Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity

Exit Capitalism Exit Capitalism explores a new path for cultural studies and re-examines key moments of British cultural and literary history. Simon During argues that the long and liberating journey towards democratic state capitalism has led to an unhappy dead end from which there is no imaginable exit. In this context, what do the humanities look like? What’s alive and what’s dead in the culture and its heritage? It becomes clear that the contemporary world order remains imperfect not just because it is unjust but because it cannot meet ethical standards produced in a past that still knew genuine hope. Simon During emphasizes the need to rethink the position of Christianity and religion in the past and, at a more concrete level, also analyzes how the decline of the socialist ideal and the emergence of endgame capitalism helped to produce both modern theory and cultural studies as academic fields. Simon During teaches in the English Department at Johns Hopkins Uni- versity, Baltimore MD. He is also a Professorial Fellow of the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books are Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2002) and Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction (2005). He is also the editor of the three editions of the Cultural Studies Reader. Exit Capitalism Literary culture, theory, and post-secular modernity Simon During First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon. OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Simon During All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data During, Simon, 1950– Exit capitalis m: literary c ulture, t heory and p ost -se cul ar mo de rn ity / Sim on D ur ing . p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Capitalism and literature. 2. Literature, Modern – History and criticism. 3. Capitalism – Social aspects – History. 4. Culture – Study and teaching. 5. Great Britain – Intellectual life – Twentieth century. I. Title. PN51.D87 2009 809'.933553 – dc22 2009005277 ISBN 0-203-87264-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-24654-7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-24655-5 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87264-9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-24654-5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-24655-2 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87264-2 (ebk) Contents Introduction vi Part I Modernizing the English literary field 1 1 Church, state, and modernization: literature as gentlemanly knowledge after 1688 3 2 Quackery, selfhood, and the emergence of the modern cultural marketplace 24 3 Interesting: the politics of the sympathetic imagination 39 Part II Towards endgame capitalism: literature, theory, culture 55 4 World literature, Stalinism, and the nation: Christina Stead as lost object. 57 5 Socialist ends: the emergence of academic theory in post-war Britain 95 6 Completing secularism: the mundane in the neo-liberal era 115 7 Refusing capitalism? Theory and cultural studies after 1968 131 Notes 162 Bibliography 173 Index 187 Introduction Spring 2008. Out there where history happens, neo-liberalism is coming to an end while around the world, in fits and starts, disbelief slips into panic. But not here, not yet – I’m lunching at the Sydney Museum of Modern Art’s rather up-market restaurant, having just visited this year’s Biennale exhibition. Under the punning rubric “Revolutions: Forms that Turn” it presents contemporary works alongside hallowed pieces from the European historic avant garde, all relating somehow or other to the concept “revolution.” It’s been a rewarding morning, an experience of contemporary taste- fulness and reflection. And now my carefully prepared beetroot salad blends subtly with an Otago pinot noir. The sea, about fifty feet away, is a lavish blue: on a sparkling morning it civilizes the city. Quite suddenly, looking up, I see the Biennale’s publicity sign. It is positioned exactly between the Opera House – that icon of Sydney’s Pacific glamor – and an elegant Mediterranean-style apartment building on the harbor’s far shore. It reads “Is this freedom?” Is this freedom? Whatever it is, it’s pretty damn good. And the sign only makes it better. The question it poses is so right because, as its apparent dumbness unfurls into an interesting complexity, it’s directed flatteringly precisely at me, that is, at us, at the relatively small group who will attend to and realize its irony, who will appreciate its subtle knotting of the connec- tions between (1) the institutionally sanctioned art that I have just been visiting, and which is, at least for the moment, preserved from economic fear, (2) the now merely historical will to political revolution which the exhibition, fashionably acknowledging capitalism’s crippling failures, treats with ironized nostalgia, and (3) the relative if somewhat fragile privilege which allows me to spend a morning at the gallery completed by an expensive lunch on a sunny morning among Sydney’s civic beauty. Here, as finance capital runs to the state for protection, I’m near the centre of contemporary Australia’s vortex of prosperous cosmopolitanism and democratic energy out of which the art show, down to its signage, delivers all its sensory and Introduction vii intellectual pleasures, especially to those whom the education system has cared for most. If that knotting and the reminder of revolutionary desire, muted as it is, also ignites a flicker of loathing for and within the experience itself; if it sparks a flash of hatred for capitalism’s capacity to spill forth so much misery alongside so much happiness, so much stupidity alongside so much intelli- gence, so much that is ugly alongside so much that is beautiful, so much cynicism alongside so much belief; if it sparks a flash of hatred for bourgeois radicalism’s complacency (mine included) as well as for the art world’s com- plicit cunning and mere suggestiveness – then, once more, all the better. Since about 1760 (when Edmund Burke wrote his treatise on the sublime and the beautiful) it has been recognized that aesthetic experiences are only intensified by smudges of darkness. I’d like to think that this book is written as a way out of – against – that generic experience. Written from within the somewhat protected citadel of the academic humanities, it seeks out exits from a social and cultural order I will call “democratic state capitalism.”1 By my lights, that order has become unsupportable at the same time as, and in part because, its crucial structures have become unassailable and its replacement unimaginable. Democratic state capitalism is now, as Marcel Gauchet has said of democracy, a horizon which cannot be passed (“l’horizon indépassable,” Gauchet 2007: 16). It is important to protect ourselves against an easy misunderstanding of what this proposition here entails: my claim is that we find ourselves not at the sanctioned “end of history” but at something like its opposite. Capitalism without hope, hopeless capitalism, endgame capitalism. Much of this book, placed in no-exit indirection, explores, from a literary- historical point of view, certain paths through which we have arrived at where we now are. But I hope that my readers don’t have difficulty seeing that a path out of endgame capitalism is nonetheless where I am pointed. Part I consists of three scholarly literary-historical essays which examine the mid-eighteenth-century moment in England when market-orientated culture gradually displaced the old oligarchic order dominated by the Anglican Church and the (still largely rural) landed classes. The first chapter describes a lost world of gentlemanly intellectual production and thinks about what our relation to this exotic, if sometimes strangely modern, domain of life and writing can now be. The second concentrates on market- orientated culture at a moment of fast and transformative expansion: it explores certain structures of feelings that were produced in the intimacy that bound the book trade to patent medicine vendors in the mid-eighteenth century. The third analyzes how the category “interesting” became a key term of praise around the same time. The tribute that we continue to pay to being interesting (in full display at the Sydney Biennale) has, I argue, helped displace the sympathetic imagination’s political usefulness. viii Introduction The book’s second part is more obviously contemporary in scope. Its first essay contends that the Australian-born novelist Christina Stead, a committed Stalinist, deployed her communism to write wonderful yet underappreciated fictions which present a profoundly disabused account of capitalist sub- jectivity, but that her political affiliation, along with her refusal of cultural nationalism and identity politics, has prevented her from becoming suffi- ciently canonized within the contemporary structures of world literature. Two of the next essays are more self-inspecting: they make a case that British cultural studies (a discipline or post-discipline to which this book still just belongs) is a product of the 1960s new left’s failure to renovate socialism, and that cultural studies’ relation to theory (and today to Alain Badiou’s post-Maoism in particular) needs to be assessed in that light.

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