still possible to say, solemnly, that “it takes a village” to make a healthy person and actually seemed to believe that the “village” still existed, or that it was still a viable alternative to the new kind of ersatz “village” organized around a strip of chain stores, a supermarket, and a parking lot. The early modernist bohemias, like Bloomsbury in the ’twenties or Greenwich Village in the ’teens, actually were village communities of a sort. Communal, faceto-face, self-organized, and self-regulating, they actually tried to create an alternative social life within the mass well into the second half of the century, until the mass itself would be further fragmented by capital into the sallow simulacra of communities, gated and anonymous and bland. If one form of the conservatism of the modernists was social, another was aesthetic. They still believed in the absolute value of art, both the

28

Introduction

finished product and the strenuously elevating processes and sacrifices by which it came to be produced. They affirmed the general idea of art’s worth. Of course this was not done in terms of openly transcendent values; the modernists were sufficiently of their time to realize they were living in a post-Christian and, more importantly, a post-Kantian world. Authenticity, necessity, primordiality were the new absolutes. These were the values that lifted the greatest works beyond the reach of the commodity. Heidegger on Being and temporality and the early Luk´acs on reification were two principal theorists. Indeed even the anti-art of Dada, Duchamp’s R. Mutt urinal for example, carried a double charge of meaning, the absolute primacy of pure form, over and above function, and a social critique of the fate of art in a commercial and philistine culture. What the modernists did not fully grasp was the actual nature of capitalism. It could transform every affirmation of aesthetic worth, every gesture of aesthetic revolt, indeed take the idea of revolt itself, and turn it into a sustaining structure of the new system. This is how the Surrealism of the 1920s can end up as four minutes of agitated, crotch-grabbing duress in music videos. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Surrealism has been dragged kicking and screaming, against itself, into the babylonian captivity of capital. Surrealism is one of the cultural spearheads of capitalism. In these and other ways, the culture of modernism was both revolutionary and conservative at the same time. The phrase “the culture of modernism” is important here. I mean by it not only the specific texts – poetry, fiction, drama – produced, but the sustaining communal ethos – the community – in which these texts were written. Rather than seeing modernism as primarily a literary phenomenon beginning in the early 1900s, I want to locate modernism in the context of the material and socioeconomic history I have sketched above. Modernist authors were as responsive to the unprecedented changes wrought in the lifeworld by capitalism as they were to purely literary matters of technique and innovation, if not more so. Many of their works were exploratory, trying to reinvent social and domestic life from scratch. I argue that artists were far more attentive, as the twentieth century began, to the long process of unmooring or disembedding what C. B. Macpherson has called “customary or status society” (Political Theory, 49–51) and its evolution into the “possessive market society” in which we now find ourselves (53–61). The texts they produced are important social documents, not just aesthetic ones, in recording their contradictory responses of horror and fascination. Their stylistic and generic heterodoxy was an integral part of the response to real world change, not simply

Introduction

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aesthetic acrobatics. Indeed, as I will argue in the next chapter about Karl Marx’s sarcasm, they were driven to experiment and innovate by the real demands of an all too real time, and not by the sudden onset of an infectious aesthetic gaiety. Indeed, I want to advance the paradoxical proposition that the early modernists, like the European communists, were the first, exemplary children of capitalism, more so than the hidebound merchants and businessmen who did the actual donkeywork of capital. These latter were citizens of two societies: one real, the other virtual. They lived in an older, traditional society, in which they were often weighed down, as if they were real, by status obligations, the inertial drag of antiquated communal duties, and the living death of defunct public moralities. The syllabus of their accelerated grimace could be found easily enough in the persistent horror of “keeping up appearances.” This was their virtual world. But they also had to make their way, like everyone else, in the real world, in the new, ethically fragmented and perpetually changing market society of the future. The tragic conflicts of these “men of property” were told by writers like John Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, and Arnold Bennett. They recorded the death throes of the older culture from within the orbit of its waning values. Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) tells their story from the outside. The cornpone Clinton impeachment in the late 1990s was a very late and farcical manifestation of the same series of self-righteous grimaces. Modernism explored the brave new world of capitalist values in its earliest phases. Exemplary in their visceral understanding of the capitalist ethos, especially its nihilism, the early modernists were among the first to flourish on the new landscape of innovation and perpetual change. They did not necessarily participate in commerce as such, although many sharp ones (like Picasso) certainly did learn how markets worked, including the canny use of stylistic updates and constant rebranding of the modern. Instead they often used their unique position in the new order of things to devise strategies by which the more corrosive and threatening aspects of that order could be kept at arm’s length, or blocked, or used to further personal ends. In other words, the early modernists, who were themselves the direct products of market society, devoted all their considerable talents and intellects to the task of protecting themselves from the very beast that had given them birth. But, inevitably, whatever they produced from within this contradictory position would always already be infected by the values of the system in which it was produced. Their example would act to invigorate the very system which it was meant to undermine or postpone.

30

Introduction

The urge to perpetual innovation in art (and personal life) among the early modernist avant-garde fused awkwardly with the conscious desire for the preservation of authentic values. The struggle, however, was carried on with a wide variety of aesthetic and existential means that could only have come into being from within, as a result of, the very system they were meant to resist. Until the closing decades of the twentieth century this situation went largely unrecognized. A blinkered literary criticism always concentrated on the innovative and experimental as a mode of spiritual renewal and, as a result, missed the cultural and political significance of modernism’s historical fate. Hence the peculiar authority of modernist texts for the formalist obsessions of American “new criticism” in the post-Second World War English Department. The belated notice in our time by post-structuralist and cultural theorists of modernism’s unique explorations in self-fashioning, the rejiggings of gender and identity, and the other performatives of ontic being (I have in mind the work of writers like Butler, Felski, Lamos, Armstrong, Sedgwick, Benstock among others) is simply the discovery of the themes that early modernism made its own in the bohemian enclave. The more interesting story to be told, however, is how the private refinements of Natalie Barney’s lesbian evenings in the rue Jacob or the exquisite gender politics of the Bloomsbury bohemia or Baroness Elsa’s “personality experiments” in Greenwich Village16 have been artlessly transposed a century later to the tough trash of daytime TV and American presidential politics. What are some of the themes that have spread out from the early bohemias to mass society in our time? The list should be very familiar by now. In the last two centuries, traditional communal arrangements, old standards of domestic and personal affiliation and intimacy, settled senses of self-identity including the set protocols of gender, the familiar contours of space and time, and customary cultural economies, including generic and formal ones, have crumbled in the face of the revaluation of all values wrought by the arrival of the marketplace as the new engine of history. Modernism tried, quixotically, to define its own historical fate against this emerging state of affairs. Its innovations in artistic, social, and economic practices were fashioned from necessity to shelter authentic cultural values from the destructive furies of a commercial age. These rearguard actions did not use the common literary forms and techniques of the immediate nineteenth-century past, nor did they advance the justifications and rationales of old. They were effected with quite radically innovative artistic weapons and with new-sounding discourses of aesthetic legitimation.

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Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, G. E. Moore, and Roger Fry, for example, replaced the generic decorousness of the ancients and the moral decorousness of Ruskin, Emerson, and Carlyle with a new emphasis on art’s formal plasticity and autonomy. But for all its renovatory rhetoric, the modernist revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century was, in one sense, a conservative revolution through and through – from the incontrovertibly conservative T. S. Eliot to the communist Bertolt Brecht and on to the feminist Virginia Woolf. By the end of the twentieth century, modernism’s own characterizing techniques, styles, and formal experiments, initially deployed as resistance to the new nihilism of the capitalist market, had become indistinguishable from the very market culture which the first modernists seemed to be stoutly opposing.17 The siren song of technical innovation in form and the accompanying bohemian social and economic practices of the early modernist avant-gardes paradoxically exposed modernism to its own self-subversion by the adaptive potency of the very system of exchange modernism was deployed to withstand. The utopian call for renovation in the arts – Ezra Pound’s rallying cry to “Make it new!” – at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a way of resisting and overturning nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, was precisely the same path by which a continuously rejuvenated and self-revolutionizing capitalism made modernism its own preferred cultural style by century’s end. It might be useful for the reader to stop reading at this point and switch on the television set. Don’t worry too much about the actual programs, just concentrate on the real content of the medium, the advertisements.18 If necessary, look past your own acquired disdain of the art of TV commercials. Look at the style of their composition. Look at the artistic traditions which many advertisements, especially the ones from the wealthiest corporations, call forth from the past. In the late 1990s, there was a television commercial for the Audi automobile corporation that was typical. A storage-roomful of lifeless crash test dummies are brought vividly to life by the galvanizing presence of an Audi car. As the dummies jerk into animate life and begin to move stiffly, but urgently, towards the gleaming car, they can be heard singing the Choral Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: “Freude, sch¨oner G¨otterfunken, / Tochter aus Elysium, / Wir betreten feuertrunken . . .,” and so on, to the end of the thirty-second shot, as they reverently congregate around the car in a tableau reminiscent of crowd scenes from the Weimar films of Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Amusing? Effective? Yes, very. The levels of irony and humour need no comment as the makers of the commercial know only too well.

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Introduction

If comment were required, such an advertisement could not work in the mass medium for which it was designed. The ad, of course, is not simply a clever piece of advertising pizzaz. It has a century-long artistic pedigree. The Audi ad is pure Dada. Instead of being presented on American network and cable TV in the late 1990s for an audience of millions, the ad could just as easily have been performed before several dozen boh´emiens in Zurich’s Salle Waag, one of the centres of European Dada, during the First World War. You could argue that a Dada version of this scenario would have had a wholly other meaning. It would not have been used to sell the Audi, for example. Indeed the Dada meanings, c. 1916, would no doubt have been a droll attack on commercial society itself, on the capitalist–bourgeois culture which turns the noble ode of Schiller and Beethoven into dismal kitsch. But these points are irrelevant. How was it possible for capitalism to take the radical critical consciousness at the root of the Dada event and turn it into its opposite? Turn it into an aesthetic discourse which brings seller and buyer together in the amused fellowship of the like-minded smirk? How do cultural practices that begin life opposing the world of commercial exchange end up as the cultural muscle that sustains it? How else than that modernism and capitalism are one and the same. The Audi ad is only one example of the relentless cultural process that transformed the twentieth century. By century’s end the technical experiments and innovations among the early artistic avant-gardes of Europe, Britain, and America had spread out to the mainstream culture. Cuttingedge advertising today, for example, has completely exposed its modernist partiality for irony and the ironic method of composition, as an examination of, for example, the print ads for Calvin Klein’s fragrance Contradiction makes clear enough. The modernist innovation represented by the poetics of juxtaposition, i.e. juxtaposition without connection, is now so much a part of every discursive routine in contemporary society that its revolutionary character is no longer visible. The style of curt trenchancy, of the luminous particular, of the radiant image, of the dexterous succession of suggestive fragments, is now the stylistic stock-in-trade of music videos, beer ads, war reportage, and, even, of the glossier brochures for upmarket condominium complexes and gated communities. If the thing weren’t so inane, I would quote from one such brochure that I have to hand. But I’ll spare you the pain. My point is not that the language of this brochure is a work of art on the same level of achievement as Pound’s Cantos. But that the methodology of Pound’s Cantos is obviously not alien to the commercial mindset freed from the pull of literary custom. Certainly, this connection

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was not possible for Edwardian and Georgian readers who carried a spent verbal world around in their heads and who, like the critic F. L. Lucas, thought the first few Cantos and Eliot’s Waste Land pretentious mumbojumbo. Today, on the other hand, what creative director in an ad agency would dismiss out of hand the sound-collage technique of Kurt Schwitters’s Anna Blume, if it could be shown to effect the more rapid sale of cut flowers?

i

The posthuman scene [A] capitalist system will help to generate a capitalist culture. Capitalism affects the manners of a people. – Spencer J. Pack, after J. G. A. Pocock

chap t e r 1

Approaching modernism

First let’s sort out some historical and methodological issues. In a review of Raymond Tallis’s Enemies of Hope a few years ago, the critic Robert Grant expressed what is now a familiar kind of historical assessment. About two nineteenth-century progenitors of contemporary theoretical discourses, he wrote: And it must be said that, ethically speaking . . . Marx and Nietzsche, did more than a little respectively to clear the ground for the Communist and Nazi atrocities to come. (TLS, 14 Nov. 1997, 4)

Grant explains that late twentieth-century theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and the rest of the usual suspects have inherited what he takes to be the moral nihilism of Marx and Nietzsche. Here is the familiar rhetoric which liberal and neoconservative1 ideologues share. The argument asserts that a post-structuralist literary critic, for example, as a byproduct of her work, strips human beings of their moral dimension and aids and abets their dehumanization, leading to pessimism, cynicism, and, no doubt, the Rwandan genocide. I suppose it is easier to blame a post-structuralist reading of Moby Dick, via Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for the killing fields of the twentieth century, than get involved in the messy business of identifying the real culprits and causes. I find it difficult to imagine why others, like Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Jeremy Bentham for example, have not been included on Grant’s blacklist. Why are these three governed by a milder standard than that which is applied to Nietzsche and Marx? The division of labor, the dehumanizing uses to which the science of demographics is regularly put today, and Bentham’s utility calculus seem far more contemptuous of actual persons than the prattle which the epigones of Derrida and Foucault are often heard to talk in the graduate seminars of the higher schools. You might well ask what this sterile and basically stupid debate has to do with modernism. Fortunately, not much. However, it is relevant in at 37

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The posthuman scene

least one procedural sense. One of the most important methodological impediments to understanding modernism, modernity, and the twentieth century lies couched in Grant’s sentence. It is important to ask how it is that in the past century, a century of philosophical and popular materialism, many cultural historians, literary critics, and theorists persisted in thinking that it is principally ideas, or the expression of ideas, which drive history in general and force it into its many symptomatic spasms. In the “Preface” to Early Modernism, Christopher Butler seems to think that Isaiah Berlin has something to do with spreading this notion, although, to be fair, Butler only wants to thank Berlin for inspiring him “to ask how it is that general ideas move individual men and women” (v). Or not. Whether this is an important question to ask, or whether Berlin simply presumed it was, is left undiscussed. It is fatuous to believe, as Grant seems to, that there is a direct line connecting, say, Marx’s Capital to the Soviet gulag, or Nietzsche’s The Gay Science to Treblinka. I suppose by the same perverse logic there may also exist a line of thought which leads from the Sermon on the Mount to the inquisitorial excesses of the Spanish Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, or the Mosaic law and the speeches of Theodor Herzl to the settler fanaticism of mass murderer Dr. Baruch Goldstein. That the ideas of a bilious German socialist exiled in England or the poetic ravings of an obscure philologist could actually move millions of people to countenance mayhem and murder, or could penetrate, except as catch phrases of convenience, the skulls of Russian or German gangsters in power, is laughable. If anything cleared the ground for the atrocities of the twentieth century, or, to quote Grant on the post-structuralists again, stripped “people of their moral dimension” making “it easier to murder them, or to watch others do so” (4), it is probably more worthwhile to look at such inhuman institutions as the factory system of the nineteenth century or, as the historian Daniel Pick has done, the industrial (or should that be industrious?) slaughter of thousands upon thousands in the Battle of the Somme. Certainly ideas and words have been powerful stimulants in prosletyzing people and prompting them to action, but if you really want to understand where Auschwitz came from, don’t bother with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, look to Henry Ford’s first assembly lines,2 look to the way human beings were reinvented as appendages of machines in the industrial revolution.3 Look to the jerky old films of the Great War, the “brisk celluloid” that still shows us the “armies of France . . . reeling towards Verdun” (Hill, Mystery, 14). That’s where people were stripped of their moral being, that’s where the British, French, and German officer

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classes found it very easy indeed to murder in their thousands the “footsloggers” at their disposal. There, not the post-structuralist seminar room, is where the “whole becomes a vast mechanical process actuated throughout by a principle of heteronomous obedience, an endless denial of responsibility” (Grant, 4). For the liberal humanist like Robert Grant, it is easier to blame Marx or Julia Kristeva for this state of affairs than the Ford Motor Company or the moral climate of a Sandhurst or a West Point. I wonder what Dr. Grant, as a responsible literary critic, could ever make of a poem like Isaac Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump?” Look to those charging limbers, sir, crushing the skulls of the dead, not the “Theses on Feuerbach,” for the moral climate which finally gave us the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front.4 The first question which any study of modernism must raise today is the question of approach. How are we to approach the matter of the modern? For one thing, we must avoid turning our attention away from the sociomaterial conditions – namely the processes of modernization – in which modernity and modernism have been forged. We must begin with the procedural insights of Marshall Berman in his All that Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), but without his credulous optimism. We must acknowledge his alertness to the “signs in the street,”5 namely the particular reality of ordinary human beings, without his romantic–bohemian reading of their struggles. No one denies that ideas, or in media-speak, people’s “dreams,” may be powerful stimulants in the eventual creation of certain material conditions. But they are not decisive. Take the case of the rationalism we associate with the name of Ren´e Descartes.6 It forms one of the intellectual sources of the Western obsession with technology in modernity. Can we then blame Descartes for the use of advanced technological methods in the Nazi death factories?7 Well, yes, we can, but what’s the use of it? So many practical innovations and decisions and steps had to be taken by so many diversely motivated historical actors over such a long period of time that laying blame in this way is nugatory in the extreme. And yet there are critics and theorists who spit out the word “Cartesian” with the same nasal contempt Churchill favored when intoning the word “Nah-zzi” in his wartime speeches. One, I suppose, can also blame Einstein and Rutherford for the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it takes the numerous intermediaries, people with the moral delicacy of a Harry Truman, say, to order it done and to do it. I’m sure that Truman’s decision to drop the bombs and the obedience of the airmen who carried out the commands did not stem from any deep knowledge of the ideas of any particular thinker. Indeed, the

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practical decisions of moral actors, like a Truman or those airmen, or the SS officers in the camps, are almost always made on the basis of immediate expediency in the culture of habit in which they dwell (unreflective notions of duty, national security, following orders, etc.), not deep moral reflection. For every J. Robert Oppenheimer, deeply troubled by his work on the US A-bomb, there are thousands of anonymous individuals who simply do what they are told. If ethics enters into the decision to do this or that at all (and it usually doesn’t), it is more likely to be the resounding clich´es of the regime’s publicists that fill the heads of the actors with the necessary words, sentiments, and images.8 Ideas are important, but the way concrete actors comport themselves in specific historical situations is usually more thoroughly conditioned by expediency in context than by ideas. As a colleague of mine never tires of saying, for every one debate or quarrel about ideas and principles on a university committee, there are a thousand over territory and power. The Bolsheviks permitted the murder of the kulaks because they represented a political threat, not because each member of the Party had a copy of Das Kapital on the shelf. Ricardo or Bentham could have done just as well. Ideas are rather more likely to be used to justify or rationalize, after the fact, particular political and/or economic events, than be the source points of action. I am not arguing that ideas are not important. They are. Descartes’s rationalism no doubt helped make possible the mechanistic worldview of the eighteenth century and, undoubtedly, that worldview, expressed through many disciplines of pure and applied learning, led in complicated ways to the modern system of production. The pragmatics of modernization came into being when the wedding of Cartesian science as a disinterested pursuit of knowledge of the natural world and market-propelled capitalism was achieved in the nineteenth century. As a result of that, the modern worker as appendage of the machine was born. However, if we were to show Descartes one of the factories of southern China where your children’s toys come from, I’m not sure he would immediately recognize it as his handiwork. Nor would he recognize the human beings at work there as the human subject he reflected upon in his Discourse on the Method of rightly directing one’s Reason and of seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637). Between him and them lies more than three-and-a-half centuries of expediency, or, as Siegfried Giedion prefers in Mechanization Takes Command (2–11), three-and-a-half-centuries of “anonymous history,” rarely touched by serious ethical reflection.

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The nature of the world we face in the early twenty-first century is the product of a multichannelled, long revolution in the material conditions that rule our lives and if it differs radically from some earlier state of affairs, it has not been made so by the post-structuralist destruction of the canon or curriculum, or by the information revolution, or by the recent arrival of the condition that Katherine Hayles tours North American campuses calling the “posthuman.” The forces of market-driven modernization as the principal determinants of our material environment, and the mindset which they generate, have been changing the world since the early nineteenth century. We have been living in the era of the posthuman at least since William Blake recognized it c. 1800, or if you are not impressed by the authority of a mere poet, then at least since Peter Gaskell reported in his The Manufacturing Population of England . . . (1833, 138) that “upwards of 20,000 individuals live in cellars in Manchester alone.” The posthuman does not arrive with the information technology revolution of the late twentieth century, but with the advent of industrial production and the industrial factory, the ur-form, the practical paradigm, of modernity. Modernity flows from this largely anonymous revolution in the procedures for the reproduction and expansion of material life, the advent of what Stephen Kern has called “the culture of time and space.” Whether we look to Manchester in the 1840s, Bangkok in the 1980s, Seattle in the 1990s, or the university campus in the year 2004 and beyond, the ur-form, the factory paradigm, remains in place and with it the human image as shaped by the industrialized workplace from the start. And what exactly is that human image? Briefly, the worker/employee is subordinated to the machine; the human subject to the production process; and humanity absorbed in toto by capital. The history of the last two hundred years has been the history of the irresistible spread of these conditions. If you need convincing, just visit any office or factory or working mine wherever you live. Look at how lines of authority, the work process, and the spatial and temporal structures of everyday existence in the work environment are organized. Yes, you will see human beings, but around whom or what is the organization built, even when it seems benignly humane? Is the human being at the center of the enterprise or is it the production process? Does it matter that there is this particular receptionist in the foyer of your office, or will anyone who can satisfy the requirements of the job and company do?9 Of course, this does not necessarily mean that human workers are inevitably abused or even unfairly exploited (although this is not as rare as

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one might think). It also doesn’t mean that we should unreflectively presume that those who manage or supervise them are moral monsters. It means that capitalism regards these people as little more than human equipment, instruments of production, switching devices in the network, not human beings in any seriously metaphysical sense. And because the workplace has become, in our time, one of the determining social sites for the production of identities, consumption being the other, the notion of the human being as mere category of abstract productive processes (in terms of investments, assets, and liabilities) has come increasingly to pervade all aspects of existence. This includes the way we think, in our liberal–progressivist way, of human beings as machines for perpetually exploiting their own natures in that never-ending utopian drill of personal self-development we call education. In his analysis of changing conceptions of war in the last two centuries, Daniel Pick has made essentially the same point. He argues that the theory and practice of war increasingly takes on the mechanical or technological character of industrialism in all its aspects. Machines in the battlefield and in the support areas are important new developments, but that is not all. The very idea of war takes on a machine-like cast in its structure and logic. Modern war locks up bodies and minds in a new, technologically driven rationality. He identifies two “scenarios” that define this process. In the first, “war is portrayed as increasingly under the sway of the logic of technology, science and planning . . . [A]bstract strategy is modulated by empiricism . . . The course of the conflict does not follow the conscious will of the commander” (War Machine, 165). But even though it may not be controllable by a single man or general staff (the so-called “moral” of the Somme), war “can still, in principle, be thought and written about definitively”: In the second scenario, however, the reassuring (Clausewitzean) image of human control, science, politics, instrumentality, racial improvement through war, is overthrown in a more nightmarish image of crisis. War is no longer the stable object of representation, but the threat of a more drastic foreclosure of meaning. War is internal and external; the catastrophic destroyer of its own author. (ibid., 166)

In an age that has succumbed to the industrial demiurge, Pick’s characterization of war parallels the development of capitalism over the last two centuries. What he is describing in fact, with an appropriate transposition of terms, is the new character of economic practice. The capitalist economy is bounded, on the one hand, by a particular rationality, indeed an epistemology all its own (see Chapter 4 below), which is not under the control of

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any one individual and, on the other, by a peculiar fate in which destruction, including self-destruction, is an unavoidable outcome of the process. This may be “nightmarish” and capitalism may be thoroughly unstable as an “object of representation,” but, at the everyday level of the economy, destruction, re-creation, and instability are, if we no longer worry about the fate of individuals in the process, indices of the system’s health not its death throes. The industrial mode of production, however, is not the sole constituent of these scenarios. There is another element. To the regulation enforced by the rise of factory production we ought to also add the market effect. The two go together historically as mutually reenforcing processes. For the sake of clarity, let me set out, with the help of economists Robert H. Haveman and Kenyon A. Knopf, what I mean by the term “market”: A market is the sum of contacts between buyers and sellers of a product or service. Markets may be formally organized and geographically centered, as are the New York Stock Exchange or the Chicago Board of Trade, or they may be neither. The markets for shoes or for structural steel shapes are not formally organized in this sense, nor can they be located at some particular place on a map. (The Market System, 33)

Two points are worth underlining in this standard definition. For one thing, a market is a “sum” of exchanges, that is to say, a mathematical abstraction in which the individual buyers and sellers as individuals fade into insignificance. Statistically manipulable aggregations of “contacts” or transactions are what count. Secondly, the concept of a market encompasses two kinds of “institutions,” ones that are “formally organized and geographically centered” and ones that are neither. To the New York Stock Exchange one might also add older exchange entities like a livestock market in a rural village in eighteenth-century France. It seems though that being in the market is not entirely a matter of choice or of a particular place. Markets in the nonformal sense are curiously placeless. You are in the market if you need shoes, or “structural steel shapes” or a haircut in South St. Louis (111). Even if you are a trader in one of the formally organized markets, you do not need to participate face-to-face in the “contact” with others: if we were to decide to buy 15 shares of Fruehauf Trailer Co. stock on the New York stock market, we would have no idea from whom we bought the stock, and the person who sold the stock would have no idea of its destination. (112)

It is a strange kind of “contact” between buyer and seller in which no contact actually occurs. Contact in this sense is strangely spectral. In addition, these contacts for the purpose of buying and selling occur in widespread

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“ignorance of market conditions” in “real-world markets” (113). The seeker of a haircut in South St. Louis may not know that the same haircut can be had in North St. Louis for half the price. Although economists tend to think of markets narrowly as institutions of exchange through which certain determinations, of price and quantities of goods, are made (33, 112), they are much more than this. The opaque concreteness or irreducible facticity of a person’s human nature, both its essence and its attributes, are inevitably considered instrumentally by a system organized on market principles. The human is dislodged by the transaction; humanity instrumentalized by exchange. And as all tools, and the activities they further, are of human construction, how long does it take before human concreteness seems merely one more fabrication among many? Consider for a moment Judith Butler’s devaluation of the links between the sex into which one is born (male, female) and the gender (masculine, feminine) one is said to develop as a result of biological differentiation. Erasing these links in Gender Trouble, Butler hopes to unmoor the regulation desire for the other gender from its nature-like dependence on the sexed body. Desire and, therefore, gender float free from each other, and from sex, and can be configured any number of different ways. All the stable factors of the gender system and the expression of desire collapse. She writes, “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender . . . identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Gender Trouble, 146). Gender is not a fact of life after all, but a performance, a social hieroglyphic. And like all performances its social worth depends on the bargaining process of competing performances. Like a commodity, gender has no stable being at all, simply an exchange-value. It is as fluid, unstable, negotiable as any future on a commodity exchange. Transpose the terms a little, from gender to wooden tables, and Marx had already understood the nature of the Butlerian wonderland in 1867: The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its two feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. (Capital, i, 163–64)

Marx the moralist clearly disapproves. But that was over a hundred and thirty years ago. So, is the unmooring of gender a good thing or a bad thing? Who knows, and frankly who cares? Of one thing we can be sure,

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the performative theory of gender harmonizes wonderfully well with the inner meaning, and, I suppose, greatness, of the marketplace. The supposedly enlightened observation, originating with Giambattista Vico in the 1720s, that “man makes himself ” recognizes and celebrates our liberation from the metaphysical oppressions of the onto-religions of the past. This it certainly does. But probably not in the sense intended by the philosophers of the eighteenth century and their intellectual descendants. The brave self-fashioning did unmoor us metaphysically, but instead of the promised land of an authentic freedom from superstition and the illegitimate authority of nobles and priests, it readied us instead for exchange. The celebrated notion, then, of the constructedness of the self is more like a retooling of the person for trade, than an emancipation10 or even an advance in human understanding. Realizing we are all fragile fragments of barely coherent narrative fiction has been celebrated as a laudable advance in self-awareness.11 Actually though, it’s been more like the necessary cultural preparation for absorption into the epistemology of the marketplace, for the production of narcissistic automatons. We produce and reproduce ourselves as products on the model of industrial production, i.e. as inputs, throughputs, and outputs, in order to render our being as malleable, costefficient, and imaginary as possible for participation in the marketplace. The resulting theatricalized personas, continuously in need of new ingredients, new packaging, and ceaseless updates, make do for the self in the absence of a concrete historical fate. That we don’t immediately recognize this situation as ethically significant or that we resist accepting its truth descends from the fact of its familiarity. We have simply become accustomed to thinking of human beings, even our own children, in these instrumental ways, i.e. as equipment or commodities or as mere investments. And now, with the advent of corporate management of the gene pool and with the pharmacological management of consciousness, we are little more than tranquillized pillars of genotyped tissue. Our experience and knowledge of this situation has slipped, in time, into the tacit dimension. That is why we rarely sense the ethical vacuum, in a word, the nihilism, that underlies such symptomatic usages as the corporate phrase “human resources” to refer to people. The ethical consequences of the transition to a market-driven factory system in the nineteenth century is crucially important in the internalizing of these characteristically modern attitudes and in shaping modern times. Traditional communal values and settled notions of identity did not immediately vanish as a result of this gradual change of principal mode of production, but as we see now at the beginning of the twenty-first century,

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they did not survive it either. The dangers were discernible from the start as the poetry of William Blake or the reformist efforts of the Owenites make clear. The anti-industrialism of the great Victorian sages – Carlyle, Ruskin, Eliot, Morris, to name four only – and finally in the twentieth century in the work of Lawrence, Eric Gill, and many others, carried the tradition of criticism and resistance unsuccessfully into our time. The factory model as the elementary social unit of production not only still exists, but has now been globalized and has even penetrated far down into the individual psyche’s own reflections on itself. But what exactly is a factory and why does its introduction in the Industrial Revolution make such an enormous general difference? Isn’t its existence a matter of economic history and of issues of interest primarily to economists? Haven’t the moral issues raised about exploitation and abuse in the nineteenth century been resolved by enlightened labor laws and a general raising of ethical awareness and behavior among the managers and proprietors of such enterprises? No doubt they have. But that is not the point. The implied communal and personal ethical values on which the factory as model rests cannot be reduced to a simple matter of conduct among factory operatives, supervisors, and proprietors. The very nature of the factory as a paradigm for production carried revolutionary ethical inscriptions from the start. When “mechanization takes command,” to borrow Giedion’s pithy phrase, not only is economic history transformed but moral and cultural history as well. The fact that we rarely take note of the latter does not annul the point. Economic historian Richard N. Langlois has demonstrated yet again (Adam Smith, by the way, was the first to do this) the increasing dehumanization of work in the last two centuries by simply telling the now familiar tale (and notice how he tells it) of the transition from crafts-based or artisanal and mercantilist modes of production to the factory system of the nineteenth century in Britain: Under crafts production, labor is undivided in the sense that each artisan performs a wide range of tasks. This requires a relatively large investment in human capital, since, to be proficient, the artisan must be accomplished in a wide variety of skills or subskills. Crafts production also implies a certain kind of flexibility and a lack of standardization, since the artisan controls the “interfaces” between tasks and the connections between parts. If, with Nelson and Winter (1982), we think of production as a matter of exercising and choosing among certain “routines,” then crafts production requires the possession of and ability to choose among a wide range of possible routines (Stinchcombe 1990, chapter 2). Crafts production thus obviously has advantages when production runs are small, for reasons of both demand and supply. (“Coevolution of Technology,” 16–17)

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As the market expands and consumption grows, becoming increasingly abstract (i.e. less and less tied to human needs), the situation changes and the real face of production begins to appear. And it is certainly not a human face. As proprietors recognize the potential profitability of increasing demand, they begin to look more closely at the work process itself. They begin to talk in a way that is now so familiar we barely notice its moral emptiness, or its strangeness. Indeed the proprietors begin to generate the kind of discourse we see in its maturest form in Langlois’s essay: “crafts production . . . requires a relatively large investment in human capital.” Human capital? Human beings are capital? The sway of industrialism not only transforms the economy, it transforms thought. It generates its own kind of knowledge and the disciplinary discourses that convey it. We should note in addition that today this kind of talk – where education is an investment, human bodies so many interchangeable units of production and consumption, and a failed colleague so much “toast” or “dead meat” – enjoys the favor of popular approbation. It is richly knowing in the cynical sense and, by taking the moral step for which such discourse opens the door, many have, as a result, acquired a taste for dealing cheaply with humanity. With the proprietorial concentration on the work process, the artisan’s workshop or cottage is quickly abandoned, and with it the putting out of production and other economic activities into communal space. Ruskin laments a related aspect of this loss in Letter xxx of his Fors Clavigera ii in his parable of “The Broom Merchant.” He begins by noting that the hunger for the “lowest possible price” for a commodity forces us “to pay daily less and less attention” to those people who provide it: Formerly it was not thus. The broom merchant, the egg merchant, the sand and rottenstone merchant, were, so to speak, part of the family; one was connected with them by very close links; one knew the day on which each would arrive; and according to the degree of favour they were in, one kept something nice for their dinner; and if by any chance they did not come to their day, they excused themselves, next time, as for a very grave fault indeed. They considered the houses which they supplied regularly, as the stars of their heaven, – took all the pains in the world to serve them well, – and, on quitting their trade for anything more dignified, did all they could to be replaced either by their children, or by some cousin, or cousine. There was thus a reciprocal bond of fidelity on one side, and of trust on the other, which unhappily relaxes itself more and more every day. (6–7)

It’s no use saying that this is an idealized portrait that never really existed and hid from view a whole series of political and economic oppressions. It may not have actually existed as Ruskin describes it, but what did exist is the

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moral structure on which the idealization is based. Any particular individual may have submitted to or ignored the moral force of the fidelity and trust which Ruskin prizes, but it was always there. Market and factory demoralize the economy. The moral bonds which act to discipline behavior in the community disappear. Production loses its domestic and local character and with it knowledge and skills that are human centred. The new workplace evicts the fully competent artisan and brings into being the deskilled worker. Adam Smith at the very outset of the industrial revolution was neither blind to nor morally negligent of the dehumanizing character of the division of labor and the deskilling and fragmentation that accompanied it. The fact that very few seem aware that Smith’s celebration of the division of labor in Wealth of Nations is tempered by his own sober appreciation of its negative effects is probably due to its relegation to Part v, near the end, of his long treatise: In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations. Of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for difficulties which never occur . . . He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgements concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. (Wealth of Nations, 734–35)

Just so. Increasingly, (i) the workplace for the mass of workers is organized around expensive, fixed-cost equipment12 and the intelligence of the laborers is squandered in the set of mechanical routines the machines spawn. Technological innovation encourages the one-way transfer of intelligence from human workers to their machines (Langlois, “Coevolution,” 19–20). In a more oblique way the experts and managers, the so-called “brains” behind production, undergo the same process. Their command of calculative reason grows more precise and comprehensive with time. With time, the human brain stops being human and becomes, more and more, one more machine among many. But this one is inside your skull. In the crafts-based economy, the artisan constructs or adapts his tools for particular tasks and learns what the tools are capable of doing in the context of

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nonuniform tasks. Knowledge and skills are built up through experience and the continuous exercise of human intelligence. This socioeconomic intelligence dispersed among the producers is precisely what is lost in the new system of production and replaced by the disciplinary specialties of narrowly trained experts. The factory (ii) also concentrates operatives in a single location and more fully integrates the movement of real time with the rhythm of production (rather than the spatial and temporal dispersion of artisanal modes). This spatiotemporal concentration allows for (iii) a new regime of supervision in depth, the close monitoring of work, in which hierarchical organization with a firm structure of authority leads to gains in output by way of a new disciplining of the workforce (Langlois, 8–10). Many economic historians (following Fang, Triumph of the Factory System, 16) take these three attributes as defining the factory. Langlois convincingly demonstrates that close supervision in the centralized workspace and the transfer of intelligence to machines are the key to the success of the factory mode of production. And they remain so to this day as we see the factory model not only persist into yet another century, but extend its grasp across the whole globe, and not just simply in the economic sphere. The nineteenth-century critics of industrialism – Ruskin, Carlyle, etc. – recognized early on that the rise of the new economy had fundamental moral and psychological effects. It changed life and human beings in radically new ways. There were several problems with their critiques, however, that tended to undermine their admonitory force. For one thing, they began from moral premises and imagined the world in essentially medieval terms, as a moral battleground, when consciousness of moral matters was being increasingly relegated to private life. The capitalist economy abetted and, without any explicit exertions, encouraged the invention and privatization of inwardness. Moral life shrank to the newly imagined psychological limits of the self as part of the necessary reorientation of property and property rights in preparation for the arrival of the capitalist market. After all, isn’t it necessary to believe that our bodies and identities, even Being itself, belong to us and no one else, as a necessary precondition for participating in the market, either as sellers of our labor (it is ours to sell, isn’t it?), or as consumers of the labor of others, or of the fruits of labor? It is the notion that we are God’s creatures, belong to him, and live as moral beings in the gaze of a benevolent but possessive deity that is gradually worn away.13 Indeed the self as public icon of identity gave way to the psychological construction of the person. The notion of the person as in some way belonging, not to oneself as personal possession, but to an external, objective public world,

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overseen by an always watchful God has, after a long decline, simply died away. The attempt to preserve a sense of the public world via a set of political and constitutional principles – liberty, equality, fraternity, or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for example – has declined even more rapidly. The self, as a result, has become a commodified psychological artefact, the finished product of a process of personal self-fabrication. The succession of selves as the developmental process moves from one phase to another begins to resemble, ever more extravagantly, the production of commodities in the factory. New and improved commodities for consumption were accomplished by two developments: the recognition by economists of the importance of consumption and the application of new technologies to production. So, too, newly minted selves came into being as a result of the application of psychology and education as the new theories and technologies of the self. Education, for example, stopped being treated as revelation of the presence of the divine in creation, but as practical self-enhancement. Education helped to fabricate the accomplished individual. It was refinement of the product. The older notion of the earth as a battlefield between good and evil for possession of your soul waned in the concrete practices of an everyday life in the new conditions of production. The older view persisted, however, but it persisted ideologically. Meanwhile, everyone got on with business. It still persists as a compensatory discourse in mediated form among religious fundamentalists, but, like ideologies in general, it has no power to change the world, only the power to obscure partially the contradictions which it lives. Perhaps you can concede the general truth of this story, but you might want to argue that not every person shares in the existential predicament of the dehumanized worker. There are some groups of people – millionaires and homeless derelicts to name two – who are free of the all-too-pervasive and familiar structures of subordination in the work environment to which most everyone else is condemned. No doubt there are free ones about, but their existence does not blunt my point; indeed it sharpens and presses it home more surely. The truth I claim is statistical not absolute. The truth I claim can still be seen with the naked eye any day of the week in the business or factory district of any city in the world. The individuals who make up these hustling crowds are not anonymous sheep (although early in the last century social critics often used such imagery in their polemics). They are concrete human beings, who live, breathe, hope, dream, as Berman asserts, but their concreteness as human subjects, for the purposes of reproducing their material conditions, is almost completely irrelevant. Human

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uniqueness persists as feeling and idea, but not as fact. Indeed capitalism has discovered important new ways of annihilating actual uniqueness (which is opaque and replete) by marketing the simulacrum, the mere feeling of uniqueness as an attribute of new styles of self-identity. This is accomplished in the same way that “disneyfication” of the past replaces history with the diorama and the themed park, or, more perniciously, replaces the genuine folk culture of a people with The Lion King and Mulan.14 Inevitably all of these new techniques are tied to consumption. Social critics and thinkers of the twentieth century from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Sennett have already explained in detail how people in a system which enforces the deepest conformity can still be induced to feel like individual and unique beings and to zealously assert their uniqueness, even when the dominant structures of the lifeworld cancel it out. We need to appreciate that these conditions haven’t only recently come into being. They were in place at least two centuries ago and Giedion ably demonstrates it. What’s changed is that the strong, initial resistance to the dehumanized value system of the industrial world weakened and virtually died away by the end of the twentieth century, indeed had already weakened perceptibly by Ruskin’s later years. Against this material background and in complex relation to it, modernism made its way. We need to understand the material complexities of the concrete lifeworld of the masses, the immensely lamentable culture of the subordinated individuals, in order to get a handle on modernity and to begin to understand the genesis and meaning of modernist culture. We need to understand modernism in this context as a set of diverse, complex, and deeply ambivalent responses, often bewildered and antagonistic, to this state of affairs. That is why there is no one modernism, but a plurality. Why there are modernisms from all over the political spectrum, modernisms of left and right, communist and conservative alike. The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that it doesn’t really matter who owns the means of production, but that the nature and character of those means themselves have changed the world.15 But isn’t it a bit of an exaggeration to look back to the rise of the factory system as a crucial moment in the genesis of modernism? After all, haven’t things changed since the time of the first factories? Well, yes, they have. The worker in the contemporary Microsoft factory toils in a cleaner and safer environment, for more pay and fewer hours, but she, like her counterparts in Manchester or Bangkok, is nonetheless still not a human being. She is a cog in a system of production which can very well get along without her when a machine comes along to do the job. Isn’t this what most workers

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fear? In addition, she can be replaced in the twinkling of an eye by another set of hands without skipping a beat in the rhythm of production.16 The fact that she is better fed, better dressed, better housed, has been taught to read, write, take college classes on Cubism, consume, qualify for credit and a mortgage (and welfare when the robot comes along), and accept this state of affairs as inevitable, as the way the world is, reveals the extent to which the capitalist revolution has been a total success. The system does not need the grinding cruelties of Hard Times. It has learned that moderately healthy and existentially transparent workers loaded down with things are more productive (and docile) than the wracked bodies and minds of the nineteenth-century factory. My point is that the system in which she works does not consider Ms Jane Doe human in any significantly serious sense. Her humanity, when it is acknowledged, is at best a supplementary theme in an ideological discourse, which gives human resource management, and the academic disciplines that sustain it, the appearance of a humane concern as a crucial feature of the management style of the modern corporation. As in the case of the prison and asylum, according to Foucault, the more humane approach to human resource management in office or on factory floor has more to do with new, psychologically sophisticated methods of disciplining human beings for production than the usual liberal talk about the steady enlargement of corporate sympathy for humanity. In a crisis, such “sympathy” disappears in the twinkling of an eye. The individual human resource is now more of an object than ever. The persistence of the idea that somehow any one individual person counts for something in market societies is part of the same, unbroken ideological web that comes into view when the public media celebrate the individual above the collective, the individual’s private fantasies and aspirations above the common good, and individualism as a social philosophy above Ruskin’s “reciprocal bond of fidelity” and “trust.” The ideological web intrudes even when one hears administrators in the modern university calling their colleagues “humanists” as they vanquish humane collegiality by the introduction of the managerial style and values of the modern business corporation.

chap t e r 2

Ideology

Before going on let me say one or two things about ideology. By ideology I do not mean some totalized common intuitive life in which everyone is immersed and which infects every brain in society. If that were the case, how did I or you ever escape from its embrace long enough to look around and put a name to it? Equally, ideology is not what has been called “false consciousness.” In the sense that all consciousness is “consciousness of” something, rather than immediate apprehension of a thing in itself, all consciousness is false. So to call ideology false consciousness is more or less to say nothing. We escape tautology by the meanings which are generated by the manifest differences constantly at play in the social world. Ideology in fact is more a kind of inherently incomplete compensation strategy for generating a consciousness of unity and sense that never actually exists. No society has a single ideology, nor a pervasive system of ideas, beliefs, and common feelings that expresses the perspective of some privileged epistemology (sometimes associated with a particular class). Society may have particularly influential ideologies, but, as Gramsci has taught us, there are always more than one at any one time. Society, for one thing, is not a monolith. It is composed of diverse groups or collectivities which share bonds of thought and feeling of various strengths and weaknesses. In any one society these collectivities may have much in common, but they also have important and irreducible differences. For one thing the social positioning of each gives each a unique perspective of the whole. No one point of view exactly coincides with any others. This fundamental difference gives rise to a diversity of beliefs and ideas. For one thing none of the groups has precisely the same relationship to the past or the future as any other. Look at the different perspectives on a nation’s history that different classes or regions can generate. For some, the past, history, is a vital and living force, a noble tale of heroic achievement and national fulfilment, for others, it is a tale of woe and oppression, and for others still, history is merely a nonsense. For some, the future represents a coming 53

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consummation of fate, for others the ceaseless tedium of repetition. Nor do all society’s parts realize the same ethical reading of the present. Some think they are living in the best of all possible worlds, others in Babylon. These differences, in all their complexity, delineate group boundaries and the group mystique. Indeed society is an extremely complicated confederation of these collectivities, some as large as a class, some as small as a single family. Each has its own sense of internal reality and a sense of how it is related to others and to the whole. The sense of reality is the product of the inner structure of the group and of its real and imaginary relationships with all that is external to it. From this balance of inner and outer, each generates a set of values about which the group is more or less aware. Generally speaking, no group, no matter how acutely self-aware it is, knows in their entirety the values which it projects and by which it actually behaves and dwells in the world. Chances are the group is able to articulate a set of values which may or may not concur with how it actually behaves. Usually there’s a gap, a difference, which the members of the group may even sense is there and about which they may feel degrees of guilt. The need to paper over this faultline in collective consciousness is crucial. Ideology is generated by the group when it articulates its values in such a way that it has the effect of obscuring the gap between its talk and its actual behavior. Of course, the ideological discourse of a particular group is relatively easily seen through from the perspective of another group. The others come to know you in a way you cannot know yourself. The local youth gang comes to know the police in a way the police cannot know themselves. And vice versa. Inevitably, the youth gang generates a discourse which papers over the contradictions which it lives. And so do the police. Indeed so do all of us. To live in society means to always live in a state of contradiction from which we are always being encouraged to avert our eyes. Ideology helps us (only helps us mind you) to do this. The suspicion that our group’s ideology is not sufficiently convincing – of which the sceptical reactions of others constantly remind us – creates the moods of tense defensiveness, exasperation, and truculence that keep society in a state of continuous conflict. There is no epistemologically privileged position (or theoretical perspective) in society from which the whole can be grasped (although there are plenty of pretenders who claim such powers). However, as I said before, there can be influential ideologies in any one time and they may dominate the consciousness of many (such as the nationalist ideology for which the word “America,” tremblingly intoned, is the common sign in the United States), but they can never be total. Indeed the capitalist market is a structure

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of human relationships that generates a particularly powerful ideology, but it is not all-embracing. The adversarial nature of exchange relationships, where each side in a transaction ferrets out the other side’s weaknesses or failures or ignorance, institutionalizes the partialness of all ideological constructions. Market societies are always in a state of healthy fragmentation by definition. One of the primary arenas of ideological activity in market society lies in the institutions of production. Human resources management embodies the ideological practices that construct a useful version of the human person and regulate his or her conduct in the workplace. The worker’s “humanity,” as a factor in the system which employs her, becomes an ideological token in industrial society, that is until some concrete human problem, like a concrete illness of body or mind or just simple human perversity, intervenes. Then, her “humanity” is recategorized as a liability or cost to the corporate entity which the relevant management operatives must act to minimize or off-load to the insurers’ profit. The ideological difficulties which this situation presents are not new, they have been around for quite some time. And they have been described with admirable concision and force in Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). Melville’s tale succinctly allegorizes the contradictory positioning of the human in an exchange economy. Humanism furnishes liberal discourse with one of its holiest themes while screwing up the line manager’s day when some particular human being refuses to, or cannot, succumb to the machine. The lawyer-narrator’s sense of obligation to those who work for him, deftly conveyed by Melville, is shown to be a mixture of fear of his employees and a convenient humanitarianism that quiets his conscience. The lawyer-narrator is severely tested by Bartleby, his new employee, who, after joining the law firm as a copy clerk, soon grows irritatingly, but passively, noncooperative and nonproductive in his daily duties. Again and again, he refuses to work saying only that “he prefers not to.” This enigmatic behavior taxes the narrator’s patience and after a good deal of inner travail, he has Bartleby evicted. Later he learns that Bartleby has died in prison, curled up in foetal position. The story is best read as an allegory of the opaque enigma of human nature; indeed the lawyer-narrator’s closing exclamation suggests as much, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” The unnamed lawyer is a reasonable man, a type of an all-too-worldly everyman, who is willing to accommodate the conduct not only of Bartleby but, as we learn, of his other employees as well. As long as they all collaborate in maintaining the work process, achieving a kind of peculiar equilibrium in the economy of the workplace, everything is fine. Bartleby’s arrival upsets

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the balance when he refuses to play their game, refuses to trade in the marketplace of acceptable behaviors. It is Bartleby’s unmovable presence that jams the gears of the system. He does not bargain for a place. In short, he is impossible, in the same way that Christ was impossible when his silence, his refusal to plea-bargain, perplexed to exasperation the Roman lawyer Pontius Pilate. Bartleby’s obtrusive imperturbability, his uniqueness really, obstructs the smooth operation of the workplace. He is not merely equipment, like the other employees, whose own peculiarities, like Turkey’s drinking for example, are given special leave (as private recreation) but do not threaten the work process itself. The lawyer and his other employees have an unwritten contract. As long as they do their work, they can indulge, on the side, their own private idahos. This new function of privacy as the haven of a bland simulacrum of our uniqueness requires closer inspection and is a matter I will return to in later chapters. Bartleby refuses to bargain and confounds the system. His death at the end is the final enigma. His resistance to the compromises offered by the lawyer reaches its fullness in death. Death is the incommensurable episode, that which cannot be traded or exploited by its possessors; indeed it possesses them. It is perhaps for this reason that societies deeply penetrated by market values have no social place for death, and encourage in fact its active forgetting. Death in the market, after all, simply means to have lost your place on the trading floor. There are always others who will gladly fill in the hole you have left. But wait, what of the mourning and grief when someone you love dies? Well, these are traces left over from an earlier kind of culture. Today, though, they are strictly regulated in terms of length, intensity, and interruption of routine. If, for some reasons, you “can’t get over it,” there are medications to get you back in harness. In speaking of the fate of the human under capitalism in this way, I myself might be accused of robbing Ms. Jane Doe in Seattle of her humanity, and therefore making it easier, according to Grant, to murder her or watch while someone else does so. I know it is easier for the Grants of the world to blame the relatively powerless bearer of bad tidings than to call Bill Gates (and others of course) to the bar of moral judgment for presiding over a system that is at bottom ethically vacant.1 Easier to blame my words than to look carefully at how the real Ms. Jane Doe dwells in the world and how seriously the “world” that notices her notices her filmy humanity. To repeat then, it was in the nineteenth century with the creation of the factory system that we entered the posthuman era. The discourse of humanism has persisted of course while the modernizing demiurge has worn away the human into the transparency that tries to rescue its ancient opaque

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depth by the ceaseless consumption of real and ideal commodities. Industrialism reinvented the human being as mechanized producer, as abstract labor power. That was the great achievement of the nineteenth century. “Man” the producer of things was completed in the twentieth century by the utilitarian invention of the customer or client, the human being as consumer. The quantifications of pleasure and pain, posited theoretically by nineteenth-century English philosophers,2 were achieved in practice in the twentieth. The master science of our time, economics, has already reconstructed “Man” in a new image, as a rational, self-absorbed, calculator of utilities, an image which has now so infused the human psyche that it has become the dominant way the majority of people in modernized societies grasp the significance of their own humanity. The old concept of “Man” as the exalted protagonist of humanist discourse and as the sacred subject of the historical process is now long gone, replaced by the posthuman consumer. The humanist rhetoric, however, lives on as a kind of lovable, old, official guff that no one quite knows how to stop spouting. The factory paradigm of production has beset human life so completely that it is barely noticeable any more as life’s organizing principle. It is the other side of the coin which is more discernible now, the consumption side, the side which renders visible a myriad disembodied desires. The appetite for consumption no longer enjoys a primordial, bodily basis3 ; it is no longer part of the structure of concrete being. Desire is as abstract and transparent as the carefully constructed artifices of consumption. They promise to satisfy desire of course but, as desire unveils itself as a bodiless abstraction, the empty concept of boundless self-enhancement, i.e. unchecked narcissism, as the aim of life, they never do. The human person, sad possessor of certain old metaphysical values now thoroughly devalued, was, in the late twentieth century, in the postmodern end of the century, reconstructed by consumption. The new means of production of the nineteenth century emptied the human of its old significance; the new emphasis on consumption deploys a sallow simulacrum of the human on new terms. The human being, no longer a source of concrete meaning, is simply an occasion for buying and selling to happen, an essentially blank structure, intermittently lit up by the flow of throughputs. What other metaphysical reality does a mere customer really have? You must consume without end to pass for a human being in the world market. Being human in any serious sense – namely a sense that does not require the possession of commodities and other properties as the sole measure of human substance – amounts to precisely nothing.

chap t e r 3

Permanent revolution

Of course, the factory is not the cause of all this. Nor is mechanization as such. The factory is the visible embodiment or techno-social symptom of the new values regime generated by a more fundamental material revolution in human history and consciousness. I speak of the revolution of capital. The capitalist revolution is the key material condition for the emergence of the modernity we are stuck with in the twenty-first century. Marx was not the only nineteenth-century thinker who came to understand that capitalism and the circulation of capital was in the process of revolutionizing, by dint of the industrial model of production, both the material world and the moral world as well. Many Victorian voices denounced the money economy, the cash nexus, and the factory system as soul-destroying and corrupting, in which inherited values were threatened as never before. The irresistible advance of this system of capital accumulation and production, driven on by the market-form, had its necessary ideological dimension. The changes in the material environment all through the nineteenth century changed the common, or inherited, perceptions of what it meant to be a human being. These ideological shifts opened a wide rift between perception and reality. New philosophical and legal definitions of the person and the person as appropriated by the mechanical systems around which life was increasingly organized widened as the century progressed.1 The rhetoric of human rights and freedoms, the sanctity of the person, the liberty from superstition, rigid custom, and so on promised by science, grew louder, more persistent, and increasingly sanctimonious among the Victorians. Liberal humanism was in its ascendancy as the acclaimed and indispensable rhetoric of the day. If truth be known, however, it was little more than window dressing to a different reality. The humanist rhetoric was certainly not much derived from the everyday experience of Victorian industrial life. The selective interpretation of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty among most liberal-minded Victorians is worth noting. They wanted to hear his 58

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advocacy of liberal principles and the sanctity of the individual person, but went conveniently deaf to his warnings, warnings one might add that were repeated again and again by many Victorian “sages’: [A] State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hand even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish. (Mill, On Liberty, 128)

Mill’s machine metaphor tells all. The factory, the processes of mechanization and modernization, stands four square behind the figure. Of course, it was not the political state in Britain that was in the process of learning how to “[dwarf] its men” and “work more smoothly.” The British political state, like most states, has always been something of a muddle, when it hasn’t been the arena of systematic corruption. It was the capitalist economy that functioned more smoothly as civic and communal resistance gradually was worn away. Victorian middle- and upper-middle-class elites were particularly nimble in the production of the idealist talk extolling the theoretical virtues of theoretical human beings. In the meantime, the economic work of reducing actual, living human beings to the status of investments, unsentimental units of production, and abstract desiring machines ground on unabated beneath the verbal acrobatics of Victorian humanism. In the moral latitudes defined by advancing capitalism, people like Henry Mayhew, the obsessive annalist of London labor and the poor, were always the more reliable guides to reality than the theoreticians of the liberal mirage. This kind of systemic disjunction between theory and practice, between talk and action, which Machiavelli had taught Europe in an earlier time was the prerogative of the shrewd Prince, became a pervasive, though largely unconscious, moral and political modus operandi among the middle and upper-middle classes as they gained political authority, not only in Victorian Britain, but in the nineteenth century generally. Here is Søren Kierkegaard with his eye trained sardonically on the God-fearing Danish bourgeoisie in the 1840s: I believe it is an overstatement to say that Christianity in our time has been completely abolished. No, Christianity is still present and in its truth, but as a teaching, as doctrine. What has been abolished and forgotten, however (and this can be said without exaggeration), is existing as a Christian, what it means to be a Christian. (Armed Neutrality, 34, Kierkegaard’s emphasis)

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Or Karl Marx on the unwitting self-contradictions of the Constitution of the French bourgeois democrats in 1848: For each paragraph of the Constitution contains its own antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, freedom in the general phrase, abolition of freedom in the marginal note. In this way as long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual implementation was prevented . . . its constitutional existence remained intact and untouched however fatal the blows dealt to it in its actual physical existence. (Eighteenth Brumaire, 160, Marx’s emphasis)

I am not quoting Kierkegaard and Marx to say that the disconnection between word and act is necessarily an intrinsic feature of capitalist society. I don’t think it is. It is perfectly conceivable to me that one could banish the moral sentimentalisms of old and embrace, vicious as it is, the implicit moral order of market capitalism. In our time, many have already more or less accomplished this. And we now hire a special category of modern thinker, the “ethicist,” to explain away the damage done to older habits of moral conduct. The disconnection noticed by Kierkegaard and Marx becomes systemic when traditional societies organized around custom and status in C. B. Macpherson’s sense (Political Theory, 53–61) are infected by the capitalist virus that requires the adoption of practices that inevitably contradict or even destroy the cultural investments of the past. Apologists for capitalism are sometimes ready to acknowledge its lamentable influence on traditional communities when it is not restrained by a cohesive civic culture. The most interesting fact about the impact of capitalism on nineteenth-century Britain is not that it transformed a rural, agricultural nation into a dark forest of satanic mills, but that it revealed how weakly cohesive the civic culture of the Victorians really was. For a society with a powerful national ideology and which prided itself on its Christian character, the supposed earnest pursuit of its moral and religious obligations was something of an elaborate, and probably largely unconscious, hoax. The kind of human abuses which developed as a result of the factory system are startling even at this distance in time. Yet the Victorian elites held themselves in the highest esteem, not just as successful conquerors and merchants, but as self-evidently good people. Meanwhile their moral incoherence over such questions as slavery, the naked dehumanization of the factories and the crowding of the larger towns, the moral vacuousness of utilitarianism, and so on, suggests a society in which the governing elites were simply compensating rhetorically for the candid evil they were witnessing in their everyday lives. The glitter of progressivist idealism and self-important religiosity certainly helped to camouflage the bad faith. Indeed even the abolition of

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slavery was achieved finally, G. R. Searle argues in Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain, by the economic argument that not much would change in those commercial sectors, such as sugar production, which had made extensive use of slaves. But when sugar prices started to rise in the West Indies after the end of slavery, and Cuba and Brazil began to increase their market share and profits by virtue of their lower production costs as a result of their continued use of slaves, serious suggestions began to be put forward to reintroduce the old system into the plantation economy. Only after the stabilization of the economics of sugar did the talk about slavery die away (Morality, 57–64). It was clear to the Victorians that capitalist industrialism ate away at the values which the English had inherited from the past and that the effect of the factory mode of production, as Luk´acs has argued, was to strip the individual of his humanity and society of its traditional bonds.2 This is precisely what F. R. Leavis in the 1960s (and Martin Heidegger before him) was trying to say, to considerable, smug jeering in liberal circles, about “the technologico-Benthamite climate in which we live” and which had evolved and spread from Matthew Arnold’s time: Contemplating, in an earlier phase of it than ours, the advance of industrial civilization, he [Arnold] saw that something new was happening to humanity, and that England and America in especial were exposed to a new kind of menace . . . It is that the massive and rapid growth of material civilization, the changes in human habit and the human condition brought about by technological advance, will entail a lapse of that creatively human response to economic fact, to the inescapable exigencies of life and material circumstances, which a cultural tradition is – is, while it remains a living power in the present. (English Literature, 42–43)

Leavis’s fairy-tale remedy – a vitally significant university English department – seems anticlimactic, even comically absurd, today, but that’s only because the posthuman has reached so deeply into individual and collective consciousness that it is no longer possible to imagine that there is a problem. In Carlyle’s words, we have “grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand” (“Signs,” 63). And it makes no difference that T. S. Eliot’s “human engine” in The Waste Land is now gaily dressed by Tommy Hilfiger. The engine remains an engine. But Carlyle was only repeating what Heinrich Heine had already noticed about the English on a visit to London in 1827: The perfection of machinery, which is there everywhere applied to some purpose, and which executes so many human tasks, had for me something mysterious and terrible about it; the artificial headlong action of wheels, shafts, cylinders . . . cogs and teeth, which swirl so madly, filled me with dread. The definiteness, the exactness, the meted out and measurable punctuality of life, tormented me quite

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as much, for the machines in England seem like men, so the men seem to me like mere machines. Yes, wood, iron and brass, these, these seemed to have usurped the spirit of humanity . . . While Man, with his soul gone, attends like a machine to his business. (Florentine Nights, 51)

The soul’s retreat, rapid industrialization, and the increasing practical materialism of daily life, did not lead, as one might expect, to the recognition of religion’s irrelevance. Quite the contrary. With mechanization and materialism in the ascendant, religion took on a new importance, and especially for the middle- and upper-middle-class elites, the historical beneficiaries in England of the capitalist revolution.3 Religion helped those who profited most from industrialism to avert their eyes from the mechanical horror that Adam Smith’s hidden hand had wrought and the financial system that drove it on (Neill, Anglicanism, 253). How this compensation strategy worked has been famously described by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney in their ground-breaking studies, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1912) and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) respectively. They showed in copious detail the dialectical relationship between emerging capitalism and the need for new ideological and religious discourses, not only to overcome older psycho-ethical inhibitions, but to destroy as well the public institutions and regulatory customs of medieval Europe. The physical and psychological horrors visited on rural populations drawn into the factory economy4 were obscured from view by convenient religious, and then human rights, fictions. For one thing, commerce was reinvented as God’s work. Altruism, for another, was deemed to defy the laws of divine justice. The Victorians who chose to believe these fictions were abetted in these classic mystifications by a largely obscurantist clergy. The Scots evangelical Thomas Chalmers was typical of a certain kind of clerical activist. He believed in something he called “the political economy of the Bible,” an economy which turned out to be exactly the same as typical Victorian economic practices, even of the most brutal kind. The Bible, he claimed, justified the modern system of production down to its tiniest detail. Any attempt to change the harsh environment of capitalist commerce in mid-Victorian Britain was to interfere seriously with God’s plan for the world (Searle, Morality, 11–14, 15). Charity to the poor was also to be discouraged as this would interfere with “their freedom, their industry and their morals,” according to one economist. All benevolent feelings which lead to the extension of humanitarian assistance must needs be repressed in order to avoid giving offense

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to the “canons of political economy” (Searle, Morality, 193). And one particularly dim Anglican clergyman even argued that the “repression of his powers of benevolence” was one of the “marvels of Christ’s life” (194). The denial of charity was thus seen as the fulfilment of the Christian mandate. Victorious capitalism meant that the religious spirit became effectively sequestered. Today we might refer to it as the privatization of the soul. Morality was circumscribed by the new dictum that ethical conduct was a private affair between one’s conscience and God. Additionally, this new turn in religious life undermined the authority of the clergy, so that the one institution which might, at least partially, sustain faith, belief, and conduct as public matters was weakened and finally lost (Tawney, Religion, 189–90). By the early twentieth century, the narrowing of religious and ethical sensibilities to the individual conscience was complete. Indeed, by then, the need for any kind of religious scrutiny of economic behavior had already evaporated. Religious judgment in economic matters began to carry about as much authority as my opinion that the Paris St. Germain football team is the best soccer club in the world. Capitalism had achieved a kind of self-sustaining character because its polemicists had begun to tack in a new direction. The attempt to square capitalism with religion, like the compensatory attractiveness of Calvinism among the mercantile elites of Switzerland, was abandoned as the authority of religious institutions waned. It was replaced by a more radical and powerful thesis. Capitalism corresponded not to any religious viewpoint at all, but to Reason itself and the dictates of Nature. Charles T. Gorham’s Religion as a Bar to Progress in 1930 was typical. It dismissed religion as a historical superstition that simply constituted an irrational obstacle to progress. His book offers what was by then the conventional attack from a self-described “rationalist” on all kinds of religion, even the Protestantism Weber and Tawney believed opened the psychological gate for the capitalist order. By 1930, the need for any ethically streamlined compensatory Protestantism that provided a cover for the unfettered pursuit of business was no longer as necessary as it had been in early modernity among the mercantile elites of northern Europe. Gorham’s identification of capitalism with progress and the natural order of things was also a commonplace. It was given an even more trenchant formulation in Leonard Alston’s How It All Fits Together: A Novice’s Guide to the Game of Life (1920): “The workings of modern industry resemble, in short, the circulation of the waters about our revolving planet”(19). He is comparing the natural sequence of evaporation, condensation, reevaporation to the circulation of capital and the investment cycle in business. The book’s aim is explicitly set out as advice

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on weathering the new business climate “in which we all live and move and have our being” (8). Alston’s survivor’s guide to the new economic ethos was not alone. In 1927, Cambridge University Press commissioned Sir T. H. Penson to provide a how-to discussion of the new economic thinking for laymen. His The Economics of Everyday Life: A First Book of Economic Study presented, in a form accessible to nonspecialists, the sort of technical discussion of economics which steered clear of moralizing. His chapter on money, “The Machinery of Exchange” (115–36), illustrates very well the new discourse in which the circulation of money as medium of exchange and as the measure of value in terms of price is compared, first, to the operation of natural processes, and, then, to the functioning of a machine. Thinking of nature as machine-like was itself a common conceptual trope among the new economists. From both nature and the machine, the ancient sentimentalities about moral values, just price, and the primacy of the moral life are effectively erased. Even the ivory tower of “disinterested” scholarship could not evade the new business culture. It is remarkable to note how many books on the “business life” of the ancient world began to appear in the 1920s. The classic work is Gustav Glotz’s Ancient Greece at Work (1926) for C. K. Ogden’s History of Civilization series published by Kegan Paul and translated from the German by M. R. Dobie. George M. Calhoun’s The Business Life of Ancient Athens (1926) is an even better example of this growing subgenre. Published by the University of Chicago Press, Calhoun’s work, like Glotz’s, reinterprets ancient Athenian life in a framework derived from twentiethcentury economic thinking. It is the business creed of modernity stretched back to discover its own imaginary roots in an ancient culture the name of which, in the 1920s, still carried ample prestige among the educated. In this way the business activities of the modern world could be given an impressive ancient pedigree. I suppose it made the captains of industry feel downright Periclean. A specific example of the ideological project humming in the background of Calhoun’s book is his section on the grain trade in Athens. The business elite of Athens guarded against the monopoly practices of largescale wholesale importers by requiring immediate sale of grain directly to retailers when the grain ships arrived from overseas (Business Life, 69). In this way, no one importer could manipulate the market by stockpiling the supply, stimulating demand, and, therefore, exploiting the consumer. The antitrust laws of modern America were thus shown to harmonize with the commercial law of the Athenians. What Calhoun does not explain is that the main difference between the ancients and the modern business

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elites of America lay in the fact that the laws of Athens worked because they depended on the authority of a tightly knit, participatory communal order, rather than on the authority of a highly manipulable system of statutes and courts. These books, however, were only the tip of an iceberg of a long and complex debate that cut a number of ways. The Gorhams, Alstons, and Pensons were opposed by moralists who felt that economic behavior required, in the face of a rising secularism, some form of ethical scrutiny and, perhaps, even regulation. J. A. Hobson’s Wealth and Life (1929) was widely read on the vexatious problem of the scientificity of economics and its relationship to ethical issues. Hobson champions a humanist approach to economic life against the claims of the newly emerging discipline of economics as a science, freed finally from the Babylonian captivity of nineteenth-century “political economy,” the philosophical anthropology practised by Marx, Mills, and other social theorists. After 489 pages (including study questions, bibliographies, and indices), Hobson ends up agonizing over the abyss which market-driven modernization has opened under moral life and the systematic devaluation of all humane values. Hobson, a leading public intellectual in England at the turn of the century, followed this two years later with God and Mammon (1931). His arguments seem simplistic today, but they were common currency among the religiously minded earlier in the last century. In fact, those who were adolescents in the 1950s can probably still remember the pointless discussions in church youth groups about the need for businessmen to remember the moral teachings of their faith from Monday to Friday, not just on Sundays. Hobson’s was one of the voices that tried to insist on what he called the “unity of the moral life” against the material forces of its disintegration. “[B]ecause Jesus had little to say about trade morals,” he writes, “it by no means follows that professing Christians of later times are justified in holding that his express teaching upon the duty of a man towards his neighbour in the simple society of his time can be set aside as irrelevant to the consideration of the business ethics of our time” (God, 10). But he takes this argument one step further, asserting that the damage done by this kind of dissociative thinking is to the existential reality of the whole person, not just the moral actor. He attacks a popular business journalist of his day who had argued that it “is far wiser to recognize frankly the fact that just as Jesus’s teaching is non-political, so it is in any strict sense noneconomic.” The effect of accepting this division of the moral life, Hobson argues, “would be to confine the teaching of the founder of Christianity to consideration of a private personality which has no existence.” Hobson

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recognizes explicitly how the capitalist order, through its dispersal of older communal integrities, as realized in custom and practice, depletes human concreteness. The humanist idea of what it means to be human prevails over the existential concreteness of the person and readies society for the permanent revolution of continuous material change. As Calhoun and others make clear, trading and the dynamics of buying and selling are ancient practices. Two things distinguish modern capitalism from ancient precedents. One is that the ancient market – the agora in Athens for example – is a limited or specialized social space confined by a quite different paramount order that is constituted by other social and cultural forces (Glotz, Ancient Greece, 289–91). A second distinction lies in modern capitalism’s dogged reliance on technological innovation and the harnessing of science to industry in the relentless race for competitive advantage. One of the most famous assessments of the industrial demiurge is Henry Adams’s evocation of the Chicago Exposition in 1900, to which he devotes a famous chapter of his Education of Henry Adams (1904). He was particularly impressed with the hall of dynamos in Chicago: As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring – scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power – while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy, the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive. (380)

Faced with the concentrated power of machines, Adams lamented the plight of older cultural forces: The poet groped blindly for an emotion. The play of thought for thought’s sake had mostly ceased. The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to increase it. (408)

Although a sophisticated and ironic man, whose prose style is a subtle combination of dry aggressiveness and playful restraint, Adams understood his own relationship to the anti-industrial polemicists of the Victorian past. Thomas Carlyle, specifically, is his principal point of reference. The chapter

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called “Teufelsdr¨ockh” makes this perfectly clear (see especially 413) and Adams picks up and extends the moral critique of the factory system to be found there. The theme of the psycho-ethical transformation of the mental life of America and Europe during the industrial revolution provides continuo accompaniment to personal autobiography throughout the Education. At one point in a trip to the Rhine valley in Germany in 1901 he recalls the quite different temper of the place in 1858, when he first visited the banks of the great river. Earlier, the “whole plain of northern Europe, as well as the Danube, bore evident marks of being still the prehistoric highway between Asia and the Ocean.” By 1901, the concrete presence or evidence of the past was gone: Coal alone was felt – its stamp alone pervaded the Rhine district and persisted in Picardy – and the stamp was the same as that of Birmingham and Pittsburgh. The Rhine produced the same power, and the power produced the same people – the same mind – the same impulse. For a man sixty-three years old who had no hope of earning a living, these three months of education were the most arduous he ever attempted. (415)

Against this pervasive retooling of the North Atlantic mind in the machine age, Adams tenders a stoically rebellious figure he calls the “conservative Christian anarchist” (408). By theorizing this type, he anticipates the paradoxical nature of modernist opposition to modernization. But this figure is no reactionary militant bent on reversing the historical process. He can only conceive of resistance to or withdrawal from the larger fate in personal terms or in terms of a more or less private circle of like-minded stoics. The fastidious New England Brahman, formerly at the center of social and political power, finds himself permanently exiled to a subculture of intelligent, self-conscious, and ineffectual dandies, who increasingly come to resemble J. Alfred Prufrock. To some extent Adams reflects one aspect of the social base from which modernism emerged via the aesthetes and decadents of the 1890s. There were other bases as well leading to different kinds of modernist community. Most could not be identified with the culture that produced a Henry Adams. They were compounded of entirely different manners and mores. But they were related by one thing, a general allegiance to philosophies that could be loosely labelled “conservative anarchy” as wittily espoused by Adams (405). Radically different than the Adams ethos, but still firmly conservative, Christian, and anarchical, was the community established by Eric Gill at Ditchling in Sussex during the First World War. Adams’s label is perhaps

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even more appropriate for the charismatic Gill than for the prim New Englander. Gill’s social and cultural criticism is not very well known any more. This is a shame. He is a vigorous and trenchant writer and although he sees every aspect of existence through the prism of his staunch Roman Catholic faith, he also carries into the twentieth century the anti-industrial zeal of the Victorian sages. In this he is the polemical contemporary of D. H. Lawrence whose jeremiads against mechanization are more famous. But where Lawrence was a nomad and a loner, Gill stayed put and organized a community of fellow artists and co-religionists devoting themselves to making art in an atmosphere that seemed to their contemporaries, at least, medieval in form and temper. In fact, it was nothing of the sort. It was a cell of modernism experimenting with new social forms. It was called into antithetical being by the culture of the factory and the market. The putative medievalism was inherited from earlier interstitial artistic communities in England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the William Morris circle. Both took on a medievalist coloring as a form of deliberate semiotic rupture with the encompassing industrial ethos. Roger Fry’s Omega enterprise provided a sophisticated urban parallel in London to the Ditchling artisans. Later the Gill spirit would inform private houses and small circles of like-minded people all over the British Isles, like, for example, the Ede family whose house at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge still radiates, not only these early modernist aesthetic values, but the enclave ethos as well. In his essays, Gill, like his Victorian forebears, could not have been more clear in condemnation of the psychological and spiritual wreckage which factory and market spread throughout society. As a visual artist, Gill was a maker of images and objects and he was appalled by the influence of the factory on the maker’s hands-on craft. He railed in 1921 against an English nation in which “the majority of the people are not themselves responsible workmen, being merely slaves in factories who never make more than a small part of anything” (Art-Nonsense, 1929). As a result of deskilling, they were unable to judge a thing well made from a bad. Worse, in Gill’s view, was the devaluation process by which a virtue becomes, in the new commercial set-up, a vice: But personal responsibility for work done is, from the point of view of commercial success, actually an evil! Make men responsible for their work and not merely for doing what they are told; make their own consciences their masters and the whole of the modern factory system will come tumbling down like a house of cards. For the factory system is a servile system in which personal responsibility is denied and of no factory article may you say: This is the work of such an one – he made it. (97–98)

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Only a few writers in Gill’s day thought and wrote with his clarity and toughmindedness. He is not a sentimentalist in art. “Like most artists,” he writes, “I am a realist” (Beauty, 145). He always asserted that he dealt with real things, material things, rather than imaginary possibilities. He was under no illusion about what kind of civilization he found himself in, and what effect that civilization has had on individuals and their communities. He achieved this level of clarity in a time when capitalist industrialism had come to maturity and the niche culture appropriate to it had already emerged. His own community at Ditchling was a shining example. Gill’s and Lawrence’s critiques of industrialism, with the Leavisite afterglow, were the twentieth-century culmination of a line of thinking that had emerged with the so-called “industrial novels” in England in the midnineteenth century. As Raymond Williams pointed out long ago in Culture and Society, they provide a detailed response to the reality of Coketown: Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850), and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, The Radical (1866). In each case, the authors are critical of industrialism from what is essentially a surpassed ethics: either older traditions of philanthropy that originate in the habits of noblesse oblige practised by supplanted aristocratic warrior cultures or the pastoral vision of a vanishing rural, communalist England (and Europe) with its village life, clannish moralities, and conventions of rootedness. These ethical standpoints typically provide the critical framework of the novels which expose industrialism’s practical horrors. But theirs is not a modernist critique by any stretch of the imagination. These are not voices speaking from the margins. They still participate in what’s left of a public world of discourse and ideas. They speak to and for the middle-class beneficiaries of the new economic order, but their voices are already part of a wider silence and the best they can manage as a public role is to administer the prick of conscience to their contemporaries (Culture and Society, 99–119). “These novels when read together,” Williams writes, “seem to illustrate clearly enough not only the common criticism of industrialism, but also the general structure of feeling” which was equally important in determining the nature of the response. “Recognition of evil” in the new industrial system “was balanced by fear of becoming involved” with it. Sympathy for its victims was transformed, not into action or involvement, that is into politics, but into withdrawal, or, more radically, into the concept of rural retirement, with its accompanying Wordsworthian yearnings (119). The reaction of these middle-class intellectuals at one end of the spectrum of response enacted more mildly the radical withdrawal of the Victorian

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avant-garde into its own enclaves at the other end. We can observe the extent to which this structure of feeling persisted into the twentieth century by remembering Chaplin’s film, Modern Times, where resistance to the hell of factory work occurs as withdrawal into madness in the first instance, retreat to the comforts of confinement in hospital and prison in the second, and final disappearance into the privacy of the love relation in the third. Set against the so-called industrial novels with their sad nostalgia for the rural world, we find others, like Marx and Flaubert, who provide a critique of modernization and modernity which has as its starting point a vision of society within the modern world they dramatize, and they share its essential worldview. Marx and Flaubert do not harbor an implicit nostalgia for the “green world.” They are very much more at home in the town house and the boulevard, “Amid the deafening traffic of the town” (Baudelaire, “To a Passer-by”). In fact that is the only world they know, along with other poets of the city, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarm´e, etc. The city was, and remains, a world that was being reshaped by capitalist industrialism. We should not forget that Marx on occasion welcomed the coming of capitalism as the necessary world force which in its exhilarating path was sweeping away the remnants of feudalism that still persisted in practice in many parts of nineteenth-century Europe. More importantly it persisted as ideological baggage in the common intuitive life of many Europeans well into the twentieth: The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to agriculture and industry, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? (Manifesto, 39)

He goes on to say that it has done this at great cost: violence, destruction of traditions, oppression, reduction of the value of all activity to the cold calculus of money and profit. He pressed home the point. The “bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production” (39 and see also Capital, i, 617). The laws of market competition force all capitalists to seek out technological and organizational changes that will not only enhance present profitability, but also ensure the reproduction of competitive advantages in the future. Market economies and modern industry are necessarily technologically dynamic, not because of the myth of the innovative entrepreneur

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but because of the internal dynamics of competitiveness itself, i.e. innovate, maintain your advantages, or die. This created a condition of ceaseless change and instability; it created on the economic level, to use a phrase popular in Leftist fantasy life, an actual condition of permanent revolution. Where Marx was mistaken was in believing that this destructive juggernaut was merely a prelude to the socialist emancipation of humanity. What he could not see was that European “socialism” was historically untenable, although, conceptually, a system of quite elegant ideas. Socialism, to be blunt, was and remains, not a contradiction in terms, but a contradiction in deeds. It was a communalism constructed by rationalists with eyes in the backs of their heads. Bent on the future, they were in fact looking back, as if it were the future, to the premodern culture of the village and shire which capitalism was busily destroying. We can see now that the utopian impulse in his writing was not the sign of an inevitable future, but the sign of his own blindness to a nostalgia for the organic order of premodernized societies that was everywhere passing and could not come again. The effect of continuous innovation as the modus vivendi of capitalism, however, is not only to create new wealth, or to create or add value, but to devalue, if not destroy, past investments and labor skills. We become accustomed to living continuously in a paradoxical condition of creative destruction, a condition embedded within the circulation of capital itself, that is to say, the urgent drive towards new and more productive uses of capital accelerates devaluations of the old. And often these devaluations are completely unplanned. In the general euphoria of progress and the supersession of novelty, very little mind is paid to what’s vanquished and lost. The negligible concern about the effect of these devaluations on the existential substance of human attachments to that which is devalued, written off as old-fashioned and outmoded regressions, tells you all you need to know about the liberal humanism that celebrates progress, freedom, and, most recently, the charade of human rights. There lies the charm of the “hidden hand.” Innovation exacerbates instability, insecurity, and in the end, becomes the prime force pushing market societies into a continuous state of routine paroxysm. Marx understood this very well: “the uncertainty and instability to which machinery subjects employment, and consequently the conditions of existence . . . become normal” (see also Berman, Solid, 95). What he wasn’t able to comment on was how this psychic normalization of organized havoc is achieved. He was not helped by his somewhat rigid theory of class and class consciousness. Like the contemporary feminism that insists on seeing

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capitalism as essentially patriarchal, Marx seemed to take the existing class divides of his own day as inherent to capitalism as well. This was a mistake. The effect of capitalism is amazingly plastic in terms of the organization of social life. It has torn apart the old cultures of class just as thoroughly as the old cultures of gender and, increasingly, the old cultures of race as well. The class-divided society Marx confronted in the nineteenth century still reflected the social world of the pre-capitalist past. Classes, in the form that Marx understood them, gradually became less and less relevant in the twentieth century. This is not to say that exploitation and injustice caused by power differentials, income differences, and other economic divisions no longer apply. They do. But social divisions today are marked by differences in income level and accumulation, not class hierarchies. Certainly those who come from a moneyed family, i.e. inherit wealth, have a head start, but possessing wealth was never the sole criterion for participation in the culture of an upper class. Timing and a little bit of shrewdness trump class at every turn. The old barriers of blood and manor cannot hold back the pushing man, or woman for that matter. Anyone can get into the luxury compounds in which the rich live given a sufficient amount of wealth and power, and that includes gangsters and war criminals with the right allies. Even the former Chilean strongman, Augusto Pinochet, was able to take tea with Baroness Thatcher. Riches alone could not accomplish that trick in the nineteenth century. The dominance of the market-form has obliterated all the class distinctions of old and the rich now live in the same kind of culturally horizontal enclave culture as the everyone else. It’s just that their enclaves have a higher price of admission. As I suggested earlier, the modernization of Europe could not happen until the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment and the market economy come into vital contact. Both processes have the effect, to use Anthony Giddens’s formulation, of disembedding or “lifting out” the social relations of subjects, including relations of class, from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time and space (Consequences, 21–29). The image evoked by disembedding captures the shifting alignments of time and space which are of elementary importance for social change and for understanding the specific nature of modern times. The value of the work of Marx lies precisely in his becoming aware of the disruptive, disembedding effects of modernization across the whole range of human life all the way from the technical reorganization of exchange relations within new modes of production to the transformation of consciousness itself. But what does this mean concretely?

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The invention of the mechanical clock underlines the disembedding of time-consciousness in modernity. Giddens writes: All pre-modern cultures possessed modes of the calculation of time. The calendar, for example, was as distinctive a feature of agrarian states as the invention of writing. But the time reckoning which formed the basis of day-to-day life, certainly for the majority of the population, always linked time with place – and was usually imprecise and variable. No-one could tell the time of day without reference to other socio-spatial markers: “when” was almost universally either connected with “where” or identified by regular natural occurrences [like the rising and setting of the sun]. The invention of the mechanical clock and its diffusion to virtually all members of the population . . . were of key significance in the separation of time from space. (Consequences, 17)

The clock made time visible, but it also, by the sheer fact of its existence, brought to consciousness an underlying concrete dimension of “empty” duration. The particular time-form of the clock, quantified to allow the precise designation of “zones” of the day (e.g. the “working day”), is only one possibility among many. But the precision of concrete time-measurement which the clock gives us is achieved at the cost of dematerializing duration. In the clock world, in our world, the rising and setting sun now functions as a charming, but dead, metaphor. Before the sun’s retirement into literature, time-consciousness and the natural processes which embodied it (put it in bodily form) were very difficult to disentangle. The clock arriving at the start of the machine age is the timely symbol of their separation. Whether we are frightened by the unintended effect of this innovation or whether we are amused or feel liberated by it is neither here nor there for the time being, but I’ll come back to this a little bit later. The point I want to make is that the coming of machine production in the industrialization process produced the same effect across the whole of modern life with all its attending assaults on and disruptions of premodern consciousness. The rise of the modern urban space has the same unintended effect in the matter of disembedding the social relations of place and of place-consciousness. The shock of the new lies in precisely the fact that it voids the old and leaves us in effect with empty categories, which shortly become sites of contestation and struggle. Whose time fills up the clockface? What shape will the urban space take? What the clock has done to time, and the modern city to space, an historical event like the French Revolution has done to the political organization of power, or a poem like The Waste Land to the formal congruity of works of art, or Freud’s thought to the psychological

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organization of the self. Modernization transforms material life but its effect is entirely the unintended one of disembedding consciousness from its traditional embodiments (thus the strange appropriateness of the revolting lawyers of France choosing a nonspace, a tennis court, in order to utter their oaths in 1789) and relocating it as the free agency of the unembodied subject, first, naively, in relation to new abstractions about freedom (the Rights of Man), then in relation to necessity, the power struggles (the Terror) over the empty places left behind by the cancellations of the old. Modernity denotes the physical and psychological experience of living through these annulments wrought by modernization; which is why silence, absence, memory, the abyss are profoundly modern literary themes and tropes. The internal contradictions of the modernization process by which scientific calculation, precision and definiteness, paradoxically and negatively, bring to shadowy consciousness all that is indefinite and unintended, jars individual existence by adumbrating underlying instabilities of reference and representation: the clock is not simply time as such, but a particular time-form imposed on duration and which can, therefore, be contested. Power does not inhere as Nature in the particular social group which at one time commands the heights of society, but defines a social site of struggle, a terrain to be conquered and defended. Inherited and natural-seeming experiences of one’s own self are also negated. As a result, modern times slip into the permanent crisis of identity. The anxiety and pain of this experience of an inner abyss, however, is not completely debilitating. People go on, even if, as in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, they end up going nowhere. But just as an analgesic will numb your headache, the rich fantasy life that accompanies consumption or the dreams of consumption numbs the pain left by the destruction of past attachments, even inner attachments. From the perspective of this new “freedom” from a past self, the past self seems an iron cage of stale custom and ritual, prejudice and superstition. But that experience is conditioned by the contrast it makes with that most modern of fantasies, the fantasy of a life without horizons, of a life of limitless possibility. In practice, objectively, the experience of this inner limitlessness is a mirage which keeps the thirsty shopper wandering the trackless Sahara of merchandise. Across the seeming material solidity and propositional exactness of the modernized world falls the shadow of its negation. Marx understood these matters better than most of his contemporaries, except perhaps Nietzsche. What he did not understand was that the capitalist’s clock-time and the power of the bourgeoisie were not simply opposed, one-to-one, by the countervailing potentialities of the proletariat and the

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vanguard party. Simply put, the conquest of power by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the collective ownership of the means of production could not and cannot solve the inherent instabilities of modernization. Far from it. In fact, in the Soviet experience, the process of devaluation of all values in modernity and the systemic instability were only hidden from view by terror and force, in a state-sponsored program of strategic blindness. It brought to life, not the socialist utopia, but different trains of unintended effects. Historical experience in the twentieth century has shown that it doesn’t really matter who owns the means of production; it is modern production itself that turns us into Eliot’s legions of “hollow men.” The contradictions of modernization cannot in fact be solved, because modernization is itself constituted by these very contradictions. Instability, indeterminancy, and difference are the sustaining sources of its power and dynamism.5 The market economy is by definition unstable and dynamic, the arena of “uninterrupted disturbance,” “everlasting uncertainty,” and “agitation” (Marx, Manifesto, 83): Catastrophes are transformed into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and renewal; disintegration works as a mobilizing and hence an integrating force. The one specter that really haunts the modern ruling class, and that really endangers the world it has created in its image, is the one thing that traditional elites (and, for that matter, traditional masses) have always yearned for: prolonged solid stability. In this world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well. (Berman, Solid, 95)

If the market were a nation, the thing we literature professors call deconstruction would be its bill of rights and its declaration of independence all rolled into one. When science is put in the service of the market nation, instrumental reason, in disembedded form, is directed towards ceaseless innovation, not for the sake of truth or the achievement of equilibrium, but for the sake of an institutionalized disequilibrium, and crudely put, for the sake of staying ahead of the competition. Mental life in the advanced market economies has simply come to accommodate itself to these new norms of experience.

chap t e r 4

Epistemology of the market

[M]en no longer consider what the coins weigh and are worth, but each one in turn accepts them according to the value that common approbation and their currency give them. Men do not argue about the alloy, but about the rate of exchange: thus all things are accepted equally. (Montaigne, “An Apologie of Raymond Sebond”)

Let me examine a little more closely the epistemological fallout, not of something the ideologists call a “free market” (which never exists in practice), but of a market largely freed from its entanglement in older, pre-capitalist moral and social restraints. In an older social order, ethico-religious traditions and institutions governed conduct, thought, and what constitutes knowledge, including the routines of commercial exchange. The Parthenon looks out over Athens from its position on the crown of the Acropolis hill. The dusty agora toils away at its base. Stand in the ancient agora today and look up and you will experience concretely the relation between the hierarchical sociopolitical order and the economy in ancient Athens. Greek society culminated in that great architectural icon of Greek spiritual and military power. The rude noises of the traders and the metoikos below are barely audible on that rocky summit from which the wind has blown everything away except the stones. The castes invested with political rights and power were dominated by kinship fealties, land, and religion. Down below, there existed also a class, which found its institutional expression in the agora, that represented movable wealth accumulated by trading, and, “by the nature of its transactions and its realist spirit, is extremely mobile” (Glotz, Ancient Greece, 291). When the “realist” mentality that permeates the agora has finally devalued the hieratic power of the temple, the mental life of a whole society undergoes a profound change. When the market rules, which is to say when the rules of thinking are determined by the marketform, the mental life of society changes (see also Schumpeter, Capitalism, 128). 76

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How does the market-form affect the way we think? There are some who will say this is a silly question. The market is simply an economic mechanism which has no extraordinary powers to shift the ground of thinking and knowing in any general sense. It is merely, they will say, a mechanism for allocating resources among producers, a mechanism for the setting of commodity prices, for distributing goods, for adding value, for raising capital to sustain enterprise, and so on. But this is simply too narrow an assessment of the epistemology of the market as a social form. The evidence for this change is everywhere around us today. Even in the academy, that supposedly free zone of thought and research, knowledge, and especially techno-scientific knowledge, is now parcelled out selectively through patents and other claims of proprietorship according to ownership principles more suited to market society than to the free exchange of learning among colleagues. We censoriously protect freedom of thought against political interference and religious intolerance where increasingly it no longer matters what anyone thinks, while we watch it die in the squalid scramble over intellectual property rights. The market-form has no fixed ground or space of knowing. The epistemological base for the exercise of market reason is set by the synchronic form of the whole network of exchange relations as it moves through time. The overall movement is important, but we measure the effectiveness of any action against the state of the network of relations at any one moment in time, not on any measure beyond the punctual limits of the network. As a result, in the market, there is no existential notion of time or temporality as a Kantian category and, therefore, no existentially valid history beyond the sequence of statistical norms that flow through the cascade of information which the perpetual processing of exchange transactions generates. The feedback loop functions as the market’s memory. General social time means nothing to the market when it is operating free of external moral and political constraints. Thus markets are free of that sort of time we academics still call history. This allows the ideologists of market democracies, like Francis Fukuyama, to affirm that the market-form effectively brings history to an end. Without historical time, the only thing left is “timing.” And as any trader will tell you, timing is all. The candid trader will also tell you that the market depends on another epistemological anomaly. The uneven distribution of information is the necessary state of knowledge for the market system to function in accordance with its constitutive principle. Those with information do not share it, if it is not to their advantage. And it is usually to their advantage to let those with the wrong information persist in their ignorance. The buying

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and selling of real estate is an excellent and familiar example. E. M. Forster understood this aspect of market epistemology intimately. In Howards End, when Henry Wilcox has decided to ask Margaret Schlegel to marry him, she finds out, now that she’s a Wilcox insider, all the bad news about a house which she was going to lease from Wilcox before the onset of their personal connection: Margaret could not help laughing. It was the first she had heard of the mews behind Ducie Street. When she was a possible tenant it had suppressed itself, not consciously, but automatically. The breezy Wilcox manner, though genuine, lacked the clearness of vision that is imperative for truth. When Henry lived in Ducie Street he remembered the mews; when he tried to let he forgot it; and if anyone had remarked that the mews must be either there or not he would have felt annoyed, and afterwards have found some opportunity of stigmatizing the speaker as academic. (184)

The key is in Forster’s incisive insistence on the automatic, not conscious, suppression of the truth. The information “had suppressed itself” is Forster’s marvellous way of getting at the systemic character of the calculated uses of ignorance, even though Wilcox is “genuine.” The passive construction of his sentence makes the point silently but accurately. The transparent sharing of all information, good or bad, is stigmatized as “academic.” Henry Wilcox’s annoyance with the “academic” insistence on the whole truth underlines another aspect of market epistemology: positioning and perspective. What we know or don’t know, and, therefore, how we behave, depends on where we are positioned and the perspective we have from that place. The syncretic perspective positioned beyond the limits of the network of relationships that implies facts, values, and truths not generated from the market-form itself are the subject of unrelenting scorn. They are not forbidden as such, but are subverted by the increasing post-structural authority of perspectivism, relativism, and the peculiar, ironic temper of capitalist modernity. And irony as a mode of thought helps to constitute the pervasive skepticism of modern society. The endlessly skeptical discourse of deconstruction, having begun as “realism” in the ancient agora, is the literary-theoretical embodiment of what is essentially the everyday reality of market society. The market-form fixes irony and skepticism as constituents of thought at every level of the social whole, from philosophical speculation in the ivory tower to the routine scheming of everyday life. At the level of the everyday, the market-form functions as a selfsupporting system of rewards and punishments, internally organized stipulations of what’s true and what’s false, evaluations of what’s right and wrong, and the system-generated imbalances between knowledge and ignorance,

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the necessary inequalities among buyers and sellers. It is merciless in its judgments. This constantly disruptive process is the product not of “thought” in the philosophical sense preferred by philosophers but of thought in the tactical or canny sense preferred by sellers, buyers, and manufacturers in competition with each other. The market-form, then, is the material and institutional logic of an obstreperous skepticism that has become a constitutive aspect of what now passes for the real. The mistake we make is to believe that philosophical thought is somehow immune from a merely material condition. Once the traditional restraints have been removed, the market-form permeates, over time, every aspect of existence including the realm of ideas. Think again of the cant phrase “the marketplace of ideas.” The cult of seeing through everything heaps ridicule on all aspects of transcendental thinking, but exposes us to a new risk: a congenital blindness to the programmatic innocence implicit in the politics of subject positioning. Some of course are more innocent of knowledge than others, but there is no way, in such a system, to come to know the full extent of your ignorance until you’ve been had. Perhaps this has always been a feature of interpersonal relationships, but its operation has always been subject to moral sanctions. A sin of omission, pace Henry Wilcox, is still a sin. But now that fixed or categorical ethical measures have collapsed, trading on another’s innocence, i.e. ignorance, is simply being smart. The happy trader uses information economically and coyly. This is not simply tactics. The system has as its most typical intrinsic feature this differential distribution of knowledge and ignorance. You cannot have the market-form without this epistemological disequilibrium. And, moreover, without this constantly shifting imbalance, you cannot have its peculiar form of progress by acceleration, rupture, retrogression, reacceleration, rupture, and so on ad infinitum. It is what puts the system in motion and what keeps it in motion. The result is the perpetual avoidance of the steady state. Equilibrium is death. And herein lies the market’s revolutionary action. The capitalist revolution is, in effect, the inverse of the long-awaited utopia of left-wing fantasy life; it is, mutatis mutandis, the permanent revolution.1 But it is not the permanent revolution as imagined by Trotsky, nor the permanent cultural revolution launched by Mao in China in the 1960s. Both the theory and practice of permanent revolution in Trotsky’s and Mao’s terms are complete and utter failures because of the general communist blindness to actually existing communism’s own nature. Permanent revolution is not a party program. It cannot be directed by a party elite, nor can it be canalized in this way or that by roaming cadres of censorious Red Guards. Indeed, it cannot be totalized by a single recipe for the same

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reason that no single formulation of a coral reef’s permanently changing structure can account for its punctual form in the process of its growth. Permanent revolution requires a different order of understanding the way change occurs in societies organized around the circulation of capital and, today, that means all of them. Some sociological equivalent of chaos theory is the more reliable guide to the movement of history than any synchronic snapshot or teleologically inflected narrative of either liberal progressive or dialectical materialist kinds. Wyndham Lewis’s painting The Crowd, first exhibited in 1915, renders the paradox visually. Static designs, suggesting a solid-seeming and deceptively permanent urban landscape, are punctuated by sudden cascades of shattering forms. This painting would be my choice for cover illustration for the history of Enron. The only successful revolution in modern times has been the capitalist revolution. No matter what the received wisdom tells us, historical events like the French insurrections of 1848 (the June days), the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and most other myriad social and political events of our century which drape themselves in revolutionary rhetoric and ideas, cannot match capitalism for its ruthless tearing apart of all traditional bonds and the traditional societies they held together. Even more remarkably, no other so-called revolution of the last two hundred years can match capitalism’s ability to represent its own revolutionary tumult as a perfectly natural and inevitable process. It may not have happened punctually, i.e. “compressed in time and concentrated in target, [having] a determinate beginning . . . and a finite end,” as Perry Anderson thinks revolutions ought to behave (but then he probably thinks all novels must have beginnings, middles, ends, and an overarching theme). The capitalist revolution is like a modernist work of art. It happens everywhere at once. It is a process, not a product. Like modernist literary texts, it proceeds by disjunctive ruptures, not by rationally seizable continuities. And, make no mistake, it has the requisite revolutionary effect. It overturns and continues to overturn all traditional structures (cf. Anderson, Modernity, 112). By a combination of changes in modes of production and consumption, i.e. changes from below, the capitalist revolution convulsed the old feudal–aristocratic order and broke it apart. In its mature form, the capitalist revolution has also broken down the post-Renaissance state and its apparatuses of national control. And it has called into question all the older communal orders. Where some of these ancient communalist traditions still remain as I write (often expressing themselves in the language of a die-hard nationalism), it is only a matter of time before they too lie in ruins.

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Capitalism, not the world proletarian movement envisaged by Trotsky, represents the triumph of the “permanent revolution.” Its penetration of the structures of everyday life and its annulment of old moralities were the subject of comment from the start in the poetry of the Romantics, the seventh book of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, for example. Joseph Conrad was not only conscious of it, but saw no reason not to write about it. Here he is on “limited companies” as moral agents: “of which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and thus were freed in this world and the next from all effective sanctions of conscientious conduct” (“Some Reflexions,” 142). In Nostromo, he achieved his greatest work of art by showing how capital suffuses every nook and cranny of a society and subverts the minds and behaviours of its citizens. The quotation from Marinetti’s “The Foundations of Futurism” (Selected Writings) in my introduction speaks primarily to the overthrow of fusty symbolic or cultural orders inherited from the past. This call for destruction and renewal, even when couched in cultural terms, goes to the core of market society and it has not abated in our own time. Indeed, its champions have gone global: Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. We must destroy them to advance our historic mission. (Leeden War Against the Terror Masters, 37)

Michael Leeden, as of this writing, is described as resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading Washington think tank in the service of expanding American-style market democracy around the world. He makes the distinction between traditional cultures (he has principally devout Islamic communities in mind) and the “whirlwind of energy” that characterizes market-driven modernity as purely and as cleanly as does Filippo Marinetti at the origins of the modern movements in art. In temperament, theatrical self-promotion, and general cultural attainments, the flamboyant Marinetti and colorless Leeden may be entirely different, but, curiously, they speak from within the same modernist logic. Marx and Engels were never more right than in their characterizing of capitalism in the Manifesto as the juggernaut of history that rent asunder the body and soul of the old feudal–aristocratic dispensation, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (83), and so on and so forth.

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These reflections inevitably bring up the matter of the importance of Karl Marx as an observer and theorist of nineteenth-century capitalism. There was none better than Marx. He revealed the inner processes and significance of capitalism in its earlier phases better than any other political economist of the nineteenth century. But he could only describe and analyze that which he had the opportunity to observe, and he could only do that from the moral standpoint which he, like Ruskin, and like Carlyle, had inherited from the noncapitalist past, a past in which certain fixed moral values, not exchange values, still constituted the specific gravity of concrete social existence: The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange values presupposes the dissolution of all fixed personal (historic) relations of dependence in production, as well as the all-sided dependence of the producers on one another. Each individual’s production is dependent on the production of all others; and the transformation of his product into the necessaries of his own life is [similarly] dependent on the consumption of all others. Prices are old; exchange also; but the increasing determination of the former by costs of production, as well as the increasing dominance of the latter over all relations of production, only develop fully, and continue to develop ever more completely, in bourgeois society, the society of free competition. What Adam Smith, in the true eighteenth century manner, puts in the prehistoric period, the period preceding history, is rather a product of history. (Grundrisse, 156)

What is objectionable here, from the point of view of the neoliberal economist of our own day, is precisely the moralizing mode in which Marx carries out economic analysis. It is not that Marx is wrong in his scientific analysis of how nineteenth-century capitalism works, it is his moral valuation of what he observes and analyzes that offends the pure economist. For Marx, as for so many other nineteenth-century moralists, the evolution of capitalism was experienced as a disaster. And, for Marx particularly, the disaster needed to be resisted in concrete political terms at all costs. Marx was no mere Jeremiah. He was an activist and he put his faith in his own naive (and highly dubious) analysis of the epistemological potential of the proletariat. The fact of the proletariat’s exploited position in nineteenthcentury capitalism offended and blinded the moralist, and especially the moralist who was an early reader of Hegel. He took their condition in that particular moment of capitalist evolution as an intrinsic and necessary feature of capitalism as such. He could not see that the position of the workers in the nineteenth century was simply the historical product of an unsophisticated and crude understanding of social regulation and workforce disciplining on the part of the proprietors and capitalists, not

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an essential feature of capitalism as a system. In this one respect, Melville’s understanding of the social regulation of work in “Bartleby” goes beyond Marx. As the employer’s sophistication in the imposition of certain disciplines of behavior and expectation developed into the twentieth century, the crudely exploitative practices of Hard Times receded from view and were replaced by the now familiar regimen of human resources management, with its sophisticated application of psychology, veiled threats, and therapy, for the no-less-oppressive regulation and disciplining of workers. What Marx did not see was precisely this development. He thought that the proletariat would inevitably come to an understanding of its essential condition of rude misuse. As a result it would revolt. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Perhaps Tsarism in feudal Russia did not have the sociopolitical know-how to replace the knout with self-realization seminars, but the industrialized West, with its decades of trial and error in the matter of human resource management in factory and office, did. The conditions of the workers in the nineteenth century and the crude means used by proprietors to enforce discipline as described by Marx and other reformers was fact. But what was a passing historical phenomenon was hypostasized into a fixed figure (a myth perhaps) that passed for an enduring truth. Marx did not live to read Georges Sorel’s analysis and spirited denunciation of precisely this process among the socialist politicians of France – Jean Jaur´es in particular – who were seen as blindly abetting the shrewd capitalist’s ability to find the more benign course of control.2 It’s wrong to think that Sorel understood the situation in quite the same terms I have used here. However, it is this phenomenon, working inexorably in the background of the political posturing of the time, which gives rise to his concern. Sorel not only sees socialism losing its revolutionary edge, but he also senses the rise of a more effective curriculum of control. The result? Proletarian docility. History had another disappointment for Marx. The revolutionary movements that have sworn allegiance to Marxist–Leninist principles have in fact been shown to be, not revolutionary movements at all, but rearguard actions in defence of moribund communalisms. They are revolutions only in the trivial sense of the word; they were merely going around in circles unable to mesh with the forward gearings of the historical process. History does not flow processionally on a plumb promenade. Its progress is neither dialectical as Hegel or Marx in their differing ways believed, nor progressive in conventional liberal accounts. Capitalist revolution proceeds by increments and accumulations, by the information cascades which accompany steeply increasing volumes of buying and selling – and, let’s not forget,

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by the clever exploitation of ignorance. When the critical mass of transactions of a certain kind is reached, everyone wakes to a new reality in which everyone drowns. When enough teachers and university professors over a period of time inflate the grades they give, then a new, unexceptionable scale or standard emerges without any deliberate planning and those who don’t or won’t adjust to the new reality simply end up sounding like cranks. When enough smaller, cheaper, and Windows® -less information appliances flood the personal computer market, a company like Microsoft must change or die (Brethour, “Microsoft Frets,” B1, B10). When enough people use bankruptcy as a business strategy, bankruptcy as a symptom of moral failure evaporates. Do I need to heap up examples? The capitalist revolution didn’t happen overnight, and, for the most part, it happened unannounced. The so-called revolutionary regimes of the twentieth century, like the Soviet one for example, tried to establish and maintain the notion of a collective polity acting continuously and coherently in history, when it was the very possibility of such a polity which capitalism put into question. Soviet-style communalism was certainly different from the feudal– aristocratic orders of the past displaced by the bourgeois ascendancy, but it was not a difference in kind. Which explains why communist political movements succeeded only in places which had not yet modernized, i.e. in peasant and farmer societies with well-established ruling classes and communal traditions. The peasants intuited in Soviet communism not the modern future which the regime invoked rhetorically, but something like an active atavism, a new version of a familiar past that would protect the collectivist ethic of peasant society from the dissolving acids of the capitalist market, and the modernization processes which it drives. Only capitalism has been able to accomplish the dynamic revolution through the complete overturning of old forms of community and the value-systems on which they are based. Indeed, capitalist revolutionizing is also on the brink of achieving the much heralded Marxist–Leninist goal of the eventual withering away of the state. But it is not the international working class which will superintend the state’s demise; it is the global corporation. And, ironically, it is the investment managers for the international working class’s pension funds who are leading the charge. There is a great deal of irony in all of this because the great collectivisms of the twentieth century – fascism and communism – both wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of modernity, a modernity which, they boasted, would arise from the ruins of a wasted capitalist plutocracy (cf. Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 99–101). The revolution, we were told, would bring

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into being not only a whole new social order – the Thousand Year Reich, for example, or a new Italo-Roman Empire, or the Classless Society – but a new kind of human being. Meanwhile, a ferociously revolutionary capitalism, presenting itself in the colors of the past, made comforting noises about its connections with the traditional order and its continuity with an immutable human nature, while it quietly went about the task of fabricating a new kind of social order and a new kind of human being. As the twentieth century closed, it was revolutionary capitalism in the guise of a “conservative” reaction that ended up, ironically, having conserved very little or nothing at all. It is the competing collectivisms of our century which, again ironically, are conservative through and through, although they have presented themselves as radical breaks with the past. These collectivisms turned out to be the old social order without the traditional forms of legitimacy. In truth, the totalitarian regimes, of right and left, replaced the inherited authority of ruling classes, with the authority of utopian visions and rifle butts. Marx and Engels could not have been more right when they wrote in The Communist Manifesto that a “spectre” was haunting Europe. Historical communism remained spectral from beginning to end and disappeared like all insubstantial things in the blink of an eye, virtually overnight. From this perspective, historical communism and fascism appear to be the same kind of collectivist political phenomenon despite their historical rivalry and their differing discursive programs, one using the myths of reason and science, the other invoking the reason and science of myth. Their similarity incorporates the atavistic desire to harness modernity to a collective ethos. To plan the future through rational or pseudo-rational allocationary schemes runs dead against the revolutionary temper of capital which both -isms were trying to control or supplant. Again and again this form of socioeconomic control has proved to be thoroughly conservative, even where it has been honestly tried (instead of simply being a convenient Marxist or populist sounding smokescreen for corruption or naked power lust). It has failed because it put in place of an old gang of traditional rulers a new gang who did not dare relinquish political and economic control. Continuous revolutionizing of the means of production not only modernized Western society once, but continued to modernize it at accelerated rates. The Soviet attempts at modernization occasionally achieved limited success in the first phases, but stopped because there was no automatic mechanism for the shaking out of the old and the weak and for continuous reinvestment in the new. It was capitalist-driven remodernizing in the noncommunist world (the inexorable cycle of investment, deinvestment,

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reinvestment), with which the actually existing communist states tried to compete, that led eventually to their disintegration. Essentially conservative entities cannot master the accelerating velocities of change in economies that gradually begin to behave like games of chance. For states whose dialecticians and theorists were supposed to be so keenly attuned to the contradictions of capitalism, the communists were remarkably ill-informed on the lethal contradiction of their own condition, a progressivist rhetoric from the publicists and ideologues and a pathological fear of change among the faceless functionaries. In the material transformation of the lifeworld, nothing can compete with the developmental ferocity of capitalism. What needs to be understood is that capitalism and the market are inherently and pervasively disruptive. And this is seen to be a good thing, not even simply of some benefit on the road to a final equilibrium, but absolutely necessary. The Great Depression was not an aberration of capitalism, or a failure. Nineteen twenty-nine (or even the collapse of Enron in 2002) perfectly expresses the revolutionary essence of market society. It is the moment of capitalism’s triumphant success. Its enormous power can be glimpsed in the way the inertial drag of centuries of practical communal solidarity and Christian feeling are overcome and smashed by the general acceptance of the doctrine of the “invisible hand” curled, for a time it is true, into a fist. That market societies could maintain sufficient discipline in order to see the crisis through during the 1930s while millions of “human beings” were reduced to penury is truly amazing. Of course, what else can one expect from a system whose theory of knowledge posits self-involved somnambulism as the summit of human knowledge: By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, [the capitalist] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

We are told that by promoting his own interest, the capitalist actually “promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it” (Smith, Wealth of Nations, 423). Adam Smith knows what sweet music this epistemological paradox sounds in the merchant’s ear. He tells us that “very few words need be employed” in dissuading men of business from the “affectation” of consciously or deliberately acting for the public good. The revolutionary force of capitalism lies precisely in this doctrine

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of the blessings that accumulate through the unerring righteousness of unintended consequences. The capitalist socioeconomy is in continuous turmoil at the micro level. That is why statistics is the master discipline of our time in the same way that theology was queen of the medieval curriculum. Stand back far enough and the big numbers may give the impression of equilibrium as a possible output. If you’re standing on Mars nothing much seems to be happening on earth. But don’t be fooled. In the street, day to day, “change is good,” the Disney baboon tells us. Innovate or die means that the old bonds which sustained the communal orders of the past have had to disappear if they could not align themselves with the new order of things. Old values are devalued, even the highest, and in their place the logic of exchange generates new behaviors, new human natures, and I suppose, pace Kristeva, new maladies of the soul. The human being, or “Man” in the old discourse, is replaced as the holy source of meaning and value by a new consummation. Exchange as a socioeconomic framework for everyday life brings into play new values, encouraging new kinds of sociality and conduct. But the new sociality seems from the perspective of the old a species of nonsociality. The human community is replaced by the human series. Massed aggregates and the big numbers (Benjamin, Arcades, 290) which they generate take the place of actual people dwelling in interdependent, mutually regarding groups. Thinking that you belong to a community descends in stages to simply feeling you are part of a “demographic.” The face-to-face contacts and intimacies of the public square, or village green, or Venetian campo are replaced by society as “the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes” (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 239). The Parisian boulevards institutionalize anonymity in the nineteenth century. The flˆaneur not only embraces, savours, and consumes their remorseless movement, he is the drift. He is the permanent revolution. It is in the context of this state of flux that most of the modernists opposed modernity in their various ways. Pound’s fixation on the nature of value within the financial system is a crucial symptom. Lawrence’s Carlylean diatribes against industrialism are another. Gertrude Stein’s happy residence in the face-to-face communalism of an important Paris bohemia one more; Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, another; and Eliot’s attacks on the sociopolitics of liberal society as the sharp edge of a disintegrative nihilism that would lead to atavistic figures like Hitler and Stalin yet one more.3

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Woolf, Joyce, Stein, Lewis, and Eliot were modernists in a curiously ambiguous way. Their artistic work was revolutionary and their personal lifestyles created an authoritative and far-reaching revolution in personal conduct and manners. But their innovations in art and living were produced, quixotically, as a defence against the blind rapacity of the only revolution that mattered in modern times, capitalism. To the extent that they tried to devise defenses against the juggernaut, the modernists resembled those other revolution-spouting modernists, the communist parties of Eastern Europe after World War II. They were the exact antitheses of revolutionary societies in everything except the rhetoric of the party line. They were profoundly conservative political formations, more obsessed with control than with the uncertainties of constant change. For them it was really only a matter of changing one elite for another in the name of a hypothetical social liberation that never happened, and, worse, could never happen in those conditions. Whatever political legitimacy these regimes had collapsed because the cover story about the utopian future grew increasingly and comically fantastic in the face of actual experience; hence, the curious death of Czech communism a decade or so ago in a derisive barrage of jokes, smart-aleck ironies, and sardonic asides rather than by blood and bayonets. These state systems existed as profoundly conservative responses to the revolutionary power and ferocity of capitalism, while proclaiming in an inadvertently comic deadpan the revolution that never came. They were, in the end, more conservative than those Western political parties that continued to call themselves “conservative” long after they stopped stewarding the traditional order. The British Conservative Party comes immediately to mind. It finally discarded its own commitment to conserving things in the 1980s during the Thatcher years4 even as its publicists tried to clothe the regime in the costumes of the honored past. As the capitalist revolution gathered strength all through the twentieth century, the communist regimes were simply part of the larger and more complicated modernist response. It is for these reasons that we can count the communist Berthold Brecht as a modernist, along with the likes of the genuinely conservative T. S. Eliot and the fascist fellow travellers Ferdinand C´eline and Ezra Pound; and why in the late 1980s it was Mr. Gorbachev who found himself at the feet of Mrs. Thatcher listening to her lecture about the necessary disciplines of change. The process of incorporation begins in nineteenth-century Paris where the discourse of modernism is fashioned in opposition to a commercial culture that, still sheepishly sunk in hypocrisy and bad faith, had not yet

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found its new moral compass and not yet worked itself free of traditional attachments. Only in the late twentieth century did modernism as a style of art and life finally recognize its genetic affinity to an uncluttered, aggressive capitalism now free of the past. In Paris, then, modernism’s first task was to find the right voice for the brave new world. And for that, we need to turn first to the nineteenth century’s greatest enemy of capitalism, Karl Marx.

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chap t e r 5

Bloody farce

One does not write what one wants. (Gustave Flaubert)

Nowhere in Marx’s works does the character of a world undergoing rapid modernization appear more forcefully delineated than in the three volumes of his magnum opus, the work called Capital, or in its precursor, the Grundrisse. These works are written in the spirit of Enlightenment science and for that reason Marx and orthodox Leftists have always claimed that these texts achieve a specifically scientific authority. Time and a century of post-Enlightenment thought have seen through that language game easily enough. The problem for Marx’s “scientific” texts, as I see it, lies in the fact that they cannot grasp entirely some of the effects of the processes they are trying to theorize. They seem, for us today, naively reliant on ways of thinking designed to deal with mechanical systems of change. The elusive variousness, unpredictability, and the fractional autonomies of the social world, the decentered world of human actions, as opposed to all those aspects of existence which can be represented as if they were machines, often evade his grasp. And occasionally we become aware in some of his works of his own niggling anxieties about this. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is one of those occasions and how he comes to deal with what amounts to the partial breakdown of the interpretative machine helps us to understand how modernism, as both a discourse of art and as the more general cultural discourse of capitalism, comes into being. What always strikes me about this wonderful and vivid account of the rise to power of the fatuous Louis Bonaparte is Marx’s dismay in the face of events that, objectively speaking, should not have happened at all. His dismay and anxiety reveal themselves in a number of ways, his rhetorical excess, for example, or his sarcasm, and the portrayal of the principal actors as clowns and buffoons. It’s almost as if he has taken deep offense, not just 93

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simply because a clownish figure like Louis Bonaparte has conquered the French but because he seems to have done it inadvertently, by accident. History itself, Clio in all her glory, seems to have palmed off the embarrassing Napoleonic nephew as her own special joke on the French people and, in her wake, left the earnest, scientific observer in the lurch. First some general points should be noted. With the year 1848 we are on familiar political terrain. By that year politics in the leading nations has already begun to take its ordinary modern form. Let’s call it the society of optical illusions, or what Lewis Carroll called Wonderland and Guy Debord, the society of the spectacle. As capitalist industrialism takes command of the economy, society and culture begin to shift. The shift does not happen overnight and it does not happen as a mechanical result of that favorite Marxist contrivance, the base–superstructure dyad. Social and political institutions are relatively autonomous and they carry on for quite some time in their normal ways, even as the underlying economic system changes. Any close examination of the particulars of political events, especially as those events focus on matters of material power, quickly reveals that the closer we get to our own day the more thoroughly optical or spectacular the political process becomes. This has brought us to the point where the visible politics of a nation, democratic or otherwise, are generally incidental to the exercise of actual power. It is the needs of market, production (even the new-style factory of the digital age), and consumption which drive history forward today, not political ideas or ideals. Policy follows the diktaten of markets and the frenzied gush of technological innovation. None of these points are new. Jacques Ellul’s pioneering enquiries into politics as spectacle were written in the 1950s. Debord’s book, Society of the Spectacle, was first published in France in 1967. And Joseph Tussman’s refreshingly unblinkered Obligation and the Body Politic was published in Oxford seven years earlier in 1960. Even these important texts were not the first to discuss the decline of political agency in a world where the market becomes not only an economic force, but the paradigm for all activities. The emasculation of politics is a general theme that runs through twentiethcentury political science. As the practice of democracy has declined, Western societies have undergone two important symptoms in recent years: a lewd orgy of hyperbole in praise of democracy from those who do most to debase it; and a general cynicism of whole populations towards political figures and towards the political process as a whole. The decline of participation in politics in the United States alone, the one place on earth where the word democracy is intoned most reverently, underlines the severity of the disease and makes a mockery of democratic life.

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Tussman’s analysis in mid-century is particularly acute. He asks where: is the optimist today who has not shaken his head over apathy and private preoccupation, over the growing complexity of public issues, over the shortcomings of public education, and the mind-destroying uses of mass communication? . . . It is altogether possible that we may drift increasingly in the direction of ritualistic democracy . . . the vote will decide less and less as we move deeper into the morass of public relations, the projection of images, and the painless engineering of consent. Perhaps this path is inevitable for us, but it is not democracy – only its tragic parody. (Obligation, 106)

Tussman’s sense of a debased democracy as parody is parallelled a century earlier by Marx’s sense of Louis’s coup as farce. For both of them the evolution of the historical process in the direction of low comic forms delineates a negative development: the more history becomes farce, the more thinking about history takes on a tragic cast. In trying to understand how this state of affairs has come about, Tussman comes to grasp the essential importance of the market as both an institution and a paradigm for a new kind of thinking. “If I had to select a figure of speech which, upon analysis, would reveal the basic dilemma of our political life, I would choose the ‘marketplace of ideas’” (104). The significance of this thought astonishes him. “The marketplace of ideas!” he exclaims. “Do we appreciate enough the revolutionary daring of that conception? At one bold stroke it identifies the deliberative and the bargaining arts, turns the scientist into a businessman, the sage into a salesman. This is the most significant triumph of a business civilization.” And it is a triumph which has in the forty-plus years following these words become more pervasive and grandiose. I believe that the world which astonishes Tussman so much begins to be visible about a hundred years earlier, which is perhaps why he can speak of it with such trenchancy in 1960. The importance of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire lies precisely in the fact that we are still living in the political ethos that finds its first embodiment in Louis Bonaparte. He becomes the type of the successful contemporary politician, no matter what constitutional arrangements are in place.1 For example, the numerous political events that have gone under the name of revolution in the last one hundred and fifty-odd years have become both a common occurrence and a spectator sport. And their essentially farcical nature has been revealed again and again for anyone who cares to look. The fact that many of them have gone beyond the comic opera stage into murder and brutality does not shift them generically into another dramatic form. It only drenches the farce in blood.2 Marx is alive to these

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generic distinctions all through his little book. Like farce does of life in general, Eighteenth Brumaire recognizes perfectly the narcissistic basis of modern politics. Not only that, but narcissism requires the continuous dramatic reenactment of its primal scene of recognition. Similarly revolutionary regimes require the periodic return of revolutionary ruptures to sustain the myth of the revolution’s legitimacy. Marx tells us, anticipating almost every political figure in the twentieth century and beyond, that in order to keep the people focussed on his own political persona as a public spectacle, as the pool into which Narcissus gazes, Bonaparte must perform “a coup d’´etat in miniature every day” (Eighteenth Brumaire, 248). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Terry Eagleton has written, “finds something inherently theatrical and melodramatic in the great bourgeois revolutions” (“Foreword,” Emergence of Social Space, vi). True enough, but I don’t think that the bourgeoisie are the only class given to political melodrama and excess. The revolution of 1848 and, I believe, all modern revolutions are “traced . . . by the play of fantasy, rhetoric and fiction, masking, posturing, and unmasking, a costumed staging.” In revolutions, bourgeois or otherwise, the surges of emotion reach operatic levels of expressive intensity: Revolutions blow the lid off the unconscious in ways no revolutionary program could hope to foresee, releasing a libidinal charge whose relation to determinate social goals will always be ambiguous and uneasy. While the cadres worry about food supplies, the people shoot at the clocks. (vii)

Eagleton believes that the Eighteenth Brumaire is Marx’s most important semiotic text. That may be so, but, more importantly, it is his greatest political text and his greatest excursion into the pragmatics of ideology in capitalist society. To the extent that Marx is not trying to be scientific, as he is in Capital, but just a very good observer, the Eighteenth Brumaire gives him freer scope for imaginative and rhetorical maneuver. The book is all about systemic ruptures that beset communities of tradition as the capitalist virus spreads through civil society. Marx is particularly alive to the disconnection between the heroic windbaggery of revolution and the prosaic reality (Eighteenth Brumaire, 147–48), to the ludicrous posturing of self-important political peacocks and the shabby shuffling of office-holders. Parody, political cross-dressing and transvestism, the play of fantasy, broken occasionally by the cold, sober reality of rifle butts, give the text its rhetorical program. But this is a procedure that has not pleased everyone on the Left.

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Marx’s text has always given seriously kosher Marxist critics and theorists the willies. There is a conservative Left reading which sees the work as “an excellent example of the materialist conception of history as a method for political analysis, and that Marx displays incisiveness as a historian” (Wilde, 1848, 1). Lawrence Wilde could have written that in his sleep. Orthodox Leftists, such as Wilde, feel the need to argue that the exuberance and excessiveness of the writing is interesting but not really relevant. In short, the style doesn’t count. They would like to believe that the rationalist in Marx simply went a little overboard in his polemical engagement and that beneath the slapstick and the tropic copiousness, dialectical reason patiently marks out its schematic diagram of understanding, as coolly and as rationally as ever. But this obscures the text’s most important lesson for modern times. It is the very restlessness and impatience of the text that speaks most candidly to modernity. The orthodox would prefer to stunt the style. But the style is the message of Eighteenth Brumaire. Isaiah Berlin is willing to give Marx, the “penetrating and cruel” pamphleteer, his due under the head of style, but Berlin’s own unshakable rationalism sees only the brilliance of Marx’s description and analysis but makes nothing of a situation which, he writes, Marx “represented as a travesty of the events of 1789” (Karl Marx, 141). Why Marx resorted to a literary genre – the travesty (what Marx himself called a farce) – to represent an historical event is left unexamined. And with that omission a good deal of the historical significance of this crucial text remains out of sight. Marx’s little book – with its giddy array of metaphors, parentheses, asides, narrative strategies, offhand observations, comic devices (some of which are pure slapstick), ironic reversals, relentless piling up of detail, etc. – anticipates just about everything that post-structuralism might have to say about the collapse of Enlightenment metanarratives and the very breakdown of theory itself – “classic” positivist and unitary theory that is – in the face of contingent historical events, or what the Scots modernist Hugh MacDiarmid used to call “the upwelling of the incalculable” (Selected Essays, 73). The book tackles the way absurdity confronts reason with a challenge that exceeds its powers of explanation. In Marx’s own words, “the content somehow comes to transcend the phrase”(Eighteenth Brumaire, 149). An orthodox Left reading sees these incommensurable elements as “often rather clumsy” formulations of concepts Marx would, supposedly, clarify later in his theoretical writings (Fernbach, “Introduction,” 15). But this way of reading the text cannot grasp the inner drama among three things: Marx’s conceptual expectations; his perception of events; and his

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literary style. Reality refuses the confinement of a priori concepts and the resulting conflict works itself out as a particular stylistic program. Rather than a repressive, but false, scientism, Marx is able, perhaps even in spite of himself, to let the inexplicable find voice through the text’s artfulness. Marx begins with one of his most famous passages: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”(Eighteenth Brumaire, 146). The story we are about to be told, the story of Louis Bonaparte’s improbable assent to power, is thus assigned to a particular dramatic form, the farce. Let us remind ourselves what “farce” means as a literary subgenre of comedy: it is “a kind of comedy that inspires hilarity,” often mixed with strains of panic, cruelty, and hysteria. The action advances through an accelerating and increasingly “improbable series of ludicrous confusions, physical disasters, and sexual innuendos among its stock characters” (Baldick, Literary Terms, 82). The social typing of the characters is an essential literary resource of farce. Characters represent certain kinds of people, certain social classes or groups: the cuckolded bourgeois husband, for example; the dutiful daughter; the aristocratic seducer; the idle, parasitical son; the conniving upstairs maid; the clean-limbed young man, and so on. Where this sort of social typing might carry an allegorical significance in premodern literary works, in farce it rarely, if ever, does. Stock characters are used as an easy and rapid way of getting to the fun. The characters do not develop in the realist sense. Their natures are given. They do not have individual pasts and are constituted by stereotyping, that is from the common intuitive grasp of individual types, groups, and classes found in a particular society. The farce proper is a form that begins to appear in the eighteenth century when the allegorical temper of premodern societies begins to weaken under the impact of an increasingly pervasive materialism. The farce is related to certain older forms of low comedy, but with the allegorical double reading almost completely erased. I have in mind low comic forms like the fabliau (e.g. Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale”). Farces are therefore modern. They have little intrinsic literary significance. They are primarily the most popular forms of entertainment in modernity. Today, the pervasiveness of the situation comedy, the ever-popular sitcom, in prime time television is evidence enough. Even the most serious modernist play of the twentieth century, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, is a sitcom of sorts, deeply immersed in the tradition of farce and farce’s vision of human existence as absurd to its core. To glimpse that one lives in a deeply absurd human world was, at one time, profoundly disturbing. As traditional societies lost touch with the

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spiritual infrastructure of a rational order, the absurd arrived to take the place of the divine guarantees. Reason alone cannot make sense of absurdity. It is the incommensurable, the undecidable, the random, and the incommunicable wrapped up in one bright package of laughter and language. The overflow of intellectual energy (beyond the meager resources of reason) which the absurd releases registers not as ideas or concepts but as a necessary artfulness of expression (the bright package). The more fully absurdity is experienced, the more artful the response, the more style takes on a life of its own. The intellectual limit of this process in human history is the familiar terrain of aestheticism. In the Anglo-Saxon world, it finds its John the Baptist in Walter Pater and its Christ in Oscar Wilde. In Noel Coward, Edward Albee, Joe Orton, Tom Stoppard, and others, including the countless writers of contemporary sitcoms, the absurd finds its early church fathers. This is the political message of aestheticism. It was this experience of the absurdity of human existence that gave modernism its primal political consciousness. In a world from which deity has fled, the absurd is what science and capitalism bring clearly to view. Science replaces the idea of a wilful and personed God with the inhuman lure of big numbers. Capitalism replaces the value-system embodied in the Parthenon set on the wind-swept crown of the Acropolis hill with the values of the dusty agora down below. When statistics and exchange rule, the farce and its generic cognates – travesty, the theatre of the absurd, Dada, the sitcom, stand-up – is the literary form that predominates. Farce represents psychological R & R for societies pervaded by the otherwise sober business of production, exchange, and accumulation. In this respect the farce functions in the same way as pornography, substanceabuse, and gambling, a kind of holiday from repressive behavioral conventions and from the unnervingly serious exercise of narrowly calculative reason in commercial society. Thus, it represents moments of expenditure, psychological shopping sprees, where the daily migraine of accumulation can be temporarily suspended and we can simply go out and spend to our heart’s content. Hidden in the semidarkness of the theatre and psychically barricaded from the unreason on stage by the proscenium arch, commercial society invents farce as a form of sequestered expenditure, a wild shopping binge that costs nothing. The more hilarious it is, the more orgasmic the experience. It is precisely this libidinal secret of a society acculturated by commerce that Oscar Wilde discovered in the 1890s. And the same secret which, incidentally, Louis Bonaparte seems to have discovered fifty years earlier as the new role of an autonomous staged politics (Eighteenth Brumaire, 238),

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politics as theatre in an emerging society of the spectacle. Louis is “the serious clown who no longer sees world history as a comedy, but his comedy as world history” (198). As a result we have the spectacle of a stock character from farce, Marx calls him “a cunning old rou´e,” whose political effect has been to clothe the whole of society in the mantle of his delusions. Now we must assume that Marx, one of the great and most sober masters of nineteenth-century realism, simply accepted the view that the origin of the farce he is about to narrate inheres in the events themselves, although the text seems to be ambivalent about this very point. The actual rise to power of Louis Bonaparte is seen to be farcical. We are not meant to believe that it is Marx’s own words which give these events a farcical reading or interpretation. The style of the telling merely amplifies the farce which is already there as the real content of the actions. In order to tell his story in a way which brings out its inherently farcical qualities, Marx adopts a kind of zany, burlesquing narrative of those events, rather than a coolly dispassionate historical and analytical record. In this respect, as he is driven to commit the necessity of style in his unexpected confrontation with history as farce, he discovers inadvertently that “the secret of human consciousness,” as Hayden White writes, “is to be found in its most original product, which is not reason, but figurative language” (Metahistory, 107), repeating a point made more elegantly by Jacques Derrida in “White Mythology Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” Works like Eighteenth Brumaire, that may not have a conscious intention of being “works of art,” discover, in the process of struggling to complete themselves, a solution to the concrete dilemmas they cannot resolve. They are not an art object, but they accomplish or do the work of art in spite of themselves, as a way of achieving the elusive equilibrium that the monocular discourses of Enlightenment reason can no longer reach. Now, one might argue that if the events that Marx narrates are themselves farcical through and through, then their nature will stand out unmistakably for every observer and that the deployment of this rhetorical apparatus is essentially unnecessary. The events, in short, can speak for themselves. They merely need an honest historian, not an ingenious and artful ventriloquist. Premodernist discourses were not so concerned with getting reality right, with representing it aright, and making sure everyone “got” it. Reality was not the problem for the premodern world, because the conventions of reality-consciousness, before modernity, seemed to be essentially unchanging, and the allegorical impulse was absorbed by the settledness of the symbolic order (Fletcher, Allegory, 70–74). That impulse, the allegorical

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tendency of customary societies, undergoes a decisive tectonic shift as the modernized world begins to take off. The allegorist is subducted by, gives way to the realist and the historian. The point at which allegory and realism overlap and converge is in the matter of the seamlessness of both systems of representation. The literary-historical moment of this convergence in Europe occurs in Romanticism.3 The Romantic realist delineates new “modern” contents, but tries to borrow the totalizing tendencies of allegory, while adapting to the initial phase of the modernizing world. In this disjunction, between the unifying momentum of an older poetics and the dispersive effects of modernization, you find one of the formal paradoxes of realism. Every literary work of realism in the nineteenth century is inscribed in various ways by this disjunction (for example, Oliver Twist is fractured by two conflicting aesthetic intentions after chapter eleven). Now, modernism begins at that moment when, as Veronica Forrest-Thomson writes, “a lack of fit” begins to appear “between language and the world,” calling into question “our concept of the relation between subjective consciousness and physical reality” (Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, 90). On this disjunction, which pervades not only consciousness alone, but even more significantly the material reality of a modernizing world, modernism builds its own disjunctive poetics (Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics). I’m not sure I agree with Forrest-Thomson that the snug fit of subject and object is “our concept” exactly, but it is certainly a realist convention, one of the underlying methodological assumptions of all realists from Jane Austen to Danielle Steel, Marx included. But where Jane Austen or Balzac or Dickens or E. M. Forster manage to conventionalize the allegorical in literary realism as a new kind of totalizing strategy, Marx the scientist is forced to confront the incommensurable, the farcical, in history without a deliberate intention of enacting the totalizing work of art. His aim is to encompass the historical farce conceptually. He will analyze modernization later in terms of overlapping material processes, which we have come to understand in postmodernity as relatively autonomous domains: the production/consumption model; the circulation of capital (or the investment, deinvestment, reinvestment cycle); the market-form for assigning and determining value; the disembedded communities of money; and the commodity fetish. These are the tectonic plates of his total vision. The subduction zones, the places where the plates meet and overlap, in other words the faultlines in the seamless-seeming crust, are structured conceptually as underlying contradictions.

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The rhetorical apparatus of Eighteenth Brumaire is the seismic record of these tectonic shifts occurring out there in history. The slippages and tremors that result are historical aporia, those baffling moments in history in which history itself cannot offer up its own unambiguous meanings and leaves us at a loss, bewildered. Marx’s unwilled, but necessary, artfulness registers the slippages as they work their way into the text. The text’s stylistic energy does not effect a seamless covering of the “crying contradictions” (Brumaire, 170). It makes those contradictions apparent, but not positively or empirically. It does so, rather, in the manner of a photographic negative. the june earthquake Marx pursues his argument about farce to a point where – as some commentators have noted (Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition, 28–30, for example) – all the axioms of rational explanation, including Marx’s own dialectical materialism, are subject to a kind of self-deconstructive meltdown, a series of wildly comic descriptions which seem to stand historical progress on its head. The nephew (Louis Bonaparte) sets out to reenact the previous triumphs of the uncle (Napoleon), but only succeeds in producing a species of out-and-out involuntary farce, a mockery of everything that had gone before. And this effect proves contagious when Marx gets around to describing and explaining the course of events. For everything about Eighteenth Brumaire seems to carry a message that is always a little beyond Marx’s explanatory control: that reason – positivist or dialectical – is here completely out of its depth, since there seems to exist no possible paradigm or theory, except the scheme of farce, by which to make sense of such a thoroughly absurd chronicle. The language and the style of the narrative spill over and obscure the rational categories that such events are meant to embody and clarify. As a result, the Eighteenth Brumaire inadvertently precipitates a proto-modernist literary discourse all its own as an unstable, fluctuating, afflicted response to the unstable, fluctuating, afflicted conditions of modernity which underlie the Bonapartist travesty. And this comes about, not because Marx conceived his task in aesthetic terms, that is as an artist, but as the inevitable result of occupying the social world like an artist, i.e. without blinkers. The first theme in the making of this proto-modernism is the use of parody, and transvestism, not for the sake of generic etiquette, but heuristically, as ways of understanding the world. It is developed by Marx right from his first paragraphs. Ideology, for one thing, is “a process of world-historical necromancy”:

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The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation of something which does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them; they borrow their names, slogans, costumes so as to stage the new world-historical scene in this venerable disguise and borrowed language. Luther put on the mask of the apostle Paul; the Revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire; and the revolution of 1848 knew no better than to parody at some points 1789 and at others the revolutionary traditions of 1793–5. In the same way, the beginner who has learned a new language always re-translates it into his mother tongue: he can only be said to have appropriated the spirit of the new language and to be able to express himself in it freely when he can manipulate it without reference to the old, and when he forgets his original language while using the new one. (Brumaire, 146–47)

Each era imagines its relationship to a past it believes to be real but which is, in reality, its own invention. So the personas, images, events, ideas of certain historical eras are resurrected in the context of immediate contingencies. It is necessary to give essentially sordid and banal power struggles appropriate cover stories, known narratives in recognizable genres and moods, that will borrow legitimacy for the parties in conflict. In France, “the emancipation and establishment of modern bourgeois society” is adorned by “Roman costume and with Roman slogans” (147). Cromwell and the English people borrow “for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament” (148). And more recently, the former leader of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, must be re-costumed as Adolf Hitler, with all that name’s capacity to provoke the proper response, in order to pulverize Serbia with a theatrical flourish of “humanitarian” wrath. This ideological necromancy is not a universal condition applicable to all times and all places. It is specific to the historical evolution of capitalism in the context of a culture in which the past still carries considerable significance and value. It is predicated on the fact that a population generally knows quite a bit about its own history, or at least approved versions of it. Later, as in our own time, when society slips into advanced states of historical amnesia, it is the imaginary future, the “promise-of-things-to-come,” that matters more, not the imaginary past; hence the generic importance of science fiction in popular culture today. But even then the past doesn’t ever entirely disappear. It will always provide a few, well-marked-out cultural points of reference, reduced to fixed ideas about heritage. For example, there’s the ever-amazing wisdom and vision of the American Founding Fathers as embodied in the US Constitution. This is a document

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which must, for national–ideological purposes, always be seen to work, even if it is almost entirely irrelevant to the realities of contemporary American life and to the nasty power struggles which typify its political culture. Again the Clinton impeachment is a case in point. You can be sure that the former President would have been easily removed from office had his poll numbers collapsed. And you can be sure that every political figure and commentator in America would have been saying, just as they did say in exactly the opposite case, how well the Constitution worked. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire gives us the imaginative tools for recognizing and understanding this state of affairs. Furthermore, this awareness is a fundamental starting point for modernism. This is not to say that history as such is a parody or farce (but see Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony, 14–20), but that in a society in which political representations no longer connect with a general existential consensus about reality, it is only a matter of time before notions of epic, tragedy, heroism, and the like begin their generic migrations towards what Northrop Frye used to call low comic forms (Anatomy, 34). It is how the stricken kings Richard II and Lear eventually end up as Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. And it is also the starting point for Lewis Carroll’s sense of Alice’s world as no longer anchored in a reality of reason. The systemic disjunctions of the Victorian mind are distilled in the Alice tales to their radical essence. Marx, like Carroll, brings into view the modernist understanding of the working of the political culture of capitalist industrialism. In one highly amusing instance, Marx records the absurdist drama of the Revolution of 1848 running, Wonderland-like, in reverse. He writes that the first French Revolution proceeded, as one might expect, by “an ascending path” as each ruling group leaned on more progressive parties beneath it for support (Eighteenth Brumaire, 169). The more progressive party would then kick the first group aside in order to take the Revolution to the next, higher stage of development. But this was not the case in the Revolution of 1848. The relationship of progressive development was put into reverse and the resulting pratfall gives Marx a chance for a comic scene he cannot resist: Every party kicked out behind at the party pressing it forward and leaned on the party in front, which was pressing backward. No wonder each party lost its balance in this ridiculous posture, and collapsed in the midst of curious capers, after having made the inevitable grimaces. In this way the revolution moved in a descending path. (169–70)

Don’t be surprised if reading this, in Ben Fowkes’s excellent translation, you are reminded of Lytton Strachey’s comic biographies in Eminent Victorians

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(1918), a defining text of British modernism. The jaundiced perspective, the sarcasm and irony, the sense of the subject as buffoon (especially in Thomas Arnold’s case), and the witty disjunctive thrusts that disclose the difference between how one thinks one is acting and what the unblinkered observer sees, help to construct the political consciousness of modernism. The accumulated effect of these passages is that political life must always be given a double reading, the parody itself and that which it parodies. A second aspect of the text that needs comment is its awareness of surprise and accident making consciousness receptive to the epistemological bounty of the unexpected. This is Lewis Carroll’s central device. Modernist discourse grows increasingly sensitive to the semic possibilities of the unexpected event as revelatory or contradictory. Chance immerses a text in the irresolvably undecidable. In this sense it is related to the critical concept of aporia, which is the unexpected event that arrives from within the work itself. So that the phrase, “crying contradictions,”quoted earlier, wobbles in a moment of indeterminancy as we wonder who exactly it is that’s crying. The narrator? The reader? France? Marx develops this idea in Eighteenth Brumaire as an historical trope. As a narrative plot proceeds, it arouses expectations in the reader about the future course of events, and how characters will respond to them. If what, in fact, happens violates our expectations, we are surprised. So in the plot of Louis Bonaparte’s coup, the climax comes out of the blue. “It remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions could be taken by surprise by three swindlers,4 and delivered without resistance into captivity” (152). So too, in modernist texts, the tension/anxiety aroused by the steady deferral or breach of expectation reaches its maximum intensity in the fully stochastic text. From the historical surprise of the coup of 1851, we might trace a family lineage right down to the shocks of Gertrude Stein’s syntax, John Cage’s silence, and blank time. Of course such a line must pass inevitably through Mallarm´e’s exemplary text, Un coup de d´es (1897). Aporia, as I suggested above, is a related concept. It is a Greek figure of speech, meaning difficulty, being at a loss. It has been adapted by poststructuralist critics in the sense of final impasse or paradox. It is used in criticism to identify a text’s self-contradictory meanings that can no longer be resolved at the spot at which the text undermines its own most fundamental presuppositions. As a result, texts, including, one supposes, history itself, force on us double readings. I think this is the reason why the figures of irony, parody, satire, etc. are so important in modernist artistic practices, not as classical forms, but, as I said a moment ago, as heuristic devices,

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engaging in discovery or learning about something which has taken us by surprise, stolen upon us unawares. We could, if we were so inclined, connect this shadowy or hidden aspect of a text, that which emerges at the aporiatic point of surprise, to Freudian notions of the unconscious. We could reprise for texts the richly eerie return of the repressed in the individual consciousness. But this would be a waste of time, it seems to me. It would drive the emergent, possibly monstrous, figure back into the text, in the same way that the therapist encloses the repressed as a problem in individual psychology, part of the routine hermeneutics of therapeutic narcissism, rather than allowing its full, and dangerous, external expression, as aesthetic or political act, to emerge. In Marx’s modernism, the aporias, the surprises, of the historical plot are experienced painfully, as offending violations. They are reason’s freaks. And his characteristic response is sarcasm, derision, mockery. In this particular strategy he has Lytton Strachey and Joseph Conrad as fast companions. One might say Marx cannot bring himself to believe in the undecidable, but hopes again and again to find the real agent behind the costume and the mask (Eighteenth Brumaire, 147–48). This results in a double reading of history. It recognizes, in one text, a comfortable legibility superficially disturbed by illusory or theatrical effects of meaning made to cohere by the witty work of style. The other, more difficult text loses its grip on the actual plot of history entirely as it continuously finds itself in hermeneutical dead ends and flips, in desperation, into literature. In this latter dimension, literature works to earn sense; history expends it in indeterminancy. How does Marx manage these aporiatic moments? He certainly doesn’t do it by the exercise of logic. The paradoxes and contradictions of history, against which Eighteenth Brumaire bumps again and again, are surmounted not by logic, but by exuberant climaxes of pure Dada. These provide a kind of embarrassed resolution. Take his comments about the Constitution of 10 December 1848. In his deliciously drawn out, comic narration, of the Republican’s labor in making a Constitution, Marx zeros in on the document’s contradictions and incongruities (158–62). It is a document which cannot survive the melodrama of its own absurdities and Marx draws out the discrepancies one after the other in a series of exquisite deadpans. It was this Constitutional arrangement which Louis Bonaparte, playing the part of the new Napoleon, overthrew in 1851. Marx concludes his recitation with an inspired moment of Dada: “This, then, was the Constitution of 1848, overthrown on 2 December 1851 not by a head, but by coming into contact with a mere hat; this hat was of course of the three-cornered Napoleonic variety” (162–63).

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You would need to read the whole sequence to get a feel for its beautifully contrived rhythm and pace. Marx’s best effects are arrived at by accumulation and extended comic parallelisms. One such long paragraph tells of the final months before Louis’s coup, the period of “crying contradictions” when all individuals, parties, and other political forces have reached a crescendo of paralysis. For over five hundred words, Marx lists at length how everyone in France seems to be working for the triumph of the very things that they oppose. It is a time of “heroes without deeds of heroism, history without events; a course of development apparently only driven forward by the calendar . . . the official collective genius of France brought to ruin by the cunning stupidity of a single individual” (“cunning stupidity” is, of course, a regal touch). Marx concludes with enviable brio: If any section of history has been painted grey on grey, it is this. Men and events appear as Schlemihls5 in reverse, as shadows which have become detached from their bodies. The revolution paralyzes its own representatives and endows only its opponents with passion and forcefulness. The “red spectre” is continually conjured up and exorcized by the counter-revolutionaries; when it finally appears it is not with the Phrygian6 cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of order, in red breeches.7 (170–71, Marx’s emphasis)

Yeats’s “best” who “lack all conviction” and his “worst” who “[a]re full of passionate intensity” (“The Second Coming,” Collected Poems) have arrived at the same historical aporia but too gravely, and without Marx’s final, comic image. That these strange turns of the historical process are the systemic disjunctions wrought by the ideological twitching of the various parties, Marx understands explicitly: A distinction is made in private life between what a man thinks and says and what he really is and does. In historical struggles one must make a still sharper distinction between the phrases and fantasies of the parties and their real organization and real interests, between their conception of themselves and what they really are. (Brumaire, 174)

But once the play of mere “phrases and fantasies” matters, once one’s conception of oneself, with all its potential illusion and self-deception, enters the historical event, then chaos, of a sort, has surely come. And then only the disciplines of modernity, like Dada, can help. This admission lifts off the lid of reason and out pops a whole series of unpredictable surprises. So, the history of the group of bourgeois liberals Marx calls the “Montagne”

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provides a lesson in “very odd” behavior (179). Their words clash with and, thus, undermine their actions: And when they have run into a blind alley, when they have compromised themselves sufficiently to be compelled to carry out their threats, they do this in an ambiguous way, avoiding the means to the end like the plague and clutching at excuses for their failure. The blaring overture which announced the struggle dies away into a subdued grumbling as soon as it is due to begin, the actors cease to take themselves au sˆerieux, and the action totally collapses like a balloon pricked by a needle. (179)

I would argue, against Lawrence Wilde the Marxist and Isaiah Berlin the liberal humanist, that the deadpan is as important here as the supposed “brilliance” of the analysis. It is the rhetorical structure that “expresses” the essence of these events, the means by which astonishment finds its most penetrating voice. It would be possible to extract many such moments from Eighteenth Brumaire. Let me just list a few more to underline my point: the brilliantly ironic description of the military “state of siege” as a political tool, “the barracks and the bivouac were thus periodically deposited on the head of French society in order to compress its brain and keep it quiet” (163); the uniform of the National Guard losing its magical power to coerce assent and becoming merely an impotent “woolen rag” (183); the acidulous account of the origins of Bonaparte and of his political base, the Society of 10 December, in that part of French society known as la boh`eme (197); the marvellously zany description of the “trade-crazy brain” of the bourgeois businessman (227); the final, and generally unconvincing, attempt by Marx to ground the Bonapartist coup in a reasonable explanation by arguing that the “real” basis of his power lay with the smallholding, peasant class in rural France whom Louis’s Napoleonic burlesque seems to have completely hoodwinked (238–45). But even in this final labor to salvage reason from farce, Marx’s verbal exuberance continues to betray the niggling doubts about how “cunning stupidity” could so decisively trump sense. In this work, Marx is an artist first and a theoretician second. He lets the style speak for itself. In reading these passages we cannot help feel a sense of aesthetic liberation, a sense in which the real meaning of these events lies not somewhere in their depths, but only in the fact of their inexplicability. In the experience of the unaccountable, we have the enabling conditions for finding their meaning in the anterior production of works of art, that is to say, in artfulness. At this point, modernism lays its hands on the aesthetic as “pure” practice of representation, and specifically to the modern work of art, which alone among postpolitical and subpolitical

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practices appears to hold out the promise of an oppositional synthesis and wholeness. This strategy is usually misread in the Western critical tradition as the autonomy of art. The “pure” practice of representation in modernist works of art is grounded, if that is the right word, in an act of selfconstitution, in a kind of shudder of revulsion from a world in the grasp of show business and all its consequences (and, let me add, when the revulsion has more or less passed, and we reach the state of cynical whimsy, we have the postmodern). But let’s remember that works of art do not suddenly acquire autonomy in modern times. This they have enjoyed in all traditional aesthetic philosophies, at least since Kant. What they acquire – partly as a result of this autonomy already realized philosophically – is the opportunity for “standing in,” for occupying the lost terrain of social representation, and even for the historical agency (Marx’s dream of order in Eighteenth Brumaire) which the unresolved aporias of capitalist modernization have paralyzed and then demolished. It is this peculiar logic of ascribing to modernist works of art a kind of negative historical agency (but calling it autonomy) that becomes an important constitutive moment of modernism. Marx calls Louis’s revolution a farce; Joyce will refer to all history in terms of a Gothic genre, the nightmare. It is this that brings both the Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Joyce, and, more radically still, Oscar Wilde into the same line of modernist ancestry. Modernist works of art are born, in the historical aporias of capitalist industrialism, as the inversions of instrumental or social reason. Initially they are made as unassimilable forms of anticapital and their difference is located precisely as Wilde said, in their style. Later, capitalism, having finally rid itself of its pre-capitalist and feudal blinds, recognizes the family resemblance in these works and reclaims them as the “other” style of its own inner logic. The modernist “other” is inextricably bound to that from which it defines its difference by the fatal, common descent from the same gene pool. Modernism, then, is misapprehended as a strictly aesthetic revolution, as merely a challenge to traditional artistic practices. The older aesthetics is already dead. It has vanished with, as Marx says, “the abolition of the old spiritual world” (155), or if not yet dead, it staggers towards the grave on its last legs. Modernist artworks and the modernist work of art (i.e. the work it does) appear as a direct response to the capitalist industrial world from inside its own sustaining logic. The industrial novels noticed by Williams earlier belong to a rural, allegorically minded world which modernization has already devalued and silenced even as they are written. It is a world modernization will eventually grind into dust.

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The circumstances of market-driven modernization and its effects as modernity are incommensurable, and as a result they push consciousness towards the aesthetic as the only solution to the philosophical dead end, the nihilism, into which this mode of production drives us. The early modernists did not choose the aesthetic solution as some sort of technical quarrel with previous generations of artists, they were driven to it by the material conditions they faced. Under the same compulsion, Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times finds in the private love relation the pure relationship, a refuge from the hell of machine production. That is Charlie’s “art,” the beginning of the new arts of personal identity and of the private person.8 Love and its attendant intimacies will increasingly become the private “art” of the consumer culture. Wyndham Lewis will make this aestheticizing of intimate life his principal point of attack in Tarr. It will also lie behind the political dissent of Eliot and Pound as well, in short the angry conservatism of “the men of 1914.” It will be more easily acceptable to the modernist women, like Stein and Woolf, for reasons that I’ll discuss in a later chapter. What Charlie’s film is silent about is the fact that, at the end of the day, the system he has fled remains intact and someone else, some other chump, is working those machines, or, to put it more accurately, is being worked by those machines. And this situation continues to this day. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, we might then term modernism not only an “aestheticization of the political” but of the historical as well. Today we tend to think of the postmodern as the postpolitical. Today we accept, even embrace, the demolition of historical agency in the developed world happily, exuberantly. But we can push the boundary back to include the earliest manifestations of modernism, even in someone like Marx who does not see himself as an artist, driven to a kind of vigorously derisive, sarcastic artfulness in coming to terms with, as he puts it, the “contradictory demands of the situation” (Eighteenth Brumaire, 248). What’s different today is that we no longer feel ashamed or dishonored by our loss: to quote Marx, “Easy come, easy go”(150). What turns our attention as readers of Eighteenth Brumaire towards its artfulness is the recognition of the shadow of that very serious and very sobering loss of historical agency lying everywhere across the text’s body. I mean that hopeless sense of the historical situation being beyond the rule of reason as embodied in reasonable individuals able to sit down and think through to a reasonable form of life in which we can all live without want and with our humanity intact. Eighteenth Brumaire registers, as photographic negative, the unacknowledged pattern

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of philosophical tragedy which works itself out in the comic telling of Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’ˆetat as farce. It might be amusing to think that these terms have now been turned inside out once again in our time. The philosophical tragedy of Eighteenth Brumaire, even in the midst of the text’s tough glee, is itself being reenacted today in countless postmodern texts, not as tragedy anymore, but as farce.

chap t e r 6

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If we are to believe his letters, Flaubert, the so-called realist, was never very happy with realism. Like Marx, his work registers the same historical disjunctions, but unlike Marx he more consciously feeds the seismic disturbances into the work of art, producing a fictional text that looks and feels like realism, but actually undermines and subverts it at every point. He too, like Marx, is a modernist of sorts. Their sort of modernism bears a family resemblance to one of the new arts of capitalist industrialism, photography, and its first exemplar, the daguerreotype. The photochemical rendering of reality, in shades of gray and black punctuated by luminous pools of light, quickly gets naturalized as a kind of concentrated visual realism. But, as all theorists of photography have noted, at every point the photochemical and mechanical mode of production casts its shadow across the variegated surface of the photograph’s performance of reality. The uncanny mirror effect of the photograph, even this earliest type, seduces the uncritical viewer by its alleged reflection of the real world, as opposed, at the time, to a “reality” built up by strokes of paint bent towards a vanishing point. Its realism vanishes the instant you notice the photograph’s rhetoric of light and shade, in precisely the same way that the conceptual calm of Eighteenth Brumaire disappears when you begin to hear the gibing, artful, desperate voice. Sentimental Education was published in 1869, a year before the fall of Louis Bonaparte, although it looks back to the decade of the 1840s, culminating in the rise to power of the charlatan, the swindler in a Napoleon mask. Part II of the novel coincides, more or less, with the period covered by Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. The novel has been called the supreme achievement of the French realist tradition. Along with Peter Brooks, I disagree completely with this view. Sentimental Education has a place in the overlapping of realism and the making of modernism, and I want to think of it as a work of proto-modernism. It should be clear by now that by modernism I don’t simply mean the particular literary movement that goes by that name which is to be found 112

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in London around 1910 and after. I mean something more pervasive, a particular kind of response, sometimes unwilled or unintended, to the variety of economic and social conditions which I am grouping under the names of market society, modernization, and modernity. I am also saying that the response does not necessarily have to begin and take shape as a conscious artistic aim. That we are reading works of art should not hide from us the fact that there is a modernist kind of discourse which includes novels as well as other kinds of text. Marx’s, for example, or Wittgenstein’s Tracatus logico-philosophicus, a modernist work of the same stature and importance as, say, Eliot’s The Waste Land or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The work of art, though, does merit close scrutiny in the context of the conditions I have tried to sketch. The aesthetic domain and the work of art seem to offer a plane on which a certain equilibrium can be achieved in the face of a modernized reality which is always already in a state of disruptive disequilibrium. Societies organized economically and socially by markets, the money-form, the commodity fetish, and so on, cannot, by definition, achieve stability or equilibrium, and, moreover, are never meant to achieve such a thing. In these conditions of permanent upheaval, there are only temporary moments of arrested development.1 Art is such a moment in market societies In the status or customary societies of the past, in which communal equilibrium was the principal social goal, art was one stability among many in societies that changed so slowly they seemed to be unchanging (which makes the catastrophic opening gesture of King Lear such an interesting psychological event). The stability of art as an institution, and its conservatism, was located in the ancient system of genres and rhetoric inherited from the Greeks and Romans. That system of classical representation, so well anatomized by Northrop Frye in its forms, and then again epistemically by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, we still preserve piecemeal in the curricular structure of the study of English. It began to come apart at the seams in the eighteenth century, culminating in the generic and tropic experimentation of the Romantics. Yet the sense that the completed work of art conveys a supremely stable character persists to this day, except of course in the various strands of post-structuralist criticism. The persistence of this sense that works of art must achieve discursive stability and harmony has been a matter of great moment for artists working in the modernized world. The work of art, as I said a moment ago, becomes in the modernized context one of those moments of arrested development, of stasis or stillness, which seems temporarily at least to stay the hand of relentless and accelerating revolution. This has been very well understood

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by some. The work which the work of art does in modernity was once described (among the New Critics in the 1950s) as the bringing of order to chaos; art was supremely the work of order resulting in a complex harmony, while life, reality was simply a weltering chaos. How is this different, the sceptical literary historian might ask, from the literary topos among, for example, the Elizabethan poets (as among the ancients) which is given its most familiar embodiment in Shakespeare’s sonnet 55? Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. (lines 1–2)

Art, the poet tells us, is our stay “’Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity.” In communities of tradition, as Shakespeare’s still was in its majority forms, art is only one of a number of cultural forms and institutions which perform this office. And it was also an office about which there were no disagreements. In societies modernized by the doctrines and practices of capitalism, every cultural form is undermined by market values. Putting it another way, all use-values, including spiritual use-values deriving from a time when the spirit had its uses, are transformed into exchange-values. Modernism’s obsessive-compulsive fixation on art and aesthetics is the final refuge of this desire to achieve the timeless moment of being as an order beyond the corrosive action of “sluttish time.” We know this is nonsense of course, but understandable nonsense. Such a definition of the function of art would have made no sense to any artist or critic in the premodern world. Certainly they would have understood that the work of art occupies an intermediate zone between heaven and earth in a world of mutability. Yeats is nearest to the older ideal when he characterized art as the “artifice of eternity.” But this is the aesthetics of the rearguard. The modernist aesthetic is not a theory of art as much as it is a nervous symptom, with attitude. The world seems chaotic only when you are blinded and deafened by your own desperate desire for order, stability, and belief in the context of remorseless upheaval without guarantees. It is not surprising that the further we enter market society, the more untenable the whole notion of art as a timeless order of being has become. But this has been the case for some one hundred and fifty years now. Criticism and theory are only now catching up with what was already affecting the artistic practices of avant-garde artists of mid-nineteenth-century Paris; which is why, when studying these matters, it is important to begin with the culture of Paris in that period.

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I said a moment ago that I agree with Peter Brooks in the matter of the kind of novel which Flaubert has written in Sentimental Education. Now, don’t get me wrong, nowhere in his marvellous essay on Flaubert’s work, “Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert’s Perversities” from his book Reading for the Plot (1984), does Brooks argue what I have just laid out before you. His destination is rather different than mine, and I must say I have to part company with him on some pretty basic points, but we seem to be on the same track for some of the journey. He is more interested in the evolution of the plot function in narrative. But Brooks is such a good practical critic and so sensitive to the internal play of form and narrative structure in the novel, that he delineates in his essay on Flaubert the pragmatics of the disjunctive procedures I have attempted to ground historically. Brooks’s book is a slyly ingenuous critical foray onto a terrain crowded with theory. He has decided to examine that most pedestrian, that most plodding and traditional of narrative elements, the plot. You can hear the “ho hums” rising like a chorus in several hundred English departments across America. I am interested in his work because of the corroborative evidence to my thesis which he seems to provide from a different starting point: formalism. If my assumption is that material processes, experience, and textuality are vitally connected, then I ought to expect that the historical conditions I have sketched must have some impact, as they seem to have on Marx’s historical text, on the most basic elements of narrative form in a literary work. Brooks sees Flaubert as marking a turning point in the history of the novel. He writes that “any discussion of plot . . . needs to confront Flaubert, since his relation to traditional uses of plot can only be described as perverse. His mature work is indeed carefully structured by a systematic perversion of plot as a central system of narrative organization and meaning” (Reading, 171). Brooks reads Flaubert’s oeuvres from Madame Bovary through Sentimental Education and on to the unfinished Bouvard et P´ecuchet as enacting a plot of noble perversity, in which the author does all he can “to parody and explode the ordering discourses elaborated over the ages by mankind to make sense of nature, society, and human history” (171). Sentimental Education is chosen for special attention because it is Flaubert’s “most fully accomplished and most ambitious novel,” a kind of perverse Bildungsroman of an individual character and of a whole generation. Located “in the main tradition of nineteenth-century plots” it allows us to see its intertextual relations to such precursors as Stendahl and Balzac, in short, the tradition of conventional realism. Sentimental Education is a novel, Brooks writes, “whose tenuous readability depends directly on its intertextual support, its

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presupposition of a certain standard novelistic mode which it resolutely refuses to endorse.” But this is not the whole cloth of Flaubert’s perversity: he pushes on out past the traditional realism of the novel to confront “history [itself] as a signifying system and a sense-making discourse” (172). The novel, then, problematizes both the practice of the novel as defined by Balzac and the uses of history as represented by the Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath. According to Brooks, Sentimental Education undergoes a continuous process of displacing or de-realizing all those standard narrative noises and gestures which make up the conventions of realism. The novel of growth and education it seems fails to provide very much development of the central character at all, whereby Fr´ed´eric’s moral being could be fully revealed through the dialectic of his vital contact with others and through the growth of self-knowledge. But vital is not a word that often comes to mind when we think of Fr´ed´eric Moreau. When his mother asks him what he plans to do with his inheritance when he returns to Paris, after a sojourn at home, he blandly answers, “Nothing!” Nullity pervades the whole novel as its most active element. Even the enactment of desire, sexual desire or the desire for possession, which drives the traditional Bildungsroman forward, always manages to lose its urgencies in the course of the novel. It doesn’t take very much to deflect Fr´ed´eric from an appointed path. The novel doesn’t progress so much as spread out. It enacts a kind of obsessive languor, like Goncharov’s Oblomov, but without the Russian’s heroic passivity. The supine defines the character of the novel’s body language. In commenting on that masochistic dream-image of Rosanette as “La Mar´echale” “astride” our hero “ripping open his flanks with her golden spurs” (Reading, 134), Brooks comments that the “action of desire remains radically discontinuous; it does not work as ordering principle,” as is so often the case in realism from Balzac to Henry James. Desire offers no anticipation of arrest and cohesion, of concentration and purpose. In fact, the novel seems to be a Bildungsroman that is simply treading water: the purposeful machinery of education as a process of organic growth has lost its purpose, has run down. Its energies seem to dissipate quickly in the novel, as if the steam engine had sprung leaks in its valves and slowly ground to a halt. It replays in a formal fiction what Marx described in a sequence of historical events as development driven forward only by the calendar, not by men. In the domain of an active, purposeful political idealism, with history as its medium, Flaubert shows us dissipation. The culmination of the political struggles during the Second Republic (especially the ferocious aftermath of

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massacres and tortures during the June Days) are seen by Flaubert to reduce formerly intelligent beings to complete idiocy (Sentimental Education, 334). Brooks comments: That the revolution ends in idiocy has to do rather with revolutionary action, and indeed with action itself, of which revolutionary action is perhaps simply the paroxystic condition. To act as if the world could be changed is the error. To act in the belief that it must change as the result of your action risks the result of idiocy. If L’Education sentimentale claims to be the history of Flaubert’s generation, it appears to pass its severest judgement on that generation’s belief that change is within the grasp of human agency. (Reading, 203)

Brooks’s comment is dead on. The overall character of Flaubert’s project is shaped, not so much by some personal obstinacy on his part, but a particular response to the inability of a particular tradition of the novel to adequately represent what had become virtually unrepresentable with those means. What leads to Flaubert’s refusal of realism is realism’s own inadequacy and innocence as a procedure in the face of the incommensurable in history. And as history seems to lack a purpose other than bloody farce, so too the individual. Fr´ed´eric runs through all the possibilities of a purposeful life like so many fashionable commodities, purchased or acquired only to be discarded. Now a realist (like Henry James) would tells us that Fr´ed´eric’s behavior is the result of a moral failure, a kind of moral infantilism which must be overcome in order for the program of education and moral growth to proceed. On one level he’s probably right, but the theme of dissipation, the program of purposeless expenditure, of desire as a malign mechanism of self-dispersion in lassitude is also, what an economist might call, structural or systemic. It is beyond the control of human agency, since the internal dynamics of such a system restructures the very notion of human agency itself. Dispersion is inscribed not only in the novel, but in the new text of modernized society itself. It is the regime of the market-form, the circulation of capital and of commodities without end (cf. Marx, Grundrisse, 197). In its most malign and dystopian form, the market creates human subjects near the zero degree of action, which is passivity, and it constructs them as nullities. They are flavored and colored by the structural motions of circulation itself, and by the fetish character of commodities. Fashioning an identity for oneself is little more than accessorizing the void. And it’s not only a matter of acquiring gloves and waistcoats: Fr´ed´eric “bought the works of his favourite poets, travel books, atlases, and dictionaries, for he had countless plans for work” (Sentimental Education, 134); a work,

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of course, which comes to nothing. Flaubert is so unerringly accurate in describing the social and psychological effects of the commodity system on Fr´ed´eric’s generation that his novel can be read as the ethnographic fieldwork for Marx’s opening chapter of Capital, i, the chapter called “The Commodity.” Things when they become commodities take on a life of their own, independently of their producers and of their capacity to satisfy concrete human needs. They enter into relations of their own and construe an autonomous system of meanings that obscures the human labor which produced the object in the first place or the needs it is meant to satisfy. As a commodity, then, the object acquires a new character and is transformed into a kind of “social hieroglyphic” which circulates in the framework of the market-form.2 Its value is assigned not by the concrete determinants of its production or its capacity to satisfy human needs, but by the alchemy of circulation itself, by the dynamics of exchange. The value of the books of the poets for Fr´ed´eric is not to be located in the actual uses to which they might be put (his plans for work), but to their place as social hieroglyphs. If it was only a matter of their use, they probably wouldn’t be as expensive as they are, but as they only exist for Fr´ed´eric as accessories of the null and void, then their price mysteriously goes through the roof. By simply recording what he sees about him in the first stages of modernization, Flaubert has intuited the actual nature of the commodity system and inscribes its image not only in the themes of Sentimental Education, but in the figuration and structure of the novel as well. To further explore this point, let’s briefly compare Madame Bovary, a work which is much more fully entangled with realism as a narrative mode. The two novels are quite different. One difference lies in the fact that there have always been more readers for Madame Bovary than for Sentimental Education. The style of Madame Bovary is more literary in terms of a visible control and deliberate design; its tropological structure is more unified and focussed. It is something archly literary, that is to say, one is aware of an artifice at work, in the shaping of the paragraphs and the syntactic energy of the sentences. The effect of the style of Sentimental Education seems less consciously worked to yield up the epiphanic aperc¸u in the telling detail, the nicely turned image or phrase. The search for le mot juste is just not as apparent in Sentimental Education. The result is, I think, a flatter, more businesslike approach to the narrative. And this lack in the novel as a whole, a dialectical image of Fr´ed´eric’s own nullity, is I think deliberate. The tropic superstructure of Sentimental Education seems not to have a center of gravity that is not deliberately aimed at delineating the substance and main effects of the novel. The material resources of

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the narrative, the story and subject, are more diffuse, indeterminate, and decentered. There are plenty of incidents in Sentimental Education, but very few of them impress us as being critical. Madame Bovary, as in most realist novels, remains in every reader’s mind as a succession of decisive events: Charles’s first meeting with Emma, their marriage, the ball at Vaubyessard, the move to Yonville, L´eon’s departure to Paris, Rodolphe’s seduction of Emma, Charles’s bungling of the operation of Hyppolyte’s club-foot, and so on down to Emma’s suicide. Sentimental Education seems by contrast to be made up of a series of nonevents. None of the central characters dies, except for Dussardier at the end, and he is a comical figure, whose death is partly done as farce. There are the many nameless dead during the fighting in Part 3, and of the cries, offstage, of those who are in the dungeons of the Party of Order. Death of course is ever-present, as a kind of memento mori, but lacking its moral significance. The romantic plot and subplots never really materialize; Fr´ed´eric’s passion for Madame Arnoux never achieves either a positive or negative conclusion. We are left in old age with the same indecisiveness and irresolution. The events which decide Fr´ed´eric’s course of life are never under his control; he unexpectedly inherits a large fortune and finds himself able simply to enter a new social circle and do plenty of shopping. Things happen to him. Sentimental Education is pervaded, one might say, by a sense of aimless drift. This is much like that suburban banality about life, that it’s just “one damned thing after another.” Madame Bovary gives the impression of having been organized by an external agency, the author disguised as destiny or fate. We are provided with the fullest account of Emma and Charles’s “prehistory” and can see for ourselves how their subsequent behavior is conditioned by their past. This is, of course, an effect of realist convention, that sense of a seamless reality which mimes life, if life had an author and a teleology. It’s from these lessons of literature, a certain realist strain in literature, which generates one of the reigning illusions of modern life. It takes powerful hold of self-imaging and self-imagining in the nineteenth century and was only seen through and demolished by critical theorists in the late twentieth. The illusion runs something like this. The individual lifeworld is imagined as having a coherent plot with a beginning, middle, and end. It has its dominant themes and common ideas, subplots, settings, major and minor characters, the appropriate attitudes, and a properly retributive moral as coda. This last is the key illusion: that everyone in the end gets what they deserve. Inevitable gaps and anomalies in the life-narrative are accounted for by the

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belief that the complete narrative often eludes final understanding but may be recuperable by the close reading of the life, even into its darkest corners. The realist novel, like Madame Bovary, is the paradigm for this kind of self-imagining. Sentimental Education and the modernist narratives that come after explode the neat logic of these powerful fictions of the self. What the modernists bring to waking life is the very fictiveness and arbitrariness of this system of self-projection. The inner logic and coherence of the individual life thus comes to resemble a particularly nasty piece of selfdeception, an anterior tidying-up of illogical, incoherent, compulsive lives. It is this essentially literary system for the realist presentation of the self in everyday life which takes a beating in Sentimental Education. How can we be sure? We need look no further than Flaubert’s companion text to his novels, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, a hilarious list of words, their socially acceptable meanings, and the suitable attitudes one ought to have towards them in order to be able to perform ontic normalcy in society. Private determinism is replaced in Sentimental Education by the unfathomable ebb and flow of history. Although the text is historically specific, history does not deliver up its sense to the narrative of Fr´ed´eric’s life. It has none. And yet specific dates and places seem crucial as if some pattern of significant historical meaning is at work. The opening date of 15 September 1840 is given in the very first sentence; the majority of the novel takes place in the years between 1840 and 1851, covering the last eight years of the July Monarchy and the brief span of the Second Republic, before the Bonapartist coup brings the Second Empire. The spatiotemporal specificity of Flaubert’s text is similar to Joyce’s Ulysses. In this respect, both novels, and perhaps all modernist novels, are structurally related to the workings of a market or a stock exchange. As all investors and businesspeople know about punctual success in the flow of the exchange system, timing is everything. Yet the system as a whole has no greater particular significance than a game of tag in a playground. Joyce’s addition of the Odyssean superstructure represents a retrograde gesturing towards old-fashioned notions of unity. Finnegans Wake takes the bolder step. Like Ulysses, Sentimental Education, on one level, is obsessively interested in getting the facts right. Flaubert himself witnessed the February days in 1848, including the storming of the Palace in the Tuileries, an event he enjoyed with his best friend the photographer and writer Maxime Du Camp. The account of those days in Part 3 is, on one level, documentary realism with all its open-texturedness as history without a telos. The details Flaubert gives of the course taken by the Revolution subsequently, in the spring and summer of 1848, are equally accurate from the documentary

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point of view. The care Flaubert took to sift truth from legend was exemplary: not a single incident, not a single allusion to topical events was invented. But the effect is not the realist one of concentration and focus, but of dispersion. This also comprises Joyce’s double movement in Ulysses: his documentary scrupulousness in constructing the physical and cultural setting of Dublin on Bloomsday and the diversity of styles and approaches from chapter to chapter. No doubt Fr´ed´eric Moreau is the central character. The novel’s plot is constructed around the episodes of his life, but the impression this gives is far from sharp, nor do we have the clearly defined outlines of characters as in Madame Bovary, or in other classic writers of the realist tradition in France or England. Fr´ed´eric (like Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe before him) is the prototype of a kind of hero we came to know well in the twentieth century: Bloom is a sympathetic version in Ulysses, Prufrock or even the speaking voice of The Waste Land, Martin Decoud in Nostromo, various characters of Kafka, Gide, Musil, Camus, Sartre, Beckett, etc. It is T. S. Eliot who recognized Fr´ed´eric in a way that delivers him whole to the twentieth century. Fr´ed´eric’s character is obviously not drawn in positive and simple outlines. Eliot writes: He is constructed partly by negative definition, built up by a great number of observations. We cannot isolate him from the environment in which we find him; it may be an environment which is or can be much universalized; nevertheless it, and the figure in it, consist of very many observed particular facts, the actual world. Without this world the figure dissolves. (Sacred Wood, 111)

– in short, Prufrock, or the man without, or at least with borrowed, qualities. The point of view is omniscient (good realist practice) but limited (nice paradox), that is we only know the events through Fr´ed´eric’s consciousness (like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist). Even with this focusing device we are left with an insubstantial sense of Fr´ed´eric’s character and an indeterminate sense of the other figures who move through the novel. As Brooks well shows, it is Flaubert’s use of le style indirect libre that interferes and unfocusses the mimetic effect in terms of compositional technique. Following up Eliot’s suggestion about environment, we recognize, finally, that Paris in the narrative is more powerfully the center of the novel than any one character. The city has a number of salient aspects. It is the blank place, the canvas on which the dreams of personal passion and of political idealism are painted. But what the novel lays bare is that one’s emotional and intellectual investments in those two areas do not yield a return. In its absence, only the calculative investment remains. As a result Paris becomes

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by degrees the marketplace: where lives, careers, things, love, and labor are bought and sold. Paris as marketplace is dominated by the trope of the brothel (Parm´ee, “Introduction,” xix–xx), the zero degree of commerce. It begins with Fr´ed´eric’s own youthful experience. His sexual appetite is satisfied by the traviata Rosanette, while his idealized passion for the unattainable Marie Arnoux remains forever unfulfilled. And, of course, he becomes something of a prostitute himself in his relation to Madame Dambreuse, until, of course, she can no longer afford him. But more importantly, what the city as market brings to consciousness is the void at the heart of social forms of being. I mean by this the general crisis of identity which the disembedding action of capitalism effects in Western society. Like the city and space, or clock and time, individual identity is there both as an empirical entity and as a void. The very presence of the empirical self inevitably raises the issue of its absence. In premodernity, the self was not that easily seen around or through. Like time and space, it seemed immobile or incontestable. Only God, the author of your being, could see into your soul. With capitalist industrialism, the regime of permanent unrest, the self is dislodged from its moorings. In Sentimental Education we see it ripped free from its rural setting and, as a result, we are shown its loss of substance and the loss of its opacity. We are able to see through Fr´ed´eric, and all the other characters, from the first word of the novel to the last. Modernist literature is obsessed with identity for this very reason and Paris becomes the first crucible of this new situation of the self. Marx also recognized this aspect of the politics of capitalist modernity. Whether they are democratic, totalitarian, or corporatist, matters of personality and selfpresentation in politics are always more optical illusion, like the daguerreotype or the dramatic monologue for that matter, than the rock of being. Walter Benjamin is the authority here in his work on Baudelaire: “because he did not have any convictions, he assumed ever new forms of himself. Flˆaneur, apache, dandy, and ragpicker were so many roles to him. For the modern hero is no hero; he acts heros (Benjamin, Lyric Poet, 97). And Fr´ed´eric readily assumes a whole series of roles, none of which mean a thing. They simply mask an empty space where conventional psychology theorizes blindly the presence of a tangible subject. The constant alteration of identities is crucial because the marketplace enforces the compulsory circulation of commodities. The disguises of Rosanette’s party with its witty, perverse play of stock characters at the beginning of Part 2 is a trope for this fluidity of identity (Sentimental Education, 121–34). Delmar the actor, whose “vulgar face, intended, like a stage set, to be viewed from a distance” (128), enters the novel in the

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costume of Dante, and we are quickly told about all his name changes as he moved from the music hall to the stage (127). The others are all treated as stock types from farce: Deslauriers, the conniving, two-faced clerk; de Cisy, the corrupt and cowardly aristocrat; S´en´ecal, the model of the fanatical ideologue who eventually ends up as a part of the Bonapartist government; Hussonet, editor of a paper that changes title and political slant frequently; and, finally, Jacques Arnoux, Madame Arnoux’s philandering husband. He appears initially as the proprietor of a periodical called L’Art industriel, then he’s a manufacturer of ceramics, a printer of wine labels, and, finally, a purveyor of religious objects. The Flaubertian deadpan in this series of flamboyant career changes is delicious. Arnoux’s is the paradigm of life in the market,3 a life with an increasingly tenuous conscious relation to the objects of production or the production process itself. The defining relation now is to the ungrounded dynamism of the ever more rapid circulation of goods. The fluctuating character of his engagements is simply the effect of the permanent revolution of the market-form. Into this revolution every aspect of human existence is fed, including the fashioning of personal identities.4 tribul ations of the self The multiplication of the identities of the self is not Flaubert’s invention. It is already a matter of ironic comment and experiment in the Shelley circle, for example, and especially in the work of Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, from Frankenstein through to Don Juan. But the effects of modernity can also be glimpsed, negatively, in those, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, for whom Nature represented the essential unmovable condition of human existence, the permanent, transhistorical, context of human life. Wordsworth’s decisive withdrawal into the pastoralism of Book 8 of The Prelude only occurs after the concussive and, what can only be called, “Cubist” experience of the newly modernizing city of London in Book 7. The meltdown of the natural self in the St. Bartholomew Fair’s segment that ends Book 7 shocks the poet from his self-absorption. Without warning, the ground of identity, the natural self, from which the poetic self has been seen to emerge as part of a natural and inevitable development, disappears from view. The confident self-reflexivity (i.e. the poem’s overall strategy of intense self-regard along one autobiographical axis of attention) careers out of control in the city, where the monstrous self-creative potential of a humanity, now decisively broken away from Nature, is experienced in terms of extreme consternation, catastrophe, and in a steep curve of

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anxiety. This experience of the city, from which he recoils in horror, gives Wordsworth a glimpse of what Kierkegaard, in the 1840s, and Heidegger later, will theorize as the modern concept of dread: i.e. the prospect of being overwhelmed by anxieties that reach to the very roots of our coherent sense of “being in the world.” When you read the last two hundred lines of Book 7 in The Prelude, immaculately juxtaposed with the opening of Book 8, London juxtaposed to the Lake District, you can hear the audible sigh of relief spread through the text. The speaker embraces that which he theorizes, in a nostalgic mood of confident return, as unchanging Nature. Nature is not only the refuge of the stable self, but is also sovereign, in Wordsworth’s rather smug sense that Nature must always take the measure of the built environment. Wordsworth resists the modern, but that does not mean he can escape it. It is not simply a matter of choosing not to be modern; his retreat into the country, the occupation of a rural enclave as insulation from the rapidly modernizing world, also helps to define modernity. In traditional literary history, we tend to think of period designations as a list of positive features. In the Romantic period, for example, the handbooks tell us, we begin to notice a worshipful attitude towards Nature best exemplified by Wordsworth’s poetry and life. Clearly this cannot be a general statement about the way people felt in the period. Because at the very same time that Wordsworth was worshipping Nature, the despoiling of the English countryside had already begun in earnest. The countryside was already gripped by modernization and the redefining of “Nature’s bounty” as extractable natural resources. Wordsworth’s attitude to Nature was no doubt worshipful, but delimited by a large measure of desperation and hopelessness. What I would like to say is that Wordsworth’s attitude towards Nature is not a general feature of English Romanticism, but identifies a general point of struggle or contention in society about those visible aspects of the modernized world that had appeared by that time. It locates and exposes those sites of conflict and argument, rather than listing off a series of features, that will always define a period. At the end of The Prelude, with its transcendent, unifying vision on Mount Snowdon, Wordsworth experiences Nature in all its human and cosmic connections. The experience certainly reverberates with the music of exultation, but, I think that if you listen closely, it does so in the key of hysteria. Wordsworth’s mind is still entangled in that Platonic tradition which tells us that the particular contingencies and appearances of individual lives are finally unimportant, no matter how flashy. There is no point in wasting time on mere idiosyncrasies of behavior, feeling, and thought, and especially when perversely provoked by artificial stimulants, like, for example, the

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accelerated masquerades of city life. The truths of our nature impel us towards essential reality, not the distractions of accidental appearance. The only task laid upon humanity by Nature is to know the truth, to be in touch with what is out there and in here, as the bedrock of being. Everything else is sand trickling through our fingers. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who explicitly suggested that we drop the whole Platonic idea of knowing the truth in this way. His definition of truth as a mobile army of metaphors amounted to saying that the whole idea of representing reality by means of language, and thus the idea of finding a single context for all human lives, should be abandoned. Richard Rorty has argued, in the same vein: The drama of an individual human life, or of the history of humanity as a whole, is not one in which a pre-existent goal is triumphantly reached or tragically not reached. Neither a constant external reality, nor an unfailing interior source of inspiration forms a background for such dramas. Instead, to see one’s life, or the life of one’s community, as a dramatic narrative is to see it as a process of Nietzschean self-overcoming. The paradigm of such a narrative is the life of the genius who can say of the relevant portion of the past, “Thus I willed it,” because she has found a way to describe that past which the past never knew, and thereby found a self which her precursors never knew was possible. (Contingency, 29)

In this respect the self-creative and re-creative potential of human consciousness, which parallels the investment, deinvestment, reinvestment cycle of the circulation of capital, has the potential, so we belive, to overcome the dizzy terrors of perpetual mobility. The realization of this potential gives birth to the uniquely modernist concept of freedom as the compulsions of perpetual self-overcoming and reinvention. When immersed in a political economy that never stops shouting, “Make it new!” or “Change is good,” the modern self always labors to tear itself away from the inertias of inherited tradition and to make a new life. And it doesn’t matter whether these are the inertia of an inherited position in society, the inertia of an inherited human nature, including the inertia of gender, the inertia of inherited knowledge, and what passes under the names of wisdom and common sense, or, more to our point, the inertias of inherited systems of representation and established procedures for making meaning. Modernity is thus unavoidably a post-traditional order and the modernist foreshortening of time in conceiving of a select group of literary monuments of the past as alive in a perpetual present, as in Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” fits right in. The transformation of time and space propels social life, including the constitution of the self, away from the old inertias. For this journey, we arm ourselves with a thoroughgoing

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reflexiveness, which we experience in its most intense psychological form as self-consciousness. The reflexivity in the modern temper is systemic and refers to the susceptibility of social action, and material relations with nature to undergo chronic revision in the light of new information, knowledge, or desires. Revision, reassessment, reevaluation identifies the constitutive practices of a reflexive modernity not as accumulations of new knowledge, or wisdom, or lore of one kind or another, but as cancelling or clearing operations. New knowledge replaces what is no longer of use. The “humanities curriculum” loses its “market value” and is replaced by techno-bureaucratic expertise (Guillory, Cultural Capital, 46). The 14th edition of the textbook supersedes the 13th. The broken appliance is replaced by a new appliance (they aren’t even built to be fixed anymore). An old self is replaced by a new self. The therapist tells you to put the past behind you and move on. In Flaubert’s novel, Fr´ed´eric is rescued from the inertia of tradition by an unexpected inheritance. He is suddenly and immaculately translated, i.e. disembedded, to a new plane of existence. And it is significant that his first experience of freedom as an emancipated young man in Paris occurs at the Marshall’s costume party. In an older cosmology his legacy might be seen to symbolize the blind turning of Fortuna or fortune, narrativized as a moral allegory of fate, responsibility, and retribution. For modernity, his sudden good fortune symbolizes, on the one hand, the precariousness of a socioeconomic system which more and more begins to resemble a gambling casino (Sentimental Education, 105–6) and, on the other, the power to reinvent oneself as whatever one desires within the given social circumstances (Marx, Brumaire, 146). Fr´ed´eric’s reinventive maneuvers and costume changes are effected within the enclave of money that acts to protect him from the society of perpetual risk. His self-inventions require an intense reflexivity, a kind of perpetual reflexive project of the self (Giddens, Self-Identity, 74–80). In order to stabilize the changes of mask, the reflexive project yields a steady stream of narrative: Going down the staircase, Fr´ed´eric felt that he had become a different man, that he was surrounded by the scented air of hothouses, that he had finally made his way into the exalted world of patrician liaisons and aristocratic intrigues. To reach the top, all that was needed was a woman like Madame Dambreuse. Greedy, in all probability, for power and action, and married to a mediocrity whom she had served devotedly, she wanted a man of strong personality to guide her. Nothing was impossible now! He felt capable of travelling five hundred miles on horseback, or working for several nights on end, without the slightest fatigue; his heart was brimming over with pride. (Sentimental Education, 363)

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We see from this self-characterization and what follows, and what follows is essentially the ironic revelation of this life-narrative as a tissue of fantasies, that, in modernity, the narrative of self-identity is inherently fragile. Selfidentity has to be created and more or less continually reordered against the backdrop of shifting experiences of day-to-day life and the fragmenting tendencies of the modernized environment (Giddens, Self-Identity, 78). Moreover, the sustaining of such a narrative directly affects, and in some degree helps construe, the body as well as the self. In fact, in the whole sequence from which I’ve drawn the quotation, we see that Fr´ed´eric’s body language as a lay actor in a series of diverse situations is entirely the product of his self-construction as a type of the “worldly man of destiny,” from the theatrical gesture of going down on his knees to swear eternal love to Madame Dambreuse while stroking her hand, to distractedly fiddling with his cravat while listening to Deslauriers describing the torment of the political prisoners on the prison-ships, and finally to the gesture of sexual possessiveness, of pulling the Marshall, Rosanette, onto his lap as sexual foreplay. What is somewhat premodern about Fr´ed´eric’s own reaction to his capacity for self-invention is that he feels that his control and manipulation of his various masks is deliciously diabolical, “What a swine I am! he said to himself, glorying in his wickedness” (Sentimental Education, 366). This is the Byronic reaction. And it is essentially an aestheticizing reaction. In another moral register, such self-scrutiny might lead to guilt and shame. In modernity, guilt, shame, and even the witty diabolism will lapse entirely, and the circulation of identities become simply a matter of morally vacant strategies of survival, gratification, domination, and the aestheticization of the embodied self. The fragility of the life-narratives of self-identity in Sentimental Education is an important aspect of the fragility of narrative in general in Flaubert’s novel. Flaubert’s conscious strategy of making the novel’s overall form virtually unseizable, the deliberate meander of its structure, is certainly not evidence of a lack of artistry or artfulness in its composition. We cannot seize its shape in the same way we cannot seize the shape of a large city. We can know a street here or there, a square, a restaurant, a neighborhood, but not really the whole enchilada. The novel’s artfulness does not lie in the clear identification of an overarching artifice, with its specific gravities of theme and character embodied in a tropological apparatus which brings out the text’s inner determinants at every point of the narrative. The novel doesn’t develop, it sprawls, very much like the modern city. The most evident aspect of the artistry of the work is not in its narrative line, which at some points is little more than an afterthought, but in its

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production of the stunning, singular image as the determining aesthetic effect. In the collapse of conventional realism as a way of representing the social whole, we are left with the fragile threads of Fr´ed´eric’s lifenarratives and, most memorably, with the magnificant, complex, isolated images which stud the surface with hallucinatory vividness and manage to survive the novel’s continuous and ironic decay into contingency. Many instances could be cited. One example from the bal masque at the Marshall’s in Part 2 will have to suffice. Remember we are in the midst of a mad hatter’s ball; the party has reached one of its moments of intoxicated and libidinous frenzy, then this: The Sphinx was drinking brandy, shouting at the top of her voice, and throwing herself around like a madwoman. Suddenly her cheeks puffed out, and unable to hold back the blood which was choking her, she put her napkin to her lips, then threw it under the table. Fr´ed´eric had seen her. “It’s nothing!” And when he urged her to go home and take care of herself, she answered slowly: “Oh what’s the use? If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. Life isn’t much fun.” He shivered, seized with an icy melancholy, as if he had caught a glimpse of whole worlds of misery and despair, a charcoal stove beside a trestle-bed, and the corpses in the mortuary in their leather aprons, with the cold tap-water running over their hair. (130–31)

Now this, in a traditional allegorical narrative, would be a memento mori, a reminder that in the midst of the mad frolic, death will lay his icy hand on all of us. But lacking any larger allegorical framework, some determinate structure of values which provide the text with its allegorical meanings, this stunning image trails remnants of the old memento mori tradition in its passage, but, more profoundly, strikes us with its startling aptness and beauty. It stands out with its own kind of perfected intelligence and authority. With it we are put in the presence of the aesthetic through and through. In fact I would argue that our aesthetic response to the image here supersedes the traditional allegorical function of the memento mori. In this novel of education, does Fr´ed´eric learn anything from this moment of vision? Hardly. Is this a flaw in his character? Well, yes, but in this scheme of things the question hardly seems relevant. And as a result of his obvious blindness in the long term, does the narrative swing some satisfyingly decisive apparatus of retribution into place? What a joke. At the end Fr´ed´eric and Deslauriers are found amiably recalling the moronic events of their youth and, particularly, their visit “to the Turkish woman’s

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house” (418) remembered tranquilly as the happiest time they ever had. The novel peters out, the way life does, inconclusively. But what does remain is that amazing image of the tapwater running cold over the corpse’s hair, an image that is direct, economically conveyed, and musical, and, if relineated, would make a perfectly respectable imagist poem. Here we have one of the more profound reactions of the modernist temper to the conditions of modernity. In a morally organized symbolic order, the memento mori would carry a determinate meaning in a particular ethical register; it would have a moral to tell and the community of readers it summons would take it absolutely seriously. In a symbolic order which is morally vacant because it is, at bottom, organized around a certain mode of production rather than a set of moral values, the image of the corpse carries very little thematic meaning, if any. What it signifies is not the presence of death as a device of retribution in a moral drama, but simply the production of the aesthetic itself as a substitute for moral vacancy. The text at that point forgets its own requirement to maintain a kind of consistency of mode, or to put it another way, to maintain intact the suspension of disbelief. The meaning of the image is not an aesthetic realization of something else, say a theme or an ethical value. The aesthetic operates as the meaning of the image, not as the stylistic complement to a thematic core. In this radical aestheticization of the image (which parallels what I said earlier about the aestheticizing of the self ) we glimpse a constitutive condition of modernism as a new type of discourse in the nineteenth century. With this feature comes the beginning of that inclination to reflexivity which characterizes the modernist novel proper. But that will come later in the twentieth century.

chap t e r 7

The unnameable

From the very day of its publication in 1848, Wuthering Heights has provoked perplexity and confusion. In a literary scene acclimatized to realism, and to a moral realism which had as its recent history the ethico-religious traditions of allegory, Wuthering Heights came as something of a shock to contemporary readers. It was acknowledged to display “evidences of considerable power,” but was seen on the whole as “wild, confused, disjointed and improbable” (Examiner, 8 Jan. 1848). On 22 January 1848, the Atlas reviewer found “Wuthering Heights . . . a strange inartistic story.” Lacking in “unity and concentration,” it “is a sprawling story, carrying us, with no mitigation of anguish, through two generations of sufferers – though one presiding evil genius sheds a grim shadow over the whole, and imparts a singleness of malignity to the somewhat disjointed tale. A more natural unnatural story we do not remember to have read.” In the same month, the New Monthly Magazine reviewer found himself unable to refer to anything that could be compared to Bront¨e’s novel. In the end, he could only refer to the world the novel represented as “a perfect misanthropist’s heaven.” Many of the American reviews in the spring of 1848 are even more uncomprehending. “We rise from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we come fresh from a pest-house. Read Jane Eyre is our advice, but burn Wuthering Heights” (Paterson’s Magazine, March 1948). G. W. Peck, writing in the American Review in June 1848, with the fact of the novel’s widespread popularity among “young ladies in the country” already established, begins by cautioning new readers against the novel, “simply on account of the coarseness of the style”: There is a certain decorum in language as well as in manners or modes. We may express the deepest thoughts, the most ardent passions, the strongest emotions, without in the least offending propriety. We are not called upon to affect surliness or bluntness of speech; and where a whole book is in this style, whatever may be its merits, this is a simple obvious defect, the first to impress itself upon the reader, 130

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and by no means the least serious . . . The book is original; it is powerful; full of suggestiveness. But it is still coarse. (All the above quotations are included in “Contemporary Reviews”, 40–55)

The major complaint in the reviews seems to be that the author hasn’t sufficiently taken in the proper compositional codes for the production of a decorously realist narrative. She has produced instead some fractured and malignant parody of the real thing. That it is a fractured, displaced narrative goes without saying, but it hasn’t been produced as a result of incompetence, or, if it has, it is the incompetence of genius. We are confronted with a necessary alternative artistry, a regime of deliberate unrest that takes as one of its central preoccupations the defining of a subject position outside the traditional social polarities which provide its context. Bront¨e’s disjunctive artfulness is as indispensable to Wuthering Heights as Marx’s necessary plunge into art is to Eighteenth Brumaire. There is a good deal about this novel that I probably do not need to repeat. It has been read critically so often that the main relevancies have been well established. Clearly the contrast between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange sets a whole series of differences in play. They are obviously social and economic. And they are also temperamental. Yet the social whole which they define cannot fully absorb all the social and psychological energies which the text generates, and Bront¨e’s uneasy generic positioning of Wuthering Heights as a realist text cannot stabilize the precariousness induced by the excess. The two social poles of the novel are also to be distinguished by their differing relation to dominant ideology, in this case determined by the common intuitive resources and sociopolitical emplotments of the landed gentry, threatened historically in the 1840s by the dramatic rise of the industrial bourgeoisie in the towns. Thrushcross Grange is more thoroughly incorporated in the settled world of the property-owning classes. Its family has been released from the bondage of work to pursue the more comfortable and decorative side of bourgeois life. “The delicate, spiritless Lintons in their crimson-carpeted drawing-room,” Terry Eagleton writes, “are radically severed from the labour which sustains them” (Myths, 105). Gentility lives parasitically on the work of others, detaches itself from that work and dominates it. “In doing so, it becomes a form of self-bondage; if work is servitude, so in a subtler sense is civilisation.” It is the Grange’s civilized order, so to speak, that seduces Catherine. She begins to despise Heathcliff ’s lack of breeding. He is not conventionally wellspoken, nor does he brush his hair, or wash often enough. Edgar, besides being handsome, “will be rich and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the

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neighbourhood,” Catherine muses, “and I shall be proud of having such a husband” (Wuthering Heights, 78) Wuthering Heights has not been so fully incorporated into the social ideology radiating out from the Grange. It is only partially constituted ideologically in those terms because the Earnshaws have not entirely put their concrete relation to working the land behind them. As Eagleton notes, they are still subject to the disciplines of the working farm, although the Earnshaw men are still gentlemen, yeoman farmers, who enjoy freedom (Myths, 105). But it is a freedom that is different. It is not the disembedded and more modern freedom of the Lintons or Fr´ed´eric Moreau. We should note here that Edgar and Fr´ed´eric are to some extent cut from the same cloth. The Edgar of the Yorkshire moors will not survive the face-to-face brutalities of the countryside for very much longer. By the end of the nineteenth century, depending on their incomes, the Lintons will have moved to London, or to the local metropolis, and although still connected to their properties by the rents they need to sustain their condition, their lives will more and more come to resemble Fr´ed´eric’s. The social unit of Wuthering Heights – the family – is still a working economic system that generates its own surplus. It does not live comfortably off rents. The family, as a totalizing social structure, mediates between an idealized Nature and the concrete working of nature, naturalizing property relations and socializing the blood-ties. Relationships in this isolated world are turbulently personal and face-to-face. The mechanism of domination is encoded in the family structure and enforced by the boot and the fist. But these relationships are also impersonally mediated through a working relation with the land. The family makes a tight order, is relentlessly and unavoidably intimate, and is canopied by simple retributive moralities. The entry of Heathcliff into this closely ordered world rips it apart. Heathcliff has no inherited place in either the closed system of the house at Wuthering Heights, or of the larger social whole defined by Heights and Grange. He is the free radical, the pure outsider, plucked out of the Liverpool slums by a generous act of philanthropy, typical of the noblesse oblige ethic of an older eighteenth-century gentry, a morality that passes, of course, with the death of the senior Earnshaw. The relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff proposes an alternative to it. Heathcliff’s connection with Catherine is a relationship marked by a certain kind of pure intensity. Their passionate union works their personal bond out past the social polarities of Grange and Heights, with all their inherent contradictions. A good deal of the criticism dealing with Heathcliff and Catherine positions their connection in a tradition of Romantic or Gothic literature, with

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Heathcliff drawn from the pages of one of Byron’s verse tales. This both misunderstands the nature of Byron’s tales and Heathcliff. If Heathcliff has any literary precursor it is Caliban from The Tempest. Like the unnurturable Caliban, Heathcliff is the unassimilable, disruptive element in a system with an established hierarchy of values and a settled social system that embodies them. The settledness of the Heights and the Grange should not deceive us into believing they are idyllic worlds disrupted by the outsider. Certainly Heathcliff is an outsider, but, as Eagleton argues, his appearance in this community acts to bring the inherent contradictions already there explosively to the surface. In one aspect as landlord and property-owner himself he simply plays out more ruthlessly and with a greater degree of violence the intrinsic brutality of the system which the civility of the Grange conceals. The vicious bulldogs which guard the genteel Lintons are Bront¨e’s preliminary move in bringing the contradiction to the surface. Heathcliff ’s subsequent behavior clinches the point. It is too easy to read the novel as an allegory that merely sets off as opposed terms the values of personal relationship and those of conventional society. I agree entirely with Eagleton about this point: What prevents this [simplification] is the curious impersonality of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. Edgar Linton shows at his best a genuine capacity for tender, loving fidelity; but this thrives on obvious limits . . . Linton is released from material pressures into a civilized enclave; and in this respect his situation differs from the world of Wuthering Heights, where personal relations are more intimately entwined with a working context. The relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff, however, provides a third term. It really is a personal relationship, yet also seems to transcend the personal into some region beyond it. (Myths, 107)

I think this is the crucial point, the novel attempts to define and locate a personal relationship of greater intensity than anything conceiveable within society as constituted by the two determining poles of the two houses. It is the first cell of a new kind of community, expelled by a closed social world that cannot accommodate it. It offers a model of exile and marginalization, a social configuring of a bohemia of two. It is a relationship that in these particular circumstances cannot survive in “reality,” the “reality” which ideology posits. But, in the world of the 1840s, shaken by the proximity of the gathering forces of modernization, it is now possible to imagine such a union as an apotheosis and refuge. It is the couple’s creative/destructive intimacies, what Giddens calls “the pure relationship” in modernity (Self-Identity, 88–98), that is the key. This is a relationship that is internally referential, depending fundamentally on gratifications or rewards generic to the relationship alone, a relationship,

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sui generis, for which no social languages exist, a going beyond what Edgar’s liberal humanism might make of the word “personal” or the rougher notion of face-to-face personalism found in the yeoman clannishness of the Earnshaws. This “going beyond” what literal language can express is registered in a number of other ways. One is in the cumulative uneasiness or confusion of the novel’s early readers, and possibly even readers today, best illustrated by the comments of the first reviewers. The problem here lies in not being able to locate the formal and tropic destination of the novel, a mistaken tendency to think of the novel as an indecisive war of several limited and inadequate points of view – the genteel, the Christian, the pragmatic, the animistic, and so on. A better register for the unnameable in Wuthering Heights, as in the Eighteenth Brumaire, is the verbal style itself. There is something extraordinarily violent and tense about the writing – some drive towards a desired object that cannot be reached, a gnashing of teeth and explosive rages in pursuit of an emotional or psychic goal that always eludes understanding, that, in key passages, verges on the psychotic. I have in mind a passage like the one at the beginning of Chapter ix (73) when Hindley pushes the knife point between Nelly’s teeth. Or the recitations of the dreams, Lockwood’s or Catherine’s dream of heaven, which she must force Nelly to hear by holding her down, the dream in which she says that: heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. (80)

I could multiply the examples. Critics sometimes refer to the novel’s economy of impossible yearning as a metaphysical or ontological hunger which cannot find a precise verbal expression and so must move stylistically to exaggeration, hysteria, and the combustible energies we see pent-up in the preverbal world of the infant or in the internalized antagonisms, frustration, and self-loathing in the thwarted or the limitless rages of the oppressed. The two houses define a terrain of inertia; Catherine and Heathcliff slip out past their gravitational pull to reinvent themselves in a new register of being which has not yet been socialized in the given circumstances, and represents that surplus of social and psychological energy which cannot be absorbed by the symbolic order which has given rise to it. But “Catherine, of course, is absorbed: she enters the civilized world of the Lintons and leaves Heathcliff behind, to become a ‘wolfish, pitiless’ man” (Myths, 108). But that does not negate the revolutionary depth of the relationship between them, even in Emily Bront¨e’s post-Romantic terms, as an elusive dream

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of absolute value, preserving the primordial moment of what Eagleton calls “pre-social harmony,” but which might better be thought of as the exaggerated, even farcical, paradigmatic occasion for the postsocial pure relationship of modernity. Fr´ed´eric Moreau is translated to a new plane of social existence by the most banal of disembedding mechanisms, by money, the unexpected inheritance. Catherine and Heathcliff are also driven free of the given social circumstances which have shaped them. Their freedom is achieved not by the strategem of wealth, but by something that Emily Bront¨e cannot even name, except to uneasily identify it with another banality, namely romantic love. But that does not capture it. The novel struggles to give birth to something new, some new imaginative configuration of consciousness, which has to do with trying to name one of the strategies for surviving modernity. This is in effect a novel of consciousness and Catherine herself puts her finger on it in the conversation with Nelly about dreams: “Nelly, do you ever dream queer dreams?” she said, suddenly, after some minutes reflection. “Yes, now and then,” I answered. “And so do I. I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.” (Wuthering Heights, 79)

The generic focus shifts and it is clear that what it will lead to is that later development criticism calls modernist stream of consciousness, the last chapter of Ulysses, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and so on. Bront¨e cannot enact that kind of narrative mode yet, but, through Catherine, she has already theorized its possibility. The mimetic representation of an action in the Aristotelian sense is in the process of being displaced. Instead, the narrative endeavors to represent states of mind and feeling and the contents and processes of consciousness as a new domain of fictive possibility disembedded from the anxieties of history. In a sense it is a repetition of Wordsworth’s recoiling from the alien city, but without his smugness, nor his sense of a safe refuge in Nature. This is a recoiling without a determinate destination, except towards the work of art itself, now identified not with action out there, but with consciousness in here. intimacy Let me take, for a moment, a short excursion into the history of private life in modern times, especially that special relationship of intimate life

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we call love. Earlier I wrote of the Catherine–Heathcliff relationship in terms of Anthony Giddens’s sociological concept of the pure relationship. He is not describing by this term some ideal relationship or situation. He is concerned to get at the sociological reality or particular emphasis or twist which intimate relations carry in modernity. The love relationship in traditional society reaches toward social equilibrium in the form of the institution of marriage. In fact the continuity of the institution of marriage does not even require an actual state of love to exist between the conjugal actors. There are plenty of societies in which love may even be seen as disruptive interference with more important social matters, for example the orderly transmission of wealth from generation to generation or the orderly establishment of interfamily relations by the union, or even opposition, of houses. The love of Catherine and Heathcliff operates on another register, but it is not entirely Emily Bront¨e’s invention. In European cultures, the bare outlines of such a love-relation had already been theorized as early as twelfthcentury Provence, where love, as passionate feeling, could only exist outside of the confines of the traditional marriage. It reached its apogee in the context of an adulterous relationship, according to the courtly coding of intimacy among the Provenc¸al nobility. But it should be recalled that courtly love traditions, or cortezia, were not asocial or unstructured. They had a place and a function in the history of private life within society. They represented the social form to which passion, desire, and the veneration of the body was consigned among a leisured aristocracy. The one aspect of these late medieval forms of private life which is germane to my main line of argument is that they were celebrated with song and poetry and dance. In this respect, they represented a sequestration of passion which began the long process of aestheticizing privacy. I think it is probably true to say that in the courtly love tradition the aesthetic imperative was perhaps the principal impulse, although not the only goal. Marriage, as the visible social form, was a contractual relationship among families rarely initiated by the marital couple; parents and relatives brought other concerns into the marriage negotiations than the state of feeling of the couple. “The contract was usually strongly influenced by economic considerations, and formed part of wider economic networks and transactions” (Giddens, Self-Identity, 89). As a result marriage was often loveless. Courtly adultery as the private and secret domain of desire did not undermine the institution of contracted marriages. For one thing it made them more manageable psychologically, no matter how ambiguous the clandestine relation was in ethical terms. It did this while respecting the material

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importance of the marriage union for the social whole. The power and longevity of this courtly tradition is actually astounding and extends well into the nineteenth century. It is still a very powerful influence in Stendahl, On Love (1822) and Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1865), one of its greatest modern expositions.1 The relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff is not entirely irrelevant to those earlier anticipations, but it is not limited or exhausted by them. In fact, it breaks with these traditions in several decisive ways. Most obviously, the relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff is not conceived as a secreted passion within society at all, that is as a relationship which can only exist in the context of established conjugal forms, like the state of courtly adultery. I think the thematic indeterminacy of Wuthering Heights occurs as a result of the fact that Catherine and Heathcliff cannot be circumscribed by the two available social contexts for intimate unions. First, they cannot be encompassed socially and domestically by Heights or Grange. Their darkly ironic apotheosis lies in the grave, not in a union which affirms society through them, as we find, say, in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. There is a kind of social affirmation at the end of the novel when the second Catherine and Hareton, the younger generation, begin to reassemble the fragments of domestic life, although I wouldn’t say that the novel conveys this decisively and unambiguously. In any case the relation of the domestic scene to the wider social setting is left undefined. Catherine and Heathcliff elude tradition in a second way. Their love, if that is what it is, cannot be circumscribed by the norms of marriage as a Christian institution (cf. Nussbaum, “Romantic Assent,” 378), on the one hand, nor by its dialectical negative, the heresies of cortezia, on the other. Its meanings cannot be exhausted by either of those two poles of intimacy, or by their entwined history. Catherine and Heathcliff ’s “fierce mutual tearings” cannot be enclosed by the word “personal” either, in the sense of personal relationship. “Their relationship is ‘ontological’ or ‘metaphysical’ because it opens out into the more-than-personal, enacts a style of being which is more than just the property of two individuals . . . Their relationship articulates a depth inexpressible in routine social practice, transcendent of available social languages” (Eagleton, Myths, 108), including the outmoded languages of passion in the courtesy literature. It is, for all intents and purposes, impersonal. It both depersonalizes and offers a significant paradigm. I will come back to its paradigmatic significance in a moment. The love between Catherine and Heathcliff is an intuitive intimacy raised to cosmic status, “by-passing the mediation of the ‘social’”; and this is “both its strength and its historical limit.” Its nonsociality, as Eagleton puts it, is

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“a revolutionary refusal of the given language of social roles and values”; and if the relationship is to remain unabsorbed by society it must therefore appear as natural rather than social, since Nature is “outside” of society. Eagleton goes on to say that as a result Bront¨e universalizes the meaning of the relationship. This is fine as far as it goes but I would push Eagleton’s argument one step further and say that even Nature does not offer the proper conceptual framework to grasp the significance of what is attempted in the portrait of the two lovers. Indeed the novel is metaphysical in the literal sense of that word, having to exploit the primitive language of ghosts, apparitions, mysterious illuminations, dreams as the only nomenclature available for the inexpressible. I said earlier that the Catherine and Heathcliff relationship carried a kind of paradigmatic significance. By this I meant to emphasize that it is not an invention cut to the pattern of clear precedents. It borrows available materials, but redirects them, not towards the past, but towards the future. Bront¨e makes it very clear that this relationship can only exist outside of society, some distance from it. It can’t even exist in Nature as a socialized pastoral idea of perfection. It can only exist in and for itself. In the development of modernity, the passion Catherine and Heathcliff share defines a new kind of norm. Their relationship establishes them as defining a new kind of goal and expectation, one that defines the starting point for a new kind of relationship in the social history of the future. Contrast Jane Austen’s attitudes towards love which are more typical of early nineteenth-century British society, as illustrated, for example, by the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. There is no doubt that they finally love each other, and that love is the foundation of their union, even against all social obstacles. And it is perfectly clear that only the two of them, working together, can secure their connection. But, at the end of the day, as they stroll around the grounds of the great house at Pemberley, Darcy’s estate which is the very embodiment of settled society, they must position their love firmly within society’s institutions. In a social world that still very much had the Austenian compromise as the idealized norm, Emily Bront¨e’s remarkable reinvention of the love-relation must have come as a shock (if we are to judge by contemporary reactions). The revolutionary potential of her portrait of the two lovers in the history of personal life has never been explored fully. But it is important. In Catherine and Heathcliff, the paradigm certainly takes an exaggerated form that is both typical of modernism, exaggeration is one of its principal early styles, and typical of the painful struggle to bring to consciousness something that is not completely grasped by its progenitor. Pain and violence

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form the crucial matrix of feeling in the narrative, and the extremes of feeling which Bront¨e explores should key our reading (DeRosa, “Life of the Novel,” 27–28). I do not see Catherine and Heathcliff as naively continuous with any of the past traditions of European passion. Wuthering Heights breaks with them. It anticipates a new form of the intimate relation that takes shape within modernity. This new form of the love-bond responds, at first, to the felt inadequacy of the tradition of contracted marriages and of the comforts of its inverse analogue, the secreted passions of cortezia, in the face of changed historical conditions.2 The sea-change in the social regulation of passion which we see in Wuthering Heights readies individuals to weather psychologically and emotionally the destruction of the traditional social networks that oriented individuals to social life. These inclusive kinship and class structures absorbed their life-energies in the myriad forms which accommodated and circumscribed social, domestic, and personal trajectories of the self. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary provides a remarkable metacommentary on the decline of these older forms of communal stability. Now what’s interesting for us about the model which Catherine and Heathcliff define is that in some respects it has been considered an unattainable apotheosis. Clearly that is how it is represented in the novel. It has to be, if Bront¨e is to raise the text to its maximum voltage. And in the position of a young woman inescapably bound into a set pattern of roles and functions by Victorian patriarchy, Bront¨e can only imagine the autonomous love-bond in absolute terms beyond our reach. I would like to argue, however, that, as a paradigm, this relationship is not out of reach at all, and has been institutionalized in modernity as the expected destination of the intimate relationship in general. Giddens’s appropriation of D. H. Lawrence’s phrase, pure relationship, underlines and connects Bront¨e’s relevance to the future. In Women in Love, Lawrence uses the term to describe the kind of relationship towards which Birkin and Ursula are moving and from which Gerald and Gudrun are barred. The specific passage I have in mind comes from the “Marriage or Not” chapter in the novel: [Gerald] was ready to be doomed. Marriage was like a doom to him. He was willing to condemn himself in marriage, to become like a convict condemned to the mines of the underworld, living no life in the sun, but having a dreadful subterranean activity. He was willing to accept this. And marriage was the seal of his condemnation. He was willing to be sealed thus in the underworld, like a soul damned but living for ever in damnation. But he would not make any pure relationship with any other soul. He could not. Marriage was not the committing

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of himself into a relationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptance of the established world, he would accept the established order, in which he did not livingly believe, and then would retreat to the underworld for his life. This he would do. The other way was to accept Rupert’s offer of alliance, to enter into the bond of pure trust and love with the other man, and then subsequently with the woman. If he pledged himself with the man he would later be able to pledge himself with the woman: not merely in legal marriage, but in absolute, mystic marriage. Yet he could not accept the offer. There was a numbness upon him, a numbness either of unborn, absent volition or atrophy. Perhaps it was the absence of volition. For he was strangely elated at Rupert’s offer. Yet he was still more glad to reject it, not to be committed. (398)

Time was that most progressively minded people thought Lawrence’s “other way” was a ravishing vision of love, a new beginning in the generally bleak picture of personal relations at the end of the nineteenth century. Time has not been kind to the conception of the pure relationship to which this passage refers. Time has not been kind, not because of its failure, but because of its unusual success as a social paradigm. It is the pure relationship, something like Lawrence’s hypothetical lovers, that has triumphed and defines the new norms of intimacy in late modernity. For Giddens, the pure relationship defines the paradigm, not for the rarely achieved intimacy we find in Lawrence, but as the general form of the love-bond in contemporary society. In the 1920s, Lawrence’s pure relationship (and it cannot be accidental that Giddens uses Lawrence’s term) was a difficult and rare achievement. It was, in his fiction and in his life with Frieda, an experiment in living that could not be accomplished in mainstream society, but could flourish only on the margins of what he calls “the established order” in the passage. This seemed in fact a necessary condition of its possibility. Lawrence understood this and commented on it in a variety of places, including Women in Love through Birkin’s description of the kind of people he associates with in London. Art – music – London Bohemia – the most pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the world – perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and negation – but negatively something, at any rate. ... Painters, musicians, writers – hangers-on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere

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particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say. (65–66)

The emphasis here is on a new kind of social autonomy for the person and for the relationships which that person forms. In the margins, these new styles of living flourished free of the constraints and bonds of the traditional communal values, goals, and expectations. The bonds of custom and tradition, that held people in particular social and psychological positions, weakened more quickly in Lawrence’s time, as they had done more slowly all through the nineteenth century. Lawrence was keenly alert to the impact of change at the level of personal life. On one side there was the increasing mechanical regimentation of the masses; on the other, the freedom from convention available to new explorers like Birkin and Ursula. The only problem is that he thought of their reinvention of a couple’s intimacy, or his own with Frieda, as occurring only rarely, and to exceptional and gifted people. He could not imagine that the pure relationship (or at least a version of it) could be achieved easily by great numbers of quite ordinary people. He thought it could only be earned through great personal struggle and sacrifice. How wrong he was. Perhaps he was right if we expect such a relationship to rise to the mystical and the absolute, whatever this language of remoteness and intensity means. But, the pure relationship is relatively easy to achieve in form. It has become as a result more general and less remote. The twentieth century witnessed a startling and unexpected evolution. Regimentation for the purpose of increasing economic efficiency was leavened by the general social deregulation of desire. What was marginal and rare (and therefore valuable) is now normative and conventional. Not to mention utterly banal. In the first half of The Rainbow, Lawrence portrayed a traditional rural society. Marriage meant home and children; the family was the normative social form through which all experience was filtered. In Women in Love, however, this communal ethos has begun to collapse. It has been replaced by individual figures on a landscape, figures increasingly isolated from each other and from what remains of the surrounding social context. The chief actors in Women in Love are emancipated and uprooted, so that a correspondingly greater strain is thrown on their private relations, relations that are not social givens, but created or negotiated by the individuals concerned. What Lawrence dramatized in the novel as the product of a creative and redemptive self-fashioning has become through repetition, and, paradoxically, in thoroughly conventionalized forms, the sociological

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reality of personal life in the early twenty-first century. This is not to say that Lawrence has somehow caused this change to happen. Or that it happens with the same intensity and vigor he imagined. He didn’t and it doesn’t. But he was one of the first intellectuals of Europe to notice it and to imaginatively explore and assess the consequences for individual persons. Wyndham Lewis, coming to quite a different set of conclusions in Tarr and The Apes of God, was another. It is perhaps easy to recognize the physiognomy of the contemporary relationship in the above description and to recognize how much it has become the norm in modern societies achieving degrees of pervasiveness and banality unimaginable in Lawrence’s time. In the earlier part of the century, such forms of personal relationship were exceptional rather than normal and, therefore, carried a rather more explosive psychic charge. In this respect, the emotionally explosive relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Emily Bront¨e’s Wuthering Heights is a prototype of the relationships of the future. But such relationships could not exist unless the wider social context underwent radical change. The emergence of market society saw to that. The accommodation of the authentic relationship as model and goal, paradoxically, within society was only possible in the new social reality. In contrast to close personal relationships in traditional contexts, the authentic or pure relationship is not anchored in external conditions of social or economic life, or even in an idealized Nature. It is, as it were, free-floating, decontextualized, as a new element in the social texture. Confirming evidence can be found in the changes in the institution of marriage itself, that most socially binding of personal bonds. The modern marriage tends towards the eradication of preexisting external involvements – a phenomenon originally accompanied by the rise of romantic love as the basic motive of marriage. Pride and Prejudice incidentally marks one of the moments of the transition. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Giddens is very helpful in delineating the new physiognomy of intimate relations. What he describes realizes the paradigmatic nature of the relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff. The transformation of marriage is the key. Marriage becomes more and more a relationship initiated by the partners, and it is kept going for as long as “it delivers the emotional satisfaction to be derived from close contact with another” (89). The partner, in the lovebond, as in friendship, “is defined specifically as someone with whom one has a relationship unprompted by anything other than the rewards that the relationship provides” (90). Love or friendship attachments may have their own “inertial elements,” children for example, or other forms of codependency, but, “in practice as well as in principle one normally stays a

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friend of another only in so far as sentiments of closeness are reciprocated for their own sake.” Secondly, “the pure relationship is sought only for what the relationship can bring to the partners involved.” Personal relationships of any duration are tests, and sometimes tense with conflict, as well as being mechanisms of gratification and reward. But in relationships which only exist for their own sake, anything that goes wrong between the partners intrinsically threatens to dissolve the connection itself. As a result, it is very difficult to “coast along” in the way one can when social relations are dominated by external factors, the overbearing presence of the kin system for example, or the contracted economic ties of family alliances, etc. Nor does the authentic relationship survive the secreted passion of the courtly love form. It must embody passion itself; the domestication of passion is one of its raisons d’etre. Consequently, the authentic relationship is “reflexively organized, in an open fashion” (91), and on a basis of continuous surveillance, with a corresponding rise in levels of anxiety and fear, especially in the recurring moments of reassessment. The typical leitmotif – “Is everything all right?” – of the connection when it is in the monitoring mode resembles the frantic cries of the spouse in “A Game of Chess” in Eliot’s Waste Land, “‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think’” (Collected Poems, 67) or Ursula and Birkin’s constant talk about how they are getting on, how they are doing. “The more a relationship depends only upon itself, the more such reflexive questioning comes to be its core – and contributes to anxieties” when any differences arise. The self-examination inherent in the authentic relationship fuses with the reflexive project of the self. Indeed the reflexiveness of relationships in the late twentieth century, no matter how distant they are from being fully disembedded, “participates in the broader reflexivity of modernity” (Giddens, Modernity, 92). If you have any doubt about this, spend an afternoon or two watching the popular talk shows on TV or listen to the way people discuss their personal relationships. The pure relationship is keyed by a series of internally organised factors: 1. commitment (essentially what “replaces the external anchors that close personal connections used to have in pre-modern situations”); 2. intimacy (“the demand for intimacy in modern societies persists to the point of being compulsive” – Bensman and Lilienfeld, qtd by Giddens); 3. trust (cannot be taken as “given”: “like other aspects of the relationship it has to be worked at – the trust of the other has to be won”); and, finally, 4. recognition. Recognition begins in the mutually affirming responses to each other’s

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self-identity. But it is expanded through linked processes of self-exploration and the development of intimacy with the other (92–98). These affective processes of attachment help create “shared histories” (97) of a kind potentially more intensely charged with personal meaning than those “characteristic of individuals who share experiences by virtue of a common social position” or even through kinship ties. These amalgams of shared experiences and the shared knowledge derived from these experiences may diverge from the orderings of time and space that prevail in the wider social world. They soon constitute the meaning of the relationship in the absence of any other significance it might have. They are also carefully and exactly narrativized within the bond itself as its most defining and characterizing moment. Indeed the narrative of the relationship, its origins, its ups and downs, its triumphs and setbacks, takes on an increasingly aesthetic and even imaginary character with each retelling. As mutual trust and commitment deepen, the archival work of making the shared history of the bond itself becomes a new affirmation of the bond and a form of resistance to assimilation and dissolution. The narrative will increasingly carry inflections which are specific to the bond itself. These work to consolidate and defend the narrative from immersion in externals and, therefore, the loss of its uniqueness and meaning. Yet it is important, from a wider perspective, to emphasize that in practice these narrative artefacts of intimate life must be seen as interpolated within the wider social world rather than completely cut off from it. In fact, some of the more defining episodes of difference and separation from the world have to do with the adventures of securing the bond’s safety or integrity in a social world that often does not acknowledge or even know of its special, unique character. In my view the pure relationship, as here described, is the minimal social unit, the social building block, of a new kind of community in the mode of modernist resistance. Much of what has been described as characteristic of the personal relationship in modernity also characterizes the wider subcultural formations which lie athwart the traditional kin, class, gender, and racial divisions of society. Although Giddens concentrates his attention on the social history of the later twentieth century, he is also a very good guide to understanding the social configurations of early twentieth-century modernist bohemias. What he notes in late modernity is the emergence of “internally referential systems of knowledge and power” as a consequence of a wider social process he calls the “sequestration of experience” (144). These internally referential networks are what I am calling the bohemian enclave or noetic community. I use the word noetic on the authority of William

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Irwin Thompson who posits a “noetic polity” as a new communal form in the late twentieth century. In The American Replacement of Nature (1991), he contrasts the noetic community with traditional communal organizations: Whereas a sanguinal polity is a tribal one in which identity is based on relationship through blood, on being, for example, the children of Abraham, and a territorial polity is one in which identity is based on land defined by boundaries, a noetic polity is based upon states of consciousness. (29)

Although I do not subscribe to his extended use of the term to compass “a new planetary noetic polity,” I do think that the term is useful in more limited ways. As a term for describing subcultural formations that depend less and less on sanguinity and territory, it has its uses. The internal organization of a marginalized bohemia in the early twentieth century is brought together by a series of shared affects, knowledge, and experience; these include mutual interests and goals, shared anxieties about risk and trust, mutually affirming discourses, even semi-private idiolects. The noetic bonds that define bohemia spread out over the course of the twentieth century into the mainstream as the new social terrain of market societies in general. The internal history of the group emphasizes its difference from the mainstream. The bohemian enclave accentuates these differences, especially in the dreary routines generated by production and consumption. In the noetic community, the sense of belonging is modified by distinct senses of time and space. Time is intimately bound to the history of the group and to its eventual dissolution. World-historical events like wars may affect the group’s history, but its unity is mainly determined by the state of the personal relationships in the group and, therefore, the cohesiveness and longevity of the corporate bonds. This means that the group may only make sense as a social formation for a relatively short period of time. Place, as well as time, undergoes a radical reordering. In the past, communities were rooted in a particular geography with well-defined boundaries and limits. The noetic community, however, may occupy the same neighborhood in a city – Soho, Greenwich Village, Montmartre – but place here is more a locale of convenience (it offers a richness of personal contacts or cultural experience) or necessity (cheap rents) or both. Increased mobility means that the bonds which keep one in place must work reflexively in a person’s mind, feelings, and personal goals rather than persisting as a kind of social inertia. The modernist place is also very flexible in terms of the occupation of actual territory. One can be a member of a group and not live anywhere near the base of operations. Being part of the Bloomsbury Group, for

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example, did not require actual residence in WC1 in London. The places of modernism are, thus, constituted by pursuit of specific interests and by choice. Choice also defines the internal organization of life-experiences for everyone in our time. We now share, with early modernist bohemias, citizenship in what Lawrence M. Friedman calls “the republic of choice.” “Decisions about when and whom to marry, where to live, how many children to aim for, how to care for one’s children, how to spend one’s old age” are made in contexts that differ radically from the standard in premodern societies (Giddens, Self-Identity, 147). The lifecycle of the noetic group has worked itself free of the traditional anchorings and describes a trajectory constituted by an explicit curriculum of mutual interests and goals. One’s ancestors in this new setting are defined by individuals in the past who have contributed to the group’s self-definition and goals rather than by the given crowd of relatives and predecessors one is stuck with. Finally, the noetic community cultivates what Giddens calls “‘open experience thesholds’ rather than ritualised passages” (148). New ritual practices may arise within the group (evenings in Gordon Square or Gertrude Stein’s dinner parties, for example) but, in general, ritual observances that mark major life transitions – birth, adolescence, marriage, and death – decline in their power to shape collective or personal experience. Transitions, of whatever kind, in the noetic context are experienced as open-ended crises of identity. Crisis, rupture, reconstitution define the style of change within the group. Indeed, the group continuously monitors its own state of being and is psychologically prepared to deal with “the anticipated need to confront and resolve such crisis phases” (148). This aspect of life-experience stresses the development of self-reflexiveness to a high degree. We have had a good long time now, more than one hundred and fifty years, to learn to reorient ourselves to the new communal possibilities of a fragmenting social whole. These are the social norms that define developed market societies, norms that are intrinsic to it. Modernist artists and intellectuals have been in the avant-garde of these developments. They constituted the first social groups to find themselves in the interstices of societies beginning to fragment under the impact of the market-form in the nineteenth century. A whole bibliography of texts could be assembled which chronicle the rise of the artistic bohemias, the outlaw communities, of the nineteenth century. In English literary culture alone there are a half-dozen artistic groups which embody new ideas and practices of personal authenticity and relationship, groups that span the whole nineteenth century, from the libertarian Shelley circle through to

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the queer inflections of the 1890s. In such groups new forms of associative life are not only structured on the basis of personal life choices, but as micropolitical modes of struggle and resistance against what is perceived as the monolith culture of the mainstream. The irony lies in recognizing that the noetic communities themselves are the fissures and fractures in the cultural monolith under the disintegrative pressure of the market-form. With artists, writers, and intellectuals in the vanguard, the practices of authenticity as a new form of life are often identified with artistic communities, like the ones I have mentioned, or, say, the Bloomsbury circle later. They are also the reason why personal relationships in modernity often become the focus of a kind of intense aesthetic attention, like the playful reversals of traditional social and domestic bonds in Oscar Wilde’s aphorisms and late plays. Recall, for example, the plasticity of the gendersystem in The Importance of Being Earnest, or the revisions of gender identity and of the un-conventions of sexual possessiveness among the Bloomsbury bohemians. People’s experiences with their closest intimates, lovers, friends, co-dependents, take on the character of works of art as modernity expands and comes to pervade the whole of social life. It is this consciousness of the life-span as a work of art, as having, in Roger Fry’s phrase, “significant form” in its own right, which stands behind Caresse Crosby’s dictum in the Paris of the 1920s, another notable bohemia, that “Living well is the best revenge.” The relative autonomy and aestheticism of personal life lived in these new contexts occurs in concert with the development of important aspects of modernist aesthetics. For one thing, the theory and practice of the autonomy of the work of art seems hardly an astonishing development when put back in the concrete history of intimacy and the evolution from it of wider noetic bonds, especially in artistic communities. And the notion of the aesthetic itself as the destination of the work of meaning in the modernist text, as we saw in Flaubert’s proto-imagism, can hardly seem a revolutionary innovation for artists already acclimatized to the aestheticizing of personal relations. But if we see that the new bond is also constituted as a strategy of resistance, we can also understand why modernist aesthetics took so much trouble in aggressively trashing the aesthetic culture and routines, the “realism” of the Victorian bourgeoisie.

chap t e r 8

Childhood as resistance

From the poetics and sociology of the pure relationship and the noetic community let’s move on to another terrain of purity. I speak of the much misunderstood innocence of the child. Childhood has a long history as a marginalized and displaced zone lodged in self-absorbed societies that have paid very little heed to the inner culture and sensibility of the community of children. For all intents and purposes, this is a silent, unrecorded history. And to try to delve into its existential reality is to indulge not only in speculation but in presumption as well. How can we really know what the community of children exactly consists of? We might draw on our own memories, but even they are not reliable, as childhood quickly dissolves into adult consciousness as the purest of arbitrary fictions. In fact, for an adult, childhood is the surest domain of fictive invention and aesthetic effects. Often the quality of an adult’s imagination is best measured by listening to his or her recollections of childhood. Childhood, unfortunately, is always locked away as the children’s unconscious secret forever. And this is true even for children we may think we know well. Only the psychic affinities of animals are more thoroughly hidden from us. First of all, childhood participates in the adult flows as a resistant element. It cannot be grasped by adult consciousness in its interiority. Adult consciousness can only document its visible episodes and events, what children say and do. The sense these make is mediated by the warping effect of adult needs, adult agendas, adult impatience. The interior life of children cannot be grasped whole. It can be occasionally glimpsed in fragments, moments of the most weightless and fleeting whimsicality, or in the counterflows of childhood trepidation or in their unreflective acts of defiance. Adults can never understand the whole interiority of childhood and the children themselves do not find it necessary to represent it for us. They do represent it perfectly well to each other and to themselves in the most limpid and translucent terms. Adults often persist in thinking that childhood is essentially the domain of nonsense in need of the restraining devices of education 148

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in public civility and personal morality, that is to say, childhood is in need of colonization. And, with the advent of child psychology early last century, the colonization has become more deeply penetrative and nuanced. The adult agenda for childhood has traditionally been a socializing one, incorporating the child-savage to the primary structures of the conventional lifeworld and to the common intuitive resources of the primary social group. Essentially represented as a wild savage, the child needed to be soothed and then conducted into civility. Adult texts for children, or what is called with inadvertent irony, children’s literature, have been in the forefront of the civilizing project. They have usually reflected this colonial agenda through the centuries of taming the Yahoos of childhood. Or at least this was the case in the nineteenth century until, according to Gillian Avery, an “unobtrusive but immense revolution . . . took place among children’s books in the 1860s, when for the first time in the century stories of pure entertainment were allowed their place on the nursery shelves previously reserved for didactic and impeccably moral books” (Nineteenth Century Children, 121). The revolution was obviously not complete. There are still a great many children’s entertainments which have as their thematic agenda the socializing of children in adult practices and expectations. These works represent a kind of junior realism, at least at the level of theme. By this I mean that the messages which children are supposed to take away from the work simply reenforce the common intuitive fixations and investments of adult society. Now these aims were much more open and common in the nineteenth century, and they were still around in the twentieth. Yet in the 1860s, according to Avery, a new kind of discourse for children by adults came into being. I am interested in the date, of course, as it locates this change in adult writing for children in the crucial decades during the long period of the consolidation of modernity. I want also to propose, as a general principle, that texts for children written by adults, adults of any ideological persuasion, have more to tell us about adults than they tell us about children, or childhood, a primordial community which absolutely resists adult understanding. In other words, childhood, for adults, will always remain an area of darkness artificially lit by adult intentions and other unconscious adult investments. What do I mean by “unconscious adult investments?” Well, I take Lewis Carroll’s peculiar interest in photographing naked and seminaked female children, for example, as just such an unconscious psychic investment in childhood. The fact is that this activity tells us much more about Carroll than it does about the girls he photographed. It is true to say that the children’s reasons for actually taking off their clothes remain, and will

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remain, a mystery forever. We’ll never know why they did it. Carroll’s reasons for wanting to photograph them are a little more transparent. Chances are that the two intentions, Carroll’s and his girls’, were a thousand miles apart. So the whole episode as we have it in our adult knowledge of it is completely colored by the adult man’s emotional investments. Lewis Carroll was only one of a number of writers who divested their texts of childhood of the moral straitjacket and the thematic commitment to the commonsense realism of the adult. So this change cannot merely be put down, as is sometimes suggested about Carroll, to either the peculiarities of temperament or the unconscious and unrealized erotic desires of one individual. As a general tendency in making texts for children, this change recognized, within a wider pattern of possibly unconscious recognitions, not only the psychological autonomy of childhood, but also its inherent resistance to adult incorporation. Children could be battered into submission, and even be made to forget the violence of the operation, but childhood itself could not be dissolved. Many adult writers of texts for children, then, participated in this wider reorientation of children’s literature. The child in the new texts could be repositioned as an autonomous subject, spellbound in an imaginary world, rather than a moral idiot in need of pacification and instruction. What distinguishes Lewis Carroll’s work, his great discovery about writing texts for children, is that they are perfect sites for resistance to the assimilative strategies of the adult, visited with varying degrees of violence on childhood. By “a perfect site for resistance,” I mean that childhood constitutes an internalized culture which cannot be totally penetrated by adult intelligence. Carroll was in no more privileged position to grasp childhood than any other adult, except in one respect. He was fashioned in the one adult institution that seems to carry a good deal of the noetic remoteness of childhood; I mean, of course, the academy in general and, specifically, the Oxford college, with its Senior Common Room as the communal nursery. His greatest intellectual achievement was in understanding, perhaps even unconsciously, that whatever childhood was, it did not participate in the iron cage of instrumental rationality that had come to pervade the consciousness of whole populations in modernized society. It had come to pervade the so-called commonsense world of the everyday, during the consolidation of the first machine age as the first-order logic of industrial production. It is perhaps difficult today to appreciate to what extent whole populations in the West have been dematerialized as human beings and intellectually incarcerated in that iron cage. Indeed childhood, like the

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College gaudy, could not help but resist, as an attribute of its primordiality, the techno-logic of expert systems, the dyadic linearity of machines. It is highly probable that as a mathematician and logician Carroll understood that much about his own creations.1 However, as an essentially innocent clergyman, what he may not have understood is the political dimension of his intellectual and emotional investment in childhood. This was, briefly, to conceive of the child as a political accomplice, as a political ally in the armed struggle of a new kind of tendentious and absurdist artfulness against the cyclopic regime of instrumental reason. Now, as I said before, I don’t believe that Carroll or anyone for that matter can penetrate from the vantage of our vanished childhoods, that is to say, from our position as adults, the primordial being of childhood. The importance of Carroll’s work is not that it is more in tune with childhood’s own agenda, as some persist in believing (how can we know?), but that in Alice and her adventures we see inscribed another, aggressively defiant narrative, the narrative of Carroll’s own conservative resistance to the dissolutions of modernity, the dissolutions of family and clan, of the ingrained, and unreflexive, customs of a single people living for a long time in the same place in the same way, and, in his case, the same Senior Common Room. His personal mania for order and exactness, neatness and completeness, borders on the obsessive. Let me put it another way. It is obsessive, identifying negatively the great preoccupation of the age: fear of the increasing fragmentation of public and domestic life and its compulsive parcelling into ever smaller units of manageable coherence. The pure or authentic relationship, like the modernist work of art as an autonomous artefact, is one of those smaller units of manageable coherence. But it is also, if we follow on from what I’ve been saying about Carroll, a site of resistance to the same dispersive pressures that threaten to dissolve, in Marx’s ringing phrase, all that is solid, into air. Carroll’s textual and visual construction of childhood, with its peculiar landscapes and with its curious eco-logics, is another. As is the model on which it draws, the bizarre (and largely secret) coherence of the inner culture of the Oxford college. Carroll takes the typical situation of the Victorian child, inmate of the domestic penal colony, the nursery as correctional facility and torture chamber, and reverses its polarities: the child is no longer the panting Yahoo. Instead, Wonderland becomes the comic domain of barbarism, the morally incomprehensible, and the systematically nonsensical. Alice, on the other hand, remains to the end the very embodiment of gentlemanly civility.

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Wonderland is Carroll’s trope of incomprehensible adult society, out there, into which childhood is always already thrown, a society which is a limitless expanse, or rabbit warren, or both at the same time, of horror and randomness. Alice’s endearing politeness and sang froid in the face of the most appalling experiences (so thoroughly the ideal of interiority of a certain kind of Victorian gentleman), including unimaginable threats and potential brutalities, makes of her the exact reverse of what Victorian psychology took to be the child’s nature. She is wittily presented as the representative of what adults believe themselves to be, self-controlled, reasonable, highly principled, consistent, but are not. The strange, deformed, inconsistent, sometimes brutal, inhabitants of Wonderland are exactly cut, with a little exaggeration, from the cloth of an adulthood tipped by the dispersive logic of capitalist modernization not only into moral anarchy, but physical anarchy as well. Only a child, in Carroll’s impersonation of childhood, can see the real physiognomy of the world as it is. Precise collaborative evidence on this point can be found in that other important Victorian novel of childhood, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), which should always be read in conjunction with the Alice tales. Like Maisie’s domestic scene, Carroll’s Wonderland is a scopic regime of childhood, that is to say, it is a world imagined as a child’s vision of the adult domain, a world in reverse looked at through the “wrong” end of the telescope, full of unintelligible reversals of fortune, temptations (eat m e, drin k me), magical geographies (London is the capital of Paris), Multiplication Tables that get nowhere, Pigeons that believe little Girls are Serpents (the skewing of a Victorian Bible-thumper’s commonplace in the child’s mind is brilliant) and fragile narratives of the embodied self in astonishing episodes of metamorphoses (see 35–36 where Alice begins to grapple with these bodily mutations). Alice’s Wonderland is Fr´ed´eric Moreau’s Paris minus Fr´ed´eric’s moral nullity and the grotesque pragmatics of the commodity fetish. Well almost. I’ll return to the commodity fetish and Wonderland below. Carroll intuited the noetic integrity of childhood and construed a useful version of its imaginary investment in the world as a strategy of resistance. If we want to know what Carroll’s sense of the nature of the wider world in which he found himself was, we need look no further than Wonderland itself. Whether he knew it or not, he has provided there a virtual portrait of the way the circuits of capital and the market-form strike across a consciousness habituated to stability and continuity. As an Oxford don and clergyman he already belonged to a traditional community of long standing, within which he had formed the steadiest of habits and the most regular of

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lives, an obsessive exactitude of living which always drew amazed comment from others. Here is how a close relative, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, described one part of Carroll’s manic orderliness: An old bachelor is generally very precise and exact in his habits. He has no one but himself to look after, nothing to distract his attention from his own affairs; and Mr Dodgson was the most precise and exact of old bachelors. He made a precis of every letter he wrote or received from the 1st of January, 1861, to the 8th of the same month, 1898. These precis were all numbered and entered in referencebooks, and by an ingenious system of cross-numbering he was able to trace a whole correspondence, which might extend through several volumes. The last number entered in his book is 98,721. (Collingwood, Life and Letters, 265)

This comprehensive record of his network of correspondents is crucial. It sounds very much like what I called earlier the narrative artefact, or shared history of the new kind of bond, the authentic relationship’s defining moment and its semantic center of gravity. Carroll’s sense of relationship with his correspondents has already acquired subcultural features (and no doubt virtual features in our own digital age as well). His meticulous documentary record of every transaction, even if it is at a distance, suggests as much. It is a project in time, but not of time. Although bounded by dates and places, his archival record is timeless and placeless, floating free of any external context that is not defined by the network of correspondents itself. And according to Collingwood it is a sealed artefact, without loose ends, complete in itself, I suppose much like a novel by Henry James or a lyric poem by Mallarm´e or Rilke, or a local area computer network (LAN) today, or any of the myriad virtual communities which now lie athwart national, class, ethnic boundaries via the Internet. As a self-reflexive project, as a way of sharing history with the inmates of the comradely circle, Carroll’s ink-and-paper LAN goes a little overboard, is somewhat exaggerated, exaggerated to the same degree as Emily Bront¨e’s account of Catherine and Heathcliff ’s relationship perhaps. Indeed it brings Lewis Carroll, as it does Bront¨e, into direct alignment with modernity, notwithstanding his public persona as a rather old-fashioned Victorian curate. He positions his archive, and let me say also that this narrative artefact, what I am calling his archive, includes all those meticulously catalogued photographs of little girls, as a refuge from and a rebuke of modernity. In the same way, to have put himself in the place of a child, or to have appropriated childhood as a political co-conspirator in locating an imaginary world as a viable point of resistance, or impediment, to the juggernaut of modernization, has tied his fate to that of modernism.

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But there is nothing new in associating Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories with the modern movement in literature by the way. As Michael Holquist has pointed out: [H]is name figures in the first Surrealist manifesto (1924); Louis Aragon and Andr´e Breton write essays on Carroll; the former attempts a translation of The Snark (1920), the latter includes selections from Carroll in his Anthologie de l’humour noir (1939). Henri Parisot publishes a study of Carroll in 1952, in a series called, significantly, Poetes d’aujourd hui; Antonin Artaud tries to translate the Jabberwocky song; Joyce’s use of portmanteau words, without which there would be no Finnegans Wake, is only one index of his high regard for Carroll; Borges admires Carroll, and Nabokov translates all of Alice in Wonderland into Russian (Anja v strane chudes 1923). (“Nonsense and Modernism,” 146–47)

And I might add to Holquist’s list, the more contemporary use Luce Irigaray makes of Carroll’s Alice as a site of resistance in her exposition of female discourse, what she calls parler-femme, in the first chapter of This Sex Which Is Not One (1985), the chapter called “The Looking Glass, from the Other Side.” Carroll’s celebrity among the moderns parallells the fame among the moderns of another obscure Victorian clergyman and writer of nonsense verses, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The meaning of Alice’s imaginary world did not require translation into the register of adult civilities and ethical restraining devices. The imaginary is its meaning, in the same way that the spectacle of power is the meaning of power in Louis’s Second Empire, or in the way the narrative artefact or shared history is the meaning of the pure relationship, or, again, the production of the aesthetic is the meaning of the image in the modernist text. In this respect, the figure of Alice, intrigued by the continuous metamorphosis of Wonderland, resembles the increasingly decommunalized consumer of commodities. She resembles also Marx’s bewildered Frenchman held spellbound by Louis Bonaparte, the sly magician, who keeps everyone off balance by means of bareknuckle threats and constant surprises, who bewitches France by staging a revolution in miniature every day. In the Alice tales we find a paradigm for the modernist work of art, a kind of work which takes into account the disposition of the dominant culture in which it finds itself. It does not have to refer explicitly to that culture, to what lies outside the fictive totality; it may take it into account negatively. This is the case with Wonderland. Lewis Carroll may not have set out for himself with absolute clarity the intention of satirizing the impact on traditional society of the market-form and the commodityfetish, but he has carried it off in spite of himself. The white rabbits, the hookah-smoking caterpillars, the living playing cards, the mad parodies of

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tea-parties and legal processes are “fantasy,” in the sense that none of it is realistic, but its inner logic, the interplay of sense and nonsense, connects the fictive invention to the emerging culture of market society. All modernist artworks share this power to reveal obliquely or negatively, without any overt exertions or even intentions, the dissociative effects of capitalist culture. This disclosive action of the artwork, which may not be under the completely conscious control of the artist, requires a negative analysis. A negative analytic is necessary because the modernist artist is not interested in showing us the visible world as it is. It is the very visibility and obviousness of the social world which hides it from sight. A positivist criticism simply tries to align the literal themes of the artwork with what is social appearance. A negative analytic discloses the way in which these social appearances are connected, in short the Wonderland logic that holds the social world of capital and the commodity together. What the modernist artist is interested in revealing is the conventionality of what is, not necessarily the errors in thought and vision which conventions blindly reproduce in everyday life. To convey this, the modernist artist deals with what is closest to hand, i.e. with his or her consciousness and its contents. The modernist work of art focusses attention on its own workings in order to reveal primarily the truths of its own constructedness. Identifying the errors of conventional society or conventional consciousness is a secondary matter, if it is of any concern at all. The modernist work of art seems autonomous because it refuses to operate the conventional epistemological machinery. It seems to denote, like Carroll’s Alice tales and his local area network of correspondents, nothing other than itself, yet at the same time embodying, principally in its formal plasticity, an admonitory critique of that from which it separates itself. This critique is rarely made explicit, but is produced negatively as the product of the dialectics of artwork and context. The modernist work does not participate in public discourse about the familiar issues of the day, except, of course, obliquely, at cross-purposes, or not at all, because its constitutive gesture is a recognition that what passes for debate and thought in the social world or the public sphere is not necessarily “false,” but beside the point. The point is that in the social world, under the conditions of modernity, i.e. the conditions of the market-form and the commodity-fetish, what needs revealing is the new set of conventions by which consciousness of what passes for reality is constructed. If we take Flaubert’s Sentimental Education as paradigmatic of the modernist perspective, all the reformist and revolutionary zeal of various characters is simply absorbed without effect by the society of the spectacle, because all of them are blinded by the power of past investments.

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As Marx tells us, and Flaubert confirms, the participants in the Revolution of 1848 could only conceive of taking part in the new events in the costumes and speeches of the Revolution of 1789. And their own self-consciousness of themselves as actors in a drama, rather than liberating them, contributes to their blindness. Fr´ed´eric’s mind may be blinded in the same way by the same past investments, but his body as apparatus of desire, as a desiringmachine, runs happily and unreflectively along a second track, that of the consummate consumer of commodities. It is this double-tracking of consciousness which Flaubert and Marx make plain. The problem is the society of the spectacle itself, not the tactics and strategies of the actors. To think unreflectively within these circumstances is not to think at all. Within the social world as constituted by the market and by the modernization processes that it drives, few thoughts are possible, except the various instrumentalities. The critical energies of the moralist are replaced by the calculative reason of the civil engineer. One of the assumptions with which modernism begins has been well put by Theodor Adorno: “when people no longer think,” by which he means think critically, “their thinking sanctions what simply exists” (Minima Moralia, 127). Modernist works of art from the start have wanted to break the hold of “what simply exists” on the mind, in the name of a liberation of consciousness and conscience. Two hundred years ago, it was liberation from traditional or customary society with its bedrock of unmovable socioeconomic, political, and religious hierarchies, what Wordsworth identifies in “Intimations of Immortality” as the tragic fate of the new born child: Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight And custom lie upon thee with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! (Poetical Works, 126–28)

For Wordsworth, a kind of liberation is possible in this state of affairs, burdened by “earthly freight.” It occurs sadly in a minor key and is marked by fleeting memories of some “ember” that yet burns, that survives even in the midst of a frozen and paralyzed existence. Geoffrey Hill tells us that in the reddened glow of that redemptive ember, “Wordsworth transfigures a fractured world” (Lords, 88). But the neo-Platonism on which such a transfiguration is grounded is already a dead letter. Modernism imagines a more complete victory. All the modernisms, from Futurism to Dada to Brecht’s epic theatre, present themselves as strategies

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for liberating consciousness from the heavy hand of custom and superstition. But then, on another level, so does an unrestrained capitalism. Modernism at first shares the optimism and promise of modernization in releasing the human potential for change and renewal that accompanies the historical destruction of the older productive orders of premodern Europe. But the reorganization of the productive forces in the economic sphere drives society towards the fragmented, dissociative, and horizontalizing culture common to market societies. Capitalism gradually, and with time, more powerfully, pervades and changes every aspect of existence. As the new situation comes more fully to view, modernism changes its tune. It did not mean this kind of material liberation, where all contacts with the past are dissolved. It meant something else, something like transcendence. For Baudelaire the perpetual flux of modernity is only half of the story of the modern; the other half lies in transcendence, the domain of l’ideal. What exactly this other sort of liberation is, is difficult to say. And that is one of the problems. The commonplace that modernist works of art are autonomous has its starting points in Baudelaire’s uncompromising formulation. Yet the two halves of the modern are unavoidably one, and the ideology of their “separation” signifies, in the larger perspective of modernized society, a resistance to the submersion of works of art in the corrosive sublimate of commercial culture. Modernism, when it recognizes its dilemma, cannot go back to premodernity, yet it cannot go forward willingly with the material forces of a new kind of freedom. This is the hidden irony of Wordsworth’s Ode, which Wordsworth cannot grasp, the irony that lies like a shadow across the poem. Where he saw that the “earthly freight” of custom and tradition, acting to smother the free consciousness of the holy child, was the inevitable destination of human life, modernization, as he himself painfully experienced it in the urban setting, was sweeping away, without a moment’s thought, that very regime of custom which seemed to him unmovable. Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life? Not on your life. We cannot deny that the modernizing process broke up the old hierarchical communities of Europe and all their common intuitive resources and loyalties and fiduciary bonds. And it can be represented as freedom in two ways: both as a force of material liberation, unleashing new productive capacities; and as a force that attacks at its roots in the psyche, the apparatuses of repression and sublimation, mechanisms that act to stopper desire in the unconscious. The release of the genie of desire from the bottle of

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repression increasingly sweeps away, has swept away, all obstacles to gratification. Whether we like it or not, this is the liberation which the capitalist revolution in the nineteenth century has brought about in practice. Many would argue that simple gratification is no liberation at all. But let’s be sensible. Of course, it is a liberation of sorts. But it is not what Wordsworth meant. He did not mean liberation in the sense of being able to buy and sell without constraint, or gratification in the Wonderland of the commodityfetish, or liberation as perpetual homelessness in the anonymous spaces of the city. Let us return for a moment to Alice in Wonderland to see what light Carroll casts on this question. What strikes me about her situation is her restraint and civility in the face of intense provocation. She never loses her temper, although she betrays moments of irritation. She does her best to be civil, to control her anxieties, and she is consistently restrained. In this she is very much like Leopold Bloom. For our purposes, her restraint markedly contrasts the behavior of Fr´ed´eric in his Wonderland, the upside-down Paris of the 1840s, the Paris of gratified desires from which a retributive moral economy seems to have ebbed away. Whatever Fr´ed´eric Moreau may have inherited as some inner code of ethical conduct has effectively evaporated by the time we get to the final pages of the novel. Whether we are happy about it or not, he is, in a sense, a free man. You can, no doubt, hear Flaubert snorting in the background. Fr´ed´eric is the new free man of modernity, banal, amoral, pursuing pleasure, generally free of guilt or shame, a consumer, an actor, a poseur, happily and unreflectively narcissistic. The Paris Wonderland, the city, is his element. And who else but an old swindler, a charlatan of the first order, and yet charmingly sentimental at the same time, again a bit like Bloom, could help but be its Emperor. No one but Louis Bonaparte, “the princely lumpenproletarian,” could have presided over such a city. That Marx paints him as a clownish, farcical figure is beside the point. Marx’s disapproval does not cancel Louis’s genius and his aptness as an imperial figure in the commodity Wonderland. That he financed his lumpenproletarian rabble / private army / secret police (the Society of the 10th of December) by the use of lottery scams and the proceeds from gambling is only a fitting tribute to a man who has intuited the spirit of the age more thoroughly than anyone else. And Fr´ed´eric Moreau is the ideal citizen of this farcical Empire, based on the commodity-fetish and the rifle-butt. The inner resources of moral grace Alice has inherited remain intact in her circuit of Wonderland and Looking-Glass House. In this respect she

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is also free. But this is an older sort of freedom whose ancient meaning dissolves as soon as capitalism recasts freedom as the simple freedom to choose among commodities. One could imagine a malign or slack Alice who, finding herself in Wonderland, reacts in the same way as Fr´ed´eric in Paris, a free zone in which inhibitions dissolve and desire is conceded its cardinal force. I remember hearing about a semipornographic film years ago which rewrote the Alice tale in these terms, with Alice in possession of a robust sexual appetite. Wonderland, in that version, simply released her from Victorian inhibition. The film was exhibited in the 1960s, and it was rather typical of what that time thought its own special mission to be in the history of culture. As societies become more market-directed, that is societies are no longer “subject to the forces of tradition and status” (Haveman and Knopf, Market System, 15), a new kind of social landscape and system of values comes into being. This new kind of society now driven by the market-form and the forces it unleashes may still retain, at the level of ideology or people’s imagined relationships to each other or to the whole, remnants of increasingly antiquated social and cultural forms. Inevitably these surpassed forms no longer exert the same power of regulation and control as in the past. Instead, the market-form entrenches new structures and practices that penetrate society at every level and, over time, transform lived reality. Older institutions may survive for a time, but the respect they are given and their powers diminish as the market-form predominates. New churches, for example, enter the market and begin to compete for adherents with the historical confessions. They offer the comfort of salvation as a commodity with all the usual disclaimers and often with sophisticated media campaigns. The change is gradual at first; it accelerates as the critical mass of forces assembled by capitalism increases. Does anyone notice these changes as the process advances? In quantitative terms, this is a difficult question to answer. However, of one thing we can be sure, people who live by their wits, like paupers, serious artists, and other risk-takers, register these changes first, as practical knowledge in pursuit of simple survival on the one hand, and greater accumulative potency on the other. The less one is encumbered by past investments in traditional constraints, the easier it is to adapt to the new conditions. Furthermore, the degree to which all cultural values, forms, and procedures are penetrated by the new reality will correspond to the degree of freedom from tradition the social agents enjoy. Artists are perhaps the most sensitive to these elemental shifts of the ground, to the earthquake of change which never stops. They are the first to notice disjunctions between

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belief and action. They are the first to modify their own behavior and, in the case of early twentieth-century modernity, to explore new forms of personal and communal life. They are the first to experiment with new resources of expression and to find new ways of bringing their productions to the marketplace, strategies that make it possible not only to survive, but to prosper.

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The margin is the mainstream Montmartre for the masses – newspaper headline, 23 March 2002

chap t e r 9

Artisanal production, Ulysses, and the circulation of goods

Louis Bonaparte, Fr´ed´eric Moreau, Heathcliff, Catherine, and Alice comprise a characterology for modern times (cf. Benjamin’s “series of types” in Arcades, 338). They will migrate from the nineteenth century into the twentieth and delimit a whole range of familiar personalities, from slacker to gangster, from lover to sell-out, from the entrepreneur to flower child. To this set of characters one must also add Marx’s narrator in Eighteenth Brumaire. In his case, we see scientific or rational man confronted by a reality that does not deliver the sense that is expected of it. The rationalist will, in turn, be transformed into a number of specific modern subtypes. One is the bureaucrat, a functional agent of that basic Enlightenment rationalism that posits the external world as fundamentally vulnerable to the operations of human reason. All problems, events, and persons, therefore, can be assigned their proper categories for solution. There is nothing more frustrating for this personality-type than that some particular thing resist its proper appointment. Early modernist writers, especially on the continent, were particularly sensitive to the sudden appearance of categorical anomalies within the rationalized state. Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” for example, allegorizes this kind of system puzzle, as does the mysterious process in The Trial. In traditional, premodern society categorical elegance depends on God. Market-driven modernity cuts the heavenly connection and dislodges the categories. Just so there is no misinterpretation here, I am not saying that the emergence of market society brings out this interest in the rationalized or administrative state and, hence, awareness of categorical noncompliance. Systematizing of the sort found in bureaucracies, for the purpose of administrative coherence (and hence political equilibrium), results from the regulatory and surveillance functions of traditional absolutism. The modern, usually rules-based, bureaucratic state is absolutism with a human face. The face may be that of the gray, humorless functionary, but it is still a face. 163

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Market society, on the other hand, thrives on the anomalous and aberrant, especially in the practicalities of creating wealth. The unconventional is not simply tolerated by the market, it defines its very essence. Markets “institutionalize” unorthodox practices; they elevate that which deviates from the typical. How, after all, does what the admirable delinquency business schools like to call “thinking outside the box” happen? The growing pervasiveness of the market-form and its disruptive effects on the settledness of a particular order brings into play the continuously renewable necessity that allows the creative person to make it new, i.e. hypothesize systemic breakdown and, from it, propose and profit from the “upwelling of the incalculable.” The problem with Marx’s narrator in Eighteenth Brumaire lies in the fact that he could not think his way around the historical farce which France offered up to his astonished eyes. Instead of society as a complex, but pleasingly predictable anthill, dialectical materialism discovered the curious commonwealth of slapstick. The narrator’s reactions resemble the exasperation of the bureaucrat confronted by the proverbial square peg and round hole. He is the more intellectually complicated version of the bitter clerks, functionaries, and rationalist intellectuals that Gogol, Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, and Gorky satirized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature. Each of the personalities listed above is a modernist prototype. If you can imagine all of them bound together in a single body, a single psyche – men and women, charlatans and innocents, producers and consumers – you are left with someone resembling Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, in this respect a man of many parts. Joyce’s copious epic hero is a pacifist, a Jew, a lover, a clerk, a petit bourgeois businessman, a biblical prophet, a salesman and smalltime investor, a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a gambler, a sexually inadequate husband, and so on (Henke, James Joyce, 106). Because psychological positions are mobile and transferable in conditions of modernity, Leopold Bloom, as Suzette Henke has suggested, is constructed as a multiple. “Paradox” is her word, but I’m not sure this is the right word. Henke argues that he is alternately powerful and obsequious, feminized and flagellated, politically exalted and socially humiliated. He emerges as a “new womanly man” and as a hero who seems to inhabit, unheroically, the marginal spaces on the edge of social discourse. The words “paradox” and “alternately” imply simple binaries, with the further implication that they define the terms of a recurring pathology. I don’t think Bloom is either bipolar or neurotic. The dialectic of either/or is a nineteenth-century drama. Bloom is a multiple man. His numerous roles and masks co-exist on a single plane and Joyce tries his best to resist the temptation to treat Bloom as a personality disorder

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in need of treatment. After all, Joyce was himself just such a multiple man. According to Charles Kemnitz, Joyce’s letters “reveal a many-sided personality – a different man to each person he addressed” (Joyce at 101, 42). In Bloom’s case, the multiples are not harmonized into a singular “character.” They are simply allowed to abide as juxtaposed particles, each coherent on its own terms, and without the benefit of an overarching concord that preserves traditional notions of unified identity as the single most important criterion for the psychic health of the subject. It is not for nothing that one of the preeminent artistic forms of the twentieth century is the collage. There is, of course, Joyce’s elaborate gesturing towards either mythological or myth-like identities for his hero. I refer to the romantic arrogation of Odysseus and the Wandering Jew as history-defeating tropes in sketching otherworldly masks for Bloom. But these are hardly practical identities in the business of everyday life. Bloom the pedestrian character, as we find him going about his business, looks forward to the ordinary individual in modernity, the individual at the very heart of market culture. He is not an Everyman as the figure of medieval allegory. He is, more aptly for modern times, Anyman walking the streets of the city. Robert Musil’s Viennese novel, The Man Without Qualities, explores the same area of metaphysical absence. The “man without qualities” is fascinated by the eccentric and the recalcitrant. This fascination reaches such a pitch that he can no longer conceive of himself as independent, but must borrow and emulate, dissemble and expose in order to approximate a “self.’ Stefan Jonsson, the Musil critic, writes: What human beings have in common is emptiness and lack. That the human being is characterized by lack implies that it is characterized by need . . . [But] the human being is at once particular, due to a constitutive need to assert an identity that guarantees social recognition and communal belonging, and universal, due to an ineffable capacity to exceed the identities that condition that belonging. (Subject Without Nation, xi)

Musil’s nostalgia for the fully specified subject, enjoying a unity of self, a meaningful discourse of self-knowledge, and a fully expressive subjectivity, blinds him to the historical potential of the condition he has noticed. Musil’s man without qualities is actually a man with any qualities he cares to take on. Jonsson’s human “lack” may be experienced by a liberal humanist as a metaphysical tragedy, but this lack is the very condition to which the market-form, freed from the past, directs its irresistible promises and its concept of freedom.

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Bloom is no “man without qualities.” He has plenty of qualities; what he lacks is a principle of order that organizes them into a practical hierarchy of values. This kind of concatenated character goes straight to the heart of the modernist dilemma in confronting its own fate in history, its own fate in the modernized world. For this reason, the loosening and fluctuating relationship between public history (Joyce’s “nightmare”) and private life, with its emphasis on authenticity and trust, becomes a central thematic of modernist culture. The privatized self, the pure relationship, the improvised or noetic community define various strategies for surviving the dissolutions of the public world as the domain of agency in market capitalism. This split is not new. What is new is that the older links between private and public have been effaced. What I mean is that the old ideal of conduct, that our outward behavior ought to reflect our inner purposes, has evaporated. Witness the decline of hypocrisy as a major fault of character. The fact that we take this condition to be normal only means that we have had a long time to get used to it (cf. Sennett, Fall, on Balzac, 155). In the nineteenth century this was rarely the case. A significant relation between private and public selves not only still persisted, but was regulated and policed by concrete sanctions. A bankrupt in the business sense was also, and in equal measure, a moral bankrupt. Bankruptcy was not just another business plan, a way of protecting assets, in order to refinance or write off debt. It was an admission of moral failure in need of moral atonement and correction. Yet, even in the nineteenth century, it was possible to see what was coming in the sphere of human or communal relations under the impact of an increasingly less regulated market society. The first step was the shift away from the extended kinship system as social focus for the communal organization of society. This unravelling is powerfully dramatized by D. H. Lawrence in his saga of the Brangwen family, in The Rainbow and Women in Love. By the end of the second novel we have seen the kinship system replaced in stages by new kinds of personal and communal attachments. During the decline of the extended family as the site of a living social space, we must look also at the compensatory development of the nuclear family as a new social domain. The domestic circle, worshipped and practised in its highest form by the Victorian middle classes in Britain, strong as it was, could not survive the corrosive action of material values in market-driven society. By the end of the twentieth century the nuclear family, too, had imploded. The individual was released from most traditional communal contexts into either the virtuality of the isolated atom or an improvised community of arranged attachments for which the bohemian enclave provides

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the modern paradigm. And this is perhaps the real, but ambiguous, story of liberation in modernity. What was controlled and enforced in private and public conduct by the communal disciplines of the past has been replaced by the self-regulating, self-sustaining moral imperatives of the inner person and the improvised group. And, luckily, Kantian moral doctrine, with its emphasis on immanence, arrived on the scene just in the nick of time in order to prevent the free fall into moral nullity. We are free then to follow our own conscience. But what if we have no conscience, like Louis Bonaparte or Fr´ed´eric Moreau or the Uzi-toting drug dealer in South Florida? Or what if the dictates of our conscience are so powerful, so much the subjects of desire that we must turn our backs on the given communal world altogether, like Catherine and Heathcliff? Or like Charlie and the gamin in Modern Times? It is the awareness of being free to live a kind of multiple existence, in which the multiples co-exist in various states of virtual autonomy one from the other, which seems to me to be the starting place of modernism at the level of the person. Market society is the ideal type of socioeconomy in which this multiple person flourishes. No other kind of society in human history offers the same ideal socioeconomic conditions for the nurturing of the multiple individual. Market society authorizes the multiplication or collage of selves, not as an evolutionary development, one thing emerging from another, but as semiautonomous elements juxtaposed in a blank space, resembling, structurally, either a Cubist canvas, or the trading-floor of a stock exchange, or, for that matter, the “structure” of Eliot’s Waste Land. As mentioned in my Introduction, Lawrence M. Friedman’s The Horizontal Society provides a general discussion of the link between a disaggregated society, i.e. a society increasingly fractured into relatively autonomous particles and the disaggregated personality. Friedman argues that “modern men and women are much freer to form relationships that are on a plane of equality (real or apparent) – relationships with peers, with like-minded people”(5). He quotes Peter Berger et al. to the effect that modern identity is “peculiarly open” (The Homeless Mind, 77) and Robert Jay Lifton on the modern individual as “fluid and many-sided,” evolving a “sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our times,” a condition of social being that Lifton calls “protean” (The Protean Self, 1). The antithesis to the horizontalizing forces in modernity lies in traditional “vertical” communities. Relationships in traditional families, clans, tribes, societies are organized around hierarchical or vertical authority structures in which there are settled lines of dominion that run from top to bottom and back again. Clearly set out reciprocal rights and obligations address the relations

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among the different social levels. In vertical society, individual identity is more strictly regulated – your place of birth, your gender, your family’s traditional occupations, and the government of a particular kinship system determine to a very large extent sense of self and of the available menu of probabilities in the life-span. In market-driven society, the probable becomes the possible. Modernity has undermined the verticality of both social and individual being. Friedman writes that “a horizontal society affects, at the deepest level, a person’s sense of self”: A horizontal society is a society of individuals – and individualists. People in society are taught, and come to believe, that they have the right and the power to construct a life, a meaning, an identity for themselves as unique individuals. The groups that make up society are different from the groups with in traditional societies. They are socially constructed, they are complex, and they are voluntary – chosen – in significant ways. In a sense, one even chooses (within limits) a race, a gender, a form of sexuality. One can also choose not to be counted as part of any particular group, though this is sometimes more difficult, because the outside society does not always go along with one’s choice. (240)

The focus of Friedman’s work is on ordinary individuals rather than on social and political notables. The portrait he draws of the “republic of choice” (244) demonstrates the degree to which the process of social fragmentation has penetrated to the level of the ordinary individual and to that individual’s sense of personal identity. The republic of choice makes its first clear appearance in the open social spaces designated by the avant-garde bohemias of the Western capitals. It has now “trickled down” to the manifold individual who comprises, in their immense isomorphic aggregates, the so-called “masses.” The important point is that the multiple person is not a site in which a social and psychological pathology in need of correction gets acted out. Only those for whom modernity is a metaphysical and/or psychological disaster can make such an argument. The multiple or horizontal personality is the norm in market societies where capitalism has eroded the vertical hierarchies of old. And with their demise, so too the social and psychological cohesion that held the hierarchies in place. The arrival of the Internet has only consolidated for the masses in the twenty-first century these modern tendencies. The personality experiments so vividly dramatized in the avantgarde literature of eighty years ago have now migrated to the trailer park and the working-class suburb. Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the first texts of modernity not only to have fathomed this situation, but to have comprehensively enacted it in the

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work of art (Eliot’s Waste Land is another). In Ulysses, Joyce explicitly refers to this very dilemma, in hilariously inflated terms, in the “Ithaca” chapter, the question-and-answer chapter: What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination? He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction of the converse domain of interindividual relations. (Ulysses, ed. Gabler et al., 545)

The liberation of human energies in the context of a radical individualism is accompanied by a loosening of the social bond. The novel traces Bloom’s and Stephen’s attempts to find again a coherent network of communal relations, those which are given, but cannot satisfy, because they are no longer vital or significant, and those which are created and sustained by the conscious effort of the participants. Joyce’s Ulysses is a virtual chatroom of actual and possible human relationships in the present, in the historical past, and in the temporally neutral domain of myth. For Stephen, the fact of this loss of cohesion crushes him. His mood remains elegiac throughout because he cannot see beyond it. For Bloom, in the spirit of “liberation” which the circulation of capital induces as the defining characteristic of the human condition, the sadness of loss in the violation of the conjugal bond by Molly’s adultery is tempered by his willingness to move on and go beyond it, to entertain the new possibilities which the effacement of past communal investments makes possible. Modern Dublin commemorates, in all its dense detail, the loss. The city becomes what might be called the totalizing trope that provides the novel with its structural coherence. In this respect Flaubert, as Hugh Kenner has long insisted, is Joyce’s mentor. The Parisian sprawl of Sentimental Education is more finely concentrated in Ulysses’s Dublin. This is a novel of people walking around a city. We follow the perambulations of two of them. But the city provides the structural trope which assembles the novel’s form and projects a new kind of social reality. The “plasticity” of the cityscape was already anticipated in the urban novels of the nineteenth century. It is certainly a clearly formulated theme in literature by the time Joseph Conrad comes to write The Secret Agent in 1906. The explosion that kills Stevie reverberates throughout the work’s imagery and structure. The bomb is the simplest part of Conrad’s “Simple Tale.” But the effects of this plot device are complicated and diverse. It is as if Conrad organized the novel in content and form around the blank space left by the detonation. The fractures that run through the language and

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imagery, the setting, and the narrative structure all seem to spread out, in a fine ravel, from the blasted center. One might argue that the bomb is the most appropriate plot twist in a novel which suggests that an explosion is the best metaphor for modern times. The importance of the urban setting lies in just this wider application of the bomb device, namely that the modern city is also the product of explosions, explosions of population, industrialism, revolution, urban sprawl, and trade. The modern metropolis is a place in which the center no longer holds. Even the topography is fractured. This is deftly conveyed by Conrad’s use of London’s famous topographical vagaries. For example, as Verloc walks towards the embassy early in the novel, we are told that No. 1 Chesham Square is nowhere near Chesham Square proper, and No. 37 in the Square actually belongs to Porthill Street. The narrator comically invokes Parliament to pass an Act to compel these wandering “edifices to return where they belong”(53). The mention of Parliament reminds us that the city does indeed have a center, in this case, a political center in Westminster, but it is a center without substance, or at least a center which is vaguely vacuous. We recognize the powerful in this seat of power by their titles and costumes rather than by any discernible traits of vigorous character. For example, take Conrad’s description of Sir Ethelred, the novel’s most imposing political personage, at the beginning of Chapter Seven. It conveys precisely a stuffed shirt sense of “substance,” a puffed-out man coming apart at the seams. The Assistant Commissioner finds him “at the very centre of the Empire” on which “the sun never sets” (198): Vast in bulk and stature, with a long white face, which broadened at the base by a big double chin, appeared egg-shaped in the fringe of thin greyish whisker, the great personage seemed an expanding man. Unfortunate from a tailoring point of view, the crossfolds in the middle of a buttoned black coat added to the impression, as if the fastenings of the garment were tried to the utmost. From the head, set upward on a thick neck, the eyes, with puffy lower lids, stared with a haughty droop on each side of a hooked aggressive nose, nobly salient in the vast pale circumference of the face. A shiny silk hat and a pair of woven gloves lying ready on the end of a long table looked expanded too, enormous. (142)

When we add to this portrait the fact that he is attended by a private secretary named “Toodles,” a “youthful-looking” man, we soon get the picture. The phrase “man of substance,” as a conventional epithet for the powerful person or a person of character can only come into a reader’s mind ironically, as does the comic description of the knight’s nose as “nobly salient” (the inflation of the phrase capturing exactly the “expanded” man). If Sir Ethelred and Toodles are the quality of person at the center of power

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in the great city, then this is certainly an exploded jurisdiction. Every individual and institution seems to be moving around a never-setting, “bloodshot”(51) sun that can no longer hold its satellites in their proper orbits. The city does not only define a place and a time, but as Raymond Williams, Richard Sennett, and David Harvey have argued, a perceptual condition as well, a condition characterized by fragmentation, acceleration, the disjunctive multiplication of perspectives, and the side-by-side horizontality of simple juxtaposition. The reproduction of these perceptual conditions leads to the urbanization of consciousness (Harvey, Urban Experience, 229–30). As readers of literary texts, we see one of the effects of this transformation of consciousness as deeply related to several characteristic forms of modern imaging, in literature, in painting, in film – especially montage as the defining technique for connecting sequences. We see it also in the use of encyclopedic forms for the structuring of narrative. Or we see it in the collage-form as a cognitive artefact of urban consciousness conceding the obsolescence and dispersion of romantic notions of organic unity along single lines of perspective. These platitudes were, in turn, tied to the idea of the substantial unity of the self, the unshakable connection of self and nature, and the notable efficacy of the discourse of humanism. As I argued earlier, in Wordsworth’s experience of the city in Book Seven of The Prelude, the effects of urban experience are concussive, disintegrative, fantasmic, unsettling, and deeply offensive, in a word, modernist. Wordsworth’s disorientations are determined by his various assumptions, which the city, whether he recognized it or not, brought into question. His assumption, for example, of the ultimate inviolability of the internal laws of human nature, radically offended by the urban experience, remains essentially unmoved and unshaken by it. From the perspective of modernism, what caused Wordsworth’s discomfort is actually the violation of certain deeply ingrained conventions of perception and feeling. He took the form and structure of his own consciousness as a natural given, certainly concussed by what he experienced in London, but escaping from it intact. Bloom’s consciousness, on the other hand, is the product of the city through and through. So is Stephen’s, but deflected and confused by his Baudelairean pursuit of the sublime and the ideal, which serves as an aesthetic stay in the perceptual flux of city life. His angst-ridden pursuit of the aesthetic helps insulate Stephen in his perambulations. Joyce’s irony lies in the fact that such protective coloring is no longer possible. By the end of the twentieth century, the aesthetic offers neither redemptive transcendence nor simple escape from the market-driven flux, but is the most potent source of persuasive effects in the science of stimulating consumption.

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Bloom, on the other hand, is shown as thoroughly acclimatized, for better or worse, to the new landscapes of modernity. Here is a description of Bloom’s morning walk in the fourth chapter. Notice the shifting of consciousness from one plane to another, even shifting effortlessly in and out of a Wonderland-scape, and the function of language as marking the shifts through alteration of diction, syntax, point of view, subject-position, register and so on: He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church. Be a warm day I fancy. Specifically in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn’t go in that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as he walked in happy warmth. Boland’s breadvan delivering with trays our daily but she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot. Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day’s march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand, strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker, old Tweedy’s big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of spear. Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel, sherbert. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well, meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal, the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches me from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet, colour of Molly’s new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass. (Ulysses, ed. Gabler et al., 46–47)

Here is the modernist rewriting of Wordsworth’s St. Batholomew Fair, no longer experienced as a spiritual disaster but simply as the way things are. In the 1790s, these disjointed experiences worked to disrupt both the subject’s internal equilibrium and discourse. In Wordsworth’s case, they took blank verse to its limit. The Joyce passage, Raymond Williams tells us, reflects one kind of realist speech community in disorder (“Kind of stuff you read” [Gabler, 47]), in midst of making a new kind of order, a new coherence from verbal elements (City, 291–94). These elements no longer exhibit cohesion in traditional syntactic and grammatical patterns. The use of shifting perspective, third- and first-person narration, means that the text must hang together in other ways. The disembedding of consciousness from its reliance on concrete contexts of situation must now underwrite a text’s coherence. In 1922, the effort to read this kind of writing was very demanding. Today hardly anyone is confused by it. The mobility of

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consciousness and the de-authorizing of point of view is now a given, not only of the theory seminar, or avant-garde poetry, but of mass culture as well. It is the older forms of syntactic and grammatical coherence (say the prose of Sir Thomas Browne or even of John Stuart Mill) which pose the greatest difficulties for most readers today. Nineteen-year-olds who have no problem getting their fractured heads around hip hop or the disjointed horizontality of a George W. Bush speech cannot follow the hypotactic cascade of a Henry James sentence. Of course, in this release from old forms and patterns, there is always exhilaration. No one can deny that modernist revisions of style release new energies of perception and speech. Things get said that could not be said in other ways, but it is always through the disintegration of previous stylistic investments. In this respect, cultural reinvestments, like Joyce’s prose styles in Ulysses, work like capital. The wrecking ball and the bulldozer must clear the property of the old brick in order to accommodate the new erections of steel and glass. Old brick that survives serves other purposes, for example as a heritage commodity to help fuel a tourist industry, or, as part of the persistence of the desire for antiquarian luxuries by the rich, or as an ideological effect in sustaining a national idea; hence the “preservation” of high-end, socially posh Georgian terraces in London while old Millwall is annihilated without a second thought. Joyce’s clever digest of the history of English verbal styles in his chapter “The Oxen of the Sun” clears the linguistic property of all its old rubbish readying the ground for a new language from which any courteous memory of its former styles has been effectively shelved (cf. Levine, “Reading Ulysses,” 271); not obliterated mind you, but bracketed off as the source of comic effects and the same derisory archness that put paid to the Isle of Dogs. Finnegans Wake is already the steel and glass tower on the horizon as we watch the bricks go down in Ulysses (cf. Kenner, Joyce’s Voices, 37 and Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions, 110–11). The best that can be said for the past of the English language in Ulysses is that it might share the fate endured by the lost objects and curios on the Antiques Roadshow. Culture in market society cannot escape this fate. It does not accumulate across its whole extent as a comprehensive and intelligible tradition. It is not ancestral baggage or a mere inheritance or “some pleasing archæological reconstruction” (Eliot, “Tradition,” 47). The great work of art from the past functions more and more like a commodity in a system of exchange. With each new work, Eliot tells us, “the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole is readjusted” (50). A system of perpetual readjustment of values? Tradition in this sense has become a marketplace

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in which no value/price is ever fixed or static. The sticker price is always negotiable. This incidentally is the unkindness that time has visited on T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and on those critics who think that Eliot is arguing for an ideal hierarchy of established and nonnegotiable “monuments.” He isn’t. “[T]he past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” It is the first part of the sentence that counts, the concession in the second part is a sop to those who haven’t yet understood the one-way aggression of market modernity. Cultural fragments survive as long as they serve some use in the present. What doesn’t serve or is not quotable, dies. The city with its disintegration of the older, rooted forms of traditional communities is the immediately material analogue of the revolution of the word. And at the base of this spiral of changes we have the abstract principle, the revolutionary principle of capitalism itself, perpetual change as the oxygen of a new way of life. In Joyce, and modernism in general, the laws/conventions of traditional observation and communication as they would have been enacted by Wordsworth have evaporated. The resulting awareness is intense, fragmented, privatized, certainly subjective, but a new kind of subjectivity that now disperses the organicist unity of the subject and the metadiscourse of human nature. It does this by the use of disembedded images, buildings, noises, smells, sights, which seem solid in their intense thinginess, but which are indistinguishable from fantasy in the subverted hierarchies of modernist discourse. Joyce is wise to this. The evocation of the orientalist city above is already recognized as a merely verbal construct: “Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read” (Gabler, 47). And he is wise also to the relationship of open-form discourse and advertising. His comments about the leader banner of Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, The Freeman, make this clear enough. “A home rule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland” is already a form of branding. And Bloom’s observations about the effective positioning of signs and billboards in the next paragraphs bring us to our own time in the span of a few hundred words. His final insight – how modifications of the cityscape (building a tramline) are driven by abstract factors (property values), disembedded from history and context – completes the story. As many media studies make clear, advertising dematerializes the commodity the more intensely it focusses attention on the object’s capacity to stimulate pleasurable experiences (Ewen, Images, 218). This, by the way, is no new thing. It was already part of the curriculum of mass persuasion in 1911:

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The man with the proper imagination is able to conceive of any commodity in such a way that it becomes an object of emotion to him and to those to whom he imparts his picture, and hence creates desire rather than a mere feeling of ought. (Quoted in Ewen, Captains, 31)

By shifting the emphasis from the concrete use to which commodities are put, advertising marks out lifestyle choices or status-regimes to which particular demographic groups are urged to aspire. The obsessive fixation on the decontextualized object brings about its dissolution as an object, a dissolution that refocusses attention to a completely aestheticized internal life. Thus, we compensate for the way the tramline runs along an abstract grid of economic gains, smashing the lived reality of place, by immersing ourselves in beautiful daydreams. What presses out, then, is consciousness itself. In fiction, the shift from the narrative focus on action (as we find it in realist narratives) to consciousness, which we saw in Wuthering Heights, is here completed. The forces of the action have become internal and in a way there is no longer a stable, intersubjectively coherent community. There is instead the sprawl of the unbounded city reflected in the mobility of the perceiving consciousness: The intense self-consciousness, the perceptual subjectivity, was . . . very powerfully developed, as a literary mode. It relates, directly, not only to what is called “stream of consciousness” or “internal monologue,” but also to that modernist version of “symbolism” in which the isolation and projection of significant objects is a consequence of the separated subjectivity of the observer. These processes . . . are profoundly related to underlying models of life and society. (Williams, City and Country, 294)

The unbounded city is for consciousness the tabula rasa of communal life – there is now less and less community and more and more city; less and less ritual, more and more routine; less and less conversation, more and more verbal exhibitionism. You do not think. You have a “take.” The substantial reality, the living variety of the city, is in the pedestrian’s, the flˆaneur’s, mind as images or spectacles always already entangled in language, indistinguishable from it, producing new verbal structures – fragmentary, partial, miscellaneous, isolated, conscious of things, but also of the way things are conventionally represented in the verbal resources of common intuitive life. As a result of that awareness, literary discourse begins to resemble in its operations the revolutionary dynamic of the market-form, the regimen of perpetual subversion of the settled, of the already said. It lays bare the fact that the only knowable community lies in the verbal forms generated by mobile and separated forms of consciousness. Perhaps

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we have here a desire that defines the inherent sociality of the human. But this is a desire that no longer finds a concrete embodiment in a practical historical memory. It finds its voice in the improvised communities of speech that lie at the heart of the modern city and at the heart of Ulysses. Both the modernist novel and the modernist city are institutions organized around verbal display. The consciousness of drift and dispersal foregrounds in discourse the only and most deeply known human community there is, which is, according to modernism, the community of language itself. Fr´ed´eric Moreau is the model here. For him the past, and that includes the past of language, is a repository of roles one might play as a function of lifestyle choices in a city where everything is possible. This melodrama is the source of Marx’s dismay about the events of 1848. The Revolution’s form and content are only partially explained by reference to the workings of material interests or constitutional settlements, the old engines of history. The revolution and Louis’s coup are as much the product of the urbanization of consciousness as they are the product of class struggle, indeed more so. In Eighteenth Brumaire, the city itself as theatre for the enactment of tragedy and farce is the shadowy explanatory concept which Marx cannot yet grasp, even though his contemporary Flaubert can. Flaubert’s obsessive historical and geographical accuracy in Sentimental Education does not paralyze his rendering of the city as the playhouse of fantasies that redefine consciousness. Indeed, this documentary realism is shown to be seriously disconnected from the sociopolitical imaginary in the same way that the physical reality of a commodity is disengaged from the lifestyle imaginary it triggers in the consumer’s head. Joyce’s Ulysses will take Flaubert’s achievement one step further in making this disconnection one of the defining instances of the culture of market society. For all the anxious dating and placing of Ulysses, the documentary exhaustiveness of the text as a whole, giving it an extraordinary density of reference, tends towards a kind of hyperrealism. I’m referring, of course, to the care Joyce took in pinpointing detail, like the day of the year, the time of day, the address with “the loose cellarflap,” and several thousand other points of empirical detail which have produced a field all its own in Joyce studies. Even with all this thickening of the setting, the reality effect is not particularly strong. It is an abstracted, or more strictly an immanent, pattern of relationships, not the lived relations of possibly actual historical actors and communities, but disembedded and re-presented as myths or transhistorical typologies, of Bloom as the Wandering Jew, of man and woman, father and son as primordial relations. We still have a family, but a family as myth, not a family you can go home to. The total effect is of human

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relations without human contact and free radicals of character searching for each other through a phantasmagoria of myth. This general sense of the represented world of the novel defines not only the novel’s themes but the novel’s own historical situation as a material object. The story of Joyce’s struggles to write Ulysses, to get it into print, and to release it from the Babylonian captivity of the British and American censors has been told many times.1 If we are to believe his letters, Joyce often perceived these obstacles in financial terms.2 Of course, when necessary and for the right audience, he also appealed to the principles of freedom of speech and of conscience as he does in the famous letter to Bennett Cerf, 2 April 1932 (Ulysses, 1961, xiii–xv). But Joyce clearly had his eye on the bottom line as well. Without copyright protection in Britain and America, which publication there would have given him, his work could be pirated at will and the profits of clandestine publication would go to those who had, as he puts it in the letter, no “moral ownership” over the work (Ulysses, 1961, xv). For him, censorship was above all a financial matter, a restriction of fair trading practices, not simply a transgression of liberal political principles. For the received history of modernism, on the other hand, Joyce’s struggles with publishers, printers, and the censors is another matter. The narrative of those events, leading to the text’s final triumph as quintessential modernist text, constitutes the early and heroic moment in the struggle of propelling modernism from the margins of market society to its cultural centre. It is the garage band phase of the modernist success story. But not a success that the modernists themselves might have expected. The making of Ulysses, along with the making of Eliot’s Waste Land, are key constituents of modern culture as we have come to know it, no longer as the coterie culture of a marginalized bohemia, but as the preferred cultural style of developed societies as a whole, in both their elite fractions and in the mass. In the course of modernism’s general expansion and acceptance, the artefact itself, the text of the novel has been transformed. Certainly, the narrative of the events surrounding the composition and appearance of the novel in 1922 (and the subsequent battles over its difficulty, the censorship, copyright, the freedom of expression, and the contest of rival editions) have a good deal to do with the transformation of the novel as a cultural icon. But these are external factors. I want also to propose an internal, stylistic reason for the curious conjunction of the text, and, through it, modernism in general, with the capitalist order of things in the late twentieth century. I want to try to lay bare why the novel is no longer simply an extraordinary work of art, positioned over and above exchange, but circulates in the market as a commodity along with cell phones, ballpoint pens, and

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lawn mowers. Of course, it was a commodity right from the start. But its early publishing and marketing history is obscured from view by the emphasis the early twentieth-century avant-garde, Joyce’s first audience, placed on aesthetic and poetic value. This was the partition between culture as a fixed and immanent good in the ethical and spiritual sense and the emerging mass market in cultural goods. At a certain point in time, Ulysses changes its character as an artefact. It no longer needs the life support of the various informal institutions of la boh`eme, what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the anti-‘economic’ economy of pure art” (Rules, 142). I mean, of course, the small press, the unpaid energy of well-meaning enthusiasts, the private collector, the wealthy patron, the stirring polemic of experiment and innovation as the life-blood of artistic process, and the critical applause of the avant-garde community in general. At a certain point in time – and that historical moment is reached, the 1961 edition tells us, on 6 December 1933 – Ulysses slips into the mainstream. Judge Woolsey’s decision to admit the novel to the American market clears the legal barrier for its transposition. This moment has been mythologized in the discourse of twentieth-century neoliberalism as an advance in liberty, in freedom of conscience and expression, in the recognition by the legal system and, therefore, by society as a whole, that artistic merit trumps the narrow moralisms of the past and does so unapologetically. All well and good, but that polemic had the further effect of obscuring what the Woolsey moment actually does to the novel. “Transform” is not the right word here, implying as it does some change that occurs to the text itself. No, what happens is more in the way of an unveiling. The Woolsey judgment discovers the commodity nature of the artefact and gives it leave to circulate openly like other goods in the mass market, rather than to circulate privately among the happy few. Ulysses could now seek an audience of its own, probably never on the scale of a popular novel, but certainly within the confines of a specialized cultural submarket. The William Morris firm and the Omega Workshops in England had already shown the commercial potential of highbrow culture carefully targeted to specific consumers. The innovations of Omega in particular came in the form of creating products that carried the biggest bang for the cultural buck but were marketed across class and income lines. Wrapping the product in an aura of high art and design, not entirely successfully carried off by Roger Fry, was eventually refined into highly profitable businesses by Terence Conran’s Habitat, Ikea or, more specifically in the recent craze for Bloomsbury products, the Potterybarn company, for example, in the US. The trade in cultural goods, whether they are in the “lifestyle” arts, or in

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experimental fiction, enjoys essentially the same structural differentiations as the trade in any other high-end commodity. For one thing they are all part of the same “experience” economy described by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore and sold by techniques of “emotion marketing” (Robinette and Brand, Emotion Marketing, 24). Eventually Ulysses would become a best-seller, not in any one year, but over a long period of time. Once the novel was established as an exemplary icon of modernism in the curriculums of several thousand university and college English departments around the world, it would never stop finding an audience. 6 December 1933 marks the moment of freedom for Ulysses, certainly of expression, but also of copyright protection, royalty payments, intellectual property rights, including the right to market the work in whatever way the owner of the property sees fit. In this way, the year 1933 marks the moment when Ulysses, and perhaps, with it, modernism, enters the mainstream. But, and this is the most interesting aspect of the story, the novel’s eleven years on the margins, as a coterie object, are not erased or forgotten. In fact, those early years are deliberately recapitulated with each new Random House edition of the novel. The aim seems to be to remind us of the noble struggle which history sometimes thrusts on the great in the progress towards the expansion of liberty and culture. That this narrative is also a shrewd marketing strategy for positioning the novel as a cultural good doesn’t hurt either. Nor does the implied flattery of the reader/consumer. The editors of the first copy I bought in June of 1967, a November 1966 reprint of the up-til-then authoritative Random House edition of 1961, still felt compelled, Ancient Mariner-like, to retell the original romantic tale. They prefaced the novel with a Foreword by one of the defense attorneys during the American obscenity trial in 1933, plus the transcript of US District Judge John M. Woolsey’s opinion (A.110–59) admitting the novel into the United States, dated 6 December of that year. They also included a three-page letter dated 2 April 1932 from Joyce himself to Bennett Cerf, the publisher, detailing the sad difficulties Joyce had encountered in publishing all his works, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and his various protracted struggles with censors after they found their way into print. As a rather young and impressionable 22-year-old, I can still remember the quiet indignation and superiority I felt as I read these preliminary pages, Judge Woolsey’s inspiring words, and Joyce’s pitiable account of his troubles. I could see in my mind’s eye all those red-faced lowbrows, the Babbits and the Mrs. Grundys grinding their teeth and shaking their fists at me, at me personally, as I, along with the attorneys, Judge Woolsey, Bennett

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Cerf, James Joyce, and progressive, enlightened opinion everywhere, stood up to them. The feeling was marvellous. It was precisely what I needed to hear. The rhetoric of the preliminaries appealed to my needs as a young adult, namely the angry rebelliousness of late adolescence and the forlorn yearning for adult acceptance. The construction of Joyce as noble victim helped with the first; Woolsey and Cerf ministered to the second. In even possessing and studying such a book, I could imagine myself as part of that heroic struggle, the struggle of getting modernism accepted, of asserting its greatness as a literary movement and of asserting my own, small, but nonetheless necessary, place in the story. I was only one, but I was also many. “Emotion marketing” could not have been more successful. What I couldn’t see in those June days of 1967, although the evidence stared me in the face, was that modernism had already arrived and it had found me out. In that blinded state of self-righteous beatitude then, I turned, finally, to the first words of the novel. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . .” I paused. The effect of the giant initial “S” and the whole peculiar lift of the phrase knocked me out. This was rapture, “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air.” By the time I reached “was sustained” I was already in a faint; the sacramental levity of the borne bowl, the mock-holy wink of crossed mirror and razor, and the ambivalent biblical and sexual resonances of “ungirdled,” having accomplished their expected parodic work, were almost too much to bear. But the verb phrase “was sustained” still awaited; it was a crowning achievement. It was perfect, so cleverly discriminated, and for at least two reasons. The word “sustained” aptly chosen from the verbal register implied by the word “Stately” (with its stately initial) (active verbs like “flapped” or “wavered” would certainly have missed the mark). It was chosen also for the onomatopoeic suggestiveness in the juxtaposition of auxiliary particle and first syllable, “was sustained,” arresting the streaming yellow dressing gown’s faint susurrus, in “the mild morning air.” The passive construction was also superbly witty, winking at one of the principal themes of the novel as a whole, the congenital passivity of the Irish scene, still suffused in 1904 by the colonial lassitude of a subject people. Having survived the first sentence, I pressed on, page after page. The initial spell lasted well into the second chapter, to about page 36, collapsing finally from the weight of the accumulating artfulness, indeed from the fatigue induced by surfeit, of following through in every syllable and phrase and pause the movement of the quickened, multiplied consciousness which the relentless aesthetic labor beget. It was my first real

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experience of what Walter Pater was getting at in his marvellous avowal of aestheticism in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, the book I had lived with in the summer of 1966. The hard, gem-like spell ended with Mr. Deasy stamping up the gravel path back into his school, accompanied by the ravishing closing image: “On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.” I closed the book. I didn’t open it again for a very long time. I didn’t have to. I had already consumed it. I didn’t really need to go any further, because I had already been primed for the task of reception. I spent a good deal of time after that getting into the scholarship, reading criticism, reading biography and memoir, getting acquainted with the community of readers, the telepathic community which the cult-object summoned out of past and present. In ca. 1967, Ulysses as a commodity was still obscured by its past. The story of its initial public life as a coterie object, as a product of an artisanal production process, a matter of limited editions, numbered and signed by the author, circulated more or less among like-minded and progressive literary friends, had already entered the commodity-structure of the actual work. The modest private press with its small-scale capacity was one of the material bases on which the modernist ethos rested even as late as the 1960s. Early on, people like Elkin Mathews, John Lane, William Bird, Robert McAlmon, Nancy Cunard, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf in London, to name only a very few, defined the productive base of early modernism. It was a face-to-face trade, sometimes little more than a system of barter and selling by consignment or subscription, carried on by amateurs with few resources in studios and lofts, in cellars and backrooms.3 What has never been studied adequately is the relationship of this system of cultural production and marketing to the evolution of the late twentiethcentury turbo-capitalism to come. Perhaps it is only at the beginning of the twenty-first century that we can begin to appreciate the importance of these small-scale operations not only to literary history, but to the history of commerce as well. We know all about their revolutionary insights into the making of works of art, but their revolutionary insights into marketing, for example, have gone largely unnoticed. In fact, their pioneering activities in getting their goods to the appropriate market niche has trickled down the years to marketing pioneers today who still follow, usually unwittingly, the practices trailblazed by, say, the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press or by someone like Julien Levy, the salesman of Surrealism in Manhattan in the 1930s. It is only in the last two decades that business schools and business writers have begun to understand the efficacy of marketing practices originally exploited, out of economic necessity, by early twentieth-century

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avant-gardes. It has not been by studying the commercial smarts of Pablo Picasso or the Omega Workshops that they have acquired the knowledge. It was primarily by noticing the innovation, experiment, and success of certain corporate entities, like Harley-Davidson or The Grateful Dead rock band, in the 1980s and 1990s. These firms had themselves broken free from traditional ways of connecting with their customers and, as a result, rediscovered the techniques that Roger Fry, Nancy Cunard, and Shakespeare & Co. could have passed on to them had they bothered to look back in time with open eyes. Avant-garde marketing practices are distinguished by a number of crucial factors according to Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin in their 1999 book Radical Marketing. Let me be clear that Hill and Rifkin have nothing to say about early twentieth-century modernism, but everything they say about innovative, experimental, and “radical” marketing techniques in the 1980s and 1990s describes to a T the visionary business acumen often found in twentieth-century modernist bohemias but never recognized as such. Specific factors include the “visceral connection”(18) between producer and primary consumer. This reenacts the face-to-face bonds that brought avant-garde artists and the community of like-minded bohemian consumers together. There’s also the pressure of a long-term and intensely concentrated commitment to the product. In the all-or-nothing, speculative conditions of avant-garde artistic activity, obsessive belief in what one is doing is the only possible path to follow. Think of the commitment of Roger Fry to Postimpressionism in the years after the December 1910 Grafton Galleries show. That’s the kind of resolute push against tut-tutting disapproval that Hill and Rifkin see as the force that keeps the “radical marketer” on message. Moreover, they tell us, this path is trod with the slimmest of resources. “Such resource constraints,” they write, “tend to keep them very focussed and promotes a willingness to try new, innovative ideas” (15). Innovation here does not mean the simple breaking of rules for the sake of breaking the rules. “It is about creating an entirely new game in which you can write your own rules, sometimes on the very playing field of the existing game” (17). For the small avant-garde publishing enterprise, the financial disadvantage of tiny print runs was compensated for by the numbering and signing of each item. From a marketing point of view this was a stroke of genius. When a work had no obvious exchange-value, nor any discernible use, the signed and numbered copy was a way of marking its inherent significance and, hence, its value. One hundred years of Kantian aesthetics had finally found its commercial application. Exchange-value the modernist literary

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work did not have. Its use-value, if it had any, was not immediately obvious. Its immanence-value, however, could not be challenged because it resided, not in the work as such, but in the consumer’s head. As in the selling of cars and beer today, the focus has shifted from the product itself to the experiences it is meant to induce. A commercial undertaking that surmounted the limitations of trade and exchange on the margins of society survived by confidently asserting it was not commercial in the first place and by making the fact that the modernist artwork had little exchange-value, a token of its superior, immanent value. The whole setup marked out one of the material bases of a complex collection of social relations in the making of a modernist community. As a system of production, incidentally, it still survives, although the multinational publishers have, with the expansion of modernism, come to realize over the years the potential of the pricey, signed, limited edition, under an artisanal-like imprint, with high price attached. This incursion is the publishing equivalent of the recent habit of huge multinational supermarkets, like Safeway, of marketing produce under low-intensity lighting and a colorful canopy and calling it a Farmer’s Market. But in 1922 that world lay in the future. My own experience in 1967 was as much a matter of learning how to participate in the aesthetic community defined by a modernist text like Ulysses, as it was a matter of simply reading the text in and for itself. In this I was simply reenacting as a kind of middlebrow parody the experience of all its earliest readers as well. Everyone, in the literary bohemias of London and Paris in the 1920s, knew about Ulysses well before anyone had read a word of it. I think that is why I repaired so quickly to the scholarship. There I acquired the proper sort of respect, the good manners of the modernist sensibility, that is I acquired the behaviors that characterized the spiritual and aesthetic community which the novel summoned in the 1920s. The Random House editors, who oversaw the 1966 reprint I had bought, were still very conscious of the need to make new readers of the book also feel a part of that community, rather than mere customers of another mass-produced paperback. I found myself, in 1967, a twenty-something university student, in some mysterious way more vitally connected to the Paris of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co., the Paris of the Lost Generation, than I was to my own immediate environment. Irrespective of space and time, I felt like a participant in that older comradely circle. And the book’s editors successfully recruited me to that phantom circuit. But, of course, the book in my hands also brought me very concretely into the present, although, at the time, I did not see it. I thought it only put me in touch with the past. The presentation of the book, as an artefact

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in a marketing strategy, did not encourage me to notice what was in front of my face. The very commodity-structure of the whole experience of first reading Ulysses tied me to the world of 1967, but below the horizon of my attentiveness. And it did this through the reified exchange relations inscribed in the material object I was conspicuously carrying around with me wherever I went that summer. All commodities connect us objectively to the situations in which they are produced and consumed, even if they direct our conscious attention to other times and places. This is the contemporary meaning, incidentally, of the theme park, and of the heritage industry in general: institutions which are meant to put us in touch with the past. In fact, as we all know they put us in touch with the present uses of the past.4 Even the consumption of antiquarian objects can tell us rather more about the society in which the moment of present consumption occurs, than the society in which the object was first produced. Of course, the moment of its initial production and reception may come to inform subsequently, as one of its typifying characteristics, the commodity-structure of the object, as has happened with Ulysses. My relation to Ulysses was already a highly structured event before I’d even purchased and read the introductory materials and the first thirty-six pages of the novel proper. The exchange relation was already highly mediated by the commodification process, especially that process as it pertains to works of art, as opposed to microwave ovens or toasters. The work was offered as the rarest of rare works, the unique masterpiece, not available to everyone. It was the auretic masterpiece, in Benjamin’s sense (“Work of Art,” 222–24), intended for the exclusive use of the happy few, a uniqueness that was certainly not available to the philistines.5 The original disapproval of censors and prudes helped to shield the work’s aura more fully. The legal battles defined the elite community which Ulysses summoned into being. They also helped to inscribe the work’s aura as a kind of permanent immanence, to make of the embattled solidarity of the group the vessel of the novel’s irreversible value. In 1922, Ulysses was physically not available to everyone; it carried a kind of cult character, both as object of veneration and as an object that collects a following. By 1967 the novel as mass-produced paperback had acquired, in addition, an exhibition value; it was now available to all, but its original cult value was encoded as the story of its first uniqueness and rarity (Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 226–27). In 1922, Ulysses summoned a tiny elite of readers who were able to get their hands on the cult object. In 1967, that tiny elite had been transformed into a mass of customers, but a mass of individuals who still believed themselves to belong to the tiny elite of those in the know. The isolated, decommunalized

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reader in 1967, in search of his own vital community of kindred spirits, was able to find it finally in his own head. Ulysses, and the modernist text in general, constituted a cultural elite that seemed to float free of the traditional social inertias. It cut across divisions of class, gender, race, income level, region, etc. Its community was formed not by kinship structures nor territorial proximities, but by a series of improvised attachments among colleagues, friends, and patrons. Was it not the case, for example, that Joyce’s work was financially supported by a series of defiant and emancipated women? Harriet Shaw Weaver of the Egoist Press in London and the modernist periodical The New Freewoman, later The Egoist, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review, and Sylvia Beach with her Paris bookshop and small-scale publishing activities, had all managed to come out from underneath late Victorian patriarchy to participate in the new culture, not only to get Joyce in circulation, but Eliot, Pound, H.D., and others as well (see Marek). The fact that many of these women were also activists in the movement for women’s suffrage provided one further confirming difference with settled society, in the making of the new cultural aristocracy. But it was an elite and it marked its essential exclusiveness and difference by being constructed in an epistemological enclave that aestheticized consciousness through and through. This was the source of its strength in the heroic period of holding off the defunctive moralism of the philistines in decline. Neither money nor blood alone could get you in. You knew you belonged to it, if, when you got to the second sentence of the novel, it raised the right sort of wry smile on your face: He held the bowl aloft and intoned: – Introibo ad altare Dei.

a smile compounded from noticing, in the amusing use of the Latin prayer “intoned” at the foot of the Altar, a mock-theatrical moment of reverential effervescence, the happy wickednesses of its blasphemy, the irony that on one side of Mulligan’s gesture lies the grievous history of ecclesiastical oppression, but that, on the other, we find the emancipation of slapstick. And a smile also for that exhilarated sense of daring that emerges very quickly in the reading experience of the novel, that Joyce has finally brought language out whole from underneath the heavy hand of what used to be called the King’s English, the generic customs, the limiting notions of appropriate diction and acceptable themes, those rhetorical good manners that always turn conventional writers into unconscious mimics and ventriloquists of styles, rather than stylists (see Kenner, Sinking Island, on

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Philip Beaufoy, 20 and passim). It was this extraordinary liberation of discourse, and therefore of consciousness, that summoned into being the first community of self-consciously modernist readers, as a social construction in language. The aesthetic core of modernism which begins with the French Symbolists, with Flaubert (see Nicholls, Modernisms, 24–41), with Walter Pater, and is the crucial current in those nineteenth-century artistic practices which push away from conventional realism in art, is brought to completion in Ulysses. Conventional realism as we all know is circumscribed by the poetics of mimesis, typified by narrative seamlessness, end-directed chains of cause and effect in the making of episodes, the coherence of motivation in the making of character, and most important of all, the subjective unity of the narrator. The careful mimesis of the Victorian novel, the hypotactic organization of sentences and paragraphs in a logical system of dependencies, the inveterate seamlessness of the represented reality, did not intentionally set out to hide from view the increasing fragmentation and dispersal which the new movements of capital and of the market-form had brought about in nineteenth-century society. In fact, the realist tradition set itself the very opposite task, to expose social and psychological reality as thoroughly as it could. It had reacted, in the socalled industrial novels, for example, quite consciously and deliberately to the decline of the communal order in the face of modernization in England. Here is a famous passage from Dickens’s Dombey and Son, describing Mr. Dombey on a train ride: Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal, across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating, where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking, where the stream is running, where the village clusters, where the great cathedral rises, where the bleak moor lies, and the wild breeze smooths or ruffles it at its inconstant will; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour: as in the track of the remorseless monster: Death. (299)

Who can argue that this is not effective writing, or effective social critique? Of course it is. This is realism at full stretch enacting both the repetitive action of the train, and, mutatis mutandis, the proliferation of the industrial scourge. It is clear in its tropic organization: the train’s cultural significance terminates in death, is a figure of death. As you read from beginning to end, the accumulating phrasal structure takes on a kind of teleological fatefulness. The single point of view, the rhythmic propulsiveness of the

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parallel structures moving train-like towards a single point of rest, the unshakable confidence of the single narratorial voice, make the passage a masterpiece of seamless coherence at every level, all the way from “hollow” at the start, to “Death” in conclusion. This is language in harness to a single purpose. It also has at its core an insurmountable obstacle. Even as he tries to achieve a panoramic expansiveness, Dickens circulates language on a narrow track of effects; the language cannot overcome its own blindness and deafness to itself. This is a result, on the one hand, of its programmatic fixation on things out there in the world and, on the other, of what we might call its poetics of identity. By poetics of identity I mean the neo-Augustan and “new critical” commonplace that the excellence of composition consists in making identical the means of expression and what is expressed, that the great artists always achieve the final repose of a singular harmony. Form must mirror meaning and meaning be identical with form. As a result, narratorial self-reflexiveness, as a source of dissonance, is more or less annulled, and a typical kind of harmonious omniscience rules. Modernism, by contrast, suffers, so to speak, from an identity crisis. The identity of form and content is allowed to come apart. In the disjunction, the text grows more self-referential and dissonant, more visibly entangled in its own narratorial procedures. One might say that the problem for Dickens, if it is a problem, lies in the fact that the passage is deaf to its own narratorial noise. It is a passage, moreover, which, in its repetitiveness and tight focus, is the stylistic equivalent of a migraine headache. We are far too bored into to ever get at what Joyce will come to call the “ineluctable modality of the visible.” The “things” on which our attention is fixed in Dickens cannot escape the rhetoric machine. The moral economy of the style still rests on a definite sense of the appropriateness of syntactic hierarchy and centerdness, of singleness of purpose, and to some extent of linguistic transparency. This is the prose of those who not only feel they can still act meaningfully in history, but that history still exists. It is the resolute prose of citizens who still occupy a coherent public realm, free of ambivalence, and free of the languageness of language. If you are hostile to modernism, you might say of modernist discourse, not that it is blind and deaf to itself as language, but that it is blinded and deafened by language. In the first stages of modernism proper, this attentiveness to language in the midst of language was, paradoxically, part of a strategy for recovering the real, for getting at reality, not the bourgeois reality of conventional realist discursive practices, but the unique thinginess, the quidditas of things themselves, not as objects in fateful patterns, but

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as standing out in their primordial difference. Joyce, speaking through Stephen Dedalus, imagined that the epiphanic claritas was achieved only by an apt attentiveness to quidditas (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 212). This was a strategy for liberating “things” from the oppression of conventional realism. William Carlos Williams’s formula, “No ideas but in things” expresses the strategy most succinctly (Collected Poems, 264). This initial modernist position was essentially a way of pushing off from the epistemological migraine of bourgeois realism. Remember that for a bohemia whose productions had little exchangevalue in the commodity system, the material viability of the community needed grounding in something other than the massive indifference of the dominant culture. The value and superiority of the bohemian enclave, its elitism, lay in an aestheticized epistemology which began from the notion that the modernist work on language gave a more genuine and vital access to the real, than what passed for commonsense reality in the bourgeois world. Ulysses foregrounds again and again the conventionality of a world fabricated by the beliefs of a numbed common sense. Herein lies the delicious irony of Bloom, the Odyssean protagonist, transformed into the droll, Flaubertian “dictionary” of accepted ideas with legs. Let me be a little clearer about the sociology of the subcultural formations of the early modernists and their importance to our own day. The bohemian enclave came into being in the mode of resistance to the threats and risks of modernizing societies. Yet, as la boh`eme tried to set itself apart from the dominant culture, it found itself firmly positioned within it, but positioned within it in a particular way. As we know now, when the market-form reaches sufficient critical mass, it acts to disperse and decenter traditional society. One of the first symptoms, as we’ve seen in our own time, erupts as the legitimation crisis of the state. Society is already in fragments by the time the neoconservative assault on the state gets under way. The regime of perpetual exchange has no center, no fixed circumference, no destination in the sense of an historical fulfilment and correspondingly no powerful myths of its own origins and end, no single path of development, no singular historical coherence; in short, it has no fate. Fate as a concept is emptied of all its ancient resources and becomes a mere synonym for chance. The casino jostles aside the basilica; Las Vegas overwhelms Rome. The bohemian enclave, on the other hand, achieves a localized coherence and fate in the face-to-face intimacies of the comradely bond. Each group has its own unique story, its own narrative development, and its own denouement. And this “tale of the (smallish) tribe” transpires as spirited resistance to the disintegrative action of the market-form. As society loses

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its general coherence, the enclave-cells multiply more generally, all across everyday life. I am describing how we get from the uniqueness of Bloomsbury’s “loving friends” in the 1920s (or earlier still the community of friends and colleagues that gave rise to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the 1850s) to the modularized social life of the 1990s and beyond, for which Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, book and movie, the TV show Friends in the US or Coupling in the UK are significant, if banal, examples. If we conceive of modernism as a radical problematic of resistance to the new disintegrative effects of the capitalist epoch, we must then try to explain how its various strategies of ironic displacement and parody, of exaggeration as revolt, of aesthetic autonomy and self-reflexiveness, and of the poetics of aesthetic epiphany, can be so thoroughly absorbed by capitalist societies? Modernism has always behaved as if it is in permanent exile and in opposition beyond the gravitational pull of commerce, while, at the same time, it has, paradoxically, become the preferred aesthetic of commercial society. How do the margins and interstices of the social whole, defined in the early twentieth century by their distance from the mainstream, end up as the embodiments of the mainstream? The answer lies partly, it seems to me, in the structure of modernist discourse itself. In the Proteus chapter, the third chapter of Ulysses, we find an inwardturned Stephen wandering Sandymount Strand in pursuit of the real. Later in the day, Bloom will also come to this beach in the Nausicaa episode to enact different kinds of inwardness in company with Gerty MacDowell. Proteus, however, belongs to Stephen: Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the Nebeneinander ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. . . . (Gabler et al., eds., 31)

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Here is the identity crisis of language. It has slipped out of the rutted landscape of “realism” and moves in whatever direction consciousness and Stephen’s feet direct it, moment by moment, increment by increment, in pursuit of quidditas, even to the point of, in the finale of the passage, its onomatopoeic simulation. There is no symbolic or allegorical destination; consciousness enacts its own difference as self-consciousness and, in the gaps, yields itself as a medium for things to speak, for the “signatures of all things” to be read. The accumulating structure of language (and the slack narrative) can shift direction and sense at any moment. The stochastic factor is perhaps not sufficiently appreciated by critical traditions that assume the incremental development of the elements, word, pause, and sentence, necessarily follow an a priori scheme. At every juncture, Joycean discourse can change direction in a myriad ways. When the choice is made, and only then, does the punctual structure, as in the incremental progress of a coral reef, come into being. Only when we see the shadowy outline of the coral reef from an aeroplane does its larger pattern come into view. Correspondingly, only when we stand back far enough from the myriad details of Ulysses do we notice the Odyssean geometry. If we compare Joyce’s passage with Dickens we can see that forms of syntax in both behave very differently. In Dickens the accumulation of prepositional phrases works towards the finale in Death. Every new element is yoked to the one end. In Joyce, the syntax is not directed along a single circuit of meaning; it spreads out, it proliferates, it does not have its point of rest in a religious or ethical dictate. Every new element changes the character of the whole, or has the potential to do so. It does not contribute to a single terminal effect. The difference between the passages can also be framed in terms of focus and dispersal. This can be translated formally into Dickens’s desire to hang onto an older, more traditional orderliness. Dickens’s syntax controls and shapes the generative surplus of language: the entire phrase regime is subordinated to the “Death” of the end (this by the way is the second of four consecutive paragraphs that terminate with the word “Death” – the local effect is mirrored in the larger structure). Joyce’s syntax lays things apart, rather than concentrates or connects them. The hesitations and silences, the gaps, the ruptures, are as meaningful in Joyce as his noises. Or should that be meaning-neutral? In Dickens there is no silence at all, except the silence of Death as the fulfilment of the train’s monstrous surge. In both passages also we see a proliferation of the concrete. But whereas in Dickens it serves to energize a scene of cyclopic horror that is communicated by the headlong rush of syntax (it is all one sentence actually), in Joyce,

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on the other hand, there’s a decentered dispersal of meaning along any number of axes that induces dissociation–disorder as an aesthetic effect. In Dickens, meaning is completed only when the syntax comes to its allegorical close – if words are capital in the financial sense, Dickens’s words are still subordinated by an explicitly Christian and premodern moral judgment. In Joyce, however, meaning is many-centered. Meaning, such as it is, resists allegorical paraphrase by accruing around the nouns and radiating outwards from each sentence-locus or fragment. Positioning, within the self-adjusting network, is all. Meaning happens everywhere at once, hence Stephen’s paralysis. It cannot be closed off, only abandoned perhaps. In Dickens, the syntagmatic chain rules; in Joyce the paradigmatic set opens the text to surplus and reinvestment. The longer Joyce’s language goes on, the more value it accumulates, just like the circulation of capital. In Dickens, the longer the language goes on in the passage from Dombey, the closer we get to Death and the end of lexical wealth. In Joyce, words begin to act like capital very much as Marx describes it: The simple circulation of commodities – selling in order to buy – is a means of carrying out a purpose unconnected with circulation, namely, the appropriation of use-values, the satisfaction of wants. The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits. (Capital, i, 227)

Marx continues by pointing out that money has to be continually recirculated in order to keep accruing value: Value therefore now becomes value in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh.

Curiously it is Dickensian discourse, with all its rigidities and noise, which stands outside the circuit of capital. It is his willingness to close off lexical reinvestment with an unnegotiable negation – experienced as the obligation which death lays on us – that cannot be absorbed by the market-form. Such an action is a large stone in the flow of the stream. It is an awkward vestige of an older integral communalism that had already passed its apogee in Dickens’s day, had already been bypassed by history. Modernist discourse, as we find it in Ulysses, parallels structurally the circulation of capital in the market, while paradoxically setting itself apart in every other way. When set against the communalism of old, it is certainly liberation from custom and clich´e. But liberation for what? Modernism affirms new possibilities, but, in not yet noticing its convergence with the

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market-form, it remains blind to its own subsequent history. In liberating consciousness from the investments of the past, in the name of a more authentic grasp of the real, as primordial quidditas, the thing in itself, not the thing as hostage of fate, modernism readies us, via a new aesthetics, for the regime of exchange, and, as a result, for the Wonderland of disembodied consumption of things. The aestheticization of consciousness, which marked the epistemological privilege and elitism of nineteenth-century bohemias, spread out in the twentieth to take the place of traditional communal duties and prohibitions. As the market economy developed sufficient complexity and freedom from the past to accommodate more and more difference, in terms of innumerable, relatively autonomous local transactions, it simply left these older, fateful communal obligations in tatters. The opening of Proteus, as a technical achievement, like the method of Pound’s Cantos, or Schoenberg’s experiments in total tonality, discover the modern discourses perfectly suited to a capitalism that, having worked itself free of an old order, was rapidly jettisoning the rhetorical and discursive traditions of premodern society all through the middle years of the twentieth century. Ulysses was admitted into Britain and the United States when the political economy had matured sufficiently to develop, for one thing, the necessary social fragmentation.6 There developed, furthermore, the neoliberal discourse of freedom as freedom of choice among commodities, and, as a result, achieved the necessary epistemological self-government of each consumer as a relatively autonomous desiring-machine.7 The maturing of the commodity-system simply erased the clumsy vestiges of communal or collective discipline as they pertained to public standards of morality and to conventional expectations of artistic production. By the time the publisher sent me, as a desk copy, in about 1990, the 7th reprint of the 1984 Gabler text, the need to make the new reader feel that he or she was part of an exclusive readership, a cultural elite, a clear marketing aim of the 1961 text, had passed for good. By 1990, paradoxically, even the masses were modernists, reenacting in the mass, if contemporary advertising is anything to go by, the rituals of uniqueness, exclusiveness, and authenticity which defined the early modernist bohemias. The aestheticized consciousness of early modernism had become the general epistemological style of the late twentieth century. And with it the imperatives of aesthetic delight in the old Horatian formula came to far outweigh moral instruction. In the new reprints of the novel, the heroic and moral tale is reduced to a list of previous editions of Ulysses opposite the imprint page, a routine

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genealogy of a once-stately family. The heavy equipment of litigation, legal opinion, and judgment, authorial eloquence addressed to noble, courageous publishers, and the implicit appeal to sympathetic readers, has been more or less set aside now that the work is part of the curriculum of mass modernity. What has been lost, of course, is that heroic, elitist sense of the rare experience of quickened, multiplied consciousness and the aesthetic vitality which lies at the heart of the modernist enterprise at the beginning. Walter Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, an early source of the modernist aesthetic and a conspicuous source of Stephen’s experience – the ineluctable modality of the visible . . . thought through my eyes, etc. – now routinely contributes to just about every cultural production of our time, including the making of car ads. The arrival of the focus group as the epistemological testing ground of a commodity’s involuntary throb value swings into place a psycho-social technology for measuring the pleasurequakes of a dissociated hedonism that, in Pater’s “Conclusion,” could not yet speak its name. The focus group, then, that temporary noetic bohemia which the commodity-fetish summons into being, is invited to test-drive the car in unrestricted conditions. But what the cameras pick up and what is conveyed to the viewers watching the ad on TV is not anything much about the car’s usefulness for life, but a great deal about the car’s immanence-value as a thing-in-itself. The cameras lavishly record the excited, emotional, stirring reactions of the lab rats. The car is both an object and a manageable structure of emotional arousal, an ineluctable modality of the thrills of motion, that allows the lab rats to burn with a hard, gem-like flame in that moment of pure puerility in simply moving fast, and only for that moment’s sake. That the whole gestalt of that moment is then refined to 30 videotaped seconds of beautifully edited Cubist agitation can no longer cancel the thrills which the participants in the focus group have experienced, and the vicarious gratification which the millions of viewers, out there in their gated sanctuaries, have experienced through them.

chap t e r 10

History and the postpsychological self in The Waste Land

In delineating the culture of market society in a previous chapter, I proposed that the market-form projects a distinctive sense of reality and, with it, certain clear epistemological standards, strategies, and forms of knowing that are intrinsic to it. These new protocols of knowing suffuse the whole social and mental order where that order has shed much of its traditional, precapitalist moral and political constraints. One aspect of the marketform’s uniqueness lies in the character of its time-sense or the individual and collective experience of temporality. As in the concept of relativity in physics, market society weakens the concept of a singular, collective historical time. Public time exists, but only by segmenting the day strictly into work-time, leisure- or consumption-time, by the opening and closing bells of various activities, like the school-day or the operations of a bourse. Temporal segmentation lays over the lived experience of duration an abstract time-scheme that regulates the form and content of daily routines. Premodern forms of time-reckoning were tied more intimately to natural, environmental processes, like the rising and setting of the sun, the changing of the seasons, and the like. These natural processes persist, but today they have slipped into the domain of rhetoric as powerfully nostalgic metaphors. Other experiences of communal time have also withered away altogether or run aground within religious sects or in the varieties of fundamentalism we find lodged awkwardly in modern societies. The old Christian or Islamic sense of the holy year, for example, measured for the whole community by the coming and going of daily and annual celebrations of certain sacraments and festivals grows increasingly meaningless from the perspective of the market-form. The increasing religious irrelevance of Christmas as a specifically holy day in the developed West, for example, is a case in point. Nonsensical also is the Christian notion of millennial time, the fated fulfilment of prophesy via divine judgment and retribution. The Marxist vision 194

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of revolutionary time as punctuated by a series of class-driven ruptures that culminate in the utopian bliss of a classless society doesn’t make much sense any more either. In market-driven societies, from which such traditional ideas have withered away, time cannot be said to be going anywhere in particular. In its earliest forms, market society embraces the liberal–humanist idea of time as moving progressively towards the enlargement of human freedom. But even this idea is gradually reduced from its more noble humanist formulations, such as Benedetto Croce’s History as the Story of Liberty (1938, Eng trans., 1941), to the simple extension of a meandering freedom for consumers to choose among an expanding number of commodities. This is the dream-time of consumption and, as Walter Benjamin notes about Parisian consumers in the mid-nineteenth century, the “dreaming collective knows no history” (Arcades, 854). Time in market society is also narrowly instrumental, becoming a function of exchange transactions. It takes the form of timely action, not of time as an ontological category. Time comes into play mainly when the transaction occurs. Is this a good time to buy (or sell) or a bad time? Or is this a good time to let time pass? The only thing that matters is the punctual timeliness of the action. Each moment in the market process presents alternatives for action. And each moment is unique in what it presents the actor. And the unique moment is unique for each actor. As the saying goes, if you snooze, you lose; or not, depending on the circumstances of the moment. Punctuality, as in Joyce’s prose, is the structural key to this concept of time, not duration. The aesthetic program of modernism provides the cognitive training required to operate in this continuously shifting temporal domain. Late twentieth-century advertising, having absorbed modernist styles of thought and feeling in all their cutting-edge manifestations, has attuned us – the rocket scientist, the sales associate, and the hair stylist – to the aesthetics of the moment of being, as the intersection of dream-time and the timely. Wordsworth’s “spots of time” in Book 12 of The Prelude to the epiphanic moment, in Joyce, in Woolf, and others, may seem a long way away from the contemporary car ad or the punctual timeliness of the economic transaction, but all of these share at least one characteristic, all occur outside the course of what has been thought of as historical time in the past. For the modernists this aesthetic gesture carries an emancipatory meaning from historical necessity; for the car ad the thrilling surge of metal and glass careering across a Fauve-hued landscape borrows the idea of an unbounded freedom as a routine trope in the culture of market society. History as understood

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from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth century has been eclipsed in both the aesthetic programme of modernism and in fully matured market society (cf. Benjamin, Arcades, 339). This is the methodological impediment that Charles Taylor has tried to overcome in his attempt to “assemble the portrait of the modern identity through its history” in Sources of the Self. “An instantaneous snapshot,” he writes, “would miss a great deal” (498). Just so. But what is missing when the “depth perspective of history” vanishes is precisely what the market-form values least. That, it seems to me, is why it is missing. For market society the past in which time still matters has been cut down to a simple graphical record of the rise and fall of indices of economic activities. The patterns on the graphs have been given mathematical formulations that are used to project possible indexical activities in the future. These predictive instruments come in handy when the economic actors try to reckon the timeliness and extent of their own interventions in the markets. History as Thucydides, Gibbon, Macaulay, Trotsky, or even Charles Taylor might have understood it is long gone. To this extent Francis Fukuyama is right; we have seen the end of history, or at least the concepts of history we’ve known in the past. We now deal with a temporality that is, more or less, the domain of statisticians. This devaluation of history as a collective inheritance was anticipated eighty years before Fukuyama by the modernists themselves. Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses, thought history a tale too often heard or a nightmare from which one tries to awake. Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man (1927) attacked the disintegration of public time or history into separate, internalized time-entities among modern artists and contemporary philosophers. He set the spatial sense – solid, fixed, motionless – against the “mystical time-cult” of the modernists. Ironically, the aesthetics of sculptural stasis which Lewis favored and the inwardly fluent streamof-consciousness in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf were, from the perspective of the new culture of the market-form, not opposed to each other at all. Both of these positions debase the historical sense. Both of them diminish history as a collective inheritance and cut it down to the meager schemes of contemporaneity and fashion. Lewis’s blast at fashion is typical of the attack: [A] time-keeping, chronologically-real, super-historic, Mind, like some immense stunt-figure symbolizing Fashion, ecstatically [assures] its customers that although fashions are periodic, as they must and indeed ought to be, nevertheless, by some mysterious rule, each one is better than the last, and should (so the advertisement would run) be paid more for than the last, in money or in blood. (Time, 218)

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What was a “mysterious rule” in 1927 is less mysterious today. Lewis’s own adoption of the language of the market in the passage already demystifies the process he describes. The epistemology of the market compels the reduction of communal history to temporal granules lodged in individual minds. This is not new in 1927. Earlier still, Walter Pater’s revaluation of aesthetic experience as a kind of neurophysiological hedonism had already shifted the weight of our attention from the collective to the individual consciousness: Every one of those [sensuous] impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. (Renaissance, 221–22)

Similarly Joyce’s sense of the epiphanic experience revives Pater’s “single sharp impression” and, specifically, as a way of escaping, for a time, the crushing burden of national, family, and religious history in Ireland. What is an ephemeral and rare experience in ca.1900 has been transformed by the culture industries into that state of remorseless aesthetic routine Mike Featherstone calls “the stylization of life” (399). It might seem blasphemous to cite Joyce or Virginia Woolf ’s “moments of being” as cognitive training for adapting to market society. But what else can we make of the indisputable fact that the most powerfully persuasive advertising today makes use of the aesthetics of the epiphany? This is a refinement, in commercial terms, of the cult of beauty that was originally formulated in the nineteenth century as a strategy of freedom and redemption from both the psychological manacles of Victorian morality and commercial philistinism. The “counted number of pulses” celebrated by Pater as the spirited nourishment of “a variegated, dramatic life” have now been whittled down by Madison Avenue to thirty-second video shots in prime time. Who in the 1890s could have anticipated the social and commercial uses to which the moment of being is now put? How exactly does the contemporary consumer in market society escape the fate of Pater’s “solitary prisoner” rapt in his or her “own dream of a world?” From this neat, self-enclosed garden of delights, history has vanished.

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I’m not saying that the modernists stopped using the term history or discussing it, but it is very clear that their concept of history undergoes a fundamental change. For one thing, modernist history is a concept in which time has, so to speak, been abolished. James Longenbach locates this annulment in Eliot’s reinvention of history as an “ideal construction,” a concept he seems to have borrowed from F. H. Bradley, and in Pound’s “transhistorical” vantage point that emphasizes the contemporaneity of the past (History, 14–16, 31). Even the naive habit of seeing historical time as the mechanical extension of clock-time, as moving relentlessly, one increment after another, into an open-ended future, is replaced by a sense of history as radically foreshortened. Modernism regards history as a many-layered text, a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces and marks of all historical moments are always already present. All history exists punctually in the timeless present. There is no place within human history which we have not already visited and to which we will not inevitably return. History does not move progressively, through social and technological innovation, towards an increase in human liberty. Nor does it tend towards fulfilment in a freedom free of necessity, as liberal–humanism supposes. Nor is it moving towards some final retributive reckoning, some Day of Judgment, at the end of time. Instead, history, in the work of Joyce, Woolf, Pound, David Jones, Stein exists, as a Cubist artefact, on a flat plane, radically foreshortened, in which the temporal and spatial discriminations we might normally make between the present, the distant past, and the virtual domains of mythology converge on a single point. The typist, the young man carbuncular, Tiresias, Bradford millionaires, the lyric poet, the persona of the poet’s social irony, Oliver Goldsmith, a gramophone, all co-exist on the same temporal and spatial plane defined by the text: The Waste Land is the London of 1922 . . . It is also a timeless phantasmagoria where that “present” dissolves into a multiplicity of detailed historical episodes and conditions. There are no processes recognized by the human actors and worked to an objective. Nor is there even chronological sequence. There may be recurrence. It does not in any secular or temporal way reveal a pattern . . . As there is no chronology, so there is no scale of values. Any thing or event is as important, or unimportant, as any other. (Maxwell, “Eliot, History, and Contemporary Culture,” 240)

D. E. S. Maxwell might as well be describing the historical pasticcio of contemporary Las Vegas. As the distinction between the text and individual consciousness has also collapsed, these temporal incongruities merge,

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virtually, in the reader’s mind. We have learned to accept as normal the dehistoricized interleaving of disparate time-scales and historical periods in Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, in Woolf’s novels of the 1920s, The Waves, Between the Acts, in David Jones’s poems and paintings, in Pound’s Cantos, and in Surrealism. In “Patriarchal Poetry” (1927), Gertrude Stein takes it a step further. She demolishes the epistemological usefulness of temporality by playful repetition, stripping all temporal terms and phrases down to brute noise. She derails what she takes to be linked patriarchal terms such as past, future, inheritance, transmission, etc. and, in their place, the poem substitutes modernist punctuality – “to be,” “let it be,” “once,” or “at once” – as the time-scale that defeats historically fraught patriarchy. In “Gerontion,” history may have “many cunning passages, contrived corridors,” but who can say whether the Polish corridor, “contrived” at the Versailles peace conference (itself “a wilderness of mirrors”), is a good or bad thing, or how it is to be distinguished from the “hall” in which “Fr¨aulein von Kulp” turns or how differentiated from a “belief” that languishes in “memory only?” In Sweeney Agonistes, the Great War co-exists temporally with its Aristophanic counterpart, the Peloponnesian War. All wars, it seems, are one war. Separating and sorting these identifications, in the name of historical fidelity or documentary decorum, seems rather petty in these radical latitudes where not fighting at Thermopylae, at “the hot gates” in 480 BCE, casts a muggy autobiographical light on not fighting in the First World War. From the avant-garde margins, the inconsequence of history – history as not only “the continuum of past events” (Maxwell, “Eliot,” 236) but as source of values, distinctions, and meaning (“no chronology . . . no scale of values”) – has now flowed down to the culture as a whole. In the epistemology of the market, history, if it can be said to exist at all, has been reinvented as heritage, as a cultural consumable, or as the soft plasticine from which the contemporary political classes contrive fanciful “historical” justifications that mask ruthless policy objectives in the present. George Orwell was the anatomist of this latter “philosophy” of history in Nineteen Eighty-Four. One of the clearest theoretical formulations of modernist history can be found in Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). This important critical statement about tradition is a curious performance for a man who begins by asserting that the critic must cultivate “the historical sense”: [T]he historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature of

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Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. (Sacred Wood, 49)

This could simply be flashy phrase-making,1 but why not take Eliot at his word? Curiously, his conception of the “historical sense” has almost completely done away with the fact of time: the literature of the past and the literature of the present enjoy “a simultaneous existence.” They compose “a simultaneous order.” The usual distinction between the “timeless” and the “temporal” has been effaced and in its place we have some punctual (and postmodern) condition Eliot calls “contemporaneity.” By this we probably should assume he means that the present moment incorporates in some concrete form all time and, therefore, stands outside of any traditional sense of history. In this stark conception of history unburdened by time, any idea that history is in some sense developmental or evolutionary is deftly annulled. Walter Benjamin in his “First Sketches” for The Arcades Project makes this annulment a methodological starting point of the modernist idea: “To root out every trace of ‘development’ from the image of history to represent becoming – through the dialectical rupture between sensation and tradition – as a constellation in being” (Arcades, 845). Eliot’s essay then moves on to discuss what happens when “a new work of art is created” (Sacred Wood, 50). The new work is “something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it.” Setting aside the vagueness of that “something,” we are brought back to the situation I have already addressed in an earlier chapter, namely, to the refiguring of tradition as operating on the same principles as a market: “the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.” The old and the new “conform”; they share the same cardinal nature as artefacts. They are, as a result, equally eligible for evaluation by new standards of judgment, not by criteria that take into account the historical contexts of their production. The new work is not to be judged “as good as, or worse or better than, the dead,” nor “judged by the canons of dead critics.” Again, history is effaced. Instead, the new and old are judged by reciprocal “comparison, in which two things are measured by each other.” If we transpose this principle to everyday life, it is, in fact, indistinguishable from the operation of a market where values or prices are determined by the commodity’s position in the constantly “readjusted” values established by the network

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of other commodities by which one object competes with all others for the customer’s business. This brings cultural products into the realm of exchange-values and blithely abandons the concept of fixed or immanent value and the notion that assessment of a work requires that we pay attention to a work’s rootedness in a value-rich historical context. In this formulation, then, the cornerstones of traditional criticism go the way of now dead principles in economics, such as the morally weighted concept of “just price.” Yes, you’re right. This is not what Eliot was proposing explicitly in the first part of the essay. He did not intend to say that tradition is like the stock exchange, where the value of the stock of a great work of literature depends on its shifting relationships with the value of the stocks of all the other great works of literature being traded on the floor of the canonic bourse. But by 4 November 1920, when The Sacred Wood was published, the epistemology of the market had already begun to invade thought in general, had already shifted the structural ground of thinking in the direction of Eliot’s disarming speculations. It is perhaps not insignificant that “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” with its ahistorical reevaluation of tradition, was written by a young American hailing from a nation where the hegemony of the market-form had already begun to make more generally visible the distinctive cultural outlines of market society.2 Eliot’s novel ideas were not restricted to literary theory and the practice of literary criticism. The artistic manifestation of the thought processes in the tradition essay are realized in Eliot’s early poems through his much celebrated borrowing style. An extravagant allusiveness (Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays, 50) characterizes many of his early lyrics, establishing Eliot as the twentieth-century master of what Leonard Diepeveen has called “the modern quoting poem.” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” for example, is a virtual archive of references and allusions to Venice and of quotations to works of literature and art on Venetian themes in which the integrity of the temporal relationships among the quoted fragments does not alter the brief melodrama of the poem’s elusive plot. Andrea Mantegna, Shakespeare, Th´eophile Gautier, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James all occupy one moment in time in the poem. In a sense this is the practical instance of “contemporaneity” as described in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” As a way of reading, atemporal co-presence puts in place a central pillar of the “new criticism.” But history without time was not confined to critical discourse. This flattened or horizontal sense of time reaches its highest degree of perfection in The Waste Land.

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It is now fashionable to read The Waste Land as the drama of a personal crisis. Eliot’s failing marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, his own sense of spiritual angst, his struggles with sexuality, and, finally, the nervous breakdown for which he sought help in Lausanne with Dr. Roger Vittoz are the common themes of recent critical attention. When it was first published, the poem was read more generally as reflecting the mood of breakdown, despair, and futility in the Europe of the Versailles Conference and, beyond that, the sense of nihilism and dread following the material and spiritual devastation of the Great War. How the poem came to be written, Eliot’s struggles to make it cohere, his eventual editorial collaboration with Ezra Pound, and the shrewd campaign for getting it into print and getting it noticed are topics that have been thoroughly explored by critics and scholars. The story of the publication of the poem, so ably described by Lawrence Rainey in his ground-breaking “The Price of Modernism,” underlines the extent to which the literary field among the modernists had already begun to operate on market (and marketing) principles. In this chapter, I don’t want to repeat what others have done. Rather, I want to look at the poem’s implied notion of historical time and of the poem’s revolutionary form as an embodiment of the new structural regimes of market society. We do not usually look to The Waste Land when we take up the topics of time and history in Eliot’s work. This is the domain of Four Quartets: in the opening lines about time of “Burnt Norton,” for example, or, again, in the fifth section of the poem, where words and music move “Only in time” (Collected Poems [CP], 194), the dismissive “only” nimbly putting time in its place. The poem reaches, “after speech,” “[i]nto the silence” beyond mere time. Time, we are told in the final lines, is, at the end of the day, ridiculous, waste, and sad (195). We can follow time in all its winding peregrinations through Four Quartets, but we always “arrive where we started” (“Little Gidding,” CP, 222). Although the next line tells us that we “know the place for the first time,” we cannot find, the poem asserts, the spiritual solace we need “in time’s covenant” (214). By the end, time has given way to the more freighted term, history, “history is a pattern / Of timeless moments . . . / History is now and England” (222). Time, history do not matter; the bright succour available “in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea” brings us to that familiar point on which all times converge. The pointed formulation in “Little Gidding” is unmistakable, “Quick now, here, now, always – / A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)” (222–23). The punctuality of the “here and now,” apart from leading to a limiting case expressed in terms of costs and benefits, acts to dispose of the historical in the epiphanic.

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The road to this “condition” begins twenty years earlier in The Waste Land. The foreshortening and even “dismissal” or “rejection” (Gordon, Early Years, 113, 148) of historical time is so clearly delineated in the poem, and is so common a feature of the cultural landscape of market society, that if noted at all by readers and critics, it is done so as an afterthought. The collocation of fourteenth-century England (via the allusion to Chaucer in the first line of “The Burial of the Dead” section, the title of which is taken from the Anglican service for the dead) with the social and political history of early twentieth-century Central Europe may license a meaningful contrast on some level, but it silently annuls historical distinctions. It brings a post-Reformation Anglican rite, a pre-Reformation Catholic poet, and a minor Viennese courtier (Marie Larisch) into a single textual space. This collocational agenda (and I choose the word “collocation” on Eliot’s authority in the note to line 309) marks the technique of the whole poem. Colleen Lamos speaks of the poem’s “citationality” as its structural key (Deviant Modernism, 66). James Longenbach also finds Eliot’s allusiveness to be “structural” (“Mature Poets,” 177). He argues that allusion in The Waste Land provides the poem with its combinatory logic. The allusion is not a literary historical complement to the text (as in Yeats’s allusion to Shelley’s “Alastor” in “Easter 1916” [“Mature Poets,” 176], for example) but a structural building block of the text. For Eliot this was not a merely technical accomplishment. It seems he thought allusively as “a crucial aspect of his personal life” (“Mature Poets,” 180). That may be so, but the effect is clear enough. The references, allusions, and quotations in the poem, drawn from a wide variety of mythological sources and historical periods, are juxtaposed one with the other in forms that do not acknowledge, in any meaningful way, temporal or historical differences, what Charles Taylor calls, as a methodological tool, the “depth perspective of history” (Self, 498). The wide variety of source materials coalesce in a single textual space. Ezekiel rubs shoulders with Richard Wagner, Dante keeps company with a contemporary astrologer and with swarms of commuters, Charles Baudelaire finds himself enmeshed in ancient fertility rituals of the eastern Mediterranean, and John Webster fraternizes with comrades in arms from the First Punic War. This is the “heap of broken images” that accumulates in the solitary mind and which Jean-Michel Rabat´e believes “is precisely what Eliot means by a ‘tradition’” (“Tradition and T. S. Eliot,” 213). More or less convincing accounts have been offered by scholars and critics for the meaningfulness of Eliot’s cutting and pasting. Indeed, atemporal co-presence has been celebrated as one of the great innovations of modernism. Joyce’s “mythical method,” drawing “a continuous parallel between

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contemporaneity and antiquity” in Ulysses, was praised by Eliot as perhaps the major technical contribution of the moderns to literature in his famous review of the novel (Dial, rev., 482). In 1922, this procedure was a radical departure both in terms of literary form and, curiously enough, in terms of the reorientation of philosophy as a discipline. It was in the early decades of the twentieth century that the philosophy of history as a subject ceased to interest serious philosophers and slipped into the province of the popularizers of ideas.3 Not one of the great twentieth-century schools of philosophical thought (as opposed to schools of literary “theory”) have carried on the historical speculations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter Osborne, in The Politics of Time (1995), describes in the work of various twentieth-century thinkers the collapse of the received, primarily Hegelian, tradition of historical thought. His suggestive definition of modernity as “a form of historical time which valorizes the new as the product of a constantly self-negating temporal dynamic” (xii) captures rather well both the fate of the historical idea in market society and the temporal paradoxes of The Waste Land. Don’t misunderstand me, I am neither complaining that Eliot is doing violence to some sacrosanct notion of history that I wish to defend, nor identifying some weakness in the poem. Eliot’s collocational procedures have received much critical attention and I completely agree that they are powerfully deployed in the service of a new kind of art. I certainly agree with Jean-Michel Rabat´e, for example, when he writes that “The Waste Land is not so much a London poem as a poem of the polis, its city one which spans the Thebes of Oedipus and Tiresias, Augustine’s Carthage, Dickens’s London, and Baudelaire’s Paris” (“Tradition,” 213). And to that list we can add King Ludwig’s Munich, Geneva, Smyrna, Brighton, Bradford, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna. My point is that this collapsing of historical (and geographical) differences into a single textual space or a flat temporal plane harmonizes rather well (as does the decline of the philosophy of history as a topic of interest for serious philosophers) with the horizontalizing culture of market society as a whole. Nowhere is the notion that all cities in the modernist century resemble each other – are in fact one city – more in evidence than in advanced market societies where the metaphor has become a physical reality, if the uniformity of architecture, consumption, traffic, and the general routines of work and leisure are anything to go by. In point of fact though, Oedipal Thebes 2,500 years ago resembles Dickensian London only if you happen to be standing on Mars. It requires a particular kind of wilful ingenuity to mingle, as if they are the same, the historical and cultural specificities of modern Bradford

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with ancient Carthage. In 1922, these startling collocations represented revolutionary ruptures in historical knowledge and experience. Indeed they struck hard, and were in tended to do so (Ricks, Eliot and Prejudice, 7), at the historicist temper of the nineteenth century. They seem less revolutionary now after the posthuman turn and when the historical sense has shrivelled down to one more speciality channel in the 500-channel universe. Inevitably, Eliot’s Martian perspective on the polis seems far less controversial now that most cities in the advanced market economies actually do resemble each other, right down to the same smart coffee emporia on every corner. The critical celebration of this treatment of history as somehow an advancement in knowledge or art is also somewhat puzzling; but not when we remember the economic context in which these aesthetic and critical innovations have taken place. The mind of the market has no need of history as conceived by Hegel, von Ranke, Marx, or Freud. If the past has any use at all for market-driven societies, it is in terms of usable data tracking the rise and fall of economic indices. The rest is, so to speak, history or, more to the point, heritage, in that special meaning of the word which savvy departments of tourism have devised for bringing the past to market in the last twenty-five years. For the composition of The Waste Land, history, as a storehouse of images, events, and personalities, resembles one of the defining cultural institutions of market-driven societies, the modern department store, recently mutated into the even more modern shopping mall, in which hundreds of specialized retailers stretch out along gaily lit, labyrinthine tunnels through which the posthuman desiring machines wander in their millions.4 History spreads out before the author its myriad wares to be plucked from time’s boutiques and combined in novel ways that meet the real or imaginary needs of the moment. The rootedness of the past in specific contexts withers away. Freed from the specifics of its original setting, the newly excavated artefact can now be worked into any shape or form that the present moment demands. Modernist “history” and the market intersect at exactly this point. And, here too, we see the nihilism of market modernity as a crucial constituent process in the devaluation of past values. The negation of history in The Waste Land is not one isolated feature that leaves every other aspect of the text intact, as if history, or historical distinctions, were a detachable element of little interest. Foreshortening time acts also to unmoor the speaking subject and compels a new approach to the poem’s voice. After all, the speaker’s place in the historical continuum, whether a contemporary or not, offers a reader many clues to understanding not only the meaning of a text but its values and culture as well. Eliot

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knew that readers accustomed to the imperturbable, unified, and valueladen speaker of a traditional lyric performance would find the multiple voices of The Waste Land difficult or confusing. The contrast in Eliot’s own time was with a poet like W. B. Yeats. We are never in doubt about the accord and imperturbability of the Yeatsian voice or with the Yeatsian persona. It’s against this unruffled lyricism that the melancholy flutterings of a J. Alfred Prufrock are to be measured. We know that Eliot thought about this problem because of the footnote he provided to line 218 of The Waste Land. “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest . . . What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem” (CP, 82). Critics like Grover Smith, who posits Tiresias as the speaking subject, or, like Calvin Bedient, who speaks of “a single presiding consciousness,” (Different Voices, 130–31) do not thereby solve the problem of the poem’s voice. Who or what is “Tiresias?” He is not a historical subject, a self that is bounded by time, place, knowledge, experience, knowable values, or even the psycho-biology of a single sex. At best he is an empty vessel, so that textual fragments and literary reverberations can be given a loose coherence by being attached to a name. Like the poem itself, put together through the editorial collaboration of Eliot and Ezra Pound, “Tiresias” as a “personage” is an edited text as well. Over and above his service as a textual function in a new kind of openform poem, “Tiresias” is also important in another way. He/she offers a new vision of the person in the twentieth century. This new vision proposes a post-psychological paradigm of personal identity. There is no evidence to suggest that this is what Eliot intended to do, other than reading far more into his “impersonal” theory of art than he actually put down in black and white. No, Eliot, it seems to me, has stumbled (if this the right way of putting it?) on the new paradigm of identity that marks the fate of the person in the culture of market society. Today we are all, to one degree or another, edited texts. Post-structuralism, life-writing theorists, and post-Freudian psychology impress us today with accounts of the human subject cut on a Tiresian bias. In place of selves composed of drives, instincts, reason, inhibitions, desires, existential attachments, and the like, we are constructions in language; but not, mind you, constructions in a language of stable reference. The self “exists” in a language universe where no word or series of words has a single, unitary, or fixed meaning. Meaning does not open out into a world “outthere” but loops endlessly through a language environment generated by the relation of the verbal elements to each other. Semiosis is interminable, but

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the self is not its starting point or end. Like a lamp, the self comes on when the semiotic currents flow. We approach stable identities asymptotically via certain partial narratives about ourselves that circulate like so many delicious, but ultimately unverifiable, rumours. We are no longer agents in history but rhetoricians who “rearrange accounts of events . . . that have been emplotted in a given way, in order to endow them with a different meaning” (White, Metahistory, 150). We are Tarr and Hobson drinking coffee in the Berne at the beginning of Lewis’s Tarr: “they were on the point of opening, with tired ashamed fingers, well-worn pages of their souls, soon to be muttering between their teeth the hackneyed pages to each other” (1928, 12). Or Bouvard and P´ecuchet, Fr´ed´eric Moreau, and the audience to which Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas was directed. We are so thoroughly word-ly beings that today we are not embarrassed to disclose our textual-ness by the trite stratagem of imprinting fragments of language – names, logos, emblems, inscriptions, slogans – on our skin, our clothes, shoes, hats, accessories, as a matter of course. That these auto-inscriptions are indistinguishable from the buying and selling of commodities hardly needs emphasizing. We are truly edited texts and “Tiresias” is our rolemodel. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, speakers in poems and characters in fiction moved out past the medieval psycho-physiology of “humors” and the humorless abstractions of the philosophers – Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant. Characters, in literature and in life, began to be constructed in humbler terms as isolated psychological artefacts, even before the formal arrival of modern psychology as a discipline of thought and as therapy. Novelists and poets explored the behavior and inner life of characters in practical terms. Their works provided just the right kind of unpretentious thought experiments for explorations of the everyday that flew close to the ground, below the conceptual radar of the philosophers. Eliot’s own Olympian disapproval of psychology in his doctoral thesis is symptomatic of the low regard in which the new discipline was held among philosophers (Knowledge, 81–83). But poets and novelists were not so archly dismissive. Their working model of the psyche, as psychological artefact, assumed a number of things, later given formal expression in the new discipline of psychology. We have a real, but invisible, identity, sealed in a real and clinically recoverable self, arrayed in a persona construed for others as a kind of theatrical exhibition. The moral center of Being lay in the interior struggles of the self. These struggles, as the “Sea of Faith” ebbed from the “naked shingles of the world” (Arnold, “Dover Beach”) increasingly lost their religious inflections, but not their urgency or force.

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Identity defined the self’s wider attachments to family, community, nation, language, religion, culture, and the like. The persona brought the interior self out into the world of the others as a performer, very much like Richard Poirier’s idea of modern poetry as the pageant of a performing self. Not surprisingly the dramatic monologue provided a useful poetic stage for just such display. The form was highly effective because the persona not only revealed itself in various conscious and deliberate ways, but, through the mysterious fluency of the unconscious, it also called into being a hidden self without uttering a sound. We see and know more about Bishop Bloughram in Browning’s “Bishop Bloughram’s Apology” than he believes he is revealing about himself. Such is the double-edged fate of the psychologically constructed persona. It was the “real” self, in interiore homine, the unique core of the whole person, that began to be constructed psychologically in the nineteenth century. “The very terms of Freudian science and the language of his analyses,” Charles Taylor writes, “require an articulation of the depths” (Self, 446). The new discipline of “the depths” further assumed that the meaning of our “character” was confined inside us. Our unique significance was inward and immanent. Understanding the self (and its crucial guarantor, identity) was entirely a matter of understanding a person’s interiority. The persona or external personality could be coherently traced back to the “great power of the human symbolic capacity, even imprisoned as it most often is in the gigantic conflict of instincts, and distorted as it is by condensations and displacements” (Self, 446). The key lay in bringing into alignment the performing persona and the “real” self within. The persona, or outward manifestation of the self, could be assessed in a vocabulary adapted from drama criticism: personas are weighed in the scale of gestures, costumes, speech, and character development. They can be convincing, wooden, exotic, polished, aristocratic, proletarian, and so forth. A persona is sometimes simply seen as uniquely interesting in itself or it is weighed in the scales of sincerity. This involves a further judgment: how extensively do persona and “real” self overlap? They can never be entirely coincident, except, of course, in the child, the holy fool, and the saint. But the closer they come to this limit, so the model assumes, the better. Most persons cannot bring the two into final alignment and the psychological fallout makes for a complex set of reactions. It is this disjuncture, with its potential for hypocrisy and duplicity, that yields the great, anguished literary themes of the nineteenth century. The importance of the dramatic monologue for early modernist poets like Pound and Eliot draws our attention to the debt they owed their

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nineteenth-century predecessors. Their intuition that the form offers more than an opportunity to put on display fascinating personalities or “cases” transformed the dramatic monologue in their hands. What they exploited is the way the dramatic monologue as a poetic form makes it easier to grasp the constructedness, instability, and malleability of the self. The intense concentration on the personality of the subject revealed, among other things, that character has no fixed ground and is essentially an empty concept. This is the psychological equivalent of the way the invention of the mechanical clock revealed inadvertently the emptiness of time as a concept. The dramatic monologue shows us that the self is scriptable and that different periods or philosophical discourses represent the self in ways that underline its instability as a concept. That is perhaps the clearest message that emerges from Charles Taylor’s recent historical chronicle of concepts of the self. More importantly, Eliot’s and Pound’s use of the form also reached journey’s end for the most recent set of inscriptions about the self, namely, the self as psychological subject in history. J. Alfred Prufrock is probably still sufficiently psychologized as a persona that we can speak about his various problems, if we want to, in the therapeutic discourse of what was, in 1917, still a new science. A good deal of the criticism on the “Love Song” does just this. However, the sense of a viable or coherent character is weakening. It is weaker still in another dramatic monologue by Eliot, “Gerontion.” In The Waste Land, “Tiresias” has absolutely no psychological center of gravity at all. His disgust or “foresufferance” during the sex scene between typist and clerk in “The Fire Sermon” does not tell us anything about him in the way that the Duke of Ferrara’s disgust at his wife’s conduct in “My Last Duchess” tells us a great deal about him. The problem of “Tiresias” is that he is merely a tissue of narrative fragments and quotations. In the note to line 218, where Eliot discusses his use of Tiresias, we are directed to Ovid’s narrative about Tiresias from the Metamorphoses. Tiresias has no other mode of existence than this Latin passage of, Eliot tells us, “great anthropological interest.”5 The self in the poem is disconcertingly fluid, changeable (“metamorphic” might be the better, Ovidian term), boundary-less, collective, demotic, and aristocratic at the same time, male and female, and not very cohesive (but not necessarily incoherent).6 It is incoherent only for those who expect the self to be constructed psychologically along existential axes of motivation or via the norms of ordinary cause and effect. The instability, as speaking subject, of “Tiresias” might remind us of the flimsiness of Flaubert’s Fr´ed´eric Moreau. Eliot himself was sensitive to Fr´ed´eric’s insubstantiality. In his essay on Ben Jonson, Eliot writes that Fr´ed´eric is a character

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“constructed partly by negative definition” and undifferentiated from his immediate environment. “Without this world,” Eliot writes, “the figure dissolves” (Sacred Wood, 111). In Blast 2, Wyndham Lewis put it more directly, “Why try and give the impression of a consistent and indivisible personality?” With “Tiresias” at its center, as the text’s negative center, the way the text behaves defies the gravitational pull of the self as psychological artefact. Instead, the name “Tiresias” is attached to an archive of literary, anthropological, and religious texts, indeed fragments of texts. They create a verbal self, a textual collage, or a tissue of writing without any one author, only an editor, and then one editor on top of another. Virginia Woolf, too, arrived at a comparable conclusion in 1929 as she was writing The Waves. She noted in her diaries that the “characters” of the novel exist in and as language. Their substance is “writing, & inscriptions, & words, & meanings” [qt. Lee, Virginia Woolf, 577]. In this new paradigm of the self, we are not the source of our Being at all, nor the origin of a unique meaning, and certainly not individuals in the accepted sense of an essential self embedded at the core of a psychological structure. We are written selves, written out of a vast, echo chamber of language and a bottomless archive of available texts. Like “Tiresias,” the normative self in the culture of market society is an editorial project, a matter of cutting and pasting from the available textual materials and vocabularies for self-fashioning. We are composite creatures, made up in several senses, all the way from the lashings of cosmetics and clothes that edit our outward appearance to the fictions we make up about ourselves. Indeed this editorial work extends even into the pharmacological emending of consciousness via the use of biochemical interventions for producing normative inscriptions of well-being. This edited self is postpsychological, postmetaphysical, and posthuman. Above all, it accords neatly with the requirements of personhood in market society. Its principal features are the individual, concrete human being’s insignificance and transparency. Haveman and Knopf tell us that competitive markets, like the market for haircuts, bring together: a multitude of participants with each participant so small relative to the entire market that he has no significant influence on the entire market or any of the other competitors. The prime characteristic of a competitive market is that no single participant has the power to affect the market outcome in any significant way. If he pulls out of the market, a pretty strong action for an individual supplier or demander, the market and the other participants fail to notice or react to his absence. Likewise, if he doubles his demand or his supply nothing happens. (Market System, 114)

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If I refuse to get a haircut or I double my visits to the stylist, my actions, as far as the market in haircuts is concerned, are meaningless. This describes rather well, if inadvertently, the metaphysical status of the human subject in market society. He or she may act, but, contrary to expectations, nothing happens. In this respect, the Alice-in-Wonderland “supplier and demander” of the economist is really no different than the original hollow man, “Tiresias.” This is not a universal human problem. If the market-form is subordinated to a wider culture based on different civic or ethical principles, the stature and fate of the human is quite different. In societies organized around loyalty to a god or clan or chieftain, actions have meanings in terms of loyalty and disloyalty and, because they have such meanings, they carry important consequences: something, in fact, happens. In this sense, the person matters. Persecution of dissidence may be bad or evil in any given society, but at least it means that the individual actor’s activities are seriously substantive. All of Eliot’s social and cultural criticism after 1922 argues for the reconstitution of an anthropologically integrated society that normative liberalism (Idea, 18) has shattered. In fully developed, posttraditional market societies, the concrete human subject has about the same substance, opacity, and reverberation as “Tiresias” in The Waste Land. His significance doesn’t lie in who or what he is, because who can say what a “Tiresias” actually is. His importance lies in the bits and pieces of language, textual fragments, tones of voice, and moods that get stuck to him. Certainly, he is not anything we can pin down in human or psychological terms. His significance for the mechanical operation of the text abides in his functionality; he is a system device. The system rules and “Tiresias” is simply a necessary text function in stabilizing the Waste Land semiosphere. The process by which the text was put together in the editorial collaboration of Eliot and Pound diminished the particular importance or meaningfulness of any one of the elements or cells that compose the whole text. As a result, the text has a high survivability7 quotient, that is to say, it could survive as a text if one element in it were to be expunged. Ezra Pound’s own Cantos survived for decades as a viable text even though Cantos 72 and 73 were missing. How radically was the poem changed by their inclusion finally in 1995? Perhaps we are more aware now of the extent of Pound’s dementia, but we certainly didn’t need the witness of the two cantos to know that the poet was not well when he wrote them. If Pound had suggested and Eliot accepted that the Ezekiel allusions in “The Burial of the Dead” were redundant or superfluous, would the effect on The Waste Land of their cancellation make much difference? If Eliot had added the cancelled

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Lady Katzegg fragment, would the poem be substantially different? If the reference to Tiresias in “The Fire Sermon” and Eliot’s note were cancelled, would the poem be so radically affected that it would become incoherent? How would the excision of Tiresias, for example, effect the Grail theme? I’m not arguing that the text is weakened or that it is illegitimate in any way because of the negotiable character of its elements, that they can come in and out with little effect on the poem as a whole. The instability or mutability of the modernist text has been very well examined recently by George Bornstein in Material Modernism (2001) and nowhere does he suggest that this subverts the power or legitimacy as art of these texts. Not at all. The significance of all this lies in how farsighted and well-adjusted The Waste Land is to the structural revolution only beginning to be wrought on the culture of the West by the advent of market society in Eliot’s time. Its more general physiognomy would not come fully to view until at least fifty or sixty years after the poem’s publication. The Waste Land is a field of structural possibilities that can be put into play in any number of ways. Marianne Thorm¨ahlen’s survey of accounts of the poem’s unity underlines the openness of the poem’s form; and the inscrutable logic that underlines it. About J. Hillis Miller’s old idea that “the poem works like those children’s puzzles in which a lion or a rabbit emerges from nowhere when the numbered dots are connected in sequence” (Reality, 145), Thorm¨ahlen retorts that the “dots” are not numbered: Every reader who goes to it unencumbered by pre-conceived notions will make out its own pattern and nobody – whatever his feelings in the matter – will be able to demonstrate that they are wrongly connected. (Fragmentary Wholeness, 205)

True enough. And C. B. Cox on the same point says: “As we read, we are aware of various possible kinds of structure . . . But all these possible structures continually break down” (“Cross-Roads,” 318–19). Eliot and Pound seem to have looked at a number of possible orderings. A thousand decisions had to be made and remade in terms of sequence, inclusion, and exclusion. Whatever arrangement the two were working with at any one time was always open to timely sequential mutations. Two parts could be interchanged, for example, and then changed back and changed again. They were not alone in this fiddling with sequence. While writing The Waves, Virginia Woolf worried about order in a narrative in which she tried “to keep [the dramatic soliloquies] running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves.” “Can they be read consecutively?” she asked, but admits that the answer to the question is beyond her (Writer’s Diary, 156).

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Eliot’s exploitation of both religious and mythological materials in the poem has often been cited as the principal factor in marking the poem’s deeper level of thematic unity. The poem’s scatter, however, cannot be so easily worked out. The dispersed or horizontal structure of the text, the collage-like character of the assemblage of materials, points, it is said, to Eliot’s critique of modern society. Fragmented, emptied of value, sterile, the modern waste land is reflected in the poem’s artful disarray. But at a deeper level, Eliot’s fertility symbolism and the entwining of pagan (Tiresias, Cumean Sibyl, Adonis) and Christian (Grail, St. Augustine, Dante) materials yield, so the argument goes, a familiar, compound narrative that moves from experiential failure, guilt, purgatorial suffering, and the hope (but not the fact) of spiritual rebirth. Although we cannot say with certainty what Eliot believed he was doing in his appropriation of pagan and paleoChristian materials, we know from his comments on Joyce’s Ulysses and Stravinsky’s ballet, Le Sacre du printemps,8 that he saw in the present the primordial imaginary of the distant past. In this conjuncture, the historical remoteness of the ancient materials had no effect. Notwithstanding the familiarity of this kind of resurrection narrative in Western culture, the poem’s thematic core, like the figure of “Tiresias,” is also the product of a highly imaginative cutting and splicing of given mythological materials. In each instance of appropriation, historical (and geographical) specificity is sacrificed in the dynamics of assembling the collage. The insistence of critics on the mythological solution to the poem’s scatter can probably be set down to nostalgia for a lost unity, the very idea that the poem itself seems to be marking out as the central failing of modernity. The editorial process in fact could have gone on forever. At a certain point in time, however, it was brought to an end and the text of the poem stabilized, more or less. Even then, the “final” configuration of the text was not sacrosanct. The notes, for example, were only added after the first publication. Thorm¨ahlen notes that Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance “only came into Eliot’s hands after most of the Waste Land material was already on paper” (Fragmentary Wholeness, 199). To say that the poem was “finished” when it was finally set down in the form we find it in Eliot’s Collected Poems is to extend the concept of completion into new semantic territory. The poem is not a completed text at all, even in its finished form. Indeed, isn’t that what Eliot was able to “say” in the formal debris of the final lines of the poem? The commonplace that modernist works of art are always “works in progress”, that they underscore the process of composition, indeed, are often filled with references to their own process and progress, as in Pound’s Cantos, couldn’t be more true. In this respect, the

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poem can not be more up-to-date in our own time. In the current epistemological conditions of modernity, The Waste Land remains an exemplary text, more so now that we are all works in progress, unfinished and unfinishable editorial projects, rather than Freudian artefacts, fractured egos in search of our lost wholeness. The non-stop editorial work on consciousness, identity, and now, increasingly, even on our physical bodies is everywhere around us. And I don’t mean “the body” as philosophical metaphor in the sex-andgender discourse of literary theorists. I mean the amending and emending of actual bodies and not only among body-pierced twenty-somethings with purple hair. I’m referring to the amazing expansion everywhere, and most noticeably in suburbia, of plastic surgeons, gyms, spas, fat farms, hairand-nail salons, and body-image boutiques where the old, lexicographical term, “editing the corpus,” has taken on a whole new meaning. The sale and promotion of exercise machines, surgical and biochemical interventions, youth-assuring oils and lotions, penile enlargements, breast enhancements, sexual reassignments, and a thousand-and-one diets make up fully a third or more of all TV broadcasts on American television today. The Waste Land did not cause this mania for cutting and splicing our flesh, but the culture which made Eliot’s editorial fiddling possible is the same culture that brings millions of bodies to the body sculpting salons and the dealers in Botox. On the day I am writing this, my national newspaper, with supposedly the highest journalistic standards, has an article that hails a scientific advance in producing movie star’s or model’s pouty lips. It seems they can be had without injections or invasive surgery, but merely by the simple application of a miraculous gel. When The Waste Land was published in 1922, only the young got the message, even if they could not put into words what that message exactly said. They didn’t need to; the poem spoke the truth of their condition, not only in the clever morbidity of its moods, but also in its radical intuition of the inner meaning of the world to come.

chap t e r 11

La boh`eme: Lewis, Stein, Barnes

Not surprisingly Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr is also an unfinished editorial project. Nor can it be said to be complete. Just ask any one of the twodozen Lewis scholars in the world which of the versions of Tarr is the best or most complete text. Be prepared for a lively response. The first Tarr (there were three “first” Tarrs, all of them different) was a product of the Vorticist period and underwent extensive revision in the late 1920s. It was originally written during the Blast years, from about 1914 to 1916. It began to be serialized in one form in The Egoist on 1 April 1916; it ran until November 1917. This periodical had begun life as The New Freewoman and was still controlled by feminists deeply involved in the suffrage movement. The novel appeared in its first English edition with many revisions in July 1918 from the Egoist Press. It had appeared a few weeks earlier in yet another form from Knopf, the principal publisher of modernist work in New York at the time. As Paul O’Keeffe observes in his Editorial Note to his edition of the novel, these three texts vary substantively (1918, 5). In his reconstruction of the 1918 Knopf text, O’Keeffe, in one of the great editorial achievements of a modernist text, manages to provide, in the apparatus, the means for reconstructing all three originals, although he has chosen to use the Knopf version as his copy text. A decade later, in 1928, Lewis thoroughly revised the text and the novel appeared again, but this time from Chatto & Windus in London. In his short Preface to the 1928 revision, Lewis acknowledges a “demand” for the book that he describes as “the first book of an epoch in England” (1928 [7]). The earlier text, he feels, “should not appear again as it stood, for it was written in extreme haste, during the first year of the War, during a period of illness and restless convalescence.” The new text is more polished, “finished” is his word, and the “rough . . . given . . . everywhere a greater precision.” But the word “precision” can sometimes be curiously ambiguous. The offending roughness of the earlier text is itself very precise in terms of the jagged explosiveness of Blast, the periodical produced at the time Lewis 215

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was first composing the novel. When we compare the earlier and later texts, the greater smoothness of the later seems oddly unnecessary. Is it a weary concession to a readership unschooled in the more exacting precisions of a fully modernist approach? Is it a play for more sales at a time when Lewis’s fortunes as a painter as well as a writer were declining? Is it the beginning of a modernist apostasy? One might argue that the 1918 Tarr has simply had the blast taken out of it by 1928. And that is a judgment, perhaps, that Lewis himself might have endorsed. Of the first Tarr, he wrote in old age, “I clipped the text to the bone of all fleshly verbiage . . . eschewed sentimental archaisms and all pretty language as it might be called” (qtd. in Symons, “Thirties Novels,” 37). Nowhere in 1928 did he put in any “pretty language,” but he certainly added flesh to the original skeleton. Perhaps, the revisions were prompted by something else, the disconcerting way the radical critique of English philistinism in Blast and Tarr had come to be adopted in the Twenties as a mere style, from the 1926 London Underground poster of umbrellas (“No wet no cold”), so conspicuously influenced by Vorticism, to the smarmy bohemian entertainment Noel Coward called The Vortex, and, finally, to the Johnny Hoop parody of Lewis’s Blast in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Lewis’s iconoclasm had been “domesticated and debased” by “the fashionable world” (Meyers, The Enemy, 65). Perhaps the revisions to Tarr in 1928 were Lewis’s attempt to save the novel from becoming a parody of itself in a changed cultural climate. The explosive energies of the Blast-era Tarr were not as alien to the evolving cultural self-awareness of market society as one might suppose. The prudish and prim moralism of the Victorian middle classes was, by 1928, a dead letter. What the times required were new strategies of resistance and these might very well be the reverse of the rules of engagement of the culture wars ca. 1914. The outrageous rebelliousness of the avant-garde had begun to lose its bite as it became the new, edgy style in the emerging culture of fashion. By 1928 Lewis had already achieved the status of a “character” on the cultural scene and it soon became evident that the new culture of celebrity fed as greedily on the outrageous and the cheeky as it did on noteworthy accomplishments. Was it necessary to adopt a more conservative or traditional plan of attack? All aspects of the culture of market society, including its idiocies, had already begun to show their modernist genealogy. Lewis’s The Apes of God (1930) was his embittered, satirical response to this state of affairs: The traditional “Bohemia” has changed radically since the War. The reason is this. Everyone able to afford to do so has become a “bohemian”. This is the term still

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employed by the more na¨ıf of the transformed majority. But of course traditionally that person was called a “bohemian” who could not afford to be anything else. The tramp, or the cynic by choice, upon a vast scale, constitutes a novel type. (Apes, 127)

Lewis thinks of these life-changes as choices in the sense of fashion. Fashion may have had something to do with it, but they were not entirely the product of a good selling job. As I have said before, it’s a mistake to think that the radical poetics of modernism were “co-opted” by market society. Rather, the artistic culture of innovation and of creative destruction expressed the very essence of posttraditional modernity. The traditional, in its turn, acquired a rebellious dimension it had never had during the cultural insurgencies of an earlier decade. If this is the case, Lewis’s revisions to the first Tarr illustrate the point very well. The early Tarr’s modernism is undeniable. It is how that modernism is tamed and rounded in the changed cultural environment of 1928 that brings out another “sometime . . . paradox,” which, as Hamlet tells Ophelia, time resolves (ii.1.114–15). Although the narrative is carefully located in place, bohemian Paris, it is not positioned in public time. Time passes in the novel, but strictly by reference to the activities of the bourgeois–bohemians. There is no temporal outside to the community whose fractured portrait Lewis draws, in the same way that there is no Paris other than la boh`eme. The effect is claustrophobic and freakish, like perfectly normal botanical specimens run monstrously to riot in a sweltering hothouse. Characters are neither drawn in the conventionally realist way nor rendered in the style of inwardness which Joyce, Woolf, Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage (1913), and Proust in France had begun to make a new modernist standard. Lewis had already intuited the paradoxical dilemma which the new inward style of writing posed in a reified culture. He adopted a series of countervailing stylistic strategies. He adapted, like Eliot and Pound, the poetics of juxtaposition and montage as the grammar of modernist narrative. He had already responded in his paintings to the physical and psychic fragmentation caused by the machine age, by modernization, in the active disconstruction of the human body as a series of machine parts and metallic planes and its disorientation in space. So, writing, passively rendered by Joyce as the legible inscriptions of consciousness-in-privacy, ought to be more actively employed as a weapon, an incursive encroachment, an invasion of consciousness, a kind of verbal B-and-E of a very fine house in a rich suburb and with its private contents spilled out on the lawn for all the curious neighbors to look at.

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Lewis was not interested in a comprehensive rendering of consciousnessin-private in the interests of its legitimation as the defining instance of the secluded subject in modernity. His prose techniques, like his visual styles, were more radically aimed at turning subjectivity inside out, to making it public, contra Joyce and Woolf, in a way that didn’t go through the monkey motions of pretending to preserve its secrecy in the private consciousness of the “character” and by constructing the reader in the very same mould as the character in the narrative, namely, as a private, self-absorbed narcissist. Joyce’s method of rendering consciousness in the privacy of the character’s own head has the effect of constructing the reader as an accomplice-inseclusion. The reader is recruited unsuspectingly into keeping confidence, occupying a position of reticence and secrecy. It is what we all know about each other, especially in the intimacies of our enclave, but keep to ourselves. But these stylistic gyrations are the verbal equivalents of trompe l’oeil effects in painting, verbal optical tricks, the intent of which is highly ambiguous and possibly parodic or malign, when it isn’t simply defensive. It was to make as visible as possible the narcissistic fallout of the reification process at which Lewis aimed, first, to make legible and, then, to smash. His failure can be glimpsed today in a film like The Hours where Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia herself are recycled as popular icons for a whole mass society of inwardly sensitized bourgeois–bohemians. Hairline fractures in the syntax of the sentences and the syntax of the succession of sentences, unconventional stops and starts, including the invention of the equal sign (=) as a new mark of punctuation, stark juxtapositions, the elimination of the usual conjunctive tissue in the context of a standard English prose, were the stylistic means he employed to carry out the assault. They were all aimed at bringing the flow of narrative continuity and the reading process itself into moments of violent arrest, into moments of crisis or undecidability. The primary aim, as in all modernism, seemed to be the breaking down of the Great Wall of China that has separated the subject and the object in European metaphysics since Descartes, but without making of consciousness the Joycean black hole into which all the external world disappears. The 1918 Tarr showed how this might be done. Here is a representative passage from the 1918 text: As he appeared on the threshold of the conservatory an expectant or anxious tremor invaded several backs.= But he just stalked round this time on a tour of inspection, as though to see that all was going along as it should.= He stared heavily and significantly at those young ladies who had been his partners, when he came across them. One he stopped in front of and gazed at severely. He then returned to the conservatory.

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In his deck chair, his head stretched back, glasses horizontal and facing the ceiling, he considered the graceless Hamlet that he was. “Go, to a nunnery, Widow!” He should have been saying that to his Ophelia. Why did he not go to her? = Contact was the essential thing, but so difficult to bring about. (1918, 152)

Here is the same passage from the 1928 Tarr: Again the tall, and in spite of the studied dishevelment, still preternaturally “correct,” satyric form appeared upon the threshold of the conservatory. – An expectant tremor invaded several backs. But on this occasion he just stalked round on a tour of inspection, as though to see that all was going along as it should. Heavily and significantly he stared at those young ladies who had been his partners, when he came across them: one he abruptly stopped in front of and gazed at severely. She did not denounce him but blushed and even tittered. He left this exhibition of cynicism in disgust, and returned to his conservatory. In his deck chair, his head stretched back, glasses horizontal and facing the ceiling, he considered the graceless Hamlet that he was. “Go to a nunnery, Widow!” He should have been saying that to his Ophelia. He hiccuped. Why did he not go to her? – contact was the essential thing: his thoughts returned to Anastasya. (1928, 153–54)

This passage comes from the chapter of the “Bourgeois–Bohemians” section of the novel and is part of the long and at-times nightmarish description of Fr¨aulein Lipmann’s party at the Club, where the obsessive Otto Kreisler stalks Anastasya, but finds himself unable to make contact with her. He ends up thoroughly humiliating himself. If you compare the two passages – the 1928 rewritten to a more standard pattern of English prose textures – you will see what Lewis’s experimentation consisted of in the 1918 original. In 1928 what I call the conjunctive and adverbial tissue is more fully deployed, making for a continuous and more clearly oriented narratorial style. The expanded subject of the first sentence gives more fictive detail, emphasizing the “characterness” of the character in question. In the 1918, the emphasis is placed not on the “he,” who seems oddly faceless and insubstantial throughout the earlier version, but on his effect, the tremor which his presence sends shiveringly along “several backs.” The equal sign which follows the first sentence suggests a relationship of some kind, but is it conjunctive or disjunctive? I agree with Hugh Kenner and Tim Materer that it is disjunctive in intent. The sentences are meant to be put somewhat apart, separated and at angles to each other, with the effect of momentarily arresting the reading process, and creating small visual snags

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in the prose rhythm. In the next sentence, the more conventionally formal “on this occasion” of the 1928 text locates the narrative in temporal terms with more polish than the brusque “this time” of 1918. The second equal sign snags the rhythm again and separates the clangorous succession of clauses and sentences to the end of the paragraph. The expanded 1928 version opens the narrative to a greater degree of continuity, as does the restructuring of the passage that follows the ejaculation, “Go to a nunnery, Widow!” In the 1918 original, this outburst is followed by two one-sentence paragraphs which form the opening sentences of a single, more unified, paragraph in 1928. The equal sign in 1918 again disjoins the successiveness of the sentences and the use of Anastasya’s name in 1928 reasserts the characterological conventions of fiction as against the immersion of character in a kind of pronomial anonymity. Although the overall context is a standard English prose, the writing in 1918 produces more discontinuity than continuity. The relative lack of conjunctions, of other markers of place, or time, or logic, the odd outbursts of speech, sometimes in English, sometimes in German, and so on, creates a microtexture of juxtapositions, but unlike a passage of interior monologue in Joyce, the juxtapositions are not projected on a character’s consciousness, nor are they projected as a series of counterpointed “voices”, as in The Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos, and the Sirens episode of Ulysses, making for a kind of complex polyphony. They are inscribed instead as a system of hairline fractures and faultlines in the narratorial language of the novel itself. They act to snag and arrest the continuous movement of narrative in order to bring the visual images more stunningly to consciousness: They were like trunkless, living heads rolling and bobbing past, a sea of them. = The two or three instruments behind the screen of palms produced the necessary measures to keep this throng of people careering, like the spoon stirring in a saucepan. It stirred and stirred and they jerked and huddled insipidly round and round. (1918, 152)

If you look back to Sentimental Education you will see that Flaubert, for example in his description of the party at the Marshalls’, was the early master of these techniques of juxtapostion and arrest. This disjunctive approach to the sentence, both makes the image stand out more vividly as a result of the unsettled texture and, one might think, helps to disrupt the smooth operation of language as the primary coding mechanism of reification. But the surprise that market society had in store for modernism was precisely the use of these very same techniques for the more effective delivery of reification. In the media discourses of the twenty-first century, the poetics

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of a text like Tarr has become, admittedly at a lower level, standard-issue language play in advertising, in journalism, in stand-up comedy, in daily White House press briefings, and in the entertainment industry in general. Lewis explored, without using the word, the whole complex of reified relations, that systematized network of cultural codes and representations which preexists, speaks, and produces the individual subject as the primary commodity of market-driven modernity. In such a situation, the personal language, the private thought, the intimacies of the pure relationship, are themselves glimpsed as the most deep-seated of illusions, where reified states dictate in advance the thought or feeling that has seemed to choose the personal and private as its own most authentic mode of expression. Whoever, under such circumstances, continues to affirm the unproblematic functioning within the noetic community of a pure language of mutually comprehensible affects and meanings falls victim more surely to this illusionistic structure which silently undoes one’s most “authentic” utterances. The experience of authenticity within the bohemian enclave gains substance by contrast to philistine society. But the contrast is really with the remains of traditional manners and mores rather than with the culture of freebooting entrepreneurs. What is sensed as narrow, artificial, and desensitized in modern times is not the capitalist order but the old forms of relationship, conduct, and ritual which capitalism and modernism, in their different ways, are putting to the sword. Within the magic circle of noetic connectedness, life is experienced as vitally effervescent, spontaneous, and caring. Rather than being the devil’s hook, desire bubbles up as a creative and liberating force. The new Freudian psychology formalizes, in authoritative quasi-scientific terms, a new licensing of libidinal entrepreneurship that thrillingly permeates personal relationships. The love between a man and a woman loses, for one thing, its compulsory matrimonial destination. For another, it abandons the rituals of monitored wooing. Sexual desire no longer beckons from over the horizon. It finds expression in the honest and mutual expression of unashamed carnality. Because of the old restraints, now experienced from the margins, as reified objects of ritual and routine, the new life seems suddenly quickened, sensitized, and replete. It is these accepted truths of the existential vivacity of bohemia that Lewis questions. The noetic community, the pure relationship, and the reflexive project of the self are the very structures that Tarr draws out for examination. If these communal and personal forms are the social and historical framework for and from which modernism speaks, then those who see modernism as a revolutionary leap forward have tended to see, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, the social forms of the historical avant-garde as themselves

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revolutionary repudiations of “the values of a business society” (Jameson, Fables, 13). But what Lewis sees, not as part of a theoretical or ideological campaign, but from his own brute experience in the artistic communities of Paris and London is something quite different. For him, the forms of life in bohemia are, in their own way, as thoroughly reified and abstract as the routines of old. When describing Bertha’s letter to Tarr in response to one from him announcing an imminent trip to London, Lewis tells us that she wrote “easily and directly”: She was so sure in the convention of her passion that there was no scratching out or hesitation . . . All the feeling that could find expression was fluent, large and assured, like the handwriting, and went at once into these conventional forms. (1918, 169)

The phrase “convention of her passion” strikes the very heart of the bohemian cult of authentic experience. At every turn Lewis elaborates the idea of dead forms or conventions of feeling (and thought) among the Bourgeois–Bohemians. Feeling has no play or spontaneity; it goes “at once” into conventional forms: To Bertha Nature still had the usual florid note. The immediate impression caused by the moonlight was implicated with a thousand former impressions: she did not discriminate. It was the moon-illumination of love-affairs.=Kreisler, more restless, renovated his susceptibility every three years or so. (1918, 141)

The supposed existential vibrancy of the emancipated bohemian individualist is shown to be bogus; experience is as frozen in its routine expressiveness (“thousand former impressions”) as the dreary rituals of philistine life. Kreisler’s importance for the text is that he has fallen through the delicate net of automatic emotions and thoughts pretending to be existentially vivid and hit ground hard. He has reached a kind of depressive rock bottom and cannot respond any more in the conventional ways of the supposedly “liberated” bohemians (“Kreisler ignored his surroundings” [141]). Meanwhile, Bertha persists in counterfeiting the poetic responses she believes define a conscious and vital life: For Bertha the darkened trees rustled with the delicious and tragic suggestions of the passing of time and lapse of life. The black unlighted windows of the tall houses, held within, for her, breathless and passionate forms, engulfed in intense eternities of darkness and whispers. Or a lighted one, in its contrast to the bland light of the moon, so near, suggested something infinitely distant. (141)

Lewis’s parody of a routine romantic expressiveness is deliciously funny. The suggestiveness of the setting, her breathlessness, the romantic detail of

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moon and trees and whispers are part of a staged and largely unconscious personal drama. But, Lewis insists, there is nothing personal or unique about it. To think that there is is simply delusional. These signs of vital, conscious life are, in fact, things, reified objects as dead and repetitious as the traffic lights, or the “spent insect” (281) of commuters toiling from home to work and back again along the boulevards. Lewis, however, is not just writing satire. He has in his sights, as Paul Peppis has convincingly argued, “the radical individualist philosophy of . . . Max Stirner” (English Avant-Garde, 137). Stirner’s appeals for liberation from the “alien constraints on individual freedom” in his The Ego and his Own (1907) gave the editors of The Egoist, the periodical in which the first Tarr was serialized, their radical point of departure. Stirner’s alien constraints to a full expression of individual will, however, are not really very alien at all. They are the familiar train of social and political duties demanded in traditional societies: duties, for example, to clan or tribe, to religion and family, to dynasty or nation. It is this regime of obligations against which Stirner campaigned in the 1840s in Germany. This analysis, more or less, constitutes Lewis’s critique of the inwardness and intimacy of bohemia. It is no better in the public sphere, and Lewis was honest enough to say so, although he was by temperament, like Pound and Eliot, disposed to hope against hope in the continuing validity and historic relevance of a coherent public world. It was a social vision along the lines of the civic spirit of the Italian city states in the quattrocento or of the early years of the American republic, the hands-on authority and clear-eyed public-mindedness of a Machiavelli or a Sigismondo Malatesta or a Jefferson. It was a world which had a place for the artist out in the open.1 In modernity that world was gone for good and, although Lewis misunderstood the reasons for its passing, he knew it could not be resurrected. But he could not abide what replaced it for the artist either: the stifling intimacies of bohemia. He grew more isolated and more gloomy with time, reaching the nadir during the years of exile in Toronto at the time of World War II. How isolated he had become is recorded in his grim account of those years in Self Condemned (1954). Lewis’s alternation of rage and melancholy, violence and despair, about the end of a meaningful public world, a world openly celebrated, but subtextually eulogized, in The Lion and the Fox (1926) and Paleface (1929), ought perhaps to be read as defining the epochal response of a settled authoritarian patriarchy, a masculine voice trying to hold on to the essential unity of res publica, in the new conditions of fragmented society:

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We, the natural leaders in the World we live in, are now private citizens in the fullest sense, and that World is, as far as the administration of its traditional law of life is concerned, leaderless. (Paleface, 82)

The fragmentation of the social world as a whole, and the fragmentation of its constitutive institutions, into private noetic particles, from the point of view of patriarchal consciousness, resembled Marx’s comic vision of the French peasant culture incongruously mobilized by the bohemian charlatan Louis Bonaparte in support of his political goals: Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it directly produces the greater part of its own consumption and therefore obtains its means of life more through exchange with nature than through intercourse with society. The smallholding, the peasant, the family; next door, another peasant smallholding, another peasant, and another family. A bunch of these makes up a village, and bunch of villages make up a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as a sack of potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 239)

The noetic particles were separate, autonomous social entities, each with its own life, its own internal orders, and a desire to work out its own destiny. Their simple addition into a larger social whole could not produce society in the sense of a totality greater than the sum of its individual parts. A certain kind of patriarchal consciousness could not abide this unintended social consequence of market-driven modernization, but other points of view, obscured by the authority structure of the patriarchal past, most certainly could. Perhaps one might map modernism along this faultline in its genesis and evolution. The conditions in which artistic activity lost touch with res publica, a public space increasingly transformed into a series of private noetic groupings, was more easily a condition in which women artists, homosexuals, and intellectuals seemed immediately more comfortable, than heterosexual men. The disparagement of “bourgeois–bohemia” as schizophrenic and hallucinatory in Tarr was repeated in less sanguine forms and about the wider social whole by Pound and Eliot. Their diagnoses and remedies of, in Eliot’s phrase, “negative liberal society” (Idea, 19) were expounded to a mainly uncomprehending readership in a series of prose works in the period between the two wars, by Eliot in After Strange Gods (1934) and The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), by Pound, in his money pamphlets, Guide to Kulchur (1937) and all through the Malatesta and Jefferson cantos, and by other specifically male voices.

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This defensiveness was necessary as the ideological tide of early modern England, especially by the 1920s, was run through by an aching nostalgia for a past social and political unity that had gradually vanished. The hearty social phobias, gender resentment, and an essentially masculine incomprehension of the social processes unleashed by modernization had their nasty side. The obtusely male style of a British periodical like Punch, or the mass circulation middlebrow and lowbrow press, which laid the blame for social change at the door of “modern” women, avant-garde artists, Bolshy professors, Jews, and deracinated homosexuals, set the tone of public discourse. Like Tarr, Eliot’s The Waste Land presents itself as the symptom of the very condition the poem reviles. The modernist critique of modernized society, as a strategy of dispersal and decentering of discourse, is scarred by a fateful paradox. The critique, it turns out, is itself a textual paradigm of the action on the social bond of market-form and commodity-fetish, the very forces of modernization the poem opposes. In other words, the market-form is projected aesthetically into the innermost structure and method of the work of art. It is represented in a positive light as innovation of artistic technique and of form. At the same time, the work of art, like the Shakespeare and Co. Ulysses, pushes away from the exchange economy by defining itself as having very little commercial value and, hence, acquiring immunity from defilement by the system of commodity circulation. Yet the gesture of withdrawal from the exchange nexus defines one of the most characteristic features of the culture of market society; the fragmentation of the public world into noetic enclaves of private individuals brought together by shared interests and chosen attachments. It is this very process of disintegration of the social and cultural unity of traditional society that most troubled Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. The disintegration of the old social imaginary is perhaps why the later Eliot also solved the paradox of modernist art by abandoning the revolutionary avant-garde of the Blast period for what remained of the so-called “classicism” of a courtly pastoral England (Ellis, English Eliot) that was by century’s end long gone. Lewis, too, looked back to the “more vital inheritance” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries interrupted by the Victorians, all “that sensiblerie, pathos of Dickens, personality-mania, and so forth [which] has alienated us from that time” (“Fry’s Rˆole,” The Tyro, 3). He responded negatively and violently to what seemed to him the claustrophobic and messy intimacies of bohemia. Tarr was written by a man whose values still reflected a good deal of the vertical, patriarchal culture of tradition. He still believed in a public world that mattered, long after

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E. M. Forster had withdrawn into the sort of personal relationships which would lead him to say in a famous essay that he wished he would betray King and Country, before he betrayed a friend. Forster’s touching faith in the culture of “loving friends” points to the striking differences of perspective among the modernists themselves. The new social situation of the artist in modernity was an event from which Lewis never fully recovered. But not all modernist voices reacted negatively. The gay and bisexual males of Bloomsbury modernism, for example, found the new noetic havens congenial and secure. Lewis was trenchantly and perhaps even violently heterosexual in a noetic community of intense intimacy in which the women had already come out from under Victorian patriarchy, and in which gay men and women had already, within the confines of the enclave at least, simply come out. Lewis always joked about this, but there remained an ever-present note of nastiness in his humor. Lewis’s personal relations with women, for example, were appalling, especially in a period when feminism was finally taking a political focus. The general male relationship towards women was difficult in this period in any case because of the suffrage movement, the most visible of many symptoms of women’s desire for greater independence and autonomy in the early years of the century. Suffrage was perceived by settled society as particularly provocative. The fact that many women had begun to acquire money and, therefore, power, and to participate in the economy as producers and consumers, put a good deal of traditional male culture in a lather. The paradoxes of recognition, resignation, and rage are very plainly played out in the popular, and male-dominated, press of the time.2 The ambivalent and contradictory portrayals of the “new” or the “modern women” in the daily newspapers, for example, are very revealing in the 1920s. The strident antifeminist tone on the editorial pages up front clashed with the flattering courtship of women consumers with money power in the advertising pages at the back. Needless to say the editorial intelligences that operated the popular press seemed blind to the contradiction. The women’s movement, because it was politically radical, was regarded initially as a part of the modernist vanguard, an ally of modernist artist, writers, and intellectuals, in the remaking of society. How else would the Dora Marsdens of the world have put up with men like Lewis? Lewis and other male modernists, although lending support when the women were simply talking, grew ambivalent or even hostile when women’s political and social activities required greater commitment and resolute action, and sometimes action which challenged their own attitudes and behavior. The

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fact also that activists faced enormous hostility in the population at large, beyond the noetic boundaries of bohemia, gave male modernists more pause for thought. In general though, it was the face-to-face renegotiation of all personal relationships in bohemia that tested and frightened Wyndham Lewis. Where the members of the Bloomsbury Group were able to find in the open mutuality of friendship the basis of the new bond, Lewis felt only that an aesthetic of concentration, maximum intensity, hardness was being softened and feminized by being enveloped in the sweet mush of privacy. When he came in contact, and at close quarters, with, say, the slack delicacy of a Lytton Strachey, he was disgusted. When he ran across what he thought were the snivelling impostures of the Sitwell clan, especially Edith, a fragile doll-like character in white-face in the 1920s, he was nauseated. The cult of subjectivity, inwardness, and psychology in the literary London of the 1920s offended him and he took out his aggression in a number of ways. He was a thorough scoundrel in his relations with those he didn’t like, and that meant that with time he had more or less alienated everyone he knew. His dismissive attitudes towards the artistic bohemias of London were scathingly voiced in the roman a` clef, The Apes of God which made him one of the most hated men of his generation. These attitudes, in the end, came to reflect his estimate of all humanity. His ostracism from cosmopolitan artistic circles was more or less complete by the time he came to write a scandalous book in praise of Adolf Hitler in 1931. D. H. Lawrence, not unfairly, said that Lewis’s final verdict on his fellow human beings could be summed up in two words: they stink. Lewis came to believe that what stood in the way of the genuine artist, one interested in producing something of significance, was the very intimacy of the bohemian enclave itself. For Lewis, relations of intimacy inevitably ran on towards sex; sex became the still point of the intimate world. And we cannot deny that sex, in all its varieties, was one of the central themes running through the social text of these early improvised communities. This should not be surprising. What the London bohemia represented, even as early as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, later, on the more sexually adventurous terrain of the 1890s, was liberation from the massive repressions of Victorian society. Men and women were free to reorganize their intimate lives and a good deal of time and effort was expended in thinking about it, and doing it. The free expression of sexuality in the pure relationship came to signify emancipation and freedom, as it perhaps still does. The sexual arrangements and activities of Bloomsbury, for example, still have the capacity to surprise people today who think of themselves as

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worldly. Lewis, if the “Ape-Flagellant” chapter of the The Apes of God is anything to go by, was not surprised. An attack on sex pervades his work in general, and is customarily explained by charging Lewis with misogyny and homophobia (Munton, “Imputing Noxiousness,” Lewis Annual, 5–6). Misogynist he may have been, but what his work seems to express is simply a pessimism about the liberating and/or creative possibilities of sex. Michel Foucault has expressed a similar skepticism: “We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power” (qtd in Dasenbrock 51). Lewis would have gone on to remark that by saying yes to sex, one says no to art. Sex, he believed, in the most fundamental way endorses and perpetuates the way things are. It is a vote of confidence in the spurious completeness of intimate life and, therefore, in our social and political arrangements. The emphasis on relations of intimacy simply diverts intellectual and emotional energy into maintaining the status quo all the way down the line. The painstaking cultivation of sexual intimacy, which comes to characterize the pure relationship, takes on a kind of aestheticized aspect. Sex, according to Tarr, is as close to art as the average person can get. In bohemia, sex becomes a kind of substitute for art and art a way of trying to get in touch with the vigor of life. This is Kreisler’s problem in the novel. And, Lewis was to write in the later 1920s, D. H. Lawrence’s problem too (Paleface, 57). Tarr, towards the end of the novel, tries to define art for his sexual partner, Anastasya Vasek, in a way that sees it as occupying a maximum distance from what he calls “life,” by which he means “life” in the close context of proximity and intimacy within the noetic bond. “Life” in the pure relationship is, as it were, out, proud, and in your face: “Soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as an object can be.” [Tarr tells Anastasya] “Art is merely the dead, then?” [she answers] “No, but deadness is the first condition of art . . . The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.” (1918, 299–300)

Art is separate from life, more durable, more fixed, and more permanent, Tarr says: Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art. It is a dead thing, as you said; you are life. There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good.= A statue, then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its lines and masses are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and

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women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of a tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art. (1918, 299)

Lewis’s art, then, like Oscar Wilde’s, is an art of surface and as such finds its clearest modal pattern, according to his essay “Interior Religions,” in comedy and satire. The power of Lewis’s fiction issues from his theory of comedy: “The root of the Comic,” he wrote, “is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observation of a thing behaving like a person. But from that point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons” (Wild Body, 158). In writing, the only thing that interests him is the behavioral shell, the actions and appearances of people, not their internality. Their inwardness, the structure of subjective intentions, is the unguided missile of their pathetic wills and, therefore, the source of never-ending hilarity. The bulk of his published writing attacks virtually every manifestation of modern literature and philosophy presenting life as if from the inside, as in the case of “stream-of-consciousness”. This is what his seemingly diverse attacks upon Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Henri Bergson, and Virginia Woolf come to: his unwavering contempt for any of the arts of inwardness. And he is especially contemptuous of the philosophies of Time, like Bergson’s for example, that allow us to distinguish between mechanical time, mere chronos, and some deeper, private time made available to intuition, memory, and chance. His attack on inwardness and the conception of the self as engaging a warmly self-congratulatory human nature, as the imaginary institution produced by the ego to hide its own hideous machinery from itself, makes up a good deal of what Lewis’s eerie schizophrenic rush of laughter and terror are all about. It was Lewis’s project to discredit “the shapeless warm organic dur´ee of the inner monologue and of a pysychology-oriented subjectivism” (Jameson, Fables, 52). Here is one reason he chose the comic as literary mode and the satirically inclined, ethically blank, purely external mode of representation in Cubist and Vorticist forms. In this he shares some affinities with Joyce, recognizing with him that the comic is the modality most inclined to untying the text of the familiar and habitual. Frederic Jameson’s book on Lewis, Fables of Aggression: The Modernist as Fascist, makes this point well. His reading of Lewis is based on the notion that the most influential, formal impulses of the modern, both in the arts of high modernism and in the development of modernity in everyday life, have been “strategies of inwardness, which set out to re-appropriate an alienated [or reified]

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universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages” (2). These strategies ironically do no such thing. Instead they are a way of disarming society for its more efficient penetration by the culture of the market. The leading intellects of modernism record what might be called the “inner emigration” of consciousness towards contemplation of itself, strategies for withdrawal into the safe havens of intimacy and connection, but recoded as art or mysticism or orthodox religion, or even sex. Lewis’s is an explosive, often acid critique of these tendencies in the making of modernity. For Lewis characters are metal-plated machines for whom feelings are “powerful violent springs” masquerading as “Destiny” (1918, 191) or they are beasts. The machine is examined in minute detail and rendered as fragments until whatever coherence it had is reduced to randomness, accompanied by surges of panic and hysteria. Lewis, more clearly than any other of the early modernists, formulates explicitly (often implicit in others) an essential characteristic of literary modernism, that is its essential antihumanism. Tarr is soaked in a persistent, bloody-minded loathing for humanity. They are machines, or headless chickens running “from the block,” or the slowly moving legs of a “spent insect” (1918, 281). In The Art of Being Ruled, the loathing is no longer absolved by the appeal to fiction. It is visceral and as John Carey has noted “it wavers between the extremes of robot and wild beast (not, of course, that he was alone among intellectuals in embracing these contradictory stereotypes)” (Intellectuals, 192). These attitudes he shared with others, like Eliot who, in The Waste Land period, consistently characterized certain classes of people as subhuman. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a survey of Poems 1920 reveals a spectacular distaste of hoi polloi. Jews, for example, are not born, they’re “spawned” (CP, 39), and when they aren’t squatting on window sills (CP, 39), they are reduced to “protozoic slime” (CP, 42) or symbolized as “rats” (CP, 43); lumpenproletarians like Sweeney are orang-outangs (CP, 44), epileptics (CP, 45), “red-eyed scavengers” (CP, 47), and “punaises” (CP, 50). They sometimes give off “une forte odeur de chienne” (CP, 50) or “a feline smell” (CP, 56), and they are always “en sueur” (CP, 49, 50) when not “d´elabr´e” (CP, 53), or being compared to zebras, giraffes (CP, 59), and silent vertebrates (CP, 59) (Cooper, Voice, 30–1). Looked at from within the noetic community, the mass of humanity seems little more than the anonymous, moving streams of the metropolis – the sheep-world in Chaplin’s Modern Times, Eliot’s “undone” crowds, or the “army of the dead” descending the escalator to the Underground in Woolf’s The Waves, “[g]reat wheels churn inexorably urging them downwards”

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(148). The notion that these automatons, these “them,” represent the final triumph of “Man,” of humanism, as it was celebrated in the Italian city states in the quattrocento right through to the liberalism of John Stuart Mill is, Lewis would say, hysterical, laughable. The utilitarian massification of pleasure and pain, the rise of demographics as a nineteenth-century science had already seen to the practical obliteration of “Man,” of individual people as unique beings. Of course this has not stopped “Man” living on as a useful ideological trope for the discourses of power, human resource management, and marketing. In the noetic enclaves, the micropolitics of intimacy and connectedness managed to keep alive some comforting notion of human significance, but this was achieved simply by drawing the social boundary tightly around the new community, and installing the double regime of continuous reflexivity and strenuous aestheticism. The swarming masses out there were, as best as one could, simply kept at arm’s length. Unlike so many of his contemporaries who sought safe refuge from the waste lands of public life, Lewis reacted against this state of affairs. A decade later, the political writers of the 1930s would deepen the contradiction: they would both struggle against the capitalist fragmentation of the public sphere and yet, in their personal relationships, intensify it by withdrawal into Bloomsburyesque noetic fragments. As I have argued in another connection, this was as much the case in the authoritarian Soviet Union as it was in the democratic West (Cooper, Ideology, 164). Lewis, Pound and Eliot were the modernists most discomfited by finding themselves in this situation. None of them ever abandoned the hope of a revitalized communal unity and wholeness and, with it, a significant public culture in which artists and intellectuals could play a leading part. The intellectual roots of these ideas are now well known.3 They could also see that the odds were very long in remaking modern mass society to an ideal pattern that it was important to believe had existed earlier in European history but, in fact, probably had not. Pound’s increasingly frantic and irrational efforts to breach the institutions of power on both sides of the Atlantic – his quixotic struggle to contact FDR in America and his selfdeluding service to Benito Mussolini in Italy – led eventually to humiliation and imprisonment. Lewis did not go to prison, but his self-exile in Toronto during World War II and his ostracism from most artistic circles in England after the 1920s was perhaps just as effective as Pound’s thirteen years behind bars. Eliot, more cautious in his sociocultural polemics and with the Church of England as a bulwark, soldiered on, trying to flesh out an impossible medieval vision of a traditional, agrarian society in the midst of a Britain long committed to modernization.

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Others, like Joyce, Stein, Woolf, Barnes, found the noetic bond more to their liking – at least it solved the problem of how to live in the uncongenial environments of mass modernity. For them J¨urgen Habermas’s dictum about the place of art in market society could not be more true: “Art is a sanctuary for the – perhaps merely cerebral – satisfaction of those needs which become quasi illegal in the material life process of bourgeois society” (qtd in B¨urger, Theory of Avant-Garde, 25). The social constitution of the “sanctuary” evolved as kinship, national–historical, and other traditional ties diminished. In their place, a new regime of social relationships came into being increasingly free of those ties. It was in these small communal nodes, organized around the making of art, from which the later social history of twentieth-century market societies emerged. From these places a new kind of minority art emerged and with it an intense discussion about technique, style, and presentation. Its conscious aim was the desire to open new possibilities for art and this was to be done by a reworked mastery of form and technique. The emphasis on technical proficiency in modernism had a number of functions. It was perhaps the only way an artistic movement, taking as its raison d’ˆetre innovation and experiment, could go. It was also a way of meeting the typical contemporary complaints about modernism: namely, that what seemed like a kind of frenzy of incoherence and gibberish to the ordinary reader or gallery-goer was in fact the product of careful deliberation and design, and evidence of a greater level of skill and mastery than most artists of the Victorian past were in possession of. That it required an extraordinary skill and dedication to paint like Picasso, or to compose like James Joyce, was insisted upon in every friendly venue and on all possible occasions. But it was said of both of them that they were simply bad artists who had not learned their lessons well enough to do the business of art in the conventional ways and, therefore, had gone on to invent new, but unnecessary, aesthetic theories and schools in order to obscure their want of talent. This was the taunt regularly thrown in Eliot’s face after the publication of The Waste Land and the sort of thing Gertrude Stein so touchingly conveys in her story of the “very nice very american young man” from the Grafton Press who comes to Paris, after the arrival in New York of the manuscript of Three Lives. He is there to find out if her knowledge of English is up to scratch, and to enquire whether, perhaps, she had not had “much experience in writing” (Autobiography, 76). When one turns from Tarr to Gertrude Stein’s account of the Paris bohemia in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1934), the gender difference in modernism is brought clearly to view. In fact, the difference is

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night and day and it has primarily to do with differing attitudes towards the bohemian enclave. Gertrude and Alice’s Paris bohemia is surely not a prison in which consciousness lies strangled and inert. No Kreisler, as comic buffoon, rapist, and Nazi-schizophrenic-in-training, darkens the doorway of number 27 rue de Fleurus. Which is not to say that no such comparable figures lurked around the Left Bank in Stein’s day. But where Lewis makes these tinpot Raskolnikovs the negative image of his modernist bohemia, Stein gives us at worst the unhappy “village explainer” Ezra Pound, talking so violently, that he falls out of his chair, and a happy Ernest Hemingway trying to find his way through bohemia towards the only kind of literary immortality market culture has to offer: flavour-of-the-month celebrity (234). Gertrude Stein was perfectly at ease in the society of the isomorphous magnitude. “[A]t that time,” she writes of Paris in the first decade of the century, “every little crowd lived its own life and knew practically nothing of any other crowd” (60). The very idea of a “little crowd” snuffling around in each other’s underpants offended Lewis. Whereas Stein was amused by the intimacies of the little crowd and the nonstop gossip, the normative discourse of the noetic circuit, Lewis was inflamed. “Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions,” she reports (87), delighting William James at Harvard as a living refutation of certain depth-psychological commonplaces. Lewis would have no doubt agreed, but where Stein quietly and efficiently adapted her prose style to simply deflect attention from the unconscious, Lewis never stopped hacking away at the point. Divergent as Lewis and Stein are, they converge in one respect, namely their similar approach to prose texture and syntax. Both of them come at texture disjunctively and for the same reason: the desire to interrupt the smooth flow of rhetorical custom and verbal routine (see North on Stein in 1922, 200–2). They foreground and subvert clich´e as the primary discursive coding measure of everyday life. In these ordinary linguistic practices one finds consciousness freeze-dried by reification and, as a result, the gradual petrification of the common language. Angularities, swervings, fissures of syntax in both Lewis and Stein are handled in two very contrasted ways. The differences lie not so much in technique, but in attitude and temperament. Stein’s systemic waywardness of approach, the little syntactic snags in her sentences, the anomalous juxtapositions, the swerves of sense, tiny linguistic loops, wayward punctuation, and the deadpan tone, so reminiscent of Flaubert, all work to disperse the narratorial subject. The fact, moreover, that “Alice B. Toklas” is the factitious persona of the speaker obscures the authorial voice as well.

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The whole text is, of course, a classic dramatic monologue in the guise of a prose autobiography, a kind of displaced graphing of the fabricated self, or as Lewis caustically put it in “Inferior Religions” (Wild Body, 152), “the chemistry of personality” (238). Stein’s exploration of identity and inwardness by deft adherence to the outward and, in the best sense, the superficial is only possible in the noetic enclave, where the authentic self can emerge from the closet, as the vital embodiment of the real, over against reification. Lewis and Stein understood how the subtle disruptions and interferences of the inert phrase regimes of philistine life might bring life to life again. “It has always been rather ridiculous,” Stein writes of herself through the Alice persona: that she who is good friends with all the world and can know them and they can know her, has always been the admired of the precious [by which she means bohemia]. But she always says some day they, anybody, will find out that she is of interest to them, she and her writing. And she always consoles herself that the newspapers are always interested. They always say, she says, that my writing is appalling but they always quote it and what is more, they quote it correctly, and those they say they admire they do not quote. This at some of her most bitter moments has been a consolation. My sentences do get under their skin, only they do not know that they do, she has often said. (Autobiography, 78)

The reversals and ironies of this passage are wonderfully carried off. We know that the “newspapers” must take care in quoting her, even in quoting her derisively, because her style works with the unfamiliar. Her quotations must be proofed carefully, whereas the “admired” are admired and not quoted, because they produce what everyone already knows. The whole process of getting their conscious attention deposits her sentences under their skin, “only they do not know that they do.” This gap in knowledge, this not knowing, is where the irony flourishes in the passage and in the displaced narrative of the dramatic monologue form. It is the spot where the dramatic monologue reveals its greatest relevance to modernist discourse, provides the modern with one of its most important genealogies. The loosening of the social bonds of traditional communities, the recognition across class and kin and gender lines of a new order of mutually affirming experiences and knowledge among co-inhabitants, and the discovery that language, like the circulation of capital, always already exists in a state of discursive openness and possibility, of suspended animation, that makes the work of a Gertrude Stein possible in 1900, but not in 1800. She can as easily slip unobserved into the persona of a “real” person, Alice in this case, as speak in the voice and mask of that other and more labyrinthine piece of fiction, the persona of herself. Here is the rather bland culmination,

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without all the blood, the thunder and lightning of the drama on the Yorkshire moors, the storm and stress of Catherine’s fusion with Heathcliff in an unnameable and indescribable union, a pure union beyond words. The irony is that in truth it is all too conspicuously a union made out of words; it can only exist in words. Eighty years later The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas tells in detail and a tranquilly domestic style all of its own what is silent potentiality in Wuthering Heights. In The Autobiography we find the record of the pure relationship, the exact fusion of the couple in the form of dramatic monologue, narrated from the inside, in contrast to that which in 1848, in Wuthering Heights, could only be conceived of from the outside, with all the indirections and displacements of the external narrators. Its style is a function of the relationship itself. It does not bridge private and public spheres. The pure relationship within the noetic community of which it is a part carries its own stylistic variants that emerge as the peculiar language of the relation, its idiolect (cf. Lamos Deviant Modernism, 136). Bloomsbury was to bring the semiprivate language of insidership to one of its stylistic peaks. Before modernism, a style was both an individual invention and a public legacy. Shakespeare’s language was unmistakably his own, but it was also an inheritance from the past. It was already a styled and shaped historical possession when he found himself within it. It had already been handled by countless others and Shakespeare’s use of it is instinct with his knowledge of that prior activity. For him it was not a question of finding ways of bracketing off the inheritance, i.e. purifying the dialect, with irony, parody, pastiche, in order to find some more authentic mode of expression. The modernist “end of history” has effaced Shakespeare’s historicized epistemology. The supposed burden of history, as we know, is Stephen Dedalus’s dilemma; and Joyce’s. The equivocal style and the Cubist morphology of Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s final solution to the problem. Shakespeare’s audience found part of its satisfaction in hearing the inheritance properly revived and wittily correlated across time to present circumstances. The fact of its temporal remoteness, not its liquidation, authenticated the birthright. Their pleasure in language lay in the continuous dissemination of the ancient literacies derived from the Mediterranean world as they informed their equipment for communal life, their religions, their political and philosophic ideas, their literatures and other arts, indeed the texture of intelligibility which held the society together as a single public sphere and as a continuous history over thousands of years. With the coming of the revolution of capital this continuous honor paid to the past declined. Capital, of course, is all future-directed. Even though

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it is accumulated in the past, is the accumulation of past investments, it has no place for nostalgia. Capital points us towards the future and the regimes of endless variety to come. Those sentimentally attached to the past simply find themselves working for dwindling incomes. The unintended historical irony of Stein’s Autobiography, and of modernism, lies in a twosentence fragment whereby the internal operations of the noetic community itself comes to resemble the operation of commodity culture. Think of the comings and goings at number 27 rue de Fleurus: Who else came. There were so many. The bavarian minister brought quantities of people. Jacques-Emile Blanche brought delightful people, so did Alphonse Kahn. There was Lady Ottoline Morrell looking like a marvelous feminine version of Disraeli and tall and strange shyly hesitating at the door. There was a dutch nearroyalty who was left by her escort who had to go and find a cab and she looked during this short interval badly frightened. There was a roumanian princess, and her cabman grew impatient. Helene came in to announce violently that the cabman could not wait. And then after a violent knock, the cabman himself announced that he could not wait. (135)

And on it goes. Of her countless guests, Stein writes “It was an endless variety. And everybody came and no one made any difference.” The endless variety of the commodity wonderland and the endless novelty of stylistic variations, each object and style markedly different and marketed as different, or new, or all-new, having worked free, been purified, of any form of the inherited literacies, paradoxically, ends up making no difference, like the people who come to visit the Steinian enclave, with Gertrude herself sitting “peacefully in a chair” at the center. The variety of modernist styles and the uniqueness of each is an inevitable result of the social fragmentation of thought and feeling into separate noetic particles. Stein’s style is not an idiom of the public sphere, and it is not intended to be; which is why she takes such delight telling of her frustrations with a larger, but comically inept and cowed, readership that cannot get the hang of her sentences. Her sense of superiority in the discomfort of hoi polloi suggests something rather unpleasant about her, but constitutes also an important bohemian defense mechanism. The perplexity caused by the manuscript of Three Lives with the American publisher gave rise to the following self-satisfied anecdote in the Autobiography: One day some one knocked at the door and a very nice very american young man asked if he might speak to Miss Stein. She said, yes come in. He said, I have come at the request of the Grafton Press. Yes, she said. You see, he said slightly hesitant, the director of the Grafton Press is under the impression that perhaps your knowledge of english. But I am an american, said Gertrude Stein indignantly. Yes,

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yes I understand that perfectly now, he said, but perhaps you have not had much experience in writing. I suppose, said she laughing, you were under the impression that I was imperfectly educated. He blushed, why no, he said, but you might not have had much experience in writing. Oh yes, she said, oh yes, Well it’s alright. I will write to the director and you might as well tell him also that everything that is written in the manuscript is written with the intention of its being so written and all he has to do is print it and I will take the responsibility. The young man bowed himself out. (76)

Joyce, of course, had to undergo the same frustrations, although he did not have Stein’s capacity for public conceit about them. For all these early modernists none of the available public discourses were able any longer to sustain serious aesthetic work. The early chapters of Hugh Kenner’s The Sinking Island go into the problem of the debasement of the cultural coinage in Britain in the early years of this century. His diatribe is the longer version of T. S. Eliot’s essay “The Three Provincialities” published by Lewis in The Tyro (March 1922). Stein’s primary self-creative gesture is rejection of past investments, the ornate edifice of the Jamesian period for example, neatly bracketed by the faintly derisive irony of her admiration for him, the one writer “whom she considers quite definitely as her forerunner” (86). Of course, given the time and the stamina, she was able to ensure that her sentences did finally find a readership all their own; and that, in our own time, a readership for her style of sentence, not necessarily her own actual sentences, but sentences like her own which now flood posttraditional modernity from contemporary advertising to the pedagogical currencies of the composition classroom and the impromptu verbalizations of triumphalist American presidents. That her original readers did not necessarily overlap with anyone else’s readership is only one further consequence of the noetic fragmentation, and hence the special kind of freedom, of literate society in market culture. But this is only one style of modernism; there are plenty of others, possibly an endless variety, and some are not so charmingly benign and coy as Gertrude Stein’s. The unboundedness of discursive potentiality has its negative side also. And that negativity also develops from the new social conditions and the more malign styles of relation which they sometimes generate. The vertiginous infinity of conceivable propositions and statements in language entails, in addition to the cornucopia of endless variety, the endgame logic of nullity. Within the pure relationship this capacity for nullity involves the limitless potential of arrangement, rearrangement, and derangement of personal relations, and so enter Robin Vote and company. Nothing is

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ever firmly in place on the anxious side of unboundedness, but is part of a constant negotiation and surveillance. Nora Flood and, more balefully, Jenny Petherbridge in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood are the exact double embodiments of the anxieties which arise in the uncertainties of the pure relationship and the nervous monitoring, as Giddens notes, of every movement of the other and of oneself (Modernity, 88–98). If Stein’s Autobiography smugly realizes in the language of a new kind of domestic tranquillity, that is the otherworldly fusion of Catherine and Heathcliff as the earliest paradigm of the pure relationship, the disjunction of Robin and Nora represents the micropolitics of the failure of that fusion. Nightwood, whatever else it is, is a love story and whether it is a same-sex love story or not, it primarily explores the rending pain of misunderstanding and separation. If it is based on Barnes’s own troubled relationship to the sculptor Thelma Wood, as most critics suggest, then the novel is rather more personally focussed than many recent feminist critics, on the lookout for exemplary feminist texts, are ready to accept. The fixation in some recent criticism on the fact that the novel deals with a lesbian couple and that therefore the novel must be about the lesbian experience misses an important sociological truth. Within the Parisian bohemia of the 1920s, and within other noetic communities of the same kind, same-sex lovers were more free to leave behind the gender norms and expectations of bourgeois society. They were more free to explore every area of sexuality and gender identity than in society in general. But even a superficial reading of the novel tells us that it is not a treatise about gender relations or patriarchal culture out there in the everyday world. And to read it in order to find out whether Barnes is on “our” side, or not, about the larger questions of the social order is, I think, a bit of a mistake. A feminist reading of this novel is difficult. It means, for example, having to say that in Nightwood Nora Flood is a kind of “male” figure who remakes Robin as a cultural stereotype: She cannot “read” Robin Vote because Robin’s behaviour, appearance, and efforts to communicate are not inscribed in the societal code to which she is asked to conform. A product of a culture that has suppressed female difference, Nora Flood sees Robin as a man would see her: as an object of desire. Like a man, Nora constructs Robin in her own image. Thus Robin serves simultaneously as a “sign” of female difference repressed by Western culture and is misread by Nora into conformity with the cultural code. Every time Robin’s actions make obvious the strain of conforming to the operations of this society, every time she draws attention to Nora’s “misreading” of her, Nora suffers, claiming that Robin – rather than Nora

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herself – is the cause of the ensuing misery. Nora both loves and fears Robin, but she loves her own “re-made” image of Robin and fears the Robin who signals woman’s difference, the Robin who stands outside the sexual economy of this culture. (Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 258)

But what “culture” is Shari Benstock referring to when she asserts that Robin Vote stands outside the sexual economy of this culture? What culture? The bourgeois culture of society at large, or the microculture of the noetic community which houses this relationship? It is somewhat blinkered to think that Djuna Barnes is simply mapping patriarchal culture into the enclave; as if the story of a relationship between two women who have already taken an enormous step in leaving the patriarchy behind should now simply replicate it unwittingly. Why would Barnes even want to invent such a deflationary tale? Nightwood is an exploration of feeling and relationship well beyond the pull of a mundane and declining patriarchy which it has already thoroughly defeated for itself within its enclave. In order to rotate the novel as feminist allegory, Benstock squanders the novel’s far more important insights into the nature of the pure relationship. Of Nora’s comment about eroticism and death in the passages near the end of the novel when Nora is telling the doctor of her fruitless searchings for Robin, Benstock writes, “Woman’s eroticism is linked to death, her womb the center of a dark, threatening mystery. This culture has tried to expunge woman’s presence,” (258). Yes, this is true of patriarchal culture at large, but can it also be true of a relationship that has already worked itself free of patriarchy? A relationship like Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s, or the one which fatefully links Nora and Robin? But all this is beside the point when we look at the passage Benstock refers to. Nora is speaking: At that moment I stood in the centre of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained, and I knew in that bed Robin should have put me down. In that bed we would have forgotten our lives in the extremity of memory, moulted our parts, as figures in the waxworks are moulted down to their story, so we would have broken down to our love. (Barnes, Nightwood, 158)

This isn’t so much about the “mystery of woman’s sexuality” which is “hidden from her,” an embodiment of “this ethic” which sees woman’s nature as “the root of all evil.” The ethic of male dominance seems to me to be very far from what this short passage conveys. It is about what the last few words are trying to say through the elegaic sadness of loss and yearning, to break down through all the alien selves to the one constructed by love,

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to find that point of fusion between lovers which recovers “their story” and defeats the reified “figures in the waxworks.” Like Stein’s text, Nightwood is situated inside a noetic boundary and that, in a fragmented society, reorients psychic and personal space. Within its boundaries, the reach and magnitude of that which Benstock considers to be “this culture” and “this ethic” is diminished and allayed. Barnes herself delineated its borders in Ladies Almanack (1928), one of several lesbian documents of the expatriate community in Paris. It is a satiric celebration of Natalie Barney’s Academie des femmes which met regularly in the garden at number 20 rue Jacob to read women’s writing. Having found her way into this community with Thelma Wood, Barnes sensed the sanctuary of freedom in which the two women might have their own private relationship without necessarily having to defend at every moment its right to exist in a world that would not understand it anyway. In Nightwood Barnes was interested in exploring the internal micropolitics of such a relationship, the politics of love and commitment, the anguish of rejection, the pain which it engenders, and implicitly the larger philosophical issue of our fateful appointment, woman and man, with nullity, as the defining philosophical experience to which modernity must always lead us. The darkness and pain of Nightwood arrives as a result of that rendez-vous with the facticity of death in a factitious reality. Nietzsche and Heidegger are the theoreticians of this momentous encounter. In a modernized lifeworld turned by the circulation of capital and the commodity-fetish into spectacle, reification, and inauthenticity, it is left to the early modernists, within their noetic enclaves, to attempt to think and live authentically. Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) is the philosophical work that most readily takes on the task of defining the philosophical groundwork of the noetic relation in society. It is this ontological imperative or need, beyond the social polarities of Grange and Heights, that Catherine and Heathcliff enact only when they have lost it. It is what Nora and Robin also confirm in loss. Nora’s final wanderings to reunite with Robin by doing “what [Robin] had done” is her final effort to be Robin, in the same way that Catherine senses that Heathcliff is her, or in the way that Gertrude Stein becomes Alice B. Toklas in The Autobiography, as a private act of love (and possession) and as an open consecration of the union. The conflict in Nightwood is not about Nora’s attempt to possess Robin, because Nora acts like a man and can’t understand Robin’s freedom and sexuality as a woman. I don’t think Nightwood was written primarily as a polemical intervention in the history of feminism, nor was it written with an eye to setting itself up in business as a lesbian classic in the future curriculum of the posthuman

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university. It was not written on a soapbox. If you are not frightened by its scrupulous and courageous accounting of the cost of love, and of its rending failures, and of its anticipatory resoluteness in the face of death, you have not read it carefully enough. Better to recognize the novel’s importance by accepting that it penetrates the inner world of darkness, the night, beyond the painful failures of love between two women; and this irrespective of what, when we stand back from it far enough, it tells us about the history of gender relations or the level of awareness which the text demonstrates in a political struggle for the achievement of social and political rights today. The debate about whether Nightwood is a modernist text or not, how like or unlike it is to Joyce’s work or Stein’s, which has also exercised some critics, is a fruitless endeavor. It is a modernist work because of the assumptions it made in 1936 about where it was speaking from and who was listening. It was written within the noetic enclave, about the consequences of the failure of the pure relationship. It accepted its own place of freedom within modernity, a freedom that Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot could not finally abide, and it was modernist because, like Heidegger and like all modernists, it assumed that it would speak most concretely to a small handful of readers who were themselves inside the defined boundary. For the rest, it would mean very little, exactly nothing in fact. T. S. Eliot’s introduction to the novel speaks of its intended audience in just these terms. Using Pound’s representative figure, we might say that there would have been about five hundred readers scattered across Paris, London, New York, or wherever, who could have recognized what tale Barnes was telling and recognized the propriety of how she was going about telling it. This explains the unconcern about the conventions of realism, the vagueness about time and place and sequence in the novel. If you were part of her world, the novel could be set anywhere. Where, in an outmoded historical geography of realist expectations, this time, in this place, does not matter. The pure relationship exists in history no doubt, but it has chosen to cut itself off from history. What underlies the huff and bustle of history is pure, unstructured duration, a kind of historicalness without events, because, from inside its own world, noesis refuses to make any investment in what is out there, the tattered remnants of a public sphere dispersed by the market-form. Thus the pure relationship, like the noetic community in Stein, is free to conceive of the concrete history of itself as the only possible history that matters. Like the movement of capital which no longer recognizes national borders, nor the vestiges of past loyalties to structures of kinship, custom, and territory, and occupies its own space and time, modernism as the discourse

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of avant-garde noesis exists in a state of permanent expatriation, of exile, from rootedness. It is perpetually unhoused. It has in fact no living past, no loyalties to the continuous weave of words from the past, voiced and unvoiced, within which people have conducted or realized by means of speech, their everyday lives. I mean that it has no loyalty to the preservation of the irreversibility of the word, that sense of its communicative authority and groundedness. Its capacity to hold together as a shared and historically grounded subjectivity, in the minds of countless agents, their felt belongingness to a common realm is lost forever. Modernism’s loyalty to the word is loyalty to the language system and to the cultural productions that are its impressive yield. That these productions are cut off, like the market-form, from a national or ethnic history only cements more firmly the genetic link between modernism and the market. Modernism is no longer interested in the past as history, as the accumulative, and still vital, legacy of the whole polis. Communal history is a storehouse, a museum of usable fragments, archival remnants of past voices, gestures, forms, and events which one can use, gripped in quotation marks, for some present aesthetic purpose, but from which no moral tale unwinds. Stephen Dedalus’s dismissal of history as nightmare on Sandymount Strand is germane here. Shari Benstock, in her comments on Nightwood, is simply trying to force Barnes back into the feminist nightmare from which she has already broken free.

chap t e r 12

Bloomsbury nation

Of all the avant-garde groups on the English scene in the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury Group seems, at first glance, to be anomalous. Bloomsbury has many of the same internal features as other bohemias, yet its peculiar position in English society leaves it less socially marginal or cut off than other groups. Its principal members and associates enjoyed closer ties with the social and political elites in London. This contrasts with the social divide that separates avant-garde groups in continental Europe from the native upper classes. Their more distinct separation is probably best explained by the greater degree of active political radicalism of continental avant-gardes as opposed to their English counterparts. In London, avant-garde groups that numbered foreigners, young men and women from the provinces, and the sons and daughters of recent migrants to England – as in the case of writers and painters from the Jewish community in Whitechapel – did not enjoy Bloomsbury’s relatively easy and continuous access to the elites. Mark Gertler’s personal difficulties leading to his suicide in 1939 cannot be put down entirely to the class system, but his origins, his “foreignness” as a poor Jew in what was still an insular and anti-Semitic society did not help. His unremitting poverty, his egotism, his social gaffes, and his clinical depression, as Sarah MacDougall has shown, were mainly to blame for his situation. Yet, it was clear to him that he did not belong to and, eventually, was not even welcome in the social world, including Bloomsbury, to which he had enjoyed partial admission when young. Egotism, depression, and bad manners did not necessarily disqualify anyone from the comforts of the upper-middle and upper classes. But birth a stone’s throw from Spitalfields Markets, one of twenty-six people living in a small house in Gun Street E1, put an indelible mark on Gertler that no amount of talent, good looks, and the patronage of rich women was ever able to expunge. Better had his family concluded their migration by crossing the Atlantic to America. 243

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In New York, by contrast, the gap between avant-garde Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century and the wealthy was not unduly wide. This is especially true of the circle within the elite that patronized the arts or simply liked the company of artists. The salons of Mabel Dodge, the Stettheimer sisters, Walter and Louise Arensberg brought artists, writers, amusing hangers-on, and others into contact with the wealthy and with the proprietors and agents of galleries, publishers, and theatres. The Greenwich Village community attracted men and women from all income levels and from all the regions of the United States and Europe. In its heyday, during and shortly after the First World War, the bars and restaurants of the Hotel Brevoort at 5th Avenue and 8th Street and the Hotel Lafayette, University Place and 9th Street, “provided the meeting ground for the moneyed and the bohemian” (Watson, Strange, 124). The nature of the American class system, set to wealth rather than blood, made for a quite different social ethos in the relations between art-producers and art-consumers. No wealthy American is ever very far from the hustle of office or shop floor. And there are no bloodlines blue enough to maintain a family in Wright Mills’s “power elite” when the fortune dries up. In addition, the various levels of cultural sophistication in America were, and perhaps still are, measured along mainly regional lines (Midwest, New England, Old South, etc.) to which other sociospatial markers, like education for example, have been added. Interlocking terms like rural, suburban, inner city, urban, gentrified, signify cultural as well as income differences. Notwithstanding these unique factors, the overall character and career of avant-garde communities hold, more or less, to the same pattern on both sides of the Atlantic. Many Bloomsbury notables were born into various degrees of comfortable privilege: they benefited from materially stable upbringings, superior educations (or, as some might put it, educations in superiority), and plenty of capital life chances when they entered their various adult pursuits. The network of family connections and marriages, a relic of a more traditional society, helped to cement the bonds among them. Outsiders, even foreigners like T. S. Eliot, could enter the charmed circle now and then, but they were usually “our kind of people.” Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence were decidedly not that kind of people and were spurned after awkward contacts with the Group. Prickly personalities and their unfamiliar kind of candor may have contributed to the difficulties, but we should not discount the influence of class. The special character of the English class system played a significant role in both the Group’s external relations and its sense of internal cohesion.

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Bloomsbury is a familiar and comfortable English scene. The clubby character of the workaday literary scene in Victorian London, in which a professional writer like Leslie Stephen could flourish, made a life in letters possible. Intersection of the literary and political, often originating in the universities, helped foster a closer sense of communal identity. Bloomsbury was also only possible in a country with universities like Oxford and Cambridge in their heyday. Their special character provided Lewis Carroll with the vantage from which his brilliant social allegories of the Wonderlandworld could be drawn. At Cambridge, Rupert Brooke’s intimate circle of “Neo-Pagan” friends also flourished in an atmosphere that occasionally, as in the wedding celebration of Charles Darwin’s granddaughter Gwen and Jacques Raverat in May 1911, evoked the Wonderland ethos (Spalding, Gwen Raverat, 114). Social distance, the impenetrable fellowship of the elect, and esoteric language-games were the keys to the social effectiveness of the old universities as the model from which the Bloomsbury Group derived, paradoxically, a very modern solution to the posthuman condition. As a result, the Group’s distance from philistine society initially was an easy one to maintain. Old Cambridge is a perfectly English solution to the problem of reconciling adventurous intellects and conformity to the system of English castes. It was precisely this happy and comfortable truce between extreme intelligence and the ruling class that the French never managed to effect in the nineteenth century. Maximilien de Robespierre, Louis Bonaparte, and Gustave Flaubert could not possibly have been the products of a Cambridge education. Of all the class systems in Europe, the English was perhaps the most “post-structuralist,” giving every appearance to the external world of unity and regimentation, but on the inside rather decentered, open, contradictory, full of nooks and crannies for the dotty and the erring, but endlessly forgiving of its eccentric or intelligent portions. Bloomsbury enjoyed the happy nonchalance of privileged insidership. The intellectual pedigree of Cambridge cemented the remaining bonds. These and other factors appear to make the Bloomsbury Group an exception to the case I am making. But, in this case at least, appearances are deceiving. Bloomsbury exceptionalism does exist but not in the expected sense of the term. They were not an exception to the rule as such; they were an exception at that time. What I mean is that they were ahead of their time. The constitution, internal character, and evolution of the Group looked ahead to what would become the norm for all in the culture of market societies later in the century. They were exceptional, not because they could not escape an older order of community, but because they illustrate

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how social microstructures still partly enmeshed in traditional forms of life effected the transition to posttraditional society, or, what I have been calling after Friedman, horizontal society. Bloomsbury was able to maintain, especially early on, a sense of “family” solidarity within an English context but also effect with the passage of time the inevitable transition to a group defined less and less by social and family relations and more and more by common purposes, shared antipathies, artistic pursuits, and styles. The self-imposed boundaries of friendship and other attachments characteristic of contemporary society seemed to offer the members of the Group sanctuary and protection from the unravelling of traditional society and its public sphere. Loathing of public politics and politicians was a touchstone. Leonard Woolf’s “conviction that ‘all politicians were beneath contempt, fools and knaves’”(Lee, Virginia Woolf, 679) measures rather well the width of the moat Bloomsbury had dug round itself by the mid-1930s. If politics mattered at all, it was in the sense in which Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) transposed the political from its traditional public arena to the personal politics of everyday life. The personal as the political would resonate with the even more fractured market societies of the late twentieth century. It is in the avant-garde communities of early modernism that identity politics, so familiar to us today, begins to take shape as the sociopolitical history of the future. However, and rather ironically, Bloomsbury’s self-protective shell did not protect a figure like Virginia Woolf from obsessive concerns about “her value in the market-place” (Lee, 558). Neither did it render her circle immune from incorporation into posttraditional, horizontal society. Indeed, the sociocultural self-segregation of the Bloomsbury Group provides market society with its most typical form of social and cultural development. The emphasis on personal relations was not simply prompted by socioeconomic pressures. It had philosophical support from G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica published in 1903. Moore’s influence on the young males in Bloomsbury during their student years at Cambridge has already been very well documented. The stress he placed on “the importance of beautiful objects and personal relations” (Stansky December 1910, 9) made explicit the themes around which the Bloomsbury idea cohered. Personal relations as understood at the time implied both a maximal reflexivity of the self and a commitment to the open reciprocities of the pure relationship. The openness of relationships and a most un-Victorian eagerness to discuss the intimate details of one’s life, including taboo subjects like sexuality and the body, align Bloomsbury with other avant-garde circles:

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What was unusual about their conversation, unusual even now, but certainly so in England before the First World War, was their willingness to chat openly about their own and others’ sexual lives. This did not come about immediately but after they had known each other for some while, after Vanessa Stephen and Clive Bell had married in 1907. Perhaps Vanessa was influenced by Clive’s worldliness. After their marriage Bloomsbury had two locations, the Bells remaining at 46 Gordon Square; Virginia and Adrian moving to 29 Fitzroy Square and in 1911 to 38 Brunswick Square. The latter address became something of a “commune,” with Maynard Keynes and the painter Duncan Grant living on the ground floor and Leonard Woolf, who had returned from Ceylon after seven years there, on the top floor. The men were willing to share with Virginia and Vanessa a sexual frankness, more common among sophisticated undergraduates, that they had developed at Cambridge. Their closeness was intensified by Woolf, Strachey, and Keynes being members of the Apostles, and by Keynes and Strachey’s openness about their homosexual pursuits. (Stansky, December 1910, 9–10)

Virginia Woolf herself defined the moment when the old life of the “family” begins the transition to internal relations more typical of a bohemian subculture. In a famous passage from her short memoir “Old Bloomsbury,” also quoted by Stansky, she describes the “spring evening” in 1908 when the sisters were sitting in the drawing room: The door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress. “Semen?” he said. Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of the good.

No doubt bodily fluids were a popular topic of conversation among quite a large number of avant-garde groups in the period: as they are with just about everyone today, from designer semen to produce super-babies for the rich right down the income ladder to the paternity politics of outlaw ejaculations on the Jerry Springer free-for-alls. Certainly the convergence of the Bloomsbury ethos with the patterns of life and relationship in our world can be glimpsed in the extraordinary general success of the film The Hours in 2002. This success even extends into the domain of those who in the past might have been thought of as irredeemably philistine. Who could have guessed when Mrs. Dalloway went to press in 1925, or even, thirty years ago, that Septimus Smith’s suicide by impalement on a rusty spike and Clarissa’s reflections on the fall of the body and the “suffocation of blackness” (202)

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could provide contemporary culture with a marketable psychological style, supplemented by interior decoration, flower arrangement, and good books? Or who could have imagined that the subject of a semen-stained dress could move from a private moment of hilarity and liberation at number 46 Gordon Square in 1908 to the spectacularly trashy, multimillion dollar “special” probe of a semen-stained dress at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1998. The “lifestyles and life plans” (Giddens, Consequences, 80) of late modernity have Bloomsbury as one of their founding communities. Today we are all citizens of the Bloomsbury nation. Bloomsbury had formed as a circle of intimates at Cambridge before moving to WC1. The group ethos had came into being as a conscious intellectual and ethical withdrawal from philistine society, not in the name of revolutionary artistic aims, but as a result of class and the elite educational culture which shaped them at Cambridge. Their Penelope was not Flaubert, but Moore, a different kind of stylist, whose aggressive dryness had helped demolish philosophical idealism and whose rigorous and wry interrogation of concepts like the Good and the Beautiful left a permanent mark on the younger generation. Who could resist Moore’s choice ironies and his refined cultivation of the quietly hilarious as a mode of thought? It hardly seems necessary to expend twenty-one pages of an essay refuting Idealism when he turns it into a nonsense in the first ten lines. Modern Idealism, if it asserts any general conclusion about the universe at all, asserts that it is spiritual. There are two points about this assertion to which I wish to call attention. These points are that, whatever be its exact meaning, it is certainly meant to assert (1) that the universe is very different indeed from what it seems, and (2) that it has quite a large number of properties which it does not seem to have. Chairs and tables and mountains seem to be very different from us; but, when the whole universe is declared to be spiritual, it is certainly meant to assert that they are far more like us than we think. (Selected Writings, 23)

The doubt-raising asides (“whatever be its exact meaning”) and the artful knack for allowing the rhythm of simple thoughts to bring us, one step at a time, to the incongruous revelation – chairs and tables and mountains “are far more like us than we think” – not only provided the Bloomsbury males with a style of thinking but a mode of reading as well. It was not necessary to demolish bad ideas by frontal assault; the oblique or even the knowingly naive or literal perspective could do the work of refutation without the earnest expenditure of a great deal of puffing force. The method of absurdity-as-revelation drew its sustenance from the tradition of skepticism that enters the modern mind on two planes: the essays of

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Michel de Montaigne on one and the rude irreverence of the marketplace on the other. It informed Bloomsbury culture through and through. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) was a high point in the method and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando (1928) two more. The exasperated sarcasm to which Karl Marx resorted in Eighteenth Brumaire was crude when compared to the refinements of this private language of deadpan comedy for Bloomsbury insiders. Philip Guedalla, a Bloomsbury acolyte in the 1920s, even tackled Marx’s own turf, the coming of the Second Empire, to which he brought the Bloomsbury touch learned from Moore via Strachey. “There was an agreeable spontaneity about the Revolution of 1848,” he quipped, “which it shares with the best earthquakes” (Second Empire, 149) and, after the sack of the Tuileries during the “February days,” “Outside in the street an excited gentleman named Baudelaire was waving a gun and shouting, and all Paris was roaring with the intoxication of a successful riot” (157). By 1922 the style was already contracting into a mannerism in Guedalla’s hands. Compounded from a certain kind of detachment, dismissiveness, worldly sagacity, mild cynicism, irony, and weariness, the Bloomsbury manner has now achieved a generality so pervasive that not only does it provide cosmopolitan newspaper columnists with the semblances of wit, but it even serves in selling cheap beer. Moore’s prose as a model of verbal behavior invites a more general point. Although using the common tongue, Bloomsbury and other noetic communities, each in their own way, evolved semiprivate idiolects and variants of language that helped guard group identities against the forces of standardization and dehumanization, or, better put, the departicularization of the human, that turned the new, faceless aggregates of market society into habitat for triteness. Not only group identity, but individual identity was also sheltered by the verbal barrier of a private language. Bloomsbury probably took this aspect of the noetic enclave further than any other avantgarde group. It was only a matter of time before Bloomsbury verbal style encouraged other manifestations of group identity, like Postimpressionism, the decorative styles of the Omega Workshops and Charleston Farm, the relaxed manner of child-rearing and other group intimacies, sexual openness, and a general air of breezy spontaneity, an ethos, summarized by Leon Edel as “a pattern for a casual kind of communal life” (Bloomsbury, 173). That this “pattern,” or what Quentin Bell called their “domestic revolution” in living (Edel, 171), eventually took on the character of a “brand” in the commercial sense has not really been recognized until recently (Wicke, “Coterie Consumption,” Marketing Modernism, 110). Their “domestic revolution” is now a style package and it can be purchased off shelf and rack

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along with all the accessories. But the branding process began much earlier with language. It evolved through the mutually reaffirming interplay of language and behavior. A proprietary language, drawing on all the resources of tone, gesture, modulation, and symbolic solidarity, not only reenforced the making of a lifestyle, but it also provided a medium for ideological reflection. The form chosen was not political or social but aesthetic. And Roger Fry was its guiding force. Lifestyle experiments among artistic or intellectual groups within uppermiddle and upper-class English society were already a familiar part of cultural life in the previous century. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the William Morris bohemia were history by the time the “experiment” began in Gordon and Brunswick Squares. Morris’s designer business, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., set up in the 1850s, was the first avant-garde community to go into business on a corporate basis. The rise of the arts and crafts idea in Victorian England as a rejection of soul-denying machine culture provided the Morris company with two things: a practical approach to its work and an ideological vantage from which to continue to oppose the industrial scourge. Roger Fry’s founding of the Omega Workshops in 1913 had, therefore, a powerful precedent in the immediate past. But the two enterprises were not identical. A principal difference between them lay in the fact that Fry did not begin with Morris’s “politico-social motivation”: He remained a sceptic in such matters though they deeply interested him. And with Duncan and Vanessa as his co-directors, it is unlikely that he would have found much support for any social motivation behind the establishment. It was not in any prosletyzing spirit that he opened the Workshops. If a change did come about in the public’s taste in furnishing and decoration then it would be a happy miracle on the side; his immediate aim was practical and altruistic in that he wished to help the many young artists whom he knew and whose work was in one way or another sympathetic. (Shone, Bloomsbury Portraits, 98)

The lack of an overt missionary agenda is the key mutation in relating these business ventures to the evolution of capitalism. Morris’s ideas were still entangled in the social and cultural opposition to machine production and the power of the cash nexus. Carlyle and Ruskin continued to exert powerful influences and intellectuals like Morris were willing not only to listen to them but to act as well. That ordinary middle-class Victorians listened respectfully, even agreed with them, but then promptly and genuinely forgot they had done so in their everyday activities, reveals one of the more interesting gaps between moral theory and practice. It is the same

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distinction one might draw between a genuine Christianity and Victorian Church-ianity. Ethical and political judgments lay at the root of Morris’s project. Cultural activities that did not arise from the day-to-day life of traditional communities, using the crafts-based practices that were their productive life-blood, were, in a word, evil. Omega was not entirely free of moral purpose, but it was more limited and personal. Providing income for talented, but starving artists, was moral purpose enough for Fry and his co-directors. This narrowing of the wider critical project to a practical matter of helping one’s friends and colleagues coincided with the new ethical ideal of the emerging culture of market society. Where Morris hoped to exert a wide social impress, Omega “had only a small influence . . . and then mainly among the rich and cultivated patrons of a restricted circle” (Shone, Bloomsbury, 99). One could argue that Morris’s hopes notwithstanding, he had, in the final analysis, only a limited practical effect. Omega, however, was more market-savvy. With Omega the concept of the niche market in the modern sense comes into play as a form of cultural marketing for the first time. Fry understood that the appeal of the Omega brand was limited to consumers of a certain cultural sophistication. This is quite different from the practice in the eighteenth century and after of royal or noble patronage. In that case, individual nobles commissioned furniture, furnishings, and stuffs from particular craftsmen. Omega’s designs and products were made with the hope that they would find consumers without the benefit of specific commissions (although these were not discouraged). And, of course, those in search of “the real article” did manage to find their way to Fitzroy Square when the big Heal’s store some blocks off in the Tottenham Court Road no longer satisfied their level of refinement (Shone, 109). Different also was Omega’s attitude to machine production. Morris’s crafts-based, or artisanal, production practices canted towards a Luddite loathing of industrial machinery. Fry had no such reflex prejudice. If a machine could make something better than a person or, in his own words, “a purely servile and mechanical human being,” then a machine was used. “What Fry was against was the utterly soulless production on a vast scale of badly designed objects that had arisen since the Industrial Revolution” (Shone, 99). He wanted to bring the artist or designer into closer collaboration with the craftsman or machinist in order to produce more beautiful objects for the market, not to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages. As Richard Shone has noted, Fry’s aim was to retain “the spontaneity of immediate expression” in his products (100), not ignore technological techniques. It was twentieth-century inheritors of the Ruskin/Morris crusade,

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like Eric Gill and D. H. Lawrence, who could still speak of the machine in moral terms as the embodiment of evil (Lawrence, “Death is Not Evil, Evil is Mechanical,” CP, 713). In Omega the focus shifted from the means of production to a new emphasis on the consumer’s emotional involvement with the product. This required a change in focus from the object imprisoned or enmeshed in traditional usages from which it took its whole meaning and significance to the object abstracted from the necessity of its place and function. The new object in the capitalist marketplace was lifted onto a new plane of contemplation no longer defined by customary practices. It began to resemble the modernist work of art that no longer took its meanings from the social environment in which it was produced but could speak across time and space as a desirable object and find its appropriate niche among consumers who were themselves increasingly posttraditional in their culture. As a result, the Omega commodity and the modernist work of art navigated in domains entirely defined by metaphor as the new content of a voided communal ethos. In the late twentieth century, the savvier business entrepreneurs not only understood the commercial pragmatics of metaphor, but had even begun to work out its theoretical outlines. Here is Jim Koch, founder in 1984 of the highly successful Samuel Adams brand, a craft beer produced by his Boston Beer Company, on the practical benefits of informing his beer with “spirit and metaphor and imagery and mythology”: If you want to understand this, you might as well go to the first four chapters of the Odyssey and find out what was in Telemachus’s head when he set out to find his father. Or read Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and find out what makes Prufrock unappealing to us. Yes, it’s esoteric. But you are not going to figure out why people started smoking cigars again by thinking rationally. It’s metaphorical. So you go to people whose stock in trade is metaphor, not marketing. (Qtd in Hill and Rifkin, 247)

Fry understood precisely how the new modernist culture, right down to a continuing fascination with the Odyssey, dovetailed with a new commercial sensibility, increasingly freed from past investments in dying conventions. In his letters at the time of the Omega founding, he wrote again and again about the difficulty of bringing together art, production, commerce, and advertising (Anscombe, Omega and After, 25–26). But the six years of Omega production suggests that for a time at least he had successfully fused what would have seemed for an earlier generation a set of alien forces, the very same forces that seventy years later Jim Koch was able to harness in making his art-beer a success.

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The emphasis on feeling and emotional attachment to the design of the object required not only new marketing practices that focussed on this aspect of the commodity (a development which came into its own later in the century) but a new kind of aesthetic as well. The necessary aesthetic lay to hand in the immediate past. Reviving a usable form of the aesthetic hedonism of Pater and Wilde that was free of the bad odor into which the aesthetic ideal had fallen in Wilde’s time was Fry’s task. Here Fry, with the help of Clive Bell and Bloomsbury in general, made his most significant contribution in the making of modern times. To understand Fry’s reinvention of aestheticism in a usable form, it helps to know something of the evolution of his knowledge and taste in art, the stages by which he arrived on the doorstep of the modern. During the 1890s, the years of his training, he had studied Italian painting closely. His first book was devoted to Giovanni Bellini. In subsequent years his articles in the Athenaeum and the Burlington Magazine espoused the importance of form and design, especially in the Italian masters. Here he is on Uccello’s St. George and the Dragon, then one of the highlights of the JacquemartAndr´e collection. He writes that the landscape in the painting is: a system of rectilinear forms seen at right angles to the picture plane . . . And out of the play of these almost abstract forms mainly rectangular, with a few elementary curves repeated again and again, Uccello has constructed the most perfect, the most amazingly subtle harmony. In Uccello’s hands painting becomes almost as abstract, almost as pure an art as architecture. And as his feeling for the interplay of forms, the rhythmic disposition of planes, was of the rarest and finest, the most removed from anything trivial or merely decorative (in the vulgar sense), he passes by means of this power into a region of feeling entirely remote from that which is suggested if we regard his work as mere illustration. Judged as illustration the “St. George” is quaint, innocent, and slightly childish; as design it must rank among the great masterpieces. (Vision and Design, 154)

The crucial moment in this close reading of the Ucello St. George occurs with the modulation from a description of the painting’s design “into a region of feeling entirely remote from that which is suggested if we regard his work as mere illustration.” A region of feeling which can only be defined negatively, because it is not only the zone of the wordless apprehension of form but also the very place in Kant’s aesthetic where cognition both grasps the particular properties of a thing and, yet, swerves away from the real, which is unknowable, towards the more satisfying pursuit of the imaginary plenitude of the abstraction. Clive Bell in his popularizing handbook, Art (1914), would later stamp it by that familiar formalist tag, significant form.

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For Fry this “region of feeling” was the aesthetic zone as such and it was reached not by the simple deployment of geometry, though a thorough mastery of design was a necessary precondition of art, but by an intensification of what he called vision. This was not a moral category, but what can only be called an ontological one. He was able to speak of Ucello in these terms in 1914 because he had apprehended, in just these terms, the inner meaning and greatness of the work of C´ezanne in 1905. He saw in a C´ezanne landscape a magical handling of what he called “the illusion of the planes of illumination” and he saw a C´ezanne still life with new eyes – the intensity of the color, the handling of greens and grays, treated with an insistence on the value itself, in which light and shade were subordinated to color. It was the crucial modernist step for Bloomsbury modernism towards the unburdened apprehension of the object, of the thing itself, not existing independently of human cognition, but cognition as a process of release, not of appropriation, as a process, in practical terms, of making room for the consumer’s affective response. It was not a matter of filling space, but for taking the observer into the object as a way of disclosing the object’s quidditas. The goal was a new constitution of the aesthetic object freed from two nineteenth-century prisons: Ruskinian moralism on the one hand and the chatty subjectivism of the French Impressionists on the other. In both cases the object as object disappeared from view, being turned into entities which it was not. The emancipation of the object free of obstructive associations became a modernist crusade; a work of art is a work of art and not another thing: In actual life the normal person really only reads the labels as it were on the objects around him and troubles no further. Almost all things which are useful in any way put on more or less this cap of invisibility. It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purposes than to be seen that we really look at it, as for instance at a China ornament or a precious stone, and towards such even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity. (Vision and Design, 29)

But, despite Fry’s innocent intentions, positing the object’s ontological legitimacy as a function of its Kantian purposelessness and as a construct of pure vision did not guarantee its inviolability in another sense. Ironically, new model aestheticism positioned the object for its more rapid absorption into the space of the commodity; and not only the aesthetic object, but all things. Omega was the logical extension of this outspoken aesthetic of imaginative emancipation and silent integration of the object in the market-form; it was how Postimpressionism as a style of “fine art”

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was so easily transformed into a brand: “The artistic attitude of pure vision abstracted from necessity.” How this theme resonates in the various credos of the modernist avant-gardes in the last century! In it one hears the deepest longing of the modernist and of modernism in the visual arts, in literature, in dance, in music. It also sounds deeply in the new commerce of the twentieth century, “the entrepreneurial attitude of pure trade abstracted from regulation.” The slogan works in both discourses. The issue can be phrased as questions. How does one find a way of evading the necessities imposed on individual and society by tradition? How is it possible to live freely, in the embrace of a full existence, outside of the dictates (or nightmare) of history? The simple answer is that one can’t. But it is possible to create a community in which the idea of that kind of freedom might be imagined and to produce an art and commerce that expresses something of that ideal. But rather than an escape from necessity we find that the favored enclave is the best and surest expression of a new necessity, a new kind of social and cultural logic, but now in perfect harmony with posttraditional market society, in fact, as its profoundest cultural expression.

Notes

in tro d u c tio n 1. See Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows 265. 2. However, this very thing was made the subject of a curious bit of publicly available television on Pride TV, a Canadian gay/queer channel offered by a mainstream cable provider on the evening of 3 November 2001. The broadcast looked like an amateur video of four or five women shaving each other’s pubic areas with razors in a bathroom. 3. T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society theorizes the institutionalizing of an exemplary avant-garde as his “Community of Christians.” See my discussion in T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets: 96–98. 4. Filippo Marinetti’s phrase, parole in libert´a (Selected Writings: 97), was one of the key slogans of Italian Futurism in the period of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912). Freeing words from the prison of conventional syntax gave modernism one of its greatest technical achievements. Subsequently, the word, emancipated from its humble syntactic service, went on after the 1920s to a wonderfully energetic career in the advertising and public relations industries, especially in America (see North, Reading 1922: 77). 5. Indeed the very names – Greenwich Village, Montmartre, Bloomsbury, Soho, Chelsea, and others – are now put on the blandest, the most tediously charming, gated subdivisions and condominium complexes on the planet, just to bolster, I suppose, the inhabitants’ sense that they too participate in the nonconformist, creative energies for which these names are thought to stand. 6. Marx had predicted it all when he recognized that “Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative” (Capital, i: 617). 7. “What has changed is not the character of capitalist society itself but the fact that the consequences of its ‘logic’ have now become apparent, consequences that arose from the successful establishment of capitalist society” (Narr, Observations: 36). 8. This process was already discernible in 1729 when Swift published A Modest Proposal, in which the matter of cannibalizing the poor in Ireland, as a moral problem, is rewritten as a problem in cost–benefit utility. Satire was still possible 256

Notes to pages 15–31

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

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in Swift’s day because a clear difference could be discerned between traditional values (like noblesse oblige) and the new values regime of the market-form. By the end of the twentieth century this difference had disappeared and satire had become virtually impossible to write, or read. It was easy for the Roman poet Juvenal to remark “difficile est satyras non scribere” (it is difficult not to write satire), when satire was still possible. By the twentieth century, the opposite was true; it had become increasingly “difficult to write satire” (Adorno, Minima Moralia: 209). And see also Three Guineas: 210 passim. Many children and teenagers are also being forced out of childhood norms and into new identities by the same market forces. Childhood consumption is less and less regulated, or mediated, through the screen of adult or parent choices. On 7 December 1989, Marc Lepine a confessed misogynist and gun enthusiast, entered the engineering faculty (the Polytechnic) of the University of Montreal, burst into a lecture theatre and shot and killed fourteen women students before committing suicide. His suicide note expressed rage against women for pushing men aside and taking places, in the Polytechnic for example, traditionally occupied by men. “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here” (Nov. 1887–March 1888, Will to Power: 3). Nietzsche’s grandiose “necessity” is in fact nothing more than the capitalist market beginning to work freely, unimpeded by sentimental attachments to the past. George Bornstein’s Material Modernism (2001) takes collaborative revision as a primary theme. By “intrinsic quality” I mean that quality in a thing by which it is what it is. Rigid hierarchies of control are not intrinsic to capitalism. This reached preposterous levels during the Clinton impeachment crisis of the winter of 1998–99, when appeals to “values,” even by supposedly serious moralists like William Bennett, were quite obviously barefaced theatre. For more information about Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and the whole Greenwich Village bohemia in the period from 1913 to about 1920 see Steven Watson’s very informative Strange Bedfellows: the First American Avant-Garde. Watson’s account of her extraordinary personality can be found on pages 269–71. The Baroness’s diary was published in 1992 by Oberon Press with the title Baroness Elsa, edited by Paul I. Hjartarson and Douglas O. Spettigue. For more on the Village environment see Anne Cheney’s chapter, “An Overview of the Village,” in her Millay in Greenwich Village and a classic text on American modernism and the Greenwich Village bohemia, Frederick J. Hoffman’s The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade. “That the great works of literary modernism were first received in a context determined to a large extent by men like [Edward] Bernays [the founder of public relations] and publications like Vanity Fair might mean that they were

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Notes to pages 31–39

both influential and offensive for reasons rather different than is now usually assumed” (North, Reading 1922: 211). 18. Advertising is where the battle for the survival of the fittest in capitalism is seen to best advantage on television. The programming often appeals nostalgically to vestigial traditions of narrative and drama. The thirty-second TV ad is where the corporate modernist “makes it new” again and again and again. 1 a p p roac hin g m o d e r n i s m 1. I realize that the people I have in mind are not really conservative in the original meaning of the word. They are in fact neoliberals, espousing many of the social and economic ideas of nineteenth-century liberalism. However, they are nowadays often called “neoconservatives”, primarily because they belong to political parties which at one time were conservative. 2. In this respect, Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (and Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command) is a more reliable guide to the moral condition(ing) which produced Buchenwald than Dr. Grant’s flimsy demonizing of Nietzsche. 3. “In handicrafts and manufacture [Marx means this word in its original sense from the Latin, making by hand], the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacturing the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers who are incorporated into it as its living appendages” (Capital, i: 548). 4. Before I go much further let me straightaway correct an impression I may have begun to create. I am not a partisan of post-structuralism, nor of what mostly passes for theory in the English or languages departments of the contemporary university. Indeed I cannot take many of its formulations seriously as either theory or philosophy; at best they are interesting polemical engagements in the culture wars of our time. Yet one must ask: why has post-structuralism appeared at this moment? It has very little, if anything, to do with the notion that it is an advance on earlier theorizations as is sometimes assumed by its devotees (an untenable view for a post-structuralist in any case). Nor do I believe with the Tallises, Grants, Himmelfarbs, and others that it represents a new style of “trahison des clercs.” The arrival of post-structuralism today has more to do with the dispersive logic of contemporary market society than it does with either the progressive sophistication of theory or the betrayal of learning by a deliberate campaign of politically motivated idiocy and/or subversion. 5. This phrase is the title of Berman’s reply to a review article of All That is Solid . . . by Perry Anderson. Both Anderson’s attack on Berman’s book, “Modernity and Revolution,” and Berman’s reply, “The Signs in the Street” appeared in the same number of New Left Review (144 [March–April 1984]: 96–113 and 114–23 respectively.)

Notes to pages 39–48

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6. If anyone deserves to be put on Grant’s blacklist as one of the great dehumanizers of the West it is Ren´e Descartes. “Descartes is radically anti-humanist; that is, he dissolves the Renaissance Humanist unity of man as the highest Creature, the summit of creation, into pure cogito and its bodily remainder: the elevation of the subject to the transcendental agent of the synthesis constitutive of reality is correlative to the abasement of its material bearer to one among the worldly ˇ zek’s inelegant way of saying that human bodies are objects.” This is Slavoj Ziˇ so much disposal matter (a “remainder”) in a Cartesian universe (The Plague of Fantasies: 12). 7. Advanced? I mean advanced over bare hands, daggers, and clubs. The camps were no cottage industry. Close supervision of the work process and the organizational efficiencies of mass production made the Nazi death camp typically industrial in operation. 8. Those who seriously reflect on the moral issues raised by public actions and who want to act as morally responsible agents now operate on the periphery of the power arrangements of the capitalist lifeworld. And have done so for some time. The position of the professional moralists in the universities is typical. Sequestered in comfortable enclaves, we are like animals in a zoo. We growl now and then to startle the deliciously astonished visitors but scamper for the feeding troughs when the keepers arrive with the board. 9. Daniel Levine’s Disgruntled: The Darker Side of the World of Work (1998) is particularly illuminating about the current situation in the workplace. 10. Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipation(s) (1996) tries to navigate the philosophical sandbars onto which Western notions of freedom have run aground in recent times. See especially the first essay in the book, “Beyond emancipation,” where he tries to salvage something of the notion of emancipation as the product of a revolutionary break with the past but gets completely tangled up in the current confusion over the status of the subject in history. Can a subject suffering oppression strike a blow for freedom that isn’t always already infected by the very oppression that has “constructed” the subject in the first place? His solution to this dilemma? “This contradictory situation is expressed in the undecidability between internality and externality of the oppressor in relation to the oppressed: to be oppressed is part of my identity as a subject struggling for emancipation; without the presence of the oppressor my identity would be different. The constitution of the latter requires and at the same time rejects the presence of the other” (17–18). I’m not sure this points ahead to what he calls “the beginning of freedom” at the end of his essay, but it certainly defines the political dead-end in which most of us sheepishly dawdle today. 11. The new interest in autobiography, or life writing, with its theory-driven vaporizing of identities, and its knowing undermining of the self-aware subject is what I have principally in mind here; see, for example, Julia Watson’s “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography.” 12. See also Marx, Capital, i: 319.

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Notes to pages 49–52

13. Related to this is Tennyson’s horror in the possibility of a change in the divine perspective, that we no longer dwell in God’s gaze. See, for example, In Memoriam, § 54–56. Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type [species] she seems, So careless of the single life. (§ 55)

For Tennyson, the new ideas of evolution, which come to be associated with Darwin later in the century, provoke dread, especially the fashion of economists after Adam Smith for thinking in terms of aggregates, like the utilitarians or Malthus’s studies of population. These modes of thought become the norm of economics before they take on their more dramatic expression in biology. A single life seems meaningless when only statistical norms can grasp the truth of the aggregate. What’s happened, Tennyson laments, to the notion that each of us, even the tiniest sparrow, enjoys the undivided attention of God? Is it surprising that in the poem Tennyson eventually repositions the divine inside the human psyche. At the end of the day, He becomes, commodity-like, our private possession. 14. For a particularly interesting discussion of these points see William Irwin Thompson’s The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life (1991), especially his chapter on Disney World, 17–79. 15. “The gigantic development of Industrialism (the factory system and mass production) in Russia shows that the Russian Communists are not inspired by the desire for a different kind of world from that desired by Capitalists in other countries, The difference is simply in the distribution of the product” (Gill, Beauty: 218 and passim). 16. I do not mean to look down at the contemporary working class from some Olympian height. This may seem to be the case, but the case is not what it seems. Yes, I am a university professor with tenure and therefore currently enjoy a measure of protection from the vicissitudes that beset Jane Doe in Seattle. But recent trends in the restructuring of higher education, the increasing use of low-paid contract workers for teaching at all levels, the abolition of tenure in some jurisdictions, the questioning of the relevance of humanistic study, the steady encroachment of corporate interests in the defining and carrying out of research, the persistent reference to students and teachers as “full time equivalents” render my advantages somewhat chimerical. Who, in the publically funded academic world of the early twenty-first century, unless teaching and doing research in areas of immediate importance to the business elites, does not feel assailed by the direct complaint or insinuation of some that we are merely an expensive and unnecessary burden on taxpayers?

Notes to pages 56–83

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2 id eo lo gy 1. But then again why should we even blame Gates for this state of affairs. The system doesn’t actually need him either. Or put it another way, if Bill Gates didn’t exist, the system would no doubt have to invent him. Scott Rosenburg, in his review of Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (1999), tells how the young Gates loved machines because they always followed orders. About Gates, the adult, Rosenburg writes, he “still loves machines that follow orders – only now the machines are organizations made up of human beings.” 2. For the Nietzschean reaction to the English utilitarians, see Beyond Good and Evil, § 228. 3. The elder Mr. Emerson’s impassioned avowal in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View that Lucy Honeychurch observe “the holiness of direct desire” (219) both recognizes the emptiness of the experience in modernity and the need to embody desire anew. It is a principle that could only be enacted in practice in the kind of secluded haven Forster himself occupied for most of his life. 3 per m a n en t revo lu ti o n 1. See Marx on “The Working Day” in Capital, i: 340–416, but see especially 375–76. 2. Luk´acs’ “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in his History and Class Consciousness (1923): 83–222 provides my work with an important theoretical foundation. 3. In Capital, i: 564, Marx cites many passages in Andrew Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufactures (London, 1835) in which the earnest apologist of the industrial holocaust in nineteenth-century England argues that machinery has the advantage of giving factory hands “the leisure to think of their immortal interests.” 4. Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of the industrial horror for its victims should read Marx’s chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” (Chapter 15, Part 4 in Capital, i: 492–639). 5. It’s hardly surprising then that contemporary critical theory has made instability, indeterminancy, and difference important categories of critical thought. 4 ep is tem o lo gy o f the m a rk e t 1. It was in the 1990s that the leading business intellectuals finally discovered that a successful capitalism entails permanent or perpetual revolution. See Gary Hamel’s best-seller, Leading the Revolution, published by the Harvard Business School Press in 2000. 2. See in particular Reflections on Violence, translated shortly after its 1906 publication in France by T. E. Hulme, friend and colleague of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis in the pre-World War II bohemia which evolved into the movement we now call modernism.

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Notes to pages 87–118

3. Any number of texts by Pound in poetry and prose could be cited. The inevitable dangers of liberalism as the prelude to totalitarian solutions form a recurrent theme of Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and other writings. 4. Of course, this characterization contrasts with the official conservative rhetoric of Thatcherism. But what other kind of rhetoric could a so-called conservative party produce? Meanwhile its actual economic policies were undoing a century of measures that had the intent of protecting the inherited collectivities of an older Britain. Thatcherism represents the final absorption of Britain into the global system and only those aspects of traditional British styles and forms of life can survive that coincide with and do not disturb the global movement of capital into, out of, and through Britain. 5 b lo o d y fa rc e 1. There is an interesting essay to be written on the similarities between Louis Bonaparte and former US President Bill Clinton. 2. The revolution (as bloody farce) in Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) comes immediately to mind. 3. See also Moretti, Modern Epic, Part One, “Faust and the Nineteenth Century,” but especially 77–80. 4. Marx is referring to Bonaparte himself, his half-brother Morny, and Eug`ene Rouher, Minister of Justice from 1849 to 1852. 5. Central figure in Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl. In the story, Schlemihl sells his shadow for a magic purse. 6. The conical peaked cap worn by the radical Jacobins in the French Revolution; frequently used in the nineteenth century as a symbol of liberty. 7. This comic image refers to the trousers worn by the French Army, used at the time to brutally repress revolutionaries and anarchists. 8. And, also one might add, the politics of identity which have so thoroughly dispersed political action into the tunnel vision of political grouplets that can no longer contest political reality as a whole and, as a result, limit themselves to simply demanding their piece of the action. 6 a va r iegated d agu erre ot y pe 1. For the relevance of this term about childhood development to Flaubert, see Jean-Paul Sartre’s biography of the young “Gustave,” translated as The Idiot of the Family. 2. “Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language” (Capital, i: 167). Marx notes a little later in the same passage, that this set of relations “marks an epoch in the history of mankind’s development.”

Notes to pages 123–181

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3. Arnoux’s career zigzag has now become the deadly serious “wisdom” of contemporary career counsellors, who, along with business leaders and politicians, warn people not to expect to have one job or profession or single career trajectory over the course of a lifetime. 4. The trade in identities as made artefacts is more and more a global phenomenon. Take the case of nightclub dancers in Bombay: “What we have is a sense that they are putting lives together, fabricating their own characters, using the cinematic and social materials at their disposal” (Appadurai, Modernity at Large: 63). For Baudelaire, according to Benjamin, this editorial construction of identity is precisely what one of the poet’s heroes of modernity, the ragpicker, is all about (see Lyric Poet: 79–80). In Part Three, I develop this theme in relation to Eliot’s The Waste Land. 7 the u n n a m ea b l e 1. Two works by Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society (1940, rev. edn., 1956) and Myths of Love (1964), are still the best literary explorations of this important dimension of the history of intimate relations in Europe. 2. Victorian moralism had already taken its toll on what had been a perfectly respectable tradition of courtly adultery among the nobility, even as late as the Regency, although by the time of Byron’s self-exile from England, the tradition had already slid into a condition of irreversible decay. 8 c hil d ho o d a s res is ta n ce 1. See George Pitcher’s fine essay, “Wittgenstein, Nonsense and Lewis Carroll.” 9 a rtis a n a l p ro d u c tio n , u ly s s e s , a n d the c irc u l atio n o f go o d s 1. The most complete account of Joyce’s problems with the censors can be found in Paul Vanderham’s James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses (1998). 2. Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman’s edition of James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921–1940 (1987) make for “sparse, unbeautiful” reading according to the editors. Stuart Gilbert’s edition of Letters (1957) in the same period are, on the whole, less “sparse,” but no less “unbeautiful.” Joyce’s obvious interest in money matters is evident throughout. Of course, his financial position was always somewhat precarious. Even with Harriet Shaw Weaver’s generous financial gifts (see letter of 12 July 1923 in Gilbert, for example), he needed as much capital as his literary work could earn. 3. Nicholas Joost has written extensively about the “little” magazine and “small press” culture in his three books about The Dial and its press. His Ernest Hemingway and the Little Magazines: The Paris Years (1968) is full of useful information. Jane A. Marek’s Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines

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4. 5.

6.

7.

Notes to pages 184–192

and Literary History (1995) cuts into the topic from the perspective of the many women involved in the trade. There have been at least three rather good doctoral dissertations in the last ten years that have also explored the role of women in early modernist publishing. John Young’s “Publishing Women: Modernism, Gender, and Authorship” (1998), Nina van Gessel’s “Re-casting the Midwives of Modernism: Autobiographies of American Expatriate Women Publishers and Editors” (1996), and Sheila Kineke’s “Prefacing Modernism: The Marketing and Mentoring of Women Writers in the Early Twentieth Century” (1996) all contain important information about modernist publishing during its cottage industry phase. The more general situation is treated very well by Joyce Wexler in her articles “Who Paid for Modernism?” and “Modernist Writers and Publishers.” Of course, one cannot overlook Lawrence Rainey’s several contributions to this topic, most recently in his chapter, “The Cultural Economy of Modernism” in the Cambridge Companion to Modernism and in his 1998 book Institutions of Modernism. Rainey’s translation of Claudia Salaris on F. T. Marinetti as a publisher and impresario (“Marketing Modernism”) should also be mentioned. This has been very well explained by William Irwin Thompson in his “Record” section of The American Replacement of Nature. Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, in which some sections of Ulysses were published in March 1918, made opposition to bourgeois philistinism explicit by emblazoning the slogan, “Making no compromise with the public taste,” on its cover. The recent fate of Ulysses in the Republic of Ireland provides interesting confirmation of the point I am making here. Long after the novel had begun to circulate freely elsewhere, both legal and social prohibitions persisted in an Ireland still in the grips of church, family, and the nationalist ideologies that sustained Irish cultural identity. The novel’s status only began to change with the taking off of the Irish economy after integration with Europe. The increasing sophistication of the Irish market, as it began to mesh with the European super-market, eroded the structure of moralizing prohibitions that had circumscribed the novel well into the 1970s. One could say that now the novel in the new Euro-Ireland has been accepted, but that way of putting it is perhaps a little misleading. In Ireland the novel has been neither accepted (if by this we mean a conscious embracing of the work) nor rejected. The novel’s difference has been annulled. It now occupies space on the shelves of bookstores and is permitted to circulate freely like any other commodity; its power to shock or disturb Irish moral and nationalist sensibilities gone for good. If anything, its value in pulling in certain kinds of cultural tourists, has, of late, not only been recognized by the heritage business, but enthusiastically exploited, as the centenary celebrations of Bloomsday made only too obvious. In his “Foreword” to the 1934 Random House Ulysses, Morris L. Ernest connects the end of the prohibition of Joyce’s novel with the repeal of Prohibition proper. It’s clear that the battle for freedom of expression, the right of free speech, in the Ulysses case was connected in the minds of some to the idea of freedom as the

Notes to pages 200–205

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right to consume without censorious interference. “The first week of December 1933 will go down in history for two repeals, that of Prohibition and that of the legal compulsion for squeamishness in literature. It is not inconceivable that these two have been closely interlinked in the recent past, and that sex repressions found vent in intemperance. At any rate, we may now imbibe freely of the contents of bottles and forthright books” (1961: vi). 10 h i s to ry a n d the p o s tp s yc ho lo g i ca l s e l f in t h e wa s t e l a n d 1. “Actually the trenchancy and vigour are illusory and the essay is notable for its ambiguities, its logical inconsequences, its pseudo-precisions, its fallaciousness, and the aplomb of its equivocations and its specious cogency. Its offered compression and its technique in general for generating awed confusion help to explain why it should not have been found easy to deal with.” F. R. Leavis, “T. S. Eliot as Critic” (English Literature: 179). 2. I am making an argument that diverges significantly from John Guillory’s pages on the “Tradition” essay in Cultural Capital (1993). Unlike Guillory, I don’t consider Eliot the stiff-necked upholder of an ideal, canonic order that the new work finds virtually impossible to crack. Indeed, I think the essay points us towards a much more disjunctive, diversifying, and centrifugal understanding of tradition. Eliot may have been a die-hard reactionary in politics, culture, and sex, but zealous reaction is not exactly what the essay is all about. Guillory has put the argument of Eliot-as-arch-conservative in one of its more subtle variations. He quotes the key paragraph from the essay in which Eliot speaks about the “existing monuments” forming “an ideal order.” He argues that the “idealization of the very order of the monuments means that what the new poet threatens is disorder.” The new poet, therefore, must acquire the “demeanor of conformity if there is to be any chance of altering the existing order of monuments” (Cultural Capital: 143). How it’s possible for a work to conform to, to be exactly like, the existing works and still threaten them with disorder is not quite clear. Guillory fixes on the phrase that he takes to be Eliot’s placement of a limit on the possibility of change in the canon. Eliot’s tag, “ever so slightly,” is taken to imply that the readjustment wrought by the new work among the existing monuments must be minute. Yet, the phrase means no such thing. Eliot writes “if ever so slightly,” which means that the new work will modify the existing order even if the change is small. The sentence does not necessarily condemn the new poet to what Guillory calls “a strategic modesty.” Perhaps the change is modest, perhaps not. However, the essay does not set itself the task of protecting a sacred order inherited from the past. In fact, the essay moves in exactly the opposite direction. 3. I have in mind popularizers like Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells, Alfred North Whitehead, and Christopher Dawson. 4. Benjamin was the anatomist of this aspect of modernity in his Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project).

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Notes to pages 209–211

5. In these paragraphs I am reworking Hugh Kenner’s shrewd assessment of Eliot’s poetic “characters” in 1960. “J. Alfred Prufrock,” Kenner writes, “is a name plus a Voice. He isn’t a ‘character’ cut out of the rest of the universe and equipped with a history and a little necessary context, like the speaker of a Browning monologue. We have no information about him whatever; even his age is ambiguous . . . Gerontion . . . is . . . another Voice with no ascertainable past and no particularized present . . . The extreme case of the Eliotic pseudo-person is Tiresias in The Waste Land” (Invisible: 35–36). 6. Tiresias’s extraordinary dexterity can sometimes reach comical proportions. “And Tiresias is not simply the Grail knight and the Fisher King but Ferdinand and Prospero, as well as Tristan and Mark, Siegfried and Wotan. In his feminine role he is not simply the Grail-maiden and the wise Kundry but the sibyl, Dido, Miranda, Br¨unnhilde. Each of these represents one of the three main characters in the Grail legend and in the mystery cults – the wounded god, the sage woman (transformed in some versions of the Grail legend into a beautiful maiden), and the resurrected god, successful quester, or initiate. Counterparts to them figure elsewhere. Eliot must have been conscious that the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Childe Roland’ had analogues to his own symbolism” (Smith, Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: 70). 7. The term “survivability” applies equally well to the operation of markets or of capitalism in general. The command and control structures of these systems are not concentrated in one place. They are decentralized and diversified throughout the society. Take out one grocer in a market economy and the system of food distribution will survive. In fact, the system thrives on the cyclical replacement of its various units. In highly centralized economies, the sudden elimination of the food distribution ministry is catastrophic. The logic that underlines survivability in this sense has even invaded the most hierarchical, centralized institutions known to human history, i.e. the military. The precursor to the Internet, the ARPAnet, was developed by the US Department of Defense in the late 1960s in order to elevate the survivability factor of US state apparatuses in the event of an attack. By decentralizing its command and communication structure, the American military strengthened its capacity to respond. It could not be catastrophically paralyzed by the simple decapitation of HQ. The recent revolution in military affairs has extended this principle right down to platoon level in the modernist battlefield. Information-rich, network-centric warfare, as demonstrated in the campaign in Iraq in 2003, has replaced the old platformcentric paradigm. The older cyclopic or single perspective vision of the field of battle has now reached its Cubist phase in the multiple perspectives made possible by decentering control and command and networking the information traffic coming to and from a variety of highly mobile, communication centers. The warrior still fights, but today he or she also processes information. We may still be swept, as Matthew Arnold feared, “with confused alarms of struggle and flight” but today we do so on battlefields that bear a striking resemblance to the structure of the modernist collage rather than to a “darkling plain . . . [w]here

Notes to pages 213–231

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ignorant armies clash by night” (“Dover Beach”). The avant-garde military intellectual Vice-Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski has provided the theoretical underpinning for this revolutionary rupture with traditional conceptions in a ground-breaking article in 1998 (“Network-Centric Warfare”). 8. Eliot’s review of the London production praised the ballet for fusing the sounds of primitive and modern life. See “London Letter,” Dial 71 (October 1921): 453. 11 l a b o h e` m e : l ew is , s tein , ba r n e s 1. See Ezra Pound’s letter from Paris to T. S. Eliot in response to Eliot’s request for contributions for The Criterion (14 March 1922, Letters: 511–15). Pound’s disappointment in finding a vital public life in England is energetically conveyed to Eliot: “The Morning Post is the real voice of England, and the most concentrated and persistent will toward evil in Europe . . . I am interested in civilization, but I can’t see that England has anything to do with any future civilization” (511, 512). 2. See my 1987 book on T. S. Eliot for more detail (Voice: 34, 100–1). 3. I have the work of William M. Chace, Russell Kirk, Michael North, and Kenneth Asher principally in mind.

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Index

Acropolis 76, 99 Adams, Henry 10–11, 66–67 The Education of Henry Adams 10, 66 Adorno, Theodor 156, 257 advertising 174, 175, 195, 196, 197, 221, 226, 256, 258 Albee, Edward 99 Aldington, Richard 2 “Some Reflections on Ernest Dowson” 2 Alexandria 204 Alston, Leonard 63 Anscombe, Isabelle 252 Antiques Roadshow 173 American Enterprise Institute 81 American Review 130 Anderson, Margaret 185, 264 Anderson, Perry 80, 258 Apostles, the 247 Appadurai, Arjun 263 Aragon, Louis 154 Arendt, Hannah 10 The Human Condition 10 Arensberg, Walter and Louise 1, 9, 14, 22, 28, 32, 156, 244 Aristophanes 199 Aristotle 135 Armstrong, Tim 30 Arnold, Matthew 23, 61, 207, 267 Arnold, Thomas 105 Artaud, Antonin 154 Asher, Kenneth 267 Ashton, Winifred (“Clemence Dane”) 15 Athenaeum 253 Athens 204 Atlas 130 Attali, Jacques 7 Auden, W. H. 12 “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” 12 Audi 31, 32 Augustine 204, 213 Auschwitz 38, 39

Austen, Jane 101, 137, 138, 142 avant-garde 1–3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 22, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 32, 70, 114, 146, 168, 173, 178, 182, 216, 221, 225, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 250, 255, 256, 267 Avery, Gillian 149 Baldick, Chris 98 Balzac, Honor´e de 101, 115, 116, 166 Bangkok 41, 51, 262 Banta, Melissa 263 Barney, Natalie 30, 240 Barnes, Djuna 215, 232, 238–42 Ladies Almanack 240 Nightwood 238–42 Baudelaire, Charles 70, 122, 157, 203, 204, 249, 263 Beach, Sylvia 183, 185, 263 Beckett, Samuel 74, 98, 104, 121, 183 Bedient, Calvin 206 Beethoven, Ludwig van 31 Bell, Clive 247, 253 Bell, Quentin 249 Bellini, Giovanni 253 Benjamin, Walter 87, 110, 122 The Arcades Project 87, 163, 195, 196, 200, 265 Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism 7, 122, 263 “Fourier or The Arcades” 6, 7 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” 184 Bennett, Arnold 29 Bennett, William 257 Benstock, Shari 30, 239–40, 242 Bentham, Jeremy 37, 40, 61 Berger, Peter 167 Bergson, Henri 24, 229 Berlin, Isaiah 38, 97, 108 Berman, Marshall 39, 50, 71, 258 Bernays, Edward 257

281

282

Index

Bible 62 Bildungsroman 115, 116 Bird, William 181 Birmingham 67 Blake, William 41, 46 Bloom, Leopold 158, 164, 165, 166, 188 Bloomsbury 3, 22, 27, 30, 87, 145, 146, 147, 178, 189, 226, 227, 231, 243–55, 256 Borges, Jorge Luis 154 bohemia 2, 4, 9–21, 24, 25, 27, 30, 32, 108, 133, 145–47, 166, 168, 177, 178, 182, 183, 185, 188–92, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222–23, 227, 228, 233, 238, 243, 250, 257, 261 Bonaparte, Louis 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 105, 106, 108, 111, 112, 154, 158, 163, 167, 224, 245, 262 Bonaparte, Napoleon 102, 106, 108, 112 Boni and Liveright 22 Bornstein, George 212, 257 Boston Beer Company 252 Bouguereau, Adolph-William 1 Bourdieu, Pierre 178 Bradford 204 Bradley, F. H. 198 Brady Bunch 26 Brand, Clare 179 Brazil 61 Brecht, Berthold 31, 88, 156 Breton, Andr´e 154 Brighton 204 Bront¨e, Emily 130–42, 163 Wuthering Heights 130–42, 167, 175, 238, 239, 240 Brooke, Rupert 245 Brooks, Cleanth 23 Brooks, David 23 Brooks, Peter 112, 115–17, 121 Browne, Sir Thomas 173 Browning, Robert 201, 208, 266 Buchenwald 258 B¨urger, Peter 232 Burlington Magazine 253 Bush, George W. 173 Butler, Christopher 3, 38 Butler, Judith 15, 30, 44 Byron 123, 127, 133, 263 Cage, John 105, 107, 114, 203, 206 Calhoun, George M. 64–65, 66 Caliban 133 Calvinism 63 Cambridge University 245, 246, 247, 248 Cambridge University Press 64 Camus, Albert 121

capitalism 5, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15–20, 22, 23, 25, 29, 31, 32, 42, 59, 60, 62, 63, 66, 71, 82, 86, 89, 93, 94, 99, 103, 104, 109, 112, 114, 122, 152, 155, 157, 159, 177, 181, 189, 192, 221, 231, 257, 259, 261, 266 capitalist revolution 10–15, 58–62, 70, 79–80, 81, 86, 88, 95, 113, 123, 158, 174, 235, 241, 261 Carey, John 3, 230 Carlyle, Thomas 23, 31, 46, 49, 61, 66, 82, 87, 250 Carroll, Lewis 94, 105, 149–58, 163, 172, 192, 245, 263 Carthage 204, 205 Cebrowski, Arthur K. 12, 267 C´eline, Ferdinand 88 Cerf, Bennett 177, 179 C´ezanne, Paul 120–29, 254 Chace, William M. 267 Chalmers, Thomas 62 Chamberlain, John 9 Chamisso, Adalbert von 262 Chaplin, Charlie 70, 110, 167, 221, 230, 258 Charleston Farm 249 Chatto & Windus 215 Chaucer, Geoffrey 98, 203 Cheney, Anne 257 Chernyshevsky, N. G. 164 Chicago Exposition (1900) 66 Chicago Board of Trade 43 childhood 148–49, 257 Chinese Revolution 80 Churchill, Winston 39 Clinton, Bill 29, 104, 257, 262 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 123 collage 165, 167, 171, 267 Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson 153 Collins, Wilke 201 commodity fetish 101, 113, 117, 118, 152, 154, 155, 158, 176, 184, 236, 240 communism 84, 85, 88 Conrad, Joseph 81, 106, 121, 169–71 Conran, Terence 178 conservative revolution 26, 27, 31, 88 Conservative Party of Great Britain 88 Constant, Benjamin 121 copyright 177, 179 counterculture 5–6, 18–19 Coupling 189 courtly love 136 Coward, Noel 99, 216 Cox, C. B. 212 Criterion, The 266 Croce, Benedetto 195

Index Cromwell, Oliver 103 Crosby, Caresse 147 Cuba 61 Cubism 14, 23, 52, 167, 198, 229, 235, 267 Cunard, Nancy 181, 182 Cunningham, Michael 189, 218, 247 Dada 1, 9, 14, 22, 28, 30, 32, 156, 257 Dante 203, 213 Danube river 67 Dasenbrock, Reed Way 228 Darwin, Charles 245, 260 Dawson, Christopher 265 Debord, Guy 94 deconstruction 75, 78, 102 Defense, US Department of 266 Dekoven, Marianne 4 department store 205 DeRosa, Robin 139 Derrida, Jacques 37, 100 Descartes, Ren´e 39, 40, 207, 218, 259 Dial, The 204, 263 Dickens, Charles 52, 69, 83, 101, 186–87, 190–91, 204 Diepeveen, Leonard 201 Ditchling (Sussex) 67, 68 Disraeli, Benjamin 69 Dobie, M. R. 64 Dodge, Mabel 244 Doe, Jane 52, 56, 260 dramatic monologue 122, 208–09, 234, 235 Du Camp, Maxime 120 Duchamp, Marcel 14, 28 Eagleton, Terry 3, 96, 131, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138 eastern Herzegovina 17 Ede, H. S. 68 Edel, Leon 249 Egoist Press 185, 215 Egoist, The 185, 215, 223 Einsatzgruppen 39 Einstein, Albert 39 Eliot, George 46, 61, 69 Eliot, T. S. 24, 25, 31, 33, 75, 87, 88, 110, 121, 185, 208, 209, 211, 212, 217, 223, 224, 225, 230, 231, 232, 241, 244, 261 After Strange Gods 224 “Ben Jonson” 209 “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” 201 Collected Poems, 1909–1962 213 Four Quartets 202 “Gerontion” 199, 209

283

The Idea of a Christian Society 211, 224, 256, 262 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 67, 121, 206, 209, 252 “The Hollow Men” 75 The Sacred Wood 121 Sweeney Agonistes 199 “The Three Provincialities” 237 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 125, 173, 199–201 The Waste Land 25, 33, 61, 73, 113, 121, 143, 167, 169, 177, 194–214, 220, 225, 230, 232, 263 Ellis, Steven 225 Ellul, Jacques 94 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 31 emotion marketing 179, 180, 252, 253 England, Church of 231 Enron 80, 86 Ernest, Morris L. 264 everyday life 5, 6, 12, 87, 200, 207, 238, 242, 246, 250, 251 Ewen, Stuart 174, 175 Examiner 130 exchange 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 20, 32, 55, 64, 72, 77, 87, 99, 114, 167, 182, 183, 184, 188, 192, 201, 225 definition 5 experience economy 179 Ezekiel 211 fabliau 98 factory 41–52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 70 Fang, Hsien-t’ing 49 farce 93, 95, 96, 97, 98–99, 100, 101, 102, 109, 111 fascism 84, 85 Father Knows Best 26 Faulkner, William 27 Featherstone, Mike 197 Felski, Rita 17, 30 The Gender of Modernity 17–18 feminism 15–18, 238–40 Fernbach, David 97 First Punic War 203 flˆaneur 87, 175 Flaubert, Gustave 70, 93, 112–29, 156, 169, 176, 186, 188, 245, 262 Bouvard et P´ecuchet 207 Dictionary of Accepted Ideas 207 Madame Bovary 118–20, 121, 139 Sentimental Education 112–18, 119, 152, 155, 158, 167, 169, 176, 207, 209, 220 Fletcher, Angus 100

284

Index

Foley, Duncan K. 12 Ford, Henry 24, 38, 39 Forrest-Thomson, Veronica 101 Forster, E. M. 78, 101, 104, 226, 261 Foucault, Michel 37, 52, 113, 228 Fowkes, Ben 104 French revolution 12, 73, 74, 103, 104, 156, 262 ancien r´egime 13, 28, 60 Robespierre 13 Committee of Public Safety 13 Friends 22, 189 Friedman, Lawrence 26, 146, 167, 246 The Horizontal Society 26, 167–68 Freud, Sigmund 73, 205, 206, 208, 214, 221 Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von 1, 30, 257 Fruehauf Trailer Co. 43 Fry, Roger 22, 31, 68, 147, 178, 182, 249, 250–52, 254 Vision and Design 253–54 Frye, Northrop 104, 113 Fukuyama, Francis 76, 77, 196 Futurism 3, 14, 81, 156, 256 Gabler, Hans Walter 172, 192 Galsworthy, John 29 gambling 99, 126 Gaskell, Elizabeth 69 Gaskell, Peter 41 Gates, Bill 56, 72, 261 Gautier, Th´eophile 201 Georgian poetry 3 Geneva 204 Gertler, Mark 243 Gessel, Nina van 264 Gibbon, Edward 196 Giddens, Anthony 6, 72, 126, 133, 136, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146, 238, 248 Gide, Andr´e 121 Giedion, Siegfried 40, 46, 51 Mechanization Takes Command 40, 258 Gilbert, Stuart 263 Gill, Eric 46, 67–69, 252, 260 Gilmore, James 179 globalization 17, 18 Glotz, Gustav 64, 66, 76 Gogol, Nikolai V. 164 Goldsmith, Oliver 198 Goldstein, Baruch 38 Goncharov, Ivan 116 Gorbachev, Mikhail S. 88 Gordon, Lyndall 203 Gorham, Charles T. 63 Gorky, Maxim 164 Grafton Galleries 182

Grafton Press 236 Gramsci, Antonio 53 Grant, Duncan 247, 250 Grant, Robert 37, 38, 39, 56, 258, 259 Grateful Dead, The 182 Great Depression 86 Greenwich Village 27, 244, 256, 257 Griffiths, Arthur 174 Guedalla, Philip 249 Guillory, John 126, 265 Habermas, J¨urgen 232 Haigh-Wood, Vivienne 202 Hamel, Gary 14, 261 Harley-Davidson motorcycles 182 Harrison, John R. 3 Harvey, David 171 Harvard Business School 14 Haveman, Robert H. 43, 210 Hayles, Katherine 40, 41 Heap, Jane 185 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) 2, 185 Heal’s store 251 Hegel, G. W. F. 82, 83, 98, 204, 205 Heidegger, Martin 7, 28, 61, 124, 240, 241 Being and Time 28, 240 Nietzsche, Vol. iv: Nihilism 7 Heine, Heinrich 61 Hemingway, Ernest 263 Henke, Suzette 164 Herzel, Theodor 38 Hilfiger, Tommy 61 Hill, Geoffrey 38, 156 Hill, Sam 182, 252 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 258 hip hop 173 Hiroshima 39 history 9, 17, 53, 73, 75, 77, 83, 88, 94, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 116, 117, 120, 145, 153, 165, 166, 174, 176, 177, 178, 179, 184, 187, 192, 194–205, 235, 241, 242, 246, 255 Hitler, Adolf 87, 103, 227 Hjartarson, Paul I. 257 Hobson, J. A. 65 God and Mammon: The Relation of Religion and Economics 65–66 Wealth and Life: A Study in Values 65 H¨och, Hannah 22 Hoffman, Fredrick J. 257 Hogarth Press 181, 246 Holquist, Michael 154 Homer 252

Index

285

Hopkins, Gerard Manley 154 Hulme, T. E. 261 Hume, David 207 Huyssens, Andreas 1

Knopf, Alfred A. 215 Knopf, Kenyon A. 43, 210 Koch, Jim 252 Kristeva, Julia 39, 87

Ikea 178 Imagism 14 Impressionism 9, 254 International Business Machines (IBM) 13 International Monetary Fund 19 Internet 153, 168 Ireland 264 Irigaray, Luce 154

Laclau, Ernesto 259 Lamos, Colleen 18, 30, 203, 235 Lane, John 181 Lang, Fritz 31, 32 Langlois, Richard N. 46 Larisch, Marie 203 Larsen, Neil 104 Las Vegas 188, 198 Lausanne 202 Lawrence, D. H. 6, 46, 68, 87, 139–42, 143, 166, 227, 228, 229, 244, 252 Leavis, F. R. 23, 61, 265 Lee, Hermione 210, 246 Leeden, Michael 81 Lenin, Nicolai (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) 23 Lepine, Marc 18 Levine, Daniel 259 Levine, Jennifer 173 Levy, Julien 181 Lewis, Sinclair 29 Lewis, Wyndham 4, 80, 88, 110, 142, 215–31, 233–34, 241, 244, 261 The Apes of God 142, 216, 227, 228 The Art of Being Ruled 230 Blast 4, 210, 215, 216, 225 “Interior Religions” 229 The Lion and the Fox 223 Paleface 223, 228 Self Condemned 223 Tarr 142, 207, 215–31, 233 Time and Western Man 197 The Tyro 225, 237 The Wild Body 229, 234 life-writing 206, 259 Lifton, Robert Jay 167 Lion King, The 51 Little Review, The 185, 264 Liverpool 132 Locke, John 207 London 204, 222, 243 London Underground 216 Longenbach, James 198, 203 Lost Generation, the 183 Lubitsch, Ernest 31, 32, 38, 42, 67, 199, 215, 244, 247 Lucas, F. L. 33 Ludwig, King of Bavaria 204 Luk´acs, Georg 20, 28, 61 History and Class Consciousness 20, 261 Luther, Martin 103

James, Henry 116, 117, 152, 153, 173, 201, 237 James, William 233 Jameson, Fredric 222, 229 Jane Eyre 130 Jaur´es, Jean 83 Jerusalem 204 Jesus Christ 65, 66, 76, 99 John Bull 11 Jones, David 198, 199 Jonsson, Stefan 165 Joost, Nicholas 263 Joyce, James 88, 109, 120, 165, 180, 185, 195, 197, 198, 217, 218, 229, 232, 235, 241, 263 Dubliners 179 Finnegans Wake 120, 154, 173, 199, 235 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 121, 179, 188 Ulysses 120, 121, 135, 163, 164, 168–92, 196, 199, 213, 220, 225, 242, 264 June days, the (Paris 1848) 80, 117 Juvenal 257 Kafka, Franz 121, 163 Kant, Immanuel 20, 109, 167, 182, 207, 253, 254 Kegan Paul 64 Kemnitz, Charles 165 Kenner, Hugh 3, 169, 173, 185, 219, 237, 266 Kern, Stephen 10, 41 Culture of Time and Space 10 Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge) 68 Keynes, John Maynard 10, 247 Essays in Persuasion 10 Kierkegaard, Søren 59, 60, 124 Kineke, Sheila 264 King’s English, the 185 Kingsley, Charles 69 Kirk, Russell 267 Klein, Calvin 32

286

Index

Macaulay, Thomas Babington 196 McAlmon, Robert 181 MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Grieve) 97 MacDougall, Sarah 243 MacPherson, C. B. 13, 28, 60 Machiavelli, Niccol´o 59 Mallarm´e, St´ephane 70, 105, 153 Malthus, Thomas 260 Manchester 41, 51 Mantegna, Andrea 201 Mao Zedong 23, 79 Marek, Jane A. 185, 263 Mars 204 Marinetti, Filippo 3, 14, 81, 156, 256 “The Foundations of Futurism” 3, 81 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature 256 market 5, 7, 8, 11, 23, 30, 31, 40, 43, 47, 49, 54, 56, 57, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77–79, 86, 95, 110, 113, 114, 117, 122, 123, 126, 156, 159, 166, 174, 177, 178, 181, 192, 197, 199, 200, 201, 205, 221, 224, 230, 233, 249, 252, 257, 266 agora in Athens 65, 66, 76, 99 definition 5, 43–45, 55, 164 freedom and 25, 159, 192, 195 as historical agent 11, 94, 159, 163 market-form 5, 11, 13, 58, 72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 101, 117, 123, 147, 152, 154, 155, 159, 164, 175, 186, 188, 192, 194, 196, 201, 211, 241, 242, 254, 257 niche market 251, 252 market society 6, 7, 8, 21, 23, 28, 29, 55, 75, 76, 77, 78, 86, 87, 113, 142, 155, 157, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 173, 176, 177, 194, 195, 196, 197, 202, 203, 205, 210, 211, 212, 216, 217, 220, 237, 245, 246, 249, 251, 255, 258 Marsden, Dora 226 Marx, Karl 13, 23, 29, 37, 39, 44, 58, 60, 65, 70, 71, 72, 74, 82–84, 89, 93, 94, 95, 112, 131, 151, 154, 156, 194, 205, 256, 258 Capital 40, 44, 70, 93, 96, 118, 191, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262 Critique of Political Economy 38 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 13, 60, 87, 93–111, 116, 126, 131, 134, 158, 163, 164, 176, 224, 249, 262 Grundrisse 82, 93, 117 “Theses on Feuerbach” 39 Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 11, 81, 85 The Communist Manifesto 11, 70, 75, 81, 85 Materer, Tim 219 materialism 38, 98 Mathews, Elkin 181 Mayhew, Henry 59 Maxwell, D. E. S. 198, 199 Mehlman, Jeffrey 102

Melville, Herman 55, 83 “Bartleby the Scrivener” 55–56, 83 Moby Dick 37 metoikos 76 Meyers, Jeffrey 216 Microsoft 51, 84 Mill, John Stuart 58, 65, 173, 231 Miller, J. Hillis 212 Millwall 173 Milosevic, Slobodan 103 modernization 40, 41 Montaigne, Michel de 19, 76, 249 Montreal Polytechnic 18 Moore, G. E. 31, 246, 248–49 Moretti, Franco 262 Morris, William 46, 68, 178, 250, 251 Mulan 51 Muller, Herbert Joseph 11 Munich 204 Musil, Robert 121, 165 Mussolini, Benito 231 Nabokov, Vladimir 154 Nagasaki 39 Narr, Wolf-Dieter 10, 256 “Toward a Society of Conditioned Reflexes” 10 Neill, Stephen 62 Neo-Pagans 245 network-centric warfare 12, 267 new criticism 30, 114, 187 new economy 14, 23–25 hot team 14 New Freewoman, The 185, 215 New Left Review 258 New Monthly Magazine 130 New York Stock Exchange 43 Nicholls, Peter 186 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 21, 37, 38, 74, 125, 240, 258, 261 Beyond Good and Evil 261 The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music 38 The Gay Science 38 Thus Spake Zarathustra 37 Will to Power 7, 257 nihilism 6–8, 9, 19, 20, 21, 25, 29, 31, 110, 205 noetic community 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 166, 221, 225, 226, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 241, 249, 255 North, Michael 5, 22, 267 Reading 1922 22, 233, 256, 258 Nussbaum, Martha 137 Odysseus 165, 188 Oedipus 204

Index Ogden, C. K. 64 O’Keeffe, Paul 215 Omega Workshops 22, 31, 68, 147, 178, 182, 249, 250–52, 254 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 40 Osborne, Peter 204 Orton, Joe 99 Orwell, George 199 Ovid 209 Owen, Robert 46 Oxford University 150, 151, 152, 245 Oxford University Press 94 Pack, Spencer J. 35 Parisot, Henri 154 Paris Commune 80 Paris St. Germain FC 63 Parm´ee, Douglas 122 Parthenon 76, 99 Pater, Walter 31, 99, 181, 186, 193, 197, 253 patriarchy 15, 17, 18, 23, 238, 239 Paterson’s Magazine 130 Peloponnesian War, the 199 Penson, Sir T. H. 64 Peppis, Paul 223 Pericles 64 Petzinger, Thomas 14, 23 photography 112, 122 Picardy 67 Picasso, Pablo 29, 182, 232 Pick, Daniel 38, 42 Pine, Joseph 179 Pinochet, Augusto 72 Pitcher, George 263 Pittsburgh 67 Pocock, J. G. A. 35 Poggioli, Renato 84 Poirier, Richard 208 pornography 99 posthuman 41, 205, 210, 240 Postimpressionism 182, 249, 254 postpsychological self 194, 206–11, 263 post-structuralism 8, 37, 38, 97, 105, 113, 206, 245, 258 Potterybarn 178 Pound, Ezra 2, 3, 14, 24, 31, 32, 38, 87, 88, 110, 185, 198, 202, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 217, 223, 224, 231, 233, 241, 261, 262 Cantos 32, 33, 192, 199, 211, 213, 220 Guide to Kulchur 224 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 2 Letters 2 Literary Essays 2 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 68, 227, 250

287

Pride TV 256 Prohibition 264 Protestantism 63 Proust, Marcel 24, 217, 229 Provence 136 PSInet 14 Punch 225 pure relationship, the 133, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148, 151, 153, 154, 166, 221, 228, 235, 237, 238, 240, 241, 246 Quartermain, Peter 101 Queen Charlotte Islands 4 Queensbury, Marquess of 21 Rabat´e, Jean-Michel 203, 204 radical marketing 182–83, 184 Rainey, Lawrence 202, 264 Random House 179, 183 Ranke, L. von 205 Raverat, Gwen and Jacques 245 Ray, Man 1, 30, 257 Red Guards 79 Report on Business 18 Rhine River 67 Ricardo, David 40 Richardson, Dorothy 135, 217 Ricks, Christopher 205 Rifkin, Glenn 182, 252 Rilke, Rainer Maria 153 Rimbaud, Arthur 70 Robinette, Scott 179 Robespierre, Maximilien de 13, 245 Rome 103, 188 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 231 Rorty, Richard 125 Rosenberg, Isaac 39 Rosenburg, Scott 261 Rougemont, Denis de 263 Ruskin, John 21, 23, 31, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 82, 250, 251, 254 action brought by Whistler 21 “The Broom Merchant” 47–48, 52 Russian revolution 12, 40, 80, 260 kulaks 12, 21, 31, 40, 99, 109, 147, 229 Rutherford, Sir Ernest 39 Rwanda 37 Saatchi & Saatchi 9 Safeway 183 St. Louis 43 Salaris, Claudia 264 salons des refus´es (Paris) 9 Sandhurst 39 Sartre, Jean-Paul 121, 262 Schiller, J. C. F. 31, 32

288

Index

Schoenberg, Arnold 192 Schumpeter, Joseph 12, 76 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 76, 77, 196 Imperialism and Social Classes: Two Essays 12 Schwitters, Kurt 22, 33 Searle, G. R. 61, 62, 63 Seattle 41, 56 Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky 30 Seinfeld, Jerry 1 Senn, Fritz 173 Sennett, Richard 27, 51, 166, 171 The Corrosion of Character 27 The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism 166 Serbia 103 Sermon on the Mount 38 Sex in the City 22 Shakespeare, William 104, 113, 114, 133, 201, 217, 235 Shakespeare & Co. 182, 185, 219, 225 Shaw, George Bernard 16 Mrs. Warren’s Profession 16–17 Shelley, Mary 123 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 123, 146, 203 Shone, Richard 250, 251 Silverman, Oscar A. 263 Sitwell, Edith 227 Smith, Adam 19, 46, 48, 62, 86, 260 Wealth of Nations 48, 86 Smith, Grover 201, 206, 266 Smyrna 204 Sorel, Georges 83, 261 Soros, George 27 Soviet Union 84–86 space 73, 77, 122, 125, 145, 153, 158, 166, 167, 169–70, 171–73, 174, 175, 176, 183, 184, 196, 217 Spalding, Frances 245 Spanish Inquisition 38 spectacle, society of the 94, 96, 155, 156 Spengler, Oswald 265 Spettigue, Douglas O. 257 Springer, Jerry 247 Stalin, Joseph 87 Stansky, Peter 246, 247 Stead, C. K. 3 Steel, Danielle 101 Stein, Gertrude 3, 87, 105, 110, 146, 198, 199, 215, 232–38, 240, 241 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 232–38, 240 Three Lives 232, 236 Stendahl (Henri Beyle) 115, 137 Stephen, Adrian 247

Stephen, Leslie 245 Stephen, Vanessa 247, 250 Stettheimer, Carrie, Ettie, and Florine 244 Stirner, Max 223 Stoppard, Tom 99 Strachey, Lytton 22, 104, 106, 227, 247, 249 Stravinsky, Igor 213 substance-abuse 99 Surrealism 14, 28, 181, 199 Swift, Jonathon 256 Symons, Julian 216 Tallis, Raymond 37, 258 Tawney, R. H. 62, 63 Taylor, Charles 196, 203, 208, 209 television 9, 18, 22, 23, 30, 31–33, 98, 143, 189, 197, 205, 214, 256, 258 commercials 9, 14, 193, 195, 258 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 260 Thatcher, Margaret 72, 88, 262 Thebes 204 Thermopylae 199 Thompson, William Irwin 144, 260, 264 Thorm¨ahlen, Marianne 212, 213 Thucydides 196 time 4, 73, 74, 77, 122, 125, 145, 153, 171, 183, 184, 194–205, 217, 229, 241 Tiresias 198, 204, 206 Toronto 231 Tranter, Michael 24 Treblinka 38 Trotsky, Leon 79, 81, 196 Truman, Harry 39 “Trenchcoat Mafia” 26 Turgenev, Ivan S. 164 Tussman, Joseph 94, 95 Uccello, Paolo 253–54 United States Constitution 103 University of Chicago Press 64 Ure, Andrew 261 utilitarianism 60 Vanderham, Paul 263 Vanity Fair 257 Vattimo, Gianni 7, 9 Veblen, Thorstein 10, 51 Theory of the Leisure Class 10 Venice 201 Verlaine, Paul 70 Versailles 202 Vico, Giambattista 45 Vienna 204 Vittoz, Roger 202 Vorticism 14, 215, 229

Index Wagner, Richard 137, 203 Wandering Jew, the 165, 176 Watson, Julia 259 Watson, Steven 244, 256, 257 Waugh, Evelyn 216 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 185, 263 Weber, Max 62, 63 Webster, John 203 Weiss, Jeffrey 5 Wells, H. G. 265 West, Rebecca 4 West Indies 61 West Point 39 Weston, Jessie 213 Wexler, Joyce 264 Whistler, James Abbot McNeill 21 action brought against Ruskin 21 Nocturne in Black and Gold 21 White, Hayden 100 Whitehead, Alfred North 265 Wicke, Jennifer 249 Wilde, Lawrence 97, 108, 253 Wilde, Oscar 12, 21, 31, 40, 99, 109, 147, 229 The Importance of Being Earnest 12 trial of (1895) 21 Williams, Raymond 69–70, 171, 172, 175 Williams, William Carlos 188 Winfrey, Oprah 18

289

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 20, 113, 263 Tractatus logico-philosophicus 20, 113 Wood, Thelma 238, 240 Woolf, Leonard 181, 246, 247 Woolf, Virginia 15, 22, 29, 31, 87, 88, 110, 135, 181, 195, 197, 198, 210, 217, 218, 229, 232, 246, 247 Between the Acts 199 Mrs. Dalloway 218, 247 “Old Bloomsbury” 247 Orlando 249 A Room of One’s Own 15, 249 Three Guineas 246, 257 To the Lighthouse 113 The Waves 199, 210, 212, 230 The Years 29 Woolsey, Judge John M. 178, 179 Wordsworth, William 69, 81, 123, 135, 156, 157, 158, 171, 174, 195 The Prelude 123–25, 171, 172 World Bank 19 World Trade Organization 19 World War I 31, 32, 38, 42, 67, 199, 215, 244, 247 World War II 88, 231 Yeats, W. B. 105, 107, 114, 203, 206 Young, John 264 ˇ zek, Slavoj Ziˇ

259