Capitalism and Definitions

We have argued that the essential element of capitalism as a system is not, as is often contended, proletarian wage labor or production for the market or factory production. For one thing, all of these phenomena have long historical roots and can be found in many different kinds of systems. In my view, the key element that defines a capitalist system is that it is built on the drive for the endless accumulation of capital. This is not merely a cultural value but a structural requirement, meaning that there exist mechanisms within the system to reward in the middle those who operate according to its logic and to punish (materially) those who insist on operating according to other logics.

We have argued that, in order to maintain such a system, several things are necessary. There has to be an axial division of labor, such that there are continuous exchanges of essential goods that are low-profit and highly competitive (i.e., peripheral) with high-profit and quasi-monopolized (i.e., core-like) products. In order to allow entrepreneurs to operate successfully in such a system, there needs in addition to be an interstate system composed of pseudosovereign states of differing degrees of efficacy (strength). And there also have to be cyclical mechanisms that permit the constant creation of new quasi-monopolistic profit-making enterprises. The consequence of this is that there is a quite slow but constant geographical relocation of the privileged centers of the system. (xiv)

These words are Immanuel Wallerstein's, from his new prologue to the 2011 edition of volume III of The Modern World-System: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s. I quote them here because definitions matter and we have too many of them for capitalism.

I have, in the last year or so, found myself embroiled in various online discussions here and there about capitalism and our current predicament, etc, in which the conversation can only go so far because we, the participants, are not operating under the same set of assumptions on what capitalism, in fact, is. I tend to avoid lengthy online back-and-forths, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the inadequacy of my available devices (which means the mechanics of it are unpleasant). But also, where once I was quick to write lengthy responses to people, usually via email, now I shy away from them. In part, I don't want to lose a piece of writing in the bowels of another blog's comments, and I write too slow to effectively respond here. It's also true that I'm simply not read deeply enough in the Marxist or liberal economic literature to respond to certain kinds of pedantry. So if someone cites a particular of a given debate, I'm often at something of a loss. However, though I would like to deepen my reading of such literature, the truth is I'm only going to get to so much of it, and things are happening right now. My gut tells me that most of it is unnecessary.

A few years ago I read Ellen Meiksins Wood's Origins of Capitalism, and I found it very helpful. She is, of course, a Marxist, writing in the aftermath of the Brenner debates of the 1970s. She helped me to see a number of different things much more clearly than I had seen them before (for just one example, the state's role in enforcing propertylessness). I was further helped along by essays from the Midnight Notes Collective, and then David Harvey's book-length study of Marx's Capital, The Limits to Capital, as well as a couple of Harvey's other books. Then came the first volume of Capital itself, along with Harvey's online lectures, and the feminist approaches of Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale) and Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch). The feminist works are crucial; they seem to take the analysis to its logical conclusions that too many Marxists seem unwilling to take it (so they said; but I had no trouble taking their word for it, given my own limited experience with the literature). Readers will notice that I've rehearsed this sequence before. All apologies. In any event, my point here is that something nagged at me. I was still having trouble understanding where it came from, and why, and it seemed really important that I do understand it, in order to wrap my head around the problems facing us today. Then I read Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, my first exposure to world-system analysis, and many things began to fall into place in my mind. This led me to Wallerstein. First to his slim World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, then to his now four-volume study, The Modern World-System. (David Graeber's work plays a big role here, too; I'm thinking a few of the essays in Possibilities, as well as the more recent Debt.)

I realized that what had troubled me were questions of focus and certain sets of assumptions. I had difficulty with the idea of a particular capitalist "state" (or "states" competing with each other) (though, indeed, Wood, in her Empire of Capital, had helped clarify for me the necessity of the state apparatus for capitalism), with the very focus on "mode of production", with questions and apparently long-running debates about such topics as whether or not slavery was capitalist, which seemed silly on their face (of course it was capitalist; for just one point, the feminist focus on how unpaid labor underpins the wage system is important here). I desired, and insisted, without knowing it, a longer view (somewhat ironic, considering the subtitle of Wood's book is, in fact, "a longer view"; it's not quite long enough), and a more detailed view. Arrighi's and then especially Wallerstein's books have helped me enormously, providing a framework in which things fit together much better (not like a puzzle, but like life, if you'll pardon the expression). Anyway, I provide the passage at the top of this post as a placeholder and reference point: this is the definition of capitalism I'm working from, the one that makes the most sense to me. Recent claims that we've already moved away from capitalism into a feudalism-like "rentism" seem to me to misunderstand both feudal arrangements and capitalism itself, and especially miss the ease with which the former historically shaded into the latter. There's nothing un-capitalist about monopolies or rent. Misplaced emphasis on wage labor and modes of production are distracting. Here Wallerstein continues:

Capitalism is a system in which the endless accumulation of capital is the raison d'être. To accumulate capital, producers must obtain profits from their operations. However, truly significant profits are possible only if the producer can sell the product for considerably more than the cost of production. In a situation of perfect competition, it is absolutely impossible to make significant profit. Perfect competition is classically defined as a situation with three features—a multitude of sellers, a multitude of buyers, and universally available information about prices. If all three features were to prevail (which rarely occurs), any intelligent buyer will go from seller to seller until he finds one who will sell at a penny above the cost of production, if not indeed below the cost of production.

Obtaining significant profit requires a monopoly, or at least a quasi-monopoly, of world-economic power. If there is a monopoly, the seller can demand any price, as long as he does not go beyond what the elasticity of demand permits. Any time the world-economy is expanding significantly, one will find that there are some "leading" products, which are relatively monopolized. It is from these products that great profits are made and large amounts of capital are accumulated.

I could go on, but will not, not now. But consider this a re-beginning, of sorts, on this topic.

Notes on feminism and reproductive power

In part addressing my recent entry on technology and the classless society, Peter Frase (previously unknown to me) has written a post called "The Dialectic of Technology" (which also appears at the Jacobin site, here). Frase writes from a very Marxist perspective, which is helpful. I find much to disagree with, but it's useful to find such a perspective so clearly laid out. He begins by invoking Shulamith Firestone, author of the feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex. I'm going to use this post to riff on the Firestone reference (which is really only in the first paragraph); I hope to have time to write about the rest of Frase's thoughtful post at another time.

Firestone first came to my attention via Nina Power, through both her blogging (from which she seems to have retired and deleted most of the archives) and her book, One Dimensional Woman. Readers will recall that I wrote about Power's book just over two years ago, including Power's use of Firestone. I don't intend to repeat what I said in that post about Firestone. I will say that Power's use of Firestone did not make me inclined to read Firestone's book. The ideas about biology and technology as presented by Power strike me, still, as altogether unappealing and, oddly, retrograde. I do, however, now plan to read The Dialectic of Sex, primarily because of what Adrienne Rich says about Firestone in her classic, Of Woman Born. In her chapter "Alienated Labor", amidst a discussion of "natural childbirth", Rich writes this:

Shulamith Firestone, as an early theorist of the contemporary women's movement, was understandably skeptical of "natural" childbirth as part of a reactionary counterculture having little to do with the liberation of women as a whole.

Firestone sees childbearing, however, as purely and simply the victimizing experience it has often been under patriarchy. "Pregnancy is barbaric," she declares; "Childbirth hurts." She discards biological motherhood from this shallow and unexamined point of view, without taking full account of what the experience of biological pregnancy and birth might be in a wholly different political and emotional context. Her attitudes toward pregnancy ("the husband's guilty waning of sexual desire; the woman's tears in front of the mirror at eight months") are male-derived. Finally, Firestone is so eager to move on to technology that she fails to explore the relationship between maternity and sensuality, pain and female alienation.

Ideally, of course, women would choose not only whether, when, and where to bear children, and the circumstances of labor, but also between biological and artificial reproduction. Ideally, the process of creating another life would be freely and intelligently undertaken, much as a woman might prepare herself physically and mentally for a trip across country by jeep, or an archeological "dig"; or might choose to do something else altogether. But I do not think we can project any such idea onto the future—and hope to realize it—without examining the shadow-images we carry out of the magical thinking of Eve's curse and the social victimization of women-as-mothers. To do so is to deny aspects of ourselves which will rise up sooner later to claim recognition. (pp. 174-175)

This still wouldn't be getting me any closer to reading Firestone, except that earlier in the book, Rich had allowed that Firestone has, with respect to advances in birth-related technology, "observed that the possibilities are terrifying if we envision the choice of human types, gender, and capacities being controlled by patriarchy." This, and Rich's claim that Firestone's work includes, among other things, "powerful analysis of the nature and extent of patriarchy", have moved me closer to wanting to read her for myself.

Anyway, it's the stuff I don't like that is relevant here. Frase calls The Dialectic of Sex one of his favorite Marxist-feminist writings because of two things it does "exceptionally well":

The first is to extend Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize. The second is to see modern technology as an indispensable element of women’s liberation, going so far as to argue that “Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity.”

It should be clear that I think it's bonkers to "see modern technology as an indispensable element of women's liberation". This is in part because I see "modern technology" as inseparable from the society that produced it, and I have seen how the "advances" in modern birth-related technology have eroded both the choices available to women and the health of babies and children, our reliance on medical doctors and technology eroding the very ability for women to make informed decisions. Women are all too often pushed into interventions that are convenient for their doctors, and lucrative for insurance companies, rather than in the mother's or child's best interests. The decisions available to women and families are unavoidably "controlled by patriarchy". Introducing further and further interventions, and even removing birth from women altogether into the realm of machines and other advanced technologies is, first, not good for the well-being of children (so often an afterthought in the radical imagination, when it is, of course, the most important subject there is), and, second, not going to do anything to effect the liberation of women. What I see as indispensable to women's liberation is the retaking of reproductive power by women, organizing society around that power, that labor, rather than around production.

In another article at Jacobin (the back page article here), Frase writes about "working time and feminism", correctly focusing on time and unpaid labor, in the reproductive arena, paying much-needed attention to the problem of men being willing (or, rather, unwilling) to do a larger share of unpaid, reproductive labor (noting that, in countries which offer substantial family leave for male and female employees, males are considerably less likely to take the time off). Interestingly, in a separate post at his blog, Frase admits that he wished he'd spent more time discussing the nuclear family in that article, and by excerpting a paragraph from an LRB essay by Jenny Turner, ends up quoting some of the same Toni Morrison (again, by way of Nina Power) lines that I do in my review of One Dimensional Woman (note, also, that in this post, I take issue with Power's version of the Marxist assumption that "entering the workforce" was somehow "liberating" for the mass of women; here I'm grateful for bell hooks and other feminists of color who have continually reminded us that black women, and poor women, always worked outside the home, along with their unpaid work inside the home: it only came to be seen as liberating when middle/upper middle class white women did so). Morrison says, "Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community—everybody—to raise a child." The thing about capitalism is not only are we alienated from our labor, we are alienated from each other. Community is difficult to build or sustain, so the prospects of a community raising a child is daunting. As Morrison says, the nuclear family "isolates people into little units—people need a larger unit." And they need time to attend to those things that matter most, which are reproductive in nature. Without time, without larger units, one or two people are forced to try to do everything themselves and to make compromises in the areas of food, health, shelter, compromises which we ought to be working towards making unnecessary, or even unthinkable.

Let me return to Frase's praise of The Dialectic of Sex. He says that Firestone "extend[s] Marxist analysis into the realm of sex and gender by simply taking Marx and Engels’ own framework to its logical conclusion, which they themselves were too blinded by the patriarchal assumptions of their time to recognize". I find this interesting, because I've long felt that the feminist critique of Marxism, taking the critique of capitalism to its logical conclusions, is not only utterly necessary, but foundational. But my key figures are feminists such as Maria Mies and Sylvia Federici, authors of, respectively, Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. I wish I had written here more systematically about these books, since they couldn't be more important. I had intended to blog Mies' book, chapter-by-chapter, but failed to do so; the best I did was to offer a brief excerpt (here; that excerpt I had intended to in part comment on the discussion that resulted from my review of One Dimensional Woman) and to use part of her argument in my review of Roberto Bolaño's novel, 2666 (here). In Federici's case, I still intend to transcribe my notes from the Federici-led workshop I attended last Spring, and I did fairly effectively deploy her arguments from Caliban and the Witch in my review of Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? (here, see also a follow-up to that review here, also heavily relying on Federici's book; incidentally, I think the points raised in that Josipovici review are essential to this conversation, though all too often they are isolated from it). Anyway, Mies follows the logic to the very end and concludes that subsistence should be our focus (indeed, most of her subsequent work has been on "the subsistence perspective"). It's frankly difficult to argue with her. Federici, among many other things, brings our attention to the many powers women had in the pre-capitalist world, powers which were systematically stripped in the development of capitalism, and which had to be so stripped, in order for capitalism to unfold. Though I now fully intend to read The Dialectic of Sex, I believe Marxists, indeed all of us, would be much better off pursuing the arguments of Mies and Federici and the like, rather than in engaging in fantasies of technological liberation.

Follow-up to What Ever Happened to Modernism?, part 1: Shakespeare, Federici, & the devaluation of women

My focus may be shifting somewhat here, but I'm by no means done with literature or blogging about literary matters. Indeed, before moving on, I have some unfinished business to attend to regarding What Ever Happened to Modernism? As long as my essay about that book was, still I had to leave certain topics more or less unaddressed, or less fully explored than I had originally intended. (Isn't it remarkable what we think of as long anymore? As if the essay is anywhere near as long as a full-length essay we'd have read easily prior to the advent of blogs. Fact is, I'm just an amazingly slow writer, so the thing felt interminable. But I digress, even more pointlessly than usual.)

First, having re-read the post a few times, I now wish I had indeed written more about the historical "responses of artists to [the] situation" described by Silvia Federici (for those keeping score at home, I'm referring to the second block quote from Federici in that post, the one that ends with the reference to Rabelais), especially the stuff on Shakespeare I'd ambitiously hoped to include. The title to Federici's Caliban and the Witch, after all, is an explicit reference to The Tempest, a play which is also invoked by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in their excellent book, The Many-Headed Hydra, in the opening chapter about the wreck of the Sea-Venture in 1609. They write:

The wreck of the Sea-Venture and the dramas of rebellion that played out among the shipwrecked suggest the major themes of early Atlantic history. These events do not make for a story of English maritime greatness and glory, nor for a tale of the heroic struggle for religious freedom, though sailors and religious radicals both had essential roles. This is, rather, a story about the origins of capitalism and colonization, about world trade and the building of empires. It is also, necessarily, a story about the uprooting and movement of peoples, the making and the transatlantic deployment of "hands". It is a story about exploitation and resistance to exploitation, about how the "sappe of bodies" would be spent. It is a sotry about cooperation among different kinds of people for contrasting purposes of profit and survival. And it is a story about alternative ways of living, and about the official use of violence and terror to deter or destroy them, to overcome popular attachments to "liberty and the fullness of sensuality".

We are by no means the first to find heroic significance in the story of the Sea-Venture. One of the first—and certainly the most influential—was William Shakespeare, who drew upon firsthand accounts of the wreck in 1610-11 as he wrote his play The Tempest. Shakespeare had long studied the accounts of explorers, traders, and colonizers who were aggressively linking the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through world trade. Moreover, he knew such men personally, and even depended on them for his livelihood. Like many of his patrons and benefactors, such as the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare himself invested in the Virginia Company, the spearhead of English colonization. His play both described and promoted the rising interest of England's ruling class in the settlement and exploitation of the New World.

No doubt I would have skillfully summarized this material and artfully incorporated it into the essay. Anyway, my point here is not to damn Shakespeare by aligning him with the powerful, but to merely remind us that he was a real person with real interests, living in a specific time and place. In any event, while The Tempest may have "promoted the rising interest of England's ruling class", and indeed Shakespeare's own interests as an investor, the figure of Caliban has long served as a symbol for Latin American rebellion and resistance to colonization. Meanwhile, the figure of Caliban's mother, Sycorax, "the witch", has remained invisible, both in the play and to the revolutionary imagination, Federici says. In Caliban and the Witch, then, Federici places her "at the center-stage, as the embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master's food and inspired the slaves to revolt."

Federici invokes Shakespeare again, in passing, in an extended exploration of the degradation of women that accompanied the transformation of the working class over the course of the 15th to 17th centuries, as part of a process through which women became defined as "non-workers", where any work they did out of the home was now called "housekeeping", and as such devalued, and "[m]arriage was now seen as a woman's true career":

This was for women a historic defeat. With their expulsion from the crafts and the devaluation of reproductive labor poverty became feminized, and to enforce men's "primary appropriation" of women's labor, a new patriarchal order was constructed, reducing women to a double dependence: on employers and on men. The fact that unequal power relations between women and men existed even prior to the advent of capitalism, as did a discriminating sexual division of labor, does not detract from this assessment. For in pre-capitalist Europe women's subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.

Perhaps you can begin to see why I decided not to include this material. Just too much background to cover in order to get to what is really a supplementary point in the course of a review. (There's nothing stopping me here though!) Federici goes on to discuss changes in the family, which

began to separate from the public sphere and acquire its modern connotations as the main centre for the reproduction of the work-force.

The counterpart of the market, the instrument for the privatization of social relations and, above all, for the propagation of capitalist discipline and patriarchal rule, the family emerges in the period of primitive accumulation also as the most important institution for the appropriation and concealment of women's labor.

With these shifts in society, "the insubordination of women and the methods by which they could be 'tamed' were among the main themes in the literature and social policy of the 'transition'." With respect to social relations, "throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, women lost ground in every area of social life" including "a steady erosion of women's rights". Women were attacked and vilified in the popular and intellectual literature of the period:

Women were accused of being unreasonable, vain, wild, wasteful. Especially blamed was the female tongue, seen as an instrument of insubordination. But the main female villain was the disobedient wife, who, together with the "scold," the "witch," and the "whore" was the favorite target of dramatists, popular writers, and moralists. In this sense, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1593) was the manifesto of the age. The punishment of female insubordination to patriarchal authority was called for and celebrated in countless misogynist plays and tracts. English literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period feasted on such themes. Typical of this genre is John Ford's 'Tis a Pity She's a Whore (1633) which ends with the didactic assassination, execution and murder of three of the four female characters. Other classic works concerned with the disciplining of women are John Swetman's (1633) which ends with the didactic assassination, execution and murder of three of the Arraignment of Lewed, Idle, Forward, Inconstant Women (1615); and The Parliament of Women (1646), a satire primarily addressed against middle class women, which portrays them as busy making laws in order to gain supremacy over their husbands. Meanwhile, new laws and new forms of torture were introduced to control women's behavior in and out of the home, confirming that the literary denigration of women expressed a precise political project aiming to strip them of any autonomy and social power. In the Europe of the Age of Reason, the women accused of being scolds were muzzled like dogs and paraded in the streets; prostitutes were whipped, or caged and subjected to fake drownings, while capital punishment was established for women convicted of adultery.

No doubt most of this literary output was dreck; it's Shakespeare we remember. It's interesting, though, that it's his play that is dubbed by Federici a "manifesto for the age". Certainly the title seems capable of naming the age and what happened in it. But my admittedly hazy memory of the play has it as rather more playful and ironic about the "taming" attempted and (in the play) provisionally achieved. Perhaps this is one measure of Shakespeare's comparative "responsibility" as an artist? I'm reminded of a passage from Josipovici's chapter on Shakespeare in On Trust. He writes:

Where Marlowe had embraced the new powers given him by the Elizabethan state by placing on that stage men whose power over both their fellows and the audience depended on their rhetoric, men with whom we feel Marlowe the playwright identifies, Shakespeare, more realistic, more responsible, made his plays out of the recognition of the ambiguous nature of play. Marlowe, like Verdi, exults in the ability of the protagonist, through his voice, his speech, his song, to transcend reality, to give body to our desires, and we love him for it and pay to be thus transported. Shakespeare, like Mozart, never forgets the limits of that power as well as its dangerous ambiguity.

I was reminded of this passage, it's true, but I also had it readily to hand, since I've had it sitting in a draft post for, literally, more than three years, where I'd also stashed this sentence from “What was Chaucer really up to?”, a review by Josipovici of several Chaucer-related books, which is collected in The Mirror of Criticism:

The responsible artist is the one who is aware of the inevitable failure of all language, its narrow ideological base, and who uses his art to bring this out in the open.

The responsible artist. More responsible. I had had some notion, three years ago, of meditating on this idea, exploring its implications in the context of what we mean by the aesthetic, and by political or didactic art. (Perhaps Joanna Russ can help me here. But more on her later.) I didn't get far with it at all. Since that time, I've written a fair amount about the need to situate an artist within his or her political time and place, including the review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? itself ("Literature is not Innocent", I also blogged). But the question of what it means for the artist to be responsible, which may not resemble calls for what the artist should do, has eluded me. Perhaps, though I remain uncomfortable claiming that artists should be expected to do any given thing, it feels accurate to say that a responsible artist manages to avoid merely transmitting (or endorsing) the dominant ideologies of his or her situation, though it seems unavoidable that those will be reflected in the work, in some way. This ambivalence, however slight, perhaps, allows the work to become available to readers or viewers from outside that situation. Shakespeare's Caliban is able to find his audience. Which is probably a good place to end this post. Further examination of the responsibility of the artist will have to wait for another post. As will further follow-ups to the Josipovici review (which follow-ups should actually be more clearly literary in nature than this one ended up being).

Ethan on Caliban and the Witch

It should be obvious by now that I consider Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch an important book. What was the word I used in the last post? Indispensable? Yeah, that's right. Unfortunately, I've merely referred to it here and there, in glowing terms perhaps, but not in much detail. It deserves far more and better attention than I've been able to give it, both for its own arguments and for the other areas of study it points us towards (some already existing, cited by Federici, and some not, but suggested as questions left raised but unanswered).

This is why I've been so happy to see Ethan devoting time and space to the book lately. Not only has he excerpted several passages on his commonplace blog for your perusal, but he has stated his intention to write about each passage at his main blog, 6th or 7th. Unsurprisingly, the early results have been excellent. So this post exists mainly to tell you to go read, if you haven't already, Ethan's set of posts discussing Caliban and the Witch (as of this writing there appear to be four: one, two, three, four).

More Directions

A third event this past Spring helping to both focus and expand my reading and thinking was a much happier occurrence than the other two: a workshop I attended at the Free School here in Baltimore, led by Silvia Federici, titled "Feminism, the Commons, neoliberal violence and the eco-crisis" (see Federici's short essay "Feminism and the Politics of the Commons"). The workshop turned out to be an excellent, wide-ranging, though inevitably all-too-short discussion. Though it took place in April, I've only just now begun transcribing my notes from that day. I hope to be able to convert them into something useful for sharing here, in particular Federici's remarks about the Italian Wages for Housework movement from the 1970s. (New names added to the list: Leopoldina Fortunanti, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, Selma James [wife of C.L.R.].)

Though the workshop was not strictly speaking a discussion of Federici's indispensable book, Caliban and the Witch, I did take the opportunity to begin re-reading that book prior to the event. This was an altogether excellent decision on my part. First, doing so refreshed my memory of some crucial history relevant to modernism, providing me with material that I needed in order to finally finish my painfully long-gestating review of Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? This was an unexpected but wholly welcome development (I had more than once given up the review for dead). Second, I had inevitably forgotten many of the book's details, though I'd internalized some aspects of the contours of her overall argument. It's good to be reminded of the details too, especially in given all that I've read and learned since the first reading, making many of these details more meaningful to me now. Third, much like Rich's Of Woman Born and Ruddick's Maternal Thinking, Caliban and the Witch is a bibliographical goldmine, this time from a more specifically history of capitalism perspective, as well as feminist. Just tons of reading to be done.

Notes on What Ever Happened to Modernism?

It’s a classic case of "be careful what you wish for". Along with a select few others, I have been writing about the work of Gabriel Josipovici for years, all the while lamenting that he wasn’t more widely read. I imagine that most of us expected more of the same as we anticipated the release of his latest book of criticism, What Ever Happened to Modernism?—the book itself would be up to his typically high standards, but it would sink relatively quickly into oblivion, largely unread or under-reviewed. These expectations were turned upside down when prior to the book’s release a pseudo-interview appeared in the Guardian highlighting some passing remarks Josipovici makes late in the book about such high-profile English writers as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes. The result was a ridiculous controversy, which threatened to overwhelm the book’s arguments. As a result, for good and bad, it turned out that the book was much more widely read and reviewed than most of us anticipated. Reviews continue to trickle in, ranging from the ridiculous (Eliot Weinberger’s clueless review in the New York Review of Books, ably handled by both Stephen Mitchelmore at This Space and the blogger at Grand Hotel Abyss; please also see Stephen’s own unique review of the book, from last October, which in part responded to the early burst of incomprehension) to the excellent (Max Cairnduff’s review at his blog Pechorin’s Journal; incidentally, I think it's no coincidence that the better reviews have appeared at blogs rather than the mainstream journals). Here is mine.

I think the book is just as necessary as Josipovici’s earlier books On Trust, The Book of God, and the collection The Singer on the Shore. In the course of this essay, there are two aspects of the book I would like to devote special attention to. First is the central role played by "the disenchantment of the world". Second is what I think is a perhaps understandable, though real, miscalculation in the last few chapters of the book, chapters which have been given an overwhelming amount of attention by most reviewers, attention which has not served the book well, though, as noted above, it has perhaps attracted new readers (good and bad). Effectively, reviewers have all too often ignored or misunderstood the former, while taking undue offense at the latter.

The bulk of the book is devoted to an exploration of what modernism, for Josipovici, is. His definition, of course, is not the only definition of modernism available to us, which is but one reason for the confusion surrounding the book (for some salient remarks on this point, in this case with respect to James Joyce, see Stephen Mitchelmore's most recent post). For Josipovici it has to do with art's awareness of and response to the condition of being modern, which in part means that the world has become "disenchanted", among other things throwing sensitive artists into a crisis of authority. Allow me to quote from Mark Thwaite's concise description of the problem:

In a world that moved from being viewed by the vast majority through a sacramental lens, to one where earthly powers had ever more secular explanations, the problem of authority became a problem for art and artists. Why and in what way did the artist have authority to speak? And how could that question inform the art that the artist produced, so that their work did not exhibit the bad faith of pretending that question away. [...] Do artists seek to re-enchant the world (and who/what gives them authority to do so) or to respond to its disenchantment?

How, under such circumstances, can the artist create? For whom does he or she create? Here, then, is Josipovici:

Here the desire, even the need, to create comes to be seen not as a gift but as a curse. For while the desire to create seems to be the most natural thing in the world, something we are all born with, what is it in a world without sure relation to either tradition or authority but a meaningless self-indulgence? When the social trappings of art fall away, when patronage disappears and the artist is forced to compete in the market-place for the sale of his goods, can there be any justification for art other than the desire for money and fame? […] in today's world there is no place for natural, spontaneous creation; everything we do seems false, laboured, second-hand; it feels like padding, pretence, a lie perpetrated by those who like to think of themselves as artists, in collusion with a market which knows that enough people need to feel they are in touch with some higher truth to make the art business profitable.

The book opens with a series of quotations from four writers faced with this dilemma, selected by Josipovici from among many possible options to "stand for a century of pain, anxiety and despair", to "stand for what has been called the Crisis of Modernism": Mallarmé ("...each day discouragement overwhelms me..."; "...I am disgusted with my self; ... and cry when I feel myself to be empty and cannot put pen to the implacably white paper"), Hugo von Hofmannsthal ("I have quite lost the faculty to think or speak on any subject in a coherent fashion"; "...the language in which it might perhaps have been given to me not only to write, but also to think, is [...] a language of which I do not know even one word, [...] in which I may once, in my grave, have to account for myself before an unknown judge."), Kafka ("I can't write. I haven't written a single line that I can accept. . ."), and Beckett ("I speak of an art. . .weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road." "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.") These quotations all come from the years 1850 to 1950, which is to say the years that are commonly seen as the Modernist period. Josipovici is aware that this makes it all too easy to reinforce the conception of Modernism as a style or period, or both, either way "as something safely behind us", rather than, as he argues, "a coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us". This "precariousness" is seen as a condition of being modern; Modernism becomes, then, "a response by artists to the 'disenchantment of the world'". Josipovici then spends several chapters exploring this disenchantment, using the work of several artists and writers as illustrations of the problem and of the array of artistic responses to the problem.

He begins by discussing two Albrecht Dürer engravings from 1514: St. Jerome in his Study and Melancholia. The former, Josipovici writes, depicts the saint as calm, at ease, "bathed in warm sunshine", "at one with himself and with his God as he works". The latter engraving is, by contrast, full of chaos, furious energy, depicting "art in competition with God", Melancolia as "a terrestrial craftsman cut off from all tradition and therefore incapable of productive work". She is inactive "because all work has grown meaningless to her": "St. Jerome shows us what has got lost; Melancolia I what we are left with.” In the following century, this new situation, combined with new possibilities presented by the printing press, is seen as the occasion for comedy for Rabelais and Cerventes. Both writers, in acknowledging the absurdity of writing in isolation for an unknown audience—where in the past storytellers told their tales directly to an audience—undercut the authority of their own narratives, reminding the reader how things really are—remember, after all, this is just a story. Don Quixote

dramatises the way we as readers collude in this game because we want, for the duration of our reading, to be part of a realised world, a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world. It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment the world is growing disenchanted.

Somewhat later we have another important example in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (not discussed in the book, though Josipovici has written about it elsewhere), in which the narrator hilariously never quite gets around to getting moving on telling the story of his life. Several key pages are spent on the poetry of Wordsworth (many reviews have indeed taken note of the unique presence of this poet in a book on Modernism) and the philosophical works of Kierkegaard, in particular in connection with problems of authority, anxiety, and inward-looking religious practice.

To be blunt, I don't think enough attention has been paid to what Josipovici says about the disenchantment of the world; it is, as Max Cairnduff writes, “absolutely critical to everything that follows”. Reviewers have missed the centrality of this, while also missing the related observation by Josipovici that this disenchantment is generally assumed to be "a Good Thing", "since it led us from an era of superstition to our modern era of common sense and scientific understanding". Which is to say that for Josipovici, as Stephen Mitchelmore emphasizes, it is "not necessarily A Good Thing". This is no small point, yet it is treated as if it were. It is in fact the main point. But how are we to approach this question, from where we sit? It is, admittedly, not easy. I submit that most readers are unlikely to be receptive to this message, and understandably so, since the very structure of our lives seems to argue against it. It is, however, a message I think we need to hear. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the problem of authority (this is covered to my satisfaction by both Cairnduff and Mitchelmore in the posts I've linked above). I'm instead going to complicate the matter of the disenchantment of the world, but in a way that I hope will help to clarify some of what is at stake.

In The Book of God (1988), his marvelous study of The Bible, Josipovici wrote the following:

. . . once Luther stood up and asserted the need to speak the truth as he saw it and not pay lip-service to tradition, things could never be quite the same again. We tend to see Luther's break with the medieval church, like Spinoza's with Jewish tradition, as the triumph of light and integrity over the forces of obscurantism and hypocrisy; but this is to see it from their own point of view. It is important, however, to grasp what gets lost as well as what is won in such revolutions. . .

Our point of view, or what feminists call standpoint, can be an obstacle; further, we can learn a lot by considering matters from alternative standpoints, especially those that are underrepresented in official histories. We view these events, respectively, from Luther’s and Spinoza’s perspectives—we see them as signposts, if you will, on the way to our current secular world, a world, in its modernity anyway, that most of us see as desirable and inevitable, if perhaps besieged. We identify with the smug self-congratulation of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment—the very labels tell us how to think about them!—and all too rarely do we consider what was lost, or if we do, we are rarely likely to consider that what was lost is worth worrying about or mourning. Josipovici, along with other critics and writers, has looked past this point of view, to consider the perspectives of artists. And indeed artists can and do offer us glimpses into changes that took place, worlds that were lost. But they do it from their own standpoint, which is a standpoint often at some remove from the events. For when we look at this period from the standpoint of artists, we are necessarily also looking at it also (but not completely) from the standpoint of the elite, or an elite, for in this period artists were either themselves elites, or at least patronized by elites, whether aristocratic, clerical, or bourgeois. So when we think of the declining of traditional authority, we are thinking of not only the Catholic Church, but also the feudal lords. In their place, eventually, are the various Protestant churches, and the bourgeoisie. This was a long process, covering almost the entire period under discussion, in one way or another.

But what if we try to look at this period from the standpoint of ordinary people? What if we think of the disenchantment of the world as a very real thing, with events affecting real people, and not simply as an increasing sense "people" had that things were changing? Because the period we're talking about just happens to correspond exactly with the long transition from feudalism to capitalism. It is the period of Karl Polanyi’s “Great Transformation”. The late feudal period was, again from the perspective of ordinary people, marked by elites banding together, by the bourgeoisie and aristocracy putting aside their longstanding differences to defeat the various diverse anti-feudal movements that had characterized the preceding few centuries, which had taken the form of peasant revolts, popular heresy and millenarian movements, not to mention everyday forms of passive resistance, and so on. So, rather than the traditional conception of a smooth or inevitable "transition" from feudalism to capitalism, it is, I think, more accurate to view capitalism as the counter-revolution (just as the United States Constitution is an outgrowth of a counter-revolution, undermining the more popular democratic tendencies of the American Revolution itself). In this light, common people were caught in between the replacement of one form of traditional authority, which they actively (as well as passively) resisted for centuries, and the newer authority imposed by the emergent capitalist social relations and mode of production, which they also actively resisted.

In this context, then, what is the disenchantment of the world? I see it as two related things, always keeping in mind these shifting modes of authority faced by ordinary people. First is the loss of the commons, and all that entails, including access to means of subsistence, control over reproduction, and community life, including festivals, holidays, gossip, mutual care, and resistance. Second, following from the first and no less important, is the disciplining of labor, which provided the backdrop for the philosophical/scientific attack on the body, as in Descartes, and theories of the state, as in Hobbes, which form twin, if occasionally opposed, pillars of our modern scientific and intellectual heritage. Related to both of these is the privatization of religion, or what could be called the "Christianization of the masses"; we know about the inwardness of mainline Protestantism itself (again, Josipovici dwells on this important point in his discussion of Kierkegaard, a writer he also discusses at length in On Trust), but the Catholic confession dates from this period as well—private religious practice being imposed, just as the more communal religious practices are actively being driven out. The Protestant Reformation was in many respects a massive land grab, another significant moment in the general enclosure of the commons. And this is the period of the witch-hunts, which, far from being the irrational attacks from the undifferentiated, ignorant mob of our popular imagination, were instead more or less systematic secular campaigns against common practices and beliefs, primarily those practices and beliefs of women in the areas of reproduction; a campaign, not incidentally, fully supported by some of the biggest names in our scientific legacy.

As Silvia Federici puts it, in her indispensable book, Caliban and the Witch (note: in the next few paragraphs, all quotes are from Federici, unless otherwise specified, but I am informed here by Marx, Polanyi, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Maria Mies, Fernand Braudel, and Giovanni Arrighi, among others):

What died was the concept of the body as a receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality, it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, whereby what the philosophers classified as "irrational" was branded as crime.[...] "Knowledge" can only become "power" if it can enforce its prescriptions. This means that the mechanical body, the body-machine, could not have become a model of social behavior without the destruction by the state of a vast range of pre-capitalist beliefs, practices, and social subjects whose existence contradicted the regularization of corporeal behavior promised by Mechanical Philosophy. [...] This is how we must read the attack against witchcraft and against that magical view of the world which, despite the efforts of the Church, had continued to prevail on a popular level through the Middle Ages. [...] Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalization of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal of work in action.[...] Magic, moreover, rested upon a qualitative conception of space and time that precluded a regularization of the labor process. [...] From [the ruling class's] viewpoint it hardly mattered whether the powers that people claimed to have, or aspired to have, were real or not, for the very existence of magical beliefs was a source of social insubordination. [Note: the above has been collapsed into one paragraph, with elisions bracketed off, in order to save space; emphasis is in the original]

This is the disenchantment of the world, and it is, in my opinion, undeniably a tragedy, a regrettable loss, one very much worth mourning. This is not at all popular view in the mainstream, but neither is it popular among leftists or Marxists, who seem just as wedded to the telos of progress as any liberal or capitalist, and who are generally more than happy to consign to the dustbin of history the "rural idiocies" of those ignorant masses dispossessed in this period of "so-called primitive accumulation". Indeed, one of the better reviews of What Ever Happened to Modernism? was by Tim Black at Spiked. Black’s review is from a largely Marxist perspective, and though he calls the book "important" (and actually offers an interesting defense of realism), he also calls it "irritating" and "reactionary". For another recent example of this general attitude, in his book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek wrote "if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists" and "we should remain resolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of 'instrumental reason' or 'modern technological civilization'. " No one who seriously considers the history of capitalism from the perspective of not only what actually happened to those people who were expropriated in the past, but also what is happening to those who are being expropriated today, still, in the same ways, but in different places, can so easily dismiss such "morphed" critiques.

But we were talking about artists. Despite what some proponents of political art would have us believe, it is not the artist's job to report on political events. Nevertheless, their work is instructive. Dürer’s The Fall of Man (1510), which depicts Adam and Eve being ejected from Eden, can be read as "[evoking] the expulsion of the peasants from their common lands". His Monument to the Vanquished Peasants (1526), following the Peasant War of 1525, could "suggest that the peasants were betrayed or that they themselves should be treated as traitors" and "has been interpreted either as a satire of the rebel peasants or as homage to their moral strength". Dürer was a follower of Luther, and his work is said to have "helped to disseminate the teachings of the Reformation". Luther himself condemned the peasant rebellions; Dürer perhaps agreed, but as an artist saw what he saw, and was able to convey some measure of ambivalence. His version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was but one example of what was at the time a common artistic theme, which with its Biblical imagery reflected the horrible, very real suffering experienced by very real, ordinary people, who, in a situation of enforced scarcity, were constrained from maintaining their own subsistence in the traditional manner. The first half of the 16th century resulted in "the absolute impoverishment of the European working class, a phenomenon so widespread and general that, by 1550 and long after, workers in Europe were referred to as simply 'the poor'." Meat disappeared from workers’ diets—"a historic setback . . . compared to the abundance of meat that had typified the late Middle Ages." Here is Federici expanding on this point, bringing Rabelais back into our story:

Not only did meat disappear, but food shortages became common, aggravated in times of harvest failure, when the scanty grain reserves sent the price of grain sky-high, condemning city dwellers to starvation. This is what occurred in the famine years of the 1540s and 1550s, and again in the decades of the 1580s and 1590s, which were some of the worst in the history of the European proletariat, coinciding with widespread unrest and a record number of witch-trials. But malnutrition was rampant also in normal times, so that food acquired a high symbolic value as a marker of rank. The desire for it among the poor reached epic proportions, inspiring dreams of Pantagruelian orgies, like those described by Rabelais in his Gargantua and Pantagruel (1552), and causing nightmarish obsessions, such as the conviction (spread among north-eastern Italian farmers) that witches roamed the countryside at night to feed upon the cattle.

Allow me to leave here my detour into this working class history. I'd planned on delving more into the responses of artists to this situation, with a special emphasis on Shakespeare (including a digression into Josipovici's use of the work of the medieval historian Peter Brown in his elucidation of Richard II in On Trust; for this, let me instead refer the reader to my piece, "A world about to be lost"), but I believe I've said enough. My point, I think, is sufficiently made.

Few people know this history; fewer still look at it from the standpoint of the ordinary people affected by its forward march, though some are sensitive to the difficult problems that history has wrought. We are most of us ordinary people ourselves, who identify all too completely with the winners. So it's probably the case that most anyone reading the book likely does see the disenchantment of the world as a good thing, if they think of it at all. Josipovici quotes the following from a footnote in T.J. Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism:

I realize that I shall be taken here and elsewhere to be idealizing pre-modern society, and inventing a previous watertight world of myth and ritual, agreed-on hierarchies, implicit understandings, embodied places, and so on. There is no easy way out of this dilemma. Of course pre-Modern societies (and certainly the ones existing in Europe immediately before the spread of mercantile capitalism and the seventeenth-century crisis) were conflicted and ideologically incomplete. I am on the side of historians who have fought against the picture of a pre-modern Europe characterised by absolute cultural uniformity, immovable religious consensus, the unthinkability of alternative views of the world, etc. Nonetheless, if we do not make a distinction between societies built, however inefficiently, upon instanced and incorporated belief, with distinctions and places said to be inherited from time immemorial, and societies driven by a new kind of economic imperative, in which place and belief are subject to constant revision by the very forces that give society form, then I reckon we forfeit the chance of thinking critically about the past two hundred years. To call such comparative thinking 'nostalgia' (or in the present techno-ecstatic conjuncture, 'Luddism') is just the latest form of philistinism about history in general.

As such, the book is fighting an uphill battle, and not just against philistinism. To the extent that reviewers have addressed the matter at all, nostalgia is indeed usually the charge (regardless of explicit attempts to anticipate and forestall such a charge).

Instead, responses have most often focused on the final two chapters of the book, in which Josipovici turns his attention back to the question raised by the title. What, indeed, ever happened to modernism? Unfortunately, these chapters, while enjoyable reads (large stretches of them are just as fascinating as the rest of the book), are not nearly as successful as the book up to that point, or indeed the rest of his criticism outside of this book. In part this is simply because he mentions several big English literary authors by name (McEwan, Amis, Barnes, etc) without making it clear why they in particular are found wanting. In this way, I think, it has been easy for admirers of those writers to read these passage as attacks. Which is exactly what happened, especially with the very first reactions. For myself, this was the first time in all of his work that I felt he wasn't speaking to me. These two chapters are written, fairly explicitly, to an English audience, with references to "these shores" and the English literary world in particular. At one point, while extolling the virtues of Clark's book, he notes that Clark, by "Writing about episodes in a history",

is free to explore a whole web of stories rather than trace any linear sequence, and thus restore a sense of history being made—by artists, by events—rather than simply lived out, that the blind alleys down which artists have gone at certain periods of their lives are as important as their achieved successes, and that different responses are called for in pre-First World War France, in post-Revolutionary Russia and in America after the Second World War.

I like this a lot, and I especially like the bit about blind alleys (I'm always thinking artists' minor or lesser works are too easily dismissed in this culture because we are impatient to move on to the next book or album or mp3 file). But I'm thrown, just a little, but the clause about the need for different responses. Not because it strikes me as wrong (it does not), but because in the previous chapter, one of the examples he uses of a writer who we read "to pass the time, to reassure ourselves that the world has meaning, and then . . . leave . . . and move on to the next book", is the American Philip Roth. He subsequently spends more time (though still not much) on Roth than he does on any other contemporary writer, because Roth has a reputation for being playful and "experimental", and Josipovici senses that his readers will have mistaken his book as an extended argument for experimental art—"Is that not what Modernism is about?" No, it is not: "If that is your reaction you have not really been taking in what I have been saying." It's clear enough to me, a longtime reader, that Josipovici has not equated Modernism with experimental art, but it's not difficult to imagine it not being clear to readers unfamiliar with his argument from his other work, given the general sense of Modernism as indeed being about experiment and innovation (on the other hand, does anyone really think of Kafka as an experimental writer?). Frankly, his remarks about the big shot contemporary writers are not terribly persuasive (even though I agree with most of them).

Related to this is a curious feature common to many of the reviews I've seen, positive and negative. These readers have noticed that Josipovici favors certain writers over others. They've even noticed to some extent what seems to differentiate those writers. Yet, having read the book, they can still do little more than wonder "why can't you like both" kinds of writers? As if two distinct species of writer were being posited. Some have expressed this point with considerable irritation, annoyed that they are being told what to like. They are being told no such thing. It is apparently easy to miss that Josipovici admits that he has enjoyed many of the novels by the authors in question. But he also says that, when he first read such writers, he wondered why they didn't touch him the way other writers did. They were enjoyable, diverting narratives, but he never felt compelled to return to them. It could be said that this disparity has animated his critical career. Anyway, it is not being suggested that readers cannot like whatever they want, just as it is not being asserted that Martin Amis and Ian McEwan are terrible writers. What is, however, being suggested is, first, what characterizes the condition of being modern, and, second, what an appropriate response to that condition might be. In this context, I wonder if it could be argued that Philip Roth is responding appropriately as an American writing after the Second World War. And if not, it seems to me that his response would still need to be situated in that American context (I happen to think this is a potentially fruitful line of inquiry, considering the American tradition of so-called post-modernism, but then I am an American). Of course, as Josipovici readily admits later in the book, these kinds of assessments are necessarily affected by our own personal situation (it is in this context that he admits that the Marxist perspective on Modernism perhaps has a point).

One of the factors leading to the writing of this book was Josipovici's dismay at the adulation showered on Irène Némirovsky's posthumous novel, Suite Française. Written in 1942, and set in the war, the novel would have been old-fashioned at the time, and in its mode is little more than "run-of-the-mill middlebrow narrative", yet was treated as a modern classic when discovered and finally published in 2004. So, in Chapter 14 ("It Took Talent to Lead Art Astray"), Josipovici discusses Némirovsky's novel, comparing it to a novel of similar vintage, also about the war, by Claude Simon. Némirovsky, he says, "is simply unaware of the inappropriateness of what she is doing, and one has to say that by her writing she makes 'a written renunciation to all claim to be an author'." In this case, it is useful to see the excerpts from the two novels, to see what Josipovici is claiming about the approaches taken by the two writers, to see what he means by an "appropriate" response. But, again, his problem is less with Némirovsky, who could only do what she felt was right, but in the out-sized praise her work received:

[T]he question is not why she should have written as she did, but what has happened to our culture that serious and intelligent and well-read reviewers, not to speak of prize-winnings novelists and distinguished biographers, many of whom have studied the poems of Eliot or the novels of Virginia Woolf at university, should so betray their calling as to go into ecstasies over books like Némirovsky's while, in their lifetimes and now after their deaths, ignoring the work of novelists like Claude Simon, Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard and Gert Hofmann.

This, then, is a fuller expression of the question asked by the title. But in the very next paragraph he admits that "To answer this would require a sociologist, perhaps, and another book." He is not really in a position to answer the question. It could be said that the book itself intends to raise the question rather than to answer it. Well, one can almost hear it being said (indeed, Weinberger says it with much annoyance), if he's not going to answer the question, what is the point? The point, I think, is that some questions need to be sensitively and intelligently posed before they can be answered. That is, since the disenchantment of the world is a general cultural problem, the question raised by the title cannot be answered via literary criticism alone, or through art history.

Towards the end of the book, Josipovici writes that "There cannot, then, be a definitive 'story' of Modernism. We cannot step outside it, much as we would like to, and pronounce with authority on it. We can only try to persuade people to see it from our point of view." His book is just such an attempt at persuasion, though he has been accused of elitism, of smugness (!!), of nostalgia, of snobbery. Rather, I think, he is peculiarly positioned to be able to perceive things many of us cannot, in part because of the details of his biography. In the final paragraph of the book, he allows that his particular affinities "may be largely because of who and what I am". He closes the book like this:

The late R.B. Kitaj compared Cézanne's rootedness in his native Provence to what he called the 'diasporist' ... imagination of the uprooted Picasso, and he suggested that at some deep level Modernism and the diasporist imagination go together. This may be true if we have a flexible enough notion of disapora to accept that an apparently rooted Frenchman like Bonnard or Englishwoman like Virginia Woolf could also have created a 'diasporic' art—and then one would want to look at Bonnard's relocation to the South of France in the latter part of his life as a kind of exile in which he went with his problematic wife, and at Virginia Woolf's sense of herself as a woman excluded from a male-dominated society. To that extent the Marxist critique of Modernism I mentioned at the start may have a point: Modernism may not be a consequence of the crisis of the bourgeoisie but it may be the product of a general European rootlessness in the wake of the French and Industrial revolutions. All will then depend on whether we see such rootlessness as pathological or as giving those who are imbued with it a certain vantage point, allowing them to see things which might otherwise have remained hidden. In other words, are we to see our own history, that which makes us what we are, as something which blinkers us or which sharpens our vision. This is, in itself, of course, a very Modernist question.

For all that Josipovici is advancing a particular perspective, he leaves it up to us to see for ourselves. Can it not be said that each of us is potentially our own diaspora? We have been fragmented, dispersed, alienated. We constitute a working class massive, but identify all too much with the very power that destroyed the history described above and seems unable to avoid destroying everything it touches, on the way alienating us from not only our own labor, but our very existences, though some of us, not only artists, are afforded glimpses of other possibilities and are receptive to art that suggests such possibilities, and otherwise questions and breathes. This is why all of this matters, and why Modernism continues to speak to us, through the din of received histories and imperial narratives, fictional or otherwise, and why we need critics like Gabriel Josipovici.

Related posts:
"Smoothness of Surface"
"A world about to be lost"
"The very notion of wholeness"
Notes on "The Bible Open and Closed"
"Modernism against Modernity"
Notes in advance of reading What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Follow-up to this post

Review of In a Hotel Garden
Review in The Quarterly Conversation of Goldberg: Variations (and follow-up)
Review of Everything Passes