Sociology

Lost in the Supermarket

"I have argued that most often in social sciences, 'social' designates a type of link: it's taken as the name of a specific domain, a sort of material like straw, mud, string, wood, or steel. In principle, you could walk into some imaginary supermarket and point at a shelf full of 'social ties,' whereas other aisles would be stocked with 'material,' 'biological,' 'psychological,' and 'economical' connections. For ANT … the definition of the term is different: it doesn't designate a domain of reality or some particular item, but rather is the name of a movement, a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrollment. It is an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment when they are reshuffled together.
To pursue the metaphor of the supermarket, we would call 'social' not any specific shelf or aisle, but the multiple modifications made throughout the whole place in the organization of all the goods — their packaging, their pricing, their labeling — because those minute shifts reveal to the observer which new combinations are explored and which paths will be taken (what later will be defined as a 'network')."

— Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 64-65

(Lots more Latour here, bien sur.)

From Foucault to Bourdieu?

From Foucault to Bourdieu?
Institutions of Social Theory in America
(Paper delivered at the UCLA Southland Graduate Student Conference, June 5th, 2009)

The institution of American literary criticism — not only, but especially, that kind of criticism that attempts to take social institutions into account — owes an incalculable debt to Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s work has been so influential in the United States over the past forty years that it may fairly be regarded as a kind of academic institution unto itself — one potentially in need of radical questioning or reform. Such a desire, to reform the institution that is Foucault’s thought — or at least to view it from a slight distance, a new angle — may perhaps explain a recent turn in literary studies engaging with social theory, away from a Foucauldian framework and towards one more influenced by Foucault’s contemporary and friend, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

The two have much in common: both agregés in philosophy at École Normale Superieure in the mid-1950s, they are alike in combining careful scholarship with theoretical ambition, minute phenomenological reflection on the body with materialist historical explanations on a grand scale, and a resistance to the problematic of Marxism with eternal vigilance toward the effects of domination exercised by all forms of power and capital. Foucault, of course, has long been the more influential figure in America. For a few decades now — at least since the pioneering New Historicist work of the late 1970s and early 1980s — American literary scholars have been working through the implications of Foucault’s genealogical method, which seeks to trace the history of concepts central to our literature and our culture: sexuality, subjectivity, rationality, sovereignty, and many others. Literary scholars and critics influenced by Foucault are legion, but some of the most illustrious and illustrative names would include Stephen Greenblatt, D.A. Miller, Walter Benn Michaels, Frances Ferguson and Mary Poovey.

Bourdieu’s influence is more recent, and perhaps less familiar, so I’ll characterize it briefly here. Literary critics working under Bourdieu’s influence are interested not so much in an analysis of the labor that goes into constituting or constructing literature’s conceptual content, but in what happens to literature once it has been constructed: how it circulates, who is able to recognize and evaluate it, who profits by it, what social practices it makes possible or participates in. Rather than attempting to craft diachronic narratives of how particular, more or less philosophical concepts might have found their way into literature, Bourdieuvians tend to favor synchronic analyses of literary practice at particular stages of cultural and social development. The object of research, in other words, is not primarily the history of culture that brings about a particular work, but rather that work’s place within what Bourdieu calls “the field of cultural production” at any given historical moment: the economies (real and symbolic) in which particular literary works are embedded. Here, the concepts operating within literary works matter less than the concepts of literature (along with other social concepts) that allow works to circulate in society in a specific way (among individuals of a certain class, for instance, or within certain institutions, or between particular nations). Scholars and critics I would align with this roughly Bourdieuvian project include John Guillory, Franco Moretti, Janice Radway, James English, and Pascale Casanova.

We are talking, in other words, primarily about a difference of methodology: a difference of theoretical object. The Foucauldians wonder how literature and culture gets to us in the form it does; the Bourdieuvians wonder how it gets from one of us to another. These critical projects, though different, hardly seem irreconcilable. If work that explicitly combines Foucault and Bourdieu, genealogy and reflexive sociology, has been rare, perhaps it’s because the practical compatibility of their methodologies is obscured by the troubling tendency that each of these thinkers has to try to eradicate the other’s foundations. Think of the famously devastating last chapter of The Order of Things, for instance, on the emergence of the “human sciences”: “There can be no doubt, certainly, that the historical emergence of each one of the human sciences was occasioned by a problem, a requirement, an obstacle of a theoretical or practical order … the threats that, since the French Revolution, have weighed so heavily on the social balances, and even on the equilibrium established by the bourgeoisie, were no doubt also necessary before a reflection of the sociological type could appear” (345). Sociology, for Foucault, like all the “sciences of man,” comes into being with an anxious sense that the behavior of human beings need to be accounted for, that their discourses and activities need to be comprehended and classified — a development he associates with the historical rise of a “disciplinary society.”

Such passages provide some pretty powerful weapons of critique, or even of a priori dismissal, not only against Bourdieu, but any sociologist, whose very object, in Foucault’s view, is at best obsolete and at worst oppressive. But the game of criticism can go both ways; just as Foucault’s genealogical critique of the human sciences can be used to undermine Bourdieu and sociology, Bourdieu’s sociology of intellectuals offers a convincing deflationary account of many of Foucault’s most anomalous philosophical choices. In his introduction to the English translation of Homo Academicus, for instance, Bourdieu places Foucault among those “philosophers … [who] were caught in a dual relation with the worlds of philosophy and the social sciences … In their relation with the philosophical high priests of the Sorbonne … they appear like religious heretics, or, in other words, rather like freelance intellectuals installed within the university system itself … More or less totally deprived of, or liberated from, the powers and privileges but also the tasks and the responsibilities of the ordinary professor (examining the entrance examinations, supervising theses, etc.) they have strong connections with the intellectual world, and especially with the avant-garde reviews (Critique, Tel Quel, etc.) and with journalism (especially the Nouvel Observateur): Michel Foucault is no doubt the most representative of this position, since, until the end of his life, and even when he became professor at the Collège de France … he remained almost entirely bereft of specifically academic and even scientific powers, and therefore of the clientele which these powers afford, even if because of his fame he wielded considerable power over the press and, through it, over the whole field of cultural production. The marginal nature of this position … is obviously not unconnected with the fact that all these heretics with a vocation to become heresiarchs … share a sort of anti-institutional mood homologous in its form to that of a considerable fraction of students: they are inclined to react impatiently to the discrepancy between their already considerable fame in the outside world, that is, outside the university and also outside France, and the subaltern status which is accorded them inside the French university world, in collusion with their contempt and their rejection, by an institution which, when they were adolescents, had attracted and even consecrated them” (xix). Thus, from a sociological perspective — which is ultimately just as valid as a genealogical one —Foucault’s ferociously “anti-institutional” mood is largely an expression (albeit a brilliantly elaborated one) of his marginal position within academic institutional space.

Furthermore, for Bourdieu, Foucault’s method of genealogy, which he was able to present as a philosophical innovation, arises — genealogically, if you like — out of a latter-day contest of the faculties between philosophy and the social sciences. Bourdieu suggests that Foucault “finds in Nietzsche an acceptable philosophical sponsor for the socially improbable combination of artistic transgression and scientific invention that he achieves and for the screen-concepts which, like that of genealogy, help to provide a cover for an ambitious enterprise in social history or genetic sociology” (xxiii-xiv). So Foucault, far from making the social sciences — like all sciences of man — impossible, in fact comes out of the closet as a sociologist himself! In other words, Foucault’s turn to something like historical sociology, under the name of “genealogy,” is closely linked to his intellectual sublimation of the “anti-institutional mood” he’s put in by his marginal academic status. Ironically, in order to attack the institution, Foucault is pushed closer than he perhaps wishes to be to that science of institutions, sanctioned and made possible by institutions: sociology.

One may find this little critical circle satisfying or frustrating, depending on your investments, but it reflects a larger and more significant difference. Besides having different notions of the efficacy of their own critical methods, Foucault and Bourdieu also have a fundamentally different sense of how institutions influence history, and intellectual history in particular. At the risk of oversimplifying, I would like to formulate it like this: Foucault sees the institution as what gets in the way of history; while Bourdieu tends to see them as what makes history, or rather, as the site and original condition of possibility for the making of history.
Foucault defined his own scholarly interest, in a document prepared in order to advance his candidacy for the Collège de France, as “knowledge invested in complex systems of institutions” (Macey, 234). In a sense, Foucault came to the study of the institution reluctantly, as something he had to delineate in order to give full plausibility to his greater claims about the historical evolution of the categories of human thought. Attention to institutions was, as it were, a methodology imposed on him by the institution: it was not taken up as an end in itself, but as something Foucault had to do in order to legitimize his intellectual project in the eyes of his teachers.

A 1957 letter by Foucault to Stirn Lindroth, his Swedish thesis advisor at the University of Uppsala (quoted by Didier Éribon in his excellent biography of Foucault) makes this clear. Lindroth, a historian of science, had charged Foucault’s work-in-progress — an early draft of Madness and Civilization — with being too speculative and insufficiently rigorous. Foucault responded in his own defense: “my … great mistake was to prepare first the pages dealing with medical theories, whereas the realm of ‘institutions’ is unclear and would have helped me to be more clear in other areas. Since you are willing to allow me to do so, I shall show you what I did over the vacation on the subject of institutions … There we are in a realm that is far easier to define and one providing the social conditions of the beginnings of psychiatry” (84).

Leaving aside the irony that it was an institutional constraint that initially forced Foucault to refine his critical analysis of the institution (the very mode of analysis that would eventually make him so famous), we see here that Foucault’s view of institutions is articulated with reference to “theories”: the institution is what needs to be more fully described so that the theories developed within it can be better understood. Foucault admits that “the realm of ‘institutions’ is unclear” in his early theoretical work, but also “far easier to define” than theory: institutions, in other words, are the easy part. (Or so he thought in 1957!) Foucault’s early thinking on the institution is that of a frustrated post-Hegelian philosopher, who finds that he has to give his narrative of the development of scientific thought a complex and persuasive empirical background. Institutions, in other words, are interesting because they have produced this philosophical concept called man, which a recently effected epistemological break has led us to realize we no longer really need. Institutions thus function as a term in a larger argument, a source of error, but not as an object of inquiry in themselves.

Strangely enough, this changes at more or less exactly the same time that Foucault himself finally escapes from everyday institutional confinement: with his election to the Collège de France in 1970, he was essentially free to do whatever work he wanted, unmonitored by supervisors and unhampered by pedagogical or administrative duties (the only requirement was that he give a course of public lectures for five weeks out of every year). Given this freedom from exigent institutional demands, Foucault decided, somewhat perversely, to focus not on “knowledge invested in complex systems of institutions,” but more strictly on those institutions themselves, and the internalization of their demands that they are able to bring about in human subjects. Hence his mid-career masterpiece, Discipline and Punish, which brings the methods of institutional history that had been imposed on his earlier work to a new level of intensity and conceptual precision. Here the approach is further from intellectual history and is more thoroughgoingly materialist. Thought, knowledge, man, “the subject,” all the grand philosophical concerns of the earlier work, fall away in this book; what takes their place are new terms like “biopolitics” and “discipline,” the “technologies of the self,” the “microphysics of power.” It’s as if Foucault, by looking closer at the obstacles that prevented thought from moving dialectically forward, the traps that it got itself ensnared in, became so fascinated with the workings of the trap that he forgot what his original object had been. But while the focus is now on the obstacle rather than the object, he still regards it as an obstacle: the purpose of institutions, in Foucault’s work, is nothing other than to repress, to keep in check, to prevent.

(To indulge in a little sociological/biographical aside: it’s interesting to note that Foucault became so obsessed by the workings of institutions in the period when he himself had effectively left everyday institutional work behind, as his position at the Collège de France left him without administrative or pedagogical duties. Occasional wry remarks in his lectures of this period remind us of this: “You know that the institution where you are, and where I am, is not exactly a teaching institution … [T]he Collège de France now functions essentially as a sort of research institute: we are paid to do research … Given that we are paid to do research, what is there to monitor the research we are doing?” ("Society Must Be Defended," 1).)
Bourdieu, on the other hand, was interested from the beginning in the obstacles that the institution poses to intellectual autonomy. But, regarding the institution as a sociologist rather than a philosopher, he did not theorize them as obstacles: rather, for him, institutions are generative structures that produce thought as a phenomenon, by organizing intellectual activity as a social game. Where Foucault came to the material (or disciplinary) effects of the institution from the side of the ideal — of pure philosophical or theoretical inquiry — Bourdieu early on renounced the traditions of the philosophy of the concept in favor of a theory built up from empirical analysis of the social world. So Foucault starts out from the existence of pure philosophy — of thought, the ideal — and then looks closer at its actual history to see what material conditions distort and determine it. For him, philosophy always has to get through or around institutions, the constraints imposed by the apparatuses of disciplinary society.

Bourdieu, on the other hand, begins with the empirical fact of institutions, often focusing his attention on the seemingly ordinary and banal (the social factors determining students’ choice of majors, for instance) and develops from that a conceptual system of extraordinary sophistication and subtlety, which accounts for philosophy as merely one of the possible outcomes of this system. In other words, Bourdieu ultimately derives all of the traditional concerns of philosophical inquiry — concerns about politics, aesthetics, ethics, etc. — from the social effects of the institution: rather than seeing thought as something that must pass through or bypass the institution, and on its way either affirm or negate it, he sees thought as something always originally produced by some institution. For him, it simply can’t come from anywhere else. Foucault’s intention, in describing the institution, was always to eventually transcend it; Bourdieu, on the other hand, insists that any possibility of transcending the institution will be predicated on the effect and authority of the institution itself, on what the institution makes possible. We might say, to sum up: Bourdieu seeks to know what the institution makes possible; Foucault what it makes impossible.

The particular institution on which Bourdieu fixes his attention most closely is, of course, the French educational system: a system in which, unlike Foucault’s madhouse, clinic and prison, he was also a participant and in which he had an interested stake. This accounts for what some see as the excruciating self-consciousness of Bourdieu’s work, but it is also what makes him a particularly important role model for those who want to do academic work on institutions: that is, examinations of the role of institutions from within an institution. Even at his most radical and critical — for instance, his infamous 1970 study Reproduction, which argues that the school system largely serves to reproduce class distinctions from generation to generation — Bourdieu always remains, in his themes and style of argument, a homo academicus. Foucault, on the other hand, sometimes seems to imagine himself as some kind of fantastic mutation of the academic genus, one that is slowly evolving away from the institution and towards something new, whether this be anarchist politics or the literary avant-garde.

Foucault's desire to simultaneously transcend and transgress manifests itself most clearly in the literary dimension of his early work, greatly influenced by his association with the French avant-garde journal Critique, founded in the early 1950s by the dissident surrealist writer Georges Bataille. In an interview collected in the volume In Other Words, Bourdieu relates that he “was, doubtless for sociological reasons, less attracted than other people (for instance, Foucault) to the Bataille-Blanchot side of Critique. The desire for a clean break, rather than for some ‘transgression,’ was in my case directed against institutional power, and especially against the institution of the university and all the violence, imposture and sanctified stupidity that it concealed — and, behind the institution, against the social order. This may have been because I didn’t have any accounts to settle with the bourgeois family, as did others, and so I was less inclined to the symbolic breaks dealt with in The Inheritors. But I think that the concern to nicht mitmachen, as Adorno put it — the refusal to compromise with institutions, beginning with intellectual institutions — never left me” (4). From Bourdieu’s perspective, it seems as if Foucault breaks with those bourgeois social institutions, the school and the family — or, more precisely, transgresses against them — in part by attaching himself to another institution, that of the literary avant-garde.

So Foucault's desire to transcend, to transgress, or simply to develop beyond the academic institution is doubtless an enormous part of his charisma for academics — and also, it should be said, for good reasons: his intransigence remains a valuable example, and his resistance to disciplinary boundaries and constraints does offer a model of intellectual activity that produces truly interesting results. But I think there are as many lessons in Bourdieu’s embattled immanence as in Foucault’s frustrated transcendence: perhaps more, for those of us who want to both study and work within institutions. For even as Bourdieu stays with the institution, always within the institution, he consistently refuses to compromise with it or let it fully determine his critical discourse. The importance of Bourdieu’s work is that it allows one to objectivate and understand the effects that the academic institution has on those within it, and to counteract them where they need to be counteracted, without indulging in the wholesale negation, or ritual transgression, that Foucault arguably indulged in, and which is so easily incorporated into the oppositional, either-or logic of academic criticism.

So where does this leave us? A too-easy dichotomy would see Foucault as an anti-institutional revolutionary, and Bourdieu as an institutional reformer. Indeed, Bourdieu was a passionate advocate for reform of the French school system; his analyses of “cultural capital,” so often misappropriated by American academics in theoretical battles over the nature of aesthetic value, were designed to account for inequalities within the school system that allowed students from certain social backgrounds to succeed out of all proportion to supposedly “natural” differences in aptitude and ability. Whereas Foucault, after the events of May 1968 especially, inclined toward an anarchist politics that opposed (in theory, at least) the existence of any coercive social institutions whatsoever, Bourdieu remained, in a sense, in the camp of the old socialist Left, seeing May 1968, for instance, as an opportunity for extensive pragmatic social reform rather than revolution. The formulation is clearly inadequate, given that Foucault, in the 70s especially, was deeply committed to practical social reform: as he put it, “justice always must question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions” (269).

But there’s a certain utility to the formulation nonetheless. We might say that Foucault opposes the normalizing effects of the institution on principle; while Bourdieu takes an explicitly normative stance on that normalization, accepting that the institution normalizes but calling for that normalization to be radically democratized. In other words, while Foucault is inclined to see institutions as sites of total control, Bourdieu regards them as sites of perpetual conflict: for him, struggles over who is in and who is outside of the institution, what practices it institutes, what social fields and interests it intersects with, are part of the process that ultimately transforms institutions, and society as a whole. So, where Foucault is most concerned about subjection and domination, Bourdieu is most concerned about access and exclusion. What may at first seem to be due simply to a difference in their object of analysis (with the prison, what’s of greatest interest is what happens inside it; with the school, it’s who is kept outside) is also a deep-rooted philosophical difference, a contrast between Foucault’s basically Nietzschean foundation, which sees the individual will to power as blocked by the intermediary of the social institution, and Bourdieu’s basically Pascalian foundation, which sees the access to truth prevented by the social, but more through collective human blindness than any insidious effect of power. (As Bourdieu puts it in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, “The fantasy of the conspiracy, the idea that an evil will is responsible for everything that happens in the social world, haunts critical social thought.”)
Foucault’s evident frustration with the institution, as a philosopher, is exactly what Bourdieu, as a sociologist, considers its saving grace: for all the tyrannical effects of domination the institution can impose, it also offers the most socially efficacious way of establishing the force of ideas. Thus the institution, for Bourdieu, far from impeding the progress of philosophy, allows philosophy to have some degree of social force in the world: allows ideas to be more than ideas, and material conditions to be meaningfully effected by the course of human thought. For Bourdieu, the institution is less cruelly oppressive than it is mercilessly selective: the final social fact to be rued (and changed) is not that institutions discipline our bodies and minds, but that they consecrate only a few of those bodies and minds; not that they construct subjects out of certain individuals, but that they fail to make anything at all out of so many others.

There is a philosophical commitment implied here too; Bourdieu's position should not be mistaken as simply a refusal of the enchanted discourse of philosophy in the name of responsible and respectable social obligation (though it is that, in part). For Bourdieu (as for his protegé Luc Boltanski), the question of the institution is closely bound up with the larger philosophical question of justification, and justice. As he puts it in Pascalian Meditations, in a surprisingly affirmative reading of the bureaucratic state: “what truly is at stake in this game, if not the question of raison d’etre, the justification, not of human existence in its universality, but of a particular, singular existence … It is the question of the legitimacy of an existence, of an individual’s right to feel justified in existing as he or she exists … [T]he social world offers humans that which they most totally lack: a justification for existing” (237-239). And a few pages later: “Rites of institution give an enlarged and particularly visible image of the effect of the institution, an arbitrary being which has the power to rescue from arbitrariness, to confer the supreme raison d’etre, the one constituted by the affirmation that a contingent being, vulnerable to sickness, infirmity and death, is worthy of the dignity, transcendent and immortal, like the social order, that he is given” (245).

One final remark. Even if we decide that Bourdieu and Foucault, as pure theorists, are fundamentally incompatible — and I think that in the final analysis, in many ways, they probably are — even if we feel we must “take a side” between Foucault or Bourdieu, there is much to be gained by reading both of them, whichever side one chooses to be on. And it is probably best, it goes without saying, to avoid slavishly imitating either one. One thing that Bourdieu shared with Foucault was a desire for his work to be seen not as an imposing theoretical edifice but as a practical “tool-kit” for researchers and political activists alike. In one of his last texts, entitled “How to effectively establish the critical attitude” (2000), Bourdieu reflected on this aspect of Foucault’s practice: “Concepts, he said, came from struggles and should return to struggles” (385). In this spirit, then, I think we should keep struggling with both of these thinkers, and letting them struggle with one another, in our work. If, in other words, it is concepts constructed by Foucault and Bourdieu that we have to struggle against, it is also concepts constructed by them that we have with which to struggle. Literary criticism, like literature, is an institution at once ideal and material — and we need all the perspective on that institution we can get.

Sign me up!

"The moderns are quite right to want reality, language, society and being all at once. They are wrong only in believing that these sets are forever contradictory…

"Are you not fed up at finding yourselves forever locked into language alone, or imprisoned in social representations alone, as so many social scientists would like you to be? We want to gain access to things themselves, not only to their phenomena. The real is not remote; rather, it is accessible in all the objects mobilized throughout the world. Doesn't external reality abound right here among us?

"Do you not have more than enough of being continually dominated by a Nature that is transcendent, unknowable, inaccessible, exact, and simply true, peopled with entities that lie dormant like the Sleeping Beauty until the day when scientific Prince Charmings finally discover them? The collectives we live in are more active, more productive, more socialized than the tiresome things-in-themselves led us to expect.

"Are you not a little tired of those sociologies constructed around the Social only, which is supposed to hold up solely through the repetition of the words 'power' and 'legitimacy' because sociologists cannot cope either with the contents of objects or with the world of languages that nevertheless construct society? Our collectives are more real, more naturalized, more discursive than the tiresome humans-among-themselves led us to expect.

"Are you not fed up with language games, and with the eternal scepticism of the deconstruction of meaning? Discourse is not a word unto itself but a population of actants that mix with things as well as with societies, uphold the former and the latter alike, and hold on to them both. Interest in texts does not distance us from reality, for things too have to be elevated to the dignity of narrative. As for texts, why deny them the grandeur of forming the social bond that holds us together?

"Are you not tired of being accused of having forgotten Being, of living in a base world emptied of all its substance, all its sacredness and its art? In order to rediscover these treasures, do we really have to give up the historical, scientific and social world in which we live? To apply oneself to the sciences, to technologies, to markets, to things, does not distance us any more from the difference of Being with beings than from society, politics, or language.

"Real as Nature, narrated as Discourse, collective as Society, existential as Being: such are the quasi-objects that the moderns have caused to proliferate. As such it behoves us to pursue them, while we simply become once more what we have never ceased to be: amoderns."

— Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter, 89-90

Hmm

"The sole fact of experience that demonstrates that life is generally good is that the overwhelming majority of men prefer it to death."

— Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. W.D. Halls, p. 190

Another Great Divide

"By the end of the Second World War, however, the great days of Deweyan philosophy and social science were over. The strenuous reformist attitude which succeeded the genteel tradition was in turn succeeded by an urge to be scientific and rigorous … American sociology, whose early stages had been satirized as the expenditure of a five-thousand-dollar grant to discover the address of a whorehouse, came to be satirized as the expenditure of a five-million-dollar grant to plot the addresses of a thousand whorehouses against a multidimensional array of socio-economic variables."

— Richard Rorty, "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture," in Consequences of Pragmatism, 63-64

"I want to see how much I can take"

As in "stand," or "carry"?

Liberal Aesthetics

[Hi all — I found this draft of an essay in an old notebook from last year, typed it up, and am wondering now how I feel about it. Basically it's about why I feel uncomfortable with the usual liberal defenses of art in general, and "morally objectionable" (or "amoral") art in particular, and how I think we need better ways of defining the relationship between art and morality (not that I have any positive proposals on that score myself). If anyone feels like wading through it at any point I'd appreciate your thoughts. I'm not really thinking about publishing it or anything, it's more like a working-through-thoughts sort of a piece.]

LIBERAL AESTHETICS

Definition of Terms

By "liberals" here I mean a set of people whose subsets include: (a) people with liberal political views, (b) people who attended “liberal arts colleges” or have aesthetic and ideological dispositions represented by same (which includes many of the faculty and graduate students in the humanities at big research institutions with all kinds of political affiliations), and (c) people who do much of the work of appreciating and encouraging aesthetic culture on its own terms, who are interested in whatever the arts present us with to be interested in, and thus have a liberal attitude toward the field of art itself. Of course not everyone in the set meets every one of the qualifications listed above, but for the purposes of my argument here two out of three — or even a particularly strongly held version of any one — are good enough. (I should also maybe point out that I consider myself covered by all three.)

I take it that a main tenet of the “liberal” attitude toward art is that we should treat art-works as we would treat people: with tolerance, faith, respect, etc. (Both approaches, which were developed in the nineteenth century and refined in the twentieth, are responses to increasing cultural diversity, in the interpersonal and in the aesthetic spheres simultaneously.) In practice, this means that we allow art-works to represent people in ways we disagree with — ways we would not treat people or would not like to be treated.

For the liberal, then, we have a kind of moral responsibility toward art-works, but those works have no moral responsibility themselves: what they depict can be the worst of human behavior, or be unrecognizable as human behavior, and still be great art. Examples of this abound: books by the Marquis de Sade or Vladimir Nabokov, films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, paintings by Kara Walker, songs by Notorious B.I.G. or 50 Cent.

So, we treat art-objects as we would treat people insofar as we respect them, protect them, attempt to understand them on their own terms, and believe they have some value in themselves which is not merely the human use we want to put them to. But we treat them differently in not holding them morally responsible — not because they contain no moral content or have no moral agency (as is the case with a non-artistic object like a cup or a stapler) but because the moral contet is not strictly traceable back to a human subject. If Picasso were to say, “I hate women,” we could hold him morally responsible; if his art says it, or seems to imply it, we could still take offense, but to denounce it on those grounds alone — or even to argue with it — we would be accused of “missing the point.” Or speaking the wrong language.

Excursus on Entertainment

Entertainment is a little different, because it is assumed to have a more direct relation to sociology, and to “the culture.” Thus, if a Hollywood movie contains what seems to be a racist idea, we not only feel no compunction about saying so and objecting, but we treat it like an empirical datum in a larger investigation: one more piece of evidence that our society is (or can be) deeply racist. When we do this we are not treating the entertainment-object like a person in one way (i.e. we don’t respect its intelligence enough to seek a more complicated explanation of its utterances than “it’s a product of its culture”) — but we are treating it very much like a person in another, by holding it morally responsible.

A puzzle arises here: art, which is largely assumed to be of importance for its humanistic value, is in important ways less available to human understanding than so-called “entertainment,” which in being aesthetically debased, commercially compromised and thus subhuman(istic), becomes the true reservoir for human values and emotions.

It’s good that we allow ourselves to get angry at the television: but bad that, in the productions of mass entertainment culture, there’s no one specific individual subject to hold morally responsible. Who exactly are we angry at, when an idea we don’t like appears in a movie? The actor who says the line? The writer? The director? The audience, who tacitly accepts it, especially if they laugh or cheer? The distributor? All of these people share in a mass moral failing: which means, every moral failure in a piece of mass entertainment has the character of a conspiracy, or a systemic injustice. I had this feeling watching the scene in Saving Private Ryan in which Jeremy Davies’ previously pacifistic character finally shoots and kills a Nazi, for example, upon which the audience cheered. I felt disgusted, but I wasn’t sure who to be angry at — Spielberg? Davies? The audience? WWII? This is the sort of moral omnidirectionality that deranges activists and revolutionaries, turning them into paranoiacs; it's what makes cynics and nihilists (and certain types of art-lovers). It's also the play-form of our liberal sense of helplessness to many gross injustices and social problems even in the "real world."

Context-Expansion and Moral Conversation

The easy way out of this problem of assigning moral responsibility is to shift our contempt towards “the culture,” whatever that culture may be in any given case. It’s as if we were saying “the thing that really bothers me about this racist idea is not that it was expressed (that it exists) in the mind of an individual fellow human, but that it was found acceptable, both by the artists that produced it and the audiences that responded to it.”

Problems with this reaction:

1. It assumes that we have knowledge of the multiplicity of “cultural” responses — whether articulated or not — to a given moral lapse. Just because a statement or action has been allowed to pass does not mean that it has been “accepted.” This is exactly where the accounts of sociology can help, in showing how response to statements are determined by a variety of facts.

2. It lets the moral actor(s) off the hook, in ways that both deepen their crime (by making it symptomatic of a widespread societal sickness) and trivialize it (by taking it out of their hands and finding the true meaning of the action in a framework for which neither he nor anyone else can be held morally responsible). This is a signal problem with the logic of political correctness: as a moral reproof, it’s fairly light, since it basically amounts to saying: “You are using words that, in a context larger than the one you have in mind, are offensive.” This move of expansion of context is also a hallmark of deconstruction, and has roots in Freudian discourse I think.) But it’s also unusually enraging, both because it can be seen as condescending (“you don’t know enough to know what you’re saying”) and because it’s essentially unanswerable (except if you deny that any such larger context exists, i.e. that anyone could conceivably be offended). Most moral reproofs admit of objections on their own terms (???) but accusations of political incorrectness rarely do.)

For moral conversation, we need to conceive that both parties are sensible of the meaning and likely repercussions of their statements and actions, or at least that the meaning of one’s statement can be redescribed by the other with a minimum of context-expansion. But the corollary to this is that we cannot dismiss the other’s points by supplying a context — most often a “cultural context” — which explains or excuses them in ways the other would object to. (How do we know if they object? We ask them.) This is the rhetorical move common to liberals and conservatives, continental and analytic philosophers, etc.: filling in the story to help make sense of what seems like an unreasonable (or sometimes, too reasonable) point of view.

This “filling in the story” is also what we do with entertainment — fairly, I think. It’s a coping mechanism that helps us filter the extraordinary amount of media material we receive daily: we fit it into fixed ideas we have about “our culture.” But we act a little differently towards art. Perhaps because there is so much less of it in our lives (a situation that is entirely deliberate — most people intentionally limit their encounters with art, and this is by no means a bad thing), our concern is not to place it in the story of ordinary culture but to hold it apart — at first, at least. (The art-historicizing impulse, if it occurs, should kick in later, once the object has been humanly appreciated.) We want to see what this, just this, will tell us about our lives (I might add “just our lives”). We open it up not to a story about “culture” but a story about “life” (and yes, they’re really the same thing; but not in our minds they’re not).

This leads naturally to the auteur theory/glorification of the author in the liberal arts: for if experience of art is first and foremost a “human” (not a “cultural”) encounter, then we need a person on the other end. And understanding about ourselves will be a function of understanding about her or him. No such reciprocity is needed for the experience of entertainment (or popular culture, which I might redefine here as “art understood culturally”). (Of course, one could change one’s relationship to a work of entertainment simply by looking into it a little more deeply. This is what the Cahiers du Cinèma crowd did with Western directors like John Ford, for instance; and in doing so they made movies which perhaps were interesting to intellectuals (such as Adorno) for what they revealed about American cultural codes into works of art which were interesting for what they revealed about John Ford, and his artistic decisions. They changed the viewing of these films from a form of surveillance into a form of conversation.)

A conversation has a moral basis: we speak expecting to be evaluated, and listen expecting to evaluate. But it also, necessarily, suspends evaluation: I’m going to wait to judge what you say until I’ve given you the chance to explain it to me (or I’ve had the chance to explain it myself). Capital-A Art is like this kind of conversation in that we imagine it to be an encounter with another person who gets the benefit of the doubt; but it is unlike it in that we will happily suspend moral evaluation forever, as we will not in interpersonal situations. We respect the piece of art (or, if you like, the artist) enough to let it speak, and to give it time to justify itself; but we are satisfied (perhaps even more satisfied) if the justification never comes. Hence the contemporary approbation for art that is undecidable, ambiguous, that can be “read” and approved more than one way — and the ensuing tendency to theorize that all art is like this.

The Humanities and Disciplinary Non-Reciprocity

What is still more symptomatic is the attendant rush to judgment on the entire context that surrounds the art: as if art were necessarily a mystery, but the apparatus of culture were plainly transparent. This if, of course, an abuse of techniques and theories developed by sociology and Marxism to explain cultural phenomena which once seemed baffling and unexplainable (e.g. alienation, reification, reproduction of the social order, false consciousness, etc.) but which now have the worthy obviousness of academic clichés. But it’s an amazingly widespread and firmly entrenched abuse: to the point that anyone who wants to care about art, and to hold it apart from what might be term more generally “entertainment,” almost has to insist on this transcendental quality of art to escape theory; and on the capability of theory to explain literally everything else.

This may be part of what is isolating the Humanities, and English in particular, from other academic, and especially scientific, discourses: its eagerness to steal concepts from all over the disciplinary map to frame its discussion of what is ostensibly its subject (literature), coupled with an extraordinary resistance to allowing that subject to be reappropriated “reductively” by other disciplines to their own ends. (Exhibit A: English professors’ frequent hostility to the sociology of literature, and to moral philosophers who make use of literary examples, like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum.) In this way, the academic literary establishment is now more insular and quasi-religious than ever: it will absorb and scrutinize every datum the world throws up, while refusing scrutiny on other people’s terms.

Conversations with Conservatives

Such scrutiny might look like this: What is art good for? How does it benefit society? Do the assumptions that lie behind it make sense any more? Is it really worth devoting your life to? These are questions we as liberals are quite right to ask about the church or some particular political or social institution, but they now seem to us retrograde and unhelpful, even idiotic or philistine, when applied to art and literature. But they are, in fact, the very questions that will be asked, and answered, by conservatives who'd like to replace the kinds of "daring" or "avant-garde" art many liberals enjoy with something more morally responsible, and we are inclined to think, aesthetically debased.

There's a larger ideological issue here: have we, as liberals, since the sixties, invested more in people as they are (i.e. identity politics) and literature as it is (i.e. as it appeared as an institution in the postwar period) than in human possibility, or the possibilities of the human endeavor called literature? Ironically, perhaps, “progressive” politicians for the past twenty to thirty years have been more focused on safeguarding current freedoms (freedom of expression, the right to privacy, Roe v. Wade, affirmative action) than on advancing the liberal agenda any further. This is why the liberals sometimes appear today as the conservatives must have in the sixties: fearful, reactionary, pessimistic, unwilling to trust in the possibilities of the future.

And the liberal relation to art since that period shows some of the same tendencies: a burgeoning “avant-garde classicism” (comforting, in that it reiterates that sixties-era countercultural values are still a motivating force in art), a hardcore commitment to auteurism (in the form of ever more expansive and fulsome appreciations of “true artists,” retrospectives, etc.), and an accompanying skepticism toward all schools and movements trying to advance new aesthetics, which are all too often labeled "reactionary" or simply "retro." Presiding over it all is a sense that it’s not quite clear what art as a social practice is for — the inevitable outcome of a philosophy that strenuously maintains that it can be "anything" — but that it should nonetheless definitely be protected, at all costs.

This liberal attitude — of insisting on protecting what you refuse to define — is both sensible and kind of odd, if you think about it; and it must be particularly odd-sounding to people (let’s call them, paradoxically, conservatives) who find the overwhelming majority of this so-called art that is to be protected completely unpleasurable. And much of it, not to put too fine a point on it, immoral. Furthermore, how frustrating must it be, if you're a conservative who takes issue with a particular art-work, that not only don't liberal art-lovers share your feeling that this given piece of art is objectionable, but that they don’t even admit that morality comes into it — that art even can be considered objectionable? That these liberals will immediately launch into a defense of free speech, or condescend to you, or ridicule your response as unsophisticated? If they’re feeling particularly philosophical, they might explain that they just don’t see art in those terms — that, for them, art is valuable as an expression of human imagination (or maybe of the principled rage of the underclass) and, as ugly or repellent as it might initially seem, we art-lovers have a duty (they might not say “duty”) to try to understand it and see what it can tell us. To which you, if you’re feeling provocative, might ask: Well, why treat art this way and not people? Why spend a lot of time and energy trying to resolve why the word “CUNT” scrawled on a canvas is justifiable when you won’t look into my words (viz., that I find that canvas offensive) long enough to form a more coherent account than “he’s not used to it” or “she doesn’t understand”? Why does art get the benefit of the doubt and not audiences?

I would argue that we as liberals need to have a good answer to these questions — or a few good answers. We can’t just argue that they’re irrelevant. In trying to protect the aesthetic from the theoretical pressures of moral or political ideology, we risk perpetuating a more insidious ideology of practice. We need to find a way to defend art as art — that is, as a common human behavior fundamentally different from other kinds of human behavior, and learnable on its own terms — without recourse to any transcendental, uncriticizable category.

Erving Goffman, the 50s and Literature

Sociology: what is it good for? For students of literature, that is. I'm pondering this question as generals loom. Still on my list, yet to be cracked, are Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction and Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere — both works that have already influenced my thinking via my hazy preconceptions of what they are likely to say, but which I must admit I'm scared to actually confront. And even more scared to have to talk about in front of a committee who might actually know something about them.

One sociology book I have managed to read, however, as previously mentioned, is Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I have some ideas about how I might eventually be able to work this into a developing thesis idea about the social self-presentation of poets and the genealogy that stretches from Eliot to Auden to Ashbery, but I will leave those aside for another day. In the meantime, I'll just give a sketch of some first impressions of Goffman, in the hope that they might lead to something more fruitful later.

I was turned on to Goffman originally by Jeff Nunokawa, who used a little bit of I think Frame Analysis in his Victorian novel seminar as a conceptual framework to talk about "awayness" and the evasion of the social totality (Jeff, in his own personal conceptual system, plays Goffman off against Foucault). He is (still?) highly regarded as a sociologist who facilitated a paradigm shift within the discipline from the macro- to the micro- level, i.e. studying not broad social trends or "laws" but actual human behavior as collected by experts in the field operating similarly to anthropologists.

Anyway, The Presentation of Self is a weird, crafty, idiosyncratic little book that is equal parts empirical survey, philosophical treatise, etiquette guide and public relations manual. Its basic subject is "the art of impression management": how people strive to make other people feel a certain way about them, or to limit or control the information others have about them. (This theme gets its best literary expression, to my knowledge anyway, in the works of David Foster Wallace.) To this end, Goffman uses "some language of the stage," speaking of performances, backstage areas, rehearsals and improvisations, etc., only to retract this conceit on the second-to-last page in a headspinning rhetorical move: "The claim that all the world's a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to be familiar with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation" (254) — that is, this very claim, on which the whole book has been based, was itself an impression-management strategy. It made me slap my forehead when I read it.

Though Goffman focuses on real-time interactions and thus is naturally led to use theatrical terminology, the manipulations he describes could just as well be those of a novelist, or a poet, both of whom also work by carefully controlling the amount of information, both literary and extra-literary, given to the audience of their work. In fact, one thing that distinguishes Goffman from sociologists past (Weber, Durkheim) and future (Bourdieu) is his conscious literariness. Not only is his own prose style economical and attractive, clearly learned from reading short stories and New Yorker profiles, but he often takes his clinching examples from literary sources: some of the authors he quotes from at length include Kenneth Burke (25, 175, 194), Henry Mayhew (41), Kafka (96), Warren Miller (97), Evelyn Waugh (101), Orwell (122), Melville (137), Gore Vidal (193) and Mary McCarthy (219) (as well as stuff like Character, Manner and Customs in the People of India and Ebony magazine). And it must be admitted that he sometimes comes off like a frustrated novelist himself ("So, too, members of the team must not exploit their presence in the front region in order to stage their own show, as do, for example, marriageable stenographers who sometimes encumber their office surroundings with a lush undergrowth of high fashion," 214). There's a lot of that sort of thing, sometimes a little too much: a number of Goffman's categories seem like opportunities for examples rather than helpful distinctions in their own right.
Goffman is also, noticeably, a creature of the 50s, receptive to the literary and intellectual influences of that time. One of the more interesting features of Goffman's book are its periodic mentions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre's Being and Nothingness supplies a description of a waiter in a café who "is playing at being a waiter in a café": "The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realize it" (76). De Beauvoir's The Second Sex is quoted a few times to describe the attitude of women (problematically labelled "woman," a usage not followed by Goffman) to their performances in the presence of men: "Confronting man woman is always play-acting; she lies when she makes believe that she accepts her status as the inessential other … With other women, a woman is behind the scenes; she is polishing her equipment, but not in battle; she is getting her costume together, preparing her make-up, laying out her tactics…" (113).

On the one hand, Goffman's quotations from Sartre and De Beauvoir clearly have something to do with the widespread popularity of Existentialism in America in the 50s; this vogue both explains why the quotes impressed Goffman and why he feels they will bolster his argument with a "lay" "literary" reader. But in another sense Sartre seems an odd choice of hero, given that Goffman (a) doesn't seem to be much interested in metaphysics, or abstract thinking of any kind, and (b) avoids any explicit discussion of politics. And yet Sartre and De Beauvoir were also associated with and influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, author of The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception — both Goffman-ish titles. And while I don't know squat about phenomenology — just that it was also being enthusiastically received in the art critical world at about this time, by Michael Fried for instance, and that it made my eyes glaze over in college — it's clearly this aspect of Existentialism, and not so much its concern with "being" or "commitment," that interested Goffman.

Well, how about this. A vogue for phenomenology suits a sudden awareness of an explosion of phenomena: and that's what the affluence of the American postwar economy, with all its attendant cultural renaissances, produced. And there was apparently also an explosion of sociological research conducted and published in the 1950s (much of it, I think, under Goffman's supervision). Reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life you get the feeling that we have so much more data on 1950s America than we do on any previous society. While Goffman occasionally dips back into earlier eras (often Victorian or eighteenth-century England) for his examples, he rarely "historicizes" in the sense of accounting for changes in values or social agreements from one period to another. I would have to think that this close focus on the current day was fairly radical for the field of sociology, which, in its development out of Hegelian philosophy and traditional social history, would have been interested in nothing so much as epochal change. My question is, how much of Goffman's contentment with "now" was tied to a general sense in the America of the 50s that, after centuries of talking around the subject, everyday life itself was finally being discovered, a notion that is connected both to the public events of the time — the Kinsey Report comes up in passim — and the gradual permeation of such intellectual events as Freudianism and phenomenology into American life? It's a notion, at any rate, that prepares the way for Confessionalism, and for the Beat poets.

A final question. Can Goffman meaningfully be called a Modernist, or even placed in respect to the intellectual influence of Modernism? This is tricky. His literary sources (with a few interesting exceptions, like Kafka) are straight-ahead novelistic realism, because that's where the source of the best information lies. He shows little concern with language, and much with physicality and expression, making his work hard to subsume under the heading of "the linguistic turn" that is often seen to be Modernism's theoretical counterpart. (On the other hand, it suggests points of contact with the later Wittgenstein.) In his concern with "everyday life" rather than "culture," with the facts of contemporary social life rather than what it evolved out of or might be tending toward, he is not at all in the semi-metaphysical tradition of Eliot, Leavis and Raymond Williams. But clearly he's in no way a throwback to 19th century intellectual traditions either: he engages with Freud, with Simmel and Durkheim, with literature. He recognizes modernity has taken place, but he prefers to anatomize and catalogue it than to situate it in a larger historical or theoretical framework. For this reason the Modernist he most resembles is probably Joyce, the Balzacian Joyce who bragged about Ulysses being a blueprint from which turn-of-the-century Dublin could be reconstructed.
Or maybe Beckett: "Performers are aware they foster and ordinarily also possess destructive information about the show," Goffman states on page 144. Waiting for Godot had its American premiere in 1956, Endgame in 1957; a dedicated follower of Existentialism would presumably have been aware of them. This last point raises the question of what I'll risk calling the postmodernity of Goffman's approach, and it's closely connected with one of my biggest problems with his book in general. It seems to me that Goffman's concept of "destructive information" (first used on page 141) is seriously flawed. Putting my objection in short, analytically unrigorous form: just how sensitive are we, anyway? Goffman sometimes talks as though the merest breeze that happens along could destroy the delicate ecosystems of human interaction that he so minutely anatomizes. Social relations are more adaptable and impervious than that, as the early work of Stanley Cavell (in my view a direct inheritor of Goffman: but more on that trajectory another day) shows quite extensively. Goffman, for one thing, is so eagle-eyed himself that he fails to account for the fact of repression, or willful not-noticing, that the more Freudian Cavell so doggedly attends to in essays like "Knowing and Acknowledging." But this emphasis on the ever-present possibility of destruction, far from being a mere weakness on Goffman's part, may point to something bigger, a distinctively postwar epistemic framework that extends inexorably to where we are now: that is, we are getting used to being disillusioned — perhaps Adorno would say "disenchanted" — consistently, and in every aspect of our cultural life. (This is a condition perhaps also anticipated by Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations was made available and became influential only after the Second World War.)

Hypothesis: in the postmodern period, disillusionment itself becomes the frame in which cultural activity — and not just, but especially, literary activity — is automatically viewed.

Corollary: it's time for a nap.

New set of skeletons

From Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959, the same year as Life Studies:

"…interactive teams sometimes seem to be prepared to step out of the dramatic framework for their actions and give themselves up for extended periods of time to a promiscuous orgy of clinical, religious, or ethical analysis. We can find a lurid version of this process in evangelical social movements which employ the open confession. A sinner, sometimes admittedly not of very high status, stands up and tells to those who are present things he would ordinarily attempt to conceal or rationalize away; he sacrifices his secrets and his self-protective distance from others, and this sacrifice tends to induce a backstage solidarity among all present. Group therapy affords a similar mechanism… In-group solidarity tends to result, and this 'social support,' as it is called, presumably has therapeutic value. (By everyday standards, the only thing a patient loses in this way is his self-respect.) …

"It may be that these shifts from apartness to intimacy occur at times of chronic strain. Or perhaps we can view them as part of an anti-dramaturgical social movement, a cult of confession. Perhaps such lowering of barriers represents a natural phase in the social change which transforms one team into another: presumably opposing teams trade secrets so that they can start at the beginning to collect a new set of skeletons for a newly shared closet. In any case, we find that occasions arise when opposing teams, be they industrial, marital, or national, seem ready not only to tell their secrets to the same specialist but also to perform this disclosure in the enemy's presence." (204-205)

The second paragraph, in particular, deserves serious unpacking, which I don't quite feel up to at the moment. But I think it could be related to Adrienne's post back in July about poetry and self-display in the late 50s/early 60s.

World Series

Georg Simmel's writing is full of ideas; and while it seems like you should be able to say this of any philosopher or theorist of note, I think GS gives an unusually strong feeling of an active mind deluged with possibilities, searching for at least a temporary way of disgorging them in a useful and convincing manner. His training was in Neo-Kantian philosophy, and he is unapologetically a systems guy, but he was just as firmly committed to the practice of cultural criticism, and to the development of what he termed a "German philosophical culture." To this end, he wrote about money, art, literature, clothing, women's liberation, space (paging Adrienne!), meals, and the history of philosophy — all of which makes him a perfect poster-boy for the intersection of Modernist literature (or, if you prefer, culture) and theory.

It also tends to make his essays rather messy, and of course Simmel's not traditionally one of the "master thinkers" of the 20th century (unless you ask Jeff Nunokawa); his methods and opinions are a little too idiosyncratic, and many of his conclusions are far too tied to the political and historical circumstances of his time and place (Germany during and preceding the first World War) to be usable in other connections. He goes in big for German nationalism, for one thing, and his conclusions about the differences between "male" and "female culture" are today not much more helpful than the average stand-up comic's. But despite all these flaws, he's a great and inspiring writer, I think, and, more perhaps than his contemporaries, seems like a Modernist himself in his passionate concern with culture from a slight remove, and always with a weird mixture of missionary zeal and caution.

Appropriately, then, I find the Simmelian concept that's having the most afterlife with me is that of the "cultural series," which he formulates most cogently in this passage from his 1911 essay "On the Essence of Culture":

"We are accustomed automatically to label as cultural values the great series of artistic and moral, scientific and economic achievements. Perhaps they all are; but they are certainly not so by virtue of their purely objective, as it were autochthonous significance. The cultural significance of any particular achievement is by no means equivalent to its significance within its own series as determined by its specific nature and purpose. For example, a work of art is subject to quite different criteria and norms when considered within the sphere of art history or aesthetics, than when its cultural value is involved.

"Each of these great series can be regarded on the one hand as an end in itself, so that each individual member of them constitutes a value which is proven directly by being enjoyed and giving satisfaction. On the other hand, they can all also be included in the cultural series, i.e. considered in respect of their significance for the overall development of individuals in society at large. Standing on their own ground, all these values resist inclusion in the cultural series. A work of art aspires only to perfection as measured by purely artistic criteria … Their contribution to the development of human personality, i.e. their cultural value, is a different matter." (43, italics mine)

This is an extremely useful encapsulation of the problems swirling around l'art pour l'art and the historical efficacy of art and literature which converge so noisily and excitingly in the Modernism of the 1910s and 20s. What's important here, for me, is not that Simmel synthesizes the approaches but that he insists on their fundamental incommensurability. Despite the enormous differences in their writing styles and philosophical allegiances, I actually detect a lot of Jacques Derrida in Simmel: a similar insistence on irreducibility, the impossibility of either incorporating art into culture "without remainder" or of separating the two spheres completely and conclusively.

Without digging too deep, I think it'll be obvious that Simmel's view of culture as a multiply divided sphere has resonance for the Modernists and their situations. Marianne Moore's "Poetry" comes to mind first: "I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine." This is saying more than "most poetry is trivial, but some of it is worthwhile": it's saying, at least in its extended context, that "all this fiddle" is what poetry is, and that "the genuine" will never be found unless we can find it within the fiddle. Moore is perhaps more of a liberal humanist than Simmel, but like him she shies away from any claim that "reading poetry will make you a better person." What it will do is make you a better reader of poetry; and with that skill in your back pocket, you're on your own to hunt out the genuine. As Moore ends it: "if you demand on the one hand, / the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness and / that which is on the other hand / genuine, you are interested in poetry."

The distinction, then, is between "artistic and moral, economic and scientific achievements" — each of which we must preserve in their own distinctness from the others — and what these achievements are for, the use-value of culture as it were. One could say that Pound and Eliot's problem was that they tried to ignore this distinction, to collapse the multiplicity of cultural series into one epic narrative of civilization's decline (and potential rebirth), though I think Eliot was a lot more tortured by the aporia than Pound was.

Lastly, I'll say that part of why this "cultural series" idea appeals to me has something to do with the process of reading for Generals itself. Following the cultural series that is "Modernism" — let's leave aside the subseries "American," "British," and "French" for now — is not exactly equivalent to following that of "literature," or "history," or even "poetry." Each series includes some of the same materials, perhaps even with the same interpretations placed on them, but the important part is that they reach them and proceed from them in decidedly different ways. The path that leads to Eliot from "French Symbolism" is related but fundamentally foreign to the path that leads to him from "late Victorianism"; and what to make of the longer trajectory that gets us there from Dante, or the Metaphysicals, or, as Edmund Wilson suggests, from New England Protestantism? When dealing with such lengthy series — Derrida, or Mallarmé, might call them "chains" — it's probably best not to try to over-intertwine them, or lay them out parallel, for fear of distorting or destroying the integrity of the individual series itself. But in order for the act of criticism to be worth performing at all, there needs to be some kind of space where they can come together, or where you can put them together, at least provisionally. That space, for Simmel, is called "culture" (and for Habermas, the "public sphere"?). For us, maybe "theory."

Of course all of this (my pontification, not Simmel's) is to some extent graduate-student navel-gazing (hello if you've made it this far!): the thing is to get on with your work, learn as much as you can about context in the broadest sense, and use what seems relevant in any given connection (the pragmatist approach). But I guess what I want to affirm here is why Simmel is now sort of a hero of mine: he's a proud non-specialist who resists being a universalist, but is nonetheless far from a nihilist. (As a matter of fact, the other philosopher he reminds me of most is Nietzsche.) The problem for Simmel was that there was too much stuff in the modern world — too many material objects, too many people, too much knowledge, theory, art, culture; not too much because in and of itself excess is deplorable (that's more the Puritan consciousness as diagnosed by Simmel's mentor Max Weber), but too much for any individual subject, even a highly educated and "cultivated" one, to absorb for him or herself. (In this attitude we might see a hint of self-pity; Simmel can be read as sort of a Modernist Henry Bemis.) Thus he saw most trends in modern life and thought as a way to either screen out or superficially synthesize the overwhelming plethora of series existing all around us.

It's this awareness of plethora, and strange mix of caution and exhilaration in the face of it, that makes me want to put Simmel forward as the model for a kinder, gentler critical theory: one which does not insist on a forcing of connections across cultural fields, or anyway recognizes the eternal difficulties of such connections,* but which allows that these connections are possible and desirable, are something which all but the most blinkered and limited human beings will want to do. And which, along with whatever expert authority it claims for itself and its own interpretations, maintains a trust in the capacity of other people to make these connections for themselves, given proper access to a wide enough variety of series, and enough time.


(* I'm dancing around the figure of Adorno here, who strikes me in many ways as Simmel's evil twin. )

The sky, the sun, the stars

"Where, exceptionally, the eye also provides such an identity of impressions for a great number of people, then the communalizing sociological effect also occurs. The fact that all people can simultaneously see the sky and the sun is, I believe, an essential element for the union which every religion implies. For each religion somehow turns, in its origin or form, to the sky or the sun and has some sort of relationship to these all-encompassing and world-dominating entities. The fact that a sense which in practical life is so exclusive as the eye, which even somehow modifies what is simultaneously seen for each person by means of the diversity of the viewpoint, nonetheless does indeed have a content — the sky, the sun, the stars — that is absolutely not exclusive, and which offers itself uniformly to everyone. This fact must foster, on the one hand, that transcendence from the narrowness and particularity of the human subject which every religion contains and, on the other, support or favour the element of a union of the faithful, which every religion likewise contains." (Simmel on Culture, 116-117)

Take heart, Adrienne

Georg Simmel feels your pain:

"[In modern culture] there is no reason not to expand indefinitely, not to line up book after book, work of art after work of art, discovery after discovery: the form of objectivity as such possesses an unlimited capacity for accomplishment.

"However, this inorganic accumulative capacity, as it were, makes it profoundly incommensurable with the form of personal life. For the latter's absorptive capacity is limited not only by strength and longevity, but also by a certain unity and relative closure of its forms, and it therefore makes a selection with a determined scope from among the elements offered to it as means of individual development … The infinitely growing stock of the objectified mind makes demands on the subject, arouses faint aspirations in it, strikes it with feelings of its own insufficiency and helplessness, entwines it into total constellations from which it cannot escape as a whole without mastering its individual elements.

"There thus emerges the typical problematic condition of modern humanity: the feeling of being surrounded by an immense number of cultural elements, which are not meaningless, but not profoundly meaningful to the individual either; elements which have a certain crushing quality as a mass, because an individual cannot inwardly assimilate every individual thing, but cannot simply reject it either, since it belongs potentially, as it were, to the sphere of his or her cultural development. One could characterize this with the exact reversal of that saying, 'Nihil habentes, omni possidentes,' which characterized the blissful poverty of the early Franciscans … Instead of that, human beings in very rich and overburdened cultures are 'omnia habientes, nihil possidentes.'" (Simmel on Culture, 72-73)