Michael McKeon says Goodbye to the Long Eighteenth

[Here’s Michael’s final statement–DM]

Now that the “collective reading” of The Secret History of Domesticity is over I’d like to thank both participants and silent readers for their interest–of the former, especially Dave, Carrie S., and Laura, who’ve given me a great deal to ponder. It’s a unique experience, at least for me–a running “review” that’s really more like a virtual workshop held on the occasion of a recently published book.

I hope the discussion has generated interest in the book that will outlive the occasion. And I’d welcome and respond to (michael.mckeon@rutgers.edu) any thoughts that didn’t get aired in the past few days. I’m new to blogging (and had some technical difficulties here, as Dave in his patience can testify), and I see what a remarkable difference it can make in helping subcultures like our own to cohere. Thanks again to everyone involved. Now go out and buy the paperback!

Michael

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McKeon on the Difference between Post-Structuralist and Marxist Attitudes towards the Hermeneutic Circle

[Once again, half of Michael’s posted comments in our exchange were consumed by cyber-gremlins today, so I have reunited them and put them up here for easier reading–DM]

Dave,

Although I can see there may be some basic disagreements between us about historical method, I’ll first try to be clearer about what my method aims to do.

By the distinction between seeing the past in its own terms and seeing it in terms other than its own I mean something simpler–more methodological or structural and less epistemologically-“truth” oriented–than you take me to mean. For me the distinction doesn’t entail opposing determinate contents–the initial categories are epistemologically-speaking arbitrary–but is rather the engine that sets in motion the process of understanding by which the discovery of determinate contents will be achieved. That motion is dialectical in the sense that the nature of the “internal” and “external” viewpoints it works with is defined by an interaction, like that between particular facts or bits of evidence and a general hypothesis, whereby the two enter into a back-and-forth process of reciprocal revision until a point is reached at which what seems a satisfactory correspondence between the two has been found–i.e., at which the hypothesis seems adequately responsive to the data and the data seem adequately contained by the hypothesis.

This isn’t to “idealize” the act of historical understanding but to acknowledge its possibility, and to suggest a “realistic” way of going about it. By the criteria of the “satisfactory” and the “adequate” I mean the sorts of probabilistic standards that govern empirical analysis, although the “rules of evidence” that apply in this sort of study are more like those that operate in a court of law than like those involved in scientific method. The problem I have with poststructuralism in this regard is that the absoluteness of its epistemological skepticism, at least on paper, makes this kind of judgment impossible. If the choice is between either the accessibility or the inaccessibility of the past, the choice becomes a dichotomous opposition between absolutes for neither of which methodological decisions about the adequacy of evidence to a particular hypothesis have any interest. This is the choice between the positivism of “a privileged access to the past” and “some fixed point of historical truth” on the one hand and the relativism or aestheticism of “valuable insights” on the other. If the value of insights is assessed rhetorically, i.e., by the degree to which they speak to or satisfy the needs or expectations of a contemporary audience, there’s no way of judging between the value of insights that, relatively speaking, are equally attuned to their respective publics. (Nor, to return to the defense of a “master narrative,” is there any middle ground where the epistemological value of taking into account a little evidence or a lot, or of doing it “well” or “badly,” might be assessed.)

If these were really the principles on which literary critics and historians operated, their investment in either activity would seem inexplicable. I include criticism here because I think reading a text is liable to the same sorts of epistemological caveats as is “reading” the past. Adducing a text’s “own” terms is no less problematic than adducing those of the past, yet the ambition to do this probabilistically–“privileged” not a priori but by virtue of the way one construes the meaning(s) of a text on the evidentiary basis of the language in which it’s written–is one we’re happy to shoulder, as teachers and writers, on a daily basis.

As I understand it, the difference between poststructuralist and Marxist method, at least on the theoretical level, can be expressed as the difference between two distinct attitudes toward the hermeneutic circle. To analyze the nature of the parts on the basis of our knowledge of the whole presupposes a knowledge of the parts as that which gives the whole its wholeness; to begin at the level of the parts presupposes a knowledge of the whole on the basis of which their partial nature is predicated. For poststructuralist theory, this is a contradiction that precludes knowledge. For Marxist theory it’s a contradiction–between parts and whole, between own terms and other terms, between interpretation and explanation–that inaugurates the process of coming to knowledge.

Michael McKeon

The Long Eighteenth says Good-bye to the Secret History

As you’ll see, I’m letting Michael McKeon have the final word (see above).

Nonetheless, I’d like to personally thank everyone involved with this first Collective Reading: Carrie Shanafelt, who made this blog possible with her time and energy, and who kicked off discussion with the first post; Tita Chico, Carrie Hintz, and Laura Rosenthal, and most of all Michael McKeon, who submitted himself and his book to a grueling, week-long process of cyber-questioning, despite technical glitches and truncated posts. I do hope that all of you continue to check in with us from time to time. The Long Eighteenth will always welcome your suggestions and contributions. Please stay in touch.

Some of my students have told me they were following our exchanges, and I’m hoping that those who listened in on the discussion will soon start posting their own comments, observations, and queries on everything “Long Eighteenth.” As you can see from last week’s discussion, we do not bite (even while debating method).

Please let us know your ideas for the next collective reading, either in terms of books or other kinds of events. If you or your friends want to propose some new type of event, maybe a forum on a particular topic, or something entirely new, please post it to the list or contact me offlist at dmazella@uh.edu. We’re also eager to hear any suggestions you might have about improving the format of our Collective Readings.

Michael Warner once remarked that a modern “public” is by definition an address to strangers, an address to a group of people that cannot be known in advance. A public is “more than a list of one’s friends,” but is instead a group of strangers who come together into a “public” by virtue of their participation (74). I have been very happy to find the names of some old friends on this blog; but I am also pleased to find here some scholars whose work I look forward to learning about in the future. Thanks to all of you for helping us come together around this book.

Best wishes,

David Mazella

A Tale of Two Michaels: McKeon and Warner on the Virtuality of the Public

Since this is the final day of discussion, I wanted to make sure we responded to at least one of Michael’s questions, so I decided to focus on the Secret History’s relation to another book that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit over the past year: Michael Warner’s Public and Counterpublic (Zone, 2002). As I was reading Michael’s book, I found myself thinking a lot about Warner’s, and, sure enough, I saw Warner’s book acknowledged at some key points of discussion.

As Carrie Shanafelt pointed out on the first day of discussion, “the special thing about the conceptualization of public discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that, suddenly, it becomes one of the main explicit concerns of writers and other public figures.” After quoting McKeon’s reference to Charles Taylor and the “social imaginary” on p. 107, she gives an excellent description of how this social imaginary coalesced:

As any of us working in the long eighteenth century are aware, almost every author of the period has passages explicitly describing, defending, and even performatively constructing a particular relationship between the public and the private selves of the author, or even between the private and public selves of the reader. The text itself self-consciously serves as a mediator between those selves, both creating a public community for discourse through the publicity of publication and offering a subject for private contemplation.

Carrie has noted the important organizing effect of texts in these virtual spaces of community and solitude, an organizing effect that McKeon has characteristically aligned with two other effects of modernity: the emergent division of knowledge that likewise organizes generals and particulars, as well as the modern marketplace, which “conceives value to be a general and homogeneous category available through the equalization of particular and distinct commodities” (106).

Though Warner is not making a historical argument in the manner of McKeon, McKeon’s point about the role of the marketplace as a model for the new, virtual social and communicative relations of modernity adds an important, causal piece of the Big Picture (as Laura would call it) that Warner discusses chiefly in contemporary contexts. McKeon goes on to relate these features of epistemological “disembedding” to the characteristic features of modernity:

These basic features of features of the modern social imaginary–virtuality, self-constitution, reflexivity, –are germane to the fundamental quality of modern socioeconomic and cultural relations, the fact that they are relatively disembodied, mediated rather than face to face, disembedded from the substratum of physical presence and practice. Although in differing ways, modern social relations–the social contract, market exchange, public opinion–are normatively impersonal relations between “strangers” that who have no actual experience of one another (107).

For this statement, McKeon cites a number of sources, including Warner’s book, which includes this interesting passage:

The expansive force of these [modern] cultural forms [nation or public or market] cannot be understood apart from the way they make stranger relationality normative, reshaping the most intimate dimensions of subjectivity around co-membership, with indefinite persons in a context of routine action. The development of forms that mediate the intimate theater of stranger relationality must surely be one of the most significant dimensions of modern history, though the story of this transformation in the meaning of strangers has been told only in fragments. It is hard to imagine such abstract modes of being as rights-bearing personhood, species being, and sexuality, for example, without forms that give concrete shape to the interactivity of those who have no idea with whom they interact (76).

What we owe to McKeon, and what I am grateful to Laura for pointing out as well, is the recognition of how much these modern cultural forms of epistemological “disembedding” and virtual, “disembodied” interactions owe to the emergence of the modern marketplace, as an engine of historical change, as an epistemological model, but also as a model of social relations. And one of the key places where we see this virtuality elaborated is in the distinction between actual and concrete particularity, and the emergent doctrines of realism and the aesthetic (109).

DM

Dave’s response to McKeon

Michael and I probably agree more than we disagree about these issues of interpretation, but I’ll outline some of the areas of agreement, indicate the main points where we diverge, then get out of the way of discussion.

I should say straight off that the previous post is a very full and useful guide to Michael’s thoughts about historical method, which help a great deal to illuminate the decisions he made in structuring the book and approaching his topic.

Now here are the areas of agreement:

1. I am fine with treating interpretation and explanation as a doublet, both of whose terms represent phases in a process equally necessary for the proper understanding of the past.

2. I also appreciate your concern for beginning with the intentions of historical actors, then fully exploring the social contexts of their actions within those socio-historical settings. Frankly, I don’t know any other way to proceed with historical inquiries.

3. I also understand your caution about reading subsequent historical events (i.e., the “failure of Enlightenment”) backward into the actions and consciousness of those historical actors who had no clue about how those historical events were going to work out.

4. Your whole paragraph on modernity and its failures is really admirable, and explains why we need to remind ourselves and our students what modernity looked like before it was tried out.

Now, here are the disagreements:

5. Having said that, because I hold what you call the poststructuralist belief in the epistemological inaccessibility of the past, I do believe that historicists and presentists both reconstruct the past more or less adequately (or persuasively) in the present; no one can claim a privileged access to the past, no matter what terms they use, or how well they use them.

6. My biggest problem with the notion of “seeing the past in its own terms” is not simply with the question of “whose past [meaning which people in the past should be described],” but also the problem of “whose terms,” meaning whose scholarly interpretations should be preferred, and why.

As you noted, this problem does indeed beg a number of questions: should “the past” be understood in only one set of terms, which we could recognize to be the past’s own terms? How would we which of all the different ways to describe the past are not just true statements, but the past’s own terms? Whose authority decides? In a few instances, we might have direct evidence from contemporary accounts, but otherwise we are relying upon traditions of interpretations/explanations that have accompanied these texts into the present, and then using that tradition as a corrective to our own obsessions and desires concerning these topics.

In other words, I suppose I am stressing the fact that historicist interpretation is not just an individual, synchronic act, but a collective process repeated over and over again on a diachronic axis, rather like your brilliant account of Johnson’s “quantitative” analysis of Shakespeare.

This is one reason why I am less worried about anachronism, since I believe that successive historians are not advancing away from, or towards, some fixed point of historical truth, but are instead attempting to generate valuable insights into their materials that will speak to contemporary (scholarly) audiences. I do take it for granted that the nature of these insights will change over time.

If we think about the historical accumulation of interpretations of the past, we would see really staggering variations in critics and epochs’ views of the past’s “own terms” over time. These wildly divergent views tend to get institutionalized and naturalized, however, into a rather tidy and academic version of the “past in its own terms” that may in fact have little to do with what people in the past may have actually, concretely believed. The views of most 18c readers of an 18c author are certainly “partial” in comparison with what we as scholars take years to internalize.

My Swift students are still shocked to hear that a critic as good as Samuel Johnson could doubt the attribution of a Tale of a Tub, or that the rumors of Swift’s secret marriages or insanity had such a dramatic effect on even the most considered views of him in the 18th and 19th century. These were matters of debate and controversy in the past: whose view, then, counts as that of the past’s? Thackeray’s Swift? Orrery’s? Sheridan’s? Ehrenphreis’s? Do we really believe that these writers use the same set of terms to understand a figure as complex as Swift?

So I appreciate all the cautions that you have given us about projecting our present-day concerns too freely upon the past, but I in turn would caution against over-idealizing the act of historical understanding. Instead, I would call attention to the scrappiness and persistent controversy of actual historical writing in the period under question.

Is it possible that a pragmatic or “rhetorical” orientation toward the past is closer to the actual views of the past held by history-writers between Camden and Gibbon, rather than the more elevated views held by Meinecke or Dilthey? If so, what should this disparity tell us?

Best wishes,

DM

McKeon Responds to Dave and Laura on Presentism (from Comments)

[Since this response ran through three consecutive Comment posts, I thought it would be easier to read, follow, and respond to if I pasted it into a single new post. Laura, if you’d like, perhaps you could respond here? And, please, if others are interested, join us–DM]

Dave and Laura,

I agree entirely that “interpretation” and “explanation” form a dialectical doublet, in their interrelation defining what historical method should aim to achieve. I emphasize the former only because I feel as though “our” attentiveness to the self-conceptions of the past in recent years has been overbalanced by methods and perspectives that derive from modern experience. By this I meant something very imprecise, and the term “presentist” is probably misleading except in so far as it, too, means simply “what postdates the portion of the past that’s under study.” I think “explanation” is crucial to historical study, but perhaps only once (a schematic temporalization) “interpretation” has defined a sense of the past’s self-understanding on the basis of which the claim to “explain” by *other* means can become intelligible.

So in these terms, the presentism I sought to rebalance in Secret History is the tendency to read the period in which modernity first seems to emerge (which I take at least to include the 18th century) from the viewpoint of the failures of modernity, paradigmatically, capitalism, the bourgeoisie, class conflict, liberalism, the public sphere, separate spheres, “The Enlightenment.” To study these things from the viewpoint of “the past” is, as I’ve already quoted, “to view the past not only as the prelude to our present but also as a response to its own past” (xxvii), a formulation that suggests that the distinction between interp. and explan. can also name the difference between attending to the intentional *motives* with which past activities, etc. were undertaken and elaborating a theoretical or *causal* understanding whose possibility depends on taking a certain distance from the aims of the past culture in question. In 1690 capitalism meant not commodity fetishism, alienated labor, and the extraction of surplus labor but freedom from hierarchical political and economic control. The bourgeoisie was not a self-conscious class whose ideology sought to universalize its own interests. Indeed, whether it even existed is a definitional rather than an empirical question–hence my objection (74) to the translation of Habermas’s burgerlich as bourgeois rather than civil. What people *experienced* in 1690 was not class conflict but a conflict between status-based assumptions about the coextension of birth and worth and emergent class-based assumptions that worth was a function of labor discipline within one’s calling, or simply one’s industrious accomplishments and the upward mobility that attended them.

Except for a few thoughtful “Tory feminists,” “liberalism” wasn’t an ideology of human rights and negative freedom that nonetheless silently drew the line at women and indigent men but a revolutionary alternative to the tacit belief in monarchal legitimacy. Similarly, the public sphere wasn’t a hypocritical claim to inclusiveness and equality but a revolutionary intuition that the determination of public affairs should be the work of others besides the king and his ministers. Separate spheres was not simply the modern, more ruthlessly efficient instantiation of patriarchal inequality but one result of reconceiving gender relations no longer as a matter of better vs. worse but instead as a matter of equality in difference. And the Enlightenment was not the dogmatic adherence to rational and instrumental “objectivity” but a dialectical effort to make sense of the difference between the object and the subject, science and the humanities that had been bequeathed by the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. This is not to fashion an apology for modernity but to fill in its other side (as it seems these days necessary to do) so as to come closer to an understanding of the past as, like the present, historical process.This sort of presentism can’t be laid at the door of any single recent critical movement: the post-structuralist demystification of “history,” utopian Marxist contempt for the achievements of modernization, new historicist efforts to “do” history outside the protocols of empiricism–i.e., without abandoning the poststructuralist belief that “history” is epistemologically inaccessible–all these have contributed to the haze of “negative hermeneutics” (Ricoeur) of our times. To recur to one of your points, Dave, although I see what you mean about the comparable vulnerability of “presentism” and “historicism” to partiality, I’d rather reorient these terms, partly on the precedent of previous usage. I take presentism itself to be a mode of “historicism” in the now very general sense of historicism as entailing any commitment to historical understanding. But as I see it, “historicism” came into usage to name what I’ve been calling “interpretation,” the aim to study the past in its own terms, as opposed to the aim to elaborate general laws of historical formation and development that can “explain” history in a more trans-historical fashion, i.e., the attempt to apply the model of scientific “natural laws” to sociohistorical experience.(I associate this meaning of historicism with, e.g., Troeltsch and Dilthey; but ironically Popper and others later adopted the term to describe and discredit what I’m calling “explanation”.)

And I agree that to conceive interpretation as the study of the past in its own terms begs the question of what, or even more *whose*, past we’re talking about. Thinking of inter./explan. as methodologically a dialectical doublet, however, suggests that this is the necessary next step in interpretation: dividing interpretation–a whole vis a vis its opposition to explanation–into its own parts once that preceding division has been accomplished. This can be both diachronic and synchronic: the former in so far as “the past” we seek to understand is a chronology that needs diachronic subdivision if we’re to sort out different viewpoints and perspectives; certainly the latter once we recognize that any diachronic period is defined apart from others according to a synchronic perception of what makes it, as a unit, different from surrounding periods. I.e., synchronic study isn’t the opposite of diachronic study, it presupposes it as the means by which any slice of diachrony becomes susceptible, by bracketing adjacent chronologies, to synchronic understanding. In this respect I don’t think cultural studies devotes itself to synchronic rather than diachronic study; it brackets the problem of diachrony–and thereby takes a position on diachrony–by conceiving a period (or a decade or a day) as susceptible to its “own” analysis. And I think we owe synchronic study not to any recent thinking but to the Scottish Enlightenment historians and then, soon after, to the full elaboration of Marx, for whom the synchronic relationship between infrastructure and superstructure became as indispensable to “historical” study as is the relationship between one event or period and others. (The attribution of the discovery of synchrony to cultural studies might even be seen as an example of “presentism,” like the case of looking to Said [as Dave points out]for the origins of what Selden already practiced.) And I think that when people castigate “master narratives” they’re not thinking of diachronic totalizations alone. The strong meaning of “teleology” as positing “at the outset a result purported to emerge only as the result of inquiry” (xxv) doesn’t require a linear narrative in which to operate. After all, Marx’s synchronic relation of ideology/material base has been accused (although I think wrongly)of teleology, as well as of “abstraction” and “reduction.” On the other hand, the ambition to hunt out teleology has led some to conflate teleology with linear succession or temporality, which seems to me a mistake. (If this were true, then chronological readings would be ipso facto “evolutionary” readings, whereas in fact they also can be, and can be criticized as, “devolutionary.”)For a discussion of interp./explan. that very interestingly argues the subtlety with which that distinction can be made when applied to micro-questions of whether individual actions are the result of “internal” motive or “external” cause see Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Idea of a Social Science,” in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame, 1984), 211-29.

Michael McKeon

What does it Mean to Understand the Past in its Own Terms?

I was really struck by this passage of Michael’s about his critical and historical method, because it articulated an area where Michael and I probably disagree in theory, though perhaps not so much in practice:

But to characterize my method I think I need to have recourse to readings in historiography and historical method, especially the distinction between interpretation and explanation–to simplify, the difference between understanding the past in its own terms and understanding it in terms not available to it.

Now, Michael immediately qualifies this distinction between the “presentist” and what I’d call the historicist positions, by saying that we need to pursue both. Nonetheless, he does stake out a position that “presentist” studies have dominated theory and criticism for quite some time, and seems to suggest that such a historicism could act as a corrective to presentism. And this seems a worthy point: any critical method, pursued without sufficient awareness of its limits, can generate mechanical and unpersuasive results. This seems as true of “presentism” as it does of the most scrupulous historicism.

But if Michael’s dialectical method has any validity (which I think it does), the position of the careful “historicist” is going to be as conditioned by the present as the most rampant presentist, who is nonetheless going to be determined by his own historical situatedness. In other words, both sides will have constructed their notions of past AND present in a present that impinges upon them in various ways, and in response to their perceptions to the past. In other words, I don’t see any automatic advantage on either side, though both are obliged to be as scrupulous as possible in their reconstructions of both past and present.

Let me give a few examples from our own discussion: Carrie Hintz made some interesting points about secrecy in our recent political past, with her references to the Lewinsky scandal. And even as our little discussion has unfolded, a very lurid sex scandal (phone sex! on the floor of the House! whoops, not true!) has overtaken political argument in this country. Even as we discuss scandals like the warming-pan baby, the notion of “scandal” takes on a new saliency in both the present and in our reconstructions of the past, because of events none of us foresaw a few weeks ago (I hope). I’d argue that both historical interpretation and explanation use metaphors for us to render the past intelligible, and that these metaphors are as likely to come from present-day scandals as they are from past ones, for example.

In your own explanation of the traditional/modern divide, Michael, you had recourse to Chinua Achebe and his presentation of perceptions of tradition in a non-Western context. These are obviously things that chronologically and conceptually were unavailable to John Selden, though Selden had an admirable interest in “Oriental” languages and cultures. But talking about Selden’s interest in such things indeed seemed charming and “antiquarian” until critics began to think more critically about the West’s discursive constructions of “non-Western” or “traditional” cultures in pre-20th century writers. Though sustained critical interest in such topics was only generated, say, after Said, I don’t think it’s fair to claim that pursuing those questions is purely presentist, since these parts of Selden’s scholarship have been known about for some time, though they were known as part of his philological work on biblical languages. But is calling it “biblical” any less mediated or presentist than calling it “orientalist”? As you acknowledge, we need both kinds of approaches, and use them both together, all the time.

There are other issues here, as well, like the dangers of hypostasizing “the past” so that only a particular set of terms can be defined as “its own.” The virtue of the dialectical method, I think, is to put us on guard against believing that any particular set of terms could be considered self-sufficient or adequate for such explanations. Does the resident of Edinburgh in 1704 inhabit the “same” present or past as the resident of London in the same year? Does the illiterate laborer digging up Roman ruins for the local clergyman’s researches share his sense of antiquity? Etc. etc.

So I appreciate your notion that we must be careful about introducing anachronisms into our analyses, but I believe that a historicist may be in as much danger of doing so as a presentist.

Best,

DM

Michael McKeon Responds, part II (Questions for us)

[this is the second part of the email that Michael sent me–DM]

TOPICS OF SPECIAL INTEREST

In order to take full advantage of this remarkable opportunity to talk to others at some length about my work, I’d like now to list a number of topics that haven’t yet received attention in this discussion. Some of these are arguments, others are ideas or formulations; some are obvious, at least in outline, some I’ve learned from others, some I’ve developed myself; but all I’ve found peculiarly illuminating in the thinking that went into writing this book. I’d be most grateful for any reflections readers might have on these things, either pro or contra, either their interest and utility in themselves or the way I’ve employed them in Secret History.

1.) The effort to coordinate thinking about the division of knowledge at the most general and the most particular of levels with thinking about the division of labor in a similar fashion (see, most explicitly, 324-27).

2.) The distinction between positive and negative freedom, especially as I’ve conceived it in tandem with the difference between the traditional and the modern.

3.) My attempt to juxtapose literary and graphic means of treating form and structure in the representation of spatial relations. Although my ample use of illustrations in Secret History is of course broadly relevant to this topic, it becomes most explicit in my discussion of genre painting in chapter 8, 423-35.

4.) My characterization of what’s new about “the public” in the modern world as the virtuality of an imagined social totality whose indefinite inclusiveness is able to admit all of those private, actual individuals who pre-exist and determine the nature of that whole. I speak most directly about this conceptualization at 106-9 and 324, where it’s exemplified not only by the public sphere, the market, and representative democracy but also by the realm of aesthetic experience.

5.) The theory that the transition from traditional to modern notions of “personality’ is marked by a shift in the location of “the natural” from the social to the sexual register: see 274-77.

Thanks in advance. And for those readers who haven’t purchased a copy of Secret History, the paperback edition is scheduled to be available by the end of October at about half the price of the hardbound.

Michael McKeon

[Since Michael has been so generous in his responses to our queries, I’d like to keep the McKeon collective reading going for at least another day or so. Feel free to use the comments or to do your own posts to respond.–DM]

Michael McKeon Responds, part I

[Michael McKeon has asked me to post these comments on his behalf–DM]

In the last couple of days I’ve been using the comments buttons to enter into discussion on specific issues. Today I’d like to post a few responses to recent comments, as well as raise some more general issues about Secret History that may deserve more discussion.

CIVIC HUMANISM

Laura has added to her earlier remarks on the liability of the claim that civic humanism dominates sociopolitical thought around the turn of the 18th century and generates liberal discourse and capitalist ideology as a response to it. As she points out, this claim discourages recognition of the degree and depth of various efforts to confront the effects of emergent capitalist practices that occur well before civic humanism is supposed to have seized the reins of debate in the last two decades of the 17th century. I agree: the diverse range of negative speculation on emergent capitalism is thereby reduced to the ideology of a single posture, that of civic humanism, whose meaning and implications we’re supposed already to know. As for positive speculation about capitalist practices, let alone capitalist ideology, the civic-humanism-as-dominant thesis would deny its very existence until the ch critique has generated a positive defense of it. This thesis isn’t supported by the evidence (see pp. 24-33; those interested in a fuller critique of the ch thesis on both substantive and methodological grounds may want to read my essay “Civic Humanism and the Logic of Historical Interpretation,” which will appear in a collection of essays on JGA Pocock edited by DeAnn DeLuna). Moreover the ch thesis imperialistically lays claim to defining the perspective of anyone who uses ideas or words (“corruption,” “luxury,” apprehension regarding the virtuality of credit, etc.) that the proponents of that thesis identify as the intellectual property of ch.

MASTER NARRATIVES

So the ch thesis is in my view a good example of what’s wrong with master narratives (another topic Laura addresses): that is, not with form itself but the form when practiced badly. Master narratives are simply large versions of what all of us necessarily do whenever we generalize broadly about the meaning of the particular phenomena we’re treating. The real question in all such cases is: how persuasive is the fit between particular instances and overarching generalization? How open is the generalization to particular instances that would seem on the face of it to contradict it? How supple is the generalization in adjusting to the presence of particulars that clearly *do* challenge it? Some master narratives–I think Margaret Doody’s True Story is a good example–posit a vast thesis that never is subjected to this sort of questioning; “the novel” is simply asserted to have existed in classical antiquity and to be accessible to us over time as the history of the influence of (what conventional usage calls) “the Greek romance.” Both Dave–“pulling things together”–and Laura–the “accumulation of evidence”–speak of the virtues of a master narrative that throws its net very wide so as to be able to generalize about a very broad range of evidence; and this is what I’ve tried to do in Secret History. But the most important feature of a master narrative that does its job is its capacity to put particulars and generals in dialectical relation and ongoing reciprocity. My greatest ambition in Secret History was to construct an argument of great breadth but, at the most abstract level, also of relative simplicity, one whose broad plausibility might be confirmed by reference to the different kinds of evidence it mobilizes at several levels of particularity. The virtue of simplicity is not that it sums up everything with full adequacy to all it refers to, but that it provides a heuristic key by which to discover similarities between phenomena that at levels of increasing particularity are quite different from each other. This is what I hoped to do with formulaic lines of thought that run throughout the book, like distinction-separation-conflation, tacit-explicit, division-dialectical recapitulation, the devolution of absolutism, from domestication to domesticity. In the Introduction (xx) I approach this generalizing aim from another direction, one that specifies the variety of spheres of human experience that may be brought together under the generalization that “the division of one term into two … has played an important part in substantiating the notion that the modern relation of the public and the private has entailed a splitting of a former tacit whole into oppositional and self-sufficient parts.” The singular categories by which I then exemplify this generalization are estate, status, gender, honor, propriety, religion, subjecthood, knowledge, romance, and individual. In one of my comments the other day I used one of these categories–the splitting of “knowledge” into “external sense impressions” and “internal creative imagination”–as a kind of shorthand, a way of using the emergence of empirical epistemology and scientific method in particular to summarize the entire historical transformation that’s the subject of Secret History. But this is to make epistemology the favored means by which to summarize all other bodies of thought and practice, a risky and potentially biased move if made unconditionally since one might say that it’s precisely the epistemologization of knowledge–its disembedding from social practice–that defines the modern viewpoint. So again, the point is not to reduce each of these developments to the status of all others, but to offer a way of toggling back and forth between the sheer multiplicity of experience in a given historical context and the generalizations by which we may find order in diversity.

CRITICAL METHOD

One reason I’m hard put to compare my method with that of other literary historians like Gallagher and William Warner, as Dave has asked me to do, is that my aim in this book is to generalize about historical change by using literary history as only one example among several that profit from being understood in terms of the public-private relationship. That’s why I remark that the movement I describe from secret history to domestic novel is meant to offer not a genetic account of the origins of the latter form so much as a “peculiarly persuasive, because structurally eloquent, example of the historical trajectory … from relations of distinction to relations of separation” (xxi-xxiii). Of course the argument I make in this book grows out of a career of reading both literature and literary criticism focused on the 18th century. But to characterize my method I think I need to have recourse to readings in historiography and historical method, especially the distinction between interpretation and explanation–to simplify, the difference between understanding the past in its own terms and understanding it in terms not available to it. I think historical method needs to pursue both of these approaches. But it seems to me that the major tendency of theory and criticism in the past several decades (often enough with positive results) has been toward a presentist strategy by which the past has been made intelligible according to modern standards of understanding. Over the years I’ve been more troubled than informed by the results of this tendency, and so in many respects I’ve aimed here “to view the past not only as a prelude to our present but also as a response to its own past” (xxvii).

Gender, Civic Humanism, Method

Dave posed a question about my brief comment on gender and civic humanism, and this post is a follow-up. It was originally part of the response to Tita’s post, but has gotten off topic so I am following up here.

One problem that I see, in response to Dave’s question, with the over-emphasis on civic humanism has been not only the burial of Lockean theories of natural rights and the Prostestant/secularizing pre-history of modernity, as Michael McKeon points out in one of his comments (as part of the ongoing response to Tita Chico’s original post), but also more of a recognition of the extent to which 18th-century writers were engaging and confronting emerging capitalist relations as such, working through their implications in more complex ways than just embracing or rejecting. Thus various expressions of distress about the marketplace get categorized as civic humanist resistances to emergent economic practices at the expense of thinking of them as head-on confrontations with historical change and its implications. In the context of civic humanism, Addison and Steele become more interesting than Mandeville or the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. Now admittedly the former are more elegant stylists than the latter and the influence of the rhetoric of civic humanism should not be underestimated. But for those interested, I would point to an important book by E.J. Hundert called The Enlightenment’s Fable (Cambridge 1994), which places Mandeville at the center rather than at the periphery. Mandeville, Hundert argues, “introduced into the heart of European social understanding a series of arguments designed to sustain the radically unsettling conclusion that the moral identities of his contemporaries had been permanently altered by a previously unacknowledged historical transformation.” (14) Much Mandeville scholarship, I believe, demonstrates how important Mandeville became to a range of 18th-century thinkers, even (maybe especially) in unacknowledged ways.

Of course, this has to do with gender as well. In the dominance/persistence-of-civic- humanism model, representations of women come to have significance in two ways: (1) hysterical female figures embody fears of commercialization in implicit contrast to stable male figures attached to real property and (2) women serve as civilizing agents against the backdrop of commercialism’s brutality. Well, I read last weekend in The New York Times that hysteria is back. Even so, it is perhaps surprising in some ways that the classic feminist critique of hysteria has not been brought to bear on formulation (1). Certainly and without a doubt we find 18th-century female figures that really do read like hysterical versions of Fortuna. An overextension of this argument, however, runs the risk of obscuring women’s historical contribution to the emergent economy and their particular, vexed relationship to it and the way many 18th-century representations actually confront this. The same perhaps goes for (2), which is convincing in certain ways but also runs the risk of obscuring the way a certain level of material comfort is the precondition for becoming a “civilizing” influence. We might look at this in the context of Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations, which suggests the extent to which women bore the brunt of the brutality of commercialization in Britain. (Not to mention the brutality endured by “women of empire,” to borrow Felicity Nussbaum’s formulation in Torrid Zones.)

The other point I wanted to make responds in part to Carrie Hintz’s post about when modernity happens and Carrie Shanafelt’s post about method. Perhaps the most important contribution of Secret History, and probably the most potentially controversial one as well, is the big picture. Like others, I am looking forward to spending more time thinking about this book (maybe teaching parts of it), but for now I wanted to offer a few preliminary impressions of structure and method. It seems to me that it is made up of much synthesis and many local readings (Dave has mentioned a couple), any one of which could be engaged with, contested, etc. But then there is a kind of accumulation that suggests, for example, structural similarities between Marriage à la Mode and The Rape of the Lock (the juxtaposition of high and low as part of the process of domestication) that add up to a larger point about “modernity” characterized by disembedding, a point nevertheless consistently complicated by a sense of uneven development. Carrie H mentioned medievalist colleagues who will contest certain representations of traditional culture, and we might also find others who will challenge traditionalism itself as a characterization of the period. But you probably also have Victorianist colleagues who will characterize the 18th century as a traditional culture and argue for their own period as the one in which modernity happens. Then there is perhaps the radical alternative of Margaret Doody’s True Story of the Novel, which is not directly an argument about modernity but one piece associated with it, suggesting that there really isn’t much new in terms of narrative in the 18th century at all. On the one hand, I find these explosions of master narratives compelling, especially given that exceptions at any moment can be found. Master narratives can themselves become misleading, flattening, formulaic, and oppressive. On the other hand, what do we give up when we reject them?

Laura