|
...the future possibility of literary criticism is being decided." (1) Derrida had given much to this project when de Man wrote over twenty years ago. Not only has there been since then much more from Derrida that is still to be assimilated; those same early works read by de Man have themselves by no means settled into the inertia of received positions. Derrida's readings (of Rousseau, Hegel and many others) and ways of reading (which are themselves the emanations of a certain Romanticism according to which all philosophy must become literature) continue to exceed the interpretations that would contain them and will remain urgent and incomplete as long as there is some articulate opposition to those authorities purporting to administer the litmus-test for deciding what is poison and what is cure. Those who deny or ignore the debt will only add to the amount of interest coming due in a transaction that is still perhaps best imagined as the monstrosity projected in Of Grammatology--that "for which there is as yet no exergue," the as yet unthinkable shape signifying the end of logocentrism and of the logic of filiation that includes within it the patristic figure of capital itself, the parent sum. (2)
After the end of the Soviet empire in 1989 Derrida responded to the near-hysterical victory songs of many in the neoliberal West with another reminder of monstrosities still to come. Many reservations have now been lodged and circulated about Derrida's long-awaited encounter with Marx (adumbrated in Positions to be sure but still declared there as yet to happen). We should not forget Derrida's reinvention of a familiar wheel in subsuming use value into an always already established exchange value; his un-Marxian conflation of the specific formations of industrial capitalism at the turn of the 19th century with the general money form in place since classical Greece; his overexcited proof that Marx himself was fully prey to the specters he was claiming to exorcize, fully enthused with the methods of the same Ludwig Feuerbach he was proposing to critique. We know too that the spellbinding quality of Derrida's reading of Marx is distinctly enabled by his avoidance of any close engagement with a long and complex tradition of elaboration, comment and critique of Marx and Marxism. (3)
Nonetheless that reading remains spellbinding, and I find myself, like many others, haunted by Derrida's analysis of haunting and hauntology. This surely reflects an identification with his desire that the neoliberal hegemony might indeed have to reckon with the appearance of specters still to come. But it is not just that, because for a student of Romanticism these ghosts are vividly apparent in the texts recording the condition of England around 1800. They have not always been so visible; it is Derrida who has enabled us to see them taking shape as if for the first time in and through the mists of literary history. The haunted present that is contemporary life can then look to Romanticism as an exemplary form of its own preexistence. The ghosts and ghostly forms inhabiting, for instance, Wordsworth's poetry (which will be my topic here) bespeak a historical condition whose determinations we have not yet supplanted or displaced. This does not mean that nothing has changed, or that everything written around the year 1800 matters to the 21St century in the same way and to the same degree. It is rather the sign of a specific (and particularly powerful) formation whose limits we are not yet in a position to project. The light that is not yet to be glimpsed would only appear at the end of the historical tunnel of commodity form, which took on unprecedented importance for culture and consciousness around 1800 and has remained formative and dominant ever since. It would be consoling to suppose, recalling the Derrida of 1967, that the mere fact of articulating this haunted paradigm, of being able to make it thinkable at all, is itself the portent of its approaching closure and of a life beyond the parameters of commodification. We are now less confident of an imminent epistemological break and a corresponding shift in the order of the world. The most recent debate about the case for and against radical historical change, that around the notion of the postmodern, has not produced consensus.
I have been interested in fetishism and reification as central and critically contested obsessions in Romantic aesthetics for a long time, but I had always (before reading Derrida) missed seeing or understanding the ghosts, and thus missed an opportunity to reconsider the force of Marx's metaphors (and their literary analogues) as well as of his seemingly literal arguments about the achieved hegemony of commodity form. (4) Literature to be sure has been comfortable enough with ghosts. There were the ghosts of the Gothic novel, and of the English ballads and wild German poems that fed into and came out of it, along with those of the Shakespearean stage. But these ghosts were either offered as "real" ghosts, emanations of the supernatural, or they were demystified as projections of troubled or excited minds, perhaps of minds intoxicated with too much reading of the wrong sort. Either Enlightenment thought conjured ghosts away in order to bring us to our senses, or counter enlightenment reinstated them as fully and grotesquely real. Occasionally Gothic artifice leaves us hanging about which is which and how to tell the difference (this is what Todorov calls "the fantastic"); even more occasionally, as in the spectacular case of The Monk (I796), mystery and demystification tumble over one another from page to page in a hurly-burly so apparently indiscriminate and devoid of metaphysical or methodological charge that one might suspect the impersonal operations of the logic of commodification itself to be the governing energy behind the story, the force propelling one arresting moment into the next in a celebration of sheer contiguity, a narrative vindication of the general equivalent masquerading as a surprise which is always the same surprise. (5)
But the Gothic was what Wordsworth said he sought to exorcize from the national literary culture; its trappings were therefore not to be taken seriously (I must have thought) as ghosts worth being haunted by. The supernatural part of the job, if it had to be done, was to have been done by Coleridge. The famous division of labor set out in Biographia Literaria recalls Coleridge assigning himself that role and conversely nominating Wordsworth as the poet of real men and ordinary nature, the one who was to "give the charm of novelty to things of every day" and focus the mind on "the wonders of the world before us." He was to excite feelings "analogous to the supernatural" but not of them. (6) In the 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth himself claimed to be turning aside from "gross and violent stimulants," avoiding even "personifications or abstract ideas," in the worthy cause of showing that "the power of the human imagination is sufficient to produce such changes even in our physical nature as might almost appear miraculous." (7) This last admission is all too easily read as an encomium to the revivifying and creative powers of the mind, to the received idea of the imagination, and of course it is often exactly that. But it is then all too easy to miss the other side of the coin, the shadow of the substance, the "real" ghostliness of things that the imagination wants to attribute to itself, to its singular figurative operations, but which (in so far as it is a shared imagination) we might more correctly assign to a general condition. Wordsworth's interest in poetically staging figures who are between death and life, not dead but never fully alive, either animated things or deanimated persons, ghosts who are not fully of the present yet seem bereft of accessible pasts--haunting the present from the present itself--does not immediately lead us to the absent presence that is commodity form, but that is the direction I am now suggesting. It is Derrida who has insisted on Marx's deep...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from Studies in Romanticism
Aesthetics, theory, and the profession of literature: Derrida and Roma..., June 22, 2007
The rhetoric of survival and the possibility of romanticism.(Essay), June 22, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.
Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication
name or publication date.
About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company
analysis or best practices in managing your organization,
Goliath can help you meet your business needs.
Our extensive business information databases empower business
professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible,
authoritative information they need to support their business
goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting,
company research or defining management best practices -
Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.
|
(essay)%20%20&position=1)