eJournals REAL 32/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
2016
321

A Defence of Transhistoricism: Literary History between Raymond Williams and Alain Badiou

2016
Daniel Hartley
D ANIEL H ARTLEY A Defence of Transhistoricism: Literary History between Raymond Williams and Alain Badiou 1. Introduction: ‘Democratic Culturalism’ In thinking the connection between literature and cultural change, one does not get far before confronting the problem of historicism. Change implies discontinuity, which itself usually occurs in the wake of an event; and it is arguably the dialectic between the event and continuity which has traditionally constituted the material of history itself. Historicism, in a general sense, might then be said to be a mode of interpreting events by ‘returning them’ to the specific historical contexts, or ideological constellations, in which they occurred and in which they had their meaning. In other words, I assume that one obvious way of approaching the question of ‘literature and cultural change’ is via Fredric Jameson’s well-known imperative: “Always historicize! ” Yet Jameson’s maxim - and, by extension, the prevailing academic modes of historicizing literature - has in recent years become incorporated into a dominant intellectual ideology which Alain Badiou has called “democratic materialism,” 1 and which Bruno Bosteels refers to as “democratic culturalism.” 2 “Democratic culturalism” arguably consists of the following four elements: That is, historicism - or, more specifically, historical contextualization - is no longer, if it ever was, intrinsically politically or intellectually progressive, but has become institutionalized into a new, self-conscious doxa. 3 1. An insistence on the necessity of historicization - or what Bosteels has called “the absolutization of the particular, trapped behind bars in the iron cage of its proper time and place.” 4 1 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1. 2 Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror (London: Verso, 2012), 246. 3 The first two are drawn from Bruno Bosteels’ definition in Marx and Freud, 250. The third is an extrapolation from the work of Alain Badiou, whilst the fourth is my own addition. 4 Bosteels 250. D ANIEL H ARTLEY 52 2. A denial of the existence of truth - or, as Bosteels has it, a situation in which “only languages and cultures are then left, all equally worthy of respect, even though some of them, namely the present ones, seem to be more enlightened about the principle of respect itself than others.” 5 3. A replacement of collective political projects of emancipation with an individualist ethics of difference - that is, with an uncritical and - ironically - ahistorical celebration of the “Other.” It is an ethics that, as Alain Badiou has observed, is ultimately nihilist in nature since “its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death.” 6 4. A culturalization of politics - if collective political projects are now deemed to be evil and totalitarian attempts to realize abstract visions of a common Good, then ‘culture’ becomes a way of talking about collective social phenomena whilst sidestepping those now passé antagonisms - such as class struggle or imperialism - which structure the political, social and economic fields. We thus find ourselves in a dilemma. Our task is to think the connection between literature and cultural change, yet the mode in which we spontaneously approach this question, that of historicism, and one of the two terms itself, that of culture, are potentially theoretically compromised as a result of their function within the ruling academic ideology of “democratic culturalism.” This general dilemma is then intrinsically connected to a more specific concern: what, in the contemporary context, is the status of the legacy of Raymond Williams? Whilst Alain Badiou and Bruno Bosteels are surely right to reject the ideology of “democratic culturalism,” there is a danger that, in enticing others to do likewise, certain long-standing misconceptions about Raymond Williams’s work will mean that he is wrongly cast aside as a precursor or perhaps even originator of “democratic culturalism” itself. This would be regrettable, since it would overlook the extent to which Williams’s work avoids many of the pitfalls of “democratic culturalism,” albeit bearing certain superficial similarities to it. 7 5 Bosteels 250. Yet Badiou and Bosteels are right that the present historical and theoretical conjuncture must in certain key respects be broken with, and that Badiou’s work - which calls for nothing less than an empirical history of eternity - provides one such break. Ultimately, then, this article has three aims: to define “democratic culturalism,” to defend Williams from guilt by association, and to argue that both Williams and Badiou offer radical breaks with the current intellectual conjuncture. My major claim is that Williams and Badiou, in their very different yet occasionally - and sur- 6 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 35. 7 As we shall see, Williams avoids the specific types of historicism and ‘culturalism’ which are currently hegemonic. A Defence of Transhistoricism 53 prisingly - overlapping ways, offer two equally contemporary paths for the construction of literary histories. 2. Historicism in Raymond Williams The mode of historicism intrinsic to “democratic culturalism” can be seen to combine, to a greater or lesser degree, three elements: positivist historicism, residual ‘new historicism,’ and an absolutization of the particular. Anna Kornbluh and others have recently defined positivist historicism as “a mode of inquiry that aims to do little more than exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past.” 8 It is effectively a type of antiquarianism whose “primary affective mode is the amused chuckle”; 9 the condition of possibility of such ‘amusement’ is a passive stance towards the present, which it presumes to be non-problematic and, at its limit, non-historical. 10 New historicism, by contrast, is structured by two antinomic impulses: on the one hand, to stress the intrinsic unity of a given historical moment by emphasising the internal circulation between continuous and discontinuous literary and non-literary discourses; 11 and, on the other, to emphasise the constitutive moment of subversion or oscillation inherent to this unity. This sophisticated version of historicism now survives only in the residual form of a vague stress on the importance of ‘context,’ whose internal unity might be said to outweigh its capacity for exceptional subversion. Finally, the prevailing mode of historicism also presupposes what Bosteels has called the “absolutization of the particular.” 12 The meaning of ‘culture’ at work in “democratic culturalism” is then either the anthropological one of a ‘way of life,’ which lacks conceptual rigor This is the belief that every text or event must be returned to its unique historical context, which itself is understood as having little or no connection to any other - including, perhaps especially, the present. The philosophical upshot of such an approach is a general historical relativism, yet one which always surreptitiously implies the superiority of the present. 8 V21 Collective, “Manifesto of the V21 Collective,” http: / / v21collective.org/ manifestoof-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/ , 2015. [Last accessed 30 th September, 2015]. 9 V21 Collective. 10 In other words, positivist historicism falls short of Erich Auerbach’s criteria for ‘serious’ representation and Georg Lukács’ criteria for realism: for both critics, the present must be understood as historical - that is, as the contradictory and problematic result of determinate and antagonistic social forces. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), and Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone (London: Merlin Press, 1950). 11 Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 8. 12 Bosteels, 250. D ANIEL H ARTLEY 54 and fails to account for the mutual articulation of the various elements of the social formation (i.e, the social, the political and the cultural), or that of a Wittgensteinian language-game: a semiotic system which strictly delimits the meaning of singular texts or events. There is thus a clear parallel between a type of historicism which understands past and contemporary presents as disconnected synchronic systems of ‘internal circulation’ and a post- ’linguistic turn’ approach to culture which reduces the latter to a stable, regulated signifying system. Having delineated the basic theoretical presuppositions of “democratic culturalism,” we are now in a position to show how Williams’s work differs from it. To understand his theory of literature and cultural change, however, we must first briefly reconstruct his ‘social ontology.’ This can be summarised in two banal maxims: 13 1. The world is more complex than you think it is. (The maxim of complexity) 2. You are in it. (The maxim of immanence) What Williams refers to as “lived culture” or “the socio-cultural process” consists of a potentially infinite number of social and artistic practices, relationships, values and documents. 14 The potential infinity of such practices and values naturally exceeds the material artefacts in which they are recorded. As one historical period gives way to another, all that will survive of the previous period is its “recorded culture.” 15 Yet this very survival depends on the construction of what Williams calls “selective traditions”: “an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and pre-shaped present”; 16 this process of selection produces “a version of the past which is intended to connect with and ratify the present.” 17 13 I have expanded at length upon these maxims in Daniel Hartley, “On Raymond Williams: Complexity, Immanence, and the Long Revolution,” Mediations (2016). I draw on parts of that article throughout this section and the next. Both of these articles, in turn, draw on my The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Thus, Williams’s ‘social ontology’ always presupposes two interconnecting levels: a present consisting of potentially infinite social relationships and activities, and a selective tradition, immanent to and active within it, which attempts to bind it to a selected past. Our relationship with the past thus occurs at two removes: the recorded culture of any period is only a very small part of its total human activity, but this is always further limited by the selective tradition. 14 Respectively: Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1965), 66, and Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 2010), 246. 15 Williams, The Long Revolution, 66. 16 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115. 17 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 116. A Defence of Transhistoricism 55 This explains the political importance of the maxim of complexity, clearly encapsulated in one of the most emphatic passages of Williams’s oeuvre: “no mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention.” 18 Whilst Williams’s theory has been termed “democratic” and “culturalist,” such passages make clear that he nonetheless democratizes culture in a very specific manner: “Williams ‘democratized’ his conception of culture […] not by rejecting ‘high culture’ for ‘low culture’ or for an anthropological conception of ‘way of life culture’ but by admitting all objectivated culture as ‘documentary culture’ to the first stage of the reconstruction of a structure of feeling.” 19 Williams’s emphasis on complexity and resistance to total incorporation is also part of an attempt to produce a theory adequate to the discontinuities and potentialities of the present with a view to intervening into it towards a complex future. This futurity, as we shall see, is yet another feature that distinguishes Williams’s historicism from that of “democratic culturalism.” In developing and refining his major conceptual innovation, the ‘structure of feeling,’ Williams would further elaborate his theory of those elements of social complexity that are usually overlooked by what he calls “epochal” analysis. Williams democratizes culture by seeking to restore the full archive of recorded culture from which dominant traditions have been radically selected. This has nothing in common with the pseudo-populism of “democratic culturalism.” 20 The latter is a mode of analysis which treats cultural processes as systems, thereby implying that dominant social orders do in fact exhaust all human practice and intention. In contrast to such approaches, Williams emphasises the discontinuous nature of the present. For him, there exist three ‘modes of presence’ - three modes in which the present presents itself. 21 There are residual social inheritances which “formed in the past,” but which are “still active in the cultural process,” as is the case with the monarchy in Britain; 22 18 Williams, Marxism and Literature 125; emphasis original. the dominant which is a totalizing but non-total incorporation of the 19 Paul Jones, Raymond Williams’s Sociology of Culture: A Critical Reconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 21-22; emphasis original. 20 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 121. On Williams’s development of the concept ‘structure of feeling,’ see Daniel Hartley, “Style as Structure of Feeling: Emergent Forms of Life in the Theory of Raymond Williams and George Saunders’s Tenth of December,” Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses, ed. Michael Basseler, Daniel Hartley, and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2015), 164-167, and - in more detail - Hartley, The Politics of Style, ch. 5. 21 The following definitions of the three modes are adapted from Hartley, “Style as Structure of Feeling,“ 166-167. 22 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122. D ANIEL H ARTLEY 56 social as such; and the emergent which is the making-becoming of an alternative future. By the time of Marxism and Literature (1977), Williams had come to equate his best-known concept of the “structure of feeling” with this level of emergence. He defines structure of feeling as “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available.” 23 The principal differences between Williams’s ‘social ontology’ and that of ‘democratic culturalism’ are thus clear. For Williams, every present is inherently discontinuous and no present - including our own - can ever be comprehended by an ‘epochal’ system of thought which assumes an internally complete, fully achieved articulation without remainder. This latter should not, however, be interpreted as the radical ‘remainder’ beloved of a certain strand of deconstructionism - the supplementary excess which is but the flipside of an overly ‘epochal’ positivist historicism. Rather, as we shall see, the simultaneous stress on discontinuity and anti-’epochal’ thought has more to do with the attempt to understand all historical presents as dynamic moments of struggle and social contradiction. It is also an attempt to enable the active and empowering inheritance of past historical struggles; the critical negativity inherent to a given past - produced by the uneven articulations of residual, dominant and emergent - is precisely the modality of its inheritance in the similarly uneven present. Williams thus clearly rejects all three elements of democratic culturalist historicism: positivist historicism, residual new historicism and the absolutization of the particular. Thus Williams is concerned precisely with those elements of social life which are still in process, still emergent but which nonetheless possess a minimal, identifiable structure, and are hence not pure anarchic flux. These are the eloquent silences of any historical present, hovering on the verge of articulation. 3. Literature and Culture in Raymond Williams The relevance of Williams’s ‘social ontology’ in theorizing the relation between literature and cultural change can be grasped by elaborating the following implication: the dominant remains dominant only insofar as it captures and incorporates emergence. 24 23 Williams, Marxism and Literature, 133-134. In order to ensure the continued predominance of its own social forms, the social hegemon must capture and incorporate all emergent values, practices and forms. In the literary realm, this means that, for the most part, emergent structures of feeling are captured 24 This and the following paragraph are adapted from passages in Hartley, “Style as Structure of Feeling,” 167-169. A Defence of Transhistoricism 57 and incorporated by pre-existing styles and forms, which, themselves, embody or imply certain distributions of social relations favourable to the ruling social power. Truly emergent creation - i.e., that which breaks with the prevailing constellation of socially dominant literary and cultural forms - is very rare. It usually occurs during periods of widespread social upheaval or revolution. Romanticism, for example, is unthinkable without the French Revolution, just as Modernism would have been impossible without the Russian Revolution. Emergent creation is not, however, a mere ‘reflection’ of these social changes: it can be either prefigurative of, contemporary with, or an imminent successor to them. Alternatively, it can directly and immanently embody them; it is endowed with its own social efficacy, however limited that may be. There are then two main models of literary change in Williams. The first is what I call the torsion of the old. New literary styles and forms do not emerge fully formed. They often begin as tensions, ruptures and awkwardnesses in pre-existing styles, those points where emergent forms become visible not yet in their own right but in the pressure they exert on old styles. 25 One thinks here of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of Zola, whose excessive descriptions threaten to explode realism’s delicate balance between récit and affect into full-blown modernism. 26 Likewise, Jed Esty has shown that the classical European Bildungsroman, which traditionally aligned nationhood and adulthood, gradually begins to break down in the early twentieth century. 27 The second model of literary change in Williams is what I call the immanent emergence of the new. This clearly returns us to the second of the two maxims mentioned above: the maxim of immanence (‘You are in the world’). The respective protagonists of the Bildungsromane of Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf (among others) often simply do not grow up; rather, the novels rely on plots of colonial migration and displacement in order to defer closure. They contort the old, inherited form. 28 25 I have written about the problem of ‘uneven’ styles in ‘world-literature’ in Daniel Hartley, “Combined and Uneven Styles in the Modern World-System: Stylistic Ideology in José de Alencar, Machado de Assis and Thomas Hardy,” European Journal of English Studies (2016). Williams stresses that cultural forms are immanent and constitutive elements of social relations. They are not mere ‘reflections’ or - in Fredric Jameson’s Lévi-Strauss-inspired phrase - ‘symbolic resolutions’ of specific historical antagonisms, but are in fact informing elements of them. There is not a context ‘out there’ and a literary form ‘in here’; rather, there is a single socio-material process of which literary forms are formative elements. In Culture, for exam- 26 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013), 45-77. 27 Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). 28 For a detailed elaboration of this maxim, see Hartley, Politics of Style, ch. 5. D ANIEL H ARTLEY 58 ple, Williams argues that the emergence of the soliloquy was “the discovery, in dramatic form, of new and altered social relationships.” 29 Certainly, the rise of Protestantism and a nascent capitalism were producing new conceptions of the autonomous individual, but it was the dramatic mode specifically which lent itself to their initial articulation in the form of the soliloquy in a way in which other modes could not: “the formal innovation is a true and integral element of the changes themselves: an articulation, by technical discovery, of changes in consciousness which are themselves forms of consciousness of change.” 30 This consciousness was “beyond immediately available and confirmed social relations but within newly available dramatic relations.” 31 Together, then, the formal innovations internal to the dramatic mode, along with the conditions of dramatic practice in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, 32 Having now set out the central components of Williams’s social ontology and his theory of literature and cultural change, and having demonstrated how his work can be distinguished from ‘democratic culturalism,’ I shall conclude this section by reiterating the two principal differences. If, as we have seen, the historicism of “democratic culturalism” is relativist, positivist, and residually ‘new historicist,’ then it is, by definition, incapable of establishing meaningful connections between past and present. Williams’s entire oeuvre, however, is premised upon the opposite position. The sheer strangeness of Williams’s conception of historical temporality is that it combines a championing of novelty typical of modernity with an emphasis on the force of biological, generational and (relatively) unconscious attachments typical of tradition. were immanent and active elements of social change. 33 Williams’s is precisely an immanent, self-conscious traditionality. It is a traditionalism against (selective) tradition, designed to break open the fixity of the present at two levels: the level of politics and the level of literary practice itself. For example, Williams criticized the purely ideological notion of a unified ‘modernism’ for its undeclared selectivity and its overreliance on modernists’ own accounts of their activities. 34 29 Raymond Williams, Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), 142; emphasis original. To counteract this, he reinstated lines of intergenerational inheritance between ‘modernists’ and their 30 Ibid. 31 Williams, Culture, 146. 32 These included “a new kind of audience, within new kinds of theatre, no longer formally defined by terms, places and occasions of an extra-dramatic authority, but socially mixed and socially mobile within an expanding urban society, served by its own characteristic forms of commercial-enterprise theatres and specializing professional dramatists.” Williams, Culture, 146-147. 33 I take this definition of Williams’s notion of historical temporality from Hartley, Politics of Style, where I explicate it at length. 34 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 2007), 31-35. A Defence of Transhistoricism 59 supposedly non-modernist predecessors; but, crucially, he did this to try and break out of what he called “the non-historical fixity” of our own present: “we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.” 35 Williams is attempting to open up both literary and political possibilities beyond the so-called ‘exhaustion’ of the postmodern present. 36 This, finally, is the key difference separating Williams’s work from “democratic culturalism”; it is what Fredric Jameson, in another context, has called “a hermeneutic relationship to the past which is able to grasp its own present as history only on condition it manages to keep the idea of the future, and of radical and Utopian transformation, alive.” 37 4. An Empirical History of Eternity? On the Philosophy of Alain Badiou This is the radical differentia specifica that distinguishes Williams’s politically committed historicism from the ideology of “democratic culturalism.” As should now be obvious, Williams’s mode of historicism is transhistoricist in the precise sense that it constructs lines of self-conscious inheritance across historical periods with a view to intervening into the historical present towards a Utopian future. This mode of transhistoricism, however, is only one of several; given the critical nature of the contemporary moment, we may require as many transhistoricisms as we can muster. For let us not forget that the current historical conjuncture is one in which a zombie neoliberal capitalism continues to live on in the impasse of a never-ending present. It is a context in which even Stephen Dedalus’ attempts to awaken from the nightmare of history can appear overoptimistic. Indeed, it is a context in which contextualization itself has come to feel - at the level of affect, if nothing else - like an extension of the prison-house of the present. It is for this reason that, to complement Williams’s mode of transhistoricism, I shall now turn to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which has irrupted into the present to such electrifying effect. If for Williams ‘history’ is a continuous line of negotiated inheritance, for Badiou history as a single, unified process does not exist: 38 35 Williams, The Politics of Modernism, 35. in his view, there is only a 36 John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 62-76. 37 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 480. 38 Cf. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 92. D ANIEL H ARTLEY 60 discontinuous history of the eternal, since only the eternal proceeds from the event. 39 There is no space here to reconstruct Badiou’s entire philosophical system. Instead, I shall merely point to four aspects of it that may help us to conceptualise change beyond historicism. In each case I shall try to make clear how it breaks with the prevailing academic doxa. 40 Firstly, for Badiou, true novelty, which can only occur under one of the four conditions of philosophy - politics, art, love and science - can never be reduced to the given coordinates of a historical context. Novelty can only occur as a result of a subjective fidelity to a contingent and undecidable event, one which, whilst linked to a localized region of a situation (hence not transcendent to it), is never reducible to that situation. This constitutes a clear break with democratic culturalism’s fetishization of contextualization, in which every occurrence must be reduced to some previous element or combination of elements of a situation. Secondly, for Badiou, truth exists; it exists as the exception of a situation. It is the name of the set of inquiries and consequences produced by subjects faithful to an event. Truths are not a matter of erudition, but of militancy: they are the consequences developed by faithful subjects who form an organised body to resist the return of the old, to actively constitute a new present, and to show the world in light of the impossibility whose possibility they are. Thus, whilst Badiou agrees with “democratic culturalism” (or, in his terminology, “democratic materialism”) that “[t]here are only bodies and languages,” he nonetheless adds: “except that there are truths.” 41 39 Adapted from Quentin Meillassoux, “History and Event in Alain Badiou,” Parrhesia 12 (2011): 1-11, 1. This constitutes a clear break with the denial of the existence of truth and the eclipse of universal politics inherent to democratic culturalism. Thirdly, in Badiou’s philosophy there is no single, unified ‘History’; there are only discontinuous historical sequences. An unprovoked event occurs, a faithful subject names the event and develops its consequences in the future anterior - presuming in advance the universal applicability of its truth - but is opposed by countersubjects who react against it, or who attempt to obscure it by denying the event’s ever having taken place. Historical change, whether in politics, literature, love or science, is then nothing but a series of overlapping, discontinuous sequences in which faithful subjects produce new presents and force reactionary and obscure counter-subjects to become the contemporaries of the new, all the while these latter deny the novelty of the event. Such a conception thus breaks with democratic culturalism’s hyper-synchronic concep- 40 The following summary of key aspects of Badiou’s philosophy is a condensation of arguments put forth in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), Theory of the Subject, Ethics, and Logics of Worlds. 41 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 4. A Defence of Transhistoricism 61 tion of a given historical moment. Finally, for Badiou, truths are eternal. This is because, according to Badiou’s ontology, the consequences they produce are potentially infinite. 42 The set of post-evental consequences developed in one historical context can be resurrected in totally different historical contexts. Any truth is capable of resurrection. 43 Yet what does any of this mean for the study of literature? Badiou’s own literary analyses are notoriously ambiguous. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle has shown in his brilliant book on the reading practices of Badiou and Deleuze, the startling novelty of what he calls Badiou’s “strong readings” is nonetheless tempered by several factors. This is, then, a clear rupture with historical and cultural relativism. 44 These include: Badiou’s problematic philosophy of language, which goes hand in hand with what Lecercle calls a “tin-opener theory of interpretation”; 45 an underestimation of the constitutive power of verbal texture and style; 46 and a concomitant overestimation of syntax and the univocity of meaning. Nonetheless, at a more general level, Badiou’s philosophy could prove highly suggestive for reconceptualizing literary history. In what follows, I shall attempt briefly to elaborate the principal coordinates of just such a Badiouian literary history. In doing so, I shall try to remain faithful to the general spirit of Badiou’s philosophy, if not to the letter. This faithful infidelity is, in any case, necessitated by the lack of a sustained, coherent theory of literature within Badiou’s philosophical system. As a general rule, where the rigour of Badiou’s literary readings of literature (those attuned to the literariness of literary texts) tends towards a relative philosophical poverty, 47 his more philosophically systematic readings of literary texts tend towards a relative paucity of literary-critical endeavour. 48 42 Cf. Meillassoux 3. Rather than somehow ‘proving’ the essential poverty of theory, however, this 43 One of Badiou’s examples is the truth of universal human emancipation incorporated in the figure of Spartacus. This figure was resurrected in (among others) the victorious slave revolt led by Toussaint-Louverture in Santo Domingo, the Spartakists of Berlin in 1919, and the Howard Fast novel of 1951, which can be read as a response to the attempted ‘reactionary’ reappropriation of the Spartacus figure by Arthur Koestler in The Gladiators (1939). Cf. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 63-65. 44 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 45 Lecercle 101. 46 Though I think this criticism should be tempered somewhat in light of the recent appearance of Alain Badiou, The Age of Poets, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), which contains highly attentive close readings of the prose styles of Natacha Michel, Severo Sarduy and Pierre Guyotat. Several of the articles in The Age of Poets have yet to be published even in French. 47 E.g., his reading of Pierre Guyotat, in Age of Poets, 194-205. 48 E.g., his use of Wallace Stevens’ poetry in “Drawing,” Age of Poets 75-82. D ANIEL H ARTLEY 62 fact should simply be taken as a sign that the systematic philosophization of literature within the parameters of Badiou’s theory has yet to be undertaken. The first major element of any Badiouian theory of literature must surely be the following: there is no literary history except the history of literary events and their faithful elaborations. Such a theory would not focus on reconstituting the expansive popular archive of works and experiments, as in Williams, nor would it opt for the sophisticated digital processing of this archive, as in Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013); instead, it would focus solely on points of evental intensity: those pockets of compressed historicity which historize that which we know as ‘literary history.’ This critical reconstruction of literary-historical ‘configurations’ would thus differ from the selective counter-traditions favoured by Williams. 49 It would seek out literary events, which may be a single work or a series of works, usually by one author. 50 A suggestive link could be made here with Walter Benjamin’s assertion that “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one - […] they are, in other words, special cases.” 51 [m]any writers have felt that Poe founded the crime story as we know it; but in fact there were some elements already, if uncertainly, in place, and his influence did not operate properly until a good deal later, when it was mediated by Gaboriau and exploited by Doyle. It is more accurate to say that Poe saw the possibilities that others were only half grasping, and, as he did with the horror story and the melodramatic poem, constructed a form strong enough to predict the possibilities of the genre that was not yet in being. Benjamin happens to be writing about Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which is an archetypal example of a literary event, though one might just as easily refer to, say, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Of the latter, for example, Stephen Knight has written that 52 The very wording of this passage should alert us to the presence of the constitutive ambiguity of the event. There was uncertainty in the situation; Poe saw possibilities and incorporated them into a new form which predicted the potential of a genre not yet in being. This last phrase is crucial, for it is of the nature of an event that it is not, that it cannot be reduced to a multiple already present in a situation; its existence is strictly undecidable from the standpoint of the situation itself and can only be affirmed and named through the hazardous wager of a subjective intervention. The faithful sub- 49 ‘Configurations’ are the literary counterpart of historical ‘sequences.’ Cf. Badiou, Logics of Worlds 73. 50 I say “one author” in analogy with what Badiou calls the “Schönberg-event” in music, Logics of Worlds 80. 51 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 201. 52 Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 25-6. A Defence of Transhistoricism 63 ject proceeds - ‘legislating without law’ - 53 The second element of a Badiouian theory of literature would then relate directly to form. As we have seen, Badiou’s own analyses of literary texts tend to underestimate the level of texture and style, but his philosophy nonetheless contains hints as to how this limitation might be overcome. Since the ‘body’ of a literary event is a series of works of literature, and since each emergence of radical novelty involves a potentially violent forcing of the old, a Badiouian literary criticism would seek out those formal discontinuities within post-evental literary works which are the signs of the emergence of the new (not unlike what I called the ‘torsion of the old’ when describing Williams’s model of literary change). A subject, Badiou writes, is “a sequence involving continuities and discontinuities, openings and points.” as if the event has taken place. The faithful inheritors of the ‘Poe-event’ were then able to continue the literary sequence he had initiated, adapting and developing the ‘configuration’ of ‘crime fiction.’ Other inheritors, beyond the field of crime fiction (implying that a literary event may give rise to multiple sequences), became evental instigators in their own right (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot). The key point, however, is that the ‘Poe-event’ and the ‘Proust-event’ are at once of their time and ahead of it, the culmination of a past to which they cannot be reduced (since, within it, they are literally unforeseeable), and the opening of a future whose very possibility they have produced. 54 An “opening” is a modality of the subject that “continually opens up a new possible closest to the possibilities of the old world” while a “point” is that modality in which “the complexity of identities and differences brutally comes down, for the subject, to the exigency of a choice between two possibilities and two alone.” 55 Where the former involves a subtle production of the new, in constant careful negotiation with many elements of the old, the latter involves a more vehement and categorical break with what went before. These two modalities then produce effects internal to the ‘body’ of the subject (i.e., the configuration of literary or artistic works), which is inherently conjunctive: “continuities and discontinuities, openings and points.” 56 Thus, in terms of the configuration of ‘serial music,’ Berg and Webern represent the ‘opening’ and ‘point’ components of the body respectively, with Berg subtly negotiating with and continuing to incorporate many elements of classical tonal music, whilst Webern systematically breaks point by point with all aspects of the old. Many literary equivalents of this phenomenon could be found. An interesting Badiouian reading could be made, for example, of the literary sequences in which T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were 53 Badiou, Being and Event 198. 54 Badiou, Logics of Worlds 83. 55 Badiou, Logics of Worlds 82. 56 Badiou, Logics of Worlds 83; my emphasis. D ANIEL H ARTLEY 64 engaged, or, as ambiguous inheritors of this legacy (via Charles Olson), Ed Dorn and J.H. Prynne. Both Eliot and Dorn, for very different reasons, belong to the modality of ‘opening’ in that each of them produces novelty but does so in multiple continuities with what went before. Pound and Prynne, however, again for very different reasons, belong to the modality of the ‘point,’ each with an absolute poetics that refuses all compromise (and this despite - or perhaps because of - their shared obsession with the history of specific poetic forms). A further example would be that of the gradual movement from opening to point within a single oeuvre: from, say, Dubliners, to Ulysses, to Finnegans Wake. The third element of a Badiouian literary theory would be the presupposition that literature thinks. This has several meanings. Within the strict philosophical economy of Badiou’s system, what literature thinks is that which, since Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s foundational work, has become known as the “literary absolute”: 57 “what literature thinks is both a real marked in language with the seal of the One, and the conditions governing the way that real is marked.” 58 Successful literature produces an encounter with eternity through a language that is both truly unique and conscious (in modernist guise) of its singular representational logic. The real “emerges in the cracks in the story [la fable]” at those points where it coincides with a confession that has been forced from language itself, where language has been made to say “what it has always been reluctant or unable to say.” 59 This somewhat arcane ‘strong reading’ of literary works could then be supplemented by Jean- Jacques Lecercle’s observation that, since literature is one of the ‘conditions’ of philosophy, certain evental literatures may enable us to extend or adapt our theory of the event itself. 60 That is, rather than taking literature as explanandum, we can think with literature - as explanans - in order to think change differently. It is precisely such an operation in which Badiou himself engages in his readings of Mallarmé and Beckett, 61 57 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988). using their works as so many literary theorizations of the components of the event. To these could be added, among many others, Proust’s richly suggestive theory of the event in À la recherche, premised upon an interconnected series of long-awaited but ultimately failed encounters which are then retroactively sublated in the ‘dark room’ of Marcel’s mind (or bedroom, or both). Finally, literature can be un- 58 Badiou, Age of Poets, 136. 59 Badiou, Age of Poets, 133, 137. 60 Cf. Lecercle. 61 Cf. Badiou, Being and Event 191-198, and Alain Badiou, On Beckett, trans. Nina Power and Alberto Toscano (Manchester: Clinamen Press Limited, 2003). A Defence of Transhistoricism 65 derstood to ‘think’ to the extent that it inscribes events from other fields. 62 Badiou himself recognizes as much when he writes that “when one orients oneself in prose, one orients the possible thought of politics, of love, and of their aleatory crossing […] Thus oriented through prose, a political sequence is eternal.” 63 5. Conclusion Thus do the novels of Natacha Michel attest to the political sequence of 1967-1976 and its aftermath in the 1980s and 1990s. In all these ways, then, a Badiouian theory of literature would expand the possibilities of criticism beyond a ‘democratic culturalism’ for which there are only bodies and languages. Whilst democratic culturalism’s insistence on historicization may have been politically and theoretically progressive in a previous historical conjuncture, it has since become potentially conservative. The present historical moment is one of impasse, and I have argued that, at the level of theory, there are two possible exits, each of which entails a particular mode of transhistoricism: the first is Williams’s immanent self-conscious traditionality and the second is Badiou’s discontinuous historicization of the eternity of truths. At a time when Jameson’s motto - “Always historicize! ” - has become yet another academic doxa, perhaps we should combine them to collectively inherit the traces of eternity. 62 This idea is partly inspired by Lecercle’s development of Badiou’s theory of the event in his reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Lecercle 166ff. 63 Badiou, Age of Poets, 176. He continues: “The topic is an ancient one, people will say. What would the Peloponnesian war be for us without the ellipses of Thucydides? Or the Napoleonic war in Russia without the inexhaustible opacity of Tolstoy? 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