Daniel O’Quinn
University of Guelph
 

James Gillray, Exit Libertè a la Francois!-or- Buonaparte closing the Farce of Egalitè, at St cloud near Paris Novr 10th 1799, 1799.
Digital reproduction courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum, London.

It is now evident that January 6, 2021 was a failed coup d’état, a coup advertised well advance and executed with the same casual, weaponized ineptitude that characterizes all Trumpian endeavours. This has a particular Romantic resonance because the famous coup of 18-19 Brumaire (November 9-10, 1799), in which Napoleon and his allies forcibly dissolved the Directory and installed a new consular government headed by First Consul Bonaparte, was not without its miscues. Unsurprisingly, the aesthetic categories most famously associated with a coup d’état—tragedy and farce, as Marx so powerfully proposed for this event and for Louis Napoleon’s seizure of power in 1851—have been invoked frequently to characterize the assault on the Capitol.  Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte makes for bracing reading in the wake of America’s coup in part because one feels elements of historical repetition and in part because what happened feels so unprecedented.  We are confronted with the paradox of unprecedented repetition—a form of retroaction that both evokes and negates precedent in order to generate a fantasy of autonomous antecedence—a future condition that saturates time itself.  This temporal sleight of hand is in plain sight, for the imperative “Make America Great Again” makes precisely such a claim on the future by collapsing all temporal categories into the now meaningless word “again.” 

Because theatre unfolds in the present and yet mediates between past repertoires and unknown futures, it partakes of the temporal uncertainty of the political. Burke famously derogated the French Revolution as a tragi-comedy, and it was precisely generic hybridity that contravened Burke’s dramatic theory of politics.  But Burke’s invocation of the normative force of tragedy was always already farcical because Georgian theatrical culture was radically expanding its strategies for eliciting affective response across a host of proliferating new genres.  James Gillray’s appraisal of Napoleon’s coup exhibits a less belated sense of generic expectation.  In Exit Libertè a la Francoise!—or—Buonaparte closing the Farce of Egalitè, at St. Cloud near Paris Novr 10 1799, Napoleon strides across the picture plane every bit the tragic hero having suffered the dagger wounds drawn against him in the Five Hundred, a fable shored up by Lucien Bonaparte’s suggestion that armed brigands operating at the behest of the English government were afoot (the relationship between misinformation and the coup d’etat seems very prescient).  Unlike Marx, who uses the notion of historical devolution from tragedy to farce to imagine a certain death drive within the capitalist state, Gillray sets tragedy and farce at cross purposes here in a dialectical image that invokes and undercuts both genres simultaneously. The print’s caption figures the French state as a farcical imitation of equality, but its pictorial rhetoric renders the autocrat as the tragic hero, albeit one whose claims to heroism are mocked by the hideous demeanour of his armed entourage.  As fake tragedy outmaneuvers shitty farce, liberty, that ostensible province of the British constitution, exits the scene altogether.  So, Napoleon’s stance is a parody of tragic heroism: “tragedy” purges the nation of one debased entity, but fills the vacuum with a more fearsome assemblage.

Like Marx and Burke, Gillray figures historical events in theatrical terms, but this print entered the mediascape at a moment of intense theatrical and social experimentation. Audiences and publics were repeatedly confronted with unprecedented affective and generic dispositions in the worlds of both entertainment and politics.  Volatility, something ostensibly singular, became a recurrent experience that was eventually incorporated and expected within both the theatrical and the political repertoire.  At this relatively early moment in the integration of spectacle into both theater and politics, genre’s firm hold on future expectations began to loosen.  New forms emerged that largely eschewed normative causality or probability to create a performative scenario in which anything could happen, making one hyper-aware that the present can take any number of predicates. This heightened sense of the uncertainty of historical predication—how the past makes itself felt in the present and takes on a specific future disposition—makes late-Georgian culture of its time and a harbinger of so much to come.

Characterizing the politically polarized mediascape of Romantic performance in this way allows one to discern all too familiar elements of our current social and cultural predicament.  Open predication is the hallmark of both reality television and on-line gaming: both media feint at generic control but their affective punctum relies on a hyper-simulation of lived uncertainty. Inculcating the feeling that anything can happen is in many ways the Trumpian brand.  Using distraction and obfuscation to disconnect the present from the verifiable past generates the fantasy that all futures are Trump’s future: all temporal differentiation is subsumed into the present of narcissistic identification.  For Trump’s supporters, that means all futures are theirs too, not as a collective, but as individual self-generating self-affirming versions of the self-same.  That this is the endgame of white supremacy and incel misogyny shouldn’t be surprising, but is this tragedy, as so many pundits have opined? Is this farce? 

How do you categorize a performance featuring players who don the skins of animals in costumes carefully designed to show proto-Nazi tattoos; who top the regalia of white supremacy with horned headdresses; who take “direction” from the rants of fascist clowns; who, like strangely confused Romans, fall on their swords by tasering themselves in the testicles; whose patriotism involves laboriously torturing one of the Capitol guards to death (thus proving Johnson’s famous adage); who freely advertise that a similar show can be staged again and again and again because their whiteness ensures that they remain alive?  This coup was staged not to usurp power but simply to guarantee that the show will go on: it was an overtly theatrical condensation of all the Trumpian themes because theatre as a medium is so fundamentally tied to the promise of repetition. The events of January 6^th took mash-ups already popular on conspiracy websites and demonstrated in realtime the existence of a mass audience ready to relish the repeated smashing of norms to the point of suborning murder.  A failed coup but a successful spectacle of one constituency’s claim to a solipsistic future fully detached from the constraints of probability or causality.  

Because this parody of a coup deployed a crowd of deluded acolytes rather than an organized junta, it achieved something unprecedented: it became quickly accepted as but one political possibility among many, as the “expression” of a faction, as an accepted “event” that provides a future of self-replication to the Trumpists even while it extinguished the futures of five people and imperilled or permanently altered the lives of myriad others. Those who invaded the Capitol activated a style of historical cosplay that made their present endless, the only possibility for a politics of disruptive narcissism.  In this temporal fantasy, every event is unprecedented and yet a repetition not of the history of white supremacy, but rather of the desired future that propels it.  In this way, fascism’s future comes to pass without being realized or constrained by any singular historical event. For those who instigated this generic rupture, the affective payoff of this plenitudinous “fake” future is already being monetized to pay down Trump’s legal fees, his looming debts, and support the ongoing obfuscation of what he and his minions have done. 

And yet within performative time the present remains a moment when we are other to ourselves, when alterity can be most profoundly recognized. Within the repertoire of American politics, this amplifies awareness of the history of racist and masculinist privilege and challenges any notion that the efficacy of such privilege is timeless. The awareness that these mutually reinforcing forces that have defined American life are ending fuels both the Trumpist delusion and the collective resistance that is opening itself to the radical possibility of liberty grounded in difference. But as Gillray’s print indicates, the now incorporated coup will inhere as a generic possibility that may yet pass into the hands of more ruthlessly effective (or merely opportunistic) players. In that fearsome scenario the stage direction will simply be “Exit Liberty, American style.”

Orrin N. C. Wang, University of Maryland, College Park

I still remember the moment in graduate school when I realized how necessary it was to read Wordsworth’s Prelude through gender and sexuality, since in a fundamental way the poem is about what it means to become a man. I would venture for many the force of that encounter today comes from considering a particular reiteration of that question, how much the Prelude is about what it means to be a White man. And consequently, what it means to be neither White nor a man. Being neither, or being perceived as neither—for many, that is not simply the place where the literary dwells, but the social, political, and existential too.

In my case the most immediate context for this predicament has been the surge in violent attacks against Asian Americans this past year. A number of commentators responding to those attacks have done a good job of making explicit the ties between race and sexuality that underlie aggression against members of the Asian community in this country, a junction the shootings in Atlanta recently crystallized. The inability of the Georgia police captain to make that connection—not believing the shootings constituted a hate crime but conveying instead the suspect’s understanding that his actions were an attempt to deal with his sexual addiction—provided critics with the chance to rebut that view by pointing out how there are many in American society who don’t have the luxury of separating the racism and misogyny invading their lives: young Asian American women whose bullying and harassment are always expressed in racist terms as well as Asian sex workers materially vulnerable to the demands of their customers, exploitation by their employers, and vagaries of their immigration status. The hyper-sexualization of Asian women in society, a predicament that for many makes all Asian women a caricatured fantasy of the sex-worker in the male imagination, is enabled by a racializing imperative underwriting the numerous aggressions, both micro and macro, that Asian American women endure.

There is another dimension to this dynamic that also helps explain the uptick in attacks this year, and how, young women aside, the preponderance of victims have been elderly Asians, both men and women. Other reasons have been widely discussed, such as the racist language of Trump and other Republicans, who by labeling Covid-19 the Wuhan Flu or the China virus attached it to the bodies of Asian Americans, tapping into a history of the “Yellow Peril,” of anti-immigrant paranoia that imagines Asians as indistinct members of an invasive, infectious, and belligerent force. With the psychic strain of over a year of the pandemic, it’s no surprise that anger toward Asian communities should rise and take the pathological form of physical and verbal attacks. And the targeting of elderly and young women would seem to confirm the very nature of this racist hostility as bullying and cowardly, choosing victims thought least able to defend themselves. A number of the recorded attacks are as abrupt as they are vicious and cruel, a push to the sidewalk or a punch in the face, the perpetrator walking quickly away out of the camera’s view.

These connections all seem right to me. I want simply to add another, one presaged by my initial reference to Wordsworth and known all too well in Asian American literature and critical thought: that within this country Asia and the Asian American are neither White nor male. However individual Asian Americans might identify themselves there is always a bar, materially and structurally overdetermined, that prevents entrance to the domain of masculine subjectivity. (Of course, Asian American covers the diverse experience of a number of people and ethnic groups, something activists knowingly deployed when they coined the term in the sixties and which we need to be reminded of given its current reification. But that fact and the barring from Western masculinity I’m describing both simply speak to Laclau and Mouffe’s point about how much identity is not about essence or shared experience but shared restriction; I and others are defined by what constrains us.) Asian American men are not men, which means they either are sexually neutered or racially inscribed by the “feminine” traits of passivity, submissiveness, docility, and meekness—the loss of agency that constitutes someone as an individual who can be victimized with impunity. And elderly and young female Asian Americans, as those beings who supposedly express those traits in a hyper-manner, become the representatives for a whole community of racialized subjects defined by a non-Whiteness that is definitively non-masculine.

We are witnessing a time of self-perpetuating logic, seeded by a politics of racialized scapegoating perfected by the past administration and its boosters on the right.  In such a toxic landscape, where punishing the scapegoat becomes an episodic, reflexive expression of the free-form anger of daily life, little wonder that the target is a race of people defined by their supposed lack of agency and resistance, and that its most exposed members are especially at risk as emblems of that racialized and sexualized vulnerability. Beyond whatever end such attacks seek to accomplish (stamping out the virus or giving the model minority their comeuppance), the attack itself is its own achievement, one to be repeated again and again. Lash out at someone different (neither White nor male) and lash out at someone who is there to be attacked (neither White nor male.) Hence the especially unnerving nature of assaults that in many cases seem so random and spontaneous. In a time when so many openly lobby for vindictiveness as a virtue, with Blake’s jealous Father of Men as their avatar, the everyday violence against Asian Americans becomes figuratively and literally the violence of the everyday, as spontaneous as it is omnipresent.

Of course, the attackers’ cruel delight also manifests a selfish fear, an attempt to erase the mirroring threat of a perceived lack, something missing without which a jealous Father could never exist. Recognizing the smallness of those carrying out these acts, however, offers little comfort to those suffering the pain of an attack or waiting for the next one to happen.

What then is to be done? Aside from supporting the practical demands activists and others are currently making, I would say we must recognize that, given the geo-political realities of this new century, anti-Chinese and thus anti-Asian American sentiment may spike at any moment and take on a life of its own. And that this will happen either in the way I’ve described or another way Asians and Asian Americans have been sexually imagined and punished: not as the docile lotus blossom but as the devious and seductive dragon lady, to use Renee Tajima-Peña’s terms. I would also second what others have said, that the key to resistance to racial and sexual violence lies in solidarity over tribalism. For myself that task involves the quiet, difficult, and defiant work of reflecting upon the place of neither, historically and structurally, as not a limitation or disadvantage, but as a strength and a resource. Not as a fetish or an oppression or an occasion to mourn. Not simply a place either, but the point of an intervention, from which the impetus of a politics might follow. Rephrasing Žižek: neither, yes, please.  

Suh-Reen Han, Seoul National University

My sister lives in LA, and our weekly Facetime chats across the Pacific have lately turned into outbursts of grievances about the prolonged pandemic crisis. My sister’s tirades against government incompetence and apathy have been escalating, and I have come to share her worry about raising two children amidst a growing environment of intolerance. Despite our common distress and outrage, however, I have to be honest in acknowledging that my pandemic experience comes with mixed feelings. On the day that the news of the first COVID-19 outbreak in South Korea appeared, I remember Director Bong Joon Ho and his cast having a celebratory lunch at the presidential residence after Parasite had won four Oscars. News of quick and innovative containment of the virus followed the initial chaos, and soon South Korea was globally hailed as the forerunner of successful disease control. The Korean Baseball Organization was one of the first professional baseball leagues to start its 2020 season last summer, and the games were aired daily on ESPN for those thirsting for live sports. Just recently, the K-pop group BTS topped the Billboard 100 chart with their first English single, which they released in the hope of “revitalizing” their global audiences “in this very difficult time.”

Koreans still stand in awe of the global attention they have garnered during these strange times. I say “global” not because America is the world, but because America is usually the last to open up to foreign cultures. This global recognition, however, has proven to be a double-edged sword since it drew attention to our racial difference and instigated old and new racial prejudices. Hate crimes and derogatory remarks made against Asians also became part of our news. We were suddenly a racial minority.

When did we become a minority? How did we become a minority? Of course, Korea is no exception to social divides and inequalities along gender, class, and political lines. Even if race may not be a particularly dominant part of our domestic discourse, encounters with other races and ethnicities, on both individual and national levels, do let us know of our place in racial politics. And we, too, use racial politics to our advantage or disadvantage. However, something feels different this time. Our reduction to a racial minority feels, not necessarily unjust, but perceptually jarring. The discrepancy between the racial discourse generated around us under global scrutiny and our experience of representing our own culture on the global stage is baffling. Most cultures do not set out to represent a race but rather a lived experience and a heritage, and the idea of racial representation does not sit well with the experience of life and culture. No person “represents” a race unless she or he is forced to by political ideology or systematic discrimination.

It may be time to rethink the minority question. The “minority” has been a politically valuable and often ethically imperative concept in a world where not all groups get equal political representation. And we certainly need it now more than ever. However, the minority cannot adequately remain a political category when it comes to cultural representation. To expand the minority question from the political to the cultural, I call forth Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature from their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minor literature is defined less by the minor status of its maker or language than by the more radical dynamic of its “becoming-minority” in relation to major literature. Major languages become deterritorialized when minor uses make them strange and intense: Deleuze and Guattari’s examples are Kafka’s Prague German, Beckett’s English and French, and Black authors’ American English. While individual concerns merely connect with other individual concerns in major literatures, the individual connects immediately with politics in minor literatures, producing “collective assemblages of enunciation.” The individual in minor literatures is not a subject speaking for oneself or a group, but a solitary being opening up to everything that occurs in history and thus meeting one’s limiting boundary in the form of politics.

Today’s world is virtually connected, all the more so because of the pandemic. The becoming-minority of cultures is not confined to regional politics or colonial relations anymore. Non-English content on the Internet now comes with auto-generated captions or subtitles provided by streaming services; if not, devoted fans are more than willing to translate content into multiple languages and share. Minor cultures even in foreign form have the platform to gain global recognition and deterritorialize major cultures. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the minor author’s deterritorialization of language through its intensive, creative, escapist use as “pop”—as in pop music or pop writing. Perhaps it is not surprising that the truly political becoming-minority is starting with pop culture today.

The globalization of becoming-minority could also have implications for literary studies. Last semester, my graduate seminar read the Seventh Book of Wordsworth’s Prelude alongside the London poems of Park Tae-Jin, a Korean poet and foreign correspondent who also wrote of metropolitan wonderment a century and a half after Wordsworth. Our comparison of the two poets ended with the recognition that Wordsworth’s ability to textualize and read the metropolis comes from his uniquely earthly vision—one that allows him to imagine a nature greater than any human empire and thus boldly reduce London into a scale model of the British Empire. Park also wanders about London’s streets but thoroughly embodies the urban experience through sensory imagery and movement, only to wonder about the power of the imagination that took the West to the moon in the twentieth century. Against Wordsworth’s imperial vision, Park’s refusal to see beyond what meets the eye makes him a minor author. Against Park’s bodily vision, however, the “Earth” that opens Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” becomes a particularly Western vision. In this global context, Wordsworth also becomes a minor author. For me, this year will be remembered as the year I started contemplating the becoming-minority of British Romanticism.

David L. Clark, McMaster University

We can think abstractly about the world only to the degree to which the world itself has already become abstract.
          —Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious

The deadly pandemic conditions demand a radical reconsideration of all forms of critical investigation—not only immunology, demography, epidemiology, and health studies, but also practices of knowledge that address the braided futures of racial justice, global capital, climate change, and the public good amid the predations of fast and slow violence. As I teach my classes through the aperture of a tiny camera, the future of the humanities also feels profoundly at stake. Yet as a researcher and educator, I often feel strangely immobilized; I am mostly groping in the dark, to recall something Freud says when he thinks about the death-drive, reminding us that making little or no headway may be the only way to do justice to certain intense and difficult questions, especially questions concerning la vie la mort.  Never have I more acutely felt the torsions rippling through Derrida’s injunction, “Take your time, but be quick about it because you do not know what awaits you.” Yet I am also learning something from this mood of expectant stasis, and to recognize what an unearned gift it is to be in a position to shelter a space for a form of thinking whose indolence, despondence, and désoeuvrement I recognize to be paradigmatically Romantic. To be sure, different communities are differently enduring conditions of extraordinary agony, loss, and uncertainty, but my hope is that this wounding precariousness doesn’t mean that colleagues react to the current conditions by reaching too quickly for certitude, thereby abandoning a Romantic predilection for not-knowing and non-knowledge that is inseparable from the open-ended labor of professing the humanities.

Arundhati Roy tells us that the COVID-19 moment is “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” Her claim is as much an invitation to consider the possibilities of the threshold as it is a summons to make the crossing. In that spirit, let us resist the temptation as thinkers dedicated to the exploratory energies of critique too hurriedly to traverse this verge, as if claiming to know in advance what lies or should lie on the other side. I say this while also fully acknowledging the importance of never losing sight of what must await us on the far shore. Certainly, let there be the abolition of the cruel racisms and structural inequalities that the pandemic exacerbates but whose miserable origins lie in the global system of slavery that was perfected during the time of Blake and Wollstonecraft and Equiano. But what a theoretically inflected humanities will look like once it has made this perilous passage—assuming that it makes it at all—is for me much less certain and may in fact be indifferent to certainty. In the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic—which remains a pressing concern, with well more than thirty million deaths to date—Paula A. Treichler’s How to Have Theory in an Epidemic (1999) was taken up as an exemplary defense of thinking critically about the experiences, representations, and understandings of HIV and AIDS. For Treichler the secreted deaths and ungrieved losses of the AIDS pandemic made sustained critique a mandatory part of learning to live with a virus for which there is still no vaccine and that has always disproportionately affected marginalized communities—not necessarily so for this latest pandemic, when we see a surge in a summary decisionism that denounces what is called “theory” to be useless and distracting, if not dangerous. How not to have theory in a pandemic is too often the order of the day. Ground zero for this denegating gesture is the reaction to Giorgio Agamben’s brief speculations about the Italian government’s “techno-medical-despotism” in response to the crisis. What interests me here is less the persuasiveness of Agamben’s claims and more the level of outrage that those claims have triggered, up to and including the denunciation of his entire biopolitical project. “Forget about Agamben,” Sergio Benvenuto proclaims. This immune or perhaps autoimmune gesture has spread virally through elements of the scholarly community, leading thinkers to disavow tout court the risky gesture of thinking aloud about the topical as an always already abstractable matter rather than as an ethical substratum beyond which no further contemplation is required or permissible: “It would be obscene and unethical to theorize about the epidemiological catastrophe that is unfolding under our very eyes,” Rosi Braidotti writes: “This is not a time for grandiose theorizing.” Professing cultural critique was once treated as “the weak link” in the war on terror; now it is characterized as the chink in the armor in the war against the virus. Whence comes this moralizing panic regarding the putative immodesty of theory, its embarrassing untimeliness and inertness? Of what contagion is this reaction a neuralgic symptom? Why do “practitioners,” or whoever is imagined to be the antithesis of “theorists,” assume that theory is theirs to know and claim with such confidence? And who but the more vulnerable members of the profession—graduate students, new or precariously employed scholars—most feel the force of this kind of authorized interdiction?

These questions all sound uncannily familiar because, since long before the pandemic, theory has been the subject of scolding disciplinary measures—always too foreign, somehow at once scarily communicable and maddeningly incommunicable, both catching and perversely out of touch. To a Romanticist, jettisoning theory in favour of the unassailability of practice feels like déjà lu all over again, as if the labor of slandering Shelley, and with him all that is deemed to be self-indulgent and profligate, or the compulsion to disavow the impractical and careless theoreticism of the French Revolution, is never complete. After Romanticism, it seems, there is no having done with theory, and there is no having done with the refined pleasures of having done either. Charging theory with the crime of abstraction and immorality has had a storied career, extending through the 1980s, when the name “Paul de Man” was weaponized as metonym for all that was wrong with a “deconstructionism” whose roots and collaborators, it was suspected, lay, respectively, in Romanticism and with Romanticists. When the previous President of the MLA went so far as to blame Trumpism on the pernicious influence of de Man, you start to understand that the origins of the animus towards critique lie too deep for tears. My point is that if the humanities are indeed passing through a portal, then among the many things to be changed in medias res is the anxiously reiterative sifting of theory from its more practical and productive and less obscene others. Adorno forcefully makes this very point in 1969, another historical flexion point, in a programmatic piece that is written in the tradition of Kant’s snappy essay, "On the common saying: That may be correct in theory but it is of no use in practice." The Prussian philosopher knew a thing or two about the perilous position of theory and critique under duress and amid the emergency measures for which wartime in particular calls or is said to call. Late in his career, Kant jokes that his “ineffectual ideas” about peaceableness will be easily dismissed as so much dreamy and unworkable nonsense. Writing in the mode of a perpetual peace project, he deliberately adopts the genre that was in his day most closely associated with the clueless irreality of philosophy, especially philosophy that gave itself to think untrammelled thoughts that are not sutured to things as they are and to what we know or will know. But Kant is winking at his readership: it was the “sorry comforters” preaching realpolitik who were in fact the dreamers, nourishing fantasies of a completely administered world, and legitimizing what Adorno calls “the repressive intolerance to thought that is not immediately accompanied by instructions for action.” 

My question after Kant is whether or in what way will theory survive the current war. Is it to be barred passage through the portal of the present, deemed an unwanted parasite on what is proclaimed to be “real,” “practical,” and thus irrefutably true? If theory is meant to survive, I would suggest, it will be in the mode of survivance, a living-on that is in the service of neither death nor life (including the demise or flourishing of a field, Romanticism, for example), i.e., suspended between worlds rather than compelled to perish in one world or thrive only as praxis in the next. More: it is not the impracticality of theory that is the true source of its inextinguishable trouble, but the deeper scandal of an ineffectuality—or “scarcity,” as I argue elsewhere—that is irreducible to either theory or practice, a thinking beside itself that remains otherwise illegible as long as we continue to allow the dyad of theory and practice to police our conversations. Alain Badiou argues that the pandemic demands “new figures of politics.” Those figures include gestures that are, like Kant’s reflective judgment, not in possession of their own concept and that refuse the imperative for thinking always and everywhere to be productive, actionable, unresigned, or salvific. These would be Romantic figures, in other words, and new in the sense of never getting old. For if Romanticism has taught me anything it is that we do not know what a body of theory can do.