TY - JOUR
AU1 - Sawaya,, Francesca
AB - In recent years, we have seen a range of calls for the revitalization of literary and cultural studies through transformation of our theoretical and methodological paradigms. One of the most recent is the “V21 Manifesto” of 2015 assembled by a Victorianist collective of scholars who work primarily in British studies. This document argues that Victorian literary and cultural studies is mired in “positivist historicism” which is characterized by an “instrumentalist evisceration of humanistic ways of knowing.” As a corrective, the V21 collective argues for “presentism.” The collective defines presentism, on the one hand, as the use of contemporary theoretical methodologies to engage the Victorian past, but also as the recognition that “the world we inhabit bears the traces of the nineteenth century.” Through “presentism,” the collective thereby hopes to challenge the ways in which “Victorianists are our own and only interlocutors. … . [and fail] . . . to imagine paths of argument compelling to scholars who do not care about Victorians as Victorians.” Presentism—what was once seen by many scholars as a bug in historicism—now becomes, intriguingly, a feature. As a nineteenth-century scholar who works primarily on US texts, I admire the forthrightness and polemical energy of this call for “presentism.” Indeed, that different forms of literary historicism offer the possibility to meditate on the present has been one of its most undertheorized and most enacted characteristics. In US literary studies, for example, Jennifer Fleissner has repeatedly asked us to take seriously the work of intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra and his notion of the necessary, complex, and also problematic transference that always occurs between past and present in the historian’s work. Fleissner has carefully demonstrated how presentism drives often diametrically opposed versions of historicism and has argued for more self-reflexivity and theoretical rigor in the presentism of our historicisms (“Historicism Blues”; “Is Feminism a Historicism?”). In short, presentism has long been acknowledged by some scholars as central to historicist work of all stamps, but V21’s bracing call helps us return with renewed energy to the theoretical and methodological questions and problems presentism poses. At the same time, as The Rambling’s knowing, even tragicomic commentary, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the V21 Manifesto,” suggests, the document is marked by its own present and registers what Bruce Robbins described at the height of the culture wars as a professional “jeremiad” (19–21). The Rambling reads the Manichean rhetoric of professional fallenness and worldliness (“instrumentalist evisceration of humanistic ways of knowing” [“Manifesto”]) as registering the jockeying that results from a brutal job market for nineteenth-century scholars and the declining status of professional expertise—specifically the declining value of our field of expertise—nineteenth-century print text literacies. The Rambling describes the difficult professional present to which it suggests the V21 manifesto responds in this way: “It’s not just that we … [Victorianists are] a joke according to new university policy that emphasizes readings of three pages or less or that our students think Trollope is a social-networking app for sex workers.” My career has taken me from working-class and middle-class state universities across the Midwest, West, and South. Over the years, I have found it increasingly challenging to assign the long texts of the nineteenth century, which require immersive reading over extended periods of time. There are still students who are eager to read these texts and find their form and content revelatory; many, however, can’t make time in their financially precarious and busy lives or are bored by the extended framing and logics of nineteenth-century texts. Likewise, if the universities where I have worked are any gauge, administrators have oddly enough focused on the cost of books in the skyrocketing costs in higher education. Inadvertently or not, the message sent to students and faculty alike is that big, thick books (and reading) are somehow causing education to become unaffordable. Here, of course, I am engaged in my own professional jeremiad; and as my digital media and film studies colleagues might point out, it would be equally true to note that students come to the university with digital and filmic literacies that far exceed my own. My larger point, then, is a simple one and not unrelated to the V21 manifesto—that different models of literacy are being promoted by differently situated actors in our contemporary public sphere, and so far, the outcome of that struggle has not been to renew attention to the forms of textual literacy and immersive reading—whether historical, theoretical, or literary—that center on the nineteenth century. For Robbins, himself a signatory to the V21 manifesto, professional jeremiads, despite their Manichean rhetoric, are helpful in revitalizing intellectual work. They show “how disciplines work, how they manufacture vocations for themselves, how they shift from one vocation or paradigm to another” (21). Can V21’s notion of “presentism”—worked out more fully than it can be in a manifesto—be helpful to those of us working in nineteenth-century studies and aid us in better explaining to other scholars, as well as students and universities, the significance of what we find there? Can the bug in historicist studies become a feature? I think it can be and that two recent books by scholars in the V21 collective, Anna Kornbluh and Susan Zieger, demonstrate the promise and the problems that “presentism” can entail. Both Kornbluh’s Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (2014) and Zieger’s The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (2018) provide ambitious, wide-scale arguments backed by impressive erudition, theoretical sophistication, and meticulous close readings. They are also very different, even oppositional, attesting to the vitality of what the collective itself describes as its productive internal “disagreements.” Kornbluh focuses on the canonical literary authors in British Victorian literary studies (Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope), while demonstrating the links between their texts and the canonical modernist ones of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Zieger, by contrast, focuses on mass culture, print ephemera, and less clearly canonical texts (by Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, George du Maurier, and Oscar Wilde). Likewise, Kornbluh focuses on the abstract structure of modern capitalism—financialization—and on its various rhetorical sleights of hand, while Zieger focuses on the subjects in capitalism—consumers and affect. Both are directly “presentist,” and their methodologies have similar features, even as they are undergirded by very different arguments. In this review, I cannot do justice to the richness of detail in these books nor can I track all their invigorating and fascinating differences. I can, however, examine the ways presentism works usefully and problematically in the overall arguments of these two books. Specifically I contend that their strength is to seize on absolutely vital issues in our present and trace their roots to the Victorian period in order to reinvigorate our perspective on the nineteenth century. For Kornbluh, this means focusing on the persistent and persistently devastating myths of capitalism, and for Zieger, on elitist and dystopian accounts of mass culture. The weakness of these studies is that their polemics about the pastness of the present (as Zieger puts it, “We have seen it all before” [213]) result in methodologies that direct their arguments to specialists only and (unnecessarily) avoid questions about relations of production—whether in the Victorian period or our own. Kornbluh’s argument is particularly important and timely, and she frames it clearly and well. She posits that in the mid-Victorian period, and with financialization (“the transition to an economy in which the speculative begetting of money from money supersedes the industrial production and consumption of goods”), an era of “regular, constant [economic] crisis” ensued (1). The result was that it became increasingly difficult “to realize”—in all senses of the word—what constituted both reality and capital (2). Political economists and financial journalists subsequently developed the notion of “fictitious capital,” but it was Victorian novelists who especially leveraged that concept in productive ways (2). “Fictitious capital,” Kornbluh explains, “signals not a firm classification, but rather the very impossibility of firm classification, the very violation of class—category, but also, for this matter, caste—incited by the financial revolution” (6). For Kornbluh, while financial journalists and political economists at first critically explored the “charismatic trope” of fictitious capital, in the end, they displaced their concerns with the “literally unbelievable” workings of capital onto the notion of “psychic economy” (6, 8, 9). Evading structural analyses of the working of capital, these writers and thinkers “normalize[d]” its operations—and the necessity of ongoing crisis—by focusing on “substitute ground: a psyche whose intrinsic economy of unlimited desires and unpredictable vacillations could be located as the final cause of a volatile economy” (9). Realist literary authors, by contrast, questioned this displacement: they both explored its manifestations and indicted it for its intellectual and ethical emptiness. Kornbluh insists on a strict distinction between what she calls “literary thinking” and discourse: “To the historicist’s reduction of literature to discourse, I oppose deconstruction’s insistence on the irreducibility of tropes to intuitive ideas, and I work instead to encounter the material and process of literary thinking” (13). She calls her mode of analysis “financial formalism,” one “that reads literary form’s critical thinking about the historically specific material and conceptual question of finance,” thereby foregrounding “the contemplative agency leveraged by literature” (15). Kornbluh’s valorization of “literary thinking” is closely connected to an impassioned defense of realism, a literary form that Marxists and new historicists explored extensively in the 1980s and 1990s. Those critics, Kornbluh argues, saw literary realism as a “‘reification of the status quo’” (Patrick Brantlinger, qtd. in Kornbluh 12). By contrast, she argues that realism is “the over-determined representation of unsolvable dilemmas that disrupt the integration of reality” (4). In making this claim she carefully describes her focus as being on financialization, with literary realists “insightful[ly] framing” the “problems” of that historical process and “prob[ing] many of its effects” (4, 9). Literary realists, she argues, did so primarily through their use of “the tropes of personification and metalepsis” (4). Particularly helpful is Kornbluh’s analysis of metalepsis, of the ways that effects are substituted for causes, but in any case, her trope-centered account of financialization adds a new vantage point from which to think about the narratives and rhetoric of capitalist ideologues. That the critique of capitalism was displaced in the nineteenth century and continues to be displaced quite frequently through psychologism; that nineteenth-century literary writers embedded the issues that emerged from such psychologism in their works and thereby provide an instructive if disorienting picture of the unreality of financialization as it occurred; and that deconstructive or rhetorical modes of analysis prove valuable in reading both the fictions of capitalism and the fictions about capitalism—these are all important arguments. Why then does the book feel so narrowly specialist, a book that is directed not simply to Victorianists, but really—since she fails to engage American or transatlantic realist criticism—only to British Victorianists? Quite simply, the book’s argument is constricted by its evidentiary base and the way it renders exclusive its object of study. To rely solely on what is described as uniquely “literary,” and to rely solely on literary modes of reading—on meticulous tracings out of the workings of metalepsis and personification—with no engagement with the question of how such formulations were produced, how they engaged other critical formulations within or across other sectors of society, what other modes of reading were powerfully productive—makes the book’s argument feel airless and more limited than it could be or should be. There is something poignant in Kornbluh’s defense of the exclusivity of “literary thinking” in our present moment: To read literature, to be open to how literature thinks, is to pose that quintessential Dickensian question, “what connexion can there be?”: what connection exists between the voices, plots, motifs, temporalities, and images that are mobilized within one bounded work? Form, as forum for these elective affinities and flattering contrasts, wields a conceptual agency—an agency for assembling concepts while simultaneously defamiliarizing them—for relating without reifying, for weaving a loose and gossamer web. (15–16) Such a lyrical defense of “literary thinking” cannot but appeal to literature professors, since it acknowledges the power of forms of literacy and literariness that have illuminated and transformed our consciousness. But do only texts like those of Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, Marx, and Freud have “conceptual agency” and promote “contemplative agency” in relation to capital (16, 15)? Are close and meticulous reworkings and/or readings of metalepsis and personification in “literary” narrative or “literary” nonfiction really the only way that human beings have come to an understanding of and critique of the unreality of capital? Surely not. Most puzzling here is that this move Kornbluh makes in establishing “literary thinking” as an exclusive domain is utterly unnecessary to make her important points about “fictitious capital” and “psychic economy.”1 She insists on the exclusive “sagacity” of literature, and in doing so, she has to avoid the history of the production of that category (9). Such avoidance apparently has more to do with a polemical response to previous literary historicisms about realism than with any necessity immanent in her argument. As noted, Kornbluh argues that a previous generation of historicist critics saw realism as enforcing, even enshrining, the status quo. This was also true in the US context in some of the more Foucauldian-inspired accounts of literary realism. For Americanists, for example, there was Walter Benn Michaels’s important but exasperatingly tautological and deterministic The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987). That famous study might well be seen as a precursor text to Kornbluh’s “financial formalism,” but it is also precisely the kind of text that has provoked Kornbluh’s defense of the exclusive status of the “literary” and her refusal to engage questions about the production of that category.2 Deterministic historicist accounts of production in realism, however, have not been universal. As Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt have argued, the historicist turn in literary studies was galvanized by many different “presents,” not just that of deterministic Marxism or Foucauldianism. It was also inspired by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the opening of the university to students from different subject positions and backgrounds, and the model that an emergent social history provided (9–12). Differentials of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and locatedness (periphery/metropole)—within nineteenth-century literary culture—were therefore also central in debates about literary realism. These historicist accounts were often more open-ended and dialectical and asked what kinds of knowledge and culture are produced in different subject positions and locations, as well as what kind of dialogue and movement occurred across and between them. One thinks here of two brilliant classics: Kenneth Warren’s account of the relation between race and realism, Black and White Strangers (1993), and Amy Kaplan’s of class and realism, The Social Construction of American Realism (1988). These are, of course, Americanist arguments about realism, and if there is one thing that Kornbluh’s book strongly suggests, despite three decades of calls for transatlantic work, Americanist and British nineteenth-century literary scholars are not really even speaking to each other, whether or not they are speaking to broader audiences. Nonetheless, and most importantly, Kornbluh might have reflected more deeply on the production of the “literary” and its modes of reading. Phillip Barrish, again in the American context, pointed out long ago that debates within nineteenth-century realism about literature have continued to structure contemporary debates about theoretical models for reading it. Barrish reflected on the ways in which opposed historicist and deconstructive theoretical models of reading in literary and cultural studies each dramatically claim “special intimacy with materiality” (8). Recall here Kornbluh’s polemic that “To the historicist’s reduction of literature to discourse, I oppose deconstruction’s insistence on the irreducibility of tropes to intuitive ideas, and I work instead to encounter the material and process of literary thinking” (13, emphasis added). Barrish argued that “More-materialist-than-thou” deconstructive as well as historicist arguments are central to creating cultural capital in our debates as literary scholars and are inherited from debates about the status of the “literary” amongst the realists in the nineteenth century (147). One need not agree completely with all aspects of Barrish’s argument to agree with his larger claim that self-reflexivity and self-critique about the history of the production of our object of study and our modes of reading enrich and deepen our understanding of both. It is this latter issue, the absence of histories of production—both in terms of the object of study and in terms of methodology—that links Kornbluh and Zieger’s quite different books. At first, Zieger’s book appears to be in direct, even conflictual dialogue with Kornbluh, disputing the latter’s methodological splitting off of the literary from “discourse” more generally. Zieger writes, “This book unapologetically elevates . . . trivial ephemera to critical attention” and demonstrates how “mass print called forth a range of literacies, not limited to fluent, solitary, focused reading” (2). She describes what she sees as the “various double binds” of “many well-intentioned progressive literary critics” who “conduct . . . elaborate close readings of popular novels that their original readers were unlikely to have performed, and fail . . . to study the ephemeral materials that truly meant something to millions of people” (13). Implicitly criticizing the kind of “literary” analysis that Kornbluh advocates, Zieger focuses on ephemera—especially print ephemera—and the kinds of affect they produced, which she argues are quite different than those that “fluent, solitary, focused reading” yields (2). Working against the claims of literature as an exclusive domain and against exclusively “literary” modes of reading, Zieger also acts to counter two modes of interpretation in media studies: on the one hand, what she calls “paranoid readings that quickly explain away affective phenomena with grand narratives,” and on the other, “quantitative studies … [that] re-create the politics of mass print production, regulation, and distribution” but efface affect (10). Zieger instead hopes to give “media consumption a face” (10), to open up the “embodied, material, and situated” “everyday experiences” of nineteenth-century mass media consumers (9). She therefore relies on a methodology that she describes as “neutral description and scene-setting” (9). She especially seeks to “renovate banal and even irrational states of mind” against “the image of the mindless mass cultural consumer” created by Marxists (12), whether by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, or by Walter Benjamin, who created more nuanced but likewise “imperfect” accounts (11). Why does a book with such a different theoretical apparatus, methodology, and evidentiary base than Kornbluh’s end up nonetheless feeling, again, so narrowly specialist, restricted not simply to Victorianists, but really only to British Victorianists? Zieger’s theoretical commitments are beautifully articulated and her methodology of “neutral description and scene-setting” is provocative, but again what both come to mean as the book proceeds is the identification of certain ephemeral objects and/or affects which are then explored more deeply through meticulous close readings of primarily literary texts—albeit more middlebrow literary texts than Kornbluh’s (9). Part of the problem here is that Zieger’s affect archive presents certain conceptual difficulties. As the historian Susan Matt points out, to trace the affects and/or emotions in the past, and particularly to try to do so from below, one frequently must rely on written texts and accounts that have been preserved by those from above. This in no way diminishes what Zieger attempts to do, though one wishes she had reflected more on this issue. Yet there is a shared problem with Kornbluh that can be related to the compelling, but complex, force of presentism for the discipline of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies in this historical juncture. In her conclusion, Zieger writes that “the broad similarities . . . between nineteenth-century media consumption and our own should relieve our angst. We have seen it all before” (213). Such polemical presentism avoids the necessity to explore, for example, accounts of the dynamics of production in Victorian print culture and their similarity to or difference from (for example) contemporary transnational media conglomerates and the security state. My angst, quite frankly, was not relieved. I don’t recognize the Victorianness of our present to which Zieger so dismissively gestures. Likewise, and from a completely different vantage point, I did not recognize Kornbluh’s present in which she asserts “economists and politicians,” still “enshrine” “psychology,” rather than structure in their accounts of capitalism (156). It’s true of some economists and politicians; it’s not true of others who have moved away from psychologism into powerful, even historicist, accounts of how capitalist economies reproduce structural inequality.3 In other words, the “presentism” of two such different historicist texts with two completely different theoretical paradigms and methodologies seem to have at their heart a desire to enshrine “Victorian” texts (albeit of different kinds) as uniquely testifying to our “Victorian” present, to safeguard our privileged objects and methodologies. For reasons that appear to have more to do with debates within literary and cultural studies about methodology than as necessities immanent within their important arguments, both Kornbluh and Zieger avoid any account of production in the past or present. They thereby avoid the so-called hermeneutics of suspicion of a previous generation of literary historicist presentisms, which has been seen (both accurately and inaccurately) as “reduc[ing]” (Kornbluh 13) the documents and experiences of the past (and present) to production and thus to “discourse” or “ideology.” [T]he “presentism” of two such different historicist texts with two completely different theoretical paradigms and methodologies seem to have at their heart a desire to enshrine “Victorian” texts … as uniquely testifying to our “Victorian” present, to safeguard our privileged objects and methodologies. At the same time, such avoidance of production necessarily diminishes the possibility for dialectical accounts of both the past and the present, and likewise debate and discussion with other disciplines about how we constitute our archives and methodologies. LaCapra has argued that too-deeply presentist accounts of the past represent not merely transference, but “narcissistic infatuation” and “subjectivist aggression” (63, 64). Neither of these erudite and diligent books fit this description. Nonetheless, there is a way in which the complexly contestatory dynamics of both the past and present are (unnecessarily) flattened out in these books by the enshrining of the nineteenth-century archive and “literary” modes of analysis. If these two texts of the V21 collective are any example of the call to “presentism,” we have been given much to think about in terms of both our accounts of the nineteenth century and our methods of reading the past. Yet in thinking about our past and present, we must not avoid accounts of relations of production. In other words, we must not presume our archives and reading methods are the only “sagaci[ious]” ones or that what Sianne Ngai might call the “ugly feelings” of “suspicion” or “angst” must be avoided to argue for the value of what we do. I do think we can talk more effectively to other scholars, as well as our students and universities, about the continuing relevance of the nineteenth century in the present, but we need to be self-reflexive and self-critical and avoid succumbing to the presumption that our texts and our forms of knowledge, our accounts of past and present, are the only ones that matter in the present. Footnotes 1 For example, deconstructive methodologies have not necessarily privileged the literary, but instead seeing the workings of language itself as providing tools of demystification. 2 Kornbluh devotes a short and neutrally descriptive footnote to this precursor work (176–77n12). 3 The work of Emmanuel Saez, Raj Chetty, and Thomas Piketty that has received so much mainstream attention in the last decade, as well as the well-regarded economic journalism of John Lanchester and the Nobel prize winner, Paul Krugman, do not reduce capitalism to psychologism and is often centered on tracing historical patterns. They may not have exactly the same account of “fictitious capital” that Kornbluh does, but their work would invigorate her discussion of that formation in both the past and the present. Likewise, I kept waiting to hear from Kornbluh about the renewed interest in the work of the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi—especially in England. Polanyi’s analyses during the Cold War of the “utopian” fictions of capitalism is closely related to Kornbluh’s and is receiving renewed attention by the Labour Party in England (see Polanyi, The Great Transformation [1944] p. 138). In short, different disciplines and their debates, as well as their archives, can provide parallel if different evidentiary bases and methodologies. From another angle, current Marxist and Marxist-informed work in the humanities on the relation of subjectivity and the structures of capitalism (in various ways the work of Ann Cvetkovich, Maurizio Lazzarato, Ngai, and Franco Berardi) create much more dialectical accounts of the relation of “fictitious capital” to “psychic economy” than the tropes of metalepsis, and personification allow for and would, again, invigorate Kornbluh’s account. Works Cited “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the V21 Manifesto.” The Rambling , 18 Oct. 2018 . Web. Barrish Phillip. American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 . Cambridge UP , 2001 . Fleissner Jennifer. “ Historicism Blues .” American Literary History , vol. 25, no. 4, Winter 2013, pp. 699–717. Fleissner Jennifer. “ Is Feminism a Historicism? ” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature , vol. 21, no. 1, Spring 2002, pp. 45 – 66 . Gallagher Catherine , Greenblatt Stephen . Practicing New Historicism . U of Chicago P , 2000 . Kaplan Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism . U of Chicago P , 1988 . Kornbluh Anna. Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form . Fordham UP , 2014 . LaCapra Dominick. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language . Cornell UP , 1983 . Matt Susan. “Recovering the Invisible: Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions.” Doing Emotions History . Edited by Matt Susan , Stearns Peter N. , U of Illinois P , 2014 , pp. 41 – 53 . Michaels Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century . U of Californa P , 1987 . Ngai Sianne. Ugly Feelings . Harvard UP , 2005 . Robbins Bruce. Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture . Verso , 1993 . V21 Collective . “Manifesto.” Victorian Studies for the 21st Century . 2015 . Web . Warren Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism . U of Chicago P , 1993 . Zieger Susan The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century . Fordham UP , 2018 . © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Safeguarding the Past: “Presentist” Historicism
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajz009
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/safeguarding-the-past-presentist-historicism-AzazJn6Ne3
SP - 301
VL - 31
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -