Weekly Readings #161 (03/03/25-03/09/25)

epistemic radicalism

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I posted “The Eternal Mind in Eternal Self-Conversation” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. My subject was the little understood and even less read Faust, Part II of Goethe. I don’t claim to understand it myself, and it’s not the most rewarding book to read even in the best translation, but it probably is the most significant work of western imaginative literature after the Renaissance and before modernism, even as it is also already modernist. I never quite said this in either episode—the advantage of my no-edits one-take podcast method is intensity; the disadvantage is that I am always haunted by the spirit of the stairway—but the connection between Goethe and Joyce, between Faust and Ulysses, is that both attempted to forestall nationalism before the genesis of the nation, thus the ethical importance of an “unreadable” polyglot text inassimilable to any nation-building project and inaccessible to a national-popular readership (and thus the symbolic importance in both texts of strenuously joining all the sundered tribes and epochs of the west—ancient, medieval, and modern; Gothic, Attic, and Hebraic—for which we still hail them and their authors, for all their “problematic” qualities, as humanist landmarks). The effects of this attempt would prove ironic in many painful senses—Goethe was simply made a mascot of several projects he would not have approved of, for one, and for another the reign of the cosmopolitan expert Goethe and Joyce inaugurate in place of the nation-state’s self-governing citizenry would have its own demerits.¹ All this came to mind after I recorded the second Faust episode when I saw Julianne Werlin’s link to and brilliant comment on a learned article surveying the early modern Faust literature on Substack Notes.

Goethe’s Faust is saved, on the good modern principle that all who strive can be saved, that life is for those who do something with it, for those, in short, who treat life as a work of art. This principle is fascist at one extreme, anarchist on the other, reconcilable, among the other modern ideologies, with liberalism, but probably not with conservatism or socialism except in each’s liberal adjustment. In a startling aside in Part II, a supernatural character remarks that immortality of the soul does exist but is reserved only for those who sought to cultivate and extend their souls on earth; those who didn’t will return to nature. Here is already the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, no longer the Christian equality of all souls before God, but God’s injunction that your soul has to earn its keep with a lifetime of motivated self- and world-transformation. It’s a short step from this in one direction to “arbeit macht frei,” and a short step in the other to “my pronouns are they/them,” if those are necessarily and not contingently two different directions, which is why people very certain and very polemical in their political commitments always strike us² as hopelessly, dangerously stupid, as lost in an ethical labyrinth they don’t know is a labyrinth, one turn of the corner away from the abyss. My aloof observation of the problem, or Goethe’s or Joyce’s, is also generally unhelpful, not to mention extremely annoying, except insofar as it may at times assist in pointing out the danger. One must live, after all. Everything one does will get called “fascist” by somebody. Sometimes I think “fascism” is not only our era’s synonym for sovereignty tout court but also its synonym for anything that exists at all, this world being so imperfect that existence itself can only be a sin and a scandal, a sort of permanent civilization-wide post-1945 state of survivor’s guilt. Please consider these remarks the oblique prelude to next week’s Invisible College episode on Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, that ultimate warning about the irony inherent in all public effort, that sublime parable about how the just create more injustice than the unjust themselves; the unjust merely want to satisfy their own petty and squalid appetites, but the just take it upon themselves to re-order the very cosmos. Thanks to all my paid subscribers!

My own version of the Faust story is my forthcoming novel, Major Arcana, which you can pre-order here before its release on April 22. One of its protagonists is even named—with the addition of one letter: “n,” probably for “negation”—after Faust’s legendary precursor Simon Magus. In my Faust book the Faustus figure just is an artist, a revolutionary reviser both of the self and of art proper, forced to confront the unanticipated consequences of such revolutionary art’s wide circulation, especially on the generations who grow up in its shadow. In future newsletters, I should have news about at least two appearances I will make in support of the book’s release, links to forthcoming interviews, and more. Thanks to all who have pre-ordered!

For today, I hope you’ll excuse me if I re-post something from my super secret Tumblr I meant to put here last week since it’s an invited commentary about a debate that took place over the last month or so right here on Substack. (I both hope and assume no one reads this Tumblr, so I shamelessly mine it for these weekly posts. For anyone who does read it and dislikes the repetition, what can I tell you? I only have so many hours in the day, the week, the year!) Added footnotes, of course. Please enjoy!

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Beauty Marx: Is There a Role for Marxism in Literary Studies?

Ghan Zen Mon, Karl Marx and His Family (undated)

Recently, an anonymous reader asked: “What do you think of the recent contretemps about freeing literary studies from Marxism?”

I replied: If you mean this and this, then the conversation is happening at too low a level, the level of recrudescent Cold War cliché. No offense to the author of the first linked piece, but is the following what’s supposed to be taught in college?

Jane Eyre taught me the value of trust and persistence in the name of love. Notes from Underground provided me with a window into the human condition. East of Eden presented me with the nature of good and evil.

No one, right or left, would know what to do with that in the classroom. New Criticism, supposedly the right-wing method par excellence, was devised to get away from that kind of thing, which the modernists, right and left, would have regarded as hopelessly Victorian. Now maybe it was a mistake to put literature into the university in the first place, since one does read novels for the perfectly un-academic purpose of “grow[ing] into a richer human being,” as the author rightly has it at the beginning of the paragraph.³ But as a form of study, it did and will require methods, and one of those methods will involve the investigation of literature’s relation to its social, political, and economic milieu.

As for the universality of literature our author champions, Marxists believe in it more than almost anyone else. Marx quoted Terence: “Nothing human can be alien to me.” Jameson said, “The human adventure is one.” The right, historically, denies universality, not the left. The right says, “The Christians are right and the pagans are wrong,” within its religious discourse, and the secular or secular-ish right has tended, from Herder to Heidegger, from social Darwinists to “race realists,” to root cultural expression in ethnos or biology. (This is unfair to Herder and even to Heidegger, but let it stand for a moment as part of a sweeping polemic.) Now the left and right did get their wires crossed with multiculturalism and postcolonialism and their unavoidably ethnonationalist or racialist emphases in the late 20th century, but that’s not Marx’s fault.

I will agree with an anti-Marxist stance in literary studies on two grounds, however.

First, the social and political contextualization of literature, while itself inevitable, need not issue in the kind of essentially Leninist attitudes our author points out, which are far, far too common in academic and literary life, especially given this ideology’s pragmatic impossibility of realization and the consequent nihilist violence it implies and inspires. Ironically, it appears this ultra-left academo-radicalism has been astroturfed by the centrist parties and their bureaucracies, kept around as a reserve army of rioters for their color revolution antics, literally communists in service to the old anti-communist forces and their agenda. Leftism no longer exists except as legitimation for the crumbling old anti-left order that won the Cold War. (It occurs to me that one requires a theory of social dialectics to comprehend this.)

Second, the basis of undergraduate literary education, to the extent that this still exists, should probably be formalist and structuralist in character before it is anything else: the reading of the best and most influential texts, in some reasonable order of generic development, with an emphasis on the forms of singular works and those forms’ interrelation across the whole field of literature. Social, psychological, etc. analysis can come after that or only very gently in tandem with it. We’re here to study the butterfly, not break it upon a wheel. This method harbors an implied politics, a Schillerian one, and such fact can even be noted in the course of study, but I am not persuaded that it needs to be debunked or that it has meaningfully been discredited. Why not a positive justification for literary study? Not “critical thinking” in destructive mode, but an elaboration of beauty for the purpose of creating a more beautiful world.

Marxism is part of the intellectual heritage, however, just as various forms of bygone theology and philosophy are, and it can be rendered productive just as they can. Dialectically enough, you need a Marxist analysis to understand what’s wrong with Marxism in the first place, as I discuss here. This is possible because Marx was a Promethean Romantic in part, and that aspect of the theory can be turned against its totalitarian tendency.⁴ Somebody more knowledgeable than me can root this division within Marx and Marxism back in the real class struggle of 18th- and 19th-century Germany, which, as far as I can tell from my usual exceedingly cursory read of history, was not about bourgeoisie vs. proletariat, but about bourgeoisie vs. state bureaucracy, with Marx functionally on the side of the bourgeoisie—no surprise since the Manifesto itself opens with a hymn to the bourgeoisie so rapturous Ayn Rand might have written it. (The subsequent history of Marxism, however, represents the state bureaucracy’s revenge, as well as Marx’s divided loyalty as an academic.) Hence all of Marx and Engels’s actual comments on literature just sound like 19th-century liberal common sense—and I mean that as a compliment. Here, for example, is Engels saying fiction should not be didactic, supposedly a position the CIA invented in the 20th century, or so the Leninist believes! You can even turn the Marxist analysis all the way around to celebrate the bourgeoisie as the true hero of history, and literature, qua novel modern historical formation, as its equally heroic justification, magnanimously extended, first in print and then online, to everyone.

1. While I have never successfully read a Sally Rooney novel to its conclusion—I found no coagulant in the prose to make eye adhere to page—I am fascinated to see that her feminist criticism of Ulysses on behalf of the realist novel now stands revealed as a mask for a conservative wish to live in a pre-Joycean polis whose incentives conduce not the acquisition of cosmopolitan “experience” but rather to the domestic safety of the national hearth. Please don’t interpret my observation as merely superior, however. Time plays strange tricks on us all. I myself had to betray Ulysses on behalf of all those prostrated beneath the expert boot in the 2020-2022 period. If we could have have—and therefore meaningfully want—all good things at once, then there would be no tragedies left to write.

2. Though I use it all the time myself, this week I borrow the royal we from Alice Gribbin’s advocacy for the nude in her recent Cluny essay “Do You Want to See?” A usefully challenging essay. In some of its arguments, I recognize my own thoughts coming back to me with a certain alienated majesty: for example, her defense of representational art as more honorable in its quest for answers than the evasions of the abstract, which echoes my slightly misunderstood polemic against “literature in translation,” which is not literally against literature in translation but rather against the Kafkaesque as an exhausted literary mode. Alice’s observation about the damage done by John Berger’s simplistic Marxist-feminist public pedagogy is good, too, and cf. Blake Smith’s observation about how this reductive “way of seeing” conduces not to emancipation but merely to cynicism, an abandonment of the arts since they are simply the ornaments of an ineluctable social brutality, as well as my own riposte to the likes of Eagleton and Moretti. More challenging than self-flattering, however, is Alice’s injunction to grade art on its answers rather than its ability to provoke questions. I remember it well, the day the hip just-out-of-college teaching assistant was allowed to lead a lesson in my high-school art class by the regular teacher, the matronly presence who sternly, wittily, indulgently inculcated into us the traditional crafts of drawing painting, and sculpting. (I can still hear her: “Remember to put your darkest darks next to your lightest lights!”) Apparently finding this old-fashioned curriculum a bit vapid, the T.A. introduced us to the avant-garde. She showed us Duchamp’s In Advance of the Broken Arm. First we tried to assign the image a realist, representational narrative content (“it’s a traumatic memory of the time his abusive father hit him with a shovel and broke his arm,” etc.), but she told us, not in so many words, that we were being naive. Then we rebelled and insisted in our suburban way it wasn’t art at all. “Ah,” she replied, “but it’s really got you thinking.” This was of course Duchamp’s intention, his relocation of art’s interest from the retina to the intellect, just what Alice objects to. I remain highly conditioned by this pedagogy myself, as you can tell by my language of labyrinths above. How to think our way out of the sublime of ambiguity almost co-extensive with the modern itself—with the realization of the complete impossibility of anyone’s knowing everything, or even, more importantly, enough of everything to be persuaded one knows anything? I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now, mainly because The Brutalist’s last line deserved a better movie to be the last line of: “It’s not the journey, it’s the destination.”

3. We are, it should be said, now correcting this mistake in a hurry. As implied, I am ambivalent about the result. Obviously, academic literary studies doomed itself and we need not weep for it. This isn’t because its leaders are “epistemic radicals”—anyone not an epistemic radical is lying, gullible, or possessed of a strong faith or gnosis; see Richard Rorty, who admitted that of course Nietzsche was right about everything before claiming we should still be liberals out of the goodness of our hearts; I would say that, however, because I attended grad school in a department divided between Marxist materialists and epistemic radicals of the left with nary a positivist liberal of the kind the writer at that link (via Gnocchic Apocryphon) praises in sight—but because they abandoned their custodianship of beautiful things in favor of dubious social engineering projects any thoughtful epistemic radical would have cautioned them against.

4. I single out Ashley Frawley, recently promoted to Compact senior editor, among today’s intellectuals for keeping this legacy alive. A recent podcast appearance gives a useful introduction to her thinking on the matter—to her objection, on both classical liberalism’s and classical Marxism’s behalf, that the demos, not the expert class, should be sovereign, a view largely no longer shared by liberals or Marxists, who tend to regard the people as hopelessly fascist and in need of management. The problem, however, is that the modern demos of the scaled-up state cannot rule directly; it always needs to rule through representatives, generally recruited from the ruling classes and/or forming a ruling class of their own along with the state bureaucracy. Moreover, the demos gathers the information requisite to make sovereign decisions through a mediating layer of culture controlled by still other authorities, a nexus of public and private ones from education to entertainment. Modern democracy was theorized more than few levels of social complexity ago. That’s why I’m not as quick to write off the more utopian tech visions as some humanists are, since these nothing-human-makes-it-out-of-the-near-future attitudes both threaten the worst and promise the best outcome from any democratic point of view. If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, it’s just managerialism über alles forever, which, for some reason, is what the literati seems to want, I guess because they identify with the managers, or think that’s the only job they can get. I attribute my growing Weekly-Reading writers’ block to this issue. As this platform is increasingly populated by the habitués of 2010s Twitter, and as we saw in the aforementioned 2020-2022 period exactly what this group would do when true totalitarianism came—not the fake every-Republican-President-is-Hitler-until-the-next-Republican-President-and-then-he’s-a-wise-hero-and-statesman variety, but actual militant hostility to the very idea of the non-administered human individual as anything other than verminous disease vector undeserving of more than a few feet’s worth of liberty, exactly what Arendt, misunderstood on this point, warned us about—I am, well, a bit wary and nervous in their presence, even though I am also tasked with trying to sell them a book and should not make trouble, should let bygones be bygones, should probably just try to forget any of that every happened the way everyone else apparently has. And part of letting bygones be bygones, back to my tech-utopian point, is imaginatively engaging with the best version of that worst ideology of total techno-control. So when some “groyper-adjacent” wag recently tried to provoke me on Tumblr with “thoughts on repealing the 19th,” I replied thusly:

Invariably whenever right-wingers on social media starting debating whether they should repeal the 19th it hits them somewhere in the middle of the conversation: “Why are we talking about voting at all?” And really, within a traditional conservative gender paradigm, voting appears to be stereotypically feminine behavior; essentially passive, it seeks comity and consensus, based more on social intuition, the waveform of the opinion poll, than information. “Why did men ever vote?” is the question. The masculine approach to seeking a leader should surely involve some brute, individualizing test of reality rather than opinion, such as trial by combat. But sometimes these elements synthesize, the vote a referendum on some more or less sublimated moment of combat, e.g., a debate—or, for a more graphic example, when Trump’s survival of the assassination attempt foreordained his election, as if it would somehow have been obscene not to elect him after that, with a shift in female voters his way despite his female opponent. Even in undemocratic systems, we often or always observe a moment of referendum, as popular cinema has recently instructed of the papal conclave, or as in the absolute monarch’s canvass of his privy council. And, in counterpoint, even in democratic systems, a moment of sovereign decision stands outside consensus. Every regime is mixed. The quest for a female president has been a quest to see a woman wield not the plebiscitary power, old hat, but to see her wield sovereign power. Ironically, woman held plenty of sovereign power before the democratic age; an even older hat was the diadem. Democracy, as Burke long ago complained, had its bloody breech birth, the revolutionaries leaping feet first into progressive history from the womb of time, in the murder of the queen; communism is even worse, the princess slaughtered in the cellar (yes, Anastasia). A confusion, then, of my initial categories: democracy, male, a band of brothers; monarchy, female, our great mother. Democracy represents the brothers overthrowing mother and father; feminism is their sisters’ demand to be granted an equal share in the power seized. Virginia Woolf said financial independence and the power to wield representational authority were both more important for women than the vote. Political power follows both economic and cultural power; these latter are the true sovereignties. This is how the franchise, originally the rock-paper-scissors of the fraternal horde in a primitive information environment, became archetypally feminine in the media age, the body politic passive beneath the thrusts of media and culture. The double question is what the future holds for this exchange of masculine and feminine partners in the dance of referendum and sovereignty. The monarch telepathically connected to the populace through its collective self-representation in the data stream? Perhaps. And perhaps the monarch will not even be human, will be the emergent intelligence of organized information, and therefore the synthesis of sovereignty and referendum as it is the transcendence of male and female. The 19th Amendment, and the First Commandment, will be therefore fulfilled in such extremity as to nullify themselves in the satisfaction that they have performed their historical roles.