Tradition and the Black Atlantic Read online

  I want to emphasize the terms of argument here, which sound foundationalist but really aren’t. Because rather than taking, as you might expect, recourse to a Kantian or Humean sort of universalizing or naturalizing morality, Burke at least provisionally accepted the validity of Hastings’s construct. His counter-claim was that Hastings’s assertion was empirically false: Burke said that he was acquainted with the mores of the region and that Hastings’s behavior was in contravention of them. And note Burke’s claim was not that Asia’s morality was identical to England’s; he said it was equal to England’s, which is a claim of the same status as he might make about the respective civilizations.

  This relativizing strain in Burke is, of course, precisely what won him round condemnation from the likes of James Mill, who claimed that Burke’s morality boiled down to the proposal that whatever is, is right: “Every thing was to be protected; not, because it was good, but, because it existed.”28 And again, I don’t want to play partisan history, but it’s interesting to contrast Burke and Mill, author of The History of British India, who ridiculed the place as rude and barbarous and scoffed at its pretensions to antiquity. So Hastings and Burke—both of whom were profoundly learned in the actualities of Indian cultures—had more in common with each other than either did with Mill, the reformer and rationalizer. (And we also can contrast Burke’s reverence for India’s diverse traditions to Macaulay’s famous remark that not even an Orientalist “could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India or Arabia.”)29

  You can get a feeling, if you spend too much time with the impeachment proceedings, that Hastings became Burke’s detested brother discursively speaking, perhaps a smug Jacob to Burke’s glowering Esau. You start to realize that precisely the same principles that motivated Burke’s reverential anti-imperialism sponsored Hastings’s villainy in equal measure. And it’s hardly news that this relativist ethic, or rhetoric, which is ours, too, can raise problems that the anti-colonialist or “minority ” intellectual has to come to terms with. The politics of oppositionality create a situation in which the claim for cultural authenticity, however it’s framed, is always somehow legitimating, which is the whole subterranean moral argument behind the rhetoric deploring “cultural imperialism.” (Baldwin mused, almost as an aside in his essay on the 1956 conference, that “it was not, now, the European necessity to go rummaging in the past, and through all the countries of the world, bitterly staking out claims to its cultural possessions.”)30 You can construct a moral fable where the figure of Warren Hastings takes on a life of its own. But more of that in the next chapter.

  For what really attests to this strain in Burke is just this: Why did he need to spend eighteen years studying India? Why did he immerse himself in its “otherness” so obsessively? It makes no sense if you take Burke at his word that he was simply prosecuting one man and his associates for their legal transgressions, however heinous. It makes more sense if you take a closer look at Burke’s own profound marginality.

  “We submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us.” This might very well be an apothegm for our post-Freudian age, no doubt, but the words are Burke’s.31

  I don’t want to dissolve the paradox that Burke the reactionary anti-Jacobin was also an eloquent champion of the oppressed—the wretched of the earth—the man who developed a compelling conception of the violence of cultural imperialism almost two centuries before it would be activated by modern ideologists of national liberation. That he was both a despiser and a supporter of the nobility, both a critic of capitalism and a proponent of the free market. That both his radicalism and his conservatism fed into each other, were operated by a shared logic.

  Burke was, of course, an Irishman in England, born to a Catholic mother in an Anglican regime. Let’s go further. He was also plagued with “hidden personal problems he would rather forget.”32 Burke would have retired from public life if he had not been tormented by “obscure vexations and contexts in the most private life,” as he wrote to his childhood friend, Dick Shackleton. 33 Burke was a man dogged throughout his public career by rumors of homosexuality; cartoonists, combining religious and sexual stigmas, frequently depicted him as an effeminate Jesuit. And yet in 1870 (as Isaac Kramnick tells us), Burke stood up in the House of Commons to “protest the treatment of two homosexuals, Theodosius Reed and William Smith, who were sentenced, as part of their punishment for sodomy, to stand in the pillory for one hour. Smith died a victim of mob brutality.” Horrified, Burke “spoke eloquently in the House against this barbarity and secured a pension for Smith’s widow.”34

  He took a stand, and he would suffer for it. The Morning Post of April 13 wrote: “Every man applauds the spirit of the spectators, and every woman thinks their conduct right. It remained only for the patriotic Mr. Burke to insinuate that the crime these men committed should not be held in the highest detestation.” Burke, the editorialist suggested, was neither man nor woman. Rather, as later periodicals such as Public Advertiser would suggest, he was one of them, viz., a “sodomist,” or at least a sympathizer.

  Now I’m taking the trouble to historicize this moment of gender and sexual identity in part because I want to say more about it in the next chapter and the way it comes to function in the symbolic economy of imperialism. Burke’s reading of colonialism was highly sexualized (he figured Hastings as “this impetuous lover”).35 Many scholars have talked about this, and it’s always good to remember the uncanny way in which issues of sexuality often enter in colonialist debates. More than that, though, I want to complicate—or maybe forestall—a reading where, for instance, here’s a third world theory, but it’s really just Burke reconstructing and theorizing the alterity of the periphery from the imperial center, and you have this positional dichotomy already set in place. I want to insist on Burke’s own marginality to the social order in which he was positioned; I want to insist on the otherness within Burke himself.

  Now let’s return to Burke’s anti-foundationalism, which we can consider in isolation from his cultural obsessions. More abstractly, Burke wrote: “Metaphysical or physical speculations neither are, or ought to be, the Grounds of our Duties; because we can arrive at no certainty in them. They have a weight when they concur with our own natural feelings; very little when against them.”36 Although these are words that Stanley Fish or Richard Rorty would be perfectly happy to avow, they are obviously a refusal of the Enlightenment dream of foundations. Now Burke talked about foundations, or grounds, a great deal; he talked about human nature. But what you find is that the only foundations available to him were the aleatory sedimentations of history. All relations are contingent rather than necessary, and it’s exactly this sense of the instability of our human identities that sponsored Burke’s reactionary tendencies. Human nature, for Burke, is just another name for the human history, the natural history, of an individual.37 And it accounts for his concern with custom and habit because custom—culture, as a historical formation—was all there was.

  When our history is destroyed or expropriated, then we are, and I quote the mordant observation, “individuals without anchor, without horizon, colourless, stateless, rootless—a race of angels.” Only these words are, of course, Frantz Fanon’s.38

  So let me recapitulate what I’m presenting as Burke’s twin legacy. I want to figure it as an equilibrium equation, as in chemistry. On one side, we have Burke as the germinal theorist of anti-essentialism, of contingency, the anti-foundationalist for whom history exhausted the bases for social identity. I’m not claiming he was absolutely consistent in this, but I want to say this was a powerful current, and it was self-consciously advanced against the rationalist doxa.

  Then on the other side, following as a consequence, are the veneration of settled, organic custom; the privileging of the extant; and something like a preservationist ethic, an assumption that there’s something immanently valuable about cultures that leads us to respect their anteriority, their autonomy, an
d their integrity, instead of seeking their assimilation or extinction. (In self-reflexive form, at the very least, this can become conservatism.)

  In Chapter 2, I want to puzzle through this almost dialectical pairing, through some of the tutelary figures of British Cultural Studies, and (this is where things start really getting interesting) through what happens when these twin jets are mobilized against the “long memory” and the notional community that British Cultural Studies took as its original object of study, which is to say, British culture. We’ll find that the most recent challenge to what Michael Oakeshott calls rationalism comes from those who, like Burke, have a direct acquaintance with migrancy, diaspora, and displacement. It comes from the immigrant, from the migrant, from the most deracinated members of British society.

  At the same time, Burke’s tragic sense of history, his Christian pessimism, may accord with what Cornel West has famously described as the black prophetic tradition: “a form of Third World Left Romanticism” that “tempers its utopian impulse with the profound sense of the tragic character of life in history.” One sees, West says, “a profound sense of the tragic linked to human agency that . . . is realistic enough not to project an excessive utopia.”39 Again, this is a strain, a conjunction of opposites, first articulated in Burke.

  It strikes me that it’s a sign of how reductively Burke has been read for so long that the phrase “Right Burkean” sounds like a pleonasm. But it isn’t. I consider Michael Oakeshott, for example, a Right Burkean par excellence.40 Like Richard Hoggart, the late Raymond Williams, plainly, was a Left Burkean, and I think it’s revealing of both the power and the limitations of Williams’s work to consider him in that light. And that’s not my act of positioning; it’s his own. For the appropriation of Edmund Burke is the inaugural act of Raymond Williams’s inaugural book, Culture and Society, a book that constructs a genealogy, a progressive British tradition, designed to encompass its author.41 So we can see how overdetermined is Williams’s decision to cast Burke in the originary position of temporal priority. It’s not surprising that a symptomatic reading of Burke reveals all of the virtues and, equally, all of the tensions that run through Williams’s own oppositional criticism and the really multifarious legacy of British Cultural Studies. I want to follow this through in my next chapter. But as Richard Wright would say, “The hour is late, Ladies and Gentlemen, and I am pressed for time.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fade to Black: From Cultural Studies to Cultural Politics

  Prologue

  In the early 1990s, a lot of people were wondering why, when Cultural Studies was left for dead in its country of origin, we in the States jumped on it as the last best hope for humankind. I think Kobena Mercer reported a widespread sense of puzzlement when he complained that “for some reasons, there seems to be a lot of retroactive mythification going on; people talk about ‘British Cultural Studies’ as if . . . it were still at the center of the intellectual universe, whereas in Britain no one is particularly excited or interested in cultural studies anymore.”1 Now one might think that’s just the story of the world, given the way ideas circulate. If structuralism is passé in its land of origin, then ship it, and it can have a new life across the channel, or across the Atlantic. Oscar Wilde once quipped that when good Americans die, they go to Paris. I think that in Paris, when good theories die, they go to America, to New Haven or Ithaca.

  But I do want to resist the tempting model of “uneven development.” So even though relations between critical communities here and in Britain really are curiously out of sync sometimes, I’m going to approach this admittedly fictitious unity of “Cultural Studies” in context, as it were, before discussing the uses for which it has been mobilized in the States since Mercer expressed his concern. We will, I hope, come to understand why rumors of its demise were greatly exaggerated, after all.

  A Myth of Origins

  In Chapter 1, I ventured that there’s a sense in which British Cultural Studies began with the reappropriation of Edmund Burke, and I had a very specific reading in mind, the reading that opened Raymond Williams’s first book, Culture and Society, published in 1958, a book that I first encountered while reading Tragedy with Williams in the English Department at Cambridge in 1974. (And at least here, I guess I’ll join the consensus that Patrick Brantlinger reports when he argues that this book, “more than any other work, set the agenda for cultural studies in both Britain and America.”)2 Even as Richard Hoggart, author of Uses of Literacy, stands as the institutional founder of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams, more than anyone else, serves intellectually as the tutelary spirit of this movement, its theoretical helmsman.

  And Williams, inaugurating, as I said, that site of contestation called Cultural Studies, actually wrote very movingly about Burke. Williams took Burke to be a founding figure of the tradition of critical modernity and industrialization. He cited approvingly Matthew Arnold’s comment that “almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.” And Williams continued:It is not “thought” in the common opposition to “feeling”; it is, rather, a special immediacy of experience, which works itself out, in depth, to a particular embodiment of ideas that become, in themselves, the whole man. . . . Burke’s writing is an articulated experience, and as such it has a validity which can survive even the demolition of its general conclusions. It is not that the eloquence survives where the cause has failed; the eloquence, if it were merely the veneer of a cause, would now be worthless. What survives is an experience, a particular kind of learning; the writing is important only to the extent that it communicates this. It is, finally, a personal experience become a landmark.3

  I think that’s a passage we can juxtapose to Michael Oakeshott if we want to trace that Burkean taproot, or rhizome. Williams’s Burke “is one of that company of men who learn virtue from the margin of their errors, learn folly from their own persons. It is at least arguable that this is the most important kind of learning.” He was a critic, first and foremost, of “economic individualism.” Williams glossed Burke’s remarks about “a people” in his Reform of Representation in the House of Commons—a text to which I return—as an assertion of the dependence on man’s progress “not only on the historical community in the abstract sense, but on the nature of the particular community into which he has been born. No man can abstract himself from this; nor is it his alone to change.” And here, finally, is Raymond Williams completing the transforming of Burke into a Marxist avant la lettre:He prepared a position in the English mind from which the march of industrialism and liberalism was to be continually attacked. He established the idea of the State as the necessary agent of human perfection, and in terms of this idea the aggressive individualism of the nineteenth century was bound to be condemned. He established, further, the idea of what has been called an “organic society,” where the emphasis is on the interrelation and continuity of human activities, rather than on the separation into spheres of interest, each governed by its own laws.

  In Williams’s view, the organic society of which Burke wrote was being tragically “ broken up under his eyes by new economic forces,”4 and even though Williams regretted Burke’s blindnesses, he celebrated Burke’s insights as germinal and empowering and produced him as the father of a counter-hegemonic tradition that is meant to culminate in the project that Williams and a number of illustrious contemporaries were then, in disparate ways, pursuing.

  The beginning of post-modernist wisdom came when the blindnesses and insights of this first generation of scholars came under question. Now Williams is, of course, an intellectual who underwent a process of continual reorientation. In a history of the Birmingham Centre that Stuart Hall gave in the mid-1970s, Hall carefully distinguished among Raymond Williams I, Raymond Williams II, Raymond Williams III, and so on.5 (One reason Williams is a much more inescapable figure for us than Richard Hoggart, say, is that there never was a Hoggart the second or third; certainly Williams’s theoretical openn
ess was all the more remarkable by contrast.) But there are continuities among change, and it’s important to see that Williams inherited both sides of the Burkean equation: not merely the recognition of the contingency of culture and identity,6 but also, and more problematically, a reverence toward “settled custom.”7 (In fact, if you think back to Karl Marx’s famous remark that “the traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” you can see that Williams’s usual invocation of “tradition” had more of a Burkean inflection than a Marxian one.)

  And attention began to be focused on this problem about twenty-five years or so after the publication of Culture and Society. People began to scrutinize Williams’s reliance on the notion of a “common culture,” on the historical rootedness of the English working man, on the valorization of “lived identities formed through long experience and actual sustained social relations”—the whole right hand of the Burkean equation, in short.8 Writing in 1983, for example, Williams advanced a seemingly organicist conception of culture based on ethno-territorial continuity: “The real history of the peoples of these islands . . . goes back . . . to the remarkable society of the Neolithic shepherds and farmers, and back beyond them to the hunting peoples who did not simply disappear but are also amongst our ancestors.”9

  But if this is the “real history,” it follows that some of us—those not numbered among the possessive collectivity “our ancestors”—must not be Britain’s “real people.” The passage reprises the Anglo-Saxonist myths of lineage that serve to buttress an exclusionary and imperialist ideology of “Englishness.” (Remember, this is a country where in the 1950s Winston Churchill could suggest to Harold Macmillan that if the Conservative Party wanted to win elections, it should adopt the slogan “Keep England W hite.”)10 Pioneering publications from the Birmingham Centre such as The Empire Strikes Back (1982) strove to foreground issues that were previously subsumed or subordinated within “ larger ” structures of analysis.