Year: 2017

Frédéric Neyrat, author of Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism, will be speaking at Clemson on Wednesday evening at 5 PM in the Class of 41 Studio in Daniel Hall. Atopias has just been published in English by Fordham university Press in Lit Z, a series co-edited by Clemson English colleague Brian McGrath, and translated into English by Clemson English colleagues Walt Hunter and Lindsay Turner.  I’ve read only the first chapter, titled “Critique of Pure madness,’ but found it a dizzying poetical tour of critical and cultural theory from the late 60s, at least, to the present. The language triggered all sorts of associations to other theoretical and philosophical texts and authors including Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Jean Paul Sartre and many others.

Neyrat’s objective, if that’s the right word, is to argue against Object-Oriented Ontology which, he contends, unnecessarily flattens the world. This so-called “speculative realism” tries to imagine life from the perspective of the object rather than from the subject, the (human) subject, that is.  Neyrat quotes a description of OOO: “nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally – plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and Sandstone” (6).  Against this flattening, Neyrat turns to an idea of ek-sistence, which can be found in Heidegger, but also appears in Lacan, and argues “each existence obliged to be eccentric in order to be” (8).  It is not that we must stand out (ek-sist) in order to exist; we simply do, and we need an ontology which sees that.  To get there, we need “a positive and creative trans-valuation of values.’  We need, that is, to value valuing.

Neyrat asks “how has ontology gotten to this point? . . . How has eminence … come to mean the grim machine that destroys differences? ” (6). And it seems to me that Neyrat’s answer is that we have forgotten that “hybridization and identity are in no way incompatible” (5). Hybridity had been a popular way of thinking about relationships between others – and Derrida used to say that we are all others. Hybridity can be seen in Homi Bhabha’s important work from the 1990s, and across much of Jacques Derrida’s later work. But hybridity fell out of fashion for reasons I’m not sure I fully understand. Apparently, “conservatives” do not want to see the Other in themselves and would thus now be opposed to hybridity, whereas progressives want to preserve cultural differences and thus would not want to see themselves in the Other. The idea that one’s culture is a hydrid, and that other’s cultures are also hybrids seems at least temporarily to have been ruled out.

The fact that Neyrat is reviving and indeed–as early as page 5–insisting on hybridity and identity makes this work an important intervention in current discussions.

Sotto voce, or just below the surface of Atopias, Neyrat is engaged in a complicated discussion with Bruno Latour, distancing himself on the one hand from Latour while on the other retaining from Latour an idea of hybridity. For Latour, in we have never been modern (translated into English in 1993), the modern constitution accepts hybridity, although Latour then distinguishes between anti moderns who reject modernity and hybridity but use the tools of modernity to do so and postmoderns who don’t realize the degree to which they are accepting hybridity and thus are simply moderns. Finally, Latour posits a-moderns, who both accept hybridity and accept that they accept it. For Latour the amoderns are the only ones who might have been modern to the extent that any of us can be modern for any length of time.

This is one of the many reasons why the “a” in the title Atopias is so striking. An a-Topia is not a place and in that way refers to one of the two punning contradictory meanings of utopia – no place. Neyrat’s A is like Latour’s A. And different than More’s u-topia, whose other meaning is “this place.”

Soon, Neyrat will be at this place and he will be discussing this and other… topics, at Clemson tomorrow at 5 PM. As you can tell, I am looking forward to the discussion.

In 1517, it is said, Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the door of a Church, signaling the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Oh, sure, there’s some debate about whether he did actually nail anything to that door; and, oh sure, it overstates the case if that story  creates the impression that there was something magical about the nails, around which history then somehow pivoted. A lot has been written about that. Here, I am interested in a different question: why did this attempt at Reformation succeed when so many before had failed?  (A related question–why is this called the Reformation, but the emergences of, say, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches are called schisms?–is a matter for a different post.)  One traditional answer focuses on print; I want to address a related angle–reading.

Long before Luther or Calvin, indeed for centuries before what has come to be known as the Protestant Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church (whose name, local–Rome–and universal–Catholic, attests to earlier splits within Christianity) had successfully faced down threats to its unity in Western Europe.  The Cathars, from a region of France centered on the town of Albi,

wanted to “purify” the Church.  Their name descends from the Greek work for “purification,” a word likely known best in “catharsis.”  They were dualists, something long rejected by the Church (as early as Augustine’s reaction to the Manichaeans),  and vegetarians, and believed there should be only one sacrament (as opposed to the Catholic Church’s seven), and they denied the existence of Purgatory (from which, 800 years later, the Church would also distance itself).  The Cathars were defeated with a Crusade and the original Inquisition in the early thirteenth century.  To mark its victory, the RC Church built an unusual, fortress-like red-brick Cathedral.

The interior is filled with painted imagery.

In fourteenth-century England, of course, Wycliffe, who, like Luther, opposed transubstantiation, led the translation of the Bible into English. In the early fifteenth century, Bohemian Jan Hus was executed in Constance after opposing the Roman Catholic Church on theology and, like Luther, on practices such as indulgences.

But none of those earlier reformers had the same splintering impact on the Roman Catholic Church, then the Church of western Europe. It would be a century before Luther and Calvin would have their much greater successes against the Church. There are many reasons why Calvin and Luther succeed where so many others had not. Particularly important, though, is the reformers’ increasing focus on literacy. The Cathars, for example, may have wished to purify the church of iconography, but painting and sculpture were never the Roman Catholic Church’s weakness.  (See, for example, the Sistine Chapel.)

With literacy in Latin highly restricted, and the Bible’s availability in the local languages equally restricted, it was on questions of literacy, though, where the Church was particularly vulnerable. Wycliffe and Luther of course focused on these dual issues, working to translate the Bible while also casting the Church’s position on translation as part of a larger pattern of exclusion.

Groups such as the Cathars, Wycliffe’s Lollards, Hus’s Moravians, etc., had prepared the way for Reformation, it is true, but the focus on literacy in Luther and Calvin not only distinguished them; it is also coincided with the continent-wide spread of the printing press. It was one thing to see in advance the press’s possibilities for getting the Bible to the laity, as Wycliffe did. Later generations, though, were relying on increasingly familiarity with print. Relatedly, these later generations of Reformers were also drawing on what print had made possible for texts written in the vernacular. By the time Luther and Calvin come along, western Europe has established vernacular literary traditions, providing cultural and linguistic resources on which their project of translation could draw. Nonetheless, the poets’ success at printing literature in their native languages would still not have been sufficient for the effects Luther and Calvin had in European history. Part of their success has to do with their attention to literacy itself, i.e., to how to read, a question made all the more pertinent by the translation of the Bible and by the democratization of reading, both of which follow from print.

In short, Luther and Calvin were modernizers of literacy, paying attention to literacy in the condition of print.  If printing modernizes writing, the Protestant reformation modernizes reading. This, it seems to me, is why the Reformation of the sixteenth century succeeded where so many earlier attempts had failed to break the power of the Vatican over the religious life of Western Europe. The Cathars would not be able to defeat the Church on the question of painting and images—one of the Church’s strongest suits. Where the Church was weak was on the question of literacy. Wycliffe arose too early for printing. Luther and Calvin–not far from the region of the Rhine where Gutenberg worked–were not.

For Anthony Giddens, the premodern tends to the oral, and the modern toward the written, or, by the sixteenth century, toward print. In the sixteenth-century, Luther and Calvin brought modernizing skepticism to the analysis of literacy, to different results. Luther, for example, is part of a larger movement attempting to reverse the influence of Aristotle, a movement that affects natural philosophy or early science as well (as can be seen from Copernicus to Francis Bacon). In “An Appeal to the Ruling Class,” Luther regrets that in the universities “little is taught of the holy Scripture or the Christian faith; the blind pagan teacher, Aristotle, is of more consequence than Christ” [[470]]. It is Aristotle’s affect on how the Roman Catholic Church reads Christ’s words from the Last Supper on which Luther focuses in his crucial discussion of literacy, in “The Pagan Servitude of the Church.”  Through Aristotle, Luther claims, the Roman Catholic Church treated “this is my body” as if Jesus had said “This becomes my body.”  For Luther, “is” (rather than becoming or representing) is what “is” means, so there is no need for transubstantiation, which would require, among other things, becoming.  To Luther, the human body did not have to transubstantiated in order to be the corporeal habitation of the divine.  As a corollary, then, divinity is everywhere for Luther–once one reads both the Bible and the world in that way.

Bruce Gordon, Professor at the Yale Divinity School, will be speaking about “The Bible, Authority and the Struggle for History in the Reformation,” at Clemson on November 9th.  The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 7 p.m. in Holtzendorff Hall, room 100.

A video of University of Wisconsin History Professor Stephen Kantrowitz’s lecture on Ben Tillman can be found here.

On Friday, October 20th, Clemson will host a symposium on Plantation Modernity, the topic of a recent special issue of a journal, _Global South_ (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/391). Clemson English colleague Jonathan Beecher Field seems to know nearly everyone who contributed to the volume. (NB: it’s been my experience that he will deny this. Hint: Don’t believe him!)

Readers might wonder what the phrase “Plantation Modernity” means. Without claiming I know all that it might entail I want to consider it here as an intervention in the familiar associations that surround plantations. Often, if not usually, the southern plantation is seen as a relic, something from the past, something antiquated, and, of course, something superseded. This is true even when the plantation is considered in its historical context. In this reading, the plantation is feudal–the lords, ladies, and slaves of the antebellum period mimic a mode of production and political relation then centuries outdated in Europe, or the US north, when at its peak in the US south. We are likely familiar with all the images that flow from this image of the plantation as feudal, e.g., the preservation, for some, of the medieval chivalric codes regarding, for example, the related topics of gender and honor.

However, for a few decades historians have reimagined this image of the plantation as an anachronistic throw-back to the middle ages pulling the modern era backwards. I am thinking of Eric Williams, historian, and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, whose 1970 book, _From Columbus to Castro_, features a chapter on “Capitalism and Slavery” which speaks to the book’s argument about the Caribbean and modernity. More recently, academics such as Sven Beckert (who spoke at Clemson a couple of years ago) and Edward E. Baptist have resituated plantation slavery as part of the making of American capitalism (as the subtitle of Baptist’s book _The Half has Never Been Told_ puts it). In this reading, the productive plantation has always been a feature of the modern economy, and contributing raw materials need not make the producer of those materials pre-modern. Indeed, it could make the plantation a defining feature of modernity. In that case, then, the off-plantation processors of the raw materials would by extension be implicated in the modernity of the plantation system.

Or, in other words, the question is how to think about a linked global system, when we are accustomed to think of uneven development and differences in production, temporality, and culture (understood broadly, e.g., as habitus). My own sense is that there _is_ a difference between the mode of production in locales that received the plantation’s raw materials and those that produced them, even if both raw materials producer and raw materials processor might be part of the same modern system. Moreover, even if we were to accept that the plantation is part of modernity, a productive cog in a processing machine, we are still left with the question of where the plantation ideal comes from. I have my own ideas about that, but I suspect that the participants in Plantation Modernity: A Global South Symposium will be discussing all this, and more, on Friday (October 20).

https://www.facebook.com/events/154705948463660/?acontext=%7B%22ref%22%3A%223%22%2C%22ref_newsfeed_story_type%22%3A%22regular%22%2C%22feed_story_type%22%3A%22117%22%2C%22action_history%22%3A%22null%22%7D

I hope to see you there.

In today’s divided political climate, it is easy to forget that South Carolina was committed to religious tolerance from its very origins.  South Carolina began in 1670 as part of a land grant Charles the Second presumptuously made to a group of English men called the Lords Proprietors.  At the time, Carolina spread from the Albermarle Sound to the north through to the Savannah River on the south, and westward as far as the English, back then, could imagine the continental landmass extended.  Carolina takes its name from the Latin for Charles, after Charles the Second, and was later split into its north and south states.  The first head of the Lords Proprietors was Anthony Ashley Cooper, also the first Earl of Shaftesbury.  It is from this Earl that the two rivers beside Charleston, then Charles Town, take their names—the Ashley and the Cooper.  At the time, a young John Locke was basically apprenticed to the Earl, working as something like the Earl’s and the Lords’ secretary.  Later, John would become famous for The Second Treatise of Government (1689), but in 1669, young John helped draft The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, the document that would govern the colony through its early years.  In it, Carolina welcomes those who in “any seven or more persons, agreeing in any religion, shall constitute a Church or profession” (§97).  In other words, Carolina is committed from its beginning to welcoming people from elsewhere of whatever religious background.  Any group of seven would be enough to form a religious profession—“in any religion.”  Yes, there are lots of other retrograde and implicitly awful features of the same document, including racialized chattel slavery, and a feudal arrangement then becoming outdated in England.  Some of these features are true of the other thirteen colonies, too, all of which had chattel, racialized slavery, of course.  But Carolina was an early adopter of religious toleration, more than a decade ahead of Penn’s Woods, Pennsylvania.  And The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina were broadly applicable, even to slaves, for whom “it shall be lawful . . . to enter themselves, and be of what Church or profession any of them shall think best” (§107).  In seventeenth-century Carolina, that is, even slaves were entitled to whatever religious profession any of them shall think best.  And this entitlement was also protected in The Fundamental Constitutions.  Paragraph 106 specified that “no man shall use any reproachful, reviling, or abusive language, against the religion of any Church or profession.”  In other words, seventeenth-century Carolina created a legal space for religious difference, and no man was legally allowed to be pejorative toward another man’s religion.  “Hatred of the professors and that profession” was specifically outlawed in The Fundamental Constitutions.

350 years ago, this state, this colony, was established, to, among other things, welcome arrivals from other places, and to protect what was constructed as their right to believe whatever their religious profession asked of them, and no one was allowed to say anything reproachful, reviling, or abusive about it.  That’s more than a century before the US Constitution’s first amendment said that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” but I’m sure you can hear in the US Constitution the long earlier Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. This openness to religious difference, and to the various peoples from elsewhere who bring those religions with them, has long been part of what makes America great.  And South Carolina has long played an important part in that pluralist history.