Criterion and on...

Adam Carlson

This month’s readings thematize the “malaise of modernity”, the absence of objective/social horizons of significance against which good can be distinguished from not-good. We know that for Jameson there’s no lack of horizons, but for his Macintyre there is. For Eliot, there’s a synthetic relation between the traditional and the novel that binds the (privileged) individual’s talent to collective excellence. And for Badiou, there’s a strange synthesis between the universal and the utterly singular that for Eagleton forms no horizon at all. Each reading seeks to establish, in particular, a criterion for virtue. But more interestingly, they discuss the preconditions for criteria in general. Tradition and critique, as the two main operators in this discussion, form two modes of answering the question, what counts as an answer? As I’m tinkering together a project roughly dealing with, um, well, I guess we’ll all have to wait for next month to find out, I’m intrigued by the way each of our texts treats alterity in relation to virtue. Badiou criticizes (through Eagleton), the “ideology of human rights”, and “the idiom of difference and otherness that accompanies it [and] reflects a ‘tourist’s fascination’ for moral and cultural diversity; it accepts only those others who are ‘good’ others—which is to say, those like myself; which is to say, not other at all. It has no respect for the difference of those who do not respect its own cherished differences.” Badiou here is voicing a common critique of institutionalized diversity, multiculturalism-as-national-policy, or liberal democratic tolerance. Herbert Marcuse to Wendy Brown have argued that in the celebration of difference, it’s the majority that gets to decide what counts as “good” (or virtuous) difference. And, were Eagleton’s Badiou to stay in the truly revolutionary universal, attempting to “achieve sameness”, we may have a more profound critique of multiculturalism than those typically found on the Left a la Brown (namely, that diversity is an alibi/instrument of imperialism; and/or, it’s yet another expression of liberal democratic hypocrisy). However, Eagleton goes on to complain, Badiou ends up taking a backdoor into the difference party through his national and generational affiliation with the veneration of alterity-in-and-for-itself: “for all his undoubted political zeal”, Badiou is “caught up in an elitist sort of antithesis between the ordinary and epiphanic”, proclaiming “the non-conceptualizable, revelatory, irreducibly singular, evental, subject-constituting character of truth.”

According to Eagleton, Badiou has curiously conservative criteria for universal truth: “The sameness he has in mind is more one of truth than equality. Truths, he insists, are the same for everyone, and anyone at all can proclaim them.” Does this not smack of Hobbes’s cynical contention that the distribution of intelligence is truly democratic and egalitarian, as everyone is always sure they’re right about everything? Perhaps it’s obvious where I’m going here, but it seems to me Eagleton’s main beef with Badiou is that that truth-as-singularity, that is, as alterity, is—dare I say again “metaleptically”, or at least tautologically or analytically—simultaneously example and criterion for what really (counter-normatively) counts as good, meaningful, authentic, an event, or as significance as such: “What is to count as a situation, and who decides? Are there really any ‘singular situations’, as Badiou seems to imagine? And is there any way of analysing, or even identifying one, which does not implicate general categories?” Eagleton has me convinced that I need to read Badiou’s book, and I agree with Eagleton’s Badiou that the real trouble with diversity is not the liberal hypocritical celebration of difference which ignores/contains/disarms difference, and that some sort of non-essentialist, non-strictly-humanist concept of sameness is at least worth thinking about. But I disagree with his leftist fantasy of alterity, or the willingness to equate anything even remotely counter-hegemonic with virtue, especially since this set of criteria superimpose the bad utopia of the easy answer over the possibility of a good utopia in which answers might objectively count for something.

Eliot treats this question of the answer in terms of alterity as well, explaining that we praise a poet for being different from his predecessors, while remaining blind to those parts of his work in which those predecessors live on most vigorously (14). TSE sounds awfully Lukácsian as he describes the “great labour” through which one may gain the “historical sense” and inherit the tradition. This “historical sense”, that is, the consciousness of the present and the place of the present within the historical, and of the individual within a complex inheritance and conditions of inheritance, would in another tradition be read as the coming to class consciousness. For TSE the criterion for aesthetic virtue is historical. It cannot be understood without a complex interrelation between the complete—that is absolute—past and its disjunctive relation with the absolute present—the absolutely new or novel (“the really new”)—that is, alterity. And the tradition is what makes alterity meaningful. TSE is quick to reinforce that this novelty or disruptive force is only felt in the process of its integration or its “conformity” to the tradition it modifies. Thus his is a hegemonic aesthetics that must accommodate for the presence of the non-normative by revising/re-normalizing the whole structure of history, by canonizing the counter-canonical, or by negotiating and compromising with the new that for whatever reason cannot be ignored or suppressed. Really, TSE’s aesthetics is shaped like a liberal democratic theory of equality or diversity, and like liberal theory, his pedantic method is a textbook case of Bourdieuian exclusion via cultural capital (and of course, he makes no pretence to accessibility [16-7]).

For TSE the past is “only” a horizon of interpretation against which the ratio of individuality/conformity may be measured. “And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value” (15). For TSE, excellence or aesthetic virtue must meet the dual demands of being new, but not too new, different, but not revolutionary, and this is just one reason why TSE cannot be a Lukácsian (not that Lukács would ever have him as one!). Even despite his modernist aesthetic radicalism, TSE’s criteria for virtue, or excellence, or art, reveal him as a champion of the bourgeois liberal status quo. (What may be interesting to consider here is Jameson’s figuring—in “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”—of the modernist criterion for aesthetic success as commercial failure. I wonder if this puts pressure on Eliot’s maintenance of the status quo, or if the authenticity of commercial failure is just a “new” [sub-] cultural normativity.)

For TSE it is not the greatness of the components that make up the work of art, but the “intensity of the artistic process, the pressure […] under which the fusion takes place, that counts” (19). So, the excellent artist is a Modernist form and never a Romantic content. Content’s relation to the question of the answer follows into After Virtue: if every society values differently, then how do we know that they’re talking about the same concept of virtue? Again, the urgent need is for a criterion. Most interestingly, Jameson takes what might otherwise be read as an exercise in scholasticism and focuses on the collective nature of Aristotelian virtue: the absence of virtue constitutes the non-conforming individual as outside of the auto-fashioning community; or, to put it another way, conformity to norms equals virtue, and alterity is thus at least somewhat evil (151-2).

Contradicting his anti-utopianism, Jameson’s Macintyre must become utopian in order to imagine the communal conditions within which virtue may be regrounded. Perhaps the truly utopian goal is to imagine a way in which middle ground is not always/already an alienating mediation, to find the res publica in medias res.