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Nominalism, Romanticism, Negative Dialectics by Megan A. O'connor A Nominalism, Romanticism, Negative Dialectics By Megan A. O’Connor A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair Professor Kevis Goodman Professor Celeste Langan Professor Martin Jay Spring 2019 Nominalism, Romanticism, Negative Dialectics © 2019 by Megan A. O’Connor Abstract Nominalism, Romanticism, Negative Dialectics by Megan A. O’Connor Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Steven Goldsmith, Chair This dissertation recovers a neglected dialectical tradition within British empiricism and its Romantic afterlife. Beginning with John Locke, I demonstrate how a dialectical tradition developed as a self-critical response to the political, philosophical, and aesthetic problem of nominalism, which holds that universals do not exist and that everything is particular. As contemporaries like Dugald Stewart and S.T. Coleridge observed, British empiricists had revived the medieval nominalist-realist debates and sided with the nominalists. I show that nominalism – what Karl Marx called the “first form” of materialism – was taken up and critiqued by Romantic poets as an impediment to the task of representing abstract social and historical forces. Romantic poets as distinct as Coleridge, William Blake, and Charlotte Smith suggest that, in questioning the validity of social abstractions, the nominalist bent of empiricism tended to disable critical interrogations of larger social structures that otherwise remain inaccessible to the senses. In diagnosing the abstracting force of historical conditions like the commodification of the literary marketplace, however, the texts I examine also respond by affirming particularity. That is, even as these Romantic texts articulate the need to transcend particulars, they also resist universalizing tendencies by affirming, in Blake’s terms, “minute particularity.” These responses to the problem of nominalism are best understood, I argue, as a series of negative dialectics at odds both with the transcendent, affirmative dialectic of high Romanticism and with the subsequent Romantic particularisms and localisms that accompanied deconstruction and new historicism. Against the deeply engrained view that the Anglo-American tradition is anti-dialectical, the texts I study thus maintain a critical relation to social abstractions while at the same time including them in a more capacious materialism not reducible to matter. In making the case for a negative dialectics that emerges out of a self-critical relation to nominalism and empiricism, this dissertation pushes against the fundamental opposition between dialectics and empiricism asserted by both dialectical and postcritical discourses. In doing so, it presents a tradition in which empiricism and critique are inextricably entwined rather than strictly opposed. 1 Contents Acknowledgements ii Epigraphs iii Introduction: Nominalism, Romanticism, Negative Dialectics 1 I. Nominalism and dialectical thought II. What is nominalism? III. Salvaging nominalism: Adorno and negative dialectics IV. Marx: nominalism and materialism V. Why Romanticism? VI. The case of Blake VII. Chapters Chapter 1: “To call a constellation a complex star”: the contradictions of Locke’s Essay and the “two sides of enlightenment” 30 I. Introduction: The Essay “round & round” II. Nominalism, from Locke to Adorno III. The Case(s) Against Locke: Ideas and Things IV. Locke’s Linguistic Critics: Words and Things V. Locke’s Nominalisms VI. Constellations: Horne Tooke, Adorno, and Benjamin VII. Salvaging Nominalism: Adorno’s Negative Dialectics VIII. Conclusion: Social contradictions and “the words [of the] father” Chapter 2: To Read a Bull: Nominalism, Commodification, and Negative Dialectics 59 in the Biographia Literaria I. The politics of nominalism II. Nominalist relations and reading bulls III. The bull, commodification, and mass print IV. The bull’s antithesis V. From real abstraction to natural history Chapter 3: Charlotte Smith, transience, and ‘the idea of natural history’ 81 I. “All Things, that exist . are liable to Change” II. Postmodern nominalism and new materialisms after the end of nature III. Transience and the decay of the “everlasting” in the Elegiac Sonnets IV. Melancholy transience and the “idea of natural history” V. Transience and melancholy agency in Beachy Head Coda: Dialectics after critique; or, Latour, postcritique, and the fate of enlightenment 119 Bibliography 125 i Acknowledgments To Steven Goldsmith, whose patience, guidance, and model of thinking made this dissertation possible—“Enthusiastic Admiration is the first Principle of Knowledge & its last”; Kevis Goodman, whose comments and work are always more gift than is imaginable; Celeste Langan, for always asking the questions that Satan and his ‘Watch Fiends’ cannot find; Martin Jay for all of the insights on nominalism and whose work helped so much of this work begin. To English faculty for invaluable help at different stages: Eric Falci, Virgil and Atlas of English Graduate Studies; Mitch Breitweiser, for the best part of qualifying exams; Stephen Best and Hannah Ginsborg for their gracious help with exams. For intellectual and financial support, the UC Berkeley Department of English and Berkeley Connect. For their inspiration, friendship, and guidance, without which there was no way, two of my favorite poets and scholars, Samia Rahimtoola and Yosefa Raz. To colleagues whose intellectual companionship meant everything at crucial stages: Erin Greer, Ulf Olsson, Bruce Miller, and Andy Hines for the intellectual community of the Townsend Center for the Humanities Frankfurt School Working Group; Adrian Acu, c.f.s. creasy, Alex Dumont, and Christopher Miller for reading groups and so much more; Ryan Perry for indispensable feedback from a medievalist; Joe Albernaz, Adam Ahmed, and Tim Heimlich, collegial and exceptionally generous Romanticists; Tim and Allison Neal, for Berkeley walks and great friendship; and, in the end, sustenance from the best writing group: Maddie Lesser, Diana Wise, Johaina Crisostomo, and Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh. For their truly invaluable friendship: my two favorite wits, Sarah Mangin and Richard Lee, who kept me going through it all, from start to finish. To my parents, Ruth and Robert, and my sisters Emily and Beth, infinite gratitude for all of the love, support, and encouragement. And to Jason—home and adventure, love and delight. ii Dialectic is not a form of nominalism, but nor again is it a form of realism. For these twin theses of traditional philosophy – the notion that the concept enjoys substantial being in relation to individuals which it grasps and includes, and the alternative notion that the individual is substantially real while the concept is merely a flatus vocis, or simply ‘empty sound and smoke’ – these two conceptions must both be subjected to dialectical criticism. —Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics Warning: not to be misused. – The dialectic stems from the sophists; it was a mode of discussion whereby dogmatic assertions were shaken and, as the public prosecutors and comic writers put it, the lesser word made the stronger. It subsequently developed, as against philosophia perennis, into a perennial method of criticism, a refuge for all the thoughts of the oppressed, even those unthought by them. But as a means of proving oneself right it was also from the first an instrument of domination, a formal technique of apologetics unconcerned with content, serviceable to those who could pay: the principle of constantly and successfully turning the tables. Its truth or untruth, therefore, is not inherent in the method itself, but in its intention in the historical process… Dialectical thought includes not only the Marxian doctrine that the proletariat as the absolute object of history is capable of becoming its first social subject, and realizing the conscious self-determination of mankind, but also the joke that Gustave Doré attributes to a parliamentary representative of the ancient régime: that without Louis XVI there would never have been a revolution, so that he is to be thanked for the rights of man. Negative philosophy, dissolving everything, dissolves even the dissolvent. But the new form in which it claims to suspend and preserve both, dissolved and dissolvent, can never emerge in a pure state from an antagonistic society. As long as domination reproduces itself, the old quality reappears unrefined in the dissolving of the dissolvent: in a radical sense no leap is made at all. That would happen only with the liberating event. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia iii Introduction Nominalism, Romanticism, Negative Dialectics Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems —William Blake, Jerusalem A genuinely critical philosophy’s relation to nominalism is not invariant; it changes historically with the function of skepticism. —Adorno, Negative Dialectics This dissertation seeks to restore the neglected problem of nominalism – a philosophical tendency that elevates traditionally subordinated particulars and relegates universals and abstractions to the status of mere words or concepts – to the study of British Romanticism. The Romantic poets I examine critique nominalism, especially as it appears in British empiricism, for its inability to account for abstract social forces that escape sense experience. Dramatizing the
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