The Romantic Historicism to Come 9781501326974, 9781501327001, 9781501326998

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mediation and the Standard Model of Romantic Historicism
1. Gothic Mediation and History’s Two Materialisms
2. History’s Body and the Historicist’s Dilemma
3. Freedom and the Minimum Conditions of Historicity
4. Randomness, Romantic Historicism, and Walter Scott
5. Romantic Temporality and Queer Revolution
Index

Citation preview

The Romantic Historicism to Come

The Romantic Historicism to Come Jonathan Crimmins

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Jonathan Crimmins, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Liron Gilenberg / ironicitalics.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crimmins, Jonathan Mackenzie, author. Title: The romantic historicism to come / Jonathan Crimmins. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017043749 (print) | LCCN 2017048673 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501326998 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501326981 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781501326974 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Historicism. | Historiography. | Historicism in literature. | Romanticism. | Literature and history. Classification: LCC D16.9 (ebook) | LCC D16.9 .C75 2018 (print) | DDC 901–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043749

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2697-4 PB: 978-1-5013-5914-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-2698-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2699-8 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To my parents, William and Martha Crimmins, for a family alive with the great gifts of love.

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Mediation and the Standard Model of Romantic Historicism 1 2 3 4 5

Gothic Mediation and History’s Two Materialisms History’s Body and the Historicist’s Dilemma Freedom and the Minimum Conditions of Historicity Randomness, Romantic Historicism, and Walter Scott Romantic Temporality and Queer Revolution

Index

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1 29 57 81 107 137 177

Acknowledgments This book owes its greatest debts to Marshall Brown, who, with such expertise, acuity, generosity, artfulness, and rigor, continues to model the value of a life lived in thoughtful kindness; to Juliet Shields, whose brilliant and strategic mind introduced, in aspects great and small, a restless graduate student to the diligent and searching practices of scholarship; and to Charles LaPorte, whose patience and care so often steadied the wobbling gait of my progress. Anahid Nersessian read an earlier draft of the book and saw past its lapses and muddles. Her precise and insightful comments helped me to turn what she has called “the accidents of composition” to best advantage. Her own elegantly expansive, lyrical prose captures the spirit of genius at play. Finding myself among such subtle and philosophically astute Romanticists continues to be one of the great joys in my life. This book owes incalculably to the direct and indirect tutelage of this marvelous community; especially Nicholas Halmi, Gary Handwerk, Alexander Schlutz, David Collings, Timothy Campbell, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Andrew Warren, Caroline McCrackenFlesher, Chuck Rzepka, and Orrin Wang. The anonymous labor of my past readers deserves special recognition; many responded with the vast generosity necessary to sustain scholarship as the ongoing longitudinal project that it is. My colleagues in English at Augustana College were so supportive of me during the time when most of the book was written: Laura Greene, Kelly Daniels, Meg Gillette, Rebecca Wee, Joe and Sarah McDowell, Margaret France, Farah Marklevits, Lucas Street, Dave Crowe, Jason Peters, Umme Al-Wazedi, and John Tawiah-Boateng. The book could not have been written without the Illinois I-Share consortium and the help of the amazing librarians at Augustana College, especially Christine Aden, Diane Gehn, and Vicky Ruklic. For being so welcoming, I would like to thank my new colleagues at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise: John Mark Adrian, Emily Dotson, Amelia Harris, Jenn Holm, Gillian Huang-Tiller, Gretchen Martin, Sheila McNulty, Cynthia Newlon, Ken Tiller, and Marla Weitzman.

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Nidesh Lawtoo, Paul Jaussen, Melanie Kill, Charity Burns, Sean Clemmons, and Scott Henkle kept graduate school livable and alive. Zach Savich and Hilary Plum remind me that whatever might be praised was made from friendship. The joie de vivre of Jack, Mikey, and Val never ceases to amaze me. John and Nancy, Zach and Michelle Rasmuson will always be the dearest of delights. With grace and wit, Emily Kate Long illuminates each side of the Mississippi. The team at Bloomsbury has been a joy to work with at every step of the process. Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in Studies in Romanticism 52.4 (2013). A version of Chapter 3 appeared in Essays in Romanticism 21.2 (2014). I owe thanks to the readers for their helpful suggestions. I have gone from Annapolis to Seattle, Fort Worth, Rock Island, and Wise, and without the feisty, madcap, steadfast, and forgiving love of my family— William and Martha Crimmins, Kristine and Carolyn, Caelin, Liam, Meghan, and Connor, Amanda, Gabriel and Bryan, Carol, Denise, Cynthia, and Dan— my life could not have been lived. Kate Kremer helped me to be smarter, clearer, and more accurate in all parts of this book. Kate, you are a miracle in my life, always.

Introduction: Mediation and the Standard Model of Romantic Historicism Traveling through the Ottoman Empire in 1784, on a self-­described search for “whatever concerns the happiness of man in a social state,” C.F. Volney arrived in the city of Homs, and, close as he was to Palmyra, decided to hike out to the ruins.1 Three days of travel across the desert brought him there, and he set up camp with a group of Arabian peasants in the remains of a temple dedicated to the sun. Wandering into the hills one evening, Volney rested on the stub of a column overlooking the Valley of Tombs. As “the dying lamp of day still softened the horrors of approaching darkness,” he felt a sense of “religious pensiveness” that soaked the scene in Gothic hues—increasing darkness, the howling of a jackal, the sun setting on its temple, the moon rising over the Euphrates. Volney falls into reverie. He contemplates the astonishing reversals—from temples to ruins, from opulence to “hideous poverty,” from a “tumultuous throng” to “the silence of the tombs”—appalled that the “palaces of Kings are become a den of wild beasts.”2 That the same fate might be in store for Europe moves him to tears. As Kevis Goodman points out, the gesture of imagining one’s own “present as the future’s past” has a history as old as Virgil’s first Georgic, in which he wrote that “a time shall come” when people will “marvel at the giant bones in the upturned graves.”3 Goodman reenvisions georgic—contra Alan Liu—not as “the supreme mediational form by which to bury history in nature,” but rather as a form in which “historical presentness is often ‘turned up’ by georgic Constantin François Volney, Volney’s Ruins: or Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires, trans. Thomas Jefferson and Joel Barlow (Boston: Charles Gaylord, 1840), 21. 2 Volney, Ruins, 23. 3 Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 1

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as unpleasurable feeling.”4 Goodman and Liu’s contrary verbs—burying and turning up—make soil a metaphor for text, the etymological analogy of sowing seed and sowing meaning. Yet both, like Virgil, see history as something other than the sprouting seed in its fertile soil, something other than the farmer’s mundane work. The soil and its produce represent the regular seasonal passage of time, which covers over and occasionally offers up the residual artifacts that count as history. History is something real that enters the text from outside. The “empty helms” that Virgil’s farmer uncovers appear marvelous because they are distinct from the fruit of the soil. Because tangible artifacts stand synecdochally for history in general, this vivid and seemingly simple metaphor turns out to be not perfectly clear when one tries to reconcile it with the function of the term mediation for historicism. The conceptual difficulties surrounding mediation seem to be all on the side of the text—how does the soil occlude, deform, corrode, preserve history in its realness? It can only be on the side of the text, it seems, because the text comes between, mediates, any given historical moment and our present-­ tense understanding of that moment. Thus, despite their opposed diagnoses, Goodman and Liu are largely in agreement about mediation’s basic function. For Liu, georgic naturalizes history in its inscription; it cloaks history’s essential historical qualities with a literariness that hopes to pass as natural. For Goodman, georgic allows history to be plowed up and recovered, retrieved by reading. Taken together, the contrary emphases represent two linked features of media—writing and reading, storage and retrieval. Whether mediation acts mostly like a looking glass or mostly like a lens matters less than the crux of their disagreement, differing conceptions of history that appear in the two meanings of the word sense. Liu concentrates on sense as meaning: “the collective process of arbitrary structuration” that stands between historical context and ordered knowledge.5 For Liu, history is what exists prior to the necessary interpretation that enables a culture to know an otherwise unknowable reality. For Goodman, history is a “lived” experience that she associates with feeling, sense as sensation. Rather than historical context Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 18. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 3. 5 Liu, Wordsworth, 41. 4

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as unknowable reality, Goodman sees history as the minimally articulable evanescence of experience. Both seek historical reality in those places that resist discovery, because both consider history to be a time that is lost to us. The more evanescent, the more transient the characteristic, the more authentically historical it is deemed to be. In The Romantic Historicism to Come, I argue the reverse. Rather than defining history as that which is no longer, it would be preferable to conceive of history as that which persists into the future. Although this semantic reversal seems simple, I hope to show not only the virtue of its simplicity, but also its wide-­ranging implications and its usefulness for solving conceptual problems that have long stymied discussions of historicism and muddled thinking in areas that rely on various assumptions about history to make larger interpretive claims. The extended debate about historicism demonstrates that the conceptual problems surrounding history and mediation cannot be solved if one assumes that the text interposes or interferes between history and the now, as if media come between the present and the past. Treating the text as if it were as distinct from history as soil is from an artifact buried within traps the historian in a dilemma Michel de Certeau describes in The Writing of History. On one side of the dilemma is a historian, like Liu, who “ponders what is comprehensible and what are the conditions of understanding,” a historian who sees historical discourse as an ideological production that structures raw historical context.6 On the other side of the dilemma is a historian, like Goodman, who defines history as an attempt to “reencounter lived experience, exhumed by virtue of a knowledge of the past,” a historian for whom history is “absent as idea and present as that uncomfortable suprasensory feeling.”7 Certeau asserts that neither of these tendencies “can be eliminated or reduced to the other.”8 Between them, he argues, “there is a tension, but not an opposition” that leaves each historian vulnerable to a critique from the other.9 Bound by a critique and counter-­critique that reinforces the dilemma and makes it seem inescapable, historians on both sides position the text between Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 35. 7 Ibid. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 8. 8 Certeau, The Writing of History, 35. 9 Ibid. 6

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the past and present, depicting history in a model with three strata, as in Liu’s diagram.

Differences arise between historians depending on which stratum of the model they see as grounding historical investigation. For historians on one side of the historicist’s dilemma, Certeau writes, “the real is the result of analysis.”11 This is Liu’s sense as meaning, which values the third stratum, what is knowable. Liu’s quotes around “Truth” and “Reality” signal the subordination of unprocessed reality to the knowable and suggests that there is no reality, no context, separate from discourse. For historians on the other side, the real “is its postulate.”12 This is Goodman’s sense as sensation, which values the first stratum: not as mere context awaiting its ideological construction; but rather, as sensorium, a source of lived experience that activates the historical. When Goodman states that the historical lives on not as an idea but as a “suprasensory feeling,” she shows that, for her, the first stratum subordinates the third. History lives on, as the italics indicate, as a feeling, in our provoked laughter, our tears, our desires, even if to do so it must become suprasensory.13 For both, the text mediates, stands between, past and present: in one case as a constructed aftereffect of whatever was prior to its ideological translation; in the other as a residual trace of lived 12 13 10 11

Lui, Wordsworth, 41. Certeau, The Writing of History, 35. Ibid. Ibid. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 8.

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sensations, one body feeling another across time. For both, the fullness of history has ceased to be. In their edited collection, This is Enlightenment, Clifford Siskin and William Warner describe the conception of mediation that supports this model of history. They explain that they use “mediation” as a catchall term to cover a myriad of intervening positions. We use “mediation” here in its broadest sense as shorthand for the work done by tools, by what we now call “media” of every kind—everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply between—emphasizing the Baconian stipulation that media of some kind are always at work.14

The compression achieved by this broadest-­sense shorthand links the terms “tool” and “media” such that “everything that intervenes” is characterized as tool-­like. Mediation becomes that which is always at work, always intervening everywhere, and, as tools do, always altering, always transforming, always distorting what was there before. The unmediated, as the (impossible) unaltered thing or experience, becomes synonymous with the original and the real. This conception of the real as unmediated easily lends itself to a sense of history as lost time, with its Romantic gesturing toward irrecoverable authentic origins, inaccessible either (per Liu) because even our encounter with the “Reality” of the past as raw historical context is mediated by at least a modicum of ideological structuration, or (per Goodman) because even the most sympathetic attunement pulses in us through an encounter with text and not with those bodies that barely remain as bones in the dirt. A philosophical articulation of this conception of mediation can be found in Immanuel Kant, for whom a tool-­like cognition assembles an otherwise unmediated chaos of sensation. In his introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel critiques Kant’s conception of cognition—Siskin and Warner’s “Baconian stipulation”—and clears space for a new understanding of mediation. Hegel points out that, while it might seem natural to take “for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium,”

Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “This is Enlightenment, an Invitation in the Form of an Argument,” This is Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 5.

14

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imagining cognition as a tool for investigating truth is hardly an innocent postulate. It assumes certain things without justification: namely, “that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition.”15 When a tool-­based conception of mediation is applied to the activity of cognition, the idea of cognition is governed by the idea of tool, rather than the reverse, even though cognition is prior to and more general even than the broadest sense of tool. Rethinking cognition apart from the tool metaphor, Hegel simultaneously produces a new understanding of mediation: no longer as that which intervenes, as tools do, between the individual and the object. Hegel’s reconceptualization of mediation hinges on rethinking cognition’s difference from itself, the relationship between its two modes: consciousness and self-­consciousness. Cognition’s doubled state—the fact that “consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth”—accounts for the two sides of Certeau’s historicist’s dilemma.16 However, rather than seeing this doubled perspective as an unsolvable dilemma, as Certeau does, Hegel argues that both perspectives “fall within that knowledge which we are investigating.”17 Instead of an Enlightenment sense of mediation, in which the medium facilitates but is not the thing itself, Hegel coopts a newer sense of medium as environment. Marking a Romantic-­era shift in natural philosophy’s use of the term medium, Robert Mitchell notes that “the more that ‘medium’ was applied to living bodies and concerns, the more something other than transmission and communication came to the fore, for the term also came to connote vital transformation and development.”18 This critical shift in Hegel, the realization that cognition takes place “within” knowledge, depends less on the spatial sense of within—which could suggest the idea of environment as a transcendental domain that subsumes both consciousness of the object and consciousness of our knowledge of the object—discourse, say—than on the temporal sense of within, which suggests an environment as a zone of historical 17 18 15 16

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 47. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 53–4. Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 148. For an extended discussion of the shift in the term medium in a zoological context and how it came to have the connotation of environment, see Mitchell, pages 144–89.

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activity. As Mitchell explains: “Thinking the relationship between life and medium thus required concepts capable of handling what we would now describe as processes of recursion and feedback.”19 Hegel recognizes that the Enlightenment notion of mediation misleadingly assumes a stable, transcendental distinction where none exists, and that a reconciliation of cognition and mediation is only possible if consciousness is understood as historical consciousness and mediation as historical mediation. Pursuing this reconciliation, however, recalibrates the meaning of historical itself. § The sun setting in red behind Syria’s al-Hayal mountains and a full moon casting its blue light on the plains of the Euphrates provided a somber ambiance for Volney to muse about the grandeur of empires and the vicissitudes of time and ruin. The valley below him grew dim as the darkness increased, until only the “pale phantasms of columns and walls” could be seen.20 Straining to understand as much as to see, Volney wonders why the opulence of empires turns to waste, why fertile plains become barren, and populous nations sparse. On his own, he cannot fathom the true causes of history. His eyes fill with tears. He buries his head in the folds of his garment and blames first fate, then God’s mysterious justice, asking, “who shall dare to fathom the depths of the Divinity?”21 It is a question that leaves him stunned and motionless, and it plunges him into a “profound melancholy.”22 What happens next is strange for a book that is antagonistic to superstition and that ends by criticizing priesthoods everywhere for forming “secret associations and corporations at enmity with the rest of society.”23 Up to this point, the book had all the geographic specificity of a realistic travelogue, and yet, when Volney, hearing footsteps, lifts his mantle, he sees a phantasmagoric sight: a “pale apparition, clothed in large and flowing robes, as spectres are represented rising from their tombs.”24 The benevolent spirit appears in order 21 22 23 24 19 20

Ibid., 151. Volney, Ruins, 22. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 26.

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to explain history’s reasons, to show that ruin is not proof of God’s fickle favor, but rather the inevitable result of covetous wealth and bellicose superstition. God is to blame only as much as gullible humans follow the irrational edicts of a priestly cabal who claim unique access to divine wisdom, argues Volney, seemingly taking dictates from a “Genius of tombs and ruins.”25 Even if, to dispel the irony, one takes the apparition as a literary technique, a rhetorical device that depends on being recognized as merely rhetorical—never to be confused with vulgar notions of the supernatural—it is clear enough that Volney hopes to allude to something serious and real beyond the device. The specter is also meant earnestly, to lend a voice to an otherwise unspoken genius, as a Virgilian guide to help fathom history in its causes. The phantom Genius of tombs and ruins challenges Volney to reconsider his hasty conclusion that divine wisdom was somehow unfathomably at work in the world’s abject cruelty: “Is it the arm of God which has carried the sword into your cities, and fire into your fields, which has slaughtered the people, burned the harvests, rooted up the trees, and ravaged the pastures, or is it the hands of man?”26 The answer becomes suddenly clear to Volney: man is the author of his own despair. Acquiescing to the fact that history is not unknowable, he sees the slaughtered, starved, and maimed not as the lamentable consequences of divinely-­sanctioned holy wars, but rather as victims of ignorance and hate. So, while Volney sees his work as a paean to secularism, it is, prior to that, an assertion about historical causation. Once human actions can be attributed only to human agency, then causes can be weighed and considered on the basis of their outcomes, rather than on the basis of the spiritual values of some guiding spirit they purport to represent. Governments and their soldiers can be judged, not as temporal expressions of eternal values, but rather by their influence on the world, as actions with effects that persist into the future. Nonetheless, because social harmony depends on distinguishing, “by an inviolable barrier, the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities,” Volney’s Genius is a ghost that must not be a ghost.27 His ghost escapes being a figment of superstition only as long as it grounds its literary discourse in Ibid., 11. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 173.

25 26 27

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rational argument, reasoning only about those things “that are capable of verification.”28 In his addendum to the Ruins, Volney argues that human happiness is an extension of our natural moral guides of pleasure and pain; morality is thus a problem within the limits of thought rather than beyond, a question of reason not of faith. It is only through ignorance and lack of foresight that individuals may err in their decisions about the best way to regulate happiness. Therefore, because knowledge is “indispensably necessary to man’s existence” and because it cannot be acquired by individuals alone, society is necessary to ensure the development of the moral perfection that completes the otherwise perfect law of nature.29 Volney’s rationale—“man’s preservation, and the unfolding of his faculties, directed toward this end, are the true law of nature in the production of the human being”—mirrors Kant’s depiction of history as natural teleology in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”30 Volney’s apparition would be a ghost conjured by a torturously long spell that ends with the exorcism of all ghosts. Thus, the Genius, in his vision of a future legislative assembly, calls on legislators to suspend their meaningless religious quarrels and “investigate the laws which nature, for our guidance, has implanted in our breasts.”31 The result, writes Volney, will be “an authentic and immutable code” that applies to everyone “without exception.”32 Limiting the investigation to the natural, Volney nonetheless attributes theological characteristics, immutability and universality, to natural law.33 Each bit of knowledge revealed by inquiry must be a portion of one final complete knowledge that unites past, present, and future. The ghost of natural law and the spirit of inquiry, must be, for Volney, one and the same. We, however, who hope to think inquiry apart from finality, that is, free inquiry as historical consciousness, might intervene to note that, even if the ghost metaphorically represents reason rather than dogma, it is nonetheless a rational speculation, a fantasy of a future yet to be. We might wonder to what 30 31 32 33 28 29

Ibid., 173. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 174. Ibid. Ibid., 176.

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degree and under what circumstances the future could ever have the quality that Volney demands of being “capable of verification.”34 It is a question already implied in Virgil’s first Georgic, “scilicet et tempus veniet.”35 The adverb scilicet combines scire “to know” with licet “it is permitted” to mean “truly,” or “surely,” which, occurring in Virgil’s phrase, raises the question what are we permitted to know about tempus veniet, the time to come? Really, how can one be so casually sure of anything about the future—even that it will come at all? One answer is that the phrase itself testifies that some time will truly come. Writing is already that testament. Volney’s gesture, like Virgil’s, of imagining the present as the future’s past is a gesture implied in every act of writing. All media, in fact, are future oriented; even if, because of their material nature, they are not all oriented toward the future in the same way. All media depend on and are conditioned by the temporal qualities, such as persistence and recurrence, that make historical consciousness (and therefore cognition) possible. Thus, rather than cognition being tool-­like, the reverse is true: tools and media carry forward the impress of cognition. The ghost who declares the rational imperatives of the natural world also haunts old stones, quarried, cut and erected by human hands. When Volney addresses his opening invocation to Palmyra’s “solitary ruins,” he claims that, by “confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave,” the ruins announced the equality of all people at a time “when the whole earth, in chains and silence, bowed the neck before its tyrants.”36 Even the tyrant knows that the monumental “holy sepulchers” he builds as memorials to his grandeur resonate with Gothic overtones, poisoning “his impious joys” with proof that majestic lives also end in rot.37 Master and slave equally vanish as living bodies, more quickly and more completely than the slave’s work and the master’s stones, which then remain only as signs of their radical disappearance into equal nothingness. Such ontological equality (which, for Volney, prefigures political equality) relies on a transcendental realm where both master and slave exist equally as non-­existent in the evacuated space of history as lost time. One 36 37 34 35

Ibid., 173. Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 1. Volney, Ruins, 1. Ibid.

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could imagine this transcendental emptiness as the authentic history that is always already lost even in its appearance. Yet, for the master and slave to be equal in death, we who remain must imagine them there, alike in their nothingness. History as an absolute alterity lost at a transcendental remove collapses history into a present-­tense solipsism. To assume that history exists only in the impermanence of a moment—that the only true time is now—is, however, to ascribe a collectivizing unity to temporality that temporality itself precludes. There is no historical singularity, no monad of the now. It is neither pure nor unitary. No matter how evanescent, it retains its interval. Without this transcendental emptiness, then as much as now, the ruins tell a different story about the world. A memorial that proves the futility of memorials is nonetheless dependent on the survival of the memorial. Volney’s reading of the ruins as harbingers of universal equality, memorialized in print, is just as much a speculative vision of the future as the tombs. It was contrary to fact when he wrote it, and it remains so today. Yet both testify to the hope that their material memorializations will act in the future by carrying on as they are. As that which persist into the future, history is a persistence that no longer belongs, but which, nonetheless, participates in the new conditions. The temporal and cultural interval between Volney and Palmyra—between the French aristocrat fired with revolutionary esprit and the polyglot merchants of the ancient trading city—is a more expansive version of the ineradicable interval of temporality itself. To argue for such structural similarity between historical intervals of different size, however, one must forestall the critique that Timothy Campbell levels at David Hume: that he treats “fleeting mental impressions” as akin to “seventeen hundred years of English history,” refusing to “acknowledge methodological distinctions of scale, or to grant special status to the phenomenological condition.”38 Indeed, Hume’s assertion that “time in its first appearance to the mind is always conjoin’d with a succession of changeable objects” appears equivalent to my insistence on an interval of temporality; furthermore, when Hume compares that historical truth to a “chain of arguments of almost an immeasurable length,” he does seem

Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 133.

38

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to elide the difference between phenomenological and historiographical certainty.39 However, defining history as that which persists into the future avoids a retrospective metaphorical application of cognitive categories onto history because the interval is not a feature of cognition but its prerequisite. Cognition depends on the ineradicable historicity of the interval rather than the reverse. It is only through persistence that anything can mean. As the minimum condition of historicity, the interval structure allows cognition to become what it is. Acknowledging that material interaction defines each historical interval avoids conflating disparate time scales, since questions of duration would resolve into questions about the durability of different materials. The momentary neural configuration that produces a fleeting thought takes its character from the subtle dendrites through which its electrical impulses flit. A marble figure holds the softness of the flesh and the dynamism of the pose in near permanence. All the while, matter’s promiscuous hospitality allows it to record and preserve, even as it must therefore be helpless before the forces of deformation and decay, which, of course, is hospitality of another sort, a congeniality to ruin. The interval between an artifact’s creation and its encounter is not a simple sum of years. For instance, the decades between Robert Wood’s record of his expedition to Palmyra—“confined merely to that state of decay in which we found those ruins in the year 1751”—and Volney’s Ruins account for only some of their many qualitative differences.40 It is not that Volney and Wood are not products of their time, only that they are not exclusively so, because there is no single capacious unity to their historical moment. Their time, like ours, is thoroughly penetrated by others. Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart opens with a narrative of how the expedition came to be. Since “the principal merit of works of this kind is truth,” the preface is intended to testify to the document’s veracity by describing how the journey “was undertaken, and executed.”41 No element David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 145. 40 Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, Otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart [1753], Hathi Trust (https:// archive.org/details/ruinsPalmyraoth00Wood), 1. 41 Wood, The Ruins, i. 39

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of the document alone can stand as proof that it authentically represents Palmyra. As Hume points out, “each new copy is a new object” that is shifted from its original context in such a way that it “must lose somewhat in each transition.”42 Because the impressions that experience makes on the mind diminish as the experience becomes more distant in time—“it is evident this vivacity must gradually decay in proportion to the distance”—Hume decides that it is reasonable to object that historical accounts must inevitably become ever more insecure.43 While Hume’s solution to this uncertainty does help us to see material persistence as a key factor in historical transmission, his idea of a succession of faithful reproductions—“one edition passes into another, and that into a third, till we come to that volume we peruse at present”—continues to suppose a linear chronology that Walter Benjamin critiques as “homogenous, empty time.”44 Of course, mental impressions do fade; it is a feature of an adaptable mind. Similarly, historical events cannot secure their own facticity, and factors like remoteness and obscurity do compound the problem. As we see in Wood’s account, however, the historical interval is neither singular nor linear, rather, its various elements mutually reinforce each other. The narrative of the journey supports Wood’s archeological claim that he and Dawkins found “mummies in their sepulchral monuments,” a claim, in turn, bolstered by their assertion that they compared “the linen, the manner of the swathing, the balsam, and other parts” to methods used in Egypt, and found them to be “exactly the same.”45,46 While we have come to accept systems of differences as a feature of meaning, prior to meaning, they are a feature of historicity, a sign that any given historical interval is multi-­temporal. Even in the relatively small interval of time that Wood describes, between the outset of his journey and the time of his writing, multiple temporalities overlap. Wintering in Rome where the group planned their journey; meeting a ship in Naples that brought mathematical instruments, supplies, and “a library, Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 145. Ibid., 144. 44 Ibid., 146. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, vol. 4. trans. Harry Zohn, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003], 396). For Benjamin, this view of time is unjust. If the present were simply an effect of the past all the barbarous and totalitarian acts of the past would become the necessary steps toward a Panglossian future. 45 Wood, The Ruins, 22. 46 Ibid. 42 43

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consisting chiefly of all the Greek historians;” visiting the Greek archipelagoes; all those moments act as a prelude to their travel across the desert to Palmyra.47 What we might have imagined as one simple moment giving way to the next, a transverse line surveyable from now to then, is the uneven distribution of historical action, a semi-­unity of elements—each historical in its temporal difference from the others—that muddles any putative singularity of what might have been considered an event. What Wood concludes of the Palmyrenes—that their customs were a cultural pastiche: “their funeral customs were from Egypt, their luxury was Persian, and their letter and arts were from the Greeks”—is also true of his text.48 His transcriptions of Greek inscriptions at the site and the fifty-­seven architectural plates are scholarly responses to William Halifax’s 1691 expedition.49 The attendant notes and apparatus register Wood’s multifocal response—to Halifax’s expedition, to Palmyrene history, to the ruins, and to the concerns of an implied future readership: “Besides that we found no difficulty in reading it, both grammar and sense so evidently authorise the difference of this copy from that already published, that we shall not trouble the reader with any defence of it.”50 All texts, all media, all material persistence, in fact, comprise overlapping historical intervals, precisely because there is no unity of the now, except as a provisional interaction, in which texts and media then persist into the future and become available to new interactions that generate new intervals of temporality. Whether on the smallest scale of the idle daydream or on the grander scale of palaces and tombs, the historical enters the world through acts of mediation.

Ibid., a1. Ibid., 23. 49 William Halifax, ‘A Relation of a Voyage from Aleppo to Palmyra in Syria; Sent by the Reverend Mr. William Halifax to Dr. Edw. Bernard (Late) Savilian Professor of Astronomy in Oxford, and by Him Communicated to Dr. Thomas Smith. Reg. Soc. S.’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 217, 83–110 (1695). See also, E. Halley, “Some Account of the Ancient State of the City of Palmyra, with Short Remarks upon the Inscriptions Found there,” Philosophical Transactions Royal Society 19 (1695), 160–75. 50 Wood, The Ruins, 25. Furthermore, the project of the transcriptions, which, as Gregorio Astengo notes, contributed to the “complete decipherment of Palmyrene in 1754,” and participates in an epigraphic tradition of Renaissance scholars who “were already trying to establish this primary material as historical evidence, testing its reliability and questioning its reproducibility.” Astengo notes that Palymerene “was the first dead language to be uncovered through inscriptions” (Gregorio Astengo, “The rediscovery of Palmyra and its dissemination in Philosophical Transactions,” Notes and Records, Royal Society London, 2016 Sep 20; 70.3: 209–230). 47 48

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The difference between Volney’s Ruins and Wood’s is a difference in the peculiar synthesis each preserves.51 Just as we can wonder who is responsible for Wood’s text, spliced here into this introduction: Wood, who wrote it; James Dawkins, who accompanied Wood and facilitated Wood’s publication of the material by declining whatever “profits which may arise;” John Bouverie, who died of fever; Giovanni Battista Borra, the draughtsman; P. Fourdrinier, J.S. Müller, T.M. Müller, Jr., and T. Major, who engraved the plates; the librarian, who acquired the book for the collection as a gift in memory of James and Eleanor Moose; the Smithsonian, which sponsored the scans; keri, the archivist who uploaded them; or The Internet Archive, which administers them.52 Similarly, we can reconsider Volney’s assertion that king and his subjects equally vanish into the tomb by wondering instead who is preserved in the ruins: the traders whose wealth paid for them; the laborers who built them; the engineers whose knowledge made it possible; the priests that promulgated the customs; or the cultures that styled the temple’s delicate flourishes? The Romantic Historicism to Come hopes to enable a conception of history in which media do not stand between the now and the past like a veil, but are, rather, the material conditions that persist into the future, a conception of history in which these incremental contributions are seen instead as a supersaturated, semi-­synchronous agglomeration of residual temporalities, each carrying forward its own temporality in suspended relation to the others. § Just as Volney proffers a vision of a history undistorted by superstition, The Romantic Historicism to Come tries to banish the specter of a transcendentally lost past. Even so, as I read back over this introduction, I have to confess that it resembles Wood more than Volney. Like Wood, my concerns have been scholarly, oriented toward interpreting artifacts and crafting arguments about validity. Wood fails to mention the conflicts in his time between the Ottoman Empire and Russia and admits that on the expedition “what engaged our greatest attention was rather their antient than present state.”53 Volney, makes Wood, The Ruins, 1. Wood, The Ruins, 1. https://archive.org/details/ruinsPalmyraoth00Wood Wood, The Ruins, a2.

51 52 53

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the wars that preceded him a centerpiece of his argument. The apparition helps him to recognize that what he takes, at first, for animalcules are actual human beings, fleeing the atrocities: “these columns of flames! These insects! O Genius they are men—these are the ravages of war!”54 In 1785, Volney went to Palmyra, and believing in the humanity of history, he produced an imaginative vision of a lasting peace appearing out of a violent past. Now, as my own violent times leave their mark on the ruined city, Palmyra comes to me, through media fragments of narrative, prognostication, and analysis in The Guardian online or on Twitter: snippets of video, posts from Syrian activists expecting to be killed in the Regime’s bombing of Aleppo, photos of refugees and of the survivors, bringing comfort and aid to the casualties and their families, or dignity to the dead. My first notes for this introduction date from May 2015, when the paramilitary group Daesh, known also by the acronym ISIL, was threatening the capture of Palmyra. An op-­ed argued for intervention on behalf of the ruins—“Coalition air strikes should defend Palmyra–it belongs to the whole world”—even as the Syrian people were incensed at an international community more concerned with protecting limestone relics than saving lives.55 By the end of 2015, 400,000 Syrians had been killed in the war; 70,000 had died because of the “collapse of the country’s health-­care infrastructure, lack of access to medicine, poor sanitation, the spread of communicable diseases, falling vaccination rates, food scarcity and malnutrition.”56 1.88 million Syrians had been injured. There were 6.36 million people internally displaced, and 3.11 million refugees had fled the country.57 The ASOR Syrian Heritage Initiative reported that ISIL destroyed the Shiite Shrine of Sheikh Mohammad ibn ‘Ali sometime between March 1 and May 22; the Sufi Tomb of Shagaf/Nizar Abu Behaeddine sometime between June 15 and June 26; the Tomb of Iamliku and the Tomb of Atenaten between June 26 and August 27; Volney, Ruins, 55. Rowan Moore, “Coalition air strikes should defend Palmyra–it belongs to the whole world,” The Guardian, May 16, 2015. 56 Priyanka Boghani, “A Staggering New Death Toll for Syria’s War, 470,000,” Frontline, February 11, 2016. 57 Syrian Centre for Policy Research, Syria Confronting Fragmentation! Impact of Syrian Crisis Report, http://scpr-­syria.org/publications/policy-­reports/confronting-­fragmentation/ February 11, 2016. 54 55

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and left the Tomb of the Banai family “badly damaged.”58 ISIL destroyed several tower tombs, including the Tomb of Elahbel, the Tomb of Kithoth, the Tomb of Julius Aurelius Bolma, and Tomb #71 sometime between August 27 and September 2. On August 7, ISIL demolished the ancient Christian monastery Mar Elian. On August 23, they destroyed the Baalshamin Temple. On August 30, they destroyed parts of the Temple of Bel.59 Two years later, the horrors of the civil war and proxy war continue: chlorine gas, barrel bombs, hospitals targeted, artillery, and air strikes. To write about this is not really my place. It risks the erasure of human suffering and cultural heritage. Yet, not to write also risks an erasure, an erasure of my complicity as a citizen of a country that has pursued a foreign policy of war and targeted assassinations spanning fifteen years and seven countries. Days ago, the Pentagon confirmed that its March 17 air strike in Mosul killed at least 105 civilians, and today Secretary of Defense James Mattis said, “We have already shifted from attrition tactics where we shove them from one position to another in Iraq and Syria, to annihilation tactics where we surround them.”60 Even as the ruins of Palmyra hold the old scars and now the new, so too will Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen carry forward the violence the United States carved into them. It is much to my shame, as well, that my work can add nothing but what might have already been gleaned from Volney’s: that there is neither glory in war nor security, that war burns fantasies of nullity and heaven into soft bodies, while violence spreads, like the chatter of demons living on. § Following György Lukács, the standard model of Romantic historicism took the historical novel, and more particularly the novels of Walter Scott, for its paradigm, and thus inherited the tension in Scott’s historical sense between historical Ibid. Allison Cuneo, Susan Penacho, and LeeAnn Barnes Gordon, “ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives, Update on the Situation in Palmyra,” September 3, 2015. http://www.asor-­syrianheritage.org/special-­ report-update-­on-the-­situation-in-­palmyra. See also, Paul Veyne, Palmyra: An irreplaceable Treasure, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 60 Emily Shugerman, “US air strike in Mosul killed at least 105 civilians, Pentagon confirms,” Independent, March 25, 2017. Kathryn Watson, “Fight against ISIS has shifted to ‘annihilation tactics,’ Mattis says,” CBS News, May 28, 2017. 58 59

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accretion—history as an incomplete record of a lost totality—and revolutionary rupture—history as an estranged alterity, an alien vista across an unbridgeable chasm. Scott’s antiquarianism falls on the side of historical accretion, generating nostalgia for a folk origin retrospectively imagined as a lost unity we inherit only as fragments and ruin. On the side of revolutionary rupture falls his stadialist belief that history irrevocably progresses in stages from more primitive tribal societies toward modern constitutional nation states. For Scott, and for Lukács as well, the historical forces resolve on the side of accretion. Revolution is an inflection point in a larger continuity. Rather than a radical rupture, revolution expresses a social contradiction that teleologically contains the logic of its resolution, as one period shudders and succumbs to its inevitable successor. More recent accounts of Romantic historicism have tended to be wary of coloring cultural activity with the tones of Enlightenment progressivism. Instead, they generally valorize rupture, discontinuity, and ultimately revolution, positing a radical otherness of the past as a condition for historical freedom. As Orrin Wang suggests, one of the central questions of Romantic studies is the relationship between history and change. If one important version of the Romantic imaginary is in large part structured by the hypothetical event of radical social transformation, what is the precise form of the event? Does it begin with revolution and then open up to commodification as the rise of the commodity form, or is revolution still the proleptic telos of the narrative arc?61

Such accounts have been extremely valuable in foregrounding the problem of freedom and the relatedness of epochs. However, by privileging discontinuity, by guarding against routine causation and its incumbent determinisms, they ultimately leave unsettled the question of how and why revolutionary events erupt at one moment rather than another. Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism, for instance, in mapping the relationship between generic metamorphosis and historical change, suggests that genres arise when “the gap between literary representation and lived reality reaches crisis proportions.”62 Trumpener’s Orrin Wang, Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 7. 62 Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 150. 61

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language of contradiction and crisis coexists uneasily with her characterization of revolution as “a forcible, often violent entry into history,” marking it as a boundary between the incommensurable positions of those cultures that have entered into history and those that have not.63 Even if historical pressures accrete, building toward crisis, there nonetheless remains the question of whether those pressures have a threshold, an intensity above which the spark leaps the gap, in which case the rupture remains within a causal horizon, or whether the revolutionary crisis is truly a transcendental event that arrives bidden but undeserved like grace. Similarly, James Chandler’s England in 1819 posits discontinuities between levels of historical generality, rehabilitating “the case” as a unit useful for both nominalist chronological specificity and idealist historical accounts. Such commonality does not jeopardize the discrete quality of any given case: rather, “elaborating the anecdote into higher-­order forms of generality [comes] at the expense, primarily, of foregoing the narrative unity of the sens de l’histoire.”64 The case can be employed at both the nominalist and idealist levels without jeopardizing the discontinuity as long as there is an incommensurability of the two levels and no causal principles that would connect the nominalist sens de l’histoire to “higher-­order” idealist accounts. Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic shares a similar ambivalence, as it attempts to reconcile a Giovanni Arrighi’s longue durée dominated by economic forces with Benjamin’s weak messianism. The two are reconciled to the degree that the controlling historical periodization is marked by a temporality, modeled on the analogue of insurance, that borrows its indeterminacy from the future. Baucom leaves unanswered the question of how an indeterminate temporality produces macro-­historical stability if not ultimately secured by powerful modes of economic determinism. What currently functions as teleological critique is essentially a juxtaposition of causal accounts with quasi-­mystical assurances that history is indeed free of the teleologies that remain so stubbornly everywhere visible. There can be no answer to the question of how idealist accounts relate to the causal forces that govern the regular functions of everyday history as long as freedom is characterized as a transcendental space of pure Ibid., 142. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 71–2.

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possibility. Our conceptions of history have to move beyond the historicist’s dilemma—caught between the fullness of lost time and its corollary empty freedom—that has stymied the Romantic historicism of the past. More than a hundred years ago, Wilhelm Windelband groused about the rapid succession of historical methodologies: “the mechanistic method, the geometrical method, the psychological method, the dialectical method, and, most recently, the evolutionary-­historical method,” seeing this proliferation as a sign of incoherence.65 Perhaps nowadays we can be surer to acknowledge such diversity as a strength and to value the dexterity of a critical field that has recourse to multiple historical approaches; and if so, then my title, The Romantic Historicism to Come, may be read as offering an open-­ended gesture, providing the groundwork for a practical, flexible conception of historicity that would allow a non-­proscriptive, catholic embrace of our eclectic set of contemporary historical lenses—the longue durée and microhistory, ideological critique and historical sympathy, antiquarianism and genealogy, and the contrary formalisms of close and distant reading. Exploring the implications of a Romantic-­era conception of mediation and articulating the minimum conditions of historicity, the book offers a definition of history as that which persists into the future, in order to facilitate communication between methodologies without foreclosing on the autonomy of individual approaches. Just as the Romantic era produced a forward-­looking historicism whose time has yet to come, this book attempts to do conceptual work that will hopefully be useful in whatever future will come to be. Because history is future oriented, it can do nothing more than remain what it is for as long as possible among whatever else becomes. What I hope for this book is that it may seem timely in various ways, to various scholars, just as two people sometimes surprise each other by thinking different parts of the same stray thought, which is how I felt recently reading Emily Rorbach’s Modernity’s Mist, Timothy Campbell’s Historical Style, and Anahid Nersessian’s Utopia, Limited. In the same way that they could not have known how precisely I needed their work, I hope to have written something serviceable in a future that I cannot Wilhelm Windelband, “Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894,” History and Theory, 19.2 (February 1980): 171.

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foresee. Its title should be read as an invitation more than a statement, an openness to whatever minds might happen to encounter it, a hospitality to new work that will undo, subvert, elaborate, overhaul, tease, or refuse my own concerns. § A reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, my first chapter, “Gothic Mediation and History’s Two Materialisms,” turns to Joseph Priestley’s dismissal of the need for a vehicle of the soul—a hypothetical intermediary between matter and spirit—to see what natural philosophy’s debate about the interaction of matter and spirit reveals about the formation of the Gothic. For Priestley, matter’s dynamism obviates any need for a semi-­substantial shuttle. A vehicle of the soul is unnecessary if the whole continuum between inert and inspirited is defined by the intermediacy the vehicle would provide. Matter’s inherent dynamism could explain simple materiality and complex mental activity equally well. Identifying force and its fluctuations as the intermediate characteristic, Priestley collapses the duality between matter and spirit, producing a Gothic materiality that is subtle in its motions like the soul, and subject to corruption and decay like matter. Strangely enough, however, materialism’s collapse of the mind-­body divide fails to banish the dualism. Instead, the two orientations—which I call the two vectors of the Gothic—remain. The first vector places the source of Gothic effects in the inchoate desires of the natural body. Psychological terror has somatic roots. The second vector of the Gothic develops out of an emerging distinction between thought as individual and personal—a soul animating a material body—and thought as the product of education and influence, distributed widely across a sociocultural domain. While William Godwin’s Political Justice lays groundwork for this second vector, its rival possibilities become clear only in time. For accounts to place the source of the Gothic in the flux of cultural anxiety requires a conceptual shift akin to rethinking Hegel’s Geist not as mind but rather ideology. The ideological vector originates in a historical moment’s conflicting sociocultural messages and it conditions the innermost impulses of individual experience. The two vectors are alike in that each originates in a state of fragmentation and multiplicity, and each

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penetrates the localized consciousness of the individual; and yet, the mirrored logic of these vectors of the Gothic restores the duality that each vector tries to overcome. The chapter reads Frankenstein as a novel in which much of the interpretative complexity stems from the way Shelley balances the two vectors against each other, critiquing the utopian spirit of the Romantic and the sentimental by Gothicizing her two heroes, treating both Frankenstein and his creature as the fallen angels of conflicting value systems and setting the two against each other as antagonists. She pits a Gothicized sentimental against a Gothicized Romantic and binds the two together in a double-­directional critique. My second chapter, “History’s Body and the Historicist’s Dilemma,” examines the historicist’s dilemma—the tension between nominalist and idealist, between particular and general—and how it interacts with the competing causal regimes represented by the two vectors of the Gothic. Mary Wollstonecraft and JeanJacques Rousseau give opposing values to history that correspond with the contrary positions of the historicist’s dilemma. Wollstonecraft values history for a rationality yet to come; Rousseau values the natural sympathies of our Edenic past. Nonetheless, they share a common metaphor. Both suggest history develops as human bodies do. For Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, the metaphor of history-­as-body serves as a way of comprehending history teleologically: past, present, and future hold together like an organic body, in which the stable processes of growth regularize what might otherwise be simply arbitrary change. At its most comprehensive, the metaphor ceases to be a metaphor and becomes instead a deterministic account of the laws of causation.66 Thus, while Wollstonecraft and Rousseau adopt opposing positions in the historicist’s dilemma, they both do so from the side of first causal vector. The chapter then considers Godwin’s searching “Essay of History and Romance,” which arrives at several impasses that have the historicist’s dilemma at their root. His essay considers the dilemma’s contrary tendencies— nominalist and idealist—and exposes the failures that plague each tendency. While idealist historians were undermined by their failure to account for the For a discussion of the relationship between necessitarianism and Priestley’s views on history, see Alison Kennedy, “Historical Perspectives in the Mind of Joseph Priestley,” Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 172–202.

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empirical particulars, nominalist historians operated without any cohesive account of the interaction of social forces. Thus, traveling from the opposite direction, Godwin arrives at a second impasse. Neither of the two methods on its own can provide a reliable historical account, and thus the historian, if he “would prove the liberal and spirited benefactor of his species, must connect the two branches of history together.”67 In search of historical accuracy, Godwin’s essay fails to discover a prescriptive solution to the tensions inherent to historiography; however, in its restlessness, it manages to articulate the implications of the second causal vector for history and to provisionally sketch a four-­cornered schema defined by the interaction of the historicist’s dilemma and each of the causal vectors. The chapter finishes with a contemporary echo of the WollstonecraftRousseau debate in Thomas Pfau’s critique of Marjorie Levinson, in which Pfau articulates a particularly Rousseauian critique of Levinson’s Wollstonecraftian utopianism. Yet, in the debate between Pfau and Levinson, a crucial shift has taken place that is symptomatic of the changes in the conceptualization of history since the Romantic era. For Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, the history-­ as-body metaphor stood in for the theoretically plausible but unrealizable task of aggregating the natural impulses that en masse would make history. For Pfau and Levinson, the causal direction of the metaphor moves in the opposite direction, from the socius to the individual. Their aggregate body is not the general species body of Wollstonecraft and Rousseau, but rather a cultural body that conditions and determines historical interactions. Each vector posits a causal regime that, in the final instance, would be determinate. If either of the two were to be dominate then history would collapse into a determinism of one sort or the other. Thus, it becomes necessary to account for the mutual interaction of the somatic and the ideological—the scientific and the sociocultural—without collapsing one side into the other. Recognizing the countervailing causality of the two vectors requires a theoretical account of what it would mean for the interaction of those forces to produce a free history. My third chapter, “Freedom and the Minimum Conditions of Historicity,” William Godwin. “Essay of History and Romance,” Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 5, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: Picking, 1993), 293–4.

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begins with Kant’s attempts to reconcile natural law and human freedom in an “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.”68 To reconcile the two, Kant posits a teleological argument: because the natural human capacity for reason appears imperfect when compared to instinct, and because natural capacities must be capable of full development and not simply deficient, the purpose of an imperfect moral law must be the free development of the moral law itself, developed incrementally through collective achievement. Moral law, unfolding in time, fulfils its transcendental destiny. Kant ultimately rejects the teleological interpretation of transcendental freedom because it subordinates human freedom to natural law; human freedom would be a natural capacity that developed according to nature’s prescriptions. Subsequently, he reconsiders the relationship between the natural and the transcendental, moving away from linking them as teleological development toward understanding the relationship as a direct link between the individual in time and the moral law, present all at once and fully developed. The association of freedom with a transcendental realm is a legacy of Kant. It survives to the current day, largely in theories that rely on empty negativity. The third chapter, and the remainder of The Romantic Historicism to Come, argues for a conception of historical freedom that needs no recourse to a transcendental realm. Having traced the connection between Kant’s transcendental conceptuality and history, the chapter examines the historical implications of Hegel’s revision of Kantian conceptuality. Through a close reading of the first three sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit, I discuss the similarities and differences between these two notions of freedom and how they interact with and imply various conceptions of history. For Hegel, the phenomenal world of appearances is not divided by an unbridgeable chasm from the noumenal world of the things-­inthemselves. For Hegel, freedom exists in the reciprocal action through which identity is predicated on difference. There need not be an infinite storehouse of untouchable freedom, if, as Hegel suggests, freedom is the activity of difference itself, the action that takes place as identity-­in-difference and difference-­inidentity. Hegel recursively builds an ever more complex conceptual mechanism Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Political Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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out of modular elements, showing how consciousness develops out of and in relation to the mechanisms of historicity. Because the movement of consciousness and matter interact to produce history’s discontinuities as discrete elements slip out of sync with each other in the changing now, the chapter argues that the conception of history that meets these basic features of historicity without any superadded teleological conditions is history conceived as that which persists into the future. My fourth chapter, “Randomness, Romantic Historicism, and Walter Scott,” examines the implications of Scott’s personal financial crisis for his stadialist historicism. Eighteenth-­century stadialist historiography seemed to provide a fixed set of principles, positing a history that unfolded in stages, from primitive to modern, according to the mode of production dominant in various cultures. Scott’s Romantic historicism combined this comparative anthropology with a nostalgic antiquarianism that retrospectively projected a folk culture into an imagined past. Scott’s financial near-­ruin threatened his antiquarianism, which he had posited as a secure space for the conservation of values apart from the technological progressivism of capitalist markets, and exposed the partial entanglements of that sanctified space. Because artifacts derive their value outside the normal circulation of market forces, they suggest an alternative conception of historical causality in which indeterminacy is defined not as an unknowable emptiness or negativity, but rather as the interaction of relatively autonomous semi-­deterministic systems. Seeking a non-­teleological conception of history that remains amenable to causality, the chapter builds on Niklas Luhmann’s account of differential systems to argue that literary historians could conceive of chance as the interaction of relatively autonomous semi-­deterministic systems. Randomness need not be opposed to rationality. It is not necessarily the antithesis of reason characterized, like the noumena, by radical negativity. Rather, the outcome of any given situation becomes the measure of the relative strengths of systems that, in their relative autonomy, were unknowable prior to the event. This simpler assumption juxtaposes the possible not with the radically empty negativity, but rather with a future of many possibilities. Such a simple maneuver, however, is only viable when accompanied by an explanation of why these multiple causes, some of which would be stronger, and some weaker

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in their effectivity, do not simply interact in a deterministic sense. Reconceiving chance as I have allows us to understand why it is that some futures are quite foreseeable—for instance, the results of scientific experiments, which are predictable because they are enclosed within a single systematized frame— while other futures, because they participate in more than one semi-­ independent system, have not only unforeseen but also unforeseeable results. This reconception musters the technique of mediation to collapse the dichotomy between causal and random. Because it does not rely on an empty space of pure possibility, such a conception of randomness can account for the indeterminacy that results from an asynchronous history: the concurrent influence of various time periods and the concurrent influence of various ideological registers that, in their persistence, pressure each historical moment. It leads us to a conception of futurity that, while open to radical change, need not sever its connection to causality, and which, therefore, better addresses the problem of futurity that is at the heart of questions about the past. My fifth chapter, “Romantic Temporality and Queer Revolution,” examines Percy Shelley’s dual considerations of love and revolution in Prometheus Unbound. Taking stock of recent discussions in queer theory, the chapter explores the implications of Shelley’s assertion that love is a necessary condition for truly emancipatory revolution. Despite the nearly 200 years that stand between them, Shelley and queer theory share similar concerns: like Shelley, queer theory holds that a critique of our understanding of love and sex is necessary for fundamental social change; and queer theory, like Shelley, is distrustful of utopian or escapist solutions to political oppression. The theoretical sophistication of queer theory has given it powerful tools to produce decisive critiques of ideology and social practice; yet, the chapter argues, its dependence on the work of Jacques Lacan compromises its understanding of the revolutionary qualities of love in several important ways. Turning away from a bourgeois idea of love as contract, queer theory characterized love as arising out of a prior and more fundamental struggle for recognition, a position rooted in Lacan’s inheritance of Alexandre Kojève’s view of freedom as a violent struggle for feudal mastery. Furthermore, queer theory inherits a conception of freedom as empty negativity that creates a dilemma in which revolution is imagined to be either a radical break from a

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degraded present or a continuous and total revolt. Such a conception of the future undermines any theoretical basis for productive revolutionary action in the present. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley offers a different solution to the problem of love and revolution, freedom and futurity. Valorizing not conceptual stability, but rather, the living impermanence of love, Shelley subordinates the transcendental to temporal. He posits an intermingling of means and ends as a source of freedom. The world in actuality exists as intermixture. There is no fixed border between past, present, and future, no impenetrable distinction between causality and freedom. The present exists in the future as cause; the future exists as freedom now. Love is not static and pure, but entangled. Imperfection is not equivalent to failure, but to possibility. Shelley moves us toward an alternative view of love and freedom, that does not condemn instrumentality as subjugation, but instead considers acts of care to be a source of freedom, an endorsement of difference, temporality, and of life itself.

1

Gothic Mediation and History’s Two Materialisms Frankenstein advances bipedally, oscillating in tone—one fantastically optimistic step, one of deep despair—an ambulation that mirrors the novel’s thematic oppositions, announced, for instance, when the creature wonders about fire, “How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!” or about humans, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?”1,2 The foundational readings of George Levine and Mary Poovey argue that with Frankenstein Mary Shelley criticizes the Promethean ambitions of her contemporaries. Poovey writes that Shelley portrays Promethean desire “not as neutral or benevolent but as quintessentially egotistical,” and concludes that, for Shelley, the imagination is “an appetite that can and must be regulated—specifically, by the give and take of domestic relationships.”3 Both Poovey and Levine contrast Romantic values with sentimental values and position the Gothic in the mode of critique. Frances Ferguson, however, suggests that Percy Shelley’s anonymous review of Frankenstein “be taken as an authoritative statement of what [Percy] and Mary Shelley regarded as the meaning and message of the work.”4 The review places blame not on the Promethean hero but on the arbitrariness of sentimental attachments, claiming that “too often in society, those who are best

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, vol. 1 of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 77. 2 Ibid., 89. 3 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 123. 4 Ferguson writes “Frankenstein, in other words, is less a novel about character than about the effects of society on character” (Frances Ferguson, “Generationalizing: Romantic Social Forms and the Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 8.1 [2010] 97–118, p. 110). 1

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qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse.”5 Thus, for Percy Shelley, Frankenstein faults not Romantic egoism but rather the cloistered judgments of the sentimental. These contrary readings lend credence to Lawrence Lipking’s attribution of a moral ambivalence to the novel.6 “Should Walton give up his dreams? Should nature be left alone? Is ambition the source of evil? The novel firmly answers Yes and No.”7 The concentric frame structure of Frankenstein—the narration passing from the explorer Robert Walton to Frankenstein to Frankenstein’s creature to the core narrative of the De Lacey family—suggests another possible way to read the equivocal interaction: as a mutual containment of the sort Janet Todd finds in Ann Radcliffe between the Gothic and the sentimental. “The gothic must remain within the sentimental romance or else it can become sensational and horrific like Lewis’s Monk. But the sentimental must also be contained in the gothic, the obscure, the slightly distanced.”8 Looking inward from the novel’s outer rim casts each of the frames as a Promethean quest for knowledge; looking outward from the novel’s sentimental core casts each as a love story. Love and knowledge are bound structurally as center and circumference. If Radcliffe’s novels are “a judicious mix” of the genres, Shelley’s Frankenstein pits them in a struggle.9 She critiques the utopian spirit of the Romantic and the sentimental by Gothicizing her two heroes, treating both Frankenstein and Shelley, “On Frankenstein,” The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vol. 6 (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), 264. 6 While Frankenstein is likely the most mediated novel of all time, it has also been read by Ellen Moers, U.C. Knoepflmacher, William Veeder, Anne Mellor and others as intimately personal. It began with the collaborative and competitive play of friends, and also with the solitary play of a dream (Ellen Moers, “Female Gothic,” The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974]; U.C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974]; William Veeder, “The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein, and the Shelleys,” Critical Inquiry 12.2 [1986] 365–90; Anne Mellor, Romanticism and Gender, [London: Routledge, 1993]). See also William St. Clair for an account of the impetus stage productions of Frankenstein lent to its successive editions, as well as for the assertion that in “Victorian times, even when Frankenstein was not in print and when there was no play on the stage, the story was alive in the nation’s memory” (William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 372). 7 Lawrence Lipking, “Frankenstein, The True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques,” Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 330. 8 Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica (London: Virago Press, 1989), 256. 9 Ibid. 5

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his creature as the fallen angels of conflicting value systems and setting the two against each other as antagonists.10 Rather than functioning to mutually contain potentially dangerous tendencies, the Gothic heightens the latent violence of each genre, setting a Gothicized sentimental against a Gothicized Romantic. She pits each against the other and binds the two together in a double-­directional critique. Except for Robert Walton, who never encounters the antagonists together alive, Frankenstein and his creature have no mediator, a sign that, although the story is cluttered with media—letters, journals, books, gestures, songs—there may in fact be no happy medium between the two. § Frankenstein was written at a moment when matter could no longer be easily dismissed as inert extension. Invisible and active across distances, gravity, magnetism, and electricity showed matter to be dynamic instead. In 1777, Joseph Priestley wrote that “since matter has, in fact, no properties but those of attraction and repulsion it ought to rise in our esteem, as making a nearer approach to the nature of spiritual and immaterial beings, as we have been taught to call those which are opposed to gross matter.”11 For Priestley, dynamism allowed the natural philosopher to avoid a fallacious duality between gross matter and immaterial spirit. Matter itself was already inspirited. Priestley suggests a continuum between the elementary forces of attraction and repulsion and the yea and nay of thought, and argues that vibrations in the sensory nerves give matter “a capacity for affections as subtle and complex as any thing that we can affirm concerning those that have hitherto been called Jerrold Hogle argues that the Gothic is that “by which Romantic texts are most thoroughly haunted” and proposes that we think of the Gothic as “a sort of dark Romanticism” (Jerrold Hogle, “The Gothic-Romantic Relationship: Underground Histories in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’,” European Romantic Review 14.2 [2003], 210). For Janet Todd, the Gothic haunts not the Romantic but the sentimental, acting (to repurpose Hogle’s term) as a sort of dark Sentimental (Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica [London: Virago Press, 1989], 256). Anne Williams similarly suggests that Frankenstein be read as a hybrid, which she identifies as a mixture of a Male and Female Gothic (Anne Williams, “ ‘Mummy, Possest’: Sadism and Sensibility in Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Frankenstein’s Dream. Praxis Series, Romantic Circles. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/frankenstein/williams/williams.html). For an account of how elements of the Romantic emerged as a response to the socioeconomics of the Gothic, see Michael Gamer (Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], 2000). 11 Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 17.

10

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mental affections.”12 Thought then would be a material efflux, passing from the simple fluctuations of pleasure and pain to the more ornate varieties of our passions and further onward to the systematic truths and falsehoods of reason, all the while remaining firmly within the material realm. Priestley disparaged his contemporaries, such as William Wollaston, who worried that a vehicle of the soul—an “intermediate material substance” between the immateriality of thought and the materiality of the body—was required in order to reconcile “things so discrepant in their nature as a pure immaterial substance, and such gross matter, as that of which the human body and brain are composed.”13 Priestley argues against the existence of such a vehicle, calling it “nothing more than taking the eidolon of the ancients, or the popular ghost of all countries” and “making it a kind of body to something of which the ancients and the vulgar had no idea.”14 Priestley casts aside the vehicle of the soul as a semi-­substantial shuttle between matter and spirit and collapses the duality altogether. He identifies an intermediate characteristic, force and its fluctuations, and redefines matter in such a way that the intermediate stands for the whole. As if by sleight of hand, he obviates the need for a vehicle of the soul by defining the whole continuum with the intermediacy of the vehicle. The division of the self ceases to be the result of two separate essences wedded together and becomes, instead, simply another example of the complexity and internal division that is evident everywhere in nature. Mediation’s sleight of hand has its roots in the long-­standing debate in natural philosophy about matter and motion. In the seventeenth century, natural philosophy began to interpret the body’s mixture of voluntary and automatic movements as an important site for understanding the relationship between mind and body, as, for instance, in the famously hostile interaction between Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes in the Third Objection to Meditations on First Philosophy that centers on Descartes’ statement “But what then am I? A thing that thinks [res cogitans].”15 While both Hobbes and Ibid., 84. William Wollaston, The religion of nature delineated (London: Printed for J. Beecroft, J. Rivington, J. Ward, R. Baldwin, W. Johnston, S. Crowder, P. Davey and B. Law, and G. Keith, 1759), 104. 14 Priestley, Disquisitions, 74. 15 René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 18. 12 13

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Descartes acknowledge the intermediate status of life as a mixture of matter and motion, their mutual hostility lies in their contrary interpretations of that intermediacy. For Descartes, thinking is a power superadded to materiality: “things endowed with the faculty of thought.”16 For Hobbes, thought is a motion that arises out of materiality. He traces the motion backward down a materialist chain, “reasoning will depend on names, names will depend on the imagination, and imagination will depend (as I believe it does) merely on the motions of our bodily organs; and so the mind will be nothing more than motion occurring in various parts of an organic body.”17 Descartes dismisses this line of thinking as absurd. Hobbes’s conclusion that thought is motion is a conceptual error, according to Descartes, on the level of concluding “that the earth is the sky, or anything else he likes.”18 Descartes’ metaphor—earth distinct from sky—suggests a strong dualism. Indeed, he asserts that it is possible to “easily have two clear and distinct notions or ideas” that distinguish thought as the essential attribute of the mind from extension as the essential attribute of the body.19 However, while attempting to maintain a clear and distinct separation between mind and body, Descartes replicates the mind-­body dualism on each side of the dualism. On the side of corporeal substance, he argues that all matter is made up of particles, and that the differences between bones, flesh, blood, and humors result from the various motions of their particles.20 While the particles of even the densest objects are in motion, that motion is not an attribute of matter, but occurs and continues through the act of God, who Descartes defines as “uncreated independent

Descartes, “Objections and Replies,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 123. Ibid., 126. For how this disagreement between Descartes and Hobbes influences John Locke and David Hume, see Stephen Buckle, “Hume on the Passions,” Philosophy, 87 (2012) 189–213. 18 Descartes, “Objections and Replies,” 126. 19 René Descartes, “Principles of Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 211. “Thought and extension can be regarded as constituting the natures of intelligent substance and corporeal substance; they must then be considered as nothing else but thinking substance itself and extended substance itself—that is, as mind and body” (Ibid., 215). 20 “So there is no difference between those parts we call fluid, such as the blood, the humors, and the spirits, those we call solid, such as bones, flesh, nerves and skin, beyond the fact that each particle of these latter parts moves much more slowly that the particles of the former” (Descartes, “Description of the Human Body,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 319). 16

17

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thinking substance.”21 Thinking substance thus produces matter in all of its differences. Furthermore, matter relies on the continuance of these spiritual motions from moment to moment, which Descartes names the laws of nature.22 Descartes’ claim, therefore, that matter is distinct from thought in its essence, must at the same time admit that all real matter in the world requires the coincidence of extended and thinking substance. Likewise, Descartes duplicates a mind-­body dualism on the side of the mind. Just as his attempts to understand real matter led him to describe it as an interaction between thought and matter, so too, attempting to understand real thought, he must describe its interaction with matter. In The Passions of the Soul, he begins with a clear distinction, writing that there is “nothing in us which we must attribute to our soul except our thoughts.” Yet, when he tries to account for the varieties of thought, he splits them into two groups: in the first group are our volitions, which we experience “as proceeding directly from our soul and as seeming to depend on it alone;” in the second group are the soul’s passions, which do not proceed from the soul at all, but rather originate in the material world: “the soul always receives them from the things that are represented by them.”23 Thus the material body is composed of particles whose motions originate in thought and the immaterial soul is motivated by passions that originate in matter. During the eighteenth century, it became conventional for natural philosophers to worry that mind and body were so intimately entangled as to seem indistinguishable.24 Nonetheless, whether articulating the mutual interaction or Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, 211. “From the instant of their creation, he causes some to start moving in one direction and others in another, some faster and others slower [. . .]; and he causes them to continue moving thereafter in accordance with the ordinary laws of nature” (Descartes, “The World,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 91). 22 “For God has established these laws in such a marvelous way that even if we suppose he creates nothing beyond what I have mentioned, [. . .] the laws of nature are sufficient to cause the parts of this chaos to disentangle themselves and arrange themselves in such good order that they will have the form of a quite perfect world—a world in which we shall be to see not only light but also all the other things, general as well as particular, which appear in the real world” (Ibid.). 23 René Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 335. 24 For instance, John Gregory’s A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World asserts that to study the mind and body separately would impoverish the study of either. He argues that the mind is “governed by laws as fixt and invariable as those of the Material System” and that “the Mind and Body are so intimately connected, and have such a mutual influence on one another, that the constitution of either, examined apart can never be thoroughly understood” (John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World, 5th edition [London: J Dodsley, 1772], 5). 21

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the separate constitutions of mind and body, natural philosophers generally characterized their intermediacy with the opposing valences of either Hobbes or Descartes, based on the type of distinction they drew between a particle and its motion. The debate between Albrecht von Haller and Robert Whytt, for instance, about the involuntary operation of the nervous system and the ultimate source of bodily animation was irreconcilable largely because each firmly held contrary biases about matter. Haller argued that “the rudiments of the contractile nature are in the gluten: step by step animal motion rises from the contractile nature to the vis insita and from that to the nervous force.”25 With a stepwise progression from simple to complex motions, Haller, like Hobbes, denies that material bodies require incorporeal forces for animation: “God gave to bodies this attractive power and other forces, which once accepted are exercised; nor are they owing to any soul or spirit below God.”26 For Whytt, however, the body’s living motion required one to assume “that the all-­wise Author of nature hath endued the muscular fibres of animals with certain active powers” and that those fibers had to be animated “with an active sentient Principle united to their bodies.”27 Like Descartes, Whytt characterized motions as a mind-­like power bestowed upon matter, believing that “to suppose that matter may, of itself, by any modification of its parts, be rendered capable of sensation, or of generating motion, seems to be as unreasonable as to ascribe to it a power of thinking.”28 The debate proved highly resilient because, even as natural philosophers encountered and attempted to explain intermediate states, the period’s conception of gross matter—matter as rigid extension—continued to hold sway. 29 Albrecht von Haller, Ad Roberti Whytii nuperum scriptum Apologia (1764), 14. Quoted in R.K. French, Robert Whytt, The Soul, and Medicine (London: The Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, 1969), 70. 26 von Haller, Elementa Physiologiae Corporis Humani, vol. 4, 183. Quoted in French, Robert Whytt, 70. 27 Robert Whytt, The Works of Robert Whytt, M.D. (London: T. Becket & P.A. DeHondt, 1768), 128. Google Books. 28 Ibid. 29 In an exchange with Richard Bentley, Isaac Newton suggests that gravity should not be considered innate to matter but rather should be considered a superadded power. “Tis unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without ye mediation of something else wch is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus be essential & inherent in it” (Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 3, ed. H.W. Turnbull F.R.S. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961], 253–4). Like Descartes, Newton suggests that the superadded power that reconciles matter and the forces acting on it is divine. “I would now add that the Hypothesis of matters being at first eavenly spread through the heavens is, in my opinion, inconsistent wth ye Hypothesis of innate gravity without a supernatural power to reconcile them, & therefore it infers a Deity” (Ibid., 244). 25

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Looked at one way, Priestley’s critique of Wollaston simply replays Haller’s critique of Whytt: Wollaston’s vehicle serves the role of Whytt’s sentient principle; while Priestley, like Haller, believes that matter sufficiently accounts for all natural motions. From another angle, however, the debate is characterized by a significant change in how matter is conceived. While Hobbes gave no rationale for his assumption that motion was innate to matter, Priestley offered a way to understand matter that could do without the distinction between “inanimate brute matter” and spirited motion, and that therefore could explain how the fundamental units of matter might be dynamic at their very core.30 At the time, both corpuscular and wave theories imagined light, like gross matter, to be composed of impenetrable particles: wave theories supposed the impact of contiguous particles on one another produced a compression wave that propagated through the medium; corpuscular theories supposed that a stream of particles emanated from the luminous body and traveled across space.31 Surveying these theories in The History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours, Priestley presented Roger Boscovitch’s work as a way to reconcile the competing theories.32 Boscovitch objected to the idea of light and matter being composed of impenetrable particles, because collisions between hard spheres would require instantaneous changes in velocity, which he considered absurd: “there can never be any passing from one velocity to another except through all the intermediate velocities, & then without any sudden change.”33 To follow Boscovitch’s objection, imagine two impenetrable spheres as they approach collision. The exact point of collision on each sphere Newton, Correspondence, 253. In his 1690 Treatise on Light, Christiaan Huygens imagines light as a compression wave transmitted from particle to particle along a ray: “all the bodies which we reckon of the hardest kind [. . .] act as springs” (Christiaan Huygens, Treatise on Light, trans. Silvanus P. Thompson [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], 13–14). Because the speed of the wave’s propagation is proportional to the hardness of the particles, Huygens imagines the particles of light as being nearly perfectly inelastic: “applying this kind of movement to that which produces Light there is nothing to hinder us from estimating the particles of ether to be of a substance as nearly approaching to perfect hardness and possessing a springiness as prompt as we choose” (Ibid.). Leonhard Euler compares light’s motion in the ether to the motion of sound waves in the air: “light is with respect to ether, what sound is with respect to air.” He too describes the ether as composed of extremely subtle particles: “light is nothing else but an agitation or concussion of the particles of ether” (Leonhard Euler, Letters of Euler on Different Subjects in Natural Philosophy Addressed to a German Princess [1833; facsimile, New York: Arno Press, 1975] 85, 87). 32 Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours, 357 (London: J. Johnson, 1772), 390. 33 Roger Joseph Boscovitch, A Theory of Natural Philosophy, trans. J.M. Child (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1966), 37. 30 31

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travels with a steady velocity in one direction up to the moment of impact, at which time it can go no further or else must penetrate the other sphere at the point of impact. Thus, it would have to stop instantaneously and change its direction and velocity. In order to avoid this problem, Boscovitch imagines point charges (rather than corpuscles of some minute but definite extension) that influence each other through the interaction of interpenetrating forces.34 Conceiving of matter this way removes the distinction between a particle and its motion, and accounts for how motion could be integral to matter. Rather than admitting the need for a superadded semi-­substantial mediator between matter and spirit, Priestley reimagines matter as consisting of “physical points only, endued with powers of attraction and repulsion.”35 Identifying an intermediate characteristic—force and its fluctuations—he redefines matter in such a way that the intermediate stands for the whole. He obviates the need for a vehicle of the soul by defining the whole continuum with the intermediacy of the vehicle. All matter would occupy an intermediate state, allowing Priestley to imagine an intermediate state between mind and body as a condition of matter itself. The ability to account for all experience with a single substance—a blending of Hobbes and Descartes that appears to be a triumph for Hobbesian materialism—provides the demystifying gesture of the materialist vector. § When Marshall Brown writes that “the gothic begins neither as a revolutionary anti-­society nor as an irrational anti-­nature, but rather as the provocation to exploring a deeper, more complex humanity,” he traces the source of the Gothic to psychological impulses rather than to any social ideological construct and Even imagining the bodies as compressible does not remove the problem. The trailing hemisphere of the particle would have time to slow as it collapsed upon the forward hemisphere, however, the point of impact would not. He calls this the “Law of Continuity” and considers it to hold for both space and time (and thus for velocity). Seeing a contradiction between matter’s extension and its contiguousness, he chooses contiguity over extension, reasoning that if the smallest units of matter are contiguous they must be “compenetrated.” “Those, who say that monads cannot be compenetrated, because they are impenetrable, by no means remove the difficulty. For if they are both by nature impenetrable, & also at the same time have to make up a continuum, i.e. have to be contiguous, then at one & the same time they are compenetrated & they are not compenetrated” (Roger Boscovitch, “De materiae divisibilitate et principia corporum, dissertatio conscripta jam ab anno 1748, et nunc primum edita,” Memorie sopra la fisica, vol. 4 [Lucca, 1757]. Quoted in Boscovitch, A Theory of Natural Philosophy, 59). 35 Priestley, The History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours, 390. 34

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relies on a vector of influence similar to Priestley’s—a vector with an initial point at the material body and a terminus in thought.36 Like Priestley, Brown gives matter priority, conceiving of cultural production as derived from matter post factum. However, by portraying cultural production as an exploration, Brown calls attention to the reflexivity of the process. The head of the vector turns back on itself. Thought contemplates the material from which it is made. It attempts to comprehend itself in terms of its material origins, which determine it in such a way that the self sees itself as necessarily other. For Brown, consciousness is presence and the genre’s ghosts are the inchoate desires of the body’s deeper humanity. Likewise, David Punter writes that “by the body we may be all too easily contaminated.”37 He refers to the infection as “originary” and suggests that “we need to find a form of being which carries all the terrifying weight of infection while eschewing the bodily; thus, the haunting; thus the nature of the ghost.”38 Priestley’s materialist solution, the internally divided self, shares features with Freudian psychology. Psychology mimics Priestley’s vector when it suggests that the individual is motivated by unconscious drives that find expression in more conscious actions; as, for instance, when Sigmund Freud asserts that psychology ought to see “somatic processes” as the “true essence of what is psychical,” or that “the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were its own.”39 Like Priestley, Freud characterizes life by the fluctuations of opposing forces. “The analogy of our two basic instincts extends from the sphere of living things to the pair of opposing forces—attraction and repulsion—which rule in the inorganic world,” and “both kinds of instinct would be active in every particle of living substance.”40 Robert Miles acknowledges the conjunction of Gothic studies and psychology, writing that the Gothic has become “embroiled within a larger, theoretically complex project: the history of the ‘subject,’ ” and identifies an Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 50. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), 2. 38 Ibid. 39 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1949), 29. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 19, emphasis added. 40 Freud, Outline, 19. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 38. 36 37

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area of “broad agreement” that the Gothic represents a self in “a condition of rupture, disjunction, fragmentation.”41 Yet, for Miles, the consensus reading “does not go far enough.”42 He writes: The Gothic does represent a disjunctive subject, but these representations are in competition with each other and form a mode of debate. Gothic formulae are not simply recycled, as if in the service of a neurotic, dimly understood drive; rather, Gothic texts revise one another, here opening up ideologically charged issues, there enforcing a closure.43

Slipping from “represent” to “representations,” Miles migrates the Gothic disjunction from the self to ideology and shifts what is represented by the Gothic from the psychological to the social. He distances the Gothic from the body’s physicality, aiming to restore conscious effort to the genre’s writings. Instead of an efflux from a “neurotic, dimly understood drive,” the writings should be “regarded as a series of contemporaneously understood forms, devices, codes, figurations, for the expression of the ‘fragmented subject’.”44 For Miles, revision, understanding, and cultural discourse form the elements of Gothic writing, a formulation that reverses Punter and Brown. Rather than spirit haunted by the residue of the body, here, the embodied individual is presence and the attenuated influences of ideology are its ghosts. For an account of this reversal, we can turn to William Godwin who, like Priestley, also collapses the duality of matter and spirit, arguing that an “accurate philosophy” leads one “to question the existence of two classes of substance in the universe” and “to reject the metaphysical denominations of spirit and soul.”45 Godwin, however, collapses the duality not by elevating the status of matter as Priestley did. For Godwin, in fact, it is possible “even to doubt whether human beings have any satisfactory acquaintance with the properties of matter.”46 Unlike Priestley, whose intermediate substance was material sensation, Godwin’s intermediary is sociocultural. Because “the actions and dispositions of mankind Robert Miles. Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993), 2–3. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid. William Godwin. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, ed. F.E.L. Priestley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946), 25. 46 Ibid. 25. 44 45 41 42 43

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are the offspring of circumstances and events,” education, he argues, determines “the characters of men [. . .] in all their most essential circumstances.”47 Godwin means the term education to apply broadly, in “the most comprehensive sense that can possibly be annexed to that word,” such that its closest contemporary equivalent would be ideology.48 Godwin specifies that the term includes three broad categories of influence: political education, “the modification our ideas receive from the form of government;” direct education, those “impressions which he intentionally communicates;” and “the education of accident,” impressions that are received “independently of any design.”49 Thus Godwin’s vector moves in the opposite direction from Priestley’s: its initial point is in the broad influences of the sociocultural and its terminus is individual experience. A vector reversed in this manner would support theories of the Gothic in which ideological tremors give rise to and condition the features of individual works. For instance, Miles links the Gothic to the revolutionary crisis in France and its aftershocks in England, explaining a marked shift in the Gothic as a reaction to the Reign of Terror. He describes the political terrors that were plaguing the English in consciously ghostly terms—“English revolutionary violence was the great unmentionable that could be expressed only through displaced representations”— and he writes about culture in exactly the same way one speaks of the ghosts of the passions.50 He writes that “by definition” cultural fashions “refer to the ephemeral, to that which comes and goes” and yet they are also “profound because they key us into movements and changes deep within the culture.”51 E.J. Clery likewise gives an ideological account for the Gothic, noting the “historical coincidence of the expanding taste for commercial fictions of the supernatural and the project of a supernaturalised theory of capitalism.”52 She argues that the “resistance to representations of the marvellous, with their 50 51

Ibid., 26, 45. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 45–6. Miles, Gothic Writing, 56. Ibid., 59–60. Similarly, Jerrold Hogle writes of the Gothic as having a primarily ideological source: “What was it about the Gothic as the nineteenth century began that made it an attractive site for such vitriolic projections of what was fearfully fragmentary and culturally ‘othered’?” (Jerrold Hogle, “The Gothic-Romantic Relationship: Underground Histories in ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’ “ European Romantic Review 14.2 [2003]: 206). 52 E.J. Clery. The Rise of Supernatural Fiction: 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9. 47 48 49

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illusory, irrational appeal, coincides with anxiety over the escalation of ‘unreal needs’.”53 Thus, the Gothic for Clery becomes the “ultimate luxury commodity, produced by an ‘unreal need’ for unreal representations.”54 Clery’s articulation preserves the reflexivity that we are accustomed to as the vector of influence curls back on itself. She writes that “the literature of terror arose in the late eighteenth century as a symptom of and reflection on the modern.”55 The ideological vector finds its psychological representative in Jacques Lacan. For both Lacan and Godwin, the subject is cultural rather than somatic. Lacan writes that “the displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts” and “that willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier.”56 Both he and Godwin insist that feeling is thoroughly saturated by ideology. Godwin declares that none of man’s inclinations are “inaccessible through the medium of his reason” and that “passion is so far from being incompatible with reason that it is inseparable from it” and, similarly, Lacan: “Indeed, needs have been diversified and geared down by and through language to such an extent that their import appears to be of a quite different order.”57 These two ways of understanding the Gothic, represented by its two vectors, lead to the conclusion that the individual is haunted by two ghosts—the ghosts of ideology and the ghosts of psychology. Each has a different seat; the endocrine system is not a system of beliefs. So, while there has been a tendency to shift away from explaining the Gothic on psychological grounds toward explaining it on seemingly more sophisticated ideological grounds, noticing the mirrored logic of the two explanations restores the duality that each tries to overcome. This unresolved duality inherent in the Gothic helps us to understand why Frankenstein’s many readings, as Marshall Brown concludes, often succeed but “do not satisfy.”58 He lists an array of interpretations. 55 56

Ibid., 7. Ibid. Ibid., 10. Jacques Lacan. “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter,’ ” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 43. 57 Godwin, Enquiry, 80–1. Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 297. 58 Brown, Gothic Text, 183. 53 54

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Critics have found it a more or less direct representation of Shelley’s biography, a reckoning with the ideas of her parents, a fable of the role of women, an allegory of the unconscious, a critique of family or social structures, an indictment of political turmoil, or of scientific discovery, colonialism, economic theory, capitalist enterprise, or literary production.59

Halfway through his list, Brown pivots on the phrase “critique of family or social structures,” shifting from interpretations that read the novel as psychological expression to the various ideological interpretations of the novel. The two vectors of the Gothic help us to see these interpretations not as the excesses of literary criticism, its fashions and follies, but as the result of a dualism inherent in the theories of the Gothic. Rather than canceling each other out, the variety of interpretations seem to require each other. Psychological and ideological readings attempt to incorporate one another by denying the other its logical grounds and, thus, they generate an area necessarily outside the interpretation. Furthermore, the novel helps us to see how these two vectors of the Gothic function with respect to one another. The two vectors can be aligned with the genres of the Romantic and the sentimental: the materialist vector with the Romantic, and the ideological vector with the sentimental. The materialist vector originates in the bodily impulses, it travels upwards toward conscious thought, at which point the head of the vector turns back to contemplate its origins. The ideological vector originates with the sociocultural and travels down toward individual experience, at which point it too turns back on its origins. The origins of both vectors are alike in that each begins in a state of fragmentation and rupture, and each moves toward the localized consciousness of the individual. Each vector collapses the duality of matter and spirit by supposing that it describes the whole continuum of human experience. Because of this fantasy of completeness, each in a sense feels the influence of what it cannot acknowledge and projects this influence onto a terrain unsuited to it. In Ibid. Cf. Jerrold Hogle’s list of the many potential social energies—“all the betwixt-­and-between, even ambisexual, cross-­class, and cross-­cultural conditions of life the Western culture ‘abjects,’ as Kristeva would put it—that Frankenstein’s creature “embodies and distances” (Jerrold Hogle, “Frankenstein as Neo-­gothic: From the Ghost of the Counterfeit to the Monster of Abjection,” Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, eds. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 186).

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his earliest days, Frankenstein bears the characteristics of the sentimental while the creature, in his earliest days, bears the characteristics of the Romantic. Over time, each character tries to master the principles of the opposing vector, each provokes a Gothically violent response, and each becomes disordered by the painful haunting of the other. Looking at the novel this way shows not only the unmediated duality of the two vectors but also helps identify the Gothic distortion that results from this lack of mediation. § Struggling with the confused sensations of what he calls “the original era of my being,” Frankenstein’s creature becomes a dramatic representation of how knowledge stabilizes the flux of existence, how understanding renders routine what otherwise would be an ever-­changing flow across the sensorium.60 He reports about that time that “No distinct ideas occupied my mind; all was confused. I felt light, and hunger, and thirst, and darkness; innumerable sounds rung in my ears, and on all sides various scents saluted me” and that, as he began to distinguish one from the other senses, his “mind received every day additional ideas.”61 Here Shelley, like Priestley, imagines reason as developing out of and stabilizing sensation and the passions sensation provokes. The creature reflects on the difference between wet and dry wood and learns how to preserve his fire; he experiments with cooking his food and discovers that “the berries were spoiled by this operation, and the nuts and roots much improved.”62 His investigation of the material world and its relation to the passions is thought submitting to the judgments of the body: spoiled and improved, in this case, are judged on the tongue, and, as such, the judgments can be considered the result of sensation. The creature’s precocious autodidacticism correlates with his preternatural physicality. Likewise, his love for the De Lacey family appears under the influence of music “sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale.”63 He loves the De Laceys for their beauty and their sweetness, characteristics that cross cultures—just as the love 62 63 60 61

Shelley, Frankenstein, 76. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 81.

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of Safie and Felix crosses cultures—because they are grounded in materiality. When he applies the same critical impulse that he used to distinguish spoiled from improved to judge his own body, he cannot at first believe that he is the “monster” reflected in the still water and feels “the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.”64 The head of Priestley’s vector turns back. At the same time, however, the music’s improvement on birdsongs and the creature’s improvement of the nuts and berries imply a freedom from and a mastery over materiality. His masterful mind—one able to read and reflect on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Milton’s Paradise Lost, and able to learn from those works the poignancy of pathos—reflects and reconsiders the mastery of his body. He learns that the De Lacey family’s unhappiness cannot be reduced to physical pain, that it must have some other cause, and he understands that cause, at first, physically. Observing the kindness and affection of the De Lacey family, he feels “sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature” and withdraws from the window where he watched “unable to bear these emotions.”65 Shelley emphasizes, as the creature switches from calling the feelings sensations to calling them emotions, not only the intensity of the feelings, but their qualitative difference from physical desires: the creature says the feelings were “such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or food.”66 The physical sensation points beyond physicality and produces in him an intense desire to understand these sentimentalities. The creature’s increasing understanding of social discourse, however, only magnifies his unhappiness. Reflecting a Rousseauian conception of love as perniciously possessive, he reports that his observations of the De Lacey family “rather increased than satisfied the desire I had of becoming one of my fellows.”67 While the material components of love—beauty, sweetness—seem,

66 67 64 65

Ibid., 85. Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid., 90. Distinguishing between physical and moral love, Rousseau claims that moral love is more pernicious because it gives desire “its distinctive character and focuses it exclusively on a single object, or at least gives it a greater measure of energy for this preferred object” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 155).

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for Shelley, to be universal, the ideological components fail to be so.68 Love relies on the sentimental bonds of community and therefore cordons off an area that resists integration. The creature underscores the proprietary nature of love when he complains: “The gentle words of Agatha, and the animated smiles of the charming Arabian, were not for me. The mild exhortations of the old man, and the lively conversation of the loved Felix, were not for me.”69 Mere knowledge of love does not satisfy. Love must be had. Safie may cross cultures, but to do so she leaves her father and trades one alliance for another. The ideological component of love offers a counter explanation of why the creature is an outcast, namely, that the social has, as the creature’s first encounters suggest, its own cloistered interests. It asserts its prerogatives over those of the individual and maintains an antagonism toward the unknown. Yet the creature develops a different explanation for why others fear him. Indeed, there are two potential root explanations why a “fatal prejudice clouds their eyes” and why, “where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster”: either the prejudice has a social source, the prejudice clouding beforehand judgments that could be otherwise, or it has a physical source, the body failing to see beyond natural standards of beauty.70 With his request that Frankenstein make a companion for him, the creature chooses the physical explanation: he identifies his body as the ultimate source, reasoning “one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me.”71 Although he has felt indirectly that the body cannot provide an adequate In “On Love,” Percy Shelley writes “If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s, if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with every thing which exists. We are born into the world and there is something within us which from the instant that we live and move thirsts after its likeness” (Percy Shelley, “On Love,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat [New York: W.W. Norton, 2002], 503–4). Like Mary, Percy identifies love with sensation, another’s nerves vibrating sympathetically; and like Mary, who has Frankenstein’s creature attempt to imitate “the pleasant songs of the birds” Percy extends this form of love to all material beings (Shelley, Frankenstein, 77). The material form of love, which connects one with all that is, conflicts with the ideological component which “thirsts after its likeness.” 69 Shelley, Frankenstein, 90. 70 Ibid., 100. 71 Ibid., 107. 68

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account of the social, by demanding that Frankenstein create an equally deformed partner for him, he reduces ideological judgments to a materialist core, as if community is ultimately biological similarity. The inward projection of a social judgment onto the somatic is characteristic of a Freudian materialist incorporation of the ideological. Freud projects the cultural onto the material when he writes that the ego ideal is “the expression of the most powerful impulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id,” positing that in the ghostly inheritances of the id “are harboured residues of the existences of countless egos; and when the ego forms its super-­ego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and bringing them to resurrection.”72 So while Shelley takes pains to show that difference can be accepted across ideological boundaries—it is a polyglot narrative after all—the creature, who mastered the “godlike science” of language and sought to turn that mastery into love, despairs of acceptance and promises to destroy his body on the pyre.73 As in Freud, the hostile judgments of the social sphere and the aggressiveness which results from those judgments become “entrenched [. . .] in the super-­ego” as a self-­destructive impulse, which “often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death.”74 The creature explains to Walton, “when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die, now it is my only consolation.”75 Afflicted by the antagonism of the sentimental, the material world loses its allure for the creature, and those sensations, which had been holistic pleasures, fail to be satisfying enough to counter the internalized social rejection. Above, I associated the fragmentation of the Gothic self with the multiplicity found at its origins, a complexity in one case of passions—arising as Hogle would have it from “the multiplicity of the human body [. . .] a corps morcele rooted in and susceptible to fragmentation”—and in the other of discourses—

74 75 72 73

Freud, The Ego and the Id, 32, 35. Shelley, Frankenstein, 83. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 54–5. Shelley, Frankenstein, 170.

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“the very flux of energy that made society possible.”76 Now, however, with the projection of the unacknowledged onto a terrain hostile to it, the fragmentation and rupture of the Gothic self may be thought of, not as the product of a multiplicity alone, but also as the result of the attempt to reconcile an unresolved duality, a duality that in its exile reasserts itself as all the more haunting. A similar trajectory, grounded in the opposing vector, appears in Frankenstein’s story. Unlike the creature, who begins his tale by recounting the confusion of his physical sensations, Frankenstein orients his narrative ideologically and grounds it in the domestic. He reports that his family was “one of the most distinguished” in Geneva and that his ancestors were “counsellors and syndics.”77 He couples this ideological privilege and its concomitant duties to a sentimental plenitude that combines domestic tenderness with an education made up of amusements rather than labors.“No youth could have passed more happily,” says Frankenstein, with such “indulgent parents” and “amiable” companions.78 From this initial position, Frankenstein strives to understand materiality and in so doing threatens the ideological security that was his birthright. For Priestley’s vector, an attunement to materiality leads to a stabilizing rationality; for Godwin’s vector, kindness is the attunement that stabilizes the fragmented interests of the social. When “numerous mischances” ruin the merchant Beaufort, Frankenstein’s father responds with dutiful kindness that buffers the hardships and indignities of penury. Kindness also acts as an ideological filter, offering the possibilities of non-­biological alliances (such as taking in Justine Moritz) and securing a measure of protection against a tribalism hostile to difference. The blind De Lacey asserts that humanity is essentially sympathetic, saying that “the hearts of men, when unprejudiced by

Hogle, “Neo-­gothic,” 186. David Musselwhite describes the root of the creature’s monstrosity as a social heterogeneity similar to the heterogeneity of the body’s passions, which are both the condition of the body and also a sign of its instability. “The Monster is all that a society refuses to name, refuses even to make nameable, not just because its very heterogeneity, mobility, and power is a threat to that society but, much more importantly, it is the very flux of energy that made society possible in the first place and as such offers the terrible promise that other societies are possible, other knowledges, other histories, other sexualities” (David Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel [London: Methuen, 1987], 59). 77 Shelley, Frankenstein, 21. 78 Ibid., 24. 76

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an obvious self-­interest, are full of brotherly love and charity.”79 Formulated this way, the socius is defined as broadly charitable, undermined only by the self-­interest of aberrant individuals. Early in the narrative, Shelley flags Frankenstein’s aberrance by his preoccupation with the ancient authors of natural philosophy. Alphonse Frankenstein’s failure to address his son’s curiosity with kindness—he calls the Cornelius Agrippa that Victor reads “sad trash” and “a waste of time”—further cements that aberration.80 Kindness, however, is an imperfect solution to the vicissitudes of embodiment and the inevitability of death. Late in life, after years of service, Alphonse acknowledges his mortality by marrying, hoping to bestow on the state “sons who might carry his virtues and his name down to posterity.”81 Unlike his son, Alphonse is content to allow persons to stand in for each other in succession like signifiers, secured by the name that inhabits the body and crosses its material boundaries—or as Lacan writes, “insofar as the signifier— you perhaps begin to understand—materializes the agency of death.”82 Frankenstein, prompted by the death of his mother, pursues a materialist solution to death and decrepitude, attempting to secure his sentimental plenitude, not in disembodied language, but in gross matter. And just as the creature’s forays into the social make him acutely aware of his own sentiments, Frankenstein’s manic attention to his creature’s materiality generates an awareness of his own body, which becomes increasingly troubled. He describes his quick pulse, his palpitating arteries, aching eyes, shivers, and excessive trembling.83 He feels his “flesh tingle with excess of sensitiveness” and his body at last gives itself up to a “nervous fever.”84 Shelley portrays this psychological nervous disturbance as an eruption of the body, an attack whose only salve is the kindness Clerval shows in attending to Frankenstein’s illness. While he was assembling and animating the creature, Frankenstein resists the influence of his family—“I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings or affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my 81 82 83 84 79 80

Ibid., 100. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 21. Lacan, “Seminar,” 38. Shelley, Frankenstein, 41–2. Ibid., 43.

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nature, should be completed”—an isolation from the sentimental that prefigures and precipitates the serial loss of his loved ones.85 After the death of his brother William and the servant Justine, Frankenstein labels as “insurmountable” his isolation from the rest of society. “But busy uninteresting joyous faces brought back despair to my heart. I saw an insurmountable barrier placed between me and my fellow-­men; this barrier was sealed with the blood of William and Justine.”86 For Shelley, the kindness and attentions of domestic relationships affirm one’s connection to the society at large; the loss of the domestic prompts the loss of sociality. In addition, the culpability Frankenstein feels for William’s and Justine’s deaths echo the responsibility that Alphonse expected to share in his son’s endeavors. The shared responsibility for the actions of others has an inter-­materiality similar to that of the signifier. The detachment of the action from the actor and the detachment of the name from the individual are both modeled on the paternal claim. Lacan suggests that a paternalist basis for law and language is necessary when he writes: “For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of analysis, may lift the veil from the function it served in the mysteries.”87 The real phallus must exist beforehand in order that it may be raised to the status of signifier by giving up its materiality. The loss of the real (the threat of castration and real material death) opens the possibility of signification and, in turn, conditions the real. “For it is the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, in so far as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier.”88 While Freud maps the ideological back onto a materialist vector, Lacan, identifying the phallus as the transcendental signifier, maps the somatic onto the ideological vector.89

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 122. 87 Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 275. 88 Ibid. 89 For an alternate account of how Lacan bears on Frankenstein see Vijay Mishra, who suggests: “Frankenstein takes this as a threat to his own person and accepts the Gothic double entendre stoically enough. What the Monster is in fact saying is, I shall displace you on your wedding night, I shall dislodge the place you occupy, I will usurp the place of the signifier. All this makes sense in a Lacanian psychoanalytical economy, since the signified below the signifier/signified algorithm is always threatening to usurp the stronger position of the signifier. But in usurping that position, the ‘detour’ the Monster, as signifier, must take is to kill the woman whom Frankenstein will not recreate, as a female monster (resurrecting the dream he had on the monster’s creation) for him.” (Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime [Albany: SUNY Press, 1994], 222.) 85 86

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Elizabeth Lavenza, Frankenstein’s betrothed, points out the potential violence inherent in the shared responsibility of ideological action (or in Lacan’s phrase meaning effects) when she describes the collective action taken against Justine in the name of justice. When one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge.90

Freud traced the state’s reservation of certain prerogatives to the biological prohibition of the father against incest. For Freud, law removes certain actions as individual possibilities and transforms them into a legal exercise of ideological principles: “you may not do all that [the father] does; some things are his prerogative.”91 Like Freud, Elizabeth sees the government’s claims about the justice of its action as a fiction that transfigures individual antagonism— “men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood,” sanctifying official murder as a “great deed.”92 For Lacan, however, there is no crime of murder before the prohibition, no natural law prior to the father’s law, which is fundamentally a function of signification. It is as a signifier that murder gives the action its meaning; the hangman’s term retribution gives his action a different meaning; so too the contemporary term capital punishment gives the action a meaning. To believe that all three are one and the same action, described in three ways, is to fall victim to what Lacan calls “the realist’s imbecility” or, in comparable terms, the materialist’s imbecility.93 Lacan snares the materiality of the action and returns it to the ideological. The permeation of materiality by ideology is a necessary condition for the formation of groups beyond the biological. Without ideology there would be Shelley, Frankenstein, 62. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 30. See also, “It is like a displacement a turning round upon his own ego. But even ordinary normal morality has a harsh restraining cruelly prohibiting quality. It is from this, indeed, that the conception arises of a higher being who deals out punishment inexorably” (Ibid., 56). 92 Shelley, Frankenstein, 69, 62. 93 Lacan, “Seminar,” 40. 90 91

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no space for Justine to enter into her adopted family. Yet the ideological vector refuses to acknowledge any stable space outside of ideology, as Elizabeth fears when she exclaims “Alas! who is safe, if she be convicted of crime? I rely on her innocence as certainly as I do upon my own.”94 In the exercise of law against Justine, Shelley exposes a second counterfactual to De Lacey’s assertion that the hearts of men are “full of brotherly love and charity.”95 Not only may hearts be prejudiced by an “obvious self interest” but brotherly love is only for those considered fraternal, a status that, once transfigured into an ideological principle, depends on good standing within the community.96 The ideological defines itself by its inclusions and exclusions. Like the two biological instincts, in Freud, that operate on the limits of the ego, the ideological forces of kindness and antagonism operate on the limits of community. Frankenstein rationalizes his destruction of the female creature— whose humanity he cannot quite acknowledge—by imagining that he is acting against his own interests in favor of the broader claims of mankind as a whole: “Had I a right, for my own benefit, to inflict his curse upon everlasting generations?”97 While a new female would complete the pair, generating new standards for love in a society that would banish the fatal prejudice by enculturation, it would do nothing to alleviate the prejudice outside of the new socius. Instead it would create a nation apart, one that Frankenstein imagines would be seen as “a race of devils,” and would pass the antagonism between Frankenstein and his creature to a grander stage.98 After Elizabeth’s murder, Frankenstein, alone in the world, wanders into the cemetery where his family is buried and where “the spirits of the departed seemed to flit around, and to cast a shadow, which was felt but not seen, around the head of the mourner.”99 At the family tomb, he pledges to live on in order to see to the destruction of the creature and for resolve calls on “you, spirits of the dead; and on you, wandering ministers of vengeance.”100 Rather than the Shelley, Frankenstein, 57. Ibid., 100. Ibid. Disposing of her remains, he says, “I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being” (Ibid., 132). 98 Ibid., 128. 99 Ibid., 154. 100 Ibid., 155. 94 95 96 97

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endless iteration of the name—a process by which individuals stand in for each other in succession—the real material beings are preserved in memory. Frankenstein, who brought life out of matter, dies with the ghostly consolation of what Walton calls “the offspring of solitude and delirium”: dreams in which he holds conversations with his loved ones, believing in his delusion that “they are not the creations of his fancy, but the real beings who visit him from the regions of a remoter world.”101 At the moment the narrative describes, the reality of his loved ones is, of course, a delusion: the material beings are dead and gone. However, in the narrative’s retelling—by Frankenstein and then Walton—the loved ones are, in a sense, able to visit from a remoter world. The narrative draws them from the world of the symbolic, where they are transfigured and imbued with meanings absent from the material realm. For each vector of the Gothic, Wollaston’s vehicle of the soul—that semi-­ substance which joined the separate realms of matter and spirit—is subsumed, vanishing even as its neither/nor state comes to define the whole. Theories of mediation, whether materialist or ideological, use the same mechanism to collapse the duality of matter and spirit. By characterizing the whole as intermediate, they obviate the need for an intermediary. Following this double exorcism, on account of the doubleness of the mediation, the duality reasserts itself. The failure of mediation to banish its dualities raises the question of how the two realms, both fully characterized by mediation, interact. If the interaction is characterized as stimulation, then once more the materialist vector represses the ideological; if the interaction is characterized as communication, then the ideological vector represses the materialist. As Frankenstein suggests, however, the double repression allows each unacknowledged vector to remain an unassailable source of freedom. § Frankenstein ought to be the paradigmatic novel for what W.J.T. Mitchell called “medium theory.”102 Mitchell writes that theory is “beginning always in the middle of things,” and his description of medium theory likewise begins in the Ibid., 160. W.J.T. Mitchell, “Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 332.

101 102

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middle, with Fredric Jameson’s assertion that theory supplants philosophy “at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material, and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.”103 To this Mitchell adds a corollary, that it is “a small step, one I’m sure Fred would assent to, to note that thought is not just ‘linguistic or material’ but mediated by what Raymond Williams calls material practices.”104 This small step, in fact, introduces a significant change to his medium theory. Not simply theory that operates in the middle of things, “somewhere between the general and the particular,” it becomes theory that theorizes the middleness of things and the thingishness of the middle. Media become the medium; the middle is extruded to cover the totality.105 The small step past Jameson elides the doubleness of the “or” in the phrase “linguistic or material.” No longer might it mean either linguistic or material; it registers only as an appositive chain: linguistic, i.e. material, i.e. material practices. The equivocation vanishes. Registering the disappearance, we notice a technique—one that Jameson uses to collapse the apparent duality between a concept and its expression. He maps the two realms onto a single continuum and characterizes the whole by an intermediary.106 In “The Mysteries of Postmodernism,” Alex Link argues that Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic is a symptom of his anxiety about the generally Gothic character of the postmodern: “Jameson’s delineation of the postmodern, is, in one sense, driven by and structured around what, for Postmodernism, is an unspeakable generalization of the Gothic.”107 The generalized indeterminacy that Link alludes to is an effect of the contemporary insistence on a thoroughly mediated material realm. When the indeterminacy of Wollaston’s vehicle of the soul comes to characterize all materiality, its ghostly properties carry over Fredric Jameson “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 403. Mitchell, “Medium Theory,” 332. 105 J.D. Bolter and Richard A. Grusin likewise turn to Jameson on this point (56–8) and derive this definition of a medium: “a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to rival or refashion them in the name of the real” (J.D. Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media [Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1999], 65). 106 As Jameson writes in Postmodernism “it is because culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand that it always was material” (Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], 67). 107 Alex Link, “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots,” Gothic Studies. 11.1 (2009): 73. 103 104

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as well. In the postmodern period, according to Link, anything is “a plausible phobic object.”108 While Lucie Armitt has argued that if a postmodern Gothic can be anything then it is effectively nothing,109 Link counters that her “nothing” ought to be replaced by “everything” because “Postmodernism explodes the Gothic as a fixed, specific, and localisable genre only to find itself awash in the resulting, all-­pervasive dust of the Gothic itself.”110 Even as the Gothic thoroughly permeates the postmodern, there are nonetheless, as Link points out, two different readings of the postmodern: Jean-François Lyotard’s and Jameson’s. While both Lyotard and Jameson are critical of the stability and unity of traditional conceptions of the self, favoring fluidity, multiplicity, and fragmentation, their critiques have the opposed valences of the two vectors. Lyotard gives an ideological interpretation of the postmodern, rooting his reading in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games and writing that “a self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.”111 Like Godwin, Lyotard minimizes the importance of the biological conditions of life in favor of the ideological, “even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him.”112 Furthermore, Lyotard detaches what he calls “the ‘crisis’ of scientific knowledge” from its relations to production, writing that the crisis was “not born of a chance proliferation of sciences, itself an effect of progress in technology and the expansion of capitalism. It represents, rather, an internal erosion of the legitimacy principle of knowledge.”113 Jameson, on the other hand, gives a materialist rendering of the postmodern. He refers to it as a “thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles.”114 He asserts that the economic is prior to the political, Ibid., 72. Lucie Armitt, ‘Postmodern Gothic,’ Teaching the Gothic, eds. Anna Powell and Andrew Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 84. 110 Ibid., 73. 111 Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 15. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid., 39. 114 Jameson, Postmodernism, 313. 108 109

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that production is prior to power, and that a Marxian social psychology “must above all insist on the psychological concomitants of production itself.”115 From a theoretical standpoint, these two postmoderns rely on models describing the interoperability of the economic base and ideological superstructure that are likewise marked by these directional vectors of mediation that have their roots in the Romantic era. Mitchell links his conception of mediation to the one Raymond Williams developed in Marxism and Literature. “Media are not just materials, but (as Raymond Williams once observed) material practices that involve technologies, skills, traditions, and habits.”116 In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, V.N. Voloshinov labels the ideological vector’s intermediary with the word pair behavioral ideology, which he defines as “the whole aggregate of life experiences and the outward expressions directly connected with it.”117 Like the opposing vectors, the intermediacy of each word-­pair can be traced to a different source: practices become material, behaviors become ideological. Material practices and behavioral ideology both create an intermediate unit by attaching activity (practices or behaviors) to a form of non-­activity. Theories of mediation fail not because they are not true, but because they assume that, in their intermediacy, they have incorporated the other and describe a totality. Neither Victor Frankenstein nor his creature has left us. The double-­ directional critique is not only a critique of value systems, not simply a critique of the Romantic or the sentimental, but also a critique of total media. The suppressed existence of the opposing vector gives the lie to the exclusivity of Ibid., 316. W.J.T. Mitchell. What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 198. When Mitchell writes “material practices,” he emphasizes one half of the word pair as a way of marking its intermediacy. In other contexts, he might have to emphasize the materiality of the practices, because in truth the two terms, if they are to be anything but an oxymoron, must be equal in their interpenetration. In Marxism and Literature, Williams suggests that “The concept of ‘superstructure’ was then not a reduction but an evasion” that resulted from bourgeois materialism’s failure to understand the “material character” of the social and political order, and therefore “failed also, but even more conspicuously, to understand the material character of the production of a cultural order” (Raymond Williams. Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 93). 117 Like Godwin, Voloshinov denies the importance of material sensation—“there is no such thing as experience outside of embodiment in signs”—in order to emphasize the pervasiveness of the sociocultural force, language. The ideological vector’s initial point, what Voloshinov calls the “organizing center,” is “not within (i.e. not in the material or inner signs) but outside. It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around—expression organizes experience” (V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik [New York: Seminar Press, 1973], 85, 91). 115 116

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each, even as, like antinomies, the claims of each appear consistent when judged according to its own point of view. Jameson hints at this antinomic structure. “The identification of the base-­superstructure dilemma with the old mind-­body problem does not necessarily debunk or reduce the former, but rather restages the latter as a distorted and individualistic anticipation of what turns out to be a social and historical antinomy.”118 The term antinomy, however, leaves a sense that there can be no communication, no stimulation across realms. Better would be to register the Gothic as the effect of this lack of direct influence. Material principles cross ideological boundaries, and ideological principles cross material borders. Each, from the opposing unacknowledged sphere, undermines the status of the other; each respectively undermines the stability of matter and meaning. The Gothic may be thought of as the fear that haunts our cherished values, our cherished instincts, and thus, the Gothic is a source of freedom, an outlet, an escape, without which we would be enslaved to our beloved. Thus, our fears as much as our loves are also an education, also a practice, and, as freedom must be to be truly free, at times also a trap and a ruination.

Jameson, Postmodernism, 326.

118

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History’s Body and the Historicist’s Dilemma If we reverse Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum fragment number 80 “The historian is the prophet facing backwards,” it becomes, The prophet is the historian facing forwards.1 Such a simple reversal renders Schlegel’s gnomic turn of phrase into its prosaic counterpart. It makes a great deal of sense that any would-­be prophet ought to mull over history books, teasing out trend lines to project into the future. But in what sense does Schlegel’s original formulation hold true? Of course, it could always be taken simply in the negative—that the historian is as blind to the past as the prophet is to the future, that both history and prophecy are acts of the imagination rather than species of knowledge. However, the positive sense also merits consideration because what you wish would be colors your interpretation of what once was. The prophet facing backward and the historian facing forward are one and the same. In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft calls attention to the link between past and future when she critiques Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s use of an idealized pastoral history to argue for different educations for boys and girls. Wary that Rousseau’s construction of the past implies a future in which men and women are educated to be unequal, Wollstonecraft counters with a vision of the future that has implications for how she constructs the past. “Rousseau,” she writes, “exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.”2 She transposes the fortunate fall from eschatology to historiography, suggesting that reason develops over the course of history. “When that wise Being who

Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 170. 2 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), 84. 1

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created us and placed us here, saw the fair idea, he willed, by allowing it to be so, that the passions would unfold our reason, because he could see that present evil would produce future good.”3 Wollstonecraft’s vision of an increasingly rational future—a future in which differences in body are rendered less important by likenesses in mind—leads her to envision a past quite unlike Rousseau’s. In An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, she rejects his notion that society reached its maturity in some remote past. She sees in the past not solitude’s noble independence, but “his miserable weakness as a solitary being” and a “gradual advance towards maturity” that has only just begun.4 Wollstonecraft culls ancient history to support her competing narrative that the past was a time of tyranny and superstition. She points out that even the traditional high-­water marks of civilization did not have the advantages of contemporary society. Ancient Greece flourished at a time when “the world was mostly inhabited by barbarians,” and in Rome “voluptuousness stopped the progress of civilization, which makes the perfection of the arts the dawn of science.”5 For Wollstonecraft, the exercise of the passions in the arts blooms into the even greater beauties of mathematics and the sciences. “The fortunate invention of printing,” Wollstonecraft notes, enlarged the “scanty diffusion of knowledge” over a more general populace, which, together with philosophy’s gradual simplification of the “principles of social union” allowed “the body of the people to participate in the discussion of political science” and to “contemplate with benevolent complacency and becoming pride, the approaching reign of reason and peace.”6 The gradual spread of knowledge to a greater populace enacts at the cultural level the individual’s increasing

Ibid., 83. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, vol. 6 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, eds. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), 15. Similarly, in the Vindication of the Rights of Man, Wollstonecraft excoriates Edmund Burke for an over-­reverence for the past. “Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pile, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, and the sick heart retires to die in lonely wilds, far from the abodes of man . . . Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? Hell stalks abroad; the lash resounds on the slave’s naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labour, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good night. . . Such misery demands more than tears” (Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man, vol. 5 of The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft [London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989], 144–5). 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 16–17. 3 4

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maturity as reason flowers from its root passions. Past, present, and future hold together like an individual’s biological existence, where the stable processes of growth regularize what might otherwise be seen as arbitrary change. Likewise, Rousseau maps history onto human life. He argues that just as you presumably would have liked to stop changing once you reached your full potential, so too should you “look for the age at which you would wish your Species had stopped.”7 Rousseau projects the growth and decay of an individual onto society and equates contemporary social ills with the debilities of advancing age. All around he sees the venality and feebleness of decline, which leads him to imagine an earlier period of health. He argues that feelings of disgust at contemporary decline “must serve as the Praise of your earliest forbears, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who will have the misfortune to live after you.”8 So while Wollstonecraft and Rousseau give different valences to history, the metaphor they use is the same. Each suggests that societies mature just as individuals do. Each uses an idealized, stable trajectory of individuals in the species to write about history as if from outside of history. This closed trajectory from birth to death provides a metaphorical vantage from which to conceive of history as a totality, allowing each to function, at one and the same time, as historian and prophet. Arguing from the same idealized position and having stepped outside of history by means of the same metaphor, the two disagree about the place their time period occupies inside history. Their disagreement is not simply temporal but is also a disagreement about the body and its elements. Each speaks as a partisan for the interests of separate parts. For Rousseau, reason must align itself with the natural goodness of sentiment. It must surrender its exalted and aloof status. As Paul Hamilton writes of Rousseau: Such ideal materialism or complete merging with one’s historically natural self would enable one to dispense with further speculation or philosophical

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 133. 8 Ibid. 7

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reflection because you know you’ve got it right, that your mode of living, since natural, is automatically virtuous.9

The natural dictates of sentiment banish the necessity for reason’s critique. For Wollstonecraft, on the contrary, a healthy reason follows upon a retrospective critique of the imprudence of the passions, which, in their imprudence, contribute to a progressively developed rationality. Rather than an education based on putatively natural differences between sexed bodies, Wollstonecraft prefers an education in which knowledge emerges out of a passionate pursuit oriented toward ever more rational experimentation and discovery. Thus, in a thought experiment, when she imagines herself surveying “from an eminence” and with a quiet heart a “world stripped of all its false and delusive charms,” she redirects the rhetoric of Ecclesiastes, that eloquent advocate of prudence over the vainglorious, because, even though from her position of critique she sees “the sons and daughters of man pursuing shadows, and anxiously wasting their powers to feed these passions which have no adequate object,” she realizes that it is “the very excess of these blind impulses” that renders “short-­sighted mortals wiser” and prepares them “for some other state.”10 For Wollstonecraft, reflection recoups the passions as catalysts of progress and a more developed rationality. Even though Wollstonecraft places her eschatology in a rationality to come, and Rousseau in the natural feelings of our lost past, the body they use to connect history to futurity is the same. Both Wollstonecraft and Rousseau scrutinize the body for what it indicates about history because they share a common assumption about historical causality. Their shared metaphor substitutes for the theoretically plausible but practically unrealizable task of aggregating the natural impulses that en masse would produce history. At its most comprehensive, the metaphor ceases to be metaphorical and becomes instead a deterministic account of the laws of causation. Joseph Priestley, for instance, writes that a historian should endeavour to trace all the circumstances in the situation of things which contributed either to produce, or facilitate; to hasten, or to retard it, and Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 56. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 179–80.

9

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clearly see the manner of their operation; by which we shall be better able to form a judgment of the state of political affairs in a future time.11

Stated as such, Priestley’s vision occupies a neutral position with regard to the Wollstonecraft and Rousseau debate, forestalling judgment until “all the circumstances” can be traced empirically. Nonetheless, if the same natural laws that determine physical interactions from simple leverage to the fickle wind encompass human events from the minute to the grand, future possibilities would collapse into certainties and history would unfold according to a coherent system. Priestley’s optimism for historical knowledge stems from his vision of scientific causality: his assumption that there is a causal continuity between physical laws and social behavior, a continuum between our sentiments, the actions those sentiments prompt in individuals, the sum of those individual actions interacting at the level of the socius, and the accretion of those social actions over time as history. Wollstonecraft and Rousseau’s contrary readings of history also align with the opposing valences of Michel de Certeau’s historicist’s dilemma. When Wollstonecraft diagnoses the crises of the French Revolution as “the excrementitious humours exuding from the contaminated body” and suggests that “only the philosophical eye, which looks into the nature and weighs the consequences of human actions,” can discover the cause of the crises, she approaches history from one side of the dilemma.12 Valuing the judgment of the “philosophical eye,” Wollstonecraft endorses the type of history that, according to Certeau, “ponders what is comprehensible and what are the conditions of understanding.”13 When Rousseau complains about the difficulty of seeing natural man “as Nature formed him, through all the changes which the succession of times and of things must have wrought in his original constitution” and suggests that “for it to be natural it must speak immediately with the voice of Nature,” he approaches history from the other side of the historicist’s dilemma.14 Valuing an ear attuned to the immediacy of the past, Joseph Priestley, Lectures on history, and general policy; to which is prefixed, An essay on a course of liberal education for civil and active life (Dublin: L. White, 1788), 207. 12 Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View, 235. 13 Certeau, The Writing of History, 35. 14 Rousseau, “Origin of Inequality,” 124, 127. 11

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Rousseau endorses a type of history that “claims to reencounter lived experience, exhumed by virtue of a knowledge of the past.”15 Wollstonecraft and Rousseau’s contrary eschatologies and contrary valuations of the material body are based on similar assumptions about historical causality. Projected onto history, Priestley’s materialist vector happily accommodates both sides of the historicist’s dilemma—a nominalist past as a living amalgamation of diffuse impulses, and an essentialist future vested with the clarity of retrospective judgment. § Intended for The Enquirer but never published, William Godwin’s “Essay of History and Romance” records his attempt to reconcile the assumptions about causality he inherited from natural law with his bourgeoning understanding of ideology as an effective social force in its own right. Struggling to articulate the historical relation between individuals and society, the essay arrives at an impasse several times as it enacts the critique/counter-­critique dynamic of the historicist’s dilemma. Godwin arrives at the first impasse after dividing history into what he identifies as its “two principal branches:” the first branch is “the study of mankind in a mass, of the progress, the fluctuations, the interests and vices of society;” the second is “the study of the individual.”16 Suggesting that the first branch may be written “entirely in terms of abstraction,” without attention to individuals or their motives, Godwin organizes the study of history under a rubric aligned with the contrary poles of the historicist’s dilemma: on the one hand, an abstract idealism investigates the “causes that operate universally upon masses of people;” on the other hand, a particularized nominalism studies individual lives.17 Godwin’s overall bias toward nominalism can be read thus as a counter-­ critique of Enlightenment historiography’s idealism. As Jon Klancher argues, “Godwin mounted an aggressive critique of the Edinburgh Enlightenment’s universal history.”18 The idealist bias of Enlightenment historians, which had

17 18 15 16

Certeau, The Writing of History, 35. Godwin. “Essay of History and Romance,” 291. Ibid. Jon Klancher, “Godwin and the Republican Romance: Genre, Politics, and Contingency in Cultural History,” Modern Language Quarterly 56:2 (June 1995): 155.

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sought to clarify previous generations’ more nominalist antiquarianism, exposed them to the counter-­critique that they allowed “whole continents of context, by the magic of abridgement, to vanish into the abstract national geographies of the universal historians’ narrative machine.”19 In lieu of a sufficiently advanced understanding of social forces, Enlightenment historians, writes Godwin, used comparative anthropology to organize the “varieties of civilisation” along a trajectory that putatively represented “the progress of mankind from the savage to the civilised state.”20 Identifying patterns, the comparativist approach locates historical forces at the level of the group rather than at the level of the individual. The advantage of this approach is that the historian bypasses questions about how individual motivations contribute to large-­scale events. The disadvantage is that, unmoored from the individual as a historical unit, the historian must identify new, non-­arbitrary units to be the source of social action. Without such units, the historian would have to be satisfied with correlation rather than causation, identifying precedents that “show us how that which happened in one country has been repeated in another, and may perhaps even instruct us how that which has occurred in the annals of mankind, may under similar circumstances be produced again.”21 If, however, historians hope to understand cause rather than correlation, to understand historical change rather than what Godwin calls “dull repetition,” they encounter the very same problem they sought to avoid by means of abstraction: idealist drivers of social change appear as numerous and conflicted as individual agents.22 Even limiting history to a “fundamental article,” such as the study of civilizations, does not alleviate the problem because there are at least as many “subordinate channels” of historical study as there are motives in the individual.23 The history of any civilization divides into various accounts of social forces that vie with one another for significance: We may study the history of eloquence or the history of philosophy. We may apply ourselves to the consideration of the arts of life, and the arts of

21 22 23 19 20

Ibid. Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 291. Ibid., 293. Ibid. Ibid., 291.

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refinement and pleasure. There lie before us the history of wealth and the history of commerce. We may study the progress of revenue and the arts of taxation. We may follow the varieties of climates, and trace their effects on the human body and the human mind. Nay, we may descend still lower; we may have our attention engrossed by the succession of archons and the adjustment of olympiads; or may apply ourselves entirely to the examination of medals and coins.24

If idealist histories are as multiple as motives, the question becomes whether some principle might unite them as components of a more coherent history, whether these competing histories may be organized as sub-­genres according to some measure of their relatedness. Without clarity about the fundamental units of sociohistorical action, any account of the interaction of social forces is hampered by the general obscurity cast over the operations of power and influence. The historian’s comprehension founders because the multiplicity of social forces—like the conflicted impulses of an individual—disrupt attempts to account for how historical elements relate to history as a whole. Without clear principles of unity, “the mass, as fast as he endeavors to cement and unite it, crumbles from his grasp, like a lump of sand,” leaving historians with a situation in which they have “confounded themselves with a labyrinth of particulars.”25 Splitting history into two branches and demonstrating that idealist social accounts are also vulnerable to nominalist critiques, Godwin shows that there is not one historicist’s dilemma, but two. From the point of view of any given individual, there are many social forces that might be influential; from the point of view of any given social force, there are many individuals it could affect.26 The dilemma operates in both branches of history. Having brought the first branch of history to an impasse, Godwin begins his analysis of the individual, suggesting that historians must study the individual even if the goal is to “understand the machine of history.”27 The first branch,

Ibid. Ibid., 292. 26 For a detailed exploration of how this dynamic occurs in the relationship between genre and form, see Jonathan Crimmins “Gender, Genre, and the Near Future in Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre’,” Diacritics 39.1 (2009). 27 Godwin. “Essay of History and Romance,” 293. 24 25

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“general history,” lacks explanatory power because it does not truly engage with why change occurs and can therefore only treat events that are “no better than old incidents under new names.”28 The study of the individual, however, allows the historian to “analyze the materials” that compose history. As Klancher notes,“Godwin briefly promotes a localist, agent-­centered historicism that would overcome enlightened abstraction by grasping ‘materials’ and ‘motives’ through which history is made.”29 His promotion is brief because he is driving his investigation of the second branch toward an impasse like the first. The same fundamental dilemma that hobbles the first branch of history also hobbles the second. Just as Enlightenment historians were undermined by their failure to account for the particulars, the study of individuals fails whenever practiced with the same idealist abstraction. To proceed from general principles about human nature is a mistake. Such “pretenders” examine nothing, while the “genuine scholar” is “ever on the watch for further, and still further particulars.”30 Nonetheless, as Godwin goes on to show, pursuing a scrupulous nominalism in the second branch is no more satisfactory than it was in the first, because the same formal dilemma haunts both. Godwin’s zeal for following the subject of history “into his closet” anticipates the empiricism of historicists in the second half of the nineteenth century, who attempted to use science’s expanding articulation of natural law as a model for refining historical principles from a careful scrutiny of localized facts.31 Leopold von Ranke, for instance, suggests that history ought to be based “on the narratives of eyewitnesses, and on genuine and original documents,” because such a method does not rely on “remote” accounts but only on the testimony of people in “possession of personal and immediate knowledge of facts.”32 However, as Godwin points out, any optimism that the future might clarify the principles that govern the interaction of individual and general history ought to be tempered by the recognition that nominalism produces a vast, incoherent archive. 30 31 32 28 29

Ibid. Klancher, “Godwin and the Republican Romance,” 157. Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 294. Ibid., 294. Leopold von Ranke, History of the Reformation in Germany, vol. 1, ed. Robert A. Johnson, trans. Sarah Austin (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966), xi.

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Nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatisfying than the evidence of facts. If this be the case in courts of justice, where truth is sometimes sifted with tenacious perseverance, how much more will it hold true of the historian? He can administer no oath; he cannot issue his precept, and summon his witnesses from distant provinces; he cannot arraign his personages, and compel them to put in their answer. He must take what they choose to tell; the broken fragments, and the scattered ruins of evidence.33

If the near past is such a muddle that it requires oaths, subpoenas, and arraignments to render reasonable verdicts, how can a historian, across a span of time, hope to achieve any clarity? Godwin’s legal metaphor identifies two difficulties: first, the historical record is necessarily incomplete and evidence is fragmentary and scattered; and second, precise attention to historical particularity sows confusion alongside clarity. As we have seen with the first branch of history, nominalism on its own, without an account of how one individual’s motives interact with another’s, fails to ascend to the dignity of causal principles. Godwin, traveling from the opposite direction, arrives at a second impasse. Having concluded that neither branch alone provides a reliable account of history, Godwin suggests that any historian who “would prove the liberal and spirited benefactor of his species, must connect the two branches of history together.”34 How exactly to do so becomes the central concern of historicism following the Romantic era. One way to join the two branches is to imagine, as Priestley does, that with sufficient acuity scientific models would render history compatible with natural forces. Instead, Godwin’s essay gestures toward an alternative, toward the possibility that social forces may have historical effects independent of natural law. Godwin recognizes that the historical record, in addition to being Ibid., 461–2. Godwin’s metaphor of the historian as a judge, bereft of judicial power, sounds a proleptic note of caution to those, like James Chandler, who take case law as a model for literary historians (Chandler, England in 1819). Stephen Greenblatt, too, in “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” employs this method against Jean-François Lyotard. “The Faurisson affair is at bottom not an epistemological dilemma, as Lyotard claims, but an attempt to wish away evidence that is both substantial and verifiable. The issue is not an Epicurean paradox [. . .] but a historical problem: what is the evidence of mass murder? How reliable is this evidence? Are there convincing grounds for denying or doubting the documented events? And if there are not such grounds, how may we interpret the motives of those who seek to cast doubt upon the historical record?” (Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” The New Historicism [New York: Routledge, 1989], 4). 34 Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 293–4. 33

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fragmentary, is also partial in the other sense of the word: evidence is given and gathered by individuals who have interests at stake. Even “profound scholars,” who “pass over the historians that have adorned and decorated the facts, and proceed at once to the naked and scattered materials,” do not produce impartial histories. Instead, each one is driven to “invent his history for himself, and possess his creed as he possesses his property, single and incommunicable.”35 Similarly, historians in the nineteenth century failed to usher in a golden age of historical objectivity despite being, as Charles Bambach notes, “committed to the ideas of value-­free judgment and neutral perspective.”36 Professionalization’s reliance on primary documents increased, rather, the tension between the historian’s duty to remain value-­free and the individual “creed” the historian used to select documents. Georg Iggers remarks that “what is striking is how professionalization, with the development of the scientific ethos and scientific practices that accompanied it, led everywhere to an increasing ideologization of historical writing.”37 Historians chose artifacts to represent the period, and the selection and arrangement of those historical elements proved ideologically dependent. The pursuit of a more scientific working method for the discipline highlighted the inescapable workings of ideology. Investigating the narrativity of history and biography—mercilessly worrying the terms history and romance, driving them to their limits and crashing them toward transposition—Godwin’s genre argument becomes an essay into ideology. The ideas that Godwin offered in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice about the moral influence of political institutions begin to coalesce around a more robust concept of ideology once “it must be admitted indeed that all history bears too near a resemblance to fable.”38 Once the pejorative term romance, normally applied to portraits of individuals, equally characterizes all history, the line between history as actuality and history as story begins to blur. Stories themselves can be seen as having real effects, changing what we believe about the world and therefore changing how we act. Ibid., 300. Charles R. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 9. 37 Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 28. 38 Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 297. 35 36

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One year before “Essay of History and Romance,” Godwin revised his Political Justice to state more clearly the likelihood that political institutions act as a primary influence on individual motives. It may be, he wrote, that government acts as more than simply “foe” or “defender” of an individual’s private “domestic virtues.”39 Its influence may penetrate to the very core of individual motives. “It insinuates itself into our personal dispositions, and insensibly communicates its own spirit to our private transactions.”40 The purpose of the first book of Political Justice, writes Godwin, is to prove that it is “futile” to try to “alter the morals of mankind singly and in detail” and that true social change occurs only when an alteration of the political institutions effects “a revolution in the influences that act upon them.”41 Because the goal of “a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity” is developing a capacity to bring about progressively more humane social reform, what is required is not simply an imaginative account of the past but an account of the past that incorporates the effectivity of the imagination.42 The epistemological uncertainty in “Essay of History and Romance”—the acknowledgment that a “most intimate and sagacious friend” who nonetheless “misapprehends my motives” is “little worse judge of them than myself ”— allows Godwin to conclude that the imaginative conditions at the heart of every historical account might become the basis for instruction, persuasion, and ultimately social reform.43 “I ask not, as a principle point, whether it be true or false? My first enquiry is, Can I derive instruction from it?”44 How the historian portrays the past becomes not only a question of descriptive accuracy, but also a question of proscriptive change—the historian as backward-­facing prophet. The romance of the past allows the historian to offer futures that break with the repressive conditions of the present. History, for Godwin, should have a dual allegiance: like Wollstonecraft’s, it should have both an historical and a moral view.

William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Variants, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 4, ed. Mark Philp (London: William Pickering, 1993), 12. Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 293. 43 Ibid., 300. 44 Ibid., 297. 39

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Rounding out Godwin’s conception of ideology, “Essay of History and Romance” provides early indicators of what will later become various interpretations of how ideology operates in history. Like Theodor Adorno, arguing that “human subjects, whom psychology pledges itself to examine, are not merely, as it were, influenced by society but are in their innermost core formed by it,” Godwin suggests that sociohistorical forces penetrate to the core of human motives.45 Like Hayden White, explaining that Metahistory asks not “what are the ‘historical’ components of a ‘realistic’ art,” but rather “what are the ‘artistic’ elements of a ‘realistic’ historiography,” Godwin insists that the best writers of romance employ the same methods as the historian.46 His description of the novelist’s method—“the writer of Romance collects his materials from all sources, experiences, reports, and the records of human affairs; then generalises them”—is close to Ranke’s description of his method for writing a history of “what actually happened.”47 Like Walter Benjamin, who argued that the historian ought “to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history” in order to work against conceptions of history that justify exploitation, Godwin argues that the primary goal of historiography is to create the possibilities of social change in opposition to the dominant ideology of the corrupt political orders.48 Like Immanuel Kant, Godwin positions rationality as a principle that accounts for progressive change. He writes that it would “be necessary for us to scrutinise the nature of man, before we can pronounce what it is of which social man is capable,” because he imagines reason as human nature’s perfectible element, a moral tool that can be developed over time.49 Yet, while Kant positioned practical reason as a source of freedom from natural law, which he saw as the dominant causal regime, Godwin sees reason as reforming the

Theodor Adorno, “On the Logic of the Social Sciences,” The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976), 119. “The substratum of a human being in himself who might resist the environment—and this has been resuscitated in existentialism—would remain an empty extraction” (Ibid.). 46 Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 2 n4. 47 Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 299. Leopold von Ranke, The Secret of World History, Selected Writings on the Art and Science of History, trans. Roger Wines (New York: Fordham University Press, 1981), 58. Ranke goes on to write: “But from what sources can such a new investigation be made? The basis of the present work, the sources of its material, are memoirs, diaries, letters, ambassador’s reports, and original accounts of eyewitnesses” (Ibid.). 48 Benjamin, “Concept of History,” 396. 49 Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 293. 45

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otherwise corrupt influences of the political order, which he sees as dominating and perverting human nature with its ideological control. With Godwin’s remarkably fecund exploration in “Essay of History and Romance,” we are better positioned to understand how the conception of ideology that emerges in the Romantic era remained contested for two hundred years as various conceptions of how ideological forces might operate in history were developed. § Coming after the mid-­century conflict between left and right Hegelians, Wilhelm Windelband’s 1894 “Rectorial Address” recounts his dissatisfaction with the Hegelian taxonomy that divided knowledge into the natural sciences and the social sciences. Windelband argues that a division “grounded upon sound logical concepts” ought to be purely formal, a “purely methodological classification,” rather than based on subject matter.50 “One kind of science is an inquiry into general laws. The other kind is an inquiry into specific historical facts.”51 We recognize in Windelband’s logical distinction between the general and the particular, law and fact, the antiquarian and idealist tendencies of the historicist’s dilemma in their simplest, most abstract terms. Because each side of the historicist’s dilemma risks a contrary historiographical peril—the clarity and comprehension prized by idealism risks deforming the historical record with a theoretical bias; the particularity and specificity prized by antiquarianism risks failing to understand the relations between historical artifacts—historians throughout the nineteenth century produced critique and counter-­critique governed by the dilemma. Nonetheless, that oscillation was methodologically productive in helping codify practices for the discipline. Professionalization came to mean borrowing inductive methods with the hope that a strict observation of specific facts might allow the historian to script provisional general laws that could then be subjected to verification and further observation. Yet, as Windelband’s complaints about dividing knowledge between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften demonstrate, the empiricism

Wilhelm Windelband, “Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894,” History and Theory, 19.2 (February 1980), 175. 51 Ibid. 50

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that historians borrowed to deal with the historicist’s dilemma became entangled in an additional complication. As ideology developed into a concept able to rival natural law, the historicist’s dilemma became entangled in the opposition between scientific and ideological causation. The metaphorical body that Wollstonecraft and Rousseau relied on to represent the totality of history as the coherence of natural law evolved into a more abstract belief in a universal history in which “contradictions, individual expressions, and cultural differences could be harmonized in one overarching scheme.”52 Universal history was abstract enough that it could accommodate multiple resolutions to the problem of how natural and ideological forces interact in history. Both Ranke’s inductive contextualism and Wilhelm Dilthey’s sympathetic attunement reflect this submerged body metaphor: the past as a living amalgamation of diffuse impulses; the present as vested with the clarity of retrospective judgment. Like Wollstonecraft, Ranke sees historiography as a rational investigation that seeks “to break through to the deepest and most secret motives of historical life.”53 Like Rousseau, Dilthey emphasized the need to strip away contemporary values in an effort to understand history as it was understood by those who lived it: “we must understand this whole from within itself and its values and purposes as centered in ages, in epochs, in a universal history.”54 Ultimately, however, their shared belief in a universal history betrays a disagreement about the causal basis of that universality. Dilthey’s assertion that history ought to be known “from within itself ” shows his bias toward an ideological rubric for history, in which “values and purposes” cohere “in ages, in epochs, in a universal history”; while Ranke shows his bias toward the scientific rubric when he writes that “just as natural science not only attempts to draw a careful picture of nature, but also strives to investigate the higher goal of goal of the eternal laws governing the world itself,” so too does history.55 Ranke and Dilthey’s commitment to universal history meant

Bambach, Crisis of Historicism, 58. Ranke, The Secret of World History, 110. Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, in Selected Works, vol. 3, trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel and John Scanlon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 177. He continues: “we must consider the historical world as a whole, this whole as a productive system, and this system as positing values and purposes, namely, as creative.” Ibid. 55 Ranke, The Secret of World History, 110. 52 53 54

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that both saw historiography as an investigation into universal truths expressible as law. So, although the abstraction of the body metaphor into a more general organic unity secured the assumption that empiricism was progressively uncovering universal truth, the ideological concerns that we saw in Godwin’s essay steadily undermined the basis for such universalist conceptions. As long as ideology appeared to act as a veil, occluding the recovery of an otherwise stable substratum of fact, or appeared to function as an element of a larger organic unity, then scientific causation subordinated ideology and universal history seemed plausible. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, the rival ideological vector undermined the organicist unity that had seemed to hold together truth as transcendental. While Windelband positions his distinction as purely logical— methodological rather than based on subject matter—it is actually a hybrid. He separates the “nomological” natural world, which would be governed by natural law, from “idiographic” human history, which may only be described ex post facto; and thus he does not erase the opposition between the natural and the social sciences but merely subordinates it to the formal distinction between the general and the particular.56 History, for Windelband, can be no more than descriptive, because, unlike the natural sciences, it is the study of “process” and “event” and therefore most suited to “idiographic” methods responsive to the particularity of individual facts.57 This endorsement of two types of causality— one which unfolds according to law, the other which is free—is motivated by his desire to resist Hegelian, organic conceptions of history. Turning his back on a universal history that unfolds according to laws, Windelband returns to a Kantian distinction between a totally determined natural law, and a pure a priori realm of human freedom. The unfathomable brutality of the First World War and the genocidal atrocities of the Second strikingly clarified the formerly obscure biases behind Ranke’s goal to “see with unbiased eyes the progress of universal history” and increased the urgency in the field to deny nomological conceptions of history.58 Seeing the past as the seed of a causally rigid universal history—“a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity”—was Ibid. Ibid. Ranke, The Secret of World History, 259.

56 57 58

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ideologically mobilized to justify fascist programs of purity.59 Dedicated “in memory of the countless men and women of all creeds or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny,” Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism tried to disentangle ideology from science.60 The ideological dangers of a nomological history, combined with a general faith in scientific truth, drove Popper to make room, like Windelband, for the free exercise of human agency in history; and when later-­twentieth century theory engaged in the critique of the subject, endorsing ideology’s deepest penetration into human behavior, the question of how to make room for human agency became the more general question of how to develop a clear conception of a free history. § In “Reading beyond Redemption,” Thomas Pfau argues that Marjorie Levinson’s New Historicism fails to adequately distinguish itself from the utopian vision of traditional historicism, which aimed to assemble a historical context with an ever-­increasing accuracy that would asymptotically represent history. Such New Historical critiques embed a traditional historicist conception of the relationship between past and present, suggests Pfau, because the practice of critique assumes that the past must be rescued from its own ignorance.61 Levinson’s critique shares this utopianism, not only with traditional his­ toricists, but also with Wollstonecraft. After all, what Pfau says of Levinson— that her historicism is doubly utopian because it posits both a “steadily advancing and eventually all-­encompassing” contextualism, and because it participates in the fantasy of “retroactively liberating the aesthetic object from the ‘visible darkness’ of its own referential obfuscations”—is also true of Wollstonecraft.62 For Wollstonecraft, rationality develops over time through

Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” 293. Karl Popper, Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), iv. 61 He writes that there are “curious epistemological filiations between the allegedly false, erroneous, or partial (because expressive and aesthetic) phenomenal order known as the past and the intellectual countermeasures formalized and institutionalized in the present under the generic name ‘critique” ’ (Thomas Pfau, “Reading beyond Redemption: Historicism, Irony, and the Lessons of Romanticism,” Lessons in Romanticism: A Critical Companion [Durham: Duke University Press, 1998], 9). 62 Pfau, “Reading beyond Redemption,” 8. 59 60

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an ever-­exacting analysis of the obfuscatory machinations of prior, passion-­ induced mistakes. With Levinson in the role of Wollstonecraft, Pfau acts the role of Rousseau. Both men favor their vigorous forebears over their contemporaries, with Pfau finding today’s methodologies to be mere vexed echoes of the past. “In fact, what renders the antithesis between aesthetic surfaces [. . .] and the methodological acuity of contemporary historicism [. . .] ultimately insupportable is the startling fact that the same opposition turns out to be a constitutive feature of Romantic narratives.”63 If the antithesis of the rational and the aesthetic is a product of Romantic-­era narratives, then the task of what Pfau calls our “scrupulously reflexive models of ideological critique”—namely, that of rationally diagnosing the dynamics of power repressed beneath a dreamy aesthetic imaginary—enacts a major symptom of the ideology it assumed it was diagnosing. While it aims at rational mastery over the period, contemporary methodology’s “belated, ‘critical’ articulation of Romanticism’s allegedly symptomatic (or aesthetic) ideology may, in fact, constitute but a repetition, a supplemental effect of that very symptom.”64 Criticism, rather than being a clear-­eyed application of reason, would appear more like an attendant neurosis. And so, for Pfau, as for Rousseau, even when rationality appears to have mastery over the body, it is instead in service to and a symptom of the body. Following Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau, Pfau’s critique of Levinson reads like a Rousseauian counter critique. It is not only Levinson who replays the past, but also Pfau. Thus, even though Pfau and Levinson were actively in search of a new understanding of Romanticism and a new understanding of history, their readings likewise betray the opposing valences of the historicist’s dilemma. As Certeau points out, historians are always in “an unstable position;” because the separate foci of the discipline are functionally linked, neither type of history can ever be practiced purely on its own. The idealist needs the antiquarian and vice versa. Practicing history of one sort leaves you vulnerable to criticism from practitioners of the other. If historians “refer to their own practices and

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 30.

63 64

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examine their postulates in order to innovate”—like Levinson or Jerome McGann, who argues that “criticism must analyze, self-­critically, the effect which [our ideological] apparatuses have in shaping, and distorting, our critical activities”—they open themselves up to a critique of the sort Pfau delivers, which points out “constraints originating well before their own present, dating back to former organizations of which their work is a symptom, not a cause.”65 The instability generated by the dynamics of the dilemma, however, applies equally to Pfau. Aligning himself with one side of the dilemma leaves him vulnerable to critique from those he critiques. If historians like Pfau “aim to posit the reality of a former society in their discourse and animate forgotten figures,” Certeau suggests that they leave themselves open to a counter-­critique that shows that “the discourse destined to express what is other remains their discourse and the mirror of their own labors.”66 In other words, the historicist’s dilemma leaves Pfau susceptible to a version of McGann’s original critique: namely, that it obscures its own “immediate and projected ideological involvements.”67 Levinson quite consciously frames New Historicism as a practice that could fill “the breach opened by ‘the dilemma of historicism,” ’ yet neither her awareness of the dilemma, nor her theoretical sophistication, prevents Pfau from painting her as a latter-­day Ranke, even as he appears like a nouveau Dilthey.68 Nonetheless, while Pfau and Levinson are both bound together by the historicist’s dilemma, they replay the dynamic with a difference. Both are wary of and try to sidestep universalizing notions of history, while also trying to restore (Levinson) or recover (Pfau) some sort of historical continuity after its basis in scientific causality has been undermined. Neither supports Priestley’s Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 159. Certeau, Writing of History, 36. Certeau, Writing of History, 36. 67 McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 160. Or, as Levinson writes: “One important corollary of [New Historicist] restraint is our failure to represent the critical practice, which, by its cross-­referencing, relates phenomena that were, in the past’s immanent and differentiated experience of itself, either not related, differently related, or unselfconsciously related. We are the ones who, by putting the past to a certain use, put it in a certain order” (“The New Historicism,” 20). Marjorie Levinson, “The New Historicism: Back to the Future,” Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 68 Ibid., 31. 65

66

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dream of deriving laws of social action that are ultimately coterminous with those of the natural sciences. Neither supports the historicist’s vision of a reconciliation between natural philosophy and history. Thus, it is even more surprising to see Pfau and Levinson, like Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, engage in their own mapping of the body onto history as each anthropomorphizes historical continuity. In Romantic Moods, Pfau argues that the coherence of history is best considered as a mood. He aligns three historical divisions in British Romanticism with three bodily moods, which, he argues, allows for a historical understanding that is “no longer referential, thematic, or accumulatively contextual.”69 Historical mood could be conceived of “as a latent principle bestowing enigmatic coherence on all social and discursive practice at a given moment.”70 Just as a fluctuating multiplicity of physical stimuli interact with various chemical conditions of the body at any given moment to become an overall mood, so too would a historical mood meld contingent social components and generate a provisional historical cohesion. He quotes George Eliot’s suggestion that the seemingly random details of history “are continually entering with cumulative force into a mood until it gets the mass and momentum of a theory or a motive.”71 Pfau’s cultural materialism shifts the source of the causation from the natural impulses to cultural impulses, as individuals produce history not out of the passions and sentiments but rather out of “the deep-­structural situatedness of individuals within history as something never intelligible to them in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form.”72 For Pfau, the task of the literary critic is to achieve a sympathetic attunement whereby, through a careful sympathy with the accretive details of historical investigation, one can register the overall mood of the past that gives the historical moment its coherence. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 7. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. Pfau configures this socio-­historical context as if it is analogous to the unconscious, which in its earliest conception was strictly somatic. He argues that the values that literature posits “come into focus only ex negativo and a posteriori, that is, as something belatedly found to have been occluded or repressed by the Lacanian symbolic broadly speaking—that is, by historical tradition, present necessity, accepted morality, or aesthetic decorum, and the like” (Ibid., 25). 69

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It is precisely on this point of sympathy that Levinson wishes to distinguish her practice. Levinson believes that the order brought to particular historical elements is a product of her labor. Levinson argues for an “ideational” method, with which she might “revive a once generative conflict between fact and value,” that is, between rationality and belief.73 She notes that, when Dilthey rejected the presentism of Whig historians, he proposed “entering into the spirit of the age they narrate,” a process that required historians to “suspend their own historicity.”74 Instead of sympathetic attunement, Levinson explains that she is interested, foremost, in the conditions that enable cognition.75 “With the transcendental synthesis of apperception, Kant establishes that our experience is always already constructed through the pre-­cognitive workings of concepts and categories on our empirical intuitions.”76 For Kant, transcendental meant that the categories of cognition were common to all individuals. Levinson, however, locates “transcendence at a different level from where Kant puts it.”77 It is not the categories that are transcendental, but their constructedness. It is not that humans have a universally stable transhistorical logic that conditions their experience. Rather, the pre-­cognitive conditions themselves would be socio-­historically contingent; they would vary depending on cultural conditions. However, “that genealogy positions us to apply Kant’s insight about the constructed nature of experience to historically inaccessible conditions—functionally, another set of a prioris.”78 In other words, Levinson argues that at any given historical moment there are a priori sociocultural conditions that function at a pre-­cognitive level to structure the individual’s experience. Levinson translates Kant’s categories from the realm of logic to the realm of culture, from physiology to ideology. To risk pushing the metaphor beyond all bounds, we might say that just as Wollstonecraft and Rousseau occupy the same body, so too do Pfau and Levinson. Each gives the past the metaphorical unity of a human body— Marjorie Levinson, “Reflections on New Historicism,” European Romantic Review, 23:3 (2012) 355– 62, 358. As in Wollstonecraft, the past would be marked by erroneous belief and the present and future would be stewards of rationality. 74 Ibid., 358. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 355. 77 Ibid., 356. 78 Ibid. 73

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Levinson via cognitive categories, Pfau with somatic moods. Yet, if Pfau and Levinson are equally linked in their contrary metaphorical mapping of history onto the body, a crucial shift has taken place: the body they share has changed. Wollstonecraft and Rousseau occupy the general species body. Pfau and Levinson occupy a cultural body, and their metaphor moves in the opposite direction: from the socius to the body, rather than the other way around. When Wollstonecraft and Rousseau used the metaphor of history as body, it acted as a metaphorical abridgement of a causal chain that connected the pain and pleasure of physical stimulation to the collective interactions of individual decisions that result in historical action. It is not at all clear how Pfau and Levinson’s transposition of the body metaphor could have any plausible basis. Why should culture behave like a human body? If culture truly subordinates the biological, why should somatic metaphors have any explanatory power? How can one hold that social structures reflect the structures of the biological body and also that culture is prior to and structures a body’s cognitive functions? Here too Wollstonecraft and Rousseau are useful. Pfau and Levinson conceive of history as a body for the same reason Rousseau and Wollstonecraft did: it metaphorically offers a solution to a problem— connecting the social to the natural—that would otherwise prove elusive. Indeed, it is in part because of the critique of the nation state as the locus of historical action, the conceptual inadequacies of periodization, and the multiple entanglements of commercial markets that Pfau and Levinson resort to a metaphorical body socius as their unit of social action. Just as Wollstonecraft and Rousseau illustrate the contrary valences of the historicist’s dilemma from the side of Priestley’s scientific vector, Pfau and Levinson enact the dilemma from the side of Godwin’s ideological vector, and an anthropomorphic socius helps them take steps toward articulating the operations of the ideological vector without strictly accounting for the causal impetuses of the sociocultural. From Wollstonecraft and Rousseau to Pfau and Levinson, the historicist’s dilemma has steadily been mapped onto history as a nominalist past and essentialist future. The result, as we have seen, of mediation’s sleight of hand is that each vector claims causal determination (according to essentialist principles that become increasingly clear in time), and each vector disavows the causal effectiveness of the other, either arguing its causality is deterministic,

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or reserving the opposite vector as a source of freedom. The anti-Hegelianism of Windelband’s “Rectorial Address” stems from his desire to preserve for human history a Kantian freedom from natural law. Following the Second World War, Popper embraced Windelband’s solution, distinguishing between nomological and idiographic, proscriptive and descriptive, in order to preserve the causal supremacy of the natural sciences and ward off the encroaching claims of ideology.79 Before the war, Popper notes, anthropology was considered a sub-­discipline under the broader reach of sociology. After the war, it was reversed; sociology became a subset of anthropology.80 To describe what he considers the absurdity of the shift, Popper presents a parable about an anthropologist who attends an academic conference not to participate but to observe the discipline-­specific construction of validity. In light of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolution and Bruno Latour’s 1979 Laboratory Life, Popper’s parable hardly presents an absurdity any longer. It is, however, symptomatic of the apparent rapidity of the epistemological adjustment, in which ideology becomes recognized as having its own effectivity that can penetrate not just the fickle will but the very heart of truth. White’s 1973 Metahistory, for instance, insists that, because bare facts are mute, as soon as historians move from examination to presentation, they create an imaginative construction that is inescapably tied to the narrative genres available to a historian at the time. To insist on the narrative of history is to emphasize, as White does, that historiography relies on cultural forms.81 As the effects of ideology become increasingly visible, it becomes more difficult to maintain Windelband’s solution, cordoning off history as a free space for the exercise of human agency. Indeed, it becomes clear that adherents

Popper, Poverty of Historicism, 2. Popper divides “pro-­naturalistic doctrines,” which suppose that the techniques of the natural sciences are applicable to the study of societies, from “anti-­naturalistic doctrines,” which maintain that natural law will never fully account for human agency. He distinguishes between “essentialist” and “nominalist” tendencies in anti-­naturalistic doctrines, and between “theoretical” and “empirical” in pro-­naturalist doctrines, making explicit the four cornered-­ schema that was implicit in Windelband. 80 Karl Popper, “The Logic of the Social Sciences,” The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 90. 81 “What Ranke did not see was that one might well reject a Romantic approach to history in the name of objectivity, but that, as long as history was conceived to be explanation by narration, one was required to bring to the task of narration the archetypal myth, or plot structure, by which alone that narrative could be given form” (White, Metahistory, 167). 79

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to each side of the causal divide make the same appeal to an empty negativity as freedom, sourced to the vector to which they deny determination. Without recourse to the empty negativity of the other vector—since both vectors have causal claims on human action—historicism can no longer position human freedom as freedom from the causality. Rather, it becomes necessary to see a free history as the grounds for human agency. An individual’s freedom could only be secured by the interaction of the two causal regimes as historical processes that are free in themselves. By looking back on the Romantic era and these early moments of the formation of the concept of ideology, we can see possible strains that still remain underdeveloped—a non-­teleological history in the structure of temporality itself, a history that could maintain its freedom in the face of both natural law and ideological construction—as we imagine and fashion a Romantic historicism to come.

3

Freedom and the Minimum Conditions of Historicity Early in the Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel performs a thought experiment to test the truth of sense-­certainty. He asks the question what is now? and then, answering (e.g.) now is night, he documents this truth in writing. He claims, “a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it.”1 He then points out, however, that were he to look at the paper at some other time (at noon, say) the truth of the statement would appear “stale” [schal]. At this moment in the Phenomenology, Hegel is interested in the universality of the now, the way that it preserves itself as stable at the expense of the instability of the particular sensuous elements—dark, glittering, reflecting gloom—that had seemed to be so clearly, so immediately true. Literary historians, however, who always work with the musty and the stale, might wish that Hegel had written more about the document. After all, there are two kinds of persistence in Hegel’s thought experiment: the now, which persists conceptually, and the document, which persists physically. The now persists because it is indifferent to its matter. The document persists by becoming matter. Each element of the document—the paper, the ink, a selective sequence of thoughts, the living hand, all interacting in that interval of time—was composed separately at some other moment out of other materials, and each stayed to some degree as it was until pressed into the formation of the document, which then persisted in its own way. With characteristic flair, Friedrich Kittler calls attention to the challenge material persistence presents for Hegel’s thought experiment: “Hegel lied. Of all the candidates that could stand in for Hegel, Phenomenology, 60.

1

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‘Self-Consciousness,’ not one perishes or is destroyed: not Faust or Mephisto any more than Goethe or Hegel. Their careers fill libraries.”2 Kittler accuses Hegel of suppressing the material persistence that inscription makes possible by pretending that one form of self-­consciousness replaces another form. Such suppression is only one of several deceits that Kittler identifies. He also accuses Hegel of asking the question what is now? with a “feigned innocence.”3 Appearing to pose a question about time, Hegel’s “ontologist’s lips magically transform ‘this’ into ‘the This’ and ‘now’ into ‘the Now,’ ” and, with this elision, he can elicit the “impossible answer ‘The Now is night.’ ”4 The answer is impossible because it attributes a temporal condition, night, to the transcendental Now, while Kittler demands a strict Kantian separation between the two. He claims that “a more clever answer would have been no answer at all.”5 For Kittler, the Now can have no properties without ceasing to be transcendental and becoming a simple phenomenal now. Silence is the only answer that allows the Now to maintain its noumenal purity. The persistence of the now, for Hegel, does require the negation of the moment’s sensuous content; otherwise, consciousness would lose itself in unsynthesized stimuli, simply reflecting the rapid, disordered flux of sensation— shimmering of light and shade, a cacophonous soundscape, the chatter of nerves. Viewed one way, Hegel’s grounding of consciousness in the persistence of the now seems consistent with the transcendental unity of apperception—Immanuel Kant’s term for the mental apparatus that, a priori, enables the Subject to perceive the fluctuations of sensation as distinct objects.6 Viewed in a Kantian light, Hegel could be seen as another representative of the philosophical tradition that Jacques Derrida critiques for grounding consciousness in a stable conceptual

Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 164. 3 Ibid., 165. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 “For if we can show that even our purest a priori intuitions yield no knowledge, save in so far as they contain a combination of the manifold such as renders a thoroughgoing synthesis of reproduction possible, then this synthesis of imagination is likewise grounded upon a priori principles; and we must assume a pure transcendental synthesis of imagination as conditioning the very possibility of all experience” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965], 133). 2

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realm. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida writes that the “Western tradition” reassures itself with the idea that “the order of the signified is never contemporary, is at best the subtly discrepant inverse or parallel—discrepant by the time of the breath—from the order of the signifier.”7 Hegel’s thought experiment could be read in just this way, as proof of the non-­contemporaneity between the concept now, which would exist all at once in the mind, and the word now, which would require “the time of the breath” to be said or the time of the scrivening to be written down—in Kittler’s terms, the difference effected by the ontologist’s lips between now and the Now. The concept would be the universal now that “is indifferent to what happens in it” and therefore includes this now and then another now and another, even though the moments described by the now have changed.8 This would be one way to understand what Hegel means when he writes that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”9 As in Kant, the truth of the heterogeneous elements would depend not only on the Substance of those elements but equally on the Subject who provides conceptual stability to otherwise transient sense impressions.10 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 18. The phrase “at best the subtly discrepant inverse or parallel” suggests that Derrida is thinking of Hegel’s configuration of the conceptual realm which, as we shall see, is made up of a supersensible world and its inversion. 8 Hegel, Phenomenology, 60. 9 Ibid., 10. 10 In Hegel’s Idealism, Robert Pippin reads Hegel as agreeing with Kant on this point. For Pippin, “[Kant and Hegel] thus agree that, contrary to the rationalist tradition, human reason can attain nonempirical knowledge only about itself, about what has come to be called recently our ‘conceptual scheme,’ and the concepts required for a scheme to count as one at all” (Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 8). Pippin’s work provoked a flurry of responses. Terry Pinkard, for instance, prefers to see Hegel as a category theorist: “Thus, in Hegel’s eyes, what is important in Kantian philosophy is not its attempt to derive everything from the conditions of self-­consciousness, but its attempt to construct a self-­subsuming, self-­reflexive explanation of the categories” (Terry Pinkard, “The Categorical Satisfaction of Self-Reflexive Reason,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain: 8). Kenneth Westphal charges Pippin with overlooking Hegel’s realism, arguing that Hegel “aims to show how categorical conceptions can be spontaneously generated, and then revised or rejected, in the face of experience, even though they are not abstracted from experience” (“Hegel, Idealism, and Robert Pippin,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33 [1993]: 272). Robert Stern provides a recent overview of the argument and offers his own rather Platonist reading. “Hegel’s Idealism, in other words, amounts to a form of conceptual realism, understood as ‘the belief that concepts are part of the structure of reality.’ However, none of this implies that Hegel is an idealist in the modern (subjectivist) sense of claiming that the world is mind-­ dependent, for individuals can be understood to be instantiations of ‘such universals, ideal entities,’ which then in turn explains how such individuals are accessible to minds, without the need for this subjectivist turn” (Robert Stern, “Hegel’s Idealism,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008], 173). 7

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Viewing Hegel this way, however, creates a bias on behalf of the Subject. Substance finds its truth in the Subject, but not vice versa—or only to the limited degree that empirical sensations render the categories of understanding visible—and thus, there would be an unequal equality between Subject and Substance. The truth of Substance would be found not equally but exclusively in the Subject. If everything intelligible in what I experience is an effect of my mental apparatus, then the apparatus seems to drape a veil over the object, making it impossible to know it on its own. We would conclude then, as Kant does, that “we can therefore have no knowledge of any object as thing in itself [Ding an sich], but only in so far as it is an object of the sensible intuition, that is, an appearance.”11 Hegel addresses this issue broadly in the “Introduction” to the Phenomenology, where he rejects the idea that cognition operates as some sort of instrument or medium. However, rather than refuting Kantian notions of conceptuality in Kantian terms, Hegel takes it as his goal to show the development of conceptuality, that is, “to provide the Notion [Begriff],” which he does over the course of the first three sections: “Sense-Certainty,” “Perception,” and “Force and the Understanding.”12 The third section contains Hegel’s full elaboration of this problem, the clearest picture of the revision of Kantian conceptuality, which he achieves by placing historicity at the heart of logic. Hegel’s revision of Kantian conceptuality results in a more fundamental change than saying simply that ideas have a genealogy—the way, for example, that certain discourses can be traced to their antecedents. His revision shows instead that the conceptual realm is fundamentally never self-­same, and that, therefore, logic is not logically prior to consciousness; rather, the historicity of consciousness is the seed of logic.13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 27. Hegel, Phenomenology, 48. “Instead of troubling ourselves with such useless ideas and locutions about cognition as ‘an instrument for getting hold of the Absolute’, or as ‘a medium though which we view the truth’ [. . .] instead of bothering to refute all these ideas, we could reject them out of hand as adventitious and arbitrary” (Ibid.). 13 In The Science of Logic, Hegel writes that the reason traditional discussions of logic have been so “spiritless” is that “its determinations are accepted in their undisturbed fixity,” a fixity which he compares to mathematical calculation: “When one mechanically calculates that three-­fourths multiplied by two-­thirds makes one-­half, this operation contains about as much and as little thought as estimating whether in a logical figure this or that syllogism applies.” He goes on to write that “For the dead bones of logic to be quickened by spirit and become substance and content” it needs to find its proper method. For an example of this method, he refers readers to the Phenomenology, writing that there he “presented an example of this method with respect to a concrete object, namely 11 12

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Rather than duplicitous, then, Hegel’s “feigned innocence” is a paradigmatic instance of the irony inherent in temporality: what his words appeared to mean at first turns out to be quite different from what they mean in retrospect. Given time’s ironic structure, Hegel sets out to write a philosophy grounded in the tension between that which persists and that which does not, between what changes and what remains—in other words, a philosophy sensitive to history’s materiality. Thus, Kittler’s accusation that Hegel lied because neither Faust nor Mephisto vanished is unjust since one of Hegel’s chief concerns in the Phenomenology is persistence in change, or, in his terms, sublation [Aufhebung]. Sublation inflects such binary opposites as true and false with intermediate connotations, fresh and stale, that have their origin in materiality. While Kittler critiques Hegel for not attending to the material archive, the tenaciousness of his Kantian understanding of transcendental truth leads him to deny the intermediacy that Hegel offers as a solution to the ironies material persistence presents. Without an attention to how consciousness develops out of and in relation to the mechanisms of historicity, Kittler’s apt attention to material persistence falters, distorting Hegel’s portrayal of the relationship between Subject and Substance. Positioning himself as a spokesperson for the material side of conceptuality—its inscription as an object and the system that determines the material form of that inscription—Kittler accuses Hegel of celebrating the Subject’s freedom from the object, without attending to the fact that for Hegel freedom originates in the Subject’s interaction with Substance, that materiality’s capacity to become something other than what it was provides the necessary conditions for the Subject to go beyond itself.14 consciousness. At issue there are shapes of consciousness, each of which dissolves itself in being realized, has its own negation for result—and thereby has gone over to a higher shape. The one thing needed to achieve scientific progress [. . .] is the recognition of the logical principle that negation is equally positive, or that what is self-­contradictory does not resolve itself into a nullity, into abstract nothingness, but essentially only into the negation of its particular content; or that such a negation is not just a negation, but is the negation of the determined fact which is resolved, and is therefore determinate negation [. . .]. Because the result, the negation, is a determinate negation, it has content” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 32–3). 14 Hegel recursively builds an ever more complex conceptual mechanism out of modular elements, which, he takes pains to show, are not stable building blocks but historically dynamic exchanges. For a discussion of the implications of this method for the structural unity of the Phenomenology, see Jon Stewart, “Hegel’s Phenomenology as a Systematic Fragment,” The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 91.

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To avoid being misled by Kittler’s accusations requires understanding the implications of Hegel’s revision of Kantian conceptuality on both sides of his double-­sided account of history, first following his revision from the side of the Subject, and then using that revision to tease out a response to the challenge that material persistence presents by examining history from the side of Substance. My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I trace Kant’s career-­ spanning attempt to reconcile history and his noumenal account of human freedom. Second, I extend Hegel’s revision of Kantian conceptuality by showing its implied revision of the relationship between history and freedom from the side of the Subject. Third, I return to Kittler to consider the relationship of the document to history and the implications of Hegel’s revision for the side of Substance. With these three sections, I argue that a more accurate and flexible conception of history becomes visible by attending to the minimum conditions of historicity and that the most useful and capacious conception of history is history understood as that which persists into the future. § Written between the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” draws a distinction between human actions and the freedom of the will that mirrors the division between appearances and the things-­in-themselves. “Whatever conception of the freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will’s manifestations in the world of phenomena, i.e. human actions, are determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event.”15 In the Critique of Pure Reason, the division of phenomena from noumena created a space for the possibility of transcendental freedom. It did not, however, provide evidence of that freedom. It only showed that freedom was not incompatible Kant, “Idea for a Universal History”, 41. In the preface to the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant describes the distinction as follows: “The union of causality as freedom with causality as natural mechanism, the first of which is established by the moral law, the second by the law of nature, and indeed in one and the same subject, the human being, is impossible without representing him with regard to the first as a being in itself but with regard to the second as an appearance, the former in pure the latter in empirical consciousness. Otherwise a contradiction of reason with itself is unavoidable” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 5n).

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with natural law.16 With freedom isolated as the noumenal in-­itself of the will, the phenomena of human acts, like all natural appearances, would be determined by and adhere to mechanistic laws. Observing these acts in history, Kant suggests, one may hope to find evidence of transcendental freedom in its phenomenal manifestation. [History] allows us to hope that, if it examines the exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions. In the same way, we may hope that what strikes us as confused and fortuitous may be recognized, in the history of the entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original capacities.17

It is not immediately apparent how viewing human action on a large scale would necessarily provide any insight. On the contrary, one might expect the aggregate of freely willed actions to yield no pattern at all, that precisely a lack of a pattern might be considered as evidence that the individual actions were freely willed. Kant forestalls such worries by suggesting that the shift in perspective from the individual to the historical yields only hope rather than knowledge—consequently much of the essay operates in the conditional or the subjunctive. In fact, it yields two hopes, which Kant places in an analogous relationship to each other, letting the phrase “in the same way” stand at the head of the essay like a postulate, neither specifying the grounds nor the extent of the analogy. Thus, Kant can place limits on philosophical certainty—saying philosophers “cannot assume that mankind follows any rational purpose of its own in its collective actions”—without severing the link (however indefinite) between natural causes and free actions, since a philosopher can still “attempt to discover a purpose in nature behind this senseless course of human events, and decide whether it is after all possible to formulate in terms of a definite plan of nature a history of creatures who act without a plan of their own.”18 The second hope—that our species naturally develops its capacities as history In the solution to the third antinomy, Kant writes, “In its intelligible character (though we can have only a general concept of that character) this same subject must be considered to be free from all influence of sensibility and from all determination through appearances. Inasmuch as it is noumenon, nothing happens in it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determination in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 469). 17 Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 41. 18 Ibid., 42. 16

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unfolds—becomes primary, as the analogy allows evidence that supports the second to tacitly support the first. Looking to provide that evidence, Kant develops a teleological argument, proposing that natural capacities must be capable of full development, and that the human capacity for reason can only be developed through the incremental improvements wrought by collective achievement.19 Together these two propositions identify a natural rationale for the progression of the species, and, in doing so, bolster the hope that there may be a “regular progression among freely willed actions.”20 This line of reasoning carries through to the end of the essay, where Kant suggests that a philosophical history could be founded on this analogy and the inference it enables. If it can be assumed that nature is lawful rather than chaotic, then it aims at a “purposeful end, even amidst the arbitrary play of human freedom,” and the possibility of a purposeful ordering may then “serve as a guide to us in representing an otherwise planless aggregate of human actions as conforming, at least when considered as a whole, to a system.”21 While it makes intuitive sense that teleology would be the centerpiece of an essay arguing for the necessity of a philosophical history, the essay’s teleology subordinates human freedom to a natural order, and because Kant’s primary definition of freedom is freedom from empirical laws, his subsequent moral writings increasingly move away from propositions based on natural teleology. In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, the teleological argument plays a limited but crucial role, supporting the existence of a free will. Because, according to Kant, practical reason is an imperfect guide to self-­satisfaction (compared to natural instinct), and because nature is purposive, imperfect practical reason must have some more-­perfect purpose. “Its true function must be to produce a will that is good, not for other purposes as a means, but good in itself—for which reason was absolutely necessary—since nature has everywhere else gone to work purposively in distributing its predispositions.”22 In “Idea for a Universal History,” this production of a will, good in-­itself, takes place over the course of history, is achieved by the forces of social antagonism, 21 22 19 20

Ibid. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 52. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, revised by Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21.

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and leads eventually to a more perfect social union. However, Kant also registers his discomfort with the argument from natural teleology on account of its implied progressivism, writing that it “remains disconcerting [. . .] that the earlier generations seem to perform their laborious tasks only for the sake of later ones.”23 Such an implication is “as necessary as it is puzzling,” since earlier generations would act as a means specifically to produce a will that must not be a means.24 Kant’s discomfort with such a conclusion leads him to reverse course and assert that the will, in fact, does not need to be developed over time—“it already dwells in natural sound understanding and needs not so much to be taught as rather just to be brought to light”—and later, in the Critique of Practical Reason, it leads him to derive the freedom of the will through a wholly different argument.25 No longer is nature’s purposiveness mustered as evidence that practical reason must be an asset rather than a deficiency. Instead, Kant argues that our awareness of a moral law—a law that provides reasons for action that run contrary to our empirical impulses—can be taken as proof of a transcendental freedom. Because the practical existence of the moral law makes us aware of our freedom from empirical conditions, he calls the moral law the ratio cognoscendi of freedom, “for had not the moral law already been distinctly thought in our reason, we should never consider ourselves justified in assuming such a thing as freedom.” However, freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law because “were there no freedom, the moral law would not be encountered at all in ourselves.”26 The Critique of Practical Reason posits the objective reality of a pure will, a will free from its empirical desires, without any appeal to natural purpose.27 Bracketing out historical change, however, does not mean bracketing out the social dimension of freedom. In fact, the opposite is true. The further Kant 25 26 27 23 24

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 44. Ibid. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 23. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 4n. “The objective reality of a pure will, or what is the same thing, a pure practical reason is given a priori in the moral law [. . .]. In the concept of a will, however, the concept of a causality is already contained, and thus in the concept of a pure will there is contained the concept of a causality with freedom, that is, a causality that is not determinable in accordance with the laws of nature” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 48).

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moves from the teleological argument, the closer he approaches social accounts of freedom. The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals acts as a pivot, with its several reformulations of the categorical imperative taking on increasingly social inflections. Kant modifies the first formulation—“act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”—almost immediately.28 Since the universality of the law according to which effects happen constitutes that which is actually called nature in the most general sense (according to its form), i.e. the existence of things in so far as it is determined according to universal laws, the universal imperative of duty could also be expressed as follows: so act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.29

The term nature, here, shimmers between its two meanings. On the one hand, the reformulation suggests that we show our freedom from empirical nature by acting as if our rationale were to become natural law.30 On the other hand, the term nature seems to refer, not to the empirical world, but rather to our nature, since human nature is split between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between the sensible and the intelligible, between “what happens” and “what ought to happen.”31 The dual nature allows Kant to isolate “the relation of a will to itself, in so far as it determines itself merely through reason,” separating it out from “everything that has reference to empirical matters.”32 The Groundwork goes on to scrutinize the constitution of freedom in this second half of our nature, taking for its focus what it would mean to universalize an individual’s freedom. Solving the problem of how an individual will can be free from empirical impulses creates an attendant problem: how universalizing a single will functions with regard to the wills of others. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 71. Ibid. One should presumably emphasize the distinction between saying you must act as if your will were the law of nature and as if your will were to become the law of nature. The first case could be confused with saying one must act in accordance with the laws of nature, a formulation that would undo Kant’s primary understanding of freedom as freedom from the empirical, i.e. from the laws of nature. In the second case, we demonstrate our freedom by acting as if we could by our actions usurp the natural law with our own. As we have seen, Kant continued to puzzle over the will’s freedom from natural law, making the problem central to the Critique of Practical Reason. 31 Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 83. 32 Ibid. 28 29 30

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It was a problem that was present all along. To judge according to the categorical imperative whether an act can be universalized, one must assume a certain relationship to other individuals, which is why what began as a discussion of maxims becomes over the course of the Groundwork a discussion of the common nature of all rational beings. Because practical reason is the “objective ground” of the will—which Kant calls its end—every rational being exists “not merely as a means for the discretionary use for this or that will, but must in all its actions, whether directed toward itself or also to other rational beings, always be considered at the same time as an end.”33 The procedure of universalization changes the scope of the argument. It is no longer any given action which may be judged according to the categorical imperative—all actions must be. It is no longer a given individual will that may be considered an end in itself—all wills must be. An individual will’s relation to itself has slipped into a will’s relation to practical reason in general, which must “hold equally for all rational beings.”34 Thus, what Kant calls “the supreme condition of [the will’s] harmony with universal practical reason”—namely, “the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will”—contains a numerical ambiguity.35 The phrase “the relation of a will to itself ” can no longer be considered as limited to a given individual will. Every rational being must be in a harmonious relation to practical reason, a faculty shared in common by all individuals.36 Thus, the itself in the phrase “the relation of a will to itself ” becomes not a relation to its self per se, but a relation to its humanity, not an individual but a collective nature. Such a shift threatens the role the itself plays as the ground that secured an individual’s freedom—how can one consider the will to be in relation to itself if it is actually in relation to a collective logic? 36 33 34 35

Ibid., 83, 85. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 83. Just as in the Critique of Pure Reason, where he imagines the transcendental unity of apperception as securing a tripartite unity—a unity of the individual as a self, a unity across individuals who equally are selves, and lastly a unity of these unities, since the faculty that provides the two unities is the same—Kant imagines a similar role for practical reason in achieving a similar unity. In other words, the transcendence in the transcendental unity of apperception is twofold: the unity transcends the moment-­to-moment fluctuations of the subject’s perceptions, and it also transcends any individual subject. It unites the subject, it unites the species, and it unites the subject to the species.

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Kant addresses this conundrum in the Metaphysics of Morals, which tackles the problem—first raised in “Idea for a Universal History”—of how individuals may be considered free in the aggregate. As in his earlier works on morality, he predicates freedom on a split between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, making a distinction between “homo phaenomenon,” an individual as a “natural being,” in whom reason determines actions separate from any consideration of obligation, and “homo noumenon” for whom obligation proceeds from an individual’s freedom; one can be obligated to perform a duty only when one can choose not to.37 Not all obligations, however, are expressions of an individual’s freedom. The obligation must be self-­imposed, rather than imposed by some external power. But the same human being thought in terms of his personality, that is, as a being endowed with inner freedom (homo noumenon), is regarded as a being that can be put under obligation and, indeed, under obligation to himself (to the humanity in his own person).38

With the parenthetical Kant explains that an individual’s obligation to himself means obligation to the humanity “in” his own person. The language of interiority performs important metaphorical work for Kant, reversing the relationship between humanity and individuality, and subordinating the collective to the individual by placing humanity within the boundaries of the individual. If one’s humanity can be said to be somehow inside oneself, it is easier to believe that its edicts are actually one’s own. Of course, since the freedom is noumenal, there is no spatial dimension to the word “inner” here. It can only mean logically inner, as in belonging to its essence. Nonetheless the reversal still holds: to be obligated to oneself is to be obligated to humanity, but only in so far as humanity becomes an essential quality that belongs to each individual, his “personality.”39 Yet, is this essential quality the same for all individuals, as the Groundwork implies when it states that practical reason Immanuel Kant, “Metaphysics of Morals,” Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]), 544. 38 Ibid. 39 “A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under morals laws [. . .]. From this it follows that a person is subject to no other laws than those he gives himself (either alone or at least along with others)” (Ibid., 378). 37

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must “hold equally for all rational beings”?40 If so, in what sense can it be said to be his own, or in his own person? And if not, does the personalization of humanity (as a quality that belongs separately to individuals) divorce it from its initial purpose of universalizing individual actions? Kant’s recourse to an individualized universality, and the incumbent issue of how humanity functions in the aggregate, forms the basis for his discussion of Right, which he defines as “the sum of conditions under which the choice [Willkür] of one can be united with the freedom of the other in accordance with a universal law of freedom”.41 But what kind of unities are the two unities in Kant’s definition? If they are understood in the positive sense, the universalization of each would coincide with the universalization of others and individuals would be partial expressions of a transcendental unity. It would be hard to call such a situation self-­determination: the self would mean society as a whole and therefore also history as a whole, which would reproduce the teleological argument that troubled Kant so many years before. If the unities are considered in the negative sense, however, then each universalization of a given individual need not coincide with other individual universalizations, as long as they do not conflict. Each can remain individual even in its universalization as long as the sum of conditions under which that can happen, Right, is construed as having no positive unity. Section III of the first division of the Metaphysics of Morals suggests that Kant sees Right as involving freedom in both these positive and negative senses. “The concept of freedom is a pure rational concept” of which we can therefore have no theoretical cognition or experience and which holds as a “merely negative principle of speculative reason.”42 However, practical reason’s

Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 83. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 387. About Willkür Henry Allison writes, “Kant uses the term Willkür and Wille to characterize respectively the legislative and executive functions of a unified faculty of volition, which he likewise refers to as Wille” (Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 129). Further, Lewis White Beck suggests that Kant attributes separate kinds of freedom to each. The Wille is autonomous, because it determines itself according to its own laws; while Willkür is spontaneous, able to follow or not follow the moral law or its sensuous inclinations at any given moment (Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960], 199–200). Allison adjusts Beck’s attribution, saying the Wille, as a faculty, may be considered autonomous, but Wille in the narrow, legislative, sense must be considered neither free or unfree (Allison, Kant’s Theory, 132). 42 Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 376. 40 41

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ability to develop principles that hold “independently of any empirical conditions” proves the existence of a pure will and gives us a positive concept of freedom.43 “On this concept of freedom, which is positive (from a practical point of view) are based unconditional practical laws, which are called moral.”44 Kant’s definition of Right holds together the positive application of practical reason with the pure negativity of transcendental freedom. Right unifies an action, tested through a positive application of practical reason against “a universal law of freedom,” not with other acts, but rather with a negativity, “the freedom of the other.”45 It acts as a bridge between the pure concept of freedom—about which nothing can be known—and free actions determined according to categorical (unconditioned) imperatives. Right’s internal tension can be clearly seen in Kant’s changing description of how human freedom acts upon history. Because Kant’s view of what constitutes freedom developed over the course of his work, his view of history changed as well. The early essay, “Idea for a Universal History,” and the later, “A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?’ ” present two different views of history and attribute historical change to different forces. In the early view, history is the phenomenal manifestation of natural laws. Humans are free, but their freedom is noumenal, and therefore, whenever they act, their actions appear to result as directly from natural causes as any other natural phenomenon. By the time Kant wrote “A Renewed Attempt” his view of history reflected the new inflection freedom received in the Metaphysics of Morals. Human freedom as freedom from the empirical is taken as a given, allowing Kant to assert straightaway: “We are here concerned not with the natural history of mankind (as we should be if we asked, for example, whether new races of man might emerge in future times), but with the history of civilization.”46 Vanished is the teleological argument. Kant no longer looks for human freedom in history in “any specific conception of mankind (singulorum).”47 46

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 387. Immanuel Kant, “A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?’ ” Political Writings, 2nd edition, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 177. 47 Ibid. 43 44 45

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Instead, a philosophical consideration of history incorporates an understanding of human freedom as social freedom and history as social history—as “the whole of humanity (universorum), united in earthly society and distributed into national groups.”48 In the later view, human freedom produces history, which supposes that a human may therefore have the “quality or power of being the cause and [. . .] the author of his own improvement.”49 The answer to the question about whether the human race is continually improving requires “a history of future times, i.e. a predictive history,” which is only possible for events whose “a priori possibility suggests that they will in fact happen,” and an a priori history is only possible in cases where the one who predicts the future “produces the events he predicts.”50 Kant takes the empty negativity of transcendental freedom, which is unconditioned by the empirical, and projects it onto the future, which he had previously considered as an entirely empirical result of the present. The future becomes then the product of practical reason and therefore the product of freedom. This same tension in how historical change is understood is visible in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which suggests that change occurs as both the progressive development of an organic unity and as the product of free actions. For Hegel, the progressive unfolding of truth, like the bud, blossom, and fruit, has a “fluid nature [that] makes them moments of an organic unity,” which echoes Kant’s teleological account in “Idea for a Universal History,” that “what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.”51 But Hegel also writes, “Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself,” which like Kant’s formulation in “A Renewed Attempt” posits human history as the production of the future through free action.52 To 50 51

Ibid. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 177. Hegel, Phenomenology, 2. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 41. Kant even goes as far as saying that natural social antagonism causes the change. “By antagonism, I mean the unsocial sociability of men, that is, their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up” (Ibid., 44). 52 Hegel, Phenomenology, 51. 48 49

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see Hegel as inescapably teleological is to subsume the second characterization of history under the first—human action simply manifests the development of Spirit—and to subsume the first under the empirical—history would develop inexorably toward some final law-­bound formulation of itself. But this is not the only interpretation. In fact, such an interpretation must ignore and suppress much of the work of the early sections of the Phenomenology. Since the phenomenal world of appearances, for Hegel, is not divided by an unbridgeable chasm from the noumenal world of the things-­in-themselves—as we shall see, he instead connects the two by embedding difference and change into the conceptual realm—Hegel inserts historicity into the heart of logic. If historicity resides in the heart of logic then freedom does as well. Rather than standing aloof in the unknowable realm of pure negativity, freedom becomes a necessary condition of Being. Thus, we don’t have to choose between an organic history or a free history, because history takes place precisely where our freedom is produced and altered by the organic and at the same time where the organic is produced and altered by our freedoms. To see how this works, a closer reading of the early sections of the phenomenology is necessary. § In each of the first two sections of the Phenomenology, Hegel traces a dialectical reversal—what at first had seemed to be manifestly true proves untrue— illustrating the reciprocal action between Subject and Substance that is the primary mechanism of their mutual foundation. In “Sense-Certainty: or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’,” truth at first seemed to be found in Substance, in the rich unmediated content of our sense impressions. By the end of the first section, however, because of the instability of sensation, truth seems instead to be a function of the Subject. As the section’s subtitle suggests, truth goes from being found in “This” to being found in “Meaning” as we move from simple sensation to consciousness of that sensation and thus are led to perception. Following this first reversal, “Perception: or the Thing and Deception” begins with the truth seeming to be secured, as meaning, by the Subject. However, once perception brings stability to the object, once observation is no longer a chaos of sensation, the object can be seen as a single thing with many attributes. Observing these, the Subject distinguishes between those that are accidental

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and those that are essential. The truth of the object, on account of this second dialectical reversal, no longer seems to exist in the act of perception, but rather in a combination of properties that belong to and define the object, while contingency and error are now ascribed to the perceiving subject.53 The object remains as it is even if it appears momentarily different to the Subject. Letting the grounds of truth oscillate between Substance and Subject, Hegel traces a path from consciousness of a particular sensuous being to the object as a type. Individual instances of an object, understood now as a collection of properties that are necessarily independent of the perceiving subject, imply a type, and the truth of the individual object now seems to rest in its universality. This universality, however, is “afflicted with an opposition” because the type ought to be the object in its essence, its singularity, but what we have instead is a collection of properties. The universal “splits into the extremes of singular individuality and universality, into the One of the properties, and the Also of the free matters.”54 Each property must be simple, otherwise it could itself be broken into its components, and therefore the property has a claim to “singular individuality,” closing itself off as being-­for-self. However, in so far as it closes itself off, it ceases to be constitutive. In so far as any individual property is itself, it is not the object. On the other hand, the Also, the whole collection of properties, seems to be the essence of the object. In so far as the object holds itself together as the unity of its properties—which Hegel takes to calling “free matters”—it is being-­for-self. However, this being-­for-self achieves its unity at the expense of the free matters, demanding that each give up its independence, that each pass through the others, sharing the same place and time. From this point of view as well, the singularity of the object is burdened by its plurality. Hegel points out that while “these pure determinatenesses [the One and the Also] seem to express the essential nature itself, [. . .] they are only a ‘being-­forself ’ that is burdened with a ‘being-­for-another.’ ”55 As being-­for-self, the object “negates all otherness” as if it were self-­identical.56 Yet, if we go looking for the essential unity that underpins this self-­identity, we find relatedness rather than 55 56 53 54

Ibid., 72. Ibid., 76–7. Ibid., 76. Ibid.

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self-­determination. What we actually have is not the object in-­itself, not the internal coherence of the object, but merely two kinds of being-­for-self whose existence is conditioned by another. Even though we have not identified the in-­itself of the object—in Kantian terms we have only appearances—the One and the Also must be and are in fact unified as the object. Perception, which began with the Subject securing the stability of truth, ends with Substance as that which secures the object’s unity, a unity that Hegel refers to as the “unconditioned absolute universality [die unbedingte absolute Allgemeinheit].”57 Because Perception’s examination of the object revealed relatedness in every element rather than essence, the unity of the object seems to reside in the purging of all this relatedness. What is left behind is only what is absolutely necessary—what is absolutely unconditioned— an essence emptied of all appearance. With this unity “consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of the Understanding,” which raises, in turn, a new issue.58 Cut off from the finite world of appearances, the unity of the object is unconditioned by any causal principles that would explain why the object is as it is, why it appears— or in Hegel’s terms expresses itself—as a particular collection of properties.59 Thus having ended the second section with the arrival of the Understanding, Hegel begins “Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World” by stating the problem that the new section faces. Ibid. Ibid., 77. 59 Hegel writes that while, at this moment, “perception now takes the object as it is in-­itself,” the in-itself is “only a sensuous universality” (Ibid.). Because, at this stage, the in-itself lacks an explanation for the object’s internal coherence, the term has an oxymoronic structure: in so far as it is sensuous universality, the universality is characterized as a collection of properties rather than a unity; in so far as it is a sensuous universality, it is characterized by a unity that is at odds with sensuous multiplicity. In The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy, Hegel describes the difference between Reason and the Understanding. “In that the understanding fixes it, it posits the [the infinite] as absolutely opposed to the finite: and reflection, which had elevated itself to Reason in that it sublated the finite, has again degraded itself to the understanding in fixing the activity of reason in opposition. Moreover, it now makes the pretension of being rational even in this relapse” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Difference Between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy, [SUNY Press, 1988], 11). Here, even six years before the Phenomenology, Hegel already contrasts the Understanding as a faculty that freezes/fixes the object, positing the object’s essence (in complete opposition to the finite) as infinite, and Reason as a faculty that sublates the finite, i.e. preserves rather than rejects it. For Hegel, the activity of Reason must go beyond what can be achieved by the Understanding. Conceiving of Reason as a fixed opposition between finite characteristics and infinite (transcendental) concepts is therefore retrograde, allowing the features of the Understanding to rule Reason rather than, as Hegel would have it, have Reason overcome the limitations of the Understanding. 57 58

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If [the unconditioned universal] were to be taken as an inert simple essence, [it] would itself in turn be nothing else than the one-­sided extreme of being-­ for-self, for it would then be confronted by non-­essence; but, if it were related to this, it would be unessential, and consciousness would not have escaped from the deceptions of the perceptual process.60

If this unconditioned universal were a “simple inert essence” [ruhiges einfaches Wesen], if the Understanding were a source of concepts self-­same in their identity, then the thing-­in-­itself would be banished into an untouchable realm. If, as Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, even “space and time are only forms of sensible intuition; and so only conditions of the existence of things as appearances,” then everything that makes the object into an object belongs to the Subject.61 We would be left with a “one-­sided extreme of being-­for-self,” and therefore what the object is on its own without consciousness would be an empty “pure beyond.”62 The empty beyond of the thing-­in-­itself would contain nothing of appearances in order that it could be forever the simple unitary in-­ itself. “This mode of the inner being [of Things],” writes Hegel, “finds ready acceptance by those who say that the inner being of Things is unknowable.”63 In such a case, Substance would completely collapse into the Subject, rendering consciousness simply a daydream that we never shake, a shadow play on a veil hung before the true face of Being. To overcome this impasse, Hegel introduces an examination of Force [Kraft], continuing his elaboration of the object not as simple but as complex, not inert, quiet, or still but active. In the Understanding, this active complexity, this spatial and temporal self-­difference, seemed to be an affliction, a troubling lack of simple unity and an impossible internal contradiction. Force accounts for these contradictions of the perceptual flux (the failure to find stable truth 63 60 61 62

Hegel, Phenomenology, 79. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 27. Hegel, Phenomenology, 88. Ibid. Theodor Adorno describes the difficulty this way: “But there is a deep contradiction running through synthetic a priori judgments. If they were a priori in the strict Kantian sense, they would have no content. They would in fact be forms, pure logical propositions, tautologies in which knowledge does not add anything new or different to itself. If, however, they are synthetic, that is, if they are genuine knowledge and not mere reduplications of the subject, then they need the content that Kant wanted to banish from their sphere as contingent and merely empirical” (Theodor Adorno, “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1993] 66).

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in either the Subject or in Substance) by attributing actuality to that flux. “The movement which previously displayed itself as the self-­destruction of contradictory Notions here has objective form and is the movement of Force, the outcome of which is the unconditioned universal as something not objective, or as the inner being of Things”.64 To account for both the identity of the object and its self-­difference, Force occupies an intermediate category. It is intermediate not only because it mediates between the percipient and the perceived, but also in its structure as difference-­in-identity. As the appearance of the object’s various characteristics—what Hegel calls “the expression of Force”—Force is the difference of identity.65 As the unity of the object—what Hegel calls “Force proper” or Force “reflected into itself”—Force is the identity of difference.66 The unity of Force—its identity-­in-difference—carries difference into the conceptual realm, and creates, out of the unstable fluctuations of the sensuous world, a “supersensible world:” a “permanent beyond” that represents the inner coherence of the formerly unstable object. The supersensible world hovers above “the vanishing present” of the “sensuous world,” where, as “the first, and therefore, imperfect appearance of Reason,” it gives a stable account of change.67 Thus, spatiotemporal difference ceases to be the mark of deceit, failure, and untruth and instead becomes the basis of Reason in the form of a physical law. [Flux] is posited in the inner world [of the object] as it is in truth, and consequently it is received in that inner world as equally an absolute

Hegel, Phenomenology, 83. Hegel’s conception of the difference expressed through force compounds the conflict in the Understanding between being-­for-itself and being-­for-another by showing its doubled application. “At the same time, there would be no difference at all between Force proper which has been driven back into itself, and Force unfolded into independent ‘matters,’ if they had no enduring being, or, there would be no Force if it did not exist in these opposite ways” (82). He calls attention to spatial self-­difference by dividing force into force “proper” (being-­for-itself) and “unfolded” force (being-­for-another); and also to temporal self-­difference by dividing force into enduring being (being-­for-itself) and unfolding being (being-­for-another). The doubleness of the spatiotemporal difference in Force attributes a common root to both conceptual complexity and temporal dynamism. 65 Ibid., 81. 66 Ibid., 83. The intermediate status of Force is twofold: as difference-­in-identity Force accounts for the unfolding fluctuations of appearance, and as identity-­in-difference, Force accounts for how complexity and alteration can be an expression of sameness. Because the actuality of Force lies in its movement, it accounts for the complexity and alterations of the individual object, which had previously been attributed only to appearance, while at the same time having its own unity. 67 Ibid., 87. 64

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universal difference that is absolutely at rest and remains selfsame. In other words, negation is an essential moment of the universal, and negation, or mediation in the universal, is therefore a universal difference. This difference is expressed in the law, which is the stable image of unstable appearance. Consequently, the supersensible world is an inert realm of laws which, though beyond the perceived world—for this exhibits law only through incessant change—is equally present in it and is its direct tranquil image.68

Rationality for Hegel is not as it was for Kant, a realm of stable self-­same concepts organized according to conceptual categories; rather, reason registers persistence in change. Its basic unit is the law—the conceptual counterpart to Force. Rational laws present change as a result, a necessary outcome, and therefore posit an indissoluble unity of disparate moments. However, as the tranquil image of appearance, the supersensible world, the “kingdom of laws” is incomplete. It represents only Force proper, leaving expressed Force stranded in the sensuous world. If the dynamism of Force were only a feature of the sensuous world, if it had no conceptual counterpart, then existence would be split between a sensuous world deceptively constituted as complex and changing and a supersensible world of the true simplicity and permanence. If this were the case, we would not have advanced beyond the “the sophistry of perception,”—which considers appearances to be merely the robes of naked eternal truth. As Force, identity-­in-difference requires difference-­in-identity, and since “the first kingdom of laws” lacks “the principle of change and alteration” it obtains it in what Hegel calls the “inverted world,” a space of freedom from the laws reason uses to describe Being.69 Reason’s laws must be open to alteration because they are not only descriptions of how things are but also how they work, and since that work has effects in the world, since it effects alterations, the laws themselves have to change to account for such newness. Because historicity constitutes the laws themselves, rationality on its own does not resolve into permanence. Identity-­in-difference requires difference-­ in-identity, and therefore, rationality generates laws that, like our understanding

Ibid., 90–1. Ibid., 97.

68 69

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of objects, are open to transformation.70 The historicity that Hegel placed in the earliest moments of Sense-Certainty, in the universality of the now, carries through into the conceptual realm. Thus, Hegel predicates the identity of the object on a conception of difference that is intimately connected to force, and therefore necessarily active, energetic, differing and deferring.71 Tracing the residue of Kant’s transcendentalism in Edmund Husserl’s understanding of historical genesis, Derrida raises a question whose answer we have been following through the early sections of the Phenomenology. If in a scholastic or Kantian perspective, invoking a closed, rigorous formal system, constituted for eternity, the putting in brackets of every historical genesis is authorized, this remains contestable in principle, but coherent. If, on the contrary, logic is pure possibility, open to the infinite, then a concrete becoming of logic has, it seems, to be granted existence and credit. Because this becoming is not empirical, what is its status?72

As we have seen, Hegel’s revision of Kantian conceptuality relies on what Derrida calls the “concrete becoming of logic.” That is, Hegel demonstrates the historical becoming of logic, or, in other words, shows that historicity is the seed of logic. Yet this revision continues to be a concern, as Derrida’s question points out, because it has been difficult to fully register the impact of this For Hegel, Laws participate in the movement of becoming. They go beyond themselves, supersede themselves. Hegel denies that Law is a primordial, a priori unity from which difference flows. Rather, he suggests that in the positing of unity “the division into two moments has already taken place” (Ibid., 100), because to posit unity is to set it apart from difference. Thus, it is not that first there is unity that subsequently falls into difference that then must be overcome/superseded. Rather, Being is the activity of self-­supersession; its two sides are self-­sundering and becoming self-­identical. “The different moments of self-­sundering and of becoming self-­identical are therefore likewise only this movement of self-­supersession; for since the self-­identical, which is supposed first to sunder itself or become its opposite, is an abstraction or is already itself a sundered moment, its self-­sundering is therefore a supersession of what it is, and therefore the supersession of its dividedness. Its becoming self-identical is equally a self-­sundering; what becomes identical with itself thereby opposes itself to its self-­sundering; i.e. it thereby puts itself on one side, or rather it becomes a sundered moment” (Ibid., 101). 71 In many ways, we arrive at a Hegel that looks more like Derrida and less like Kant. Derrida gives the term différance an active sense in two ways: “to differ as discernibility, distinction, separation, diastem, spacing; and to defer as detour, relay, reserve, temporization” (Jacques Derrida. “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 18). See especially Arkady Plotnitsky: “In my view, Hegel’s conception of the inverted world—and even more so the movement of his text—come closer to undecidability or aporia, and thus to deconstruction, than to complementarity” (Arkady Plotnitsky, In the Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993], 213). 72 Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 46–7. 70

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revision on either logic or history. Logic cannot undergo such a radical revision without a similar revision of history. That is to say, asking the question “Because this becoming is not empirical, what is its status?” we remain Kantians, demanding that the freedom to become be structured as Kant structures freedom, that is, freedom from the empirical, restricted to a noumenal space of pure possibility. If the concrete becoming of logic continues to be bound to the empty negativity of noumenal freedom, the question “what is its status?” remains unanswerable (or at best tautological). Instead, we need to understand that logic is open to the infinite—that is free—only in the Hegelian sense, in which infinities are inherently unstable in so far as they are simple (because such simplicity denies the complexity at the heart of the simple itself).73 For Hegel, freedom exists in the structure of being, in the way that identity is predicated on difference. There need not be an infinite storehouse of untouchable freedom, if freedom, as Hegel suggests, is the activity of difference itself, the action that takes place as identity-­in-difference and difference-­inidentity. § Having seen how, for Hegel, historicity structures logic, and therefore having seen from the side of the Subject how the historicity of Substance conditions the rationality of the Subject, we are now in a position to reverse our point of view and consider historicity from the side of Substance. We return to the questions Kittler raised about Hegel’s thought experiment with an understanding that just as consciousness is historical even at its most rudimentary stage, so too Hegel’s document is equally predicated on difference and therefore equally historical. Hegel’s thought experiment reveals the fundamental necessity of

As such, swapping a closed eternal formality for an open infinitude would be to prefer one side of infinity over the other side, which truly are one and the same. “We see that through infinity, law completes itself into an immanent necessity, and all the moments of appearance are taken up into the inner world. That the simple character of law is infinity means, according to what we have found, (a) that it is self-identical, but also in itself [i.e. in its essence] different; or it is the selfsame which repels itself from itself or sunders itself into two” (Hegel, Phenomenology, 100). Typically, Hegel goes on to present the two sides of this infinity: identity-­in-difference and difference-­in-identity. Infinity as identity-­in-difference, which Hegel calls “simple infinity,” “pulsates within itself but does not move, inwardly vibrates, yet is at rest” (Ibid.). Infinity as difference-­in-identity is “this absolute unrest of pure self-­movement” (Ibid.).

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differences not only between Subject and Substance, but also between the Subject and itself and between Substance and itself. The Subject at the first moment of the thought experiment must be different from the Subject at the second moment, likewise for Substance. Historical consciousness functions as historical only if both Substance and Subject have a mutual independence from each other, and, at the same time, maintain a relationship. Thus a better way to understand Hegel when he writes that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” is that both Substance and Subject are equally dependent on a mediated engagement characterized by both difference-­in-identity and identity-­in-difference.74 Just as this fourfold difference enables a conceptual now to endure as historical on the side of the Subject, on the side of Substance the document is an instance of persistence that registers as historical. Both Hegel and the document separately carry their time into the future. Yet they do so with an intermingled, intermediate separation, in which the two sides exist in a state of dialectical engagement and semi-­autonomy. Not acknowledging this intermediacy, Kittler is lured down a misleading path of thought. The sentence spoken for the record is put into the record—but not without the formulaic concession that writing something down is an act without consequences for truth, or in other words is not an act at all. Such is the logic of a discourse network that never quite drops the pretense of not being a discourse network [Aufschreibesystem].75

He reads Hegel’s statement that “a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it” as an attempt to confer a transcendental status upon writing, since to act without consequences is not to act at all.76 Not registering Hegel’s revision of Kantian conceptuality, he accuses Hegel of promulgating the biases of the period’s discourse network—a network that turns a blind eye toward its material inscription—and consequently of being insufficiently attentive to the material Ibid., 10. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 165. Hegel, Phenomenology, 60.

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forms of history. “The network of 1800 invented an archive in which the data, instead of being solely accessible as such, [. . .] could always be altered.”77 Hegel is in fact suggesting that data is open to revision, but not because it has no material component. Rather, data can be revised because it is neither purely conceptual nor purely material. Precisely because data persists in a material form, it offers the possibility of reshaping our conceptual encounters and therefore of being seen differently. At the same time, data is at the mercy of the material form it takes, which opens it up to material and environmental decay and also to direct alteration. Hegel’s thought experiment addresses what the document’s intermediate status (as thought recorded in matter) implies about the reality of truth. Hegel points out that the irony of temporality requires us to hold together two distinct points of view: on the one hand, writing, precisely because it is a historical act, cannot affect truth, which he supposes transcends the fluctuations of historical becoming; on the other hand, the experiment shows that the truth is no longer correct. In this situation, Kittler claims, two readings are possible. The first, insipid reading takes it as meaning simply a particular time marked by the adverbial “now,” the other speculative reading as determining the essence of the similarly named, substantive category. In the first case the sentence is false during the day, but once was true; in the second case it is entirely false, because categories cannot be dated.78

Kittler dismisses the first reading as insipid and prefers the second, in which the Kantian disjunction between the adverbial now and the substantive category Now renders the sentence Now is night entirely false. Kittler suggests that what the experiment reveals “is the fact that writing and archiving are concrete discursive practices and are fatal to truth.”79 The difference between Kittler’s fatal and Hegel’s stale is telling. In Kittler, as in Kant, nothing of the adverbial (of the phenomenological) survives in the noumenal realm. But for Hegel, the irony is not resolved by restricting truth to one realm or the other. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 161. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 166.

77 78 79

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Rather, the mediation between Subject and Substance introduces intermediacy into and characterizes the conceptual realm. Because history cannot be pure consciousness, it also cannot be pure materiality—neither alone persists as pure. We need a conception of history fundamentally based on the interdependence of consciousness and materiality that is also flexible enough to allow the semi-­independence of the two. We need a conception of history that keeps history from collapsing into consciousness completely, histories that attempt to divine the thoughts behind the words on the page. At the same time, we need a history that does not reverse the problem by denying access to consciousness and positing only a history of objects. Through Hegel’s thought experiment in “Sense-Certainty,” we can see the symmetry between the historicity of the Subject and the historicity of Substance; and through “Force and the Understanding,” we can see that a purely psychological reading of history is both one-­sided and inert and therefore transcendental rather than historical. Together, these pieces allow us to understand that the minimum condition of historicity is the coupled persistence that develops out of the fourfold difference between a non-­self-­ identical Subject and a non-­self-­identical Substance. Truly historical thinking recognizes that it must think history from within history, must return to the way historicity was first shown to be embedded in consciousness, that is to say, when we return to historicity in its simplest form, we understand history as that which persists into the future.

4

Randomness, Romantic Historicism, and Walter Scott On the day James Ballantyne delivered to him the terrible news of their collapsing joint partnership, Walter Scott began his journal entry with the portentous “My extremity is come.”1 He braced himself for the hardships he might soon endure by tracing a brief summary of his life’s course. His romanticizing tendency emphasized his dramatic triumphs and reversals in love and money. Yet the plot of his narrative hardly takes the shape of a bildungsroman, in which successive crises lead to a rational, stable state of maturity superior to the naivety of youth, even if inevitably tinged with nostalgia. Rather, his summary creates the palpable sense of chance muddling and confounding his best intentions and of forces beyond his control driving him on to somewhere he cannot foresee. What a life mine has been. Half educated, almost wholly neglected or left to myself—stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash and undervalued in society for a time by most of my companions—getting forward and held a bold and clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere dreamer—Broken-­hearted for two years—My heart handsomely pieced again—but the crack will remain till my dying day—Rich and poor four or five times—Once at the verge of ruin yet opend new sources of wealth almost overflowing—now taken in my pitch of pride and nearly winged (unless the good news hold) because London chuses to be in an uproar and in the tumult of bulls and bears a poor inoffensive lion like myself is pushd to the wall—And what is to be the end of it? God knows and so ends the chatechism.2 Walter Scott, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W.E.K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 38. Ibid., 42–3.

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The narrative ends in confusion. “And what is to be the end of it?” Scott writes, as he resigns his life to the unknown and offers it, out of exasperation, as a Christian parable of chastened pride. For a man to feel helpless when crushed under the weight of financial ruin is no surprise. Neither, frankly, is it strange for a writer to end up bankrupt. Scott’s crisis is not unique. However, it is instructive as an instance in which a writer of historical fiction, heir to a Scottish Enlightenment tradition that viewed history as progressively developmental, had to face the apparently irrational forces that disrupted the progress of his own life. In the months that followed his first inkling of ruin, Scott learned how extensive his obligations were and how his collapsed financial partnership would shape the days of his life going forward. If it came to it, Scott asserted, he would apply for sequestration, the path that he would have recommended to a client in his position and which would have discharged his debts at the rate of approximately seven shillings on the pound. Scott hoped, however, that his creditors would agree instead to the establishment of a private trust through which, over time, he could fully repay his debts with the revenues of his subsequent literary productions. The decision to turn over his future profits to his creditors, rather than rebuilding his own wrecked finances, was ostensibly a matter of honor. Were he to choose sequestration he felt that he would “in a court of Honour deserve to lose his spurs.”3 He preferred to become, in essence, an indentured servant—or in his own chivalric terms a “vassal”—to his creditors. Scott’s self-­presentation—as a Baronet whose principles of honor are worth preserving precisely because they are out of step with the modern forces of commerce—resurfaces in Edgar Johnson’s biography of Scott, written in the early decades of what Evan Gottlieb calls “the current renaissance of Scott criticism.”4 Johnson not only affirms Scott’s self-­styled code of valor—“But still more, he felt in his heart, it was the course that honor dictated”—he amplifies it: “His demands upon himself in adversity were loftier than those of an ordinary man of the world.”5 Similarly, W.E.K. Anderson, who edited Scott’s Ibid., 68. Evan Gottlieb, “Critical Backgrounds,” Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels (New York: The Modern Language Association of America: 2009), 5. 5 Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 962, 971. 3 4

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journal, suggests that Scott “could not take advantage of [sequestration] without sinking himself for ever, in his own eyes and in the eyes of his friends, to the level of a shopkeeper.”6 In these readings of the crisis, Scott’s decision results from a clash of values, with his prejudice against trade (grounded in a putatively more primitive agrarian mode of production) conflicting with the vicissitudes of modern capitalism. A more recent biographer, John Sutherland, paints a different picture of Scott’s behavior during the crisis. For Sutherland, Scott is not a tragic figure, sentimentally holding on to outmoded ideas of agrarian honor. Rather, Sutherland points out that Scott used the incredible popularity of his writing to secure strongly favorable terms with his creditors. He speculates that sequestration might actually have been less desirable because “[Scott’s] sons’ (and possibly his son-­in-law’s) careers might well have been injured, as well as Anne’s marriage prospects.”7 Because Scott acted heartlessly toward some of the parties caught in the crisis, Sutherland concludes that he behaved more like a shrewd lawyer than a sentimental Baronet. Thus, for Sutherland, self-­interest prevailed over sentimentality rather than the reverse, and Scott’s self-­ presentation was a romantic fiction. Setting aside tone and rhetoric, the difference between Johnson and Sutherland amounts to differing judgments about the strength of Scott’s shrewdness relative to the pull of his sentimentality. Because there are several factors involved (Anderson also points out that because Scott had bequeathed Abbotsford to his son as part of a marriage deal, some people might conclude that he had done it to protect his major asset from his creditors) the interrelation of the various motives requires an account of how individual factors participated in his decision. But could we expect that account to be deterministic? Does it make sense to give an account that declares one factor— shrewdness, sentimentality—to be the deciding factor, as if there were one dominant characteristic that constrained the fluctuations of competing influences and created a linear, causal pathway from motivation to decision?

W.E.K. Anderson, “Introduction,” The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W.E.K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), xxv. John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 301.

6

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A closer consideration of the financial background of the crisis helps lead us to a more nuanced understanding of the Scott’s self-­representation, and, by extension, his representation of the mechanisms of historical change. Matthew Rowlinson explains how, in eighteenth-­century Scotland, because of the small amount of circulating coin and the inexpediency of paying in specie, financiers issued and received bills of exchange as payment. These financial instruments, usually backed by goods, functioned in part like checks, drawn up in one place to be redeemed in another, and in part like bonds, payable at some date in the future. Thus, they could also be bought and sold on the secondary market, where they traded like currency futures, representing the relative strengths of specific local markets. When Scott’s publisher, Archibald Constable, paid him his advance, Scott took the bill of exchange to a bank where it could be cashed, minus a discount the bank took as interest. However, in endorsing the bill over to the bank, Scott became liable for the amount if the publisher could not pay. Thus, as Rowlinson explains, “because the medium of his payment for the Waverley novels involved him in obligation, he carried out his bill transactions by proxy to hide the extent to which the credit of Sir Walter Scott was involved in the hazards of trade.”8 Normally, as bills of exchange circulated, they became more secure because they were backed by the fortunes of each person who, in order to the sell the bill, endorsed it. However, these serial endorsements made it difficult to calculate any given individual’s liabilities because each bill involved him “in an indeterminate series of future transactions and obligations” and created the potential for cascading failures.9 In addition, Scott and his cadre used a second type of financial instrument, known as an “accommodation bill,” which knitted together even more tightly and precariously the financial interests of the associated printers and publishers. To raise capital with an accommodation bill, one company made out a bill of credit to the second for a certain amount. In return, the second company made out an equal and offsetting bill of credit. An accommodation bill was not backed by goods, but only by the offsetting bill, and therefore, when either bill was cashed or resold (and sometimes both were) both parties became liable for Matthew Rowlinson, Real Money and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 94. Ibid., 95.

8

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each bill. By the end of 1827, Scott’s private debt was calculated as £20,066 and his total liabilities as £120,899, with the caveat that, as Johnson notes, a “considerable part of this grand total was represented by accommodation bills for which all three parties were responsible.”10 Although this financial instrument is implicated in the crisis, it was not its sole condition. Scott’s business deals were also embedded in London’s extensive financial markets. Sutherland writes, “Overshadowing everything in 1825 was the volatile British economy. The year saw one of the country’s periodic manias, a frenzy of commercial bubbles and over-­optimistic speculation,” and gives as one example Hurst & Robinson—a publisher connected to Scott’s partner, Constable— which sank £100,000 trying to corner the market in hops.11 While Sutherland emphasizes the irrationality of the crisis—it was a “mania” and a “frenzy”— Alex J. Dick argues that “The 1825 panic was caused by neither delusory investment nor imperialist autocracy but rather by a series of institutional adjustments that helped turn Britain from a centralized war economy to a decentralized peace economy.”12 While there were examples of delusionary investments, Dick argues, the true source of the problem was the variety and vastness of much smaller more rational investments. “The real cause of the panic was not credit itself, but its ready availability in small diversified portions.”13 Although Dick emphasizes the rational over the irrational, the shrewd over the deluded, he also relies on a generalized character, a summation of effects, which then can be diagnosed as being at fault. “Collectively, however, these individual transactions added up to far more activity than could be conceived within the terms of a ‘national economy,’ that is, the domestic foundation on which most people based their confidence in the financial system.”14 With the figure of the “national economy,” Dick suggests that there was a preexisting threshold of economic activity beyond which a failure of confidence would occur. The term “national economy,” however, applied to the Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, 968. For a breakdown of the liabilities, see Anderson, “Introduction”, xxiv. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, 284. 12 Alex J. Dick, “Walter Scott and the Financial Crash of 1825: Fiction, Speculation, and the Standard of Value,” Romanticism, Forgery, and the Credit Crunch, ed. Ian Haywood, Romantic Circles: Praxis Series (February 2012, ), ¶pg9. 13 Ibid., ¶pg11. 14 Ibid. 10 11

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intermingled, semi-­independent economies of England and Scotland, reveals how problematic the aggregation of economic activity is. Rephrasing the problem of aggregation in terms of Niklas Luhmann’s work in systems theory, we notice that not only does the instability of the aggregate “national economy”undermine the distinction between system and environment, it also prompts renewed scrutiny of the question Luhmann formulates: “how does the difference between system and environment re-­enter the system?”15 That is, if we do not assume that there is an aggregate national economy distinct from its environment, and instead concentrate on the instabilities inherent in re-­entry, we will be better able to account for how the rational activities within a given system can produce a systemic crisis. One does not have to assume that it was only rational interests in the aggregate that caused the crisis: even if each individual transaction were to be rational, it is not clear that these transactions interact in completely rational ways. Like an individual’s intermingled personal motivations, the interrelation of capital markets requires an account of how separate factors participated in the crisis, an account that does not break down into a hard opposition between the rational and the irrational, shrewd and deluded, as if the actions flowed from a single stable system. In the second volume of Theory of Society, Luhmann distinguishes “between system-­environment relations and system-­system relations.” For Luhmann, emptiness characterizes system-­environment relations: “a system, that is to say, the inside of the form of ‘system,’ faces an ‘unmarked space’ [. . .], which cannot be accessed or indicated—except as empty—from the system.”16 Juxtaposing a system with empty negativity allows Luhmann to give independence to the system and avoid a universal relationship between systems, a final system of systems, that would operate deterministically and be at odds with his assertion of a system’s autopoesis.17 In system-­system relations, on the other hand, a Niklas Luhmann, “System as Difference,” Organization 13.1 (January 2006), 52. Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 2, trans. Rhodes Barrett (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 10. 17 See Luhmann’s use of empty negativity in his refusal to attribute finality and completeness to his conception of society as a system: “Keeping silence silent remains the precondition for the combination game of signs that uses its own distinctions. As we see, it is a question of producing difference through indifference. The only functioning distinctions are not the final distinction, not even if they add up to the distinction between system and environment” (Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 1, trans. Rhodes Barrett [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012], 107). 15 16

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given system “cannot cross its boundaries operationally” but it may “indicate” and “observe” the “specific states of affairs” in another system.18 It is not clear, unfortunately, how these claims function with regard to his earlier dynamic description of system-­system relations: “This sets off enormous dynamization, almost explosive reactive pressure, against which single subsystems can protect themselves only by erecting high thresholds of indifference.”19 If there is no operational crossing, there is no “explosive reactive pressure” and no need for “erecting high thresholds.” In this chapter, I attempt to resolve Luhmann’s ambivalence by arguing that we can bring greater clarity to the problems of history and historical change by conceiving of chance, not as an unknowable emptiness or negativity, but rather as the interaction of relatively autonomous semi-­deterministic systems. Doing so, I use the technique of mediation to collapse the system/environment dichotomy. Collapsing the dichotomy and defining all interactions as system-­to-system relations is only viable if we can preserve the independence of the systems that Luhmann achieved via an appeal to a conception of empty negativity. Redefining chance as I have allows us to understand how it can be that differentiation “necessarily increases both dependence and independence.”20 Both dependence and independence can only increase at the same time if the systems are neither dependent nor independent but rather semi-­independent. Each of the companies involved in the accommodation bill remained functionally discrete, each with its separate interests, each pursuing its own form of business, even as they were potentially implicated in the independent decisions the others might make. Redefining chance as I have allows us to explain how randomness may enter into and potentially disrupt a given situation even under conditions where all parties presume to act rationally. Randomness need not be an unmarked space opposed to rationality. It is not necessarily the antithesis of reason. Rather, the outcome of any given situation becomes the measure of the relative strengths of systems that, in their relative autonomy, were unknowable prior to the event. As with the accommodation bill, the values that pressured Scott were mutually entangled. Thus, we might think of Scott’s pretensions to Luhmann, Theory of Society, vol. 2, 10. Ibid., 4. Ibid.

18 19 20

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agrarian nobility and the financial speculations of his publishing cohort as semi-­independent motives that at times managed to mutually support each other, and at other times threatened to bring each other down. § Walter Scott opens the second volume of Waverley with a stag hunt in which the herd, forced into a narrow pass and provoked by gunshots, charges at the Highlanders. One hunter shouts a warning. The others throw themselves to the ground. Edward, who does not know Gaelic, misses the cue, and Fergus tackles him to keep him from being gored by antlers. Even so, the stampede batters and bruises Edward. The Highland surgeon who doctors him “appeared to unite the characters of a leach and a conjuror.”21 He circles Edward three times, east to west like the sun, and while he lets blood and applies a plaster of herbs, he chants what appear to be prayers or spells. Edward ascribes his healing to the herbs, while the Highlanders credit the spells. It surprises Edward that “even Fergus, notwithstanding his knowledge and education,” believes that the doctor’s spells help cure the ankle. He decides that Fergus either “deemed it impolitic to affect skepticism” or that more probably, “like most men who do not think deeply or accurately on such subjects, he had in his mind a reserve of superstition which balanced the freedom of his expressions and practice upon other occasions.”22 Edward concludes that either Fergus is a canny participant in an ideology that holds no sway over him personally, or he is a naïve subject who confuses ideological mystification for truth. Scott’s biographers have a similar problem: how to read the connection between Scott’s character and the cultural crosscurrents that orient his actions. Each biographer attempts to determine Scott’s relationship to his cultural and historical milieu in order to generalize and stabilize Scott’s various motivations as his character: diagnosing him, variously, as a sentimental dupe or canny manipulator. As Katie Trumpener has shown, the marriage between culture and character in the literary context developed during the interval between Fielding and Scott, when Irish and Scottish national tales began incorporating the historical Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 124. Ibid., 125.

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and cultural peculiarities of their regions. The national tale integrated character and setting by linking culture to characteristic attitudes and behaviors. Using “the textures and local sublimities of peripheral culture, landscape, and speech,” national tales synthesized antiquarianism, nationalist literary culture, and travel literature into a folk mythos from which their characters took their identities.23 As products of retrospectively imagined folk cultures, characters in the national tale were synecdoches of an “unchanging cultural space.”24 Thus, while the national tale created a link between geography and character it did so by treating place as ossified and autonomous, a fount of identity rather than an evolving landscape. By the time Scott was writing Waverley, conceptions about the relationship between culture and character had shifted. Edward Waverley’s personal development acts as an analogy for cultural development. His gradual maturing—tied, as it is, to his decision to renounce his youthful fantasies of heroism and embrace the less grand, less erratic British bravery— makes the argument that societies also mature, inevitably and for their own good. As Ian Duncan notes, Waverley appropriates Adam Smith’s four developmental stages of society: “Scott invested fiction with the imperial logic of Scottish Enlightenment philosophical history, which binds all human societies to a universal scheme of development, from hunting tribes through nomadic herders and farmers to a commercial modernity. ” 25 So

Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 16. Ibid., 142. 25 Ian Duncan, “Waverley,” The Novel: Volume 2, Forms and Themes, ed. Franco Morretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 174. Describing Hume’s influence on Scott’s historiography, Ian Duncan writes that Scott’s novels “share with Hume’s History the ethos of a moderate or conservative skepticism, the combination of Whig narratology and Tory sentiment, the detachment from party faction, the critique of fanaticism, and a recognition of the authority of custom” (Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007], 137). As David Daiches notes, “Scott’s attitude to Scotland [was] a mixture of regret for the old days when Scotland was an independent but turbulent and distracted country, and of satisfaction at the peace, prosperity and progress which he felt had been assured by the Union with England in 1707” (David Daiches, “Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 6 [1951]: 36). See also D.D. Devlin, who writes “The novel is great because Scott can go beyond a full appreciation of what has been lost and can note with equal care its present impossibility and even absurdity” (D.D. Devlin, The Author of Waverley: A Critical Study of Walter Scott [London: MacMillan, 1971], 70); and Julian D’Arcy who argues that “Scott’s novels have thus been continually interpreted as a cathartic assimilation of his sentimental Jacobitism into a pragmatic Hanoverian modernity” (Julian Meldon D’Arcy, Subversive Scott: The Waverley Novels and Scottish Nationalism [Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2005], 16). 23 24

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while the analogy runs in one direction—Edward’s development as a metaphor for cultural development—it is based on a causality that runs in the opposite direction, from the cultural to the individual. Waverley suggests that as nations advance so do their subjects. Less often will they succumb to fickle violence. Instead, society becomes more law abiding in general and therefore more comprehensible. While there would be a loss of heroic vigor—for instance, in the comparison of genteel Edward to the robust Evan Dhu—a putatively more advanced society would produce individuals with their own compensating virtues. Societies, like adults, might look back wistfully on the tumultuous energy of their youths, but they also ought to accept, as Edward does, the rational superiority of maturity. Conceived in this way, an individual’s character flows out of a specific moment in history, where history becomes synonymous with cultural development. As the incident with the Highland doctor makes clear, however, the subsuming of character under ideology exposes the problem that different ideologies may have different designations of cause, and therefore that the ideologically informed rationales of one context may not be applicable in a different ideological context. Edward considers the Highlander’s belief in the power of spells superstitious and his belief in the healing effects of herbs rational. He separates the ideological from the natural: natural causes work on bodies, ideological causes work on thought. The two different kinds of ignorance in the hunting anecdote mark the supposed separation of the spheres. A strict separation would make Edward’s lack of Gaelic merely a cultural ignorance and the Highlander’s medical practices an ignorance of natural causes. The success of natural philosophy thus undergirds the separation of nature from culture and fuels the resultant desire to bring the same causal certainty to the realm of culture and history. If societies can be organized on a scale from primitive to modern according to their relationship to material production, then it might be possible to discover the mechanisms by which cultures reflect their technical relationship to the natural world, and thus to find scientific laws that control the operation of history. In his Lectures on History, Joseph Priestley expresses the scientific ambition to understand history according to predictive laws.

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If we read history like philosophers, we must principally attend to the connexion of cause and effect, in all the great changes of human affairs. We ought never to be satisfied with barely knowing an event, but endeavour to trace all the circumstances in the situation of things which contributed either to produce, or facilitate; to hasten, or to retard it, and clearly see the manner of their operation; by which we shall be better able to form a judgment of the state of political affairs in a future time, and take our measures with greater wisdom, and a more reasonable prospect of success.26

Priestley characterizes the philosopher’s inquiry as a scientific pursuit, as if the philosophy of history had a common methodology with natural philosophy, the goal of both being to craft laws that prove their validity though their predictive power. Priestley imagines that natural philosophy can enlarge its predictive sphere to eventually encompass the cultural and the historical by steadfastly tracing connections between cause and effect. Unlike Priestley, who suggests historical forces might be measured and summed like Newton’s force parallelograms, Scott’s backward glance, like that of the taxonomist, identifies cultural characteristics and historical patterns in order to generalize those patterns. While the methods of each suggest different branches of science, both Scott and Priestley associate truth with the causal certainty of science, and both assume a single causal regime unites the historical and the natural. In Edward’s case, the ideological disjunction results in his assumption that if the Highlanders only thought long and deeply they would awake from their ideological stupor—rather than, for example, generating an even more ideologically entangled explanation. Edward believes that his historically more advanced position is not simply preferable, but that it is true, and therefore, that it replaces the ideological assumptions of the Highlanders. Such a claim to universality, however, which asserts that it is retroactively corrective and also predictive of the future, problematically invalidates past explanations even as it projects its own rationales onto a future it assumes will remain stable. It asserts a retroactive applicability that requires a regime of progressive development. New knowledge is assumed not to refute the old but to modify

Priestley, Lectures on history, 207.

26

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and ultimately incorporate it as a subset of the new. While such stability would be open to progress—science and technology will improve and, thus, putatively society—improvements would occur within an overarching transhistorical causal regime.27 One of the primary metaphors for the unity of history under one causal regime is historical chronology, the importance of which is evident in the priority Priestley gives to the French invention of the timeline, because it “renders visible to the eye [. . .] the whole figure and dimensions of all history, general and particular; and so perfectly shows the origin, progress, extent, and duration, of all kingdoms and states that ever existed, at one view, with every circumstance of time and place, uniting chronology and geography.”28 With this cross-­cultural mapping, the chronicles of disparate nations are arranged to suggest that all nations suffer the same temporal progression. As James Chandler notes, “the advent of the concept of culture in Romantic historicism [. . .] involves the identification of cultural conjuncture in terms of the chronological code.”29 The chronological code maps historical change onto the progression of integers, which, at one and the same time, subordinates historical change to a straight-­line regularity and reveals history’s discontinuities and dislocations. Far from undermining notions of historical law or progress, however, this unevenness has the opposite effect. Rupture is historiographically useful because it allows the retrospective attribution of cause by marking before distinctly from after. Political revolutions become case studies because, as Étienne Balibar writes, “If the right break or breaks are found, history, without ceasing to unfold in the linear flux of time, becomes intelligible as the relationship between an essential permanence

As Marilyn Butler points out, Scott’s belief in the benign progression of history was ideologically flexible enough to speak to the Jacobite revolution of 1745 and also promise hope for a resolution to the Napoleonic wars. “He preached the right lesson for Europe in the years of restoration and reconstruction after 1815. In preaching it he meant to help the gentry to survive, but to do so by wisdom and accommodation and by accepting the irreversibility of history” (Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981], 111). 28 Priestley, Lectures on history, 128. 29 Chandler, England in 1819, 227–8. 27

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and a subordinate movement.”30 Similarly Juliet Shields points out that Scott— like John Galt, like James Hogg—“explored the connotations of revolution as, on the one hand, a dissociative break in a linear teleology of historical progress, and, on the other hand, the regenerative turning of a wheel that has no origin and no end point.”31 The attempt to generate a historical model—whether predicated on laws of causation or based on taxonomical principles—moves the cultural stasis characteristic of the national tale up one level of generality: while individual cultures may undergo change, their order of transitions from one period to another does not, or, as Priestley would have it, once one traces clearly the connections between cause and effect, change occurs according to proscriptive laws. What looks like an account of change turns out to be a second order stasis, another kind of unchanging cultural space. While the criticism generally agrees that Scott responded with ambivalence to the Scottish Enlightenment’s assertion that cultures undergo change, attempting to identify persistent principles that would govern and subdue historical flux, there is less agreement about the location of the essential permanence and the subordinate movement. Like Scott’s biographers, who emphasize either his modern shrewdness or his agrarian sentimentality, some suggest that Scott sees stability and value in the past, some in the present. Trumpener argues, for instance, that Scott portrays Scotland’s violent “entry into history” as a rupture in which the “accretion of time within the stability of

Étienne Balibar and Louis Althusser, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), 205. Bruno Bosteels calls Reading Capital “a formidable group effort to construct this new philosophy [dialectical materialism] which, though never fully formulated as such by Marx nor even by Engels or Lenin, would nevertheless already be at work, in practice, in the scientific theory of Marx himself ” (“Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: Part I. The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?” Pli 12 [2001], 204–5). Bosteels provides the indispensable Althusserian background to Badiou’s use of the term dialectical materialism. “Always marked by the possibility of false departures and sudden relapses, this contradictory processing of the difference between science and ideology, or between materialism and ideology, is key to a proper reconstruction of Althusser’s philosophy; as will likely be the case for the difference between truth and knowledge, or between fidelity to the event and its obscure or reactive counterparts, in the later philosophy of the subject of Badiou: ‘It is not exaggerated to say that dialectical materialism is at its highest point in this problem: How to think the articulation of science onto that which it is not, all the while preserving the impure radicality of the difference?’ From this point of view, the general theory being sought after can be redefined as the theory of impure breaks, using the same principle of unity in difference to articulate not only science and ideology, or truth and opinion, but also theory and practice, base and superstructure, as well as the very distinction between dialectical and historical materialism” (Ibid., 209). 31 Juliet Shields, Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 142. 30

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place gives way to the phenomenological development of places.”32 Likewise, David McCrone et al argue “History is dead; heritage is ongoing and living.”33 Others, emphasizing the trajectory of the bildungsroman, suggest that change and fragmentation were markers of the past and that Waverley results in a presumed stability. Alexander Welsh writes, “I believe that the fable of the Waverley novels was a double one: action and change occur only past times, whereas the relation of things as they stand, enhanced by the prescriptive right to property, is conceived as more or less unchanging.”34 Similarly, James Buzard suggests that “Waverley’s (and Waverley’s) progress is not from romantic fancy to sober fact, but rather from fragmented to unified visions, from ethnocentric first impressions to ethnographic total view.”35 Even as they attempt to locate the source of permanence and the source of change, these readings contain a nuanced equivocation that betrays nearly as much discomfort with their own picture of history as with the ones offered by the other side. In this sense, the paradigmatic reading would be Ina Ferris’s objection to Buzard’s assertion that the movement of Waverley is toward a more mature totalizing view. While she notes that “Scott’s narrative clearly supports [Buzard’s] reading,” she prefers to give more credence to a counter-­ strand in the novel, traceable to the national tale, which, she argues, better accounts for the novel’s “ambiguous edges, moments of opacity, and elusive carnivalesque figures.”36 The dialectical equivocation that underlies these rich and complex readings does not undermine their usefulness. In fact, it is emblematic of our contemporary difficulty in digesting the legacy of Romantic historicism. Thus, when Chandler ends the first part of England in 1819 by

Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 141. See also Susan Manning, who writes, “bildungsroman is complicated by romance’s prerogative to project character and sensibility onto landscape” (Susan Manning, “Historical Characters: Biography, the Science of Man, and Romantic Fiction,” Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011], 242). 33 David McCrone, Angela Morris, and Richard Kiely, Scotland—the Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 162. 34 Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: with New Essays on Scott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 194. 35 James Buzard, “Translation and Tourism: Scott’s Waverley and the Rendering of Culture,” Yale Journal of Criticism, 8:2 (1995): 40. 36 Ina Ferris, “Translation from the Borders: Encounter and Recalcitrance in Waverley and Clan-Albin,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 9.2 (1997): 207. 32

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asserting the persistence of Romantic-­era historicism to the present day, he posits a historicism in which an overarching frame does not preclude moments of difference. Assuming, then, that the case of Romantic historicism remains our own case—the case of those of us who take seriously the interrelation of literature, politics, and culture—we must be clear about what this does and does not mean. It means that we inhabit a frame of reference that has a history of relatively modern vintage, a history that I have partially outlined. It does not mean that we all inhabit it in the same way, nor that various Romantic writers in Britain did when they elaborated its structures and practices.37

While Chandler suggests that our sense of historicism continues to be the Romantic sense—a single “frame” arches over our long-­ago ancestors and ourselves—he takes pains to insert diversity into this commonality.38 We do not all, at this moment, “inhabit” the frame in the same way, nor did the Romantics, in their time, inhabit the frame in the same way. Nonetheless, he scrupulously segregates the diversity in order to preserve an inalienable sameness. They had their diversity; we have ours, and yet we and they are the same. When Romantic historicism asserts its own unending continuation, it assumes its principles to be ahistorical. As Jerome Christensen points out, Scott’s Tory appropriation of Whig historicism is analogous to Francis Fukuyama’s free-­market appropriation of Marxist historical materialism. “Scott’s notorious illiberalism thus paradoxically unfolds a higher liberalism— one in accord with the recognition-­based polity modeled by such post-­historical

Chandler, England in 1819, 264. A similar tension between local diversity and teleological coherence can be seen in Ian Baucom’s reading of Scott’s historiography. Although he argues that the stadialism of Scottish Enlightenment historiography, contra continental Enlightenment, was not “an experience of the synchronization of experience, the reduction of time to a single, dominant base time, a homogenizing, leveling everywhere-­available time of modernity, but the experience of a contemporaneity non-­ contemporaneous with itself, an experience of time as fractured, broken constellated by a heterogeneous array of local regimes of time” (Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History [Durham: Duke University Press, 2005], 281), he also notes that the choice between the “customary and the cosmopolitan” for Scott “is always predetermined” (Ibid.). Baucom’s book offers an alternative theory of history in which time “does not pass, it accumulates” (Ibid., 311), a theory of history in which “in a not-­entirely-Benjaminian fashion, now-­ being accumulates within itself a vast global array of what-­has-beens” (Ibid., 312).

37 38

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liberals as Richard Rorty and Francis Fukuyama.”39 Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is a book-­length extension of Alexandre Kojève’s notorious footnote on “the disappearance of Man at the end of History.”40 For Kojève, Hegel announces the final stage of a history that, spreading outwards geographically, would gradually be universally realized. Amplifying the influence of Scottish Enlightenment stadialism on Hegel and Marx, Kojève’s end of history unites two strands of historicism that Chandler distinguishes: historicism that “has generally been traced to developments on the Continent, and especially to German thinkers such as Hegel” and a “distinctively British” historicism that can be traced to Romantic-­era “comparative contem­ poraneities.”41 Such an amplification exposes the teleological orientation of Romantic historicism’s marriage of national and historical character. The marriage stabilizes transient fluctuations by transforming difference into process. It borrows the notion of a stable character in order to shape historical change as a teleological unfolding. The desire to escape the nationalist, teleological tendencies of Romantic historicism has generated an ongoing critique that, as Valerie Traub points out, has gained increasing urgency as it tries to grapple with “the force of historicism, which has been the field’s dominant (but by no means exclusive) method since the 1980s.”42 In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida critiques Fukuyama’s Kojèvian teleology, especially its positing of a historical model in which current conditions are projected out into the future as inevitable conditions that become diffused over time to other developmentally delayed societies.43 Derrida cites

Jerome Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 174. 40 See especially Kojève’s added “Note to the Second Edition” in which he writes that History after the French Revolution has been “but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the authentically historical point of view, the two world wars with their retinue of large and small revolutions had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the peripheral provinces with the most advanced (real or virtual) European historical positions” (Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Raymond Queneau [New York: Basic Books, 1969], 160). 41 Chandler, England in 1819, xiv. For an account of Hegel’s reading of Adam Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment figures see Hegel: A Biography, pp. 52–3 and 672 n15 and 16 (Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). 42 Valerie Traub, “The New Unhistorcism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128.1 (2013): 22. 43 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 158. 39

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the phrases of Fukuyama that he finds most troublesome. “It is a question of whether a ‘coherent and directional History of mankind’ will eventually lead ‘the greater part of humanity’ as Fukuyama calmly, enigmatically, and in a fashion at once modest and impudent calls it, toward ‘liberal democracy.” ’44 Derrida argues that the future, in order to be truly a future, must be unforeseeable. Were the present a simple result of causation, history would be inescapably teleological. Thus, as “hospitality without reserve,” the future must welcome the possibility that even its core principles may be revised or overturned. In order to think of history as including this possibility, Derrida interjects chance into events.45 He argues that “the condition of the event and thus of history (nothing and no one would arrive otherwise, a hypothesis that one can never exclude, of course) is the impossible itself, and that this condition of possibility of the event is also its condition of impossibility.”46 In other words, each and every historical event, in the time before it happened, was not determined. It had to be only possible and therefore not necessary. There had to be a chance that it would turn out differently, that the possible event would never become actual, that instead some other future would have rendered it impossible. Yet, if the event is predicated upon the impossible, understood as an empty negativity, it becomes linked to the unknowable and the limits of thinking and threatens to create a complete rupture with the past when projected backward. As long as we continue to understand random as synonymous with unknowable, nothing further can be said about how the future enters the present, and this unknowing renders us unable to understand our own relation to the past eras.47 Ibid., 70–1. Ibid., 82. For recent discussions of Derrida’s distinction between futur (a future that can be predicted) and avenir (a future that cannot be predicted) see Richard Klein on Derrida’s articulation of democracy-­to-come and Jonathan Crimmins on “near-­future democracy” (Richard Klein, “Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables” Diacritics 38.1/2, Derrida and Democracy [2008] 173–9. Jonathan Crimmins, “Gender, Genre, and the Near Future in Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre,’ ” Diacritics 39.1 [2009]). 46 Ibid. 47 As Valerie Traub has argued in the context of the queer critique of historicism: “Rather than practice ‘queer theory as that which challenges all categorization’ (Menon, “Period Cramps,” 233), there remain ample reasons to practice a queer historiography dedicated to showing how categories, however mythic, phantasmic, and incoherent, came to be. To understand the arbitrary nature of coincidence and convergence, and to follow them through to the entirely contingent outcomes to which they contributed: this is not a historicism that creates categories of identity or presumes their inevitability; it is one that seeks to explain such categories’ constitutive, pervasive, and persistent force” (Traub, “The New Unhistorcism,” 35–6). 44 45

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A simpler assumption would be to juxtapose the possible not with the empty negativity of the impossible, but rather with the many other possibilities. This simple maneuver, however, is only viable when accompanied by an explanation of why these multiple causes, some of which would be stronger, and some weaker in their effectivity, do not simply interact in a deterministic sense. Reconceiving chance as I have allows us to understand why it is that some futures—for instance the predicted results of scientific experiments, because they are enclosed within a single systematized frame—are quite foreseeable, while other futures, because they participate in more than one semi-­independent system, and because the relationships between the semi-­ independent systems have themselves not been systematized, have not only unforeseen but also unforeseeable results. § When Scott couples Edward’s personal triumph at the ball at Holy-Rood— where his conversational “brilliancy” wins him the admiration of Flora and the delight of Rose—with the political triumph of the Highlander victory over the British forces in the battle that follows, he undermines this fantasy of twin glories by emphasizing its sentimental price.48 Edward stumbles across the mortally wounded John Houghton, his tenant and a soldier in his former regiment, and Houghton’s death leads Edward to wonder whether his touristic enthrallment with England’s enemy has led him to become a foe of his own country. “Am I then a traitor to my country, a renegade to my standard, and a foe, as that poor dying wretch expressed himself, to my native England!”49 Thus, as Ina Ferris argues, Waverley flirts with anti-­social behavior, opening up avenues for liberated desire only to close them down in favor of socially acceptable alternatives. To male readers of its era, it offered, “the satisfaction of emancipation from the necessary restraints of civil society even as it effectually absorbed male subjectivity into those restraints.”50 As political rivals, the

Scott, Waverley, 223. Ibid., 236. 50 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 91. 48 49

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Highlanders had to be defeated, according to Scott, because the discord they fomented was not an expression of legitimate political concern, but was, rather, the violent outburst of an obsolete world. Saree Makdisi points out that the 1745 suppression of the Highlanders in Waverley apologizes for the ongoing repression of the Highland clearances. The novel removes the people of the Highlands from its own pages and from its imaginary production of their space just as they were being removed in a more literal, concrete, material, and abjectly miserable way from their land, from their ancestral homes, from the glens of their clans, all of which were quickly being claimed, purged, and re-­invented by politicians, by economists, by Lowland and English sheepfarmers, and by artists, poets, musicians, and writers, not least Sir Walter Scott himself.51

Scott’s apology attempts to offer a mitigating solution. He suggests that, by relegating the Highlanders’ virtues to the domestic, they can be stripped of political agency and preserved on an equal basis with the values of England. For this reason, Scott is keen to distinguish personal virtues from political virtues: repeated political failures, in the novel, occasion smaller triumphs of nicety and politeness. When the Prince’s lack of political savvy manifests as incompetence and failure, for instance, Scott emphasizes the merits of his character and portrays domestic values as more authentic, more satisfying, and more stable. Similarly, Scott substitutes military honor for military glory— when Edward averts a Highlander’s blow on the verge of killing Colonel Talbot—and disconnects Edward’s personal virtues from the political action of the plot. As Duncan writes, “Military honour glows forth, as an individual and sentimental aura, only at its moment of disconnection from the logic of historical action.”52 It is as if Scott suggests mourning a lost culture could avert the blows of cultural destruction and turn a political loss into an aesthetic gain. Although Scott cordons off cultural values from political succession to preserve them, such a solution is conflicted because Waverley, as we have seen, Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 72. 52 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 74. 51

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also suggests that human character changes over time. As Chandler notes, “In Waverley, the work of characterological inscription by history is arguably the most fundamental process recorded in the narrative.”53 Yet, if character is inscripted into history, if it is a product of history’s warp and weft, it is unclear how at the same time it can be sheltered from the violent stresses that rule the political realm. Duncan calls attention to the problematic duality with which Scott handles the relationship between the individual and the state: for Scott, there is “a homology, a synedochic equivalence” between the nation state and “the sentimental formation of the private individual” and at the same time a “disjunction” and “dialectical contest.”54 Because it moves cyclically from alienation to reconciliation, a dialectic could account for both halves of Duncan’s duality. The disjunction between individual and state and the homology would be separate moments of the dialectic. The emphasis in a traditional dialectic, however, is on how elements of resistance, or those elements which attempt to occupy a space apart, are reinscribed (sublated) to become part of the overall motion of history. Scott’s mitigating solution, however, demands that the personal remain separate as a cultural storehouse. Contemporary critics, who continue to be influenced by Romantic historicism, struggle to reconcile such a space with a dialectical view of history, because in a traditional dialectic alterity is a moment to be overcome (sublated). In such a case, Scott’s solution of cleaving the personal from the political in order to create a separate space for cultural values would be merely aesthetic, an imaginative contrary-­to-fact, a romance rather than a reality. This difficulty persists even if one changes the location of the dialectic. Ann Frey similarly links the individual and the state in a dialectical relationship. “Acting for the state enables them to act as individuals. And in turn, in pursuing their own interests, they solidify the British state.”55 For Frey, however, the dialectic is less a political contest than a result of the market economy. Negotiating prices for competing interests reconciles, for Frey, the individual/ state homology with individuals’ independence. “For the modern state, Chandler, England in 1819, 213. Duncan, Modern Romance, 15. 55 Anne Frey, British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 91. 53 54

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individuals’ well-­being determines the nation’s strength. Indeed, [. . .] the nation can be strong and economically successful only if each individual contributes to the wealth of the whole.”56 Frey’s reading is consistent with Scott’s emphasis on the inevitable hegemony of commercial enterprise. It would posit a Waverley in which the shift from the political to the personal corresponds to a similar shift from the political to the commercial—as Jerome Christensen suggests when he writes “The unseen line of economy [. . .] cuts off the archaic world of the political, where violent usurpations prevail, from contemporary society where change is normal and equivocation routinizes conflict.”57 However, the same difficulty crops up in the commercial realm as it did in the political. If there is a dialectic between the individual and culture, if the wheel of circulation drives historical change, then there would be no way to simply recoup the cultural losses ascribed to inevitable forces of technical progress: like raw materials entering the marketplace, the individual would return to the home refashioned. Andrew Lincoln argues that Waverley does not favor the commercial over the political, but rather treats them similarly, with a shift away from the commercial mirroring the shift away from the political. Just as the motive forces of history are “partly transferred” by Scott, “from the world of political intrigue, over which men formally preside, to the realm of sociability, art, and domesticity, in which women can take a leading role,” so too does he distance cultural transformation from commercial enterprise.58 “Waverley does all it can to disconnect politeness, sociability and taste from the commercial developments that are supposed to promote them.”59 Lincoln’s contrary conclusion returns our attention to the fact that Waverley tries to promote the inevitability of progress and also the virtues of the past. When Lincoln argues that “the economic basis of social improvement is simultaneously acknowledged and disowned,” we can note that any process of improvement—in order to improve rather than arbitrarily change—involves sifting good from bad. All improvement simultaneously acknowledges and disowns. It is not simply the 58 59 56 57

Ibid., 90. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History, 170. Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 59. Ibid.

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fact that Scott lauds both change and also conservation that ultimately proves most interesting, but rather the steps he takes toward thinking through a notion of progressive history that includes a mechanism for the conservation of values. Waverley endorses a contradiction that cannot be satisfactorily explained by a traditional dialectic. Considering Scott’s mechanism of conservation generates a familiar interpretative dilemma: does his solution look backward, relying on an opposition between the political and the personal in which the individual is involved in the dialectic of political succession but also has access to the unchanging fount of a folk identity; or does Scott’s solution look forward to a time when political struggle gives way to a dialectic of the market, in which the interaction of self and other in commercial society disarms conflict by making it routine, negotiable, and quantifiable? These two interpretations are familiar because they pose the two sides of the dilemma that positions Scott as either a nostalgic sentimental Baronet or a shrewd lawyer and entrepreneur. Like a summation of fluctuating motives as character, both interpretations use the techniques of the traditional dialectic to subdue change as second-­order stasis. Following Susan Manning’s influential Fragments of Union—which brought a Humean notion of fragments as “neither simply opposed to union, nor aggregative terms in a sum” to bear on the period’s recognition of the problematic unities of self and nation—critics have begun exploring the role of contingency in Scott.60 In her discussion of The Antiquary, for instance, Alison Lumsden argues that oppositional readings are insufficient because, even though Scott juxtaposes Jonathan Oldbuck’s Enlightenment accounts of the past with Edie Ochiltree’s folk accounts, “the discussion of what discourse actually means and how it in turn conveys meaning in The Antiquary is more complex than these oppositional readings imply. Certainly, there is not just one opposition being offered here, but many.”61 What Lumsden argues with regard to the instability of meaning is also true of value. Antiquarianism has a similarly conflicted relationship to the market. When Yoon Sun Lee argues that as Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 18. 61 Alison Lumsden, Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 93. 60

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“Scott’s own practice on the field of Waterloo shows, antiquarianism, like the marketplace [. . .] saw the value of its objects as depending not only on the cycles of supply and demand but also on broader movements like the decline and collapse of cultures, nations, and empires,” she suggests that the value of the antique is doubly determined by the micro fluctuations of the marketplace and the macro fluctuations of historical forces.62 Acknowledging the possibility of a double determination, however, prompts the idea that an antique’s value might not be simply the product of a double determination—one part folk heritage, one part commerce, or, one part use value, one part exchange—but rather, per Lumsden, that value may be multiply determined by any variety of social forces. In addition to multiple determination, antiquarianism brings a second condition into focus: semi-­autonomy. On the one hand, antiquarianism depends on and participates in economic exchange. It obeys the economic law of supply and demand, in which scarcity buoys value. “There was, it seemed, no peculiar distinction, however trifling or minute, which might not give value to a volume, providing the indispensable quality of scarcity, or rare occurrence, was attached to it.”63 On the other hand, the value of any given antique is created by the object having been removed from its original economic context and stored away, protected from the fate of common commodities. The antique gains its value by holding aloof from circulation and by becoming increasingly alienated from the iterated improvements of market goods. As Lee notes, “obsolescence, scarcity, strangeness, and fragmentation [. . .] are the conditions of antiquarian value.”64 By falling out of step with the goods that circulate in its place, the antique becomes historical to the degree that it slips away from the transformational forces of history. Rowlinson notes that “the central fact about the [antique] is its indeterminacy as an object of value” and that the antique “in general is characterized by the ease with which it can disappear into a miscellany of waste.”65 Thus, the work of the antiquary is to employ historical

Yoon Sun Lee, Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 78. 63 Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 25. 64 Lee, Nationalism and Irony, 104. 65 Rowlinson, Real Money and Romanticism, 70. 62

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acumen to deliver something of value out of otherwise worthless detritus, as in Oldbuck’s exuberant anecdote of “thrice happy, Snuffy Dave” who “had the scent of a slow-­hound.”66 In Holland, Snuffy Dave bought a copy of the first book printed in England for two pence and sold it for £20 and another £20 worth of books. As Trumpener writes, “Antiquaries, then, need the world to be fragmented in order to feel that they have mastered those fragments. They endeavor to contain the past by overwhelming it with their meticulous attentions.”67 While it is true the antiquary practices a craft with a degree of mastery and that the antiquary requires a fragmented past, however, it is not in order to contain the past as, say, a professional historian might wish. Rather, the antiquary uses elements of historical knowledge—even in the absences of an overarching account of history—to revalue the antique. Had the antique circulated continuously in a well-­established market, its value would have been repeatedly confirmed and there would be less need for expertise. Thus, the antiquary is driven toward fragmentation strangeness and eclecticism, not simply because they are markers of scarcity, but also because they are markers of less stabilized, less routine market. Fredric Jameson complains that the developed form of this metaphor— cultural heritage as an elastic, capacious, eclectic ensemble preserved for contemplation and appreciation in a museum—disguises society’s material reality. The museum and its objects become, for Jameson, the metaphor that reveals Western relativism’s approach to its own conceptual limits. “We conceive of our culture, indeed, as a vast imaginary museum in which all life forms and all intellectual positions are equally welcome side by side, providing they are accessible to contemplation alone.”68 Jameson argues that this Western relativist solution is hostile to Marxism because the only way for various beliefs to coexist—“Christian mystics and nineteenth-­century anarchists, the Surrealists and the Renaissance humanists”—is to isolate them from their material realities and treat them as pure thought detached from their socioeconomic conditions.69 Were Marxism simply a philosophy, Jameson Scott, The Antiquary, 24. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 121. 68 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 160. 69 Ibid., 161. 66 67

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argues, it could be easily assimilated. But because it denies the autonomy of thought, Marxism undermines the principal conceptual condition of Western relativism and exposes the prematurity of the relativist’s self-­satisfied tolerance. Conflicted values can be tolerated only as long as they are assumed to have no reality as action, no relation to materiality, no effectivity. “It is therefore the very structure of historical materialism—the doctrine of the unity of thinking and action, or of the social determination of thought—which is irreducible to pure reason or to contemplation.”70 The truth of Marxism, for Jameson, shows itself in the fact that it cannot be isolated from the material conditions of history. It refuses to become merely a cultural artifact. Scott, however, never intended culture’s autonomy from history to render it an occasion simply for thought. Scott imagined the detached, autonomous cultural space would nonetheless have behavioral influence. In fact, his mitigating solution only mitigates if two contradictory conditions hold: that there is not a separation of thought and action, and yet at the same time, there is autonomy. Like the antique, which participates and stands apart, the status of culture is quasi-­ participatory or semi-­autonomous. In a letter to Conrad Schmidt, Friedrich Engels addresses the question of the relative autonomy of the money market. He points out to Schmidt that financial markets can suffer crises “in which direct disturbances of industry only play a subordinate part or no part at all.”71 Engels connects the autonomously generated crises to the division of labor. Where there is division of labour on a social scale there is also mutual independence among the different sections of work. In the last instance production is the decisive factor. But when the trade in products becomes independent of production itself, it follows a movement of its own, which, while it is governed as a whole by production, still in particular cases and within this general dependence follows particular laws contained in the nature of this new factor; this movement has phases of its own and in its turn reacts on the movement of production.72

Ibid. Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, Selected Correspondence: 1846–1895, trans. Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 478. 72 Ibid. 70 71

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The division of labor creates an increasingly segmented economy that encourages the development of separate internal logics, which, alone or in consort, might generate internal imbalances or even crises. Similarly, the museum can be re-­imagined, not as a metaphor for Western culture as a whole, with its tendency to mystify the material conditions of social reality, but rather as a metaphor for one side of this semi-­autonomy. The museum is not simply a place of dead culture and aesthetic impotence. It is the counterpart to the laboratory. When Jameson identifies “Anglo-American empirical realism” as the “dominant ideology of Western countries,” he suggests that its method “consists in separating reality into airtight compartments, carefully distinguishing the political from the economic, the legal from the political, the sociological from the historical.”73 Of course, Jameson does not need to point out that this conceptual separation mirrors the division of labor. His argument is that this separation obscures the interconnectedness. As the natural world becomes divided into ever-­smaller divisions of labor, it becomes more technical, more knowable in its components, more systematized. Both science and capital achieved their hegemony through systematizing. Indeed, increased systematization does result in increased predictive power. At the same time, however, it increases the independence of the separate spheres and increases therefore also the uncertainty and lack of predictability that occurs as a result of the overlapping interrelatedness of the individual spheres. Caroline McCracken-Flesher ties the indeterminacy of the antique and the fact that “Scott’s positivistic antiquarianism has always precipitated the critique of its own utterances” to the unreliability of data and the gaps that fragmentation necessarily implies.74 “In fact, data—disparate equivalents randomly knocking up against one another—produce readings that are inevitably wrong.”75 Although not all data randomly knock up against one other—systematization is nearly synonymous with the production of reliable data and predictable results—data that occur in isolated fragments easily lends itself to the vagaries Jameson, Marxism and Form, 367–8. Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35. 75 Ibid. 73 74

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of over determination and semi-­autonomy. That is to say, randomness is not inherent in data (even fragmented data); rather, randomness is inherent in the semi-­autonomy of interpretive and productive frameworks. But, as objects with a high degree of semi-­autonomy, fragments do lend themselves to participation in various frameworks without becoming exclusively associated with any given framework. Similarly, the division of labor, like the laboratory, works by the isolation of activity. It requires a study of characteristics and operations, independent of the working of the economy as a whole, even as the purpose of that isolation is the reintroduction into economic activity. But the division of labor also results in rules and processes—the features of institutions and systems—that have an inertial conservative museum-­like gravity of the sort that Scott attributes to the domestic. Successive divisions of labor generate a variety of progressive and conservative forces that interact with varying degrees of effectivity. Every iteration of the division of labor allows for both progressively iterated improvements and conservation. A museum does not merely collect and preserve. It acquires and organizes its collection with institutional biases interacting with the contingencies of availability. Museums respond to their missions by employing a variety of methods that reflect the division of labor itself. If, however, we understand this mirroring as many reflections of the various segments of the economy, if we replace the mirror of reflection theory with a many-­faceted mirror, then we resort to Engels’ solution when he says that “In the last instance production is the decisive factor.”76 Such a claim threatens to collapse the indeterminacy that results from this segmentation. We may recast Engels’ thought to say that production carries a high degree of inertia, but this inertia can be ascribed to any highly institutionalized system, systems of thought similarly produce inertias that drive, hamper, and conduct the flow of production. Each of these social segments, in its semi-­independence, generates the conditions of indeterminacy. Even as our economy and our other social systems become more structured, we continue to produce chance encounters that arise in the articulations.

Engels, Selected Correspondence: 1846–1895, 478.

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So, while Scott’s conservatism in Waverley can be seen as escapist, a nostalgic self-­justifying fantasy, a papering over of imperial violence, at the same time, it can be considered in the light of his economic crisis as an early attempt to understand how pockets of resistance and independence develop and maintain themselves within the larger swirl of history. Those pockets of resistance need not operate from some Archimedean outside. On the day Scott signed the trust deed promising away his future profits, he was at Ballantyne’s correcting proofs for the first of the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther, titled “Thoughts on the Proposed Change of Currency, and Other Late Alterations, as they Affect, or Are Intended to Affect, the Kingdom of Scotland.” The letter opposes legislation, proposed by Britain as a response to the financial crisis, that would have included Scotland in a ban on banknotes less than five pounds. In his journal, Scott noted the strange twist. “I am turning patriot and taking charge of the affairs of the country on the very day I was proclaiming myself incapable of managing my own. What of that?”77 Scott’s interrogative shrug, which registers the moment’s undecidable meaning, has its counterpart in the title of the letter when it pivots from “Affect” to “Intended to Affect.” The “or” between them highlights the fact that the late alterations existed as possibilities only, and that how they would affect might be quite different from how they were intended to affect. It was a lesson in caution that his recent humbling had thoroughly taught. The letters gave the dishonored Baronet the chance to point out that in Scotland’s putatively less sophisticated financial system there were “very few bank failures and no dishonored notes.”78 Then, because the legislation failed to pass, thanks in part to the Letters, and Scotland achieved the independence in the financial realm that it lost more than a hundred years earlier in the political, the Bank of Scotland honored Scott by putting his image on the five-­pound banknote. Thus, the notes, a sign of the nation’s credit, bear the face of a man whose own credit failed spectacularly. Furthermore, because writing the letters fell outside of the trust deed’s definition of Scott’s regular production, he could keep the £100 he was paid for them. So, while he was enacting the trust that day at Ballantyne’s, he was concurrently creating a way to generate money

Scott, Journals, 97–8. Rowlinson, Real Money and Romanticism, 93, emphasis added.

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outside the bounds of the trust, a method he would employ throughout the remainder of his life. The density of the strangeness of this historical moment is fit for the niggling obsessiveness of an antiquarian, someone with the sensibility and the room to linger over the peculiar tangles of history, the many possible replies to the question, What of that? Chance, after all, has no aggregate. It does not operate as an untethered force to which we can offer only a mute shrug. Rather, it is complicit with the overlapping, entangled, semi-­autonomous systems through which history generates its thorny knots of suffering. But just so, chance can also be found working in the obscure place of our freedom where nascent possibilities become real. And we go on.

5

Romantic Temporality and Queer Revolution In Prometheus Unbound, Percy Shelley imagines a revolution without rancor, less a glorious revolution than a lovely one, in which pride, jealously, envy, and shame no longer spoil “the sweet taste of the nepenthe, love.”1 Following Tim Dean’s call for an approach to queer theory that “would seek queerness ‘in less obvious places’,” I examine here Shelley’s attempt to imagine a revolution that undoes the idea of revolution—which, in overthrowing Jupiter’s initial usurpation, overthrows usurpation altogether, a revolution in which patricide reveals itself not as a triumph but a double damnation.2 For Shelley, the only revolution that needs none of the brutal methods of “the revolving world” is one brought about by methods that were there all along, a revolution that employs a force that Shelley exempts from the revolutions of “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change,” namely, love.3 It is a queer revolution that demands a change beyond change, that equivocates between sameness and difference, that realizes that sameness implies a difference—the commonality of our love in all its varieties—and that difference may be a repetition of yet one more usurper. Nearly 200 years after Shelley’s lyrical drama, Lauren Berlant concluded her primer on love and desire with a paragraph that could easily stand as a précis for Shelley’s play.

Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 3.4.163. For an account of Romantic-­era uses of Prometheus as a figure of democratic revolt, see Stuart Curran’s “The Political Prometheus” (Stuart Curran, “The Political Prometheus,” Studies in Romanticism 25:3 [Fall 1986], 429–55). 2 Tim Dean, “Queer Theory Without Names,” Paragraph 35.3 (2012): 426. 3 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 2.4.118–19. 1

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This little book has tried to say some things about desire and love: that there are no master explanations of them; that they destabilize and threaten the very things (like identity and life) that they are disciplined to organize and ameliorate; that there is a long history of using the abstractions and institutions of “love” as signs and sites of propriety, so that the “generic” subjects imagined in a love plot tend to be white, Western, heterosexual, and schooled to the protocols of “bourgeois” privacy; that these tacit proprieties have been used to justify economic and physical domination of nations, races, religions, gays, lesbians, and women. Yet here the story must return to the happy ending in which desire melds with the love that speaks its conventional name. Even now, despite everything, desire/love continues to exert a utopian promise to discover a form that is elastic enough to manage what living throws at lovers. In telling the story of some things that have been touched by the intensities of desire, fantasy, and love, the project of this book is also to reopen the utopian to more promises than have yet been imagined and sustained.4

Like Berlant, Shelley suggests that there are no master explanations of desire and love—for Shelley, mastery corrupts and distorts one’s ability to give and receive love. Like Berlant, Shelley believes “the story must return to [a] happy ending”—for Shelley, love is patient and its hour, yet unknown, approaches. Like Berlant, Shelley’s project aims to open the utopian up to the “intensities of desire, fantasy and love”—for Shelley, love is utopian because its transformative powers can be foreseen long before they are politically realized. Yet, if love’s utopian possibilities could be glimpsed two hundred years ago, why does Shelley’s revolution seem nearly as far off today? Why does Prometheus’s earliest complaint—“No change, no pause, no hope!—Yet I endure”—mirror contemporary complaints that 200 years of history’s ceaseless motion have been in fundamental ways so utterly changeless?5 One reason for the coincidence of concerns between Shelley and Berlant after such a long span of time has to do with the bourgeois privacy that Berlant posits as the villain of her story. Today, it is possible to believe that we see more clearly how, as Berlant writes, “the protocols of ‘bourgeois’ privacy [. . .] have been used to justify economic and physical domination,” as long as we add the Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (New York: Punctum Books, 2012), 112. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1.1.24.

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caveat that the ideologies that support those protocols seem more indomitable than ever. In Shelley’s time, the villain had arrived more recently on the scene, and even a radical like Shelley could extol “Self-­empire” as a person’s “birthright,” without the connotations of a self-­inflected, self-­policing repression, and without a psychoanalytic field developed enough to make explicit the methods by which the constraints of the public sphere become internalized and imprison our desires.6 Bourgeois privacy, however, makes a strange villain. Just as Jupiter who sends his messenger Mercury to advise that “like a suppliant in some gorgeous fane” Prometheus should “Let the will kneel within [his] haughty heart,” bourgeois privacy gladly dictates the terms of our release because the terms are those most compatible with our continued oppression.7 Delimiting our oppression, bourgeois privacy defines with the same stroke the conditions of our freedom, which is why the villain has such a long history, and why it is has been so hard to overthrow. After all, the closely aligned bourgeois values of property and propriety reflect the split between desire and love that Berlant’s book takes for its title. Although she alludes to the book’s Lacanian inflection when she states that the rationale for her double-­entry accounting is to “stage incommensurate approaches to a problem/object in order to attend to its instability, density, and openness,” the public/private split that is the book’s core feature displays a Romantic-­era lineage.8 The book equates private desires with freedom and authenticity and equates love’s public-­sphere conventionality with deformation and corruption. For instance, when Berlant discusses “the two contradictory models of desire,” she labels one liberating and the other oppressive.9 She attributes to the oppressive model the bourgeois villainy “of oppressively traditional sexual difference.”10 The liberating model reverses the relationship between love and desire. Rather than traditional conventional relationships determining desire, the radical potential of private desire revolutionizes the public sphere. She writes that “the libidinal energies now routed into producing narrowed versions of normal/universal and individualized identity might be 8 9

Ibid., 2.4 39–42. Ibid., 1.1 377–8. Berlant, Desire/Love, 2. Ibid. 10 Ibid. 6 7

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rerouted toward more expansive and generous sociabilities and worlds.”11 Of course, reversing the directionality leaves the structure in place; or, in other words, it is only as accurate to call the two models of desire “contradictory,” as Berlant does, as it is to say that they are one and the same. Both models imply a crossing or breaching of the public/private divide in which one side forms and deforms the other. The difference between the happy ending and our current malaise is that the melding of desire and love would move from radical desire to conventional love rather than in the opposite direction. However, if one acknowledges that private desires are conventionally shaped, it is difficult to see how they can be trusted to act as unadulterated sources of radical energy. One would expect them, rather, to express their already compromised state, since, as Prometheus says to Mercury, “Evil minds / Change good to their own nature.”12 Shelley’s most vivid portrayal of how corrupt social structures pervert love occurs in The Cenci, which presents tyrannical power as thoroughly saturating a tyrant’s motives, poisoning even familial intimacy. Like William Godwin, Shelley believes that tyranny’s insidious effects are not limited to the tyrant. Tyranny damages the members of a corrupt state, as social structures reproduce their violence in the heart of private desire. Because Shelley believes that social evils distort one’s private thoughts and impulses, he is suspicious of appeals to an incorruptible conscience being used to sanction revolutionary violence. Hatred and violence spread like a contagion, as the Earth points out, when she notes that after Prometheus cursed Jupiter, “the thin air, my breath, was stained / With the contagion of a mother’s hate / Breathed on her child’s destroyer.”13 Thus Shelley’s criticism of Beatrice Cenci’s decision to murder her father because he raped her reflects Shelley’s diagnosis of a fundamental conundrum about revolution: how can one overthrow a tyrant if the outrage necessary for revolt and the violent practices of revolution turn the slave into the spectral double of the master?14 Ibid. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1.1 380. 13 Ibid., 1.1 177–9. In a repressive society, Matthew Borushko notes, “the very organ of (potential) freedom, the brain, is rendered dysfunctional” (Matthew C. Borushko, “Violence and Nonviolence in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy,” Keats-Shelley Journal, LIX [2010]: 103). 14 Cian Duffy traces this line of thought in Shelley to William Godwin, writing that his rejection of violent revolution is not merely the “familiar Shelleyan concern that violent popular revolution is itself an ‘awful’ natural phenomenon. Rather it also reveals a Godwinian conviction that [. . .] restored despotism is the inevitable outcome of defiant, revolutionary vengeance” (Cian Duffy, Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 155). 11 12

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Berlant’s question—cast broadly as how does one contravene the repressive ideologies that influence love relationships?—might seem subsidiary to fundamental theoretical concerns about political revolution and its failures. Indeed, Shelley criticism often treats love in Prometheus Unbound as secondary to the play’s philosophical implications. Stuart Sperry, for instance, writes that the most common “general assertion” about Prometheus Unbound is that it demonstrates “man’s ability to transform himself and his world in the light of the imagination;” and Hugh Roberts suggests the play contributes to an issue that “every generation of Shelley critics has tried to settle,” whether his poetry is more properly skeptical or idealist.15 Of course, it is undeniable that Shelley is deeply interested in revolutionary politics, the moral force of suffering and redemption, the epistemological grounds of truth and error, and the metaphysics of free will and necessity. However, examining Prometheus Unbound in the light of recent work in queer theory offers a chance to take seriously Shelley’s assertion that, rather than peripheral, love is a necessary condition of truly emancipatory revolution. Doing so means following on work begun by Richard Isomaki, who argues that love in the play acts as “a reciprocal causal force;” William Ulmer, who writes that the “poem envisions desire as the motive force of political renewal;” and Teddi Lynn Chichester, who argues that Shelley sought “how masculinity, sexuality, and desire may find release from the kind of destructive and ‘malignant selfishness of sensuality.’ ”16 Aligning queer theory with Shelley’s critique of revolution shows Berlant’s repudiation of the bourgeois conventionality to be a false enemy as much as her valuation of private desire is a false friend, caught as they are in the impossible dynamic Shelley articulates in “On Love,” where he categorizes love as somehow both a transcendentally pristine interior joy, “a soul within our soul,” and at the same time a sanctified wholeness of union.17 Stuart M. Sperry, “Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,” PMLA, 96.2 (1981): 242. Hugh Roberts, “Chaos and Evolution: A Quantum Leap in Shelley’s Process,” KeatsShelley Journal, 45 (1996): 162. 16 Richard Isomaki, “Love as Cause in Prometheus Unbound,” Studies in English Literature 29 (1989): 659. William A. Ulmer, Shelleyan Eros: The Rhetoric of Romantic Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 93. Teddi Lynn Chichester, “Love, Sexuality, Gender,” The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 137. 17 Percy Shelley, “On Love,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 504. Tim Milnes reads Shelley’s “On Love” as suggesting that “the Platonic notion of love, ‘a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful 15

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Queer theory has taken up the issue of futurity for reasons that hearken back to Prometheus Unbound: like Shelley, queer theory holds that a critique of our understanding of love and sex is necessary for fundamental social change; and queer theory, like Shelley, is distrustful of utopian or escapist solutions to political oppression. The driving force of Prometheus Unbound is not the valorization of transcendental interiority but rather a subordination of the eternal to the changeableness of love. At the same time, however, the issue of freedom and the future for queer theory has been dramatically shaped by twentieth-­century work that, in turning away from the bourgeois ideas of love as contract, found its models for love in notions that entered into philosophy via Alexandre Kojève’s seminars in the thirties. There, he suggested that “Man was born and history began with the first Fight that ended in the appearance of a Master and a Slave.”18 The first fight requires one man to risk his given biological life in a battle for pure prestige, and also for the other to recognize his own nothingness and therefore to cling to biological existence. The one who risked life for an ideal becomes a Master and the one who refused to do so becomes a Slave. In this way, love relations are conceived as a secondary phenomenon arising out of a prior and more fundamental struggle for recognition. Queer theory thus inherits a theoretical apparatus that, in trying to go beyond conceptions of love as contractual and managerial, turns back toward love as a feudal struggle for mastery. It exposes itself to Karl Marx’s critique of “Feudal Socialism,” which criticizes the bourgeoisie’s exploitative practices seemingly on behalf of the worker, despite wearing their “old feudal coat of arms” on their “hindquarters.” Marx calls it a “half lamentation, half lampoon, half echo of the past, half menace of the future,” a position that through its “witty and incisive criticism” manages to strike “the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core.”19 which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own’ emerges in Shelley not as a means of attaining truth, but as a model for the kind of dialogue that sustains truth” (Tim Milnes, The Truth About Romanticism: Pragmatism and Idealism in Keats, Shelley, Coleridge [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 95–6). He continues: “That is to say that Man—at his origin—is always either Master or Slave; and that true Man can only exist where there is a Master and a Slave. [. . .] And universal history, the history of the interaction between men and of their interaction with Nature, is the history of the interaction between warlike Masters and working Slaves” (Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 43). 19 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 76. 18

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§ Prometheus Unbound is not the first poem to attempt to reconfigure freedom as love rather than revolution. Like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shelley’s lyrical drama was written in the aftermath of a violent revolution and in the midst of a reactionary period, and both poems portray love as the highest exercise of freedom. In his preface, Shelley compares his poem to Milton’s, stating that the “only being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan.”20 Shelley’s claim is partly disingenuous, since, as Jerrold Hogle points out, the play also draws analogies between Jesus Christ and Prometheus, “Nailed to this wall of eagle-­ baffling mountain.”21 Milton kept his figures of revolution and salvation separate: Lucifer uses his freedom to revolt, and in doing so becomes corrupt; Jesus Christ chooses love, sacrificing his life for the sake of others. Shelley blends the two figures, opening the play with Prometheus as a wiser, post-­ revolutionary Satan, who suffers, like Christ, for the sake of humanity, and who, having suffered, no longer hates as he did when he uttered his rebellious curse, with “firm defiance,” “calm hate,” and “such despair as mocks itself with smiles.”22 In lieu, however, of a sacrificial offering through which Christ’s tortured body—the lamb of God in all its innocence—redeems sinners once and for all, Shelley insists on a historical period for Prometheus’s suffering. Shelley merges the dichotomous realms of fallen revolt and holy love into a single figure and sets redemptive suffering in a temporal relationship with redemption, which is why Shelley’s revolution depends, not on the living world’s access to a transcendental realm, but on a yet-­unmade, truly historical future. On the one hand, nothing has changed; the future is as utopian as heaven because neither exists in the here and now. On the other hand, any given future links its possibility to the certainty of some future being historically realized. As potentiality rather than actuality, the ontology of the future is

Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 206. Ibid., 1.1 20. For an extended discussion of the analogies between Christ and Shelley’s Prometheus, see Jerrold Hogle: “the Titan shifts abruptly, not just to the sympathetic charity that many have noted, but to the posture and words of Jesus in Milton’s Paradise Regained as they confront the stratagems of Satan, whom Prometheus is here in danger of resembling too much” (Jerrold Hogle, Shelley’s Process: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 174). 22 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1.1 258–60. 20 21

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opaque: it is both an unknowable indeterminacy and also the result of current circumstances. A freely determined future links the transcendental and the temporal in an oxymoronic structure. When the place of freedom ceases to be a transcendental heaven and is projected instead onto an indeterminate future, the purity of the transcendental forces a dilemma. If the future arrives by collapsing into a determinate result, it seems that there can be no free acts in the present. Either the purity is jeopardized, or the future ceases to act as a future and remains an ever-­ potential, never-­actual space of freedom. If so, how would revolutionary action be possible; how could one ever bring about Shelley’s revolution? Near the end of Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz formulates a call to action that reflects this conundrum. We must vacate the here and now for a then and there. Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage a collective temporal distortion. What we need to know is that queerness is not yet here but it approaches like a crashing wave of potentiality. And we must give in to its propulsion, its status as a destination.23

Here, Muñoz vacillates between sides of the utopian future’s oxymoronic structure. In the first two sentences, with the verb “vacate” and the phrase “temporal distortion,” Muñoz aligns himself with a vision of the future as a radical break from the present. For Muñoz, the problem with the “straight present” is that, as a succession of causally connected heres and nows, it is fundamentally unfree.24 To become free we must sever our ties with what he calls, à la Jameson, the “prison house” of the present.25 We can see the break, the severing of the future from the causality of the present, in the switch from the definite article he uses for “the here and now” to the indefinite article he uses for “a then and there.” With the definite article, Muñoz associates the here and now with the determinacy of actual conditions; using the indefinite article, he José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 185. 24 “We need to step out of the rigid conceptualization that is a straight present. In this book, I have argued that queerness is not yet here; thus, we must always be future bound in our desires and our designs” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 185). 25 “Queerness is a structuring and educated model of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house” (Ibid., 1). 23

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associates the then and there with indeterminacy, multiplicity, and freedom— one possible state of many other viable states. In the second two sentences, however, he aligns himself with the future as connected to the present moment, which can feel its “propulsion” and may aim toward it like a “destination.” While implying that the future must be both connected to the present and disconnected, he attempts to preserve his allegiance to a free future by dislocating the source of agency. Rather than the imprisoned present causing and bringing about a radical revolutionary way of being, rather than the direction of causality moving from the present toward the future, Muñoz suggests that the reverse can be the case, that the future can be the source of activity as it moves toward the present, that it must be the crashing wave of a free future rather than the stasis of the unfree present that is the cause of the revolution. In Prometheus Unbound, the present is similarly a time of fear and imprisonment and the future a place of freedom. Like Muñoz, Shelley equivocates between placing the agency of the change in the future itself and suggesting that certain acts orient the present toward the future, an equivocation that raises for both the question of how one might effect a change that escapes causal determination. It is a question that cannot be resolved by simply asserting, as Stuart Sperry does, that Shelley’s “philosophical scruples of the highest importance” led him to portray the “long tradition of debate and uncertainty about the exact balance to be struck between free will and Necessity in human affairs.”26 Sperry’s balance serves as a metaphor of last resort. One might imagine the oxymoronic freely determined as two terms hung in a balance—the proliferation of Zoroastrian twinning in the play might seem to suggest it—but doing so would explain nothing of what governing power secured the balance or how such a balance might be achieved without governance. The dropped subject of Sperry’s “to be struck” amplifies its ineffectualness, implying that some unspecified agent chooses the proper weighting of choice and non-­choice in any choice. Instead, what is needed is a recognition that Prometheus Unbound participates in a Romantic-­era shift in how historicity was understood, as a new understanding of social action raised Sperry, “Necessity and the Role”: 250.

26

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fundamental questions about societies and their relation to history that undermined formerly secure models of historical change. Futurity, Emily Rohrbach demonstrates, is at the center of these new concerns: “predictability becomes radically questioned in a way that generates altogether alternative temporalities to linear progress, regress, or circularity.”27 So, while Shelley is invested in progress, he resists a conception of history in which individual moments are the finite sequential appearance of a final unity. As Jove’s envoy, Mercury speaks for this transcendental view, using the language of “intercession” and “prayer” to highlight the coupling of teleology and subjugation.28 From a transcendental standpoint, the future does not accommodate freedom since time exists as “Eternity, where recorded time, Even all that we imagine, age on age, / Seems but a point.”29 If the future were already determined, with history secured as absolute truth in which one could “count thy years to come of pain,” then it would be necessarily unfree.30 The eternal would strictly govern the temporal—both what happens in “recorded time,” and also the space of freedom, “all that we imagine.” Prometheus resists this teleological view of history, saying that he knows only that the end of Jove’s reign “must come.”31 Shelley suggests that Prometheus’s superior assessment of futurity comes from his more accurate understanding of the relationship between the eternal and the temporal. He answers Mercury, “Perchance no thought can count them—yet they pass.”32 Because absolute certainty is antithetical to freedom, Shelley links Prometheus’s certainty of an approaching freedom to chance. Any certainty about the coming future must, as a prerequisite, be hospitable to indeterminacy. In Shelley and the Chaos of History, Roberts traces Shelley’s interest in indeterminacy to the clinamen, the Lucretian swerve. He suggests that what Emily Rohrbach, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 29. 28 In Act 1, the Phantasm of Jupiter recites Prometheus’s curse,“Aye, do thy worst. Thou art Omnipotent,” and the First Fury warns the others “Who can please long / The Omnipotent?” (Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1.1 272 and 343–4). In Act  2, Asia says “To know nor faith nor love nor law, to be / Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign,” (2.4 47–8). In Act 3, Jupiter says of himself “henceforth I am omnipotent” (3.1 3). 29 Ibid., 1.1 416–19. 30 Ibid., 1.1 414. 31 Ibid., 1.1 413. 32 Ibid., 1.1 424. 27

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literary criticism has characterized as Shelley’s equivocation between skepticism and idealism “is in fact a misrecognized form of his ‘Lucretianism” ’ and his “theory of chaotic creativity.”33 Setting Shelley’s Lucretianism against the backdrop of the mathematic and scientific articulation of contemporary chaos theory, Roberts makes it possible for us to see Shelley as searching after an alternative to the dominant view of natural law as God’s omnipotent will. By turning to nature for a theory of human agency, however, Roberts elides questions about the relation between nature’s indeterminacy and cultural production. The oxymoronic term chaotic creativity has the same structure (with a contrary valence) as freely determined. In both cases, human freedom is linked to natural conditions—determined in the one case and chaotic in the other. Both terms make assumptions about the character of that link: freely determined assumes that the natural world is determinate, that there is such a thing as a coherent natural law, and that human choice operates somehow or other freely in relation to this otherwise determinate causal chain of cause and effect; chaotic creativity assumes that the natural world is fundamentally indeterminate, and that at the same time humans choose and act within this indeterminacy, not purely chaotically or randomly, but in some way that may be called creative. As we have seen in our previous discussions of oxymoronic structures used as an intermediate term to collapse a duality, the interpretation of the conjoined term depends on which half of the term carries its effectivity. If the creativity in Roberts’s chaotic creativity is an effect of natural chaotic indeterminacy—our thoughts operating indeterminately at the level of the synapse, for instance—then the human will is subordinated to natural law and we lose the moral force of the future altogether. Being a natural expression of chaotic processes jeopardizes the moral force of human action just as much as being subordinated to the natural law in a predictable mathematizable way. If, on the contrary, human agency operates in a distinct space (of culture or language) that operates according to its own rules—purposeless purposiveness, say—then the creative activity has its own relationship to history that may respond to natural indeterminacy but is not bound by it. Thus, Roberts’s chaotic Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 411.

33

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creativity formulates the other half of the question of how agency interacts with natural processes in the unfolding or creation of history, but it does not solve it per se. Earl Wasserman, like the characters in the play, reads Prometheus’s declaration,“Perchance no thought can count them—yet they pass,” as evidence of a renewed defiance: arguing that Prometheus’s cryptic answer is a “general symbol of his refusal to abdicate his will to Jupiter.”34 Previously, when Prometheus repented his curse, the Earth believed he had given up, lamenting that “Jove at length should vanquish thee.”35 Ione protested, saying of his repentance “’tis but some passing spasm.” Thus, they both suggest that his change in belief—Prometheus’s admission that “Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine”—is a sign of a loss of will, that only a resolve greater and more lasting than Jupiter’s could ever overcome Jupiter.36 Indeed, Mercury takes Prometheus’s cryptic answer as a withholding, the word “Perchance” being a coy ironic sign of his refusal to definitively say what he knows. Mercury assumes this because he views time as being complete in eternity and therefore capable of absolute knowledge. He assumes that if Prometheus knows of Jupiter’s downfall it must be because his knowledge is more complete than Jupiter’s own. More apt, however, would be to take the expression literally: because the future is indeterminate there can be no determinate tally. The sentence finishes with the phrase “yet they pass,” adduced as proof, as if the passage of time were itself evidence that freedom is antithetical to and more powerful than sovereignty, which is, in effect, what the Demogorgon suggests to Asia, that “Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change?—To these / All things are subject but eternal Love.”37 Shelley insists on a historical period for Prometheus’s suffering—3,000 years of moments “divided by keen pangs” until each moment seemed to pass as slowly as years—as if the suffering were somehow redemptive; and, therefore, Immanuel Kant’s question about the conditions for the possibility of moral

Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1.1 424. Earl Wasserman, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 87. 35 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1.1 307. 36 Ibid., 1.1 304. 37 Ibid., 2.4 119–20. 34

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progress in history apply.38 Especially relevant is Kant’s decision to reject the argument that the moral law develops over time through the violent antagonisms of various groups. Kant changes his mind because he worries that the development of a moral law through suffering condemns the here and now to instrumentality. If future wisdom requires current suffering, then past generations become the means to a happiness they were denied. Kant models the solution to this problem on Christian conscience and asserts that people have access not to partial, historically-­developing moral reasoning, but rather to a complete moral law that remains transcendentally stable and universally accessible throughout various historical time periods. Portraying Prometheus’s suffering as a historical rather than transcendental redemption, Shelley operates with a moral schema that seems vulnerable to Kant’s original critique: current generations labor in pain to create the conditions for the fulfilment of future generations. The future’s freedom—as democratic as it might be—would depend on the enslavement of the unredeemed labor of the past. Kant’s rationale, however, depends on humanity’s ends being incom­ mensurable with its means, an absolute distinction that Shelley resists. To see how intermixed, intermediate means-­and-ends might answer Kant’s concerns about instrumentality, we can examine Prometheus’s attempt to recall the curse, noticing that Shelley shifts Prometheus away from an emphasis on his rival’s power toward an emphasis on care. In his first attempt to remember, Prometheus invokes the curse for its power: If then my words had power —Though I am changed so that aught evil wish Is dead within, although no memory be Of what is hate—let them not lose it now!39

Prometheus’s parenthetical caveat is an indicator of his conflicted impulses: the residue of his older thinking, in which power was the central factor of revolutionary action, is fractured from within by his new understanding, born out of suffering, that the wish was evil and full of hate. His residual allegiance to old notions of power and defiance are consistent with a Kantian strong Ibid., 1.1 13. Ibid., 1.1 69–72.

38 39

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distinction between means and ends. If autonomy requires one not to be the means of another, then subjugation becomes the dividing line between autonomy and instrumentality: others become the means of my happiness, while I hold myself aloof from being a means of the happiness of anyone else. Such a notion of autonomy demands universalization, otherwise the autonomy that exists in the here-­and-now could only be a degraded version of true autonomy. One way to universalize the autonomy is to perfect one’s tyranny over others, as Jupiter attempts to do. Absolute power ensures that all others are subject to one’s whims, while one is completely free from another’s demands. Kant chooses a second path: his universalization of autonomy takes place in the negative: one is free, not because one controls others, but because the morality of one’s choices does not depend on others. One’s moral choices depend on a transcendental moral law and are therefore independent of historical ideological control. One can continue to be used as a means—the object of another’s enjoyment—and also have a relationship with a transcendental freedom, an absolute law, the submission to which, as self-­control, makes one free. Shelley chooses neither of these paths. Instead, in order for Prometheus to truly repent the curse, he must also learn to repent his insistence on his own rival power. Prometheus’s repentance is part of the movement in the first act from a focus on freedom as power to a focus on freedom as care. The main stumbling block, as the Earth points out, preventing Prometheus from hearing the curse is that, as an immortal, he does not know “the language of the dead.”40 Rather than humanity learning to hear the transcendental voice of conscience, as in Kant, Shelley imagines the opposite relation as the primary condition of a revolution based on love and care: the temporal must condition the transcendental rather than the transcendental transforming the temporal. As long as the transcendental transforms the temporal, sacralizing the mundane, then the distinction between ends and means, soul and body, between love as a transcendentally pure redemptive force and actual acts of care, stands as absolute. Because Prometheus, however, is “more than God / Being wise and kind,” the Earth believes it may be possible for him to learn to hear the language of Ibid., 1.1 138.

40

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the dead. Indeed, Shelley portrays Prometheus on the cusp of understanding. Several times he nearly does: first, experiencing the voices as a feeling of potentiality that “tingles through the frame / As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike;” and then, after the Earth tells him to “earnestly hearken now,” having thoughts flutter through his mind, making him feel “like one mingled in entwining love” yet not with joy.41 Recalling the curse proves to be not a heroic act, not a simple epiphanic moment, but rather an incremental, partial attunement to another’s pain. One’s own pain, Shelley suggests, is a source of enslaving fear, except when it generates sympathy with another’s suffering, as when Prometheus concludes after he hears his curse repeated, “I wish no living thing to suffer pain.”42 At the moment that the Earth is on the brink of giving up, telling Prometheus “Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known / Only to those who die . . .,” Prometheus shows that he is learning about life.43 When he says to Earth, his mother, “All else who live and suffer take from thee / Some comfort; flowers and fruits and happy sounds / And love, though fleeting;” he acknowledges the conjunction of living and suffering, and also, that the suffering is not absolute, since there are the fleeting comforts of flowers, fruits, happy sounds, and love. To help Prometheus hear the voices of those who die, the Earth explains to him that “there are two worlds of life and death.”44 While Prometheus beholds the world of “all forms that think and live,” he exists in the other world, “underneath the grave,” where he hangs as “a writhing shade” with all the “Dreams and the light imagining of men / And all that faith creates, or love desires, / Terrible, strange, sublime, and beauteous shapes.”45 Shelley thus reverses the conclusions George Berkeley draws: rather than our thoughts being the partial temporal appearance of God’s transcendental omniscience; the gods are the flickering fantasies of living beings. What the Earth teaches Prometheus, then, is that the gods are figments, that he and they are not eternal controlling entities that secure and govern a fleeting actuality, but are rather equally fleeting figments in a generative realm of conceptual possibility. 43 44 45 41 42

Ibid., 1.1 133–4. Ibid., 1.1 305. Ibid., 1.1 150–1. Ibid., 1.1 195. Ibid., 1.1 197–8, 200–3.

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As such, however, conceptual purity is at risk. The same principle that enables Prometheus to place the words of his curse in the mouth of Jupiter’s phantasm also means that good things may well have ill effects. When the Furies torment Prometheus, they taunt him and take pleasure in the fact that truth can result in violence and despair—as when the words of Jesus Christ “outlived him, like swift poison / Withering up truth, peace and pity”; or when France, a nation dedicated “to truth” and led forth by “Freedom,” descended into a chaos in which “kindred murder kin.”46 The Furies tell Prometheus that the gifts he gave to man have done more harm than good. Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken’dst for man? / Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran / those perishing waters: a thirst of fierce fever, / Hope, love, doubt, desire—which consume him forever.47

All that the Furies can see in love is the anguish of unquenchable desire. They read the double diptych of terms as if the positive pair of love and hope must give way to the negative pair of desire and doubt. They, like Jupiter, “feel hate, fear, shame—not gratitude” because their existence is thoroughly conditioned by violence.48 For the Furies, goodness is gleefully ruined through its intermixture with evil as “all best things are thus confused to ill.”49 A selfless action in the world becomes “an emblem” that goodness only increases suffering in the aggregate, heaping a “Thousand-­fold torment on themselves and him.”50 If so, the fallen world would remain forever isolated from uncorrupted goodness, frozen in its transcendental purity. Shelley, however, immediately provides an alternate reading of the historical present’s mixed state. A chorus of spirits—summoned by the Earth, who feels “such mixed joy / as pain and Virtue give”—show the opposite result of the intermixture of good and evil. Bad events can produce good acts, as when the Ibid., 1.1 548–9 and 573–4. In “A Refutation of Deism,” Shelley writes about Christianity that “Eleven millions of men, women and children have been killed in battle, butchered in their sleep, burned to death at public festivals of sacrifice, poisoned, tortured, assassinated and pillaged in the spirit of Religion of Peace, and for the glory of the most merciful God” (Percy Shelley, “A Refutation of Deism,” The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vol. 6 [New York: Gordian Press, 1965], 37). 47 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1.1 541–5. 48 Ibid., 1.1 380–1 and 391. 49 Ibid., 1.1 628. 50 Ibid., 1.1 594, 596. 46

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“battle trumpet” and cries of “Freedom! Hope! Death! Victory!” give way to the “soul of love,” or when, in a shipwreck, a person “gave an enemy / His plank— then plunged aside to die.”51 Shelley’s exemplar, like Christ, sacrifices his life for one who seems unworthy. In Shelley’s parable, however, the act results from neither a slavish fear for one’s biological life, nor a master’s desire for recognition, and ends in a death without a transcendental overcoming. It suggests that temporal intermixture and confusion, an intermingling of means and ends, is a source of freedom. It moves us toward an alternative view, one in which instrumentality allows direct acts of care. For Shelley, life finds its freedom in its incompleteness, in a future that does not transcend the human. The fact of death lets life become something other, which is freedom as an openness to difference, which is freedom and love as the structures of temporality itself. Thus, Prometheus learns to no longer look to the transcendental, realizing that the “Earth can console, Heaven can torment me no more.”52 § In Act 2, the Song of Spirits introduces Shelley’s metaphor for a freer relationship between the transcendental and the temporal, singing “That the eternal, the Immortal, / Must unloose through life’s portal / The snake-­like Doom coiled underneath his throne / By that alone!”53 Like the Christian incarnation, Shelley’s revolution also brings the eternal into the world, not to conquer but to show that “Such strength is in meekness.”54 In the incarnation, however, the eternal becomes mortal in order to undo mortality. Shelley’s revolution—whose redeeming figure comes off the cross not through death and resurrection, but into marriage— reverses the temporality of the Christian story, beginning with torture, suffering, and humiliation and ending in a triumphant birth. The revolution, for Shelley, enters through the birth canal, in which love is made manifest through generation and birth. Shelley offers two metaphors for this hospitality to newness, change, and mutability: music—Prometheus, Asia, and her sisters will “Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new, / From difference sweet where discord cannot be”—and 53 54 51 52

Ibid., 1.1 721–2. Ibid., 1.1 820. Ibid., 2.3 95–8. Ibid., 2.3 94.

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childhood—they will “make / Strange combinations out of common things / Like human babes in their brief innocence.”55 Calling for us to feel a “something else,” Muñoz, like Shelley, looks for a revolution that would usher in desire as welcoming of the difference and change necessary for the exercise of freedom. Because of Lee Edelman’s work in No Future, which critiques the use of a “fantasmatic” figure of the child to support “a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself,” Muñoz avoids the child as a metaphor for the future’s newness, finding music more compelling.56 Riffing on a song by The Magnetic Fields, “Take Ecstasy with Me,” he writes that when he hears the song “a wave of lush emotions washes over me,” and opens him up to hearing difference even in the term ecstasy. No longer meaning simply “to submit to pleasures both pharmaceutical and carnal,” ecstasy comes to signal other possibilities. “Might it be a call for a certain kind of transcendence? Or is it in fact something more?”57 With his interest in a range of semantic possibilities for ecstasy, Muñoz broadens and redeploys Georges Bataille’s use of the orgasm as the paradigmatic ecstatic state. “Willingly we let ourselves feel queerness pull, knowing it as something else that we can feel, that we must feel. We must take ecstasy.”58 For Bataille, the orgasm is meaningful to the degree that it ceases to be marked by the pleasures of simple animal desire and becomes characterized by the risk of life that Kojève associated with mastery.59 Muñoz shifts away from Bataille’s association of the orgasm with a death-­like transcendence—the “primary anguish bound up with sexual disturbance signifies death”—preferring, instead, to associate orgasmic transcendence with the multiplicity that marks the

57 58 59 55 56

Ibid., 3.3 32–3 and 38–9. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 11. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 185. Ibid., 185. For more on the Kojèvean influence on Bataille, see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s “The Laughter of Being” (Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “The Laughter of Being,” MLN 102:4 [September 1987]: 737–60). In “The Practice of Joy before Death,” Bataille refers to happiness as an “enchantment or simple joy” which leads him to feel also the “vain yearning for empty rest implied by this beatitude.” It is at this moment, Bataille suggests, that such a person “recognizes that he cannot fulfill his life without surrendering to an inexorable movement, whose violence he can feel acting on the most remote areas of his being with a rigor that frightens him” (Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985], 235). Nonetheless, while Muñoz, like Shelley, detaches ecstasy from its relationship to mastery and violence, he retains its transcendentalism.

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otherness of futurity.60 The shift from the transcendence of death toward the transcendence of the future is central to Muñoz’s critique of the antirelational approach in queer theory, espoused by Edelman and Leo Bersani. The disagreement amounts to a dispute over how to interpret Bataille’s analysis of the orgy, which is why the public sex environment plays its role in queer theory as a central site for theoretical scrutiny. In Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” the influence of Bataille emerges out of a double critique. Bersani positions two figures as an either/or dilemma to which he offers a third way. He critiques Dennis Altman’s claim that public sex environments create a “Whitmanesque democracy, a desire to know and trust other men in a type of brotherhood far removed from the male bondage of rank, hierarchy, and competition that characterise much of the outside world.”61 He writes that “Anyone who has ever spent one night in a gay bathhouse knows that it is (or was) one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable.”62 At the same time, Bersani critiques Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin for their “profound moral revulsion with sex” and for what he calls “the pastoralizing, redemptive intentions that support [their] analysis.”63 According to Bersani, their pastoralizing tendencies lead them down a logical path at the end of which the most natural result “would be the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented.” In Bersani’s double critique we see the fundamental difficulty of conceptualizing a freely determined future. Bersani counters Altman’s claims about the radical possibilities of the public sex environment with the actuality of their present-­day failures, arguing that the present cannot serve as a site of radical possibility because it is thoroughly compromised. At the same time, he critiques MacKinnon and Dworkin for arguing for a pure future that, in its purity, can never be realized in the present. Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 104. Bataille continues, “The violence of this disturbance reopens in the mind of the man experiencing it, who also knows what death is, the abyss that death once revealed” (Ibid.). 61 Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America: The Americanization of the Homosexual (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 79–80. To be fair, Altman’s book presents a series of complex integrated claims that should not be so easily dismissed, especially considering that its broadest claim, that an increasingly visible LGBTQ community would fundamentally reshape the legal and cultural landscape of America, now seems prescient and undeniable. 62 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 12. 63 Ibid., 22. 60

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Rather than address the theoretical issue of futurity that he exploits in his double critique, Bersani turns instead to Bataille. He concedes that MacKinnon and Dworkin are correct to claim that a Master/Slave dynamic structures sex. Bersani agrees with them because he endorses the Bataille/Kojève reading of the “Lordship and Bondage” chapter of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology. Bersani writes: “For it is perhaps primarily the degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns sexuality to become a struggle for power. As soon as persons are posited, the war begins.”64 Rather than recoil, however, Bersani reverses MacKinnon and Dworkin’s “indictment of sex” and celebrates the dynamic and “inestimable value of sex as—at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects—anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.”65 For Bataille, community and the labor required to sustain it are condemned to be forever in the service of natural, animal satisfaction, and therefore are marked by servitude. Likewise, “Man’s intelligence, his discursive thought, developed as functions of servile labor.”66 Only those actions that most closely approach the Master’s risk of life—activities antithetical to the slavish morality of transcendence through work—approach sovereignty. Taking on sovereignty as a project to be achieved in the future is self-­defeating, since “the project of being-­ sovereignly presupposes a servile being,” and, therefore, sovereignty is found in those acts that approach pure expression of energy as wasteful expenditure.67 Furthermore, Bataille accepts Kojève’s claim that, because in the French Revolution humans achieved a self-­conscious awareness of their own mastery, history no longer had anything fundamental to achieve.68 Bataille responds to

Ibid., 25 (emphasis original). Ibid., 22. 66 Georges Bataille, “Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice,” On Bataille: Yale French Studies 78, ed. Allan Stoekl (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 25. 67 Ibid., 27. Eight years later, in Homos, Bersani weighed various claims made by apologists for S/M. While he seeks out the radical potential of S/M, he writes that it “has been obscured by political claims” (Leo Bersani, Homos [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995], 83). Asserting “the primacy of masochism in sadomasochism,” he notes that its surrenders “obviously serve those who wield power in society; they certify the often voluntary nature of submission, the secret collaboration of the oppressed with the oppressors. But S/M also argues for the permeability of the boundaries separating the two” (Ibid., 95–6). Also, he does propose a critique of Lacan, but like Edelman, he does so from the side of the Master: “Lack, then, may not be inherit in desire; desire in homo-­ness is desire to repeat, to expand, to intensify the same” (Ibid., 149). 68 See especially Kojève’s infamous footnote on the end of history, in which he writes that history after the French Revolution has been “but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force 64 65

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Kojève by embracing the non-­dialectical sovereignty of the Master and seeking out traces of the Master’s risk of life in a post-­historical world.69 Bataille finds these traces in useless expenditures that splinter one’s subjectivity and which through Dionysian ecstasy allow one to come as close as possible to a confrontation with one’s own nothingness in such experiences as the orgy. “Orgiacal eroticism is by nature a dangerous excess whose explosive contagion is an indiscriminate threat to all sides of life [. . .]; its potency is seen in its ill-­omened aspects, bringing frenzy in its wake and a vertiginous loss of consciousness. The total personality is involved, reeling blindly towards annihilation.”70 Edelman’s definition of sex—which “has something to do with experiencing corporeally, and in the orbit of the libidinal, the shock of discontinuity and the encounter with nonknowledge”—reveals his sympathies with Bataille and helps to explain his inhospitable response to future-­oriented accounts such as Berlant’s.71 Thus when Edelman and Berlant co-­author Sex, or the Unbearable, they state that it “explores the forms of negotiation we resort to in dealing with intimate estrangement.”72 In practice, however, their dialogue shows each adopting the theoretical point of view of opposite sides of the Master/Slave dialectic. The result, as Berlant makes clear in her afterword, is that there is no dialectic at all because Edelman’s position adopts the theoretical point of view of the Master, which is explicitly anti-­dialectical. Thus, over the course of their dialogue Edelman articulates various versions of his core position and Berlant struggles to make progress and find common ground, until ultimately, when that fails, she feels alienated and oppressed. She writes:



69



70 71



72

actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the authentically historical point of view, the two world wars with their retinue of large and small revolutions had only the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the peripheral provinces into line with the most advanced (real or virtual) European historical positions” (Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 160). Thus, for Bataille “the man of ‘unemployed negativity”’ recognizes that “his need to act no longer has any use” and thus “brings into play representations extremely charged with emotive value (such as physical destruction or erotic obscenity, and object of laughter, of physical excitation, of fear and of tears). But at the same time these representations intoxicate him, he strips off the straightjacket that has kept them from contemplation and he sets them objectively with the eruption of time that nothing changes” (Georges Bataille, “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel. . .” The College of Sociology 1937– 39, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wing [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988], 91–2). Bataille, Erotism, 113. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable (Durham, Duke University Press, 2014), 4. Similarly, Bersani writes “It doesn’t presuppose an intact order but rather one constantly straining toward mastery and containment—straining toward it in a suicidal way” (Leo Bersani, “A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” Is the Rectum a Grave? 173). Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable, vii.

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I was surprised to be writing about Bigger than Life as though Lee had cast me as the woman or the child in that film, appearing in these pages variously as the weak theorist, the reparative sociologist, the politically correct subject seeking out the virtuous archive and reparative gesture, the reader who missed a crucial point. True enough! But was I so sure that I did not want to dominate Lee back through some kind of lateral-­minded sweetness or Nietzschean weak-­strong countertheorizing style? My question opened onto the vista of contradictory desires that intimate encounters will animate: to dominate; not to dominate; to avoid being dominated; to submit to his claim so as to get on with things, or to give in to a partial agreement; to listen hard to what’s movable in the situation; to give as good as I get; to be equal; to try both to get it rightish conceptually and between us.73

Although her self-­deprecating quip that she felt like a “reader who missed a crucial point” renders the passage lightly ironic, it is nonetheless useful for us to name that crucial point so that we may more clearly understand how a project that presumably began in good faith could end with such stasis. Both Berlant and Edelman agree that by voluntarily walling off our enjoyment, as if under quarantine, and allowing our desires to be repressed and channeled into labor, we become, in typically Freudian fashion, our own wardens. But Berlant registers this oppression as a call to change, in which we see the slave’s freedom as the freedom to transform the world through self-­negating labor. She writes: “But briefly, by negativity I am pointing at once to the self-­cleaving work of the drives, being socially oppressed, and being nonsovereign, affectively undone by being in relation.”74 This is what in Kojève becomes the story of the slave’s education to self-­awareness through work. Edelman, however, concludes that the call for revolution as a project to be undertaken necessarily demands turning that revolution into labor and deferring the living of all those in the present in favor of some utopian future. Thus, for Edeleman, true freedom is the residue of the Master’s risk of life that survives as the useless expenditure of the Lacanian death-­drive. Like Bataille, who declares the idiocy of a life lived in deferral, of continually investing libidinal energy with hope for greater reward at some undetermined future moment, Edelman states that his “polemic Ibid., 124. Ibid., 2.

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stakes its fortune on a truly hopeless wager: [. . .] that turning the force of queerness against all subjects, no matter how queer, can afford an access to the jouissance that at once defines us and negates us.”75 The point here is not to resolve the Edelman/Berlant dialogue on one side or the other, not to valorize the Master’s pleasure nor the labor of the slave, but rather to suggest that, by borrowing their theoretical apparatus from Lacan, they compromise the revolutionary potential of the love relations they theorize and remain condemned to repeatedly litigate opposing sides of a bourgeois revolution that long ago succeeded without them. Looking forward to the queer revolution Shelley predicted means rediscovering the revolutionary potential of love, repudiating characterizations of love relations which smuggle in assumptions derived from the Master/Slave dialectic. If we, like Shelley’s chorus of spirits, wish to “Break the dance, and scatter the song,” and to follow those spirits “beyond heaven” while retaining “the enchantments of earth,” then we must turn away from Kojève who rules as Master at the heart of Lacan. Of course, in some ways, Lacan and Shelley do seem sympathetically attuned. Lacan, after all, takes pleasure in semantic play, writes that “to make love, as the very expression indicates, is poetry,” and argues that “the signifier repudiates the category of the eternal.”76 Nonetheless, Lacan’s thinking depends on fundamentally Kojèvean distinctions that would be anathema to Shelley.77 In Seminar XX, Lacan begins his discussion of jouissance by reminding his audience of “the difference between utility and jouissance.”78 It is a distinction he adopts from Kojève’s discussion of the dialectic between the Master’s enjoyment and the Slave’s useful labor. Lacan likewise appropriates Kojève’s distinction between human and animal desire, between simple somatic pleasure and properly human desire, which arises “in the margin in which demand rips away from need.”79 At the level of need, jouissance is limited by Edelman, No Future, 5. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 41, 72. Bruce Fink points out that faire l’amour might also suggest “playing at love” or “creating love.” 77 For more on Kojève’s influence on Lacan see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991]); and Élisabeth Roudinesco (Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan and Company: A History of Psychanalysis in France, 1925–1985 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 141). 78 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 3. 79 Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 689. 75 76

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the animal body: “it is pleasure that sets limits to jouissance, pleasure as what binds incoherent life together.”80 The body’s coherence appears in its satiation; to need nothing more, albeit temporarily, is to be complete. What raises desire beyond need is that human desire is a desire “whose appeal can be unconditional.”81 Human desire goes beyond any particular object, because it is the desire of the Other’s desire. It demands not any thing, but desire itself, a lack and a nothing.82 Combined, these two assumptions underwrite a conception of freedom as a struggle for recognition that Shelley believes reinforces society’s degradation.83 If jouissance must preserve the rift between need and demand in order not to collapse into simple animality, if acts of care are considered tainted on account of their utility, love relations become merely another arena of conflict that demands and requires slavishly alienated labor. With Jupiter’s rape of Thetis, Shelley portrays this kind of jouissance as a falsification of love, because one’s enjoyment comes at the expense of another’s freedom. For Lacan, the One projects the two possible outcomes—Master and Slave—onto the rival—“between two, whatever they might be, there is always the One and the Other, the One and the a.”84 The other person is seen both as the capital A Other [Autre] from whom one makes an unconditional demand, and, alternately, as the little a other who is rendered the object of one’s enjoyment. Likewise, Jupiter exalts Thetis, referring to her as the “bright Image of Eternity,” and describes the rape as a clash of “Two mighty spirits,” even as he treats her as an object to be annihilated for his enjoyment.85 Lacan writes that “when one is a man, one sees in one’s partner what one props oneself up Ibid., 696. Ibid., 689. 82 Kojève writes: “To desire Being is to fill oneself with this given Being, to enslave oneself to it. To desire non-Being is to liberate oneself from Being, to realize one’s autonomy, one’s Freedom. To be anthropogenetic, then, Desire must be directed toward a nonbeing—that is, toward another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another I. For Desire is the absence of Being, (to be hungry is to be deprived of food); it is a Nothingness that nihilates in Being, and not a Being that is” (Kojève, Introduction, 54). 83 “Man’s freedom is entirely circumscribed within the constitutive triangle of the following: the renunciation he imposes on the other’s desire by threatening to kill the other in order to enjoy the fruits of the other’s serfdom, the sacrifice of his life that he agrees to for the reasons that give human life its measure, and the suicidal abnegation of the vanquished party that deprives the master of his victory and leaves him to his inhuman solitude” (Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: W.W. Norton, 2006], 263). 84 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 49. 85 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 3.1 36, 43. 80 81

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on, what one is propped up by narcissistically;” that is, a man imagines in his partner both whatever it is that props up his erection, and also the rivalry that props him up as a man, elevating him above simple somatic pleasure.86 Jupiter triumphantly repeats Thetis’s anguished outcry that the rape felt like dissolution, that all her being, “Like him whom the Numidian seps did thaw / Into a dew with poison, is dissolved, / Sinking through its foundations.”87 Shelley portrays the master’s jouissance as the violent tyranny of subjugation, masquerading as glorified combat. As unrestricted jouissance, freedom is the free use of another’s submissive body, which, at its limit, results in the degradation and annihilation of the other through force. Raised to the status of an ethics, this conception of freedom declares its maxim as: “ ‘I have the right to enjoy your body,’ anyone can say to me, ‘and I will exercise this right without any limit to the capriciousness of the exactions I may wish to satiate with your body.’ ”88 Lacan distills this maxim from the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom and suggests that it is “an instance of black humor” that is also nonetheless morally rational.89 “The Other cannot in any way be taken as a One,” for Lacan, not only because the other person is the copresence of need and desire, but also because, in order for the One to be a One, for one to see oneself as whole, another must be subjugated.90 Human desire is thus a fantasy in which sex, as an expression of freedom, becomes a proxy for a fight to the death: “the object of desire, where we see it in its nakedness—is but the slag of a fantasy in which the subject does not come to after blacking out [syncope]. It is a case of necrophilia.”91 Being willing to risk the pursuit, not of simple pleasure, but of the deathly empty limitlessness beyond satiated need is prerequisite to proving oneself through the annihilation of the other’s humanity. The vicious rationality of Sade’s maxim thus reveals unrestricted jouissance to be the exception, the imperative that must be excluded as symbolic castration, the “true function” of which is “fundamentally

88 89 90 91 86 87

Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 87. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 3.1 39–42. Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 648. Ibid., 648. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 49. Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” 658.

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to unite (and not to oppose) a desire to the Law.”92 Lacan aligns the Law with what apportions and “reattributes” jouissance and defines jouissance itself as that which “serves no purpose (ne sert à rien).”93 Because the Law demands the repression of jouissance, and because it cannot be completely suppressed, “it speaks of something else.”94 The jouissance of mastery is repressed, making the one who represses “capable of serving some purpose,” a slave to utility who does not “know how to enjoy otherwise than to be enjoyed or duped.”95 Repressing desire’s insatiability results in a projection of actual desire into a displaced spiritual realm, a technique that Lacan associates with love. It is a trick one might accuse Shelley of having fallen for in the last scene of Act Two, for instance, when Asia confuses her desire with her soul, saying “My soul is an enchanted Boat” and referring to it as “The boat of my desire.”96 “Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above” would be little better than duping ourselves, pretending that the restraints on our desire are self-­imposed.97 Ultimately escapist, love could never have any revolutionary potential nor effect fundamental social change, because its role would be to supplement and thus mask and preserve the Kojèvean dynamic that leads Lacan to argue that there is an “absence of the sexual relationship.”98 Just as the fight to the death cannot end with two masters recognizing each other’s mastery, the interaction between lovers inevitably results in a dissymmetry. Love functions as a supplement to desire’s fundamental emptiness—it is “what makes up for (supplée au) the sexual relationship qua nonexistent”—and it retains the dissymmetry between

Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 698. The vertiginous emptiness of desire, for Lacan, arises from the mother’s independence, “the Other’s whimsy,” which generates the child’s fantasy of the mother as a “phantom of Omnipotence.” The mother’s independence suggests, in turn, “the necessity that the Other be bridled by the Law” (Ibid.). 93 Ibid. The full passage reads: “What is jouissance? Here it amounts to no more than a negative instance (instance). Jouissance is what serves no purpose (ne sert à rien).” Likewise, in Seminar XVII, Lacan compares jouissance to surplus value and claims: “what’s disturbing is that if one pays in jouissance, then one has got it, and then once one has got it it is very urgent that one squanders it” (Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Pyschoanalysis, Book XVII, trans. Russell Grigg [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007], 20). 94 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 62. 95 Ibid., 62. 96 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 2.5 72, 94. 97 Ibid., 2.5 97. 98 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 69. 92

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phallic jouissance and the jouissance of woman that results from the fact that mutuality is impossible under the terms of subjugation.99 Because of the dissymmetry, there are two types of jouissance and two types of love. Phallic jouissance pursues its desire to be a One, complete and independent. For it, love is the soul: a transcendental projection that stands in for the actual exercise of freedom, leaving the actual woman behind as a kind of residue. “So that the soul may come into being, woman is differentiated from it right from the beginning. She is called woman (on la dit-­femme) and defamed (dif-­fâme).”100 Kant’s moral law—in which an individual is subject to a transcendental rationality that is assumed to be the individual’s own will—is the philosophical articulation of this “feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle” to our free exercise.101 Kantian ethics bypasses the actual historical conditions of servitude for a transcendental freedom in which moral choices may be rendered independently of others. Kant conceives of freedom in the negative as non-­coercion, which is why, according to Lacan, human rights “boil down to the freedom to desire in vain.”102 Just as the Kantian moral law is the philosophical counterpart to phallic jouissance, Sade’s maxim is the philosophical counterpart to a woman’s jouissance.103 The unlimited jouissance of woman is the desire to place the body at the service of anyone and everyone, and it sublimates this as a giving oneself up to a heavenly figure who commands this generalized love of all people as a perfectly repressed non-­sexual caritas. Hers is the pleasure in giving oneself over completely, dissolving into the godhead, that goes beyond the masterly pleasure of coherent independence as a soul. “There’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal” because a woman’s jouissance goes beyond the self-­identical unity of the Master, just as, for Kojève the Slave goes beyond the Master when he is forced to “become other than what he is” through service to another.104

Ibid., 45. Lacan uses supplementary rather than complementary so that the dissymmetry between the two does not resolve into some greater unity: “You will notice that I said ‘supplementary.’ If I had said ‘complementary’ what a mess we’d be in! We would fall back into the whole” (Ibid., 73). 100 Ibid., 85. 101 Ibid., 69. 102 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” 661. 103 For Lacan woman and phallic designate discursive positions rather than biological states. 104 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 72. Kojève, Introduction, 50. 99

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Because Lacan views love as a delusion in which one pretends subjugation is self-­control, it seems naïve to valorize Shelley’s faith in love over Lacan’s cynicism. As Tim Dean writes “it is awfully naïve to imagine that sex could be a matter only of pleasure and self-­affirmation, rather than a matter also of jouissance and negativity.”105 Indeed, in Act II, when Asia’s beauty becomes as radiant as it was at her birth—when she split “the clear hyaline” of the ocean, “Within a veined shell, which floated on / Over the calm floor of the chrystal sea”—Shelley does seem to treat love as if it were a magic power, a transcendental projection or utopian fantasy, that could realize effects that are impossible in the here and now.106 Panthea describes Asia’s radiance “working in the elements” as it did at her birth when love, “like the atmosphere / Of the sun’s fire,” burst from her and penetrated the living world even to “the deep ocean and the sunless caves, / And all that dwells within them.”107 The pervasiveness of love seems to align its radiance with some sort of godlike power, sunlight that illuminates even “sunless caves.” Even so, Shelley’s solar metaphor emphasizes not the heavenly body but its undeniably mundane effects: warmth, light, and growth. Rather than love as a transcendental complement to a temporal lack, love is universal, for Shelley, in the limited sense, meaning ubiquitous.108 Life itself is grounded in love as a principal experienced by all living creatures: “common as light is love.”109 Common, here, also means non-­noble. King and commoner feel the pull of love alike. Love goes beyond a mere leveling of class. It is not that humanity is entirely kingly somehow, each person transfigured out of lowliness. Rather, just as love disturbs the boundary between God and human, it disorders the distinction between human and animal. Love humbles as well as elevates: “Like the wide Heaven, the all-­sustaining air, / It makes the reptile equal to the God . . . .”110 Suggesting that love ultimately fulfils the serpent’s promise to Eve, Tim Dean, “Lacan and Queer Theory,” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 251. 106 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 2.5 21, 23–4. 107 Ibid., 2.5 29–30. 108 For an extended discussion of how Romanticism viewed the utopian through a lens of constraint, limitation, and mitigation, see Anahid Nersessian’s Utopia Limited (Anahid Nersessian, Utopia Limited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 109 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 2.5 40. 110 Ibid., 2.5 40. 105

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Shelley critiques traditional Christian dogma that emphasizes love as mercy. If love means the forgiveness of sin then love is subordinated to justice. Foregoing punishment is nonetheless an exercise of power. Unlike Lacan, for whom love is thoroughly conditioned by power as the sublimated fantasy of universal mastery or universal submission, Shelley suggests that being loved is less important than actually loving: “They who inspire it most are fortunate / As I am now; but those who feel it most / Are Happier still.”111 To be universally beloved (or universally feared) seems godlike, as Asia seems here when even the wind is enamored of her, but as a real action in the world, love, for Shelley, is judged by its effects, the feelings it creates. Thus, love as a universal condition is less satisfying than love as particular individual acts of caring, pleasure, and play. For Kojève, the distinction between human and animal desire is absolute: to value the living body is slavish, freedom requires its disdain. For Shelley, however, love is not subordinate to the fantasies of power, is not a negation of the given world, of life. Rather, life itself is a sign of freedom, love its common call, and happiness its reward on Earth. Furthermore, just as Shelley’s leveling undermines the notion of love as exclusively a spiritual elevation, so too does it undermine the Christian hierarchy of how love connects people to each other. When Panthea tells Asia that she is radiant with love, Asia replies: “Thy words are sweeter than aught else but his / Whose echoes they are—yet all love is sweet, / Given or returned.”112 While it is sweet to be beloved by all things, Asia suggests that love’s sweetness is sweetened by the nearness of those who are dear through their close ties. It is not that partial love partakes of a more ideal, more perfect Christian caritas; rather, Panthea’s loving words are sweeter as an echo of Prometheus’s. Shelley’s directionality of love is similar to Berlant’s, moving outward from an erotic core toward a more generalized love. Like Lacan, however, Berlant posits freedom not as a common experience but as a limit condition, as a drive toward pure experience; and therefore, she marks love with the negativity of the death drive, the drive that races toward the two pure negativities of absolute identity and absolute difference. Ibid., 2.5 38–47. Ibid.

111 112

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Shelley prefers the ubiquitous intermixtures that link life and love to temporality and difference. Particular love relations, in their variety, generate an atmosphere, bright and reflective, that emanates beyond the particular. The sun-­like love that Panthea describes radiating from Asia calls forth a reciprocal effect from the world that is equally dispersive and atmospheric. Just as the heat of the sun activates the wind, the air around Asia fills with sounds that “speak the love / Of all articulate beings.”113 The winds, although “inanimate,” prove “enamoured” of Asia—and, for the first time in the play, the stage directions indicate music.114 As in Muñoz, the music is propulsive, driving Asia onward—her soul a vessel that “doth float / Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.”115 Neither ecstatic nor totalizing, music, for Shelley, is not rooted in the point of view of a single agent—the One in Lacan—nor even a pas de deux. Music is the art of time’s passage, made through the modulation and intensification of sound. Thus, Shelley emphasizes music’s indeterminacy— “And we sail on, away, afar, / Without a course—without a star— / But by the instinct of sweet music driven”—and suggests that newness is prerequisite for love: that the eternality of love, as a common principal that runs through and unites all living creatures, depends on intermixture.116 His use of the metaphor of light for love, and music as its effect, points out that love takes many forms and appeals in different ways to different senses. Yet, just as the sun’s warmth makes the winds move across the skin and the leaves rustle in the trees, love, like an environment, mingles promiscuously across type, just as Prometheus’s own family is gathered locally from a shifting and not-­exclusively biological cadre. Prometheus, released from his chains, tells Asia, And if ye sigh, then I will smile, and thou Ione, shall chant fragments of sea-­music, Until I weep, when ye shall smile away The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed;117

Ibid., 2.5 35–6. Ibid., 2.5 37. 115 Ibid., 2.5 73–4. 116 Ibid., 2.5 88–90. 117 Ibid., 3.3 26–9. 113 114

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The emotions alternate and circulate among the group, a conception of love that does not preclude sadness, but in which sadness—as Anahid Nersessian notes of Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam—“borrows from love a solace that is freely given, without the expectation of recompense.”118 Coupled with joy, sadness becomes sweet, like musical tones, through modulation. Thus, Shelley subordinates the transcendental to temporal. Love is not static. It becomes a “search” for loveliness, imperfection not cast as failure, but as possibility, the eternality of which lies in its inexhaustible ability to produce new beauty, to “Weave harmonies divine, yet ever new, / From difference sweet where discord cannot be.”119 § Describing his disappointment with the antirelational approach in queer theory, Muñoz identifies an impasse he believes it has reached. “Although the antirelational approach assisted in dismantling an anticritical understanding of queer community, it nonetheless quickly replaced the romance of community with the romance of singularity and negativity.”120 What Muñoz points out about the antirelational approach could also be said of Berlant: that eschewing “master explanations” of love and desire means having recourse only to individual desire conceived as a singular sanctum of freedom. If so, whether one suggests that, as our most valuable possession, our authentic self, desire must be jealously guarded to retain its value; or whether one argues that our desires must enter into circulation in order to return to us a more expansive reward, one reinforces the idea that the tensions that condition the flow of capital are inescapable. To want private desire to be liberated as free enjoyment—as Berlant writes of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “she wanted sex at once to expand and become specific by multiplying the range of its potential scenarios and relational rhythms”—would be radical only as the furthest extension of the master narrative of a bourgeois revolution that has been securing its dominance for centuries.121 Anahid Nersessian, Utopia Limited, Romanticism and Adjustment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 104. 119 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 3.3 38–9. 120 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 10. 121 Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable, 56. Similarly, Jasbir Puar writes “What do we make of the economic circuits that have already fully invested in affect—risk management, for example—and our collusion with these capitalist endeavors through our production of theories of affect?” (Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times [Durham: Duke University Press, 2007], 208). 118

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This is not to discount the significant achievements of queer activism, queer art, and queer sex that have made new freedoms possible. Rather, this line of thinking is only to help expose the problem of opposing teleological conceptions of the future with appeals to a futurity characterized by the empty negativity of transcendental freedom. Utopian appeals to the transcendental are coupled to the terms they oppose and are highly susceptible to reversal. As Jasbir Puar suggests, by valorizing unconditional freedom, queerness becomes a “modality through which ‘freedom from norms’ becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer”122 The “queer ideal” as “ideal queer” restricts the freedom it was intended to generate, as we are all called on to become an impossible person “who is always already conscious of the normativizing forces of power and always ready to subvert, resist, or transgress them.”123 Understanding Shelley’s freeing of the temporal from its subordination to the tyranny of the transcendental helps us to rethink the relationship between freedom and futurity. As Fredric Jameson points out, the dilemma of revolution is intimately connected to futurity and the nature of temporality. The argument is in fact also one between daily life and the great collective project, most often (and too rapidly) assimilated to the difference between anarchism and Marxism. [. . .] It is a crisis centering on the very notion of time itself, an opposition between the here and now of perpetual revolt— indeed of daily life itself as revolt and permanent revolution—and of the old Left tradition of the Day [. . .] the axial Event, the break that inaugurates a new era.124

In Jameson, we see a familiar problem: either one is trapped in the eternal present of revolt, in which (as Puar noted) we must be “always ready to subvert, resist, or transgress;” or we must count on an “axial Event” which effects a radical break with the thoroughly-­compromised and unredeemable everyday. The Marxist and anarchist sides of Jameson’s dynamic of anti-­capitalist revolt Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 22–3. She continues: deviance itself “despite its claims to freedom and individuality, is ironically cohered to and by regulatory regimes of queerness—through, not despite, any claims to transgression.” 123 Ibid., 24. 124 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 213. 122

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are, like Jupiter’s phantasm, shadows of the two modes at work in capital-­ friendly neoliberalism, which Chandan Reddy terms the “liberal-­individualist” and “republican-­nationalist.” The liberal-­individualist mode seeks the “rational development of a national egalitarian principal” and the “progressive refinement of a principle of individual liberty.”125 Valuing the individual and suspicious of state encroachment, the liberal-­individualist mode finds its revolutionary impulse in anarchism. The republican-­nationalist mode, in which the “state’s enforcement of norms and behaviors, such as tolerance [. . .], is predicated on the achievement of homogeneity in political society,” finds its revolutionary expression in Marxism.126 Reddy’s point is that liberalism’s goal of freedom from violence is always in fact freedom with violence, which is Shelley’s point as well: that the bourgeois revolution—fighting now three hundred and fifty years for management’s liberty—ushered in one more tyranny in a long line of revolutionary patricides. To Berlant’s question “Are managerial impulses really, in the end, impulses toward mastery?” Reddy would answer, yes indeed.127 But like Shelley, we may rightly be dismayed to have the horizon of freedom restricted to this dilemma between mastery and subjection, between “a despot and a slave.”128 We often use the rhetoric of radical openness, seemingly willing to reconsider all values, but in order to be taken seriously, to make our radicalism seem realistic, we tend to concede that there can be no overcoming of unjust power structures without recourse to violence. We assume Shelley’s belief that revolution’s recourse to violence ushers in a new form of the error it sought to overcome must render his politics ineffectual. Andrew Stauffer, for instance, concludes that Shelley’s “poetry of desire depends upon, but does not admit, his poetry of defiance,” and Steven Goldsmith writes “Shelley’s play relies on a revealing sleight of hand; its millennial events cannot occur without the acts of violence it condemns.”129 Nonetheless, Shelley suggests that to believe that power and its Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham: Duke University Press (2011), 6–7. 126 Ibid. 127 Berlant and Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable, 54. 128 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 4.1 549. 129 Andrew Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 132. Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 219. 125

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expression as violence are more powerful than love is to concede the argument in advance. As long as we valorize power, we will make governments of violence not of care, a science of death not of life, and an aesthetics that reflexively glorifies war for its “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.”130 To treat violence as necessary is to view ideology’s various effects as a hydra-­headed manifestation of power, as if ideological apparatuses operated exclusively according to the principles of repressive apparatuses. When Asia questions the Demogorgon, she begins by asking about the origins of power—“Who made the living world?”131 Her initial belief is that uncovering the source of power would allow one to strike at its root: “Utter his name—a world pining in pain / Asks but his name; curses shall drag him down.”132 In the first act, Prometheus learned to reject the power of the curse, and, for a different reason, Asia does in the second. She comes to understand that there is no transcendental unity to evil, that the belief in a unified conceptual source, a single name, is merely semantic. As the Demogorgon points out to Asia, “I spoke but as ye speak.”133 Instead, Asia turns away from a Platonic search for essence and recites a historical and genealogical account. Her tale begins with the moment that Saturn usurped Heaven and Earth from Light and Love. He refused humans The birthright of their being, knowledge, power, The skill which wields the elements, the thought Which pierces this dim Universe like light, Self-­empire and the majesty of love.134

Saturn’s power functioned as control; like the “envious shadow” of time that fell from his throne, his power was jealous, miserly, monopolistic, withholding.135 In Asia’s account, freedom emerged historically as plenitude through Prometheus’s care and with the gifts he gave to humanity: hope, and fire, and speech. Time then revealed its beneficent aspect. Speech became thought; Derek Hawkins, “Brian Williams is ‘guided by the beauty of our weapons’ in Syria strikes,” The Washington Post, April 7, 2017. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 2.4 9. 132 Ibid., 2.4 30–1. 133 Ibid., 2.4 112. 134 Ibid., 2.4, 39–40. 135 Ibid., 2.4, 34. 130

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thought became Science; and soon “the harmonious mind / Poured itself forth in all-­prophetic song.”136 In this way, human history achieved a freedom predicated on the actual rather than the transcendental. Like Prometheus, Asia learns that the real world is not a fallen temporal expression of some spiritual perfection. Instead, the spiritual is in service to the real. As actual, the sources of evil are not mysterious, but all around us, visible as evil things and their effects. “All spirits are enslaved that serve things evil.”137 An evil thing enslaves the spirit, and good things, like music—which “lifted up the listening spirit / Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, / Godlike”—free it.138 The actual existence of music frees the spirit; the real lifts the spirit and makes it godlike, not vice versa. Since freedom is only alive in the historical world, its work is not to consolidate the arenas of praxis, seeking out some evil core to strike at. Freedom does not rest in a justly governing force, codified by law; rather, it is created through a hospitality to an intercourse that develops in time. For Lacan, Kant’s moral law is an instance of sublimation, a psychological projection that fills signification’s empty negativity with a self-­deluded fullness. Kant’s transcendental freedom, for Lacan, is hollow; freedom is empty negativity. Kant’s idea of freedom as freedom from natural law becomes, for Lacan, a Kojèvean hostility to the given world, to life. Lacan’s disparagement of the living world is especially at odds with Shelley in his representation of motherhood. Lacan characterizes mothers as women subsumed by their biological utility. A mother’s jouissance is no longer the jouissance of woman, a complete openness to sexual submission. Instead, “she finds the cork for this jouissance [based on the fact] that she is not whole—in other words, that makes her absent from herself somewhere, absent as subject—in the a constituted by her child.”139 Lacan’s cork crassly suggests that the child is both what pops out of the mother like a bouchon de champagne and also the bouchon that plugs her like a stopper. The child, according to Lacan, frustrates her access to pleasure as a woman, plugs her up. She ceases to be a woman and becomes instead “quoad matrem.”140 However, the child, as her objet petit a, is also a new Ibid., 2.4, 75–6. Ibid., 2.4 110. 138 Ibid., 2.4 77–9. 139 Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 35. 140 Ibid., 35. 136 137

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source of jouissance. Like a man, who finds the source of his jouissance in a woman (his little a other), the mother finds the source of her new jouissance (her little a other) in the child. The jouissance that a man finds in a woman is in her submission as object, and Lacan thus casts the mother/child relationship in the same mold, according to the old feudal formula: man is to woman as woman is to child. Shelley helps us to see that what Lacan has done is subordinate love to power by characterizing love relationships as thoroughly enabled and conditioned by power. Once that idea is assumed as given, then mothers represent the pinnacle of love’s self-­delusion. The idea that love is anything more than a fantasy becomes something we must guard against at every moment if we do not wish to be degraded by servitude. Mothers and their families walk among us, warning of a world without true pleasure, an oppression that calls out for liberation, as in Edelman. I’ve already defined this child-­aversive, future-­negating force, answering so well to the inspiriting needs of a moribund familialism, as sinthomosexuality, a term that links the jouissance to which we gain access through the sinthome with a homosexuality made to figure the lack in Symbolic meaning-­ production on account of which, as Lacan declares, ‘there is no sexual relation.’141

Edelman’s sinthomosexual retains access to unlimited jouissance because there is never a danger of being enslaved to motherhood. Freed from the burden of meaning-­production, refusing to be duped into the self-­defeating fantasies of our worshipful sacrifice or castrated glory, we nonetheless all live and die somehow pleasurably alone in a transcendentally empty non-­relationship to each other. Shelley demands instead that the transcendental learn the language of the living, that self-­empire recognize the transience of the self. There is no freedom in the absolute—neither in pure possession nor pure dissolution—and providing the conditions of another’s freedom does not necessarily mean the alienation of one’s own. For Shelley, the child stands as a useful metaphor for the happy innocence to come, not because it is a sign of some original lost purity to which we are destined to return, not as the ever-­deferred sign of pure Edelman, No Future, 113.

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self-­possession, but rather because children are already here and now in time. Like love, they are vulnerable and resilient. Like love, they are partly made and partly born, partly conditioned and partly free. Through them the things that are good in the world become new. Shelley, in this sense, comes closest to Puar at her most utopian: “Can we keep our senses open to emergent and unknown forms of belonging, connectivity, intimacy, the unintentional and indeterminate slippages and productivities of domination, to signal a futurity of affective politics?”142 Shelley, too, seeks an affective politics. For Shelley, love ought to be the ruling principle of power, rather than power dominating acts of love. As Asia’s history shows, when power is freely ceded, when one lovingly creates the conditions for another’s power, it becomes its plural, powers. It creates new freedoms where before there were fewer. A community of care generates its freedoms through knowledge, skill, and art, and Prometheus’s gifts become greater gifts in human hands.143 His gift of sailing, a mastery of the winds that humans learned not by subverting but by becoming attuned to life—“He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs, / The tempest-­winged chariots of the Ocean”—allowed for the various nations to know each other—“the Celt knew the Indian”—and for their knowledge, skill, and art to comingle.144 Shelley cannot ignore the historical fact that culture was forged with the weapons of war and the chains of slavery and that cultural interchange was carried out as plunder. The Furies of the first act are not wrong about what they have observed. Yet rather than conclude from this that historical violence proceeds from an absolute transcendental struggle for freedom as mastery, Shelley points out that the “revolving world” is also alive in its many freedoms.145 Each day we live in the freedoms offered to us by acts of love.

Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xxviii. Reddy likewise has a future-­oriented call to action: “If we are to embrace this university in ruins as still having something we can use in building less violent and more responsible collective conditions of dwelling, we will need to recommit to race as that which remains our conditions of possibility for cultivating alternative trajectories of modernity” (Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 48). 143 To me, this distinction calls to mind Charles Rzepka’s discussion of Shelley and canon formation, in which he distinguishes between dogmatic and skeptical canons, “sceptical canons evince love and respect for one’s interlocutors, dogmatic canons fear and suspicion” (Charles Rzepka, “ ‘God, and King, and Law’: Anarchic Anxiety and Shelley’s Canonical Function,” Evaluating Shelley, eds. Timothy Clark and Jerrold Hogle [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996], 15). 144 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 2.4 92–4. 145 Ibid., 2.4 118. 142

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Unlike Lacan’s dependence on an Oedipal family structure, Shelley’s conception is expansive and fluid, both in the play—the Spirit of the Earth, whose parentage is unknown, calls Asia, “Mother, dearest Mother!”—and in his famously complicated personal life. That such a searching and expansive notion of family failed in many ways to be loving serves as an important corollary. Because freedoms are made, they are liable to fail and subject to revision, just as the art of sculpture at first inexpertly “mimicked” before it “mocked / With moulded limbs more lovely than its own / The human form.”146 The practical strain in Shelley’s utopianism is in its practice. Although his notions of love were not cloistered or possessive, they failed in many ways to be equitable. Even as there are new freedoms there will be new failures. Love will be compromised. Death will not go away. However, as Nersessian points out, utopia need not be a place that depends on the absolute. It may very well be something more limited. “Utopia means nothing more than the end of misuse,” which, because misuse is never a single act but many acts and ongoing, is an end to be pursued from among the distortions of tyranny.147 In this mixed state that embraces both the modest relief of suffering and revolutionary acts of joy, Shelley reminds us that we need to take love seriously as a way of life, that freedom is only ever free if it is informed by love. Freedom as care, taking pleasure in bringing pleasure to another, is a condition that “requires us to maintain an intimate, perhaps custodial proximity to these things (life, land, language).”148 Love will continue to be reinvented, with new people, in new ways, and in so far as we are assemblages, Shelley points out that whether our provisional binds are made of hate or of love makes all the difference. So, if we admit with Muñoz that we are not yet queer, we may also concede that we are queer enough to love, and may yet learn to let love be queer. To describe how Lacan has been hobbling the possibilities of queer theory is a gloomy sermon like the one the Demogorgon makes at the end of the play. Unlike the Demogorgon of Act II, perched on his “ebon throne,” the Demogorgon of Act IV emerges, more democratically, as a darkness with many sources, to remind the celebrating world that love as a practice may be Ibid., 2.4 80–1. Nersessian, Utopia Limited, 105. 148 Ibid. 146 147

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undone as well done.149 So, this is clearly not the end. It can barely mark the end of pure ends, since, as the Demogorgon warns, the “infirm hand” of Eternity, “Mother of many acts and hours,” might let slip “The serpent that would clasp her with his length” and again strangle the free possibilities of the future.150 Meanwhile, as democratic gains ebb, and peace is estranged, the Demogorgon’s spells—“To suffer woes,” “To forgive wrongs,” “To defy Power,” “To love, and bear; to hope”—must also include the simpler lessons of the play: that violence begets violence, that peace is dear, that justice is in using less and learning more. We marvel at the strangeness of the wedding masque of Shelley’s fourth act, which celebrates the innocent baby asleep inside the earth, how “its little lips are moving / Amid the changing light of their own smiles / Like one who talks of what he loves in dreams,” who melts the chaste celestial sterility of the sister moon, letting the life and love of earth overleap their bounds and bring life’s love to heaven.151 If now the melting of the frozen moon echoes too closely our polar ice collapsing into the sea, then we should remember that Shelley’s call for a free future is just that, a call for a future that allows a future. It will no longer be the future of love’s old heaven. The border between past, present, and future, between causality and freedom is null. The present exists in the future as cause; the future exists as freedom now. Now is a community of many times—of freedoms past, preserved, of limits and possibilities—that carries forward the persistence of matter, living and shaped, technique and its cares, all the materials of what might come or might never be. So, forgive me if I end here with a spell of my own, a charm written in the name of my son, Gabriel, who is now a man. May the world become a living world for you, and us, and them, the children here now and those who will be, the ones who will live into a future many years after I am gone, and those who will not. May new gifts come to the world joyfully, as to a newborn mind, alive at once in a very old world and new. May the body, which moves and breathes its pleasures and its bliss, sit closely with the sciences and with aesthetics, among letters and those atmospheric pleasures, wind and sun, the light Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 2.4 1. Ibid., 4.1 565–9. Ibid., 4.1 266–8.

149 150 151

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Of wave-­reflected flowers, and floating odours, And music soft, and mild, free, gentle voices, That sweetest music,—such as spirits love,

that all the powers may birth and build the better loves yet to come on Earth.152

Prometheus Unbound, 3.2 32–4.

152

Index Adorno, Theodor 69, 99 Altman, Dennis 155 anarchism 130, 168 Anderson, W.E.K. 107–9, 111 antiquarianism 18, 20, 25, 63, 70, 115, 128–9, 132 Armitt, Lucie 54 Arrighi, Giovanni 19 Bacon, Francis 5 Balibar, Étienne 118 Ballantyne, James 107, 134 Bambach, Charles 67, 71 Bataille, Georges 154–8 Baucom, Ian 19, 121 Benjamin, Walter 13, 19, 69, 121 Berkeley, George 151 Berlant, Lauren 137–41, 157–9, 165, 167, 169 Bersani, Leo 155–7 Borushko, Matthew 140 Boscovitch, Roger 36–7 Bosteels, Bruno 119 bourgeois privacy 138–9 Brown, Marshall 37–9, 41–2 Buzard, James 120 Campbell, Timothy 11, 20 capitalism 40, 54, 109 caritas 163, 165 categorical imperative 90–1, 94 Certeau, Michel de 3–4, 6, 61, 74–5 chance 54, 107, 113, 123–4, 133, 135, 137, 146, 148 (see also randomness) Chandler, James 19, 66, 118, 120–2, 126 chaos theory 147 Chichester, Teddi Lynn 141 Christensen, Jerome 121, 127 Clery, E.J. 40–1 clinamen 146 cognition 5–7, 10, 12, 77, 84, 93

consciousness 6–7, 22, 25, 38, 42, 82, 84–5, 95–9, 103, 106, 157; historical, 9–10, 104 Constable, Archibald 110–11 Crimmins, Jonathan 64, 123 Curran, Stuart 137 D’Arcy, Julian 115 Daiches, David 115 Dean, Tim 137, 164 Derrida, Jacques 82–3, 102, 122–3 Descartes, Réne 32–7 desire 4, 21, 29, 38, 44, 72, 79, 89, 124, 137–41, 151–69 Devlin, D.D. 115 Dick, Alex J. 111 Dilthey, Wilhem 71, 75, 77 Duncan, Ian 115, 125–6 Dworkin, Andrea 155–6 Edelman, Lee 154–9, 172 education 21, 40, 47, 56–7, 60, 114, 158 ego, the 38, 46, 50–1 Eliot, George 76 emotion 44, 154, 167 empiricism 65, 70, 72 Engels, Fredrich 131, 133 Enlightenment, the 6–7, 18, 62–3, 65; Scottish, 108, 115, 119–22, 128 eternal, the 142, 146, 151, 153, 159, 166–7; laws, 71; present, 168; truth, 101; values, 8 Euler, Leonhard 36 Ferguson, Frances 29 Ferris, Ina 120, 124 “Feudal Socialism” 142 fragmentation 16, 18, 21, 39–40, 42, 46–7, 54, 57, 66–7, 120, 128–30, 132–3, 166

178

Index

freedom 18–20, 24, 26–7, 44, 52, 56, 69, 72, 79–80, 85, 86–90, 92–5, 103, 114, 135, 139, 142–50, 152–4, 158, 160–1, 163, 165, 167–75 Freud, Sigmund 38, 46, 49, 50–1, 158 Frey, Ann 126–7 Fukuyama, Francis 121–3

idealism 62, 70, 83, 147 ideology 21, 26, 39–41, 50–1, 55, 62, 67–80, 114, 116, 119, 132, 170 Iggers, Georg 67 instrumentality 27, 149–50, 153 ISIL 16–17 Isomaki, Richard 47

Galt, John 119 Gamer, Michael 31 Geisteswissenschaften 70 Godwin, William 21–3, 39–41, 47, 54–5, 62–70, 72–3, 78, 140 Goldsmith, Steven 169 Goodman, Kevis 1–5 Gothic, the 1, 10, 21–2, 29–31, 37–43, 46–7, 49, 52–4, 56, 58; vectors, 21–2, 41–3, 54–5 Gottlieb, Evan 108 Greenblatt, Stephen 66 Gregory, John 34

Jameson, Fredric 53–4, 56, 130–2, 144, 168 Johnson, Edgar 108, 111

Halifax, William 14 Haller, Albrecht von 35–6 Hamilton, Paul 59–60 happiness 9, 44, 149–50, 154, 165 Hegel, G.W.F. 5–7, 21, 24, 70, 72, 79–86, 95–106, 122, 142, 156–7 historicism 2–3, 17–18, 20, 25, 65–6, 73–5, 80, 118, 120–3, 126; New, 73, 75; Romantic, 17, 20, 25, 80, 118, 120–2, 126 historicist’s dilemma 3–4, 6, 20, 22–3, 61–2, 64–5, 70–1, 74–5, 78 historicity 12–13, 20, 25, 77, 84–6, 96, 101–3, 106, 145 historiography 23, 25, 57, 62, 69, 71, 72, 79, 115, 121, 123; Whig historians, 77 history 1–27, 57–80, 85–8, 92–6, 103–6, 113, 115–31, 134–5, 138–9, 142, 146–9, 156, 171, 173; interval, 11–14, 81 Hobbes, Thomas 32–3, 35–7 Hogg, James 119 Hogle, Jerrold 31, 40, 42, 46–7, 143, 173 Hume, David 11–13, 33, 115, 128 Husserl, Edmund 102 Huygens, Christiaan 36

Kant, Immanuel 5, 9, 23–4, 69, 72, 77 Kittler, Friedrich 81–6, 103–5 Klancher, Jon 62, 65 Knoepflmacher, U.C. 30 Kojève, Alexandre 26, 122, 142, 154–65, 171 Kuhn, Thomas 79 Lacan, Jacques 26, 41, 48–50, 76, 139, 156, 158–66, 171–4 Latour, Bruno 79 law 9, 22, 24, 34, 37, 49–51, 60–2, 65–6, 70–3, 76, 79–80, 86–96, 100–3, 116–19, 128–31, 146–50 162–3, 171 Lee, Yoon Sun 128–9 Levine, George 29 Levinson, Marjorie 23, 73–8 Lincoln, Andrew 127 Lipking, Lawrence 30 Liu, Alan 1–5 love 26–7, 30, 43–52, 56, 137–53, 159–67, 170–6 Luhmann, Niklas 25, 112–13 Lukács, György 17–18 Lumsden, Alison 128–9 Lyotard, Jean-François 54, 66 MacKinnon, Catherine 155–6 Makdisi, Saree 125 Manning, Susan 120, 128 Marx, Karl 55, 119, 122, 142 Marxism 121, 130–1, 168–9 materialism 21, 33, 37–8, 42, 46, 48–50, 52, 54–5, 59, 62, 76, 119, 121, 131 matter 12, 21, 25, 31–9, 48, 52, 56, 81, 105, 175 Mattis, James 17

Index McCracken-Flesher, Caroline 132 McGann, Jerome 75 media 2–3, 5, 10, 14–16, 31, 53, 55 mediation 2–3, 5–7, 14, 20–1, 26, 32, 43, 52, 55, 78, 101, 106, 113 medium 5–7, 31, 36, 41, 52–3, 84 Mellor, Anne 30 Miles, Robert 38–40 Milnes, Tim 141 Milton, John 44, 143 Mitchell, Robert 6–7 Mitchell, W.J.T. 52–5 Moers, Ellen 30 Muñoz, José Esteban 144–5, 154–5, 166–7, 174 Musselwhite, David 47

179

Reign of Terror 40 revolution 11, 18–19, 26–7, 37, 40, 61, 68, 118–19, 122, 137–45, 149–50, 153–9, 162, 167–9, 174; bourgeois, 159, 167, 169; French, 11, 61, 122, 156 Robert, Hugh 141 Rohrbach, Emily 20, 146 Rorty, Richard 122 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 22–3, 44, 57–62, 71, 74, 76–8 Rowlinson, Matthew 110, 129, 134 Rzepka, Charles 173

queer theory 123, 137, 141–2, 155, 167, 174

Sade, Marquis de 161, 163 Schlegel, Friedrich 57 Schmidt, Conrad 131 science 46, 54, 58, 65, 70, 71–3, 76, 79, 117–19, 132, 170–1, 175 Scott, Walter 17–18, 25, 107–34 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 167 sensation 2, 4–5, 35, 39, 43–7, 55, 82, 84, 96 Shelley, Mary 21–2, 29–31, 42–51 Shelley, Percy 26–7, 137–75 Shields, Juliet 119 Siskin, Clifford 5 Smith, Adam 115, 122 Smith, Andrew 54 Smith, Thomas 14 somatic 21, 23, 38, 41, 46, 49, 76, 78, 159, 161 Sperry, Stuart 141, 145 St. Clair, William 30 stadialism 18, 25, 121–2 Stauffer, Andrew 169 Stern, Robert 83 Stewart, Jon 85 subject 15, 38–9, 41, 69, 73, 82–6, 91–2, 96–100, 103–6, 116, 119, 124, 138, 157–9, 161–3, 169, 171 Sublation 85, 98, 126 Sutherland, John 109, 111

Radcliffe, Ann 30 randomness 26, 76, 113, 123, 132–3, 147 (see also chance) Ranke, Leopold von 65, 69, 71–2, 75, 79, 155 Reddy, Chandan 169, 173

teleology 9, 18–19, 22, 24–5, 80, 88–90, 93–6, 119, 122–3, 146, 168 temporality 6, 8, 10–15, 19, 26–7, 59, 80, 82, 85, 99–100, 105, 118, 143–6, 150–1, 153, 164, 166, 168, 171 Todd, Janet 30, 31, 57–8

nature 1, 9–10, 24, 30–7, 61, 71, 86–90, 116, 142, 147 Naturwissenschaften 70 Nersessian, Anahid 20, 164, 167, 174 nominalism 19, 22–3, 62–6, 78–9 noumena 24–5, 82, 86–7, 90, 92, 94, 96, 103, 105 Palmyra 1, 10–17 Pfau, Thomas 23, 73–8 Pinkard, Terry 83, 122 Pippin, Robert 83 Plotnitsky, Arkady 102 Poovey, Mary 29 Popper, Karl 73, 79 postmodern 53–5 Priestley, Joseph 21–2, 31–2, 36–40, 43–4, 47, 60–2, 75, 78, 116–19 psychology 20–1, 37–42, 48, 55, 69, 106, 171 Puar, Jasbir 167–8, 173 Punter, David 38–9

180 transcendental 6–7, 10, 15, 19, 24, 27, 49, 72, 77, 82, 85–7, 89, 91, 93–5, 98, 102, 104, 106, 141–4, 146, 149–54, 163–4, 167–73 Traub, Valerie 122–3 Trumpener, Katie 18, 114–15, 120, 130 Ulmer, William 141 utopian 22–3, 26, 30, 73, 138, 142–4, 158, 164, 168, 173–4 Veeder, William 30 vehicle of the soul 21, 32, 37, 52–3 Virgil 1–2, 10 Volney, C.F. 1, 7–12, 15–17 Voloshinov, V.N. 55

Index Wang, Orrin 18 Warner, William 5 Wasserman, Earl 148 Welsh, Alexander 120 Westphal, Kenneth 83 White, Hayden 69, 79 Whytt, Robert 35–6 will, the 86–9 Williams, Anne 31 Williams, Raymond 53, 55 Windelband, Wilhelm 20, 70, 72–3, 79 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 54, 66 Wollaston, William 32, 36, 52–3 Wollstonecraft, Mary 22–3, 57–62, 68, 71–8 Wood, Robert 12–15