Happiness_adam Phillips et al_2009

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1/20/13 12:30 PM

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Table of Contents Sara Ahmed Happiness and Queer Politics Linda M. Austin John Stuart Mill, the Autobiography Autobiography, and the Paradox of Happiness Richard Dienst Happiness on a World Scale Alexander García Düttmann A Second Life: Notes on Adorno's Reading of Proust James Gordon Finlayson The Work of Art and the Promise of Happiness in Adorno Jason McGrath Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People's Republic of China Adam Phillips in conversation with Jane Elliott and John David Rhodes The Value of Frustration Brian Price On Compromises Keston Sutherland Happiness in Writing

ISSN 1938-1700 © World Picture 2009

http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_3/TOC.html

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“The Value of Frustration”: An Interview with Adam Phillips Jane Elliott and John David Rhodes John David Rhodes: In various places in your work there’s clearly a kind of skepticism about aiming to be happy or choosing that as a kind of goal, and so, as a place to start, I wonder if happiness is the wrong word for a lot of other things we talk about—like contentment, or pleasure, or joy, equanimity—and if we might be better off calling those things by what they are and disentangling them from this larger term. Adam Phillips: Yes. I think the risk is that it’s a kind of dead word because it does too much work, and that, in a way, it only becomes talkable about if you do precisely what you’ve described: break it down into all the things that it might involve for individual people at any given moment, otherwise it becomes so vague in a way, it becomes the sort of thing that no one would encourage anybody not to be, and yet, you don’t know what you’re doing when you’re encouraging them to be happy, exactly, because it contains a multitude of sins. So I think it would be better, in a way…I mean, there are two things I think. One is, it would be better to break it down. The other would be, given it’s such a prevalent word, to be able to say something about the work it does do. Because although we can say, “Let’s just drop that,” like the word “love,” and come up with all sorts of other words, it may be very interesting to know exactly how we use the word, even in its vagueness and weirdness. Jane Elliott: Sort of along the lines of the work you did with sanity, looking at the kind of practices it includes, or the kind of conceptions it links together, rather than just displacing it altogether. AP: Yes. And in way, presumably the thing to do would be just to see all the ways, all the places it just turns up, all the places one finds oneself using that word, and seeing what one might be getting at, what other people might be getting at. Because certainly people come for psychoanalysis when they’re unhappy; that doesn’t mean necessarily they want to be happy. JDR: Right. There’s a line in your recent book on kindness about how people turn to psychoanalysis because they’re more unhappy than they can bear. So, I was thinking about the word “unhappy” and the idea of bearability, or what one can bear, which is something Sara Ahmed has been talking about recently. Would it be better to think about the aim of psychoanalysis not being about happiness but about the bearable life, as opposed to the good life? AP: Yeah. I mean, I would have thought really, that’s really what people must be talking about if they’re talking psychoanalytically. Of course, it’s about pleasure, but it’s also about literally how much of yourself—your thoughts, feelings, desires—you can bear to think about, to feel, and to enact. What psychoanalysis adds to the conversation that complicates it is the pleasure of unbearability, or the pleasure one gets from being unhappy. And so I suppose that’s the thing that has to be added in here, which is the quest for unhappiness. JE: One of things I’ve been thinking about is that although there is so much of a drive for happiness, obviously, in popular discourse—that we should always be wanting the next thing—there does seem to be at the moment some kind of counter-discourse that’s http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_3/Phillips.html

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about somehow attenuating or getting away from one’s desire. I’m thinking of the Oprah culture, things like meditation, and yoga. As if happiness is sort of inversely proportionate to desire. It’s maybe a bastardized understanding of Buddhism, in a way. It’s as if we can somehow stop looking for the object, then we can be happy. It’s almost as if getting out of the time of desire, where you are constantly looking to the future, is going to solve things, because you can just “be in the moment.” So I was wondering what you think of this counter-discourse. Does it seem to be doing any useful work, or is it just another way of saying the same thing? AP: It seems to me a good thing that people want to have conversations about the problems attached to desiring. I think what can’t work is being a sort of Buddhism tourist. I don’t think one is going to be able to simply appropriate, in a sort of supermarket-y way, other world religions as a solution to these problems. But I do think—and presumably the credit crunch has something to do with this—that it’s been very weird living as though there’s no such thing as scarcity, when in fact, in a way you could think there’s only scarcity. I think that people being able to have an ironic relationship to their own desire and also be aware of the fact (or what seems to me to be a fact anyway) that we don’t want what we want, in one sense, and also that we’re always going to want something else, and that satisfaction is not the answer to life, so to speak. Partly because there isn’t an answer to life, but partly because satisfaction isn’t always the point. So I think what people should be talking about is…people should be trying to produce more eloquent, persuasive accounts about the value of frustration, not the value of satisfaction. And I think that the equation of happiness with forms of satisfaction is the problem. JDR: Is it that they are mistakenly used one for the other? AP: Yeah. JDR: Or does satisfaction still remain in play in some way? Or is it it’s coupling with happiness that’s the problem, the coupling of satisfaction and happiness? AP: I think it is that we’re bewitched by the idea of gratification and we’re bewitched by the idea that gratification is what we want and is the thing that will make us happy, as though there’s simply a sliding set of equations here. And anybody who gives it a moment’s thought knows it isn’t as simple as that. JE: We were discussing earlier how when you read some of these accounts of “being in the moment,” it actually sounds like what is being described is depression. Because when I think of having no object of desire, that’s like being dead. AP: It is. Yes. JE: It’s a strange utopianism. AP: Yes, I agree. There’s also a strange logic to it, as well. The question is whether the problem in desiring is the object of desire. Now, logically, you think it must be. So what you’ve got to do is remove the object of desire from the picture and then we’ll be okay. But in a way, you’re left with more of the problem. Because you can’t get around the fact that you’re a desiring creature. You may have different ways of relating to an object of

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desire, but you can’t, it seems to me, evacuate objects of desire. It’s all about the way in which one approaches them, or what one thinks one wants from them. JE: In a way, the inverse of thinking that the next object will fix things is thinking that getting rid of the object will fix things. AP: Yeah, exactly. JDR: The object, even if it’s a mistaken object, needs to be there. There needs to be an object, because it’s what happens in the movement towards or away from it that’s important. AP: Yeah. AP: There’s a very interesting idea that has unsurprisingly fallen out of circulation that Ernest Jones had, which was the idea of aphanisis, which is loss of desire. His idea was— and it seems to me a good one, and it’s one that psychoanalysis for some reason has dropped—is the idea that the individual’s terror is the absence of desire, and that desire might be something like the thing that Miles Davis said—that he woke up for years and years with music in his head and then one day he didn’t. Desire might be something that we wake up every day with, but one day we might not. The question would be then whether there are desireless states that aren’t depression, or that don’t need to be pathologized as a way of managing them. Because it would seem to me that it’s as though the fundamental terror that capitalism exploits is that we might not want anything. That’s the thing that we’ve all got to talk each other out of. That we really want things; in fact we want loads of things. I think, in that—the fervor of that—happiness gets recruited. JDR: Since we’re kind of talking around and about pleasure, it’s often that pleasure and happiness—and I don’t want to force us to return to the question of happiness because I think in some ways you’ve answered that question—appear proximately in some of your thinking. But it’s very clear that you never mistake them for one another; they’re never identified with one another. Should we be more concerned with pleasure, and then happiness or contentment is something that comes along in the wake of that? AP: Yes, which may or may not occur. JDR: I guess what I wonder is what is the relation among pleasure, happiness, and desire, what is in that triangulation? AP: When you said that, what I thought was that, for me anyway, pleasure has to do with absorption, and it has do with absorption in something that is at least nominally outside oneself. And absorption is the prior thing, I presume, that’s pleasure-driven, so to speak, even though the pleasure to be derived from it may not be clear at all. And happiness may be a consequence of states of absorption, but it may not be. So it would seem to me that happiness is the thing that may or may not occur, but that as an object of desire, it’s a radically misleading one. But it may be one of the good things that happens as a consequence of states of absorption. JE: Is absorption so frequently pleasurable because it has to do with release from consciousness?

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AP: Yes. Or release from consciousness as self-preoccupation. I think the project is— and actually, I think the project of psychoanalysis really is—to free people not to have to bother to be interested in themselves. What people—some people, anyway—are suffering from is self-absorption, and it’s actually the most boring game in town. There’s nothing in it, actually. The only interesting things, it seems to me, are outside oneself. Not because one is altruistic, but just because there’s nothing to be interested in in oneself, actually. Obviously it’s related to what’s going on inside oneself, but it’s to do with the external world. Happiness, if it’s going to be useful, is related to the sort of free loss of interest in oneself. JDR: That connects to what you talk about when you use the word “vulnerability”—a making oneself vulnerable. Vulnerability in that sense is the opposite of repetition. Selfabsorption is another word for repetition; vulnerability is a word for something different. AP: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly right. I think vulnerability is a word for exchange and repetition is the word for the rendering impossible of exchange by stereotyping it. JE: So repetition remains inside, in a sense. AP: Yes, exactly. It would almost be like saying that what characterizes one’s so-called internal world is repetition, and that’s precisely the problem. That actually one is endlessly repetitious and monotonous, and the external world is infinitely variable. And the question is whether you can get from one to the other. It’s extremely difficult. JDR: Do you think that’s also related to a question of futurity? It’s clear there’s narrative there, which is therefore temporal, which is then about… AP: It’s very hard to know which comes first, though, isn’t it, because presumably repetition is the wish to preclude, to preempt the future. So this is something to do with being able to bear the idea of being in a state of exchange with the future, which is by definition unknowable. So that it really is about unpredictability. So one of the things we should be educating children in is not just the dangers of unpredictability—which are fairly obvious—but the pleasures of unpredictability, too. Because only there is the possibility of getting outside oneself. JE: One of the recent articles on happiness in which you were quoted brought up the etymology that it has to do with “hap” as in happenstance and chance and luck. If real happiness requires some kind of openness to contingency, is luck some way of trying to change that into something that is always good, to get out of the contingent, to make it something more bearable? AP: Or simply, it’s a way of describing being able to take your chances. Something like that. Luck, presumably, if it isn’t called luck—whatever else it could be called—the things that happen that one has not organized for oneself (which are most things, presumably), the question is what you can make of them, what you can transform them into. And good luck is presumably the chance occurrence that you transform to your own benefit in some way, and therefore you feel it is good luck. Because it isn’t necessarily good luck to win the lottery. You may make it good luck. But in and of itself… JE: It could be a disaster.

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AP: Absolutely. JDR: It’s way of reading or interpreting. JE: It’s a way of negotiating the agency involved in happiness. Of owning it or not. AP: Yes. I think the problem is having the illusion that one knows what one wants. And the reason that frustration is important is because frustration contains the possibility of discovering a new want. What usually happens is because we can’t bear frustration, we fill it with a known want. This has to do with the repetition problem. It’s very, very difficult, actually, to be surprised by one’s desires. Surprisingly difficult. As though there is a set [of desires]. Now presumably there is a set—it can’t be infinite—but it may not be anything like as limited as one thinks it is. I imagine that one is limiting it out of anxiety. The reason we have what we think of as obvious sexual preferences, foods we definitely like and definitely don’t like, and so on, is because there is some anxiety about not narrowing the range. It’s like agoraphobia. We could want anything. Not literally anything, but my guess is that we could probably want a lot of things. I think we could like a lot more people than we do, for example, but we can’t. We just can’t let ourselves. JE: We just can’t bear it. AP: No, we can’t take it. JDR: But we can’t think ourselves there. You can’t will yourself into that discovery, right? You kind of suspend yourself in an ambiance in which something new can emerge. It seems like the new thing has to emerge, but you can’t find it. AP: Yes. Or you depend on something other than yourself to make it possible. You can’t just dream it up and go and do it. That’s the wrong picture. The right picture is that you dream up all sorts of things, and then things happen to you that are neither what you dreamt up nor what happened to you. If you see what I mean. But you can keep on generating something out of that exchange. JE: Since you mentioned lots of other people…One of the reasons we decided to focus this issue on happiness was the election of Obama. Obviously there was a huge outpouring of catharsis and joy over his election, but there was sort of a counter-reaction from the academic left. Judith Butler, for instance, published an article online about this, saying that this was very dangerous, that we need to retain critique, we need to resist these emotions. I wonder if there is some kind of resistance to the idea of collective happiness, as if in any group larger than one, or possibly a family, it’s very dangerous. Most people don’t talk about happiness beyond the individual or the relationship. Is there a more interesting or more productive way of thinking about collective happiness, or is it always dangerous? AP: There must be a link in this example, mustn’t there, between happiness and hope and a deferred future. I would have thought the problem here is the terror of hope. It’s as though what isn’t acknowledged publicly is how ambivalent we are about hope, as though it’s an unequivocal good. Hope is very, very dangerous and potentially poisonous, or poisonous for some people, because what can’t be borne is the inevitable disappointment. Because hope would be a great thing if it sort of got you to

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disappointment, then you got through disappointment and you got to the next bit. But often this process stalls, and at that point there’s a great deal of rage or vengefulness or bitterness or cynicism or whatever, and that’s the threshold, because ideally, if we could organize this, people should be encouraged to hope exorbitantly and enabled to bear the consequences of these hopes being thwarted. And that means, not exactly realized. JE: Do you have to make the hope different the next time? AP: I don’t believe in learning from experience. JE: How do you avoid it not being repetition? AP: That’s the problem. And maybe that’s what Judith Butler’s on about, although I think she’s wrong. I haven’t read the article, but her belief may be that critique will keep us sane and sober, so we’ll hope better. JE: There’s a kind of intellect versus emotion binary in a lot of these pieces. AP: Yes, I can believe that. I think, I really think we should just accept the intractability of this, that we are creatures who hope, that the more in despair we are, the more we will hope exorbitantly, and the more there is the potential for catastrophic disillusionment. The acid test in anything is always going to be, how people deal with catastrophic disillusionment, which we’ve all had an experience of, without taking refuge in cynicism or bitterness or vengefulness. If that’s possible, then something can happen. And usually it isn’t. JE: I think one of the fears at work in a lot of this writing is the fear that disappointment would drive people away. There’s an intuition that that could happen, that this disappointment is around the corner, and therefore we can’t give in to the hope. AP: Yes, exactly. And they’ll give up on politics, or they’ll give up on communality. JE: Because this is the one chance. AP: I mean, that’s the problem, in a way, with happiness being offered as the object of desire. As a lure, the risk of it is that when people discover that they simply can’t have access to the happiness that they were promised, what they will then turn into, what they will then do about it. And that must be the source of political and personal terror. JE: Because we all seem to have an intuition that bad things will come out then, probably also from personal experience. AP: Yeah, yes, exactly. I think we’re right. There’s both a superstition and there’s a regulation of excitement going on, because we know—because we’ve had the experience ourselves—that disappointment doesn’t bring out the best in us. And there’s always going to be disappointment. It doesn’t mean you have to think you’re living in a veil of tears, but one of the things you’re living in inevitably is a range of disappointments. They don’t have to be cataclysmic, but they can be. JE: To go back a little bit to the idea of collective happiness, do you think that the resistance to a feeling of joy in communality has something to do with twentieth-century

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history? Is it a necessary worry? I almost feel that there’s a sense that any kind of large group emotion is equivalent to Fascism. AP: Yes, it’s tainted by Fascism, isn’t it? Or it’s tainted by cults, or religious fundamentalism, or whatever. But it would seem to me that there is a tremendous longing. I mean, one of the things presumably that individualism has been the solution to is communal disappointment, but I think the primary longing is for that communal pleasure. That’s the real thing. I think everybody feels that. Maybe not everybody feels that, but a lot of people feel that. But people are very frightened—and understandably frightened—of what happens when large groups of people get together, because large groups are mad. But so are individuals. It’s not as though the large groups are madder than individuals; they’re just madder in different ways. And I think that’s part of the problem. But I think there’s an increasing feeling that people don’t have anything in common. Actually, they have everything in common, but the feeling is they have nothing in common. And in-commonness is the point. In other words, it isn’t taken for granted. It’s as though it’s something we have to make, or find. And I think without that there is a lot of despair. JE: It’s almost as if there’s a fear that we want that so badly that we will countenance terrible things to have it. AP: Yes. Or we’ll do everything we can to avoid it, so we won’t have to face the dealing with it, so it will be held in place as a longing. But there must be a communal possibility somewhere, or a viable political ideal somewhere, but not for us, not now. JE: Because for it actually to be instantiated would be… AP: You’d have to do deal with it. It would be real. JE: In that sense, you could see some of these articles as trying to insist that it’s not happening. AP: Yes. Or to regulate the possibility that it might be. JE: To keep it controlled. AP: Yes. Or at bay in some way. JDR: It’s a eugenic version of political success. Because it can’t see the end of the story that it wants to be told, then it has to make sure that we’re forever waiting for the right moment to commence the prologue. JE: I’ve been reading this woman’s blog called “The Happiness Project,” which is really annoying, but one of the things I notice that she says that a lot of self-help discourse for women is also saying is that it’s better not to achieve parity in your marriage in terms of childcare or housework because you’ll just get angry. You won’t ever get it, so it’s better not to try to get it. You’ll be happier if you just do all the dishes and don’t worry about it. There’s an interesting idea here about the relation between happiness and justice that, in some ways, to try to make things fair or to pay attention to inequality is to make yourself crazy. Is happiness, as it’s conceived now, an obstacle to thinking about justice?

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AP: Well, yes, it could be. Because that sounds terrible, and presumably part of the problem with it is the assumption that happiness comes from states of non-conflict, whereas actually it would be better to say that conflict is the point. People should be seeking out conflicts, not avoiding them, and bearing with that, because that’s the only way that anything’s going to happen. So that the wish to avoid conflict is actually the wish for quiescence; it’s actually the most cynical position, I think, covertly. JDR: Implicitly apolitical in that sense. AP: Yes, exactly. So the idea that happiness equals harmony is absolutely misleading. JE: It’s strange, too, because it really suggests that you need to ignore a tremendous amount to be happy. AP: So happiness equals denial of reality. JE: Yes, basically. AP: As long as you can deny enough reality, you’ll be fine. Which is a way of saying that actually in reality there is no happiness. So as long as we can delude ourselves we can be happy. So it’s actually not a viable project anyway. JE: Absolutely not viable. It’s another way of thinking about the insidiousness of happiness discourse: it can be used to say, “Don’t worry about what you’re not getting. Don’t worry about what’s not fair, because that will just make you miserable.” AP: Happiness discourse makes people retarded, it seems to me. When people get into promoting happiness, they become stupid, as though the very word is an attack on one’s intelligence. It’s a way of not thinking. It becomes like a secular religious language of the most debilitating sort. It’s a way of simplifying one’s mind. JDR: You can see it happen with artists. Bernardo Bertolucci makes less interesting movies after he becomes a Buddhist, essentially. Actually, since I’ve brought up the aesthetic, Jane and I are both interested in the way that works of art—often literature— figure in your thinking at various key moments. I’m interested in the insistence with which you think about or ask us to think about psychoanalysis in aesthetic terms—as a story that we tell ourselves. I’m thinking about the function of the indefinite article there: the fact that it’s a story, and the fact that it’s a story. There’s something really inviting, and hopeful, and pleasurable about that formulation, about the indefiniteness of the article and about the possibility of narrative, the way that narrative is so vitally at the foundation of whatever this project of psychoanalysis is. I want to ask you what you think the productivity of the indefiniteness of these narratives is? AP: Well, the thing about this is that it comes out of having a psychoanalytic training. This is not the cause, but it’s one of the sources. Because when I trained there was a prevalent view that psychoanalysis was the story; that really everything could be understood within its language, that it was the comprehensive language, it was the supreme fiction. Not a supreme fiction—it was the supreme truth. Now if you happen to have studied literature before you enter into psychoanalysis, this just seemed astounding really, in a way. I mean, I was astounded. I was very young, but I was astounded. And the way in which it is a puzzling issue is because, of course, in one sense, psychoanalysis isn’t

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a story; it’s an incredibly powerful one, if you happen to find it powerful. People are not Freudians in the way they’re Shakespearians. It’s a different sort of thing. Well that really interests me. I haven’t got anything to say about it particularly, but it really did engage me, that—that these stories could be so compelling and so explanatory and so satisfying, and yet knowing that they were competing with a lot of other stories. I mean, I’d much rather read Wallace Stevens than read Freud. There’s no doubt about it, just in terms of my pleasure, my engagement, my looking forward to it, and so on. But—but Freud’s got really useful—to me—compelling and interesting things to say about what we’re like. It’s a good language because it gives me more amusement, more pleasure than a lot of other languages. So I think it’s difficult to be clear about this, but I think psychoanalysis is good for the people who find it useful and interesting. Just that. It couldn’t be a universal thing that people are resisting and so on. Of course it’s also an interesting idea that the reason you might not like somebody or something is because you’re resisting them. I mean, I think that’s a good idea. It’s a bad idea if it’s taken to be the absolute truth or the only way. So I’m completely puzzled by this and I’m puzzled by, I think, presumably by something that we’re all puzzled by in some way, which is why some stories get a grip, what works about them. All of us have got ideas about why psychoanalysis has got a grip. But it’s got a grip on me in that, I can’t exactly say that it works, and for some reason I value it because it doesn’t work, but it’s a way of talking that makes it possible for people to feel and think and live differently. I believe that to be true. Some people. So the question is, if you don’t believe in psychoanalysis, and your friend is unhappy, what do you recommend they do? That seems to me the question. It’s not that it’s the best thing, because it isn’t. It’s the best thing for some people sometime, but there is the issue of what you advise people to do when they’re suffering in certain ways. And it seems to me one of the best things going now for some forms of suffering for some people. And in that sense, it’s not a narrative; it’s the narrative. It includes within itself the possibility of being critical of it, so that when you do it, I, as the analyst, might say something that the other person finds useful, interesting, and then you’d also want to know why they believe you. You’re doing two things at once that are potentially quite illuminating. Which is, we’re having this conversation, it’s useful to you, presumably, which is why you keep coming. But the other thing we need to work out is why you might be predisposed to give my words this kind of seriousness or gravity, significance. Not as if to say they’re not really important, but as if to say we don’t really know what their importance is, and we could maybe say something about that between us. But it’s about the possibility of it not being assumed that one person is more authoritative than another. JDR: There’s a kind of terror, though, in just thinking about the concept of being interesting, from my own experience of being in psychoanalysis. I was terrified before each meeting with my analyst that whatever I was going to say wasn’t going to be interesting enough, and then I was also worried that whatever she might offer back I might not find interesting, as well. That performance anxiety, which is about being interesting, which is somehow about telling an interesting story—is that—and I’m also feeling my own anxiety about asking an interesting question—does that need to be there in some way? Is that a necessary fear? AP: I think so. JDR: I mean, obviously it’s about transference and counter-transference, but then what happens if you fail to be interesting? Does that mean that there’s nothing for anyone to work with?

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AP: Well, no. I think the beauty of the situation is—because I regret bandying the word interesting around because it doesn’t address this that you’re talking about—this is not a comment about you, obviously. JDR: It can be. [laughter] AP: If somebody comes, as everybody does come, with an anxiety one way or the other about how interesting they are, I assume that they’re talking about an experience of not being able to hold somebody’s attention, an experience we’ve all had. That however much our mothers and our fathers loved us and were interested in us, there were times when they weren’t, and that really was difficult to deal with. And so presumably we did at least two things. One is we tried to step up our performance to engage them, and we did other things like retreated, sulked, got enraged, tried to find other people and so on. So that that would be integral to the situation, that two people are going to wonder whether they can hold each other’s attention, and that’s what you analyze. You will try to understand both how that came about and what the self-cure has been for that. So in your example, I’d say, your self-cure has been to try and be interesting, let’s say. Well that’s part of a repertoire, most of which is repressed, of self-cures for this problem. Because, for example, when your mother wasn’t interested in you, it could have freed you to go and do something else, or it could have made you think, “Well, fuck her.” Or, “I’ll find somebody else and make her jealous,” or whatever, but there are a lot of possibilities. It’s a fundamental anxiety. And the trouble is, if you bandy around the thing about people being interesting, you step up the anxiety about it. [laughter]. Which is a bad thing. JE: Would the goal be to try to recover the other self-cures to make the repertoire bigger, or… AP: Well, I think the goal would be partly simply to show what the other alternatives might be and why they might be resisted and why one has become fixed in one’s selfcure. It would be something like that. But the fundamental predicament is intractable. JDR: Coming in and wanting to be interesting, again the fixation is too much on the object, and it becomes another word for a kind of contentedness or happiness. It becomes another useless word or a dead word. AP: Yes. But you can see how the wish to be interesting—which presumably we must all have—is such a mad idea, partly because it’s an attempt to imagine what the other person wants from oneself, which, of course, one can’t help but do that, but it’s unfathomable because they don’t know either. So it’s a labyrinth, which is presumably why we’re so obsessed by it. JE: We think it’s merely a triangle, or reflexive, but it’s not. AP: But it’s infinite. JE: I guess in relation to this you can’t help but think about the infamously boring happy families that are the antithesis to narrative. There could be understood to be a kind of opposition between happiness and complexity, which would seem to make happiness a dead-end for art. Does happiness actually have anything to offer the aesthetic?

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AP: I would have thought in this sense that happiness is the repressed. That, so far, people haven’t been able to write interestingly enough about happiness, but I don’t think that we should conclude from that that it isn’t very interesting. JE: Or that it’s non-narrative. AP: Yeah. It seems to me that, for all sorts of reasons, we have assumed that all the unacceptable things about ourselves, all the difficult things are the interesting things; that’s what we’re going to articulate. It’s a bit like, children take for granted the good things about their parents and they remember the frustrations. It would be very interesting to undo that, to make an equally plausible case for saying that what’s unarticulated is happiness. There’s a tremendous resistance to finding vocabularies for happiness, whereas, weirdly enough, there’s a tremendous eagerness to complain, so to speak, or to speak fearfully. JE: To sort of survey our archive of suffering. AP: Yeah. JDR: We think of happiness as so connected to or—mistakenly—identical to joy or certain kinds of intensities that can’t be sustained in a kind of narrative context. You can write a lyric poem about a truly joyful, ecstatic state, but that somehow can’t be sustained, so, as long as we think of that as a model for happiness, then happiness remains unnarrated in some way. AP: Yes. And by the same token, we could actually feel much more exposed talking about our pleasures and our happinesses than about our miseries. JE: From that perspective, when we say that happiness is boring, we’re rehearsing our resistance, because to find something boring… AP: Is itself a resistance. There’s something about it that you don’t want to go into. JE: That you prefer to find dull. JDR: But also then happiness is the thing that makes it possible for us to like other people, so that might also be something that we’re repressing. AP: I think that’s right. JDR: Which comes back to the question of commonality as a site or object of repression. AP: And also, happiness is an object of envy. One of the things that happiness does is it stimulates envy. JE: Which is another reason to resist thinking about it too much. AP: Yes, exactly. JE: It seems to me there’s a straightforward reading of the resistance to happiness which would say that, on some level, we can’t bear the fact that we were happiest with our

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parents and we can’t be there, we had to leave. So therefore it’s better not to think that we were ever happy there, or to not think that happiness is very interesting. Do you think that’s too… AP: I believe that, but the other bit might be—which is a more difficult thing to think about, which I think is a dilemma for children—when the moment—if it is a moment— when they discover that there are pleasures not provided by the family. That creates an interminable and insoluble problem, because I think the deal is, all good things must come from the family. So if you begin to find a pleasure outside the family or that is not within the family’s realm, then this is radically confounding. So I think there might be two bits to it. One is, our original states of happiness were in that family and they’re lost forever, and if we wanted to try and recreate those forms we would have to strive in the external world in ways that might feel difficult. And then there are the pleasures that were not in the family. So I think it’s both sides of the line, and they’re both difficult in different ways. JE: Why do we feel it’s forbidden to have pleasure outside of the family? Why do we feel that so intuitively when we first encounter the outside pleasure? AP: I think because our mothers and fathers demand—they need us to need them. It’s intrinsically narcissistic. It’s disloyal and it’s endangering, because insofar as it’s disloyal, you lose their protection, so you’re radically unmoored when you’re going after that thing outside the family. JDR: Rings true. JE: You’ve extracted yourself in this terrifying way that you want to undo as soon as possible. AP: You’re too free. And that must be what the fear of freedom existentialist thing is about. It’s about when you sacrifice your protection for your desire. JE: So you think there could be an aesthetic of happiness, but we just don’t have it? AP: Yeah, I really do. JE: It might require a different temporality than we’re used to. AP: I think it might. I agree. And it would involve us not giving up on all our versions of original sin, but being able to see that if there’s an idea of original sin, then there’s another idea of, not original virtue, but of original something else that original sin is invented to manage. And it could be something like original ecstasy, or original bliss, but that’s as real, in it’s way. JDR: I remember hearing you give a talk on modernism awhile back in which you described that modernism wants to make it new, but that we are all doomed to repetition. I’ve been thinking about some recent work that’s trying to find an ethics of modernism in and around its complexity. On the one hand, a lot of this work extends out of a professed desire, or rather a professed belief in the value of the aesthetic as the aesthetic, but actually what it ends up doing is converting the aesthetic—particularly

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modernism—into an ethical medium. Because it’s harder to understand or harder to read, it makes us better subjects. We make more careful political and erotic choices. JE: It’s supposed to make us self-reflexive. JDR: So that reflexivity in the aesthetic becomes reflexivity in our ethical lives. It’s an attractive argument, but it’s predicated on an anxiety about the aesthetic. That it might not be good for you, actually. Or it might not be anything. AP: Yes. It might just be morally equivocal. JDR: I think the argument extends from a crisis in the humanities, like, what are we doing here talking about books? AP: If it makes no difference. JDR: If it might not make someone vote properly. AP: Certainly I was educated to believe that if you were a good reader, you were a good reader of life, fundamentally, and you would be less prone to Fascist suggestion and you’d be less bully-able, less intimidate-able. But, of course, the moment you fall in love, this completely falls out of the window. The moment those basic experiences happen to you, you cease to be a good reader, or you become a hyper-good reader, but not the reader you’ve been educated to believe you should be. Because you’re then precipitated into that world of proto-Fascism, proto-servility, all that stuff. So, in a way, there is some idealization of language here, it seems to me, or idealization of reading. Although I think reading’s a good thing. JDR: We can’t be the better subjects that we want to be without it, at least for those of us already in it, if we feel like we’re leading the lives that are close to, or near, or directed towards the lives we think we ought to lead, then reading figures very importantly in that, but it’s hard to imagine that it figures in the same way for everyone. It’s certainly not the magic bullet. AP: What I find baffling is that, for me, it’s the experience of reading that I like. Just doing it, just that. One of the reasons that I couldn’t be an academic is because I find it incredibly difficult to talk about the things that I read. I can do it, and in some ways it’s really interesting. But the Leavis thing, which I was more or less educated in, said that the reading was a means to the end of making you a morally better subject and certainly makes you aware of morality as an issue, gives you a language for that, but what it never talked about at all simply was the pleasure of reading, about which there might not be very much to be said, except I know—like a lot of people who read—I read, for example, to insulate myself from my own family. JE: I always felt that I was very lucky that reading was coded as moral because I used it like heroin. I was just lucky that it wasn’t considered masturbation. AP: Quite. I mean, without it, where would we have gone in our families? Or where would we have gone in adolescence to escape from real bodies?

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JE: I still feel that I manage my two relationships to literature by having a division in the two different bodies of work that I write about. Sometimes they creep into one another, but I try to keep an eddy of fiction that is merely comforting. JDR: I almost feel sorry for people who grow up in literary families or academic families, because then that experience is already assumed to be what will happen. AP: It’s very hard not to be literary and to have a sense of inner superiority. The people I was educated with, that was, broadly speaking, the result. JE: I guess that’s what we’re trying to get away from. JDR: I do think that until we find a really convincing way of talking about what we do in studying literature or the aesthetic that is not entirely beholden to an ethical discourse, then our eclipse will only draw nearer. JE: I’m confused, though, because I feel like what we’re saying is that we need to resist a kind of instrumentalization, but we’ve had that discourse as well. In a sense, it’s the Trilling argument, which holds that the instrumentality of literature is that it refuses to be instrumentalized, that it can’t be put in the service of ideology. I feel like we’ve already gone down that road, as well. JDR: That’s true. JE: I’m not sure that there’s a third way. AP: There may be a third way, but I think dreamwork is a good idea. As today is the dream day, various things may be significant to us or not, but things are being picked up that we might dream and then, were we to talk about them, things will be revealed. Well, reading could be part of the dream day, so that it has an impact, but of an indiscernible kind, that it’s fundamentally untrackable. All we know is that we love reading and we do quite a lot of that, but the way that it comes out in the wash is extremely unpredictable. So it’s not instrumental in a calculated way—although we can calculate it, we can teach it and do all sorts of things—but it has its way with us in some way, and we usually don’t know what it is. It’s a real problem in psychoanalysis because without the moral line, there’s no reason to do it. Either there’s a story about why it makes you better in some way or other or why would anybody do it? Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and writer. Jane Elliott is on the Advisory Board of World Picture and is the author of Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). She teaches at the University of York (UK). John David Rhodes is an editor of World Picture.

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Happiness and Queer Politics 1 Sara Ahmed “You might have a good story there,” Dick said, “but … you cannot make homosexuality attractive. No happy ending…” In other words, my heroine has to decide she’s not really queer”… “That’s it. And the one she’s involved with is sick or crazy.” —Vin Packer In this exchange Vin Packer, author of the first best selling lesbian pulp novel Spring Fire first published in 1952, comes to an agreement with her publisher. The novel will be published, but only on condition that it does not have a happy ending, as such an ending would “make homosexuality attractive.” 2 Queer fiction in this period could not give happiness to its characters as queers; such a gift would be readable as making queers appear “good”: as the “promotion” of the social value of queer lives; or an attempt to influence readers to become queer. Somewhat ironically, then, the unhappy ending becomes a political gift: it provides a means through which queer fiction could be published. If the unhappy ending was an effect of censorship, it also provided a means for overcoming censorship. So although Packer expresses regret for the compromise of its ending in her introduction to the new issue of Spring Fire published in 2004, she also suggests that while it “may have satisfied the post office inspections, the homosexual audience would not have believed it for a minute. But they also wouldn’t care that much, because more important was the fact there was a new book about us.” 3 The unhappy ending satisfies the censors whilst also enabling the gay and lesbian audience to be satisfied; we are not obliged to “believe” in the unhappy ending by taking the ending literally, as “evidence” that lesbians and gays must turn straight, die or go mad. What mattered was the existence of “a new book about us.” We can see that reading unhappy endings in queer archives is a complicated matter. A literal reading suggests that the very distinction between happy and unhappy endings “works” to secure a moral distinction between good and bad lives. When we read this unhappy queer archive (which is not the only queer archive) we must resist this literalism, which means an active disbelief in the necessary alignment of the happy with the good, or even in the moral transparency of the good itself. Rather than reading unhappy endings as a sign of the withholding of a moral approval for queer lives, we would consider how unhappiness circulates within and around this archive, and what it allows us to do. My aim in this essay is to consider unhappy queers as a crucial aspect of queer genealogy. As Heather Love has argued “We need a genealogy of queer affect that does not overlook the negative, shameful and difficult feelings that have been so central to queer existence in the last century.” 4 Scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn and Sally Munt have offered us powerful defenses of the potentialities of shame for queer politics. 5 I will consider what it might mean to affirm unhappiness, or at least not to overlook it. We can explore how queer literatures locate and attribute unhappiness and how, in doing so, they offer us an alternative approach to happiness as a positive, but perhaps still rather difficult, feeling. 6

world picture 3 In rethinking happiness through queer politics, I turn to the classic novel The Well of Loneliness. Lisa Walker has argued that “The Well’s status as the lesbian novel is inseparable from its reputation as the most depressing lesbian novel ever written.” 7 The Well has even been described as a “narrative of damnation,” which gives “the homosexual, particularly the lesbian, riddling images of pity, self-pity and of terror.” 8 The book has been criticized for making its readers feel sad and wretched, perhaps even causing queer unhappiness. I would not dismiss such criticisms: they are part of our shared archive. Indeed, the very expression of unhappiness about unhappiness is what makes this archive work; the threads of negative affect weave together a shared inheritance. We can, of course, inherit unhappiness differently. I will read novels such as The Well of Loneliness as part of a genealogy of unhappy queers. I will also consider how being happily queer might involve a different orientation to the causes of unhappiness, by reflecting on the novels Rubyfruit Jungle and Babyji. Happy Objects Happiness is about what happens, where the what is something good. I do not assume there is something called happiness that stands apart or has autonomy, as if it corresponds to an object in the world. I begin instead with the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, and what I called in Queer Phenomenology the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near. 9 The etymology of “happiness” relates precisely to the question of contingency: it is from the Middle English “hap,” suggesting chance. Happiness is about what happens. Such a meaning now seems archaic: we may be more used to thinking of happiness as an effect of what you do, as a reward for hard work, rather than as being “simply” what happens to you. But I find the original meaning useful, as it focuses our attention on the “worldly” question of happenings. What is the relation between the “what” in “what happens” and the “what” that makes us happy? Empiricism provides us with a useful way of addressing this question, given its concern with “what’s what.” Take the work of seventeenth century empiricist philosopher John Locke. He argues that what is good is what is “apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us.” 10 We judge something to be good or bad according to how it affects us, whether it gives us a pleasure or pain. Locke uses the example of the man that loves grapes. He argues that “when a man declares…that he loves grapes, it is no more, but that the taste of grapes delights him.” 11 Locke points out that we find different things agreeable. As he suggests: “as pleasant tastes depend not on the things themselves, but their agreeability to this or that palate, wherein there is great variety; so the greatest happiness consists in having those things which produce the greatest pleasure.” 12 For Locke, happiness is idiosyncratic: if we find different things delightful, then happiness consists in having different things. At one level, Locke’s story seems quite casual. I happen upon something, and if it happens to affect me in a good way, then it is happy for me, or I am happy with it. I want to suggest that the history of happiness is not quite so casual: one history of happiness is the history of the removal of the hap from happiness. Happiness becomes not what might happen, but what will happen if you live your life in the right way. That happiness can signal a “right way” suggests that happiness is already given to certain objects. We can 2

world picture 3 arrive at some things because they point us toward happiness, as if to find happiness would be to follow their point. Objects can thus be associated with affects before they are even encountered. We need to rethink the relationship between objects, affects and causality. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche suggests that the attribution of causality is retrospective. 13 We might assume then, that the experience of pain is caused by the nail near our foot. But we only notice the nail given we experience an affect. The object of feeling lags behind the feeling. The lag is not simply temporal, but involves active forms of mediation. We search for the object: or as Nietzsche describes “a reason is sought in persons, experiences, etc. for why one feels this way or that.” 14 We can loosen the bond between the object and the affect by recognizing the form of their bond. The object is understood retrospectively as the cause of the feeling. Having been understood in this way, I can just apprehend the nail and I will experience a pain affect, given the association between the object and the affect has been given. The object becomes a feeling-cause. Once an object is a feeling-cause, it can cause feeling, so that when we feel the feeling we expect to feel, we are affirmed. The retrospective causality of affect that Nietzsche describes quickly converts into what we could call an anticipatory causality. We can even anticipate an affect without being retrospective insofar as objects might acquire the value of proximities that are not derived from our own experience. For example, with fear-causes, a child might be told not to go near an object in advance of its arrival. Some things more than others are encountered as “to-be-feared” in the event of proximity, which is exactly how we can understood the anticipatory logic of the discourse of stranger danger. 15 We also anticipate that an object will cause happiness in advance of its arrival; the object enters our near sphere with positive affective value already in place. What makes this argument different from John Locke’s account of loving grapes because they taste delightful is that the judgment about certain objects as being “happy” is already made before we happen upon them. Indeed, we might happen upon things because they are already attributed as happiness causes. So the child might be asked to imagine happiness by imagining “happy events” in the future, such as a wedding day, “the happiest day of your life.” Perhaps this day happens because it is expected to be the happiest. We can just expect happiness from this or that to end up feeling disappointed. Arlie Russell Hoshchild, in her book The Managed Heart, explores how if a bride is not happy on the wedding day and even feels “depressed and upset” then she is experiencing an “inappropriate affect,” 16 or is being affected inappropriately. The bride has to “save the day” by feeling right: “sensing a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to be happy.” 17 The capacity to “save the day” depends on the bride being able to make her self be affected in the right way or at least being able to persuade others that she is being affected in the right way. When it can be said “the bride looked happy” then the expectation of happiness has become the happiness of expectation. To correct our feelings is to become disaffected from a former affectation: the bride makes herself happy by stopping herself being miserable. Of course we learn from this example that it is possible not to inhabit fully one’s own happiness, or even to be alienated from one’s happiness, if 3

world picture 3 the former affection remains lively, or if one is made uneasy by the labor of making oneself feel a certain way. Uneasiness might persist in the very feeling of being happy, as a feeling of unease with the happiness you are in. The apparent chanciness of happiness can be qualified: we do not just find happy objects anywhere. For a life to count as a good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course. Happiness might be how we reach such points, though it is not necessarily how we feel when we get there. We are directed by happiness toward certain things. The promise of happiness takes this form: if you have this or have that, or if you do this or do that, then happiness is what follows. Lauren Berlant usefully suggests that the object of desire could be rethought as a “cluster of promises.” 18 Happiness is promised through proximity to certain objects, which might be how objects cluster, becoming promising, becoming proximate. This is why the social bond is always sensational. We have a bond if we place our hopes for happiness in the same things. Objects that promise happiness are passed around, accumulating positive affective value as social goods. When we pass happy objects around, it is not necessarily the feeling that passes. To share in such objects, or have a share in such objects, means simply that you share an orientation toward those objects as being good. Take the example of the happy family. The family might be happy not because it causes happiness, or not even because it affects us in a good way, but if we share an orientation toward the family as being good, as being what promises happiness in return for loyalty. Such an orientation shapes what we do; you have to “make” and “keep” the family, which directs how you spend your time, energy and resources. Being oriented toward the family might make certain kinds of things proximate: tables, photographs, objects that are passed down through generations. The table, for example, gives form to the family, as the tangible thing over which the family gathers 19 . The table is happy when it secures this point. To be oriented toward the family does not mean inhabiting the same place. After all, as we know from Locke, pleasures can be idiosyncratic. Families may give one a sense of having “a place at the table” through the conversion of idiosyncratic difference into a happy object: love “happily” means knowing the peculiarity of a loved other’s likes. Love becomes an intimacy with what the other likes (rather than simply liking what the other likes), and is given on condition that such likes do not take us outside a shared horizon. The horizon of happiness is a horizon of likes. Sharing a horizon is not necessarily to feel alike. Think about experiences of alienation. When we feel pleasure from happy objects, we are aligned; we are facing the right way. We become alienated—out of line with an affective community—when we are not happy in proximity to objects that are attributed as being good. The gap between the affective value of an object and how we experience an object can involve a range of affects, which are directed by the modes of explanation we offer to fill this gap. I have already commented on the labor of trying to close the gap between an expectation and a feeling. When we cannot close the gap, we are disappointed; we are even disappointed by our inability to overcome our disappointment. Such disappointment can also involve an 4

world picture 3 anxious narrative of self-doubt (why I am not made happy by this, what is wrong with me?) or (my own preferred response) a narrative of rage, where the object that is supposed to make us happy is attributed as the cause of disappointment. Your rage might be directed against the object that fails to deliver its promise, or spill out toward those who promised you happiness through the elevation of such things as good. We become strangers, or affect aliens, in such moments. What passes when we pass happy objects around will remain an open and empirical question. After all, the word “passing” can mean not only “to send over” or “to transmit,” but also to transform objects by “a sleight of hand.” Like the game Telephone, what passes between proximate bodies might be affective precisely because it deviates and even perverts what was “sent out.” Affects involve perversion; and what we can describe as conversion points. One of my key questions is how such conversions happen, and “who” or “what” gets seen as converting bad feeling into good feeling and good into bad. When I hear people say “the bad feeling” is coming from “this person” or “that person” I am never convinced. I am sure a lot of my skepticism is shaped by childhood experiences of being the feminist daughter in a conventional family home. Say, we are seated at the dinner table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you find problematic. You respond carefully, perhaps. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel “wound up,” recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. Let us take seriously the figure of the feminist killjoy. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy? The feminist is an affect alien; not only is she not made happy by the objects that are supposed to cause happiness, but her failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others. We can place the figure of the feminist kill joy alongside the angry black woman, explored by black feminist writers such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks. 20 The angry black woman could also be described as a kill-joy; she may even kill feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist politics. bell hooks describes for us how the arrival of a woman of color disturbs a shared atmosphere: “a group of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel bonded on the basis of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of color enters the room. The white women will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory.” 21 It is not just that feelings are “in tension,” but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as getting in the way of its presumed organic enjoyment and solidarity. The body of color is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared atmosphere. hooks shows how as a feminist of color you do not even have to say anything to cause tension. The mere proximity of some bodies involves an affective conversion. To get along you have to go along with things that might mean for some not even being able to enter the room. We learn from this example how histories are

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world picture 3 condensed in the very intangibility of an atmosphere, or in the tangibility of the bodies that seem always to “get in the way” of the happiness of others. Making Others Happy Robert Heinlin’s definition of love “is a condition in which the happiness of another is  essential to your own”. 22  It is perhaps a truism that to love another is to want their

happiness. Whether or not we agree with this truth, we can learn from its status as truth. I want to turn to a text from the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s Émile, first published in 1762, which was crucial for how it re-defined education and for the role it gave to happiness. The story is told in the first person, by a narrator whose duty is to instruct a young orphan Émile, in order that he can take up his place in the world. Rousseau also offers a model not only of what a good education would do for his Émile, but also for Émile’s would-be wife, Sophy, whom he introduces in the fifth book. Sophie must become a good woman. As Rousseau describes, the good woman: loves virtue because there is nothing fairer in itself. She loves it because it is a woman’s glory and because a virtuous woman is little lower than the angels; she loves virtue as the only road to real happiness, because she sees nothing but poverty, neglect, unhappiness, shame and disgrace in the life of the bad woman; she loves virtue because it is dear to her revered father, and to her tender and worthy mother; they are not content to be happy in their own virtue, they desire hers; and she finds her chief happiness in the hope of just making them happy! 23 The complexity of this statement should not be underestimated. She loves virtue as it is the road to happiness; unhappiness and disgrace follow from being bad. The good woman loves what is good because what is good is what is loved by her parents. The parents desire not only what is good; they desire their daughter to be good. The daughter desires to be good to give them what they desire. For her to be happy, she must be good, as being good is what makes them happy, and she can only be happy if they are happy. It might seem that what we can call “conditional happiness,” when one person’s happiness is made conditional on another person’s, involves a form of generosity: a refusal to have a share in a happiness that cannot be shared. And yet the terms of conditionality are unequal. If certain people come first—we might say those who are already in place (such as parents, hosts or citizens)—then their happiness comes first. For those who are positioned as coming after, happiness means following somebody else’s goods. I suggested earlier that we might share a social bond if the same objects make us happy. I am now arguing that happiness itself can become the shared object. Or to be more precise, if one person’s happiness comes first, then their happiness becomes a shared object. Max Scheler’s differentiation between communities of feeling and fellow-feeling might help explain the significance of this argument. In communities of feeling, we share feelings because we share the same object of feeling. Fellow-feeling would be when I feel sorrow about your grief although I do not share your object of grief: “all fellow-feeling involves intentional reference of the feeling of joy or sorrow to the other person’s experience.” 24 I would speculate that in everyday life these different forms of shared 6

world picture 3 feeling can be confused because the object of feeling is sometimes but not always exterior to the feeling that is shared. Say I am happy about your happiness. Your happiness is with x. If I share x, then your happiness and my happiness is not only shared, but can accumulate through being given out and returned. Or I can simply disregard x: if my happiness is directed “just” toward your happiness, and you are happy about x, the exteriority of x can disappear or cease to matter (although it can reappear). In cases where I am also affected by x, and I do not share your happiness with x, I might become uneasy and ambivalent: I am made happy by your happiness but I am not made happy by what makes you happy. The exteriority of x would then announce itself as a point of crisis. I might take up what makes you happy as what makes me happy, which may involve compromising my own idea of happiness (so I will go along with x in order to make you happy even if x does not “really” make me happy). In order to preserve the happiness of all, we might even conceal from ourselves our unhappiness with x, or try and persuade ourselves that x matters less than the happiness of the other who is made happy by x. 25 We have a hint of the rather uneasy dynamics of conditional happiness in Émile. For Sophy wanting to make her parents happy commits her in a certain direction, regardless of what she might or might not want. If she can only be happy if they are happy then she must do what makes them happy. In one episode, the father speaks to the daughter about becoming a woman: “you are a big girl now, Sophy, you will soon be a woman. We want you to be happy, for our sakes as well as yours, for our happiness depends on yours. A good girl finds her own happiness in the happiness of a good man.” 26 For the daughter not to go along with the parent’s desire for marriage would be not only to cause her parents unhappiness, but would threaten the very reproduction of social form. The daughter has a duty to reproduce the form of the family, which means taking up the cause of parental happiness as her own. We learn from reading books such as Émile how much happiness is used as a technology or instrument, which allows the re-orientation of individual desire towards a common good. We also learn from reading such books how happiness is not simply instrumental, but works as an idea or aspiration within everyday life, shaping the very terms in which individuals share their world with others. We do things when we speak of happiness, when we put happiness into words. Let’s take the statement: I am happy if you are. Such a statement can be attributed, as a way of sharing an evaluation of an object. I could be saying I am happy about something if you are happy about something. The statement, though, does not require an object to mediate between the “I” and the “you”; the “you” can be the object, can be what my happiness is dependent upon. I will only be happy if you are. To say I will be happy only if you are happy means that I will be unhappy if you are unhappy. Your unhappiness would make me unhappy. Given this, you might be obliged to conceal your unhappiness to preserve my happiness: You must be happy for me. I am not saying that such speech acts always translate in quite this way. But we can learn from how the desire for the happiness of others can be the point at which they are bound to be happy for us. If to love another is to want their happiness, then love might 7

world picture 3 be experienced as the duty to be happy for another. It is interesting that when we speak of wanting the happiness of the loved other we often hesitate with the signifier “just.” “I just want you to be happy.” What does it mean to want “just” happiness? What does it mean for a parent to say this to a child? We might assume that the desire just for the child’s happiness would offer a certain kind of freedom, as if to say: “I don’t want you to be this, or to do that; I just want you to be or to do “whatever” makes you happy.” You could say that the “whatever” seems to release us from the obligation of the “what”. The desire just for the child’s happiness seems to offer the freedom of a certain indifference to the content of a decision. Let’s take the psychic drama of the queer child. You might say that the queer child is an unhappy object for many parents. In some parental responses to the child coming out, this unhappiness is not so much expressed as being unhappy about the child being queer, but as being unhappy about the child being unhappy. Take the following exchange from the novel, Annie on My Mind (1982) by Nancy Garden: “Lisa”, my father said, “I told you I’d support you and I will….But honey… I have to say to you I’ve never thought gay people can be very happy—no children for one thing, no real family life. Honey, you are probably going to be a very good architect – but I want you to be happy in other ways, too, as your mother is, to have a husband and children. I know you can do both….” I am happy, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I’m happy with Annie; she and my work are all I’ll ever need; she’s happy too—we both were until this happened. 27 This speech act functions powerfully. The parent makes an act of identification with an imagined future of necessary and inevitable unhappiness. Such identification through grief about what the child will lose, reminds us that the queer life is already constructed as an unhappy life, as a life without the “things” that make you happy: a husband and children. The desire for the child’s happiness is far from indifferent. The speech act, “I just want you to be happy” is directive at the very point of its imagined indifference. For the daughter, it is only the eyes that can speak; and they try to tell an alternative story about happiness and unhappiness. In her response, she claims happiness, for sure. She is happy “with Annie”; which is to say, she is happy with this relationship and this life that it will commit her to. The power of the unspoken response is lodged in the use of the word “until”: we were happy “until” this happened. The father’s speech act creates the very affective state of unhappiness that is imagined to be the inevitable consequence of the daughter’s decision. When “this” happens, unhappiness does follow. The social struggle within families is often a struggle over the causes of unhappiness. The father is unhappy as he thinks the daughter will be unhappy if she is queer. The daughter is unhappy as the father is unhappy with her being queer. The father witnesses the daughter’s unhappiness as a sign of the truth of his position: she will be unhappy because she is queer. Even the happy queer becomes unhappy at this point. And clearly the family can only be maintained as a happy object, as being what is anticipated to cause happiness, by making the unhappiness of the queer child its point.

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world picture 3 The speech act “I just want you to be happy” can be used as a form of tolerance or acceptance in coming out stories. A contrasting example to Annie on My Mind was presented in Dana’s story of coming out to her parents in The L Word. After trying to persuade her daughter to give up desire for duty, her mother eventually says: “I can see that you’ve found love. It doesn’t matter what form it takes as long as it makes you happy”. It is always paradoxical to say something does not matter: when you have to say something does not matter it usually implies that it does. Recognition can withdraw the approval it gives. What does it mean for recognition to be made conditional on happiness? I have suggested that some things more than others are attributed as happiness causes. In this occasion, the couple are asking for parental blessing of their marriage: a straight way of doing queer love, perhaps. If queers, in order to be recognized, have to the approximate signs of happiness, then they might have to minimize signs of queerness. In other words, being turned by happiness can mean being turned toward the social forms in which hopes for happiness have already been deposited. One thinks of the final film in If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000, dir. Anne Heche): the happy image in the end is of a white middleclass lesbian couple who are pregnant: they dance around their immaculate house, and everything seems to shimmer with its nearness to ordinary scenes of happy domesticity. Their happiness amounts to achieving relative proximity to the good life. 28 If this is a form of optimism, then it might be a “cruel optimism” as Laurent Berlant describes so well. You follow certain ways of life in the hope that you will catch happiness on the way, even if, or perhaps more cruelly, even because, they embody the scenes of past rejection. You can see why we might want to embrace the figure of the unhappy queer, rather than placing our hopes in an alternative figure of the happy queer. The unhappy queer is unhappy with the world that reads queers as unhappy. The risk of promoting happy queers is that the unhappiness of this world could disappear from view. Take some of the responses to the Canadian lesbian film, Lost and Delirious, released in 2001 (directed by Léa Pool). In the film, two girls fall in love. One cannot bear giving up on the life promised by acceptance into heterosexuality, so she gives up her love. The other cannot bear life without her love so gives up her life. Critics described the film as “dated.” One critic even suggests the film is “time-warped,” as if it is twisted out of shape in its representation of something that is no longer. 29 The implication of such descriptions is that queers can now come out, be accepted and be happy. The good faith in queer progression can be a form of bad faith. Those of us committed to queer life know that forms of recognition are either precariously conditional—you have to be the right kind of queer by depositing your hope for happiness in the right places—or it is simply not given. Not only is recognition not given, but it is often not given in places that are not noticeable to those who do not need to be recognized, which helps sustain the illusion that it is given (which, in turn, means if you say that it has not been given, you are read as paranoid). Indeed, the illusion that same sex object choices have become accepted and acceptable (that civil partnerships mean queer civility) both conceals the ongoing realities of discrimination, non-recognition and violence, and requires that we approximate the straight signs of civility. We must stay unhappy with this world. 9

world picture 3 The recognition of queers can be narrated as the hope or promise of becoming acceptable, where in being acceptable you must become acceptable to a world that has already decided what is acceptable. Recognition becomes a gift given from the straight world to queers, which conceals long histories of queer labor and struggle, 30 the life worlds generated by queer activism, which has created a “place at the table” in the hope that the table won’t keep its place. It is as if such recognition is a form of straight hospitality, which in turn positions happy queers as guests in other people’s homes, reliant on their continuing good will. In such a world you are asked to be grateful for the bits and pieces that you are given. To be a guest is to experience a moral obligation to be on “your best behavior” such that to refuse to fulfill this obligation would be to threaten your right to co-existence. The happy queer, the one who has good manners, who is seated at the table in the right way, might be a strategic form of occupying an uncivil world. But strategic occupations can keep things in place. Or we can keep in place by the effort of an occupation. I think we know this. There are of course good reasons for telling stories about queer happiness, in response and as a response to the presumption that a queer life is necessarily and inevitably an unhappy life. 31 We just have to hear the violence of Michael’s tragic comment, “show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse” from Matt Crowley’s 1968 play, “The Boys in the Band” to be reminded of these reasons. 32 And yet, at the same time, and perhaps even for the same reasons, we can see why telling stories about queer unhappiness might matter. Being attributed as the cause of unhappiness has unhappy effects. It might be the pain of not being recognized. It might be the conditions of recognition. It might even be the work required to counter the perception of your life as unhappy: the very pressure to be happy in order to show that you are not unhappy can create unhappiness, to be sure. Unhappiness and Deviation Happiness scripts are powerful even when we fail or refuse to follow them, when our desires deviate from their straight lines. In this way, the scripts speak a certain truth: deviation can involve unhappiness. The “whole world” it might seem depends on your being directed in the right way, towards the right kind of things. The unhappiness of the deviant has a powerful function as a perverse promise (if you do this, you will get that!), a promise that simultaneously offers a threat (so don’t do that!). To deviate is always to risk a world even when you don’t lose the world you risk. Queer histories are the histories of those who are willing to risk the consequences of deviation. The history of the word “unhappy” teaches us about the unhappiness of the history of happiness. In its earliest uses, unhappy meant “causing misfortune or trouble.” Only later, did it come to mean “miserable in lot or circumstances” or “wretched in mind.” 33 We can learn from the swiftness of the translation between being attributed as the cause of unhappiness and being described as unhappy. We must learn. The word “wretched” also has a suggestive genealogy, coming from wretch, referring to a stranger, exile, or banished person. The wretch is not only the one driven out of their native country, but is also defined as one who is “sunk in deep distress, sorrow, misfortune, or poverty,” “a miserable, unhappy, or unfortunate person,” “a poor or hapless 10

world picture 3 being,” and even “a vile, sorry, or despicable person.” Can we rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretch? If we listen to those who are cast as wretched, perhaps their wretchedness would no longer belong to them. The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the happiness of the familiar. It is hard when your very arrival into the world becomes the cause of unhappiness. We could take any number of sad queer books and they would show us this. Take The Well of Loneliness. The book tells the story of Stephen, described throughout as an invert, whose life hurtles towards “the tragic and miserable ending” which seems the only available plot for inversion. 34 Throughout the novel, Stephen has a series of tragic and doomed love affairs, ending with her relationship with Mary Lewellyn, described as “the child, the friend, the belovèd,” 35 . The novel does not give us a happy ending, and this seems partly its point: Stephen gives up Mary as a way of relieving her from the burden of their love. Every sad book has its moments, the moments when it is all “too much,” when a life, a body, a world, becomes unbearable. Turning points are usually breaking points. A key turning point in the novel is when Stephen and Mary arrive at Alec’s bar, a space in which the “miserable army” of the inverted and perverted reside. Stephen is approached by Adolphe Blanc, a “gentle and learned Jew.” He says to her: In this little room, tonight, every night, there is so much misery, so much despair that the walls seem almost too narrow to contain it. Yet outside there are happy people who sleep, the sleep of the so-called just and righteous. When they wake it will be to persecute those who, through no fault of their own, have been set apart from the day of their birth, deprived of all sympathy, all understanding. They are thoughtless, these happy people who sleep. 36 In this extraordinary passage, Adolphe Blanc speaks what we could call the truth of the novel: the happiness of the straight world is a form of injustice. Heterosexual happiness is narrated as a social wrong, as based on the unthinking exclusion of those whose difference is already narrated as deprivation. The unhappiness of the deviant performs a claim for justice. At one point, Stephen and Mary are rejected by a woman who had befriended them. She rejects them to protect her own reputation and the reputation of her daughter. She sends them a letter announcing that she has been forced “to break off our friendship” and asks them not to come to her house for Christmas as had been planned. 37 In other words, to protect her family’s happiness she has to reject proximity to those who might “stain” her reputation, those who are already attributed as unhappiness causes, as being or embodying the unhappiness they are assumed to cause. They are no longer welcome at the family table; they cannot share the celebration. We can see from this example how happiness can be fearful and defensive. You might refuse proximity to somebody out of fear that they will take your happiness away. To be rejected in order to preserve the happiness of others can mean that you experience the feelings that are attributed to you: “Then it seemed to Stephen that all the pain that had 11

world picture 3 so far been thrust upon her by existence, was as nothing to the unendurable pain which she must now bear to hear that sobbing, to see Mary thus wounded, and utterly crushed, thus shamed and humbled for the sake of their love, thus bereft of all dignity and protection.” 38 Stephen cannot bear the unhappiness that she witnesses on the face of the beloved. It is because the world is unhappy with queer love that queers become unhappy; because queer love is an unhappiness-cause for the others whom they love, who share their place of residence. It is not then that queers feel sad or wretched right from the beginning. Queer unhappiness does not provide us with a beginning. Certain subjects might appear as sad or wretched, or might even become sad or wretched because they are perceived as lacking what causes happiness. It does seem like we hurtle towards our miserable ending, when Stephen gives Mary up, by appearing to give Mary to Martin. The association between queer fates and fatality seems partly the point. For some readers this ending is evidence that the novel does not place its own hopes for happiness within lesbianism. Jay Prosser, for instance, argues “that Stephen gives up Mary to Martin Hallam in spite of Mary’s devotion to her indicates that the invert functions not as a figure for lesbianism—a lure or a construct—but precisely as its refusal. Through her passing over Mary (both passing over her and passing her over to Martin), Stephen affirms her identification with the heterosexual man.” 39 I want to read what is being affirmed by Stephen’s gesture quite differently. Does Stephen give Mary to Martin as Prosser suggests? I want to suggest that an alternative gift economy is at stake. Take the following passage: Never before had she seen so clearly all that was lacking to Mary Llewellyn, all that would pass from her faltering grasp, perhaps never to return, with the passing of Martin—children, a home that the world will respect, ties of affection that the world would hold sacred, the blessèd security and the peace of being released from the world’s persecution. And suddenly Martin appeared to Stephen as a creature endowed with incalculable bounty, having in his hands all those priceless gifts which she, love’s mendicant could never offer. Only one gift she could offer to love, to Mary, and that was the gift of Martin. 40 Stephen does not give Mary to Martin. She gives Martin to Mary. She gives Martin to Mary as a way of giving Mary access to a happiness that she cannot give. This gift signals not a failure to love, but a form of love: it is because the world is unhappy with their love that Stephen cannot be the cause of Mary’s happiness. We can see the problems of the idea that love is to cause or to want to cause happiness for a queer politics given a world in which queerness is read as wretched. In other words, a queer lover might not be able to cause happiness for her beloved if her beloved cannot bear being rejected by the straight world. We could of course point to a counter history of queers who have caused other queers to be happy through their love, even if the world has not been happy with such love. But I do wonder whether a queer definition of love might want to separate love from happiness, given how happiness tends to come with rather straight conditions. I thus offer Simone Weil’s definition of love as a queer definition: “Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy. Love on the part of someone who is unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is happy without sharing in this happiness or 12

world picture 3 even wishing to do so.” 41 Queer love might involve happiness only by insisting that such happiness is not what is shared. Stephen might not insist on sharing Mary’s happiness, but it is her desire for Mary’s happiness that leads to the awkward gift of Martin. We do not know, in the novel, whether Mary receives this gift: we are not given an ending for Mary, as Clare Hemmings observes. 42 Perhaps the point is that Mary’s happiness cannot be told, as Mary’s “real story has yet to be told” as Esther Newton describes. 43 If anything, for Mary, Stephen’s gesture is lived as a death: “A mist closing down, a thick black mist. Someone pushing the girl away, without speaking. Mary’s queer voice coming out of the gloom, muffled by the folds of the black mist, only a word here and there getting through: ‘All my life I’ve given…you’ve killed…I loved you…Cruel, oh cruel! You’re unspeakably cruel…’ Then the sound of the rough and pitiful sobbing.” 44 Martin does arrive at this moment, but only because Stephen has put him there. Perhaps the injustice of the ending is the presumption that Mary’s happiness depends on being given up. Or does the ending give up on happiness by giving Mary up? This alternative ending does not convert unhappiness into happiness, but does something else with unhappiness. For in the moment Stephen gives up on happiness, she feels a bond of unhappiness with those who share the signs of inversion: Rockets of pain, burning rockets of pain—their pain, her pain, all welded together into one consuming agony. Rockets of pain that shot up and burst, dropping scorching tears of fire on the spirit—her pain, their pain…all the misery at Alec’s. And the press and the clamour of those countless others—they fought, they trampled, they were getting her under. In their madness to become articulate through her, they were tearing her to pieces, getting her under. They were everywhere now, cutting off her retreat: neither bolts nor bars would avail to save her. The walls fell down and crumbed before them; at the cry of their suffering the walls fell and crumbled: “We are coming, Stephen—we are still coming on, and our name is legion—you dare not disown us!” She raised her arms, trying to ward them off, but they closed in and in: “You dare not disown us!” They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful—it ached with its fearful and sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation. 45 What is striking for me is the switch between “her pain, their pain” and “their pain, her pain”; the passage weaves the stories of pain together. She comes to embody this pain, to speak it, to articulate it. At this moment, the moment when she seems most on her own, she is also most connected to others. And at this very moment, this moment of madness, “the walls fell down.” This is an image of revolution: the walls that contain the misery are brought down: an un-housing that is not only a call for arms, but a disturbance in the very grounds for happiness, insofar as the happy folk, those who sleep, those who do not have to think, depend on misery being kept under ground. Indeed, the moment of revolution is a new form of reproduction, a reproduction of another kind of life form, a queer life form, perhaps. Queer unhappiness offers a rather deviant form of fertility. In The Well of Loneliness, the solution to a world that is unhappy with queer love is to give up the possibility of queer happiness and revolt against the world. It does not follow that 13

world picture 3 queers must become unhappy even if we are attributed as the origin of familial and social unhappiness. We know after all that queer history is a history of loves that are not given up. We have behind us many stories of queers who are neither made unhappy by causing unhappiness, nor who try and become happy by minimizing the signs of their queerness. Take for example Rita Mae Brown’s novel Rubyfruit Jungle, first published in 1973, which tells the story of Molly Bolt. One of the first lesbian books I read, it is for me a very happy object. I love it. I loved Molly, for her fierceness, her defiance, her willingness to get into trouble. Molly follows her desires, wherever they take her. The story of the book is a story of her conquests, and there are many. She says in response to a question from a lover about how many women she has slept with: “Hundreds. I’m irresistible.” 46 She still has to live with consequences of her deviation. When she is called into the dean's office at University of Florida after her lesbian behavior has been reported, Molly is asked by the dean about her problem with girls, and replies: “Dean Marne, I don’t have any problems relating to girls and I’m in love with my roommate. She makes me happy.” Her scraggly red eyebrows with the brown pencil glaring through shot up. “Is this relationship with Faye Raider of an, uh—intimate nature?” “We fuck, if that’s what you’re after.” I think her womb collapsed on that one. Sputtering, she pressed forward. “Don’t you find that somewhat of an aberration? Doesn’t this disturb you, my dear?” 47 Rather than being disturbed by being found disturbing, Molly performs the ultimate act of defiance, by claiming her happiness as abnormal. To be happily queer is to explore the unhappiness of what gets counted as normal. It is as if queers, by doing what they want, expose the unhappiness of having to sacrifice personal desires, in the perversity of their twists and turns, for the happiness of others. 48 Even the ending of the book is not happy—Molly is the only one from film school who is not offered a break: “No, I wasn’t surprised, but it still brought me down. I kept hoping against hope that I’d be the bright exception, the talented token that smashed sex and class barriers. Hurrah for her. After all, I was the best in my class, didn’t that count for something?” 49 And yet, we don’t end there, with the loss of hope. For Molly articulates a wish that at the very least, she can be the “hottest fifty-year-old this side of the Mississippi.” 50 To be happily queer is to hope that queerness is what will endure life’s struggle. This is not to say we always have to struggle to be queer. We can also turn to another more recent novel narrated by a happily queer subject, Babyji, published by Abha Dawesar in 2005. Set in India, this novel is written from the point of view of Anamika Sharma, a fun, smart, spirited and sexy teenager, who seduces three women: an older divorcee she names India, a servant girl called Rani, and her school friend Sheela. As a character, Anamika is very appealing. Everyone desires her, wants something from her, such that the reader is encouraged to desire her too, as well as to identify with her desire. We do not notice happiness used as a requirement that Anamika give up her desires. Instead, the first use of happiness as a speech act is of a rather more queer nature: “‘I 14

world picture 3 want to make you happy,’ I said as I was leaving. ‘You do make me happy,’ India said. ‘No, I don’t mean that way. I mean in bed.’ 51 Anamika separates her own desire to make her lover happy for “that way.” She wants to make India happy “in bed”, to be the cause of her pleasure. Not wanting to cause happiness “that way” is what releases Anamika from a certain kind of drama: it is in the bed and not on the table where she finds her place. She refuses to give happiness the power to secure a specific image of what would count as a good life, or of what she can give. This book is certainly about the perverse potential of pleasure. This is not to say that Anamika does not have to rebel or does not get into trouble. Almost all of this trouble is located in her relationship to her father. Unsurprisingly, the conflict between father and queer daughter turns to the question of happiness. Anamika says to her father: “You like tea, I like coffee. I want to be a physicist, and Vidur wants to join the army. I don’t want to get married, and mom did. How can the same formula make us all happy.” 52 To which her father replies, “What do you mean you don’t want to get married.” Anamika recognizes the idiosyncratic nature of happy object choices: different people are made happy by different things, we have a diversity of likes and dislikes. She names marriage as one happy object choice that exists alongside others. The inclusion of marriage as something that you might or might not like is picked up by the father, turning queer desire into a question that interrupts the flow of the conversation. The exchange shows us how object choices are not equivalent, how some choices such as marrying or not marrying are not simply presentable as idiosyncratic likes, as they take us beyond the horizon of intimacy, in which those likes can gather as a shared form. Although the novel might seem to articulate a queer liberalism, whereby the queer subject is free to be happy in their own way, it evokes the limits of that liberalism, by showing how the conflation of marriage with the good life is maintained in response to queer deviation. Although we can live without the promise of happiness, and can do so “happily,” we live with the consequences of being an unhappiness-cause for others, which is why the process of coming out is an ongoing site of possibility and struggle. Queer politics might radicalize freedom as the freedom to be unhappy. The freedom to be unhappy would be the freedom to live a life that deviates from the paths of happiness, wherever that deviation takes us. It would mean the freedom to cause unhappiness by acts of deviation. Queer enjoyment can thus be expressed as an embodiment of the freedom to be unhappy. In calling for the freedom to be unhappy, I am thus not saying queers must be unhappy in the sense of feeling sad or wretched, or that queer politics demands our unhappiness. I am not saying that unhappiness becomes necessary. I would say that unhappiness is always possible, which makes the necessity of happiness an exclusion not just of unhappiness but of possibility. The history of happiness is not simply about the description of unhappiness as the failure to be happy in the right way; it is also about the exclusion of the hap from happiness, as the exclusion of possibility and chance. I now think of queer movements as hap movements rather than happiness movements. It is not about the unhappy ones becoming the happy ones. Revolutionary forms of political consciousness involve heightening our awareness of just how much there is to be unhappy about. Yet this does

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world picture 3 not mean unhappiness becomes our political cause. In refusing to be constrained by happiness, we can open up other ways of being, of being perhaps. The word “perhaps” shares its “hap” with happiness. We can get from the “perhaps” to the wretch if we deviate at a certain point. One definition of the wretch is a “poor and hapless being.” I would say those who enter the history of happiness as wretches might be hapful rather than hapless. To deviate from the paths of happiness is to refuse to inherit the elimination of the hap. Affect aliens, those who are alienated by happiness, can thus be creative: not only do we want the wrong things, not only do we embrace possibilities that we are asked to give up, but we can create life worlds around these wants. Whilst we might insist on the freedom to be unhappy, we would not leave happiness behind us. Maybe it will be up to queers to put the hap back into happiness. Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her books include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (Routledge, 2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Routledge, 2004); Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others (Duke University Press. 2006); and The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a collection of essays on diversity and racism and has recently begun research for a new book provisionally entitled Willful Subjects: The Psychic Life of Social Dissent. Notes This paper is drawn from my forthcoming book The Promise of Happiness (and in particular from the chapter “Unhappy Queers” which includes a much wider archive of queer materials than is represented here). This book is due to be published by Duke University Press in 2010. Thanks to Duke for permission to include this paper in World Picture. 2 Vin Packer, Spring Fire (San Francisco. Cleis Press, 2004), vi. 3 Ibid., vii. 4 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: The Politics of Loss in Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 127. 5 Evelyn Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 6 This is not to reduce happiness to good feeling. The association between happiness with good feeling is a modern one, as Darrin McMahon shows us in his monumental history of happiness [Darrin M McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)]. We have inherited this association such that it is hard to think about happiness without thinking about feeling. Happiness has also been associated with virtue and the value of flourishing: with the good life. My interest is in how happiness involves an affective as well as moral economy: I will thus explore the relationship between feeling good and other kinds of goods, or how feelings participate in making some things and not others good. 1

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Lisa Walker, Looking Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race and Lesbian Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 127. 8 Catherine R. Stimpson, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces (New York: Methuen, 1988), 101. 9 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 10 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 216. 11 Ibid., 215. 12 Ibid., 247. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 294-295. 14 Ibid., 354. 15 See Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000). 16 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 59. 17 Ibid., 61. 18Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses,” New Formations, 63 (2008): 33. 19 In Queer Phenomenology I described the table as a kinship object and asked how a queer politics might offer a different angle on tables. The argument is extended here (somewhat obliquely) by considering the tables of happiness. 20 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1984); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from Margin to Centre (London: Pluto Press, 2000). I develop my argument about the figure of the angry black woman in the chapters “Feminist Killjoys” and “Melancholic Migrants” in The Promise of Happiness (forthcoming). 21 hooks, 56. 22 Cited in Bill Lucas, Bill (Happy Families: How To Make One, How to Keep One. Harlow: Educational Publishers, 2006), 26. This principle that to love makes the other’s happiness essential to your own is widely articulated. But does this principle always hold true? I would say there is a desire for this principle to be true, but that this desire does not make the principle true, as a psychoanalytic approach might suggest. If love is to desire the happiness of another, then the happiness of the subject who loves might depend upon the happiness of the other who is loved. As such, love can also be experienced as the possibility that the beloved can take your happiness away from you. This anxious happiness, you might say, forms the basis of an ambivalent sociality: in which we love those we love, but we might also hate those we love for making us love them, which is what makes us vulnerable to being affected by what happens to them: in other words, love extends our vulnerability beyond our own skin. Perhaps fellow-feeling is a form of social hope: we want to want happiness for those we love; we want our happy objects to amount to the same thing. Even if we feel guilty for wishing unhappiness upon our enemies, it is a less guilty wish than wishing unhappiness upon our friends. In other words, our presumed indifference toward the happiness of strangers might help us to sustain the fantasy that we always want the happiness of those we love, or that our love wants their happiness. 23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993), 359. 24 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 12. 7

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You might be asked to disregard your views on x in order to make someone happy. I have found this especially true in the case of weddings. You are asked or even instructed to join the happy event of the wedding because it would make someone happy for you to share in their happy occasion even if they know that you are not happy with the very idea of marriage that is celebrated in weddings. You are often judged as selfish when you refuse the demand to participate in the happiness of others, especially in cases when such happiness is sanctioned by law, habit or custom. 26 Rousseau, 434. 27 Nancy Garden, Annie on My Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), 191. 28 In The Promise of Happiness I offer a detailed reading of this film, suggesting that the happiness of the ending can be related to queer struggles for a bearable life, and not simply or only to aspirations for the good life. So while I am suggesting here that promotions of happiness can involve an affective form of homonormativity [see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Judith Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005)], I would not and do not equate happiness with normativity. As I will suggest in due course, being happily queer can be to be happy with and about one’s deviation. It is worth noting however that in books such as How to be a Happy Homosexual the promotion of happy homosexuality does involve a commitment to “de-queer” gay life. The book includes criticisms of practices such as cottaging, as “for the isolated and insecure gay man it fosters the idea that contact with gay people is of necessity dirty, undignified, nerve-wracking and dangerous. It can do nothing for the self-image of those gay men, who already have a bad opinion of their sexuality” (Terry Sanderson, How to be a Happy Homosexual: A Guide for Gay Men (London: The Other Way Press, 1991) 64). Cruising is also criticized as it can “increase the sense of isolation in those who are already unhappy with their sexuality” (Sanderson, 67). Sanderson criticizes the hedonism of queer culture, suggesting that homosexual men need to develop an ethics premised on making other people happy (145). Although he does not describe such ethics in terms of conservative family values (or in terms of mimicking straight relationships or family forms), it is clearly linked to the promoting of a sociability premised on fellow feeling or what he calls “finer feelings,” which is contrasted to the superficiality and hedonism of queer cultures (145). I am indebted here to Vincent Quinn for an excellent paper which reflected on How to be a Happy Homosexual as a sexual conduct manual. 29 See http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/l/lost-and-delirious.shtml. Last accessed July 9, 2009. 30 See Sarah Schulman, Stage Struck: Theatre, Aids and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 102. 31 The perception of queers as inevitably unhappy can have extremely violent and devastating consequences. See for example Michael Schroeder and Ariel Shidlo’s analysis of how clinicians have used this argument—that gay people will inevitably be unhappy— to justify sexual conversion therapy (Michael Schroeder and Ariel Shidlo, “Ethical Issues in Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapies: An Empirical Study of Consumers” in Ariel Shidlo, Michael Schroeder, Jack Drescher (eds), Sexual Conversion Therapy: Ethical, Clinical, and Research Perspectives (Philadelphia: Haworth Press, 2002), 134-135). By implication, gay patients are asked to give up desire for happiness. Many of these homophobic discourses in psychiatry aimed to debunk what they call “the myth of the happy homosexual” in order to argue for “cure” rather than “adjustment” (see Peter Conrad and 25

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Joseph W. Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 191). They are deeply invested in the necessity and inevitably of queer unhappiness. So although we might want to question the promotion of happy homosexuals discussed in note 28, we might also want to remember that disbelief in the very possibility of queer happiness is crucial to the violence of homophobia. 32 Cited by Sanderson, 141-2. 33These definitions are all taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). All subsequent definitions and etymological references are drawn from the OED. 34 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago Press, 1982), 411. Derived from sexology, inversion was used as a way of interpreting lesbian sexuality (if she desires women, she must be a man). Given this, the invert both stands for and stands in for the figure of the lesbian, a way of presenting her that also erases her, which is not to say that we should assume the invert can only signify in this way. See Ahmed 2006 for a discussion of the relation between the figure of the lesbian and the invert in The Well of Loneliness, as well as Prosser (Second Skins: Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) who reads the invert as the transsexual. See also Doan and Prosser’s edited collection on The Well of Loneliness (2001), which includes articles on the relations between inversion, transsexuality and homosexuality. 35 The Well of Loneliness, 303. 36 Ibid., 394-5. 37 Ibid., 374. 38 Ibid., 375. 39 Prosser (1998: 166). 40 The Well of Loneliness, 438-9 (emphasis added). 41 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 63. 42 Clare Hemmings, “‘All my life I have been waiting for something’: Theorising Femme Narrative in The Well of Loneliness,” in Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (eds.), Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 194. 43 Esther Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 188. Both Hemmings and Newton are addressing how The Well’s focus on the “the mannish lesbian” means that the position of the femme or feminine lesbian is left vacant. My reading concurs with theirs and suggests that this vacation could be reread in terms of happiness: the femme’s desire is not presented beyond the desire for happiness, which is assumed to lead her back into the straight world. Such readings are in sympathy with the novel, recognizing the force of its own revelation of the injustice of the straight world, even if they suggest that femme desire outside the happiness economy needs to be spoken. 44The Well of Loneliness, 445. 45 Ibid., 447. 46 Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle, (New York, Bantam Books, 1973), 200. 47 Ibid., 127. 48 The social investment in unhappy queer lives can thus exist alongside envy for queer enjoyment: queer enjoyment bypasses the duty to reproduce social form (“the happiness duty” is a “reproductive duty”), and is thus given without being earned. By living outside the logics of duty and sacrifice, queer pleasures embody what is threatening about freedom. 19

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Rubyfruit Jungle, 245. Ibid., 246. 51 Abha Dawesar, Babyji (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 31. 52 Ibid., 177. 49 50

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John Stuart Mill, the Autobiography, and the Paradox of Happiness Linda Austin John Stuart Mill’s posthumously published Autobiography (1873) is a notoriously guarded document, particularly for those who have read it in the Collected Works, which juxtaposes the final version with the draft of 1853-54. The comparison reveals that Mill cancelled passages and words that added emotional coloring to his account of his relationship with his father. Following his revisions reveals, as his editors have observed, an increasing detachment, particularly from his early life. 1 And yet the structure of the Autobiography hinges on the discovery of emotion, which occurs in Chapter Five, “A Crisis in My Mental History. One Stage Onward.” In it, Mill stages the beginning of his famous personal crisis with a question that he asked himself sometime in 1826, when he was 20 years old. “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?”(1:139). 2 His negative response marks the point at which he turns from the analytical habits developed under the tutelage of his father, James Mill, to the development of his own emotions. Mill’s question suggests that happiness or joy (a telling equation I will pursue) has a newly privileged place in his thoughts, even though happiness—specifically the greatest happiness for the greatest number—was the operating motive and principle of the Utilitarian philosophy from which his question marks a break. Indeed happiness occupies an ambivalent position not only in Mill’s work, but among the primary emotions (anger, sorrow, surprise, shame). It belongs both to the internal and to the external: it can indicate either a self-aware “feeling” (as either idealist or materialist psychologists of Mill’s era would have defined this word) or the subject’s unacknowledged and uncontrollable situation—the happiness of fortune or misfortune. One can be self-consciously happy, or one can inhabit the ontological state of happiness without being particularly aware of doing so. The alternatives are antithetical, for happiness is the only one of the main emotions in which self-consciousness threatens the duration and intensity of the feeling, as well as the unreflective ease of good fortune. Mill would have known this from reading Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34), which he acknowledged “as one of the channels through which I received the influences which enlarged my early narrow creed” (1:181). In the chapter entitled “Everlasting No,” Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle’s Wertherian hero, comes to view happiness as self-sabotaging emotion because it is self-conscious. “If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray.” 3 His “Everlasting No,” although a rejection of despair, is not an embrace of the concept of happiness but rather, an affirmation of an ancient prohibition against the emotion of happiness. 4 It goes back at least to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which ends with the chorus admonishing, “Count no moral happy till/ He has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain” (1529-30) and reappears in Mill’s time in Thomas Hardy’s early poem “Hap” (wr.1866), where it represents cosmic randomness and human powerlessness. 5 The idea of “happiness” as a conscious emotion thus tempts “hap”: in Oedipus; one cannot speak safely of his or her own happiness—without undermining it—until one is dead. Mill understands this virtual prohibition of happiness when he refers to the “antiselfconsciousness theory” of Carlyle (1:145). Like Teufelsdröckh’s, Mill’s “No!” suggests a discomfort with the self-reflection required to ponder one’s own emotional state, for the negative response in the Autobiography comes, oddly, from an “irrepressible self-consciousness”

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(1:139), an abstract formulation that instantly nullifies self-conscious happiness and in doing so re-enacts the old prohibition. In the context of the Autobiography, moreover, the question-andanswer presents a converse of Carlyle’s attitude. Whereas in Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdröckh is unhappy —heartbroken—until he realizes that he has no right to happiness, Mill in the Autobiography realizes he is unhappy by asking a question that assumes his right to happiness. Unlike Teufelsdröckh, Mill never denies the importance of happiness, even though he declares that he accepts the “anti-selfconsciousness” theory that effectively erases it as an emotion. Happiness remains a conceptual problem for us, then, and an acute paradox for Mill. It belongs to antagonistic philosophies: it was a preoccupation of both the Utilitarian creed from which he distanced himself in Chapter Five and the Romantic values to which he turned—through the same question and answer. And although it carries an ancient curse, happiness is an emotion he will not abandon despite the prohibition Carlyle had renewed, for in the Autobiography, a text notorious for its lack of feeling, it is the one emotion that depends on self-consciousness and that carries, therefore, the code of humanness. Any discussion of Mill and happiness entails two other subjects: one is the fear of the machine or the automatic; the other is, of course, happiness’s opposite—unhappiness or, in Mill’s case, depression. They are entwined: depression is represented as automatic behavior. Mill uses the word “automaton” in his draft of On Liberty (1859): those who react from “custom,” or “habit” are not organisms, but “machinery,” “automatons in human form” (18:263). The paradox of the “human automaton” also informs Mill’s depiction of the first phase of his depression in the early draft of the Autobiography, during which he describes himself as operating like a machine. “I went on [with my usual occupations] mechanically, by the mere force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out of it” (1:143). In this light, the deep motive of his question occurs suddenly in the early draft, lies in a long-standing suspicion that he lacks emotive capacity. 6 Following the associationists and empirical philosophers of the period, Mill equated emotion with sensation: in An Examination of William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), he defined emotion as a “series of feelings” (9:194). This equation is apparent in a sentence from the early draft of the Autobiography, in which he comments that his father regarded him as “a person who had not the organs of sense” (1:609). Mill later deleted this remark, but he embedded it in his description of depression as a state without feeling. In depicting himself without one faculty, Mill forfeits his capacity for the other; his slide into an affectless state seems not just plausible, but consistent with his father’s judgment. Overlooking the obvious fact that to feel depressed involves feeling, Mill depicts his state as a lapse into the automatic: it is characterized by emotional numbness based on the absence of neuro-muscular vitality. Without sensation and physical expression, Mill had no emotion. Although he expresses this obliquely in the first few chapters, the most acute version of the notion comes to him from a friend, John Sterling, who remarked that he seemed to acquaintances “a ‘made’ or manufactured man, having had a certain impress stamped” upon him that he could “only reproduce[ my emphasis]” (1:163). Sterling’s words “certain” and “only” imply that Mill lacks a sufficiently developed “discursive faculty,” and that his “impress” is tied to a specific source or stimulus. Significantly, Sterling does not call Mill a machine, but Mill himself uses this word in relation to the Benthamites (1: 111]) and, by extension, to his own education: described in the first chapter of his Autobiography, it centered on memorizing and reproducing arguments, then analyzing and redacting them. In the gravest period of his breakdown, then, Mill conflates these exercises with his later mechanical actions during his depression. In the latter instances, he functions without the impetus of immediate reward or punishment. His actions have dwindled into those of an automaton, a being driven not by 2

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drilling but by habit, habit marking the most efficient functioning of artificial memory. Thus Mill’s characterization of the first phase of his crisis as a state of automatism, of memory so ingrained it has become physiological, suggests the extent to which Sterling’s comment had framed his later understanding not only of his breakdown, but of his training, temperament, and customary self. In treating the concept of happiness, Mill had no exclusively eudaemonist philosophies from which to choose. Like many of his contemporaries writing on the operations of the mind, he reduced the emotion happiness to pleasure or enjoyment: he generally treated it not as an idea or a prolonged condition of ease and freedom from pain (following its ancient meaning), but as a local response to specific stimuli that diminished with repetition. “I am conscious in myself of a series of facts connected by an [sic] uniform sequence,” he writes in An Examination, “of which the beginning is modifications of my body, the middle is feelings, the end is outward demeanour.” Although there is no direct sensory evidence of the middle, or “Intermediate link,” he declares: In my own case I know that the first link produces the last through the intermediate link, and could not produce it without. Experience, therefore, obliges me to conclude that there must be an intermediate link, which must either be the same in others as in myself. . . .I must either believe them to be alive, or to be automatons . . . (9:191) Only the connection between neuro-muscular excitement and outward demeanor—between the physiological and the physical—verifies the existence of emotions. Calling the feelings “passive susceptibilities,” as he does in Autobiography (1:147) shifts Mill’s understanding closer to an idealist theory. Compare both passages with William James’s overtly materialist explanation: emotion occurs as a result of expression. We “feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike . . . and not that we cry strike, or tremble [my emphases].” 7 James’s theory of causality effectively eliminates the “intermediate link,” the ideational limbo between the neurological and the mental in which Mill and contemporaries such as William Hamilton had placed “feelings.” Emotions become a neurological affect of the physical. So although Mill in practice conflated emotions with sensations, his reasons for clinging to an idealist understanding of emotion, at least in theory, become clear in the Autobiography. If affects were sensational or, more precisely, neuro-muscular, no emotion could be sustained. This bothered Mill in his vulnerable condition; and in this passage about music, he treats enjoyment as a sensation that diminishes with each successive exercise of the activity that first stimulated it: The good [of music] . . . was much impaired by the thought that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very characteristic both of my then state and of the general tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations. The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones, which can be put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been already 3

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discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. (1:149) In the tradition of Associationism, Mill correlates pleasure with novelty and in doing so confronts the contravening effect of repetition and the physiological impossibility of sustaining pleasure over time. Here his thinking resembles that of other materialists working later in the century. Theodore Ribot also acknowledged the inverse relationship between habit and pleasure. And William James, summarizing decades of work on psychology in 1890, noted that emotions “blunt themselves by repetition more rapidly than any other sort of feeling” (his emphasis). 8 As human beings become older and accumulate more memories, brain-paths become more organized, and established associations and their attendant sensations, much diminished, replace the freshness of emotions. At this point, the person experiences no pleasurable affect. In this state, Mill feared, Sterling’s view of him threatened to prevail. Notwithstanding hints of idealism, Mill’s breakthrough in the Autobiography occurs as a neurophysiological event: reading of Jean François Marmontel’s Mémoires d’un père (1804) causes Mill to sob. When he reveals that he weeps over Marmontel’s memoirs, he offers his readers physical evidence of the link between neuro-muscular sensation and the invisible world of feelings. Mill cries and discovers that he feels sad. To alter this statement to a materialist version after James, Mill proves he feels sad by representing himself crying. His demonstrative weeping in the Autobiography is a performance of his unhappiness that provides evidence of his humanness. The episode could not completely slough the hint of the mechanical that haunted Mill in writing the Autobiography, however, simply because it illustrated the reflexive behavior of materialist psychology that was so repellent to idealists. Worse, the catharsis over Marmontel might also have displayed the taut emotional economy of the “economic man,” the HobbesianBenthamite figure that served as the model of behavior for nineteenth-century political economy. Happiness or enjoyment was the economic man’s chief motive for accumulating wealth, a premise reiterated by Nassau William Senior in his Introductory Lecture on Political Economy in 1826. In charting his own discovery of emotion, Mill had to show his separation from utilitarianism’s notorious conception of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as a statistical derivative of a mechanical human psychology based in responses of pleasure. For these reasons, Mill announced the end of his depression twice—once with the gush of tears over Marmontel, after which, he declares, “I never again was as miserable as I had been” (1:145), and once after reading the poems of Wordsworth in the two-volume edition of 1815. Three years separate the events, and during this time Mill relapsed into dejection several times, according to the “Early Draft” of the Autobiography (1:144). 9 In the interim, the idea of pleasure as a physiological response disappears, and in its place rises an idealist version with more durability and cerebral involvement. This is the emotion he has in mind, I propose, when he poses his ostensibly Utilitarian question about happiness. Mill uses Wordsworth to authorize these new emotions, which differ from the sensory-based “feelings” linked to reading Marmontel. Altruistic, reflective, and profound, they belong to an idealist picture of the emotions that Mill professes in An Examination, as well as in “What is Poetry?” published anonymously in the Monthly Repository in 1833. In this early essay, published just a few years after his breakdown, Mill locates them in the “human heart,” which 4

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has “deeper and more secret workings” than the physiological and physical feelings of the histrionic orator (1:345). Whereas the orator’s emotions are always embodied in gesture and voice, those of the poet can be invisible. Moreover, the emotions of the heart, he asserts, are “genuine,” unlike those of his father who, like most Englishmen (Mill writes in an early passage for the Autobiography, later omitted ) did not cultivate feeling beyond that “of mere habit, like that to inanimate objects” (1:612). At the moment he questions whether the achievement of all his goals would make him happy, Mill regards happiness as such a “genuine” emotion: a highly self-conscious one, the resounding “No!” coming, as I have mentioned, from “an irrepressible self-consciousness” (1:139). Indeed a few pages later, he vows to dedicate himself to the “cultivation of the feelings.” The resolution, he understands, undoubtedly would require continual self-consciousness, for such cultivation, Mill writes, thereafter “became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed” (1:147). At this point, then, he has embraced an idealistic, Romantic, and intentional view of emotions that valorizes them through the subject’s awareness of them. At the same time, however, (within the same pages of the Autobiography, that is) he has resolved on a seemingly opposite course. Reading Marmontel has led him to “adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on which I had before acted, and having much in common with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle” (1:145). Happiness and enjoyment, he decides, “will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” Pleasure must be taken “en passant, without being made a principal object” (1:147). Although Mill does not treat these conclusions as either different or successive, their occurrence within two pages of the text reveals his confusion, for how does one cultivate unspecified feelings that he or she has just decided cannot bear reflection? It seems that Mill has reverted to the very model of physiological pleasure from which the reading of Wordsworth had distanced him. Perhaps happiness is exempt from this cultivation. I have already mentioned its difference from the other emotions. Generally, it is not clear whether in the Autobiography Mill conceived of happiness as an emotion in a new psychological order, with no taint of its mechanical version, pleasure. If he could, what kind of emotion would that be? Mill’s question and answer imagine happiness as a reflective state of pleasure prolonged into a circumstantial condition—the classic negative definition of happiness as freedom from pain. Yet it was difficult for Mill to represent this deeper, reflective, condition without using the physiological language he associated with materialist psychology and Benthamite mechanism. Accordingly, the terms often slip into each other in his writing, as in his homage to his wife, Harriet Taylor, “a character preeminently of feeling” (1:623) whose heart “identified itself with the feelings of others” and whose “pleasures and pains [were] tenfold more intense than those of common persons.” 10 The conflation of words compatible with both idealist thought (“heart”) and physiology is unavoidable, but it contributes to the difficulty of Mill’s attempt to transform a term for localized sensation to one for a deeper or more reflective condition. Significantly, this slippage indicates that the connection between the reaction to Marmontel and the reaction to Wordsworth—between the first phase of the crisis in 1826 and the second part in 1829—is not a “progress,” as Mill conceived, in writing of the crisis and of his entire life, but a dialectical shift. 11 That is, Mill’s sudden, sensational response to the French writer dramatizes a discovery of emotion through neuro-muscular excitation. It is a reaction to the numbness of the automaton, but it soon leads to another correction. Whereas Mill reacts to Marmontel as a creature of sensibility (in the larmoyant fashion of the late eighteenth-century, remarks Geoffrey Hartman) he reads 5

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Wordsworth reacting to this reaction. 12 Accordingly, his response is marked by reflection and sympathy—far less demonstrable, more mental, emotions. In this light, the momentous question of his own happiness, which Mill recorded when writing the early draft in 1853-54, anticipates the sequence that it initiates in the Autobiography. When Mill records asking himself if attaining all his goals will make him happy, the word “happy” preserves the sensational Benthamite terminology (“happiness” based in feelings of “pleasure”and the “the enjoyments of life” [1:147]) and simultaneously resonates with the Romantic ecstasis that he had come to privilege. The question embeds a reflection and a prolepsis. Just as Mill’s understanding of “happiness” emerges through the dialectical relation between the Marmontel phase of the crisis and the Wordsworth phase, “happiness,” as Mill eventually comes to terms with the emotion, embeds its own sequence. It covers, that is, a succession of mental and physiological activities. Because, as a protracted condition, it implies—even requires—an unconsciousness, an ease and comfort that the gods attributed to fortune, as an emotion it entails first a privileging, then a rejection, of consciousness. The move and countermove occur so quickly and repeatedly in the narrative that they seem either unremarkable or bewildering, as the adoption of the anti-selfconsciousness theory becomes the cultivation of feeling, and this very cultivation suggests a displacement of mental attention to lived, physiological experience. This portrayal of happiness as a dynamic state comprising selfconscious emotion and physiological activity in succession is anticipated by “What is Poetry?” which, as I have noted, appeared shortly after Mill’s breakdown actually occurred. In the essay, Mill makes it clear that prolonged consciousness cannot remain a virtue for the poet because the poetical mood is a phase of involuntary inattention in which all perception of the outside is suppressed. His famous declaration, “All poetry is of the nature of a soliloquy” (1:349) captures this idea; the poet must be unconscious of the audience, whereas the orator is always aware of one. Mill’s notion of unconsciousness cannot be taken in the post-Freudian sense, as utter obliviousness. The sort of “unconsciousness” of which Mill writes means, more accurately, “unself-consciousness,” as Geoffrey Hartman has argued. And as Timothy Gould has specified, Mill means the “successful suppression of a piece of knowledge (namely, that there is an audience present)” and by its opposite, eloquence, a theatricality, in Michael Fried’s sense. 13 For Mill, the poet has an “inevitable awareness of an actual audience,” Gould says, “the effects of which must then be suppressed in order to achieve the ‘unconsciousness’ of the successful poem.” 14 Of course, in “What is Poetry?” the poet is aware of himself through his effect on listeners, whereas in the anti-self-consciousness theory to which Mill alludes in the Autobiography, the outside listener or viewer is the self. The versions are homologous, however (indeed Gould has connected them); if the emotions of the poet cannot “[suppose] an audience,” as the eloquence of the orator can (1:348), neither can they embed an awareness or representation of the self. 15 In this light, a prolonged awareness of and attention to “happiness” violates the poetical mood in which one ceases, for a time, to become aware of one’s audience (even if that audience is one’s self ). Mill’s reasoning in “What Is Poetry?” and its obvious connection with the remarks on selfconsciousness in the Autobiography lead to one surprising conclusion about the function of the crisis in the later text. Because in both “What Is Poetry?” and the Autobiography, Mill regards self-consciousness as necessarily ephemeral, and because the account of his life before 1826 contains few signs of self-consciousness about his emotional state—shows, rather, a life verging 6

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on the mechanical—it is only in the depression, as well as in the first breakthrough—the reading of Mémoires d’un père—that the Autobiography exhibits signs of its subject’s selfconsciousness. Mill’s immediate focus on happiness in the famous question and answer thus precipitates the crisis in the Autobiography. Clearly it is not the vain pursuit of happiness or the realization that he has no pleasure in life which causes the crisis in the Autobiography, but the sudden fear of its loss induced by attention. The remedy Mill eventually finds for his crisis must involve inattention, then. Henceforth the young Mill, having acknowledged these particular emotions, will marginalize happiness and joy, the narrator of the Autobiography implies; he will make them peripheral to attention. The question about happiness, therefore, is an anomalous and almost instantly self-nullifying moment. I have just proposed that Mill’s major bout of depression in 1826 was precipitated by abstracting sensation into emotion and making it the focus of attention. By converting a Benthamite economy to a Romantic one, Mill brought on his own predicament. When he abandons the quest for happiness in the Autobiography and vows to accept it as a transient emotion barely registering in the mind—“en passant”—he seems to revert to his original conflation of happiness with physiological pleasure. Yet although Mill seems to have come almost full circle by repudiating the grounds of his original question, in actuality he has traced a dialectical movement from attention to, to suppression and then displacement of, feeling. The sequence in the Autobiography thus overcomes the limitations of the emotions, materialist or idealist, by themselves, as Mill understood them. To be sure, the psychic mechanism of the displacement is not clearly described in the Autobiography, and the process or province of nonreflective “cultivation” is left ambiguous. The choice of models available to him, pleasure as a physiological emotion or happiness as a self-conscious ideation, formed at the time the psychological continuum on which he could plot his humanness. They would wait a century for elaboration. The debates waged between materialism and idealism in which psychologist/ philosophers like Mill, Hamilton, and William James often floundered always occurred within the mind and body dichotomy. Not until post-Freudian and post-behaviorist theories would this frame be jettisoned. The category of emotion could then be opened and drives be separated from affects. Silvan Tomkins, in particular, not only profiled individual emotions, but emphasized the behavioral individuation of affects, a quality that has special relevance to Mill’s representation of his feelings. Whereas the drives, according to Tomkins, constitute “a motivational system of little freedom,” the affects compose “a motivational system of great freedom.” 16 Whereas drives occur in a tight causality of stimulus and response, affects can vary for the same stimulus. In contrast to the drives, the course of affects is not toward consummation. Affects vary in intensity; they are connected to a wider if still limited range of objects. Most importantly, Tomkins states, “The capacity of the individual to feel strongly or weakly, for a moment, or for all his life, about any-thing under the sun and to govern himself by such motives constitutes his essential freedom.” 17 Freedom of affect makes human progress possible. It effectively separates human beings from automata, the lowest of which function through reflex action. Tomkins’s emphasis on the freedom of the affects over the drives both illuminates and solves the dilemma Mill created in broaching and resolving the question of happiness. If his reaction to Marmontel’s Mémoirs, a discovery of emotion through physiological sensation, represents only an intermediate stage in his “conversion” to a feeling human being because it does not differ enough from the stimulus and response mechanism of the drives and the mechanical, his 7

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later apparent reversion to pleasure or happiness “en passant” is not just a reversion, as it appears to be. It is, rather, a move toward complexity, for it suggests the potential for affects that are neither wholly conscious nor habitual. Thus happiness may be either liminal—nascent, at the threshold of consciousness—or marginal—peripheral, somatic, on the verge of the habitual. Liminality or marginality allows it to co-exist with other, very different emotions and to arise from a variety of acts or ideas. In addition, because the very contemplation of happiness threatens its survival, the liminality of “happiness” increases its durability and its abstraction into the abiding condition linked with good fortune and ease. Once Mill recognizes this province of happiness, if only for a moment—the moment initiated by the question about happiness—he can portray himself as someone who recognizes and exploits emotional responses. Arguably, emotional freedom and complexity have existed in the Autobiography from its earliest chapters, chapters in which Mill, in his account of his infamous education, has unwittingly established a correlation between inattention and happiness or pleasure. On the surface, this correlation looks counterintuitive. The list of prescribed reading, the picture of the boy writing at his father’s desk constantly under surveillance, of being forced to read aloud (I:8, 26), of suffering under “severe admonitions” (I:39) have stood for many contemporary and modern readers as extracts from a philosophy of education that robbed pupils of that precious Victorian construction, childhood. Certainly, the mnemonic component of this method—its emphasis on repetition, memorizing, and redacting—seems so monotonous, so torturous, that one reader has even wondered why the adult Mill felt compelled to review his education at all. 18 Rote was as disparaged as much as it was used as a learning method in the nineteenth century, and Hegel’s concept of recollection is applicable to the kind of mnemonics forced on Mill, even when it was supplemented with analysis: “Memory qua memory is itself the merely external mode, or merely existential aspect of thought, and thus needs a complementary element.” 19 Despite the remarks in the Autobiography on the pains of the drills he underwent, however, and despite the charge (which he refuted [1:35]) that James Mill had “crammed” him, happiness was a marginal but nonetheless memorable component of his earliest tutorials. Why else would he have read Pope’s translation of the Iliad from 20 to 30 times (Autobiography 1:13)? The early chapters of the Autobiography abound with instances of Mill reading texts over and over, not simply to commit them to memory, but to relive their delights through repetition. Indeed, he characterizes reporting the daily digest of his reading as “[t]o the best of my remembrance . . . a voluntary rather than a prescribed exercise” (1:11). Pope’s translation of the Iliad was “one of the books in which for many years I most delighted” (1:12); “Roman history, both in my old favorite, Hooke, and in Ferguson, continued to delight me” (1:15), as did Robinson Crusoe (“through all my boyhood” [1:13]). He “took great pleasure,” he reveals, in a volume he calls Ancient Universal History (an anonymous multivolume work of 1736 [1:17]), and writing histories was “a voluntary exercise to which throughout my boyhood I was much addicted” (1:17). The instances of repetition for the sake of repetition indicate that recollecting, which Mill demonstrated by reproducing information before his father, was simultaneously a means toward understanding and a stimulus of pleasure in itself. Recollection qua recollection had affect, but it was always peripheral in his experience. It would be wrong to infer, then, in light of his decision in Chapter Five to abandon the quest for happiness, that the earlier phases of Mill’s life (those recounted in the first four chapters) were not happy just because his father neglected to expose his son to those arts devoted to feeling. As happiness is both the ideational and unconscious (i.e., situational) version of 8

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physiological pleasure, surely Mill was often unself-consciously “happy” as his father’s pupil. That is, he experienced—sometimes at the margins of consciousness—pleasure as a result of a mnemonic activity that he also described as painful and coerced. In addition to being impermanent and unself-conscious, then, happiness was, in Mill’s experience, not extrudable. If happiness is a truly parasitical emotion, not just for Mill but, I propose, in all psychic economies, it requires more than a stimulating activity, such as memory. It needs a host-affect. If Mill could never again ponder, much less pronounce, his own happiness, he needed—in addition to conduits for peripheral pleasure—an emotion to occupy his mental attention, his sensation, and his memory. By 1858, four years after completing the early draft of the Autobiography, the death of Harriet Taylor offered him one—cultivated and repetitive mourning. It combined the comparative unconsciousness of happiness as an external condition with the intensity of more transitory and conscious sensations like pleasure or, in this case, its opposite. In this sense, it exemplified the mixed affects that marked a complex response of a human being, not the relatively simple reaction of an animal or automaton. Mill had married Taylor, his longtime friend and companion, in 1851 shortly after the death of her husband. He had submitted the early draft of his Autobiography to her editing. In it (as well as in the final version) he stresses her unusual “gifts of feeling and imagination” (Autobiography 1:195). Through the relationship with Taylor, the narrative assumes an allegorical character, in which automaton abandons the master engineer, discovers emotion through Wordsworth, and finally meets moral sympathy personified. Taylor functions in the Autobiography, not simply as a substitution for the authority of the father, but as a replacement for Sterling in supplying the overt emotions Mill felt were missing in himself. As a result, her death creates a vacuum in his life, and in the revisions of 1861 and 1869 he nurtures the overwhelming affect of sorrow through sedulous and fetishistic mourning. 20 “My objects in life are solely those which were hers; my pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, or sympathized, and which are indissolubly associated with her. Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, endeavour to regulate my life” (1:251). These commemorative acts replace the exercises of the schoolboy. He even employs the spatial and material jogs used in artificial memory, buying a cottage “as close as possible to the place where she [has been] buried.” On Liberty, their “joint production,” is “consecrated to her memory. I have made no alteration or addition to it, nor shall I ever.” The text becomes his fetish. “Though it wants the last touch of her hand, no substitute for that touch shall ever be attempted by mine” (1:257, 261). Mill’s constative statements of mourning are also performances carrying more than a modicum of pleasure. Such pleasure represents a significant complication of the emotions, for it shows that one object can evoke two simultaneous feelings, one on the periphery of his concerted and volitional performances of grief. Mill’s emotional trajectory in the Autobiography encapsulates the discursive history of happiness and shows just how elusive and perverse it is. The idea of happiness embedded in the Utilitarian understanding of it as freedom from misery haunts its new status as a reflective emotion in the Autobiography. Nonetheless, for a time under the spell of Romanticism, Mill needs to believe in his capacity for happiness to lift his depression and to acquit himself completely from Sterling’s charge that he has been a manufactured man. Consequently, he assumes, inadvertently perhaps, a much more ambitious psychological project than he or many of his readers have understood, one that valorizes happiness—views it as the most important emotion for a human being to pursue—yet all the while questions its existence as a conscious 9

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psychological state. To prove his humanness, he has to display emotions beyond the predictable reflexes of stimuli and responses. Therefore, he has to produce signs of an affect system that reveal psychic distances between the conditions that instigate an affective response and those that maintain it: these include an awareness of such conditions and further emotional responses to his awareness. This is precisely what Mill’s narration of his crisis as a dialectical sequence illustrates in Chapter Five of the Autobiography. In the text’s final pages, dedicated to the mourning of Harriet Taylor, Mill evinces a degree of emotional complexity beyond the simple shift from a psychic economy of drives to one of reflection and its affects. Whereas selfconscious happiness never lasts more than a moment in a sequence of attention and suppression that the contradictory question-and-answer encapsulates, unreflective happiness—not quite conscious and not yet habitual—emerges and remains on the margins of consciousness, eventually at the expense of a carefully nurtured grief. I began by repeating the general impression of the Autobiography as a detached and affectless narrative, but in fact Mill ends his life-story extravagantly unhappy. Bereft, remaindered (the last chapter is called “General View of the Remainder of My Life”), he produces happiness, nonetheless, through the very repetition he once feared would diminish pleasure. Because sorrow is in theory just as vulnerable to dissipation as pleasure, just as apt to become habitual, cultivating sorrow (Mill’s conscious objective) guarantees a proportional increase in pleasure with a lessening of pain. Happiness emerges as a concomitant of sorrow. Over time, then, protracted mourning not only lessens, it induces marginal feelings of pleasure that, outside the full measure of attention, are neither site-specific nor episodic. In Mill’s by no means atypical experience, this is the final feeling that approximates the Romantic idea of happiness while honoring its much older, still vital prohibition. Linda M. Austin's books are The Practical Ruskin (Johns Hopkins, 1991) and Nostalgia in Transition (Virginia, 2007). She has written on the economics, aesthetics, poetry, and prose of the long nineteenth century in Britain and is currently working on a study of automata and automatisms during the period. Notes See John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, Introduction, Autobiography and Literary Essays, in Collected Works , 33 vols.(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), vii-xxx. 2 All quotations from Mill’s work come from the Collected Works and are cited by volume and page number. 3 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 125. 4 II.7. of Sartor Resartus, 123-29. 5 Oedipus the King, trans. David Grene, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 76. 6 Or perhaps not so suddenly: Mill may have read Nassau William, Sr.’s Introductory Lecture on Political Economy delivered before the University of Oxford, on the 6th of December, 1826 (London, 1827) or he may have read of it in Discourse IV of John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which was published in pamphlet form shortly after the Dublin lectures of 1852. Newman quotes Nassau, Sr., defending political economy and in the process equating happiness 1

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with enjoyment. Either text suggests an impetus for Mill question: the original lecture if the question actually occurred sometime in 1826, Newman’s Discourse if the question occurred while Mill was writing the early draft in 1853-54. 7 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 2:1094. 8 James, 2: 1089; Theodore Ribot, Diseases of Memory: an Essay in the Positive Psychology, trans. William Huntington Smith (New York: Appleton, 1882). On Mill’s inconsistent reports of depressive periods, see Jonathan Loesberg, Fictions of Consciousness: Mill, Newman and the Reading of Victorian Prose (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 54. As Mill confessed in 1829 in a letter to Sterling, he suffered acutely during this period. The revision of 1861 leaves the dates of these subsequent episodes even vaguer; some may have occurred after 1830. 10 “Rejected Leaves” of Autobiography, 1:618. 11 Mill’s frequent use of “progress” and its synonyms in the Autobiography indicates that the narrative was intended to be meliorative to show the development that he connected with individuality in Chapter Three of On Liberty (1859). See for example, his plan to note “the successive phases of any mind which [is] always pressing forward” (1:5); the effects on his “mental developement” [sic] (1: 73 ), and the reference to the latest “period of [his] mental progress” at the opening of Chapter Six (1:193). 12 Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 302-03. 13 Hartman, 309. Timothy Gould, “Utterance and Theatricality: A Problem for Modern Aesthetics in Mill’s Account of Poetry,” Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putnam (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 140, 139; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 14 Gould, 140. 15 Gould 144-145. 16 Silvan S. Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 34. For Tomkins’ complete discussion of the affect and drive motivational systems, see vol. 1 of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 2 vols. (New York: Springer Publishing, 1962), 28-87. 17 Tomkins in Sedgwick et al, 45-46. Tomkins treats pain and pleasure as an intermediate system between the drives and the affects, because they often have “site specificity” (47). 18 See Jerome Buckley, “John Stuart Mill’s ‘True’ Autobiography,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 23 (1990): 223-31. 19 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 223. Hegel is a particularly illuminating source for explanations of Mill’s memory because he dismissed the pictographic dimension of the ancient mnemonic and the visual component that was central to Aristotle’s concept of recollection. 20 For a chronology of the stages of composition and revision, see A.W. Levi, “The Writing of Mill’s Autobiography,” International Journal of Ethics (July, 1951): 284-296. 9

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Happiness on a World Scale Richard Dienst Long ago Hegel taught that “history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.” 1 Of course for Hegel there’s something suspect about happiness: insofar as we want to be happy, to be in harmony with ourselves, we would be withdrawn from history; and insofar as we are caught up in history, we would be looking for something besides happiness. It is not immediately obvious why we would choose one over the other—history over happiness or vice versa—if indeed there is such a choice. Assuming that we all want to be happy, whatever that might mean, does not get us very far. Instead of asking what happiness is, it might be more useful to ask where it is. That way we can immediately set aside all the merely metaphysical definitions of what happiness could or should be, as well as the stubborn doubts about whether it exists at all. And in the next step we can bracket off the all-too-abrupt answers that it is anywhere or everywhere to be found. In the end we find ourselves wondering, with all the sincerity and skepticism we can muster, whether it is possible—somewhere, somehow—to live a happy life. So let’s ask: where is happiness? In the landscape of common sense there are two opposing answers: “in here” and “out there.” To say happiness is “in here” affirms its status as embodied affect, combining pleasure, contentment and well being. In blending sensuous and intellectual states of being, happiness would touch upon the highest good and the deepest selfhood at once. Whether it feels like a spontaneous disposition or a hard-won accomplishment, a fleeting moment of truth or an abiding sense of satisfaction, happiness would mark the spot where inwardness moves most freely around an intimate center of gravity. By contrast, to say that happiness is “out there” attests to the way it can prompt us to get out of ourselves, to be with others, to find or to make a place where we feel like living. Those who look outward for happiness expect that it always touches upon something or someone else: certain combinations of bodies, places, and circumstances, more or less numerous, more or less expansive, more or less reliable. Wherever we come across it, happiness would be whatever releases us to the world. Although there are countless ways of weaving between these inner and outer maps of happiness, the prevailing culture tends to treat inward happiness as the true homeland, and outward happiness as a temporary or illusory detour. Just ask around. Over and over you will hear the trump card: “ultimately” happiness comes down to what we can find inside, whether we call it mind, body, spirit or soul—so much so that the best reason to look inside yourself seems to be the prospect of finding happiness there. It has become a universal imperative: you must make yourself happy. All the solicitations of the happiness industry say the same thing: the sales pitch only works by reminding you that nobody owes you happiness and it doesn’t come cheap.

world picture 3 That is why “the pursuit of happiness” still serves as a magic phrase in the capitalist lexicon, reconciling the innocence of appetites with a well-trained capacity for disappointment. We are supposed to enjoy the pursuit whether we find happiness or not. As long as we buy into this deal, we will be rewarded with a higher-level consolation: by following our inward inclinations as selfishly as possible we have joined in building the great hive-mind of the marketplace. This remains the most stubborn myth of modernity: the aggregate efforts of all those passionately self-interested individuals are supposed to be ceaselessly transformed—through the mechanisms of impersonal exchange, supervised by impartial institutions—into the best possible social system, which would be precisely not a “society” at all, but something like eBay and Twitter writ large. All it takes to set this virtuous circle in motion is “the pursuit of happiness,” installed as the inner spring of human nature itself. And now to put this pursuit on a properly technocratic footing, contemporary behavioral economics, bolstered by neurobiology, offers itself as a science of happiness. Richard Layard, a popularizer of the field, draws upon the work of economists such as Daniel Kahneman, neuroscientists such as Richard Davidson, and a burgeoning group of specialists to propose a comparative and prescriptive approach to the problem of happiness. At last the answer to the question ”where is happiness?” has become crystal clear: like all positive feelings, it is lodged somewhere in “the left side of the pre-frontal cortex, somewhat above and in front of the ear.” 2 Now that we know exactly where happiness is, why is it still a problem? Surely rational, unhappy individuals can simply target the pre-frontal cortex with some legal and affordable drug, and the age-old problem will be solved. Layard concedes that things are not so simple. It turns out that homo economicus may have to take the happiness of other people into account after all. There are social and historical dimensions to the problem of happiness that must be addressed, even if you believe that the solution ultimately depends on what happens inside the skull. Layard begins his argument by observing that measurable levels of individual happiness have stalled, even while economic growth has boomed (and now busted): People in the West have got no happier in the last 50 years. They have become richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier. This shocking fact should be the starting point for much of our social science. 3 As an especially stylized fact, the proposition that “people in the West” are, in the aggregate, no happier than their grandparents might not seem shocking at all. (By “people” Layard means those living well above the poverty line, and by “the West” he means North America, Western Europe, and Japan.) Did we ever assume that greater material prosperity would inexorably boost the collective mood, regardless of highly concentrated accumulations of wealth and deepening inequalities? Can anybody point to something—like indoor plumbing, the polio vaccine, or gourmet coffee—that would have permanently cheered us up? In fact, it is hard to believe that there has ever been a steady correlation between rising GDP and collective happiness. Perhaps if a whole society could be rearranged so that it could meet its own needs while allowing everybody to enjoy reduced working hours, more vacation time, and longer life 2

world picture 3 expectancy, we might be able to test whether overall happiness would improve. At the moment it is hard to foresee any auspicious conditions for such an experiment. Taken on their own terms, however, the happiness statistics are full of suggestive findings. In the US, it appears that the percentage of people who declared themselves “very happy” peaked around 38% in the late 1950s, and it has been sliding generally downward ever since. (The Seventies look somewhat happier, with a blip around Nixon’s resignation, the Eighties look choppy, and the Nineties flattened on the low side. 4 Indeed it appears that the most sustained rise in GDP per head started at about the time the ranks of the “very happy” began to thin out. And again, it should be kept in mind that Layard’s choice of indicator [GDP per head] obscures the effects of income polarization and disguises the stagnation in real income growth for most people since the 1970s.) His interpretation of the data revolves around two mechanisms he calls “habituation” and “rivalry:” first, people get used to material improvements, so that their satisfaction with them wears off; second, people tend to perceive their own happiness in relation to, and especially in competition with, the happiness of those around them. The quest for status and the “arms race” of consumerism reinforce an “individualistic distortion” in our perceptions of happiness. 5 To a utilitarian liberal like Layard, it comes as a relief to conclude that happiness functions as a relational norm rather than an absolute demand: it absolves the current order of any blame for structural inequality or irreversible damage to the lifeworld. Unhappiness can now be modeled as a kind of mental disturbance rather than intractable discontent and refusal. Layard’s recommended remedy, beyond more treatment for the mentally ill, would be a somewhat more progressive tax system that could “disarm” the most flagrant conflicts between the richer and the poorer, or at least soften the perception of them. In the current ideological climate, even these modest measures in the name of greater collective happiness have been judged too radical. Martin Wolf, economics columnist in the Financial Times, saw in Layard’s argument nothing less than “an assault on modernity itself.” 6 If the achievements of the welfare state and various civil rights movements have not increased happiness in any measurable way, Wolf argues, what more can be done? Wolf sees Layard’s fight against the status system as a non-starter, and he insists that more progressive taxation would be a violation of the ironclad principle that government can never be the vehicle of happiness. A certain degree of unhappiness, like a certain degree of inequality and a more or less thick layer of poverty, is simply the price that “people” are supposed to pay for living in modern times. The dispute between Layard and Wolf neatly splits the paradox that gave the “pursuit of happiness” its original ideological force. At an individual level, the ever-expanding offerings of consumerism offer diminishing returns as a reward for accepting the status quo, while at a social level the system can convince fewer and fewer people of something they care less and less about, namely, that the system should deliver a good life for everybody. From now on the pursuit of happiness will come across as a race we have to run and an offer we can’t refuse, whether the tone is sweetly cynical or stoically tough. Perhaps we can gauge what has changed in the past 50 years by reading what Theodor Adorno had to say about compulsory happiness in Minima Moralia (originally published in 1951): 3

world picture 3 The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically hedonist sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the concentration camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. 7 On the contrary: Layard’s statistics—the very existence of which would have terrified Adorno—actually suggest that “people in the West” did not obey the mental health experts and studio chiefs who have been commanding them to be happy all these years. Television (to take one example), despite its efforts to feed the populace with insatiable programmed desires, instead accelerates the exhaustion of whatever pleasures it has to offer, while stoking extravagant and unappeasable rivalries. It seems fair to say the world is an unhappier place as a result. Recognition of suffering has not been entirely forbidden: some share of it has been turned inward, where a wide array of personal regrets, frustrations, and the rage of envy serve as the last affective links to the notion of a community bonded by emotion. And so the task falls to dialectics, bolstered by psychoanalysis, to offer a science of unhappiness. But this science is not itself dismal: on the contrary, it takes its bearings from pleasures and joys unknown to “happiness studies.” As Fredric Jameson has tirelessly demonstrated, it is not through naive optimism that we keep asking ourselves where we might find happiness: that place, named Utopia because its topos remains unknown, serves rather as the orientation point against which we can measure just how far astray we have gone. All of culture can thus be approached as a vast catalogue of determined negations and recurrent failures, an inexhaustible archive we continue to explore even though we can never expect to discover the blank pages of happiness. Does that mean that every inquiry into the location of happiness will be met by a rebuke from a theory that has already decided against it? Adorno offers us something more to chew on: There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more. [...] Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars. 8 Happiness can survive, but only under certain conditions: not as something that some people earn and enjoy at the expense of others, not as an inner refuge or cranial enclave, but simply as the place where we allow each other to keep living. To locate such a place of repose requires neither a pressing-forward nor a turning-back, but a holding-on (to others as much as oneself) and a letting-go (of pleasures as much as disappointments). Although such postures have become familiar through self-help handbooks and pop therapy culture, the ideal goes back at least to Epicurus: 4

world picture 3 The cry of the flesh: not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold. For if someone has these things and is confident of having them in the future, he might contend even with Zeus for happiness.” 9 The cry of the flesh can hardly be heard wherever unhappiness is understood as a personal misfortune, and hoarded as if it were private property. 10 A pervasive unhappiness is perpetually channeled into individualized forms, where it attempts to heal itself through various self-confirming, self-defeating rhetorics. What every remedy lacks, disastrously, is a declaration of peace that can only be collective, prevailing throughout the common spaces where we all must live together. Adorno offers the simplest guideline to keep the peace: not the fulfillment of a personal plan but the prevention of overall impoverishment. That may seem like the least we can ask, but it is still far beyond us. Perhaps that is why there can be no politics of happiness, but only a politics of the conditions of possibility for happiness. Its achievement would require fundamental changes in everything that currently passes for pleasure, satisfaction, and well being. Indeed, it is hard to know how the world will look once this elementary demand has been met. We may imagine that at that point, all the countless expressions of happiness—full of inexplicable idiosyncrasies, familiar banalities, and marvelous discoveries—will be seen to have written themselves into history after all. Richard Dienst teaches English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television (Duke University Press) and a forthcoming book on indebtedness in the world economy. Several lectures are available at . Notes G.W.F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 33. 2 Richard Layard, “Happiness: Has Social Science a Clue?” delivered as part 1 of 3 in the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures series, London School of Economics, March 3-5, 2003. Available online at: (accessed February 12, 2009). Quotation at page 9. Henceforth cited in the text as Layard 2003a. These lectures provide an early outline of the argument presented in Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005). 3 Layard, 14. 4 Ibid., 15. 5 “A Brookings Briefing: Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” transcript of a discussion with Richard Layard held at The Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., February 9, 2005. Available online at: (accessed February 12, 2009). Quotation at page 25. 6 Martin Wolf, “Why progressive taxation is not the route to happiness,” Financial Times, 6 June 2007. 7 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 6263; translation modified. Where Adorno described the sanatorium director as “wissenschaftlich lebemännische,” Jephcott translated this phrase as “scientifically 1

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epicurean.” I have replaced the key word with “hedonist,” which is not much better, but the change is necessary because I would propose that happiness can be better grasped through a properly Epicurean notion of katastemic pleasure, as opposed to the dynamic pleasures offered by the entertainment industry. For the German text, see Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 68. Future references to this work will cite the English and the German texts. Adorno’s link between the demand for happiness and the worst kinds of violence has been updated by Slavoj Zizek, who connects happiness studies to the new techniques of torture. See Slavoj Zizek, “Happiness and Torture in the Atonal World,” in In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 44-51. 8 Adorno, 156 &176. 9 “The Vatican Collection of Epicurean Sayings,” Volume 33, The Epicurus Reader, trans. and ed. by Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 38. 10 See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, “Happiness and the Work of Relationality,” trans. Sally Poor, Polygraph 2, no. 3 (1988), 186-192. This piece is an excerpt from Geschichte und Eigensinn, now republished as the second volume of Der unterschätzte Mensch (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 2001), 924-929.

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A Second Life: Notes on Adorno’s Reading of Proust Alexander García Düttmann Twice Adorno published a short text in which he asserted the importance of Proust for his “intellectual economy,” claiming that, over the decades, the French writer had exerted a consistent influence upon his philosophical efforts. 1 The text initially appeared in Die Neue Zeitung. It was written in answer to a survey that sought to establish the events that had had a significant impact on German public figures in 1953. Adorno welcomed the publication of a new translation of Du côté de chez Swann [The Way by Swann’s], part of an ambitious project to have all the volumes of Proust’s novel rendered into German for the first time. Four years later, the same text appeared again in Dichten und Trachten, an end of year review of Suhrkamp Verlag. This subsequent appearance intended to mark the German publication of the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time]. Given that Walter Benjamin’s and Franz Hessel’s earlier attempt at translating the entire novel had failed and that its reception had been interrupted by the rise to power of National Socialism, Adorno hoped that with this new translation Proust would come back to life as if for the first time, and in doing so prompt the fruition of “something crucial” in a cultural environment that had otherwise remained “behind the times.” If, assuming that such a distinction could be shown to be pertinent, one wanted to establish the manifest rather than the secret or hidden presence of Proust in Adorno’s thought, one would have to turn to the radio-essay “Short Commentaries on Proust,” included in an issue of the literary journal Akzente and then in Adorno’s second collection of essays on literature. 2 Just as the opportunity to publish the aforementioned general remarks had been presented by the new German edition of Du côté de chez Swann, so the completion of Eva Rechel-Mertens’ translation of the Recherche provided the occasion for the writing of the radio-essay, together with the broadcasting at which the well-known actress Marianne Hoppe read the sentences of Proust quoted by the philosopher. But in this case Adorno’s contribution proved to be more substantial, concerned as it was with demonstrating the unity of the work by a close reading of selected passages from the different volumes. Adorno, in fact, refers to Proust as early as 1930, in an article for the Frankfurter Zeitung entitled “Note on Names.” It seems likely that he had felt drawn to the author in the course of conversations with his friend Hermann Grab, a music critic and writer from Prague who had learnt parts of Proust’s novel by heart, and with his teacher Walter Benjamin, whose essay “On the Image of Proust” dates from 1929. 3 In one of the first letters Benjamin addressed to Adorno, he appears to assume a shared interest in Proust’s work, mentioning four volumes of the Recherche he had taken with him on a trip to Italy. Furthermore, Adorno must have come across Curtius’ famous study on Proust, published in 1925, when reviewing, in 1940, a book by the Neokantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. In his late essay on Beckett’s Endgame he quotes extensively from those passages in Rickert’s book which contain citations from Curtius’ study. Benjamin and Curtius both draw the reader’s attention to the relevance of proper names for Proust, an interest Roland Barthes revisited in the seventies. Some thirty-five years after referring to Proust in his newspaper article, Adorno once again focused on the force that, according to the French writer,

world picture 3 must be attributed to proper names. He did so in a section of “Meditations on Metaphysics,” the last chapter of his Negative Dialectics. The name of a place can promise happiness, Adorno says in this section after appealing to Proust. For the promise to be kept, for happiness to come into existence, all that would seem to be required is a visit to the actual place. And yet when, attracted by the force inherent in the promise of happiness, one arrives at the place in question, one finds that happiness withdraws as if it were a rainbow. What has allowed then for an experience here is precisely the difference between the name and the named. Adorno does not wish to denounce the anticipation of the imagination as an illusion, just as he does not wish to reduce the experience to the discovery of an empirical truth. This is why he insists on the fact that the withdrawal of happiness at the point where one would expect to be happy does not amount to a disappointment. Rather, one realizes that, having arrived at the place itself by following the trail laid out by the name, one has been brought too close to the promised happiness for it to be experienced as such. Happiness, then, lies neither in the image emanating from the name nor in the reality of the place named, but in the space and in the time stretched out between the image and reality. It springs from seeing something from the inside. However, insofar as the inside is just the other side of the outside, it only appears truly when removed from the thing. What Adorno gives here is the exact definition of the idea, even if he does not employ the philosophical term. In his “Short Commentaries,” he characterizes Proust as a “Platonist” who dismissed opinion. 4 Could one summarize Adorno’s argument by asserting that happiness is linked to the disclosure of the idea? That happiness is to be found residing in neither the name nor the named may only be understood once one has undergone the experience of searching for it in the place or the reality towards which the name points. Happiness, in other words, would depend entirely on whether one reaches a limit at which a second life could begin; one that is not the imaginary life of the promise and yet does not merge with real life in the conventional sense. It is as if the fulfillment of the promise of happiness consisted in the preservation of its form instead of the actualization of its content, or as if keeping the promise meant returning to it so as to render the form a part of the content. Adorno speaks here of a “metaphysical experience,” 5 and not of experience in general, because he wants to highlight the distance that separates happiness from both a matter of fact and a state of mind. Metaphysics interpreted in this manner has something to do with one’s own comportment towards life, with a pursuit of happiness and the yielding of an insight that manifests itself in the form of a lack of disappointment. It thereby acquires a moral or ethical dimension. By protecting each other from dumbness and madness—from the necessity of the literal and the vacuity of the figurative, from the ontological “there is” and the psychological “as if”—the name and the named bestow happiness with the reality of a second life. What Adorno ultimately suggests is that the named is too real to be real in any morally relevant fashion while the name, on the contrary, is never real enough. Does Proust not write, in the last volume of the Recherche, that it is always the attachment to an object owned that provokes the death of the owner? In the wake of Adorno’s reading of Proust, one could claim that happiness is not an object to be owned, that it does not have the form of a real thing, and that in becoming attached to it one runs the danger of turning it into something that could be appropriated. But the happy life must be understood as a second life in yet another sense. It must be understood as a second life because, having been achieved once, it can be achieved once again. Adorno partakes in the experience of which Proust writes. This is the 2

world picture 3 reason why the name as a promise of happiness leads Adorno to conceive of “the concept,” unsettling the opposition between the singularity of the name and conceptual universality. Inasmuch as conceptual universality reveals itself to have a moral or ethical dimension, and insofar as it cannot remain indifferent to the form of one’s own comportment towards life, it is the “concept of the concept” itself that is at stake in Adorno’s reflections on “metaphysical experience,” and not merely the concept of happiness: “Only in the face of the absolutely and indissolubly individuated can one hope that precisely this has existed already and will exist one more time.” 6 If the concept of happiness demands that happiness, which as such is bound to radical individuation, be more than a private experience—a fragment, as Adorno states elsewhere in his “Meditations on Metaphysics”—then this demand, based as it is on the experience that moral or ethical relevance cannot be extricated from the specificity of a lived situation without for that matter being less relevant, must extend to the concept of the concept. To put it otherwise, it is the name that calls for the concept in morals and ethics, so that no presupposed validity may be attributed to the concept prior to its being informed by the name. Clearly, when Adorno vindicates the importance of Proust for his “intellectual economy,” for what concerns him as a philosopher and what his philosophy endeavours to achieve, he is not just coining a phrase. The passage from Du côté de chez Swann to which Adorno alludes in his meditation describes a dialectical relationship between the name and the named. There the proper names of the places listed by the narrator are said to have absorbed the very images with which they are associated, and this to the extent that on each and every occasion of a name’s being mentioned, the image accompanying it arises anew. The names constitute the archive of a voluntary memory. And yet this storage of images cannot leave them unaltered. The narrator of the Recherche understands the transformation undergone by the image through its relation to the name in terms of a perpetuation of the distance between the name and the named; or, more precisely, it is the named itself which comes to be split between the image which has been submitted to a transformation and the image which has not. The name is more than a label appended to an image, as it were, for it possesses its “lois propres” [own laws] 7 from which images cannot be exempted. Thus Adorno shares Proust’s experience of names only up to a point. If names are necessarily involved in a production of images, they do not simply function as abbreviations or as the keys to an archive in which images would be preserved intact. For Proust, however, the splitting and doubling of the named can only lead to disappointment. On the day the narrator visits the places whose names he cherishes as if they were more than a meaningless series of letters, confronting the images stored in these names with a reality that resembles the mere letter in that it is plainly what it is and nothing else, he cannot but feel disappointed. In La prisonnière [The Prisoner], the narrator compares the disappointment that awaits the insatiable curiosity of the lover with the disappointment that awaits the equally insatiable curiosity provoked by the names of places. 8 Hence in one case, the case of Proust, the “law” of the name is conceived of as fatal because it causes the distance between the name and the named to increase beyond the limit at which happiness would still be possible, while in the other, the case of Adorno, the transformation triggered by the name is not considered to have a blinding effect since it fosters an insight on which happiness hinges. Therefore what enables “metaphysical experience” is also that which, in the absence of a law or a rule controlling and regulating the relationship between happiness and disappointment, threatens to render it impossible. Everything seems to come down to comportment—as opposed to compulsion—or to whether names—the law, the 3

world picture 3 letter, necessity—allow for the possibility of comportment in the first place. And yet if for the narrator of Le temps retrouvé [Finding Time Again] converting sensations into their spiritual equivalent, ideas, constitutes the task for the artist, 9 then the artist who knows that an unbridgeable gap keeps the name and the named apart forever, must try to extract the idea from the memory of things, from the second life which the recovery of time lost confers on them. If, having shed some light on the manifest presence of Proust in Adorno’s thought, one now wanted to establish his secret or hidden presence, one could start by relating an enigmatic sentence in the monograph on Mahler that reads like an aphorism to a passage from La fugitive [The Fugitive]. Such a procedure would not aim at producing evidence of the dissimulation of an objective influence upon the philosopher by the artist but would contribute towards creating a constellation of similar intentions. “To the extent that every dead person resembles a person murdered by the living, she also resembles a person whom the living would have to rescue,” Adorno affirms without explaining his claim any further. 10 However, the reader of Proust may hear an echo here that originates in a comparison introduced by the narrator of La fugitive between the death of his grandmother and the death of his beloved. 11 In both instances, the lack of suffering that the other’s absence brings about, makes him feel ashamed of having survived the death of the other and, as a consequence, to consider his life as being henceforth besmirched by a double murder. Proust’s skepticism concludes that only the world’s baseness will forgive such a deed. Adorno detects an impulse to rescue the dead in precisely the realization of the murderous disruption of life. On the one hand, then, he seems to differ from Proust; and yet on the other, one could maintain that the very impulse Adorno detects in the perception of death as murder, the need to elevate life to a second life, is essentially an expression of the artistic accomplishment of the Recherche. To the one who loves others and things and is attentive to sense, to that which surfaces when the name and the named, the letter and the image diverge, reality as the domain of the inexorably literal, of dumb proper names, must appear as a fabrication, a falsification effected by the sceptic’s reductionism. Whether this understanding is indicative of a delusion or an idea will show in the artist’s and the philosopher’s work, even though seeing what the work shows will not be tantamount to securing proof of its truth. If, as Proust writes in La prisonnière, the speed with which death catches up with the living before they die is so different in each case that one should not speak of death in general terms, if it is such that the attention directed at others and things cannot hope to catch up with reality, 12 leading this attention to fall prey to indifference and coldness long before it can resist them, and if, to express the same matter otherwise, the name is always already a “nom écrit” [written name], 13 and thus no longer something to which one may still respond, then the stakes for the artist and the philosopher could not be higher. The “remembrance of things past,” Adorno stresses in his “Theses Upon Art and Religion Today” with reference to Proust, braves death by “breaking the power of oblivion engulfing every individual life.” 14 The motif of a second life in Adorno permeates all his thinking to the degree that, much more than being just one motif among others, it is synonymous with his “concept of the concept,” with his very notion of philosophy. Philosophy’s aim, from this perspective, is to produce a second life since whatever takes place generates an ideality of a quite specific kind. Art teaches philosophy to be attentive to such specificity. For while it can be argued that whatever takes place possesses a value of irreplaceable singularity or that, by definition, the general and the universal cannot 4

world picture 3 take place, the fact that something takes place also means that it must be repeatable. What Adorno understands with his reading of Proust is that art and philosophy are intertwined—it is always the unique that calls for repetition and repetition remains empty unless it affects in turn, the unique. Negative dialectics, an expression which, like iterability in Derrida, points to the tension between singularity and ideality as one arising from the mutual antagonism of each of the two poles, inherits the lesson of both art and philosophy. The idea is the concept used to name the repetition of the unique as such. It is the philosopher’s task to develop this concept. The artist’s task is to capture the experience of happiness for which only a second life can allow, the life that stems from art’s touching upon the idea. On the whole, in spite of the commentaries, quotations and constant allusions that demonstrate Proust’s manifest or hidden presence in his work, Adorno is perhaps in a similar position to the film director Luchino Visconti who never made the one film he wanted to make the most, a film based on the Recherche. But just as it has been suggested that Visconti did not make this one film because he made it in the guise of all his other films, 15 one could suggest that Adorno did not write a major text on Proust because the idea of the French writer’s novel already informed the investments and flows at the heart of the philosopher’s “intellectual economy.” A genealogy of the motif of a second life that Adorno appropriates for his thought would have to trace it back to at least two distinct sources. The affirmation, to be found in the “Meditations on Metaphysics,” that nothing can be rescued without exposing itself to a transformation which sees it traverse the “portal of death,” testifies to the biblical and dialectical origins of the motif of a second life. 16 The affirmation, to be found in the essay on the museum dedicated to the memory of Hermann Grab, that love dwells on a “second and already past life” of things rather than on their “first” life—since nothing may be said to last unless mediated by memory—testifies to the Proustian origins of the dominant motif. 17 In a rather sketchy interpretation of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs [In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower], Adorno himself creates a link between speculative dialectics and Proust’s novel, in which Hegel is mentioned only once, in a remark on the dialectical doctrine of becoming: “Thus in Proust, whom the French, with good reason, frequently experience as German, everything individual and transient becomes null, as in Hegelian philosophy. The polarity of happiness and transience directs him to memory. Undamaged experience is produced only in memory, far beyond immediacy, and through memory aging and death seem to be overcome in the aesthetic image. But this happiness achieved through the rescue of experience, a happiness that will not let anything be taken from it, represents an unconditional renunciation of consolation. Rather the whole life be sacrificed for complete happiness than one bit of it be accepted that does not meet the criterion of utmost fulfillment.” 18 It is then the acknowledgment of the nullity of singularity—the recognition of the letter—that permits the singular—the image stored and engendered by the name—to pertain to a life which unfolds neither as the letter’s mechanical reproduction nor as the imagination’s deluding and ultimately vacuous exuberance but rather as the experience of the thing delivered from itself to itself, as it were, or of the thing that, having changed into the idea, fills the one who participates in this life with the intensity of happiness. In relation to things, Proust distinguishes the position of the image from that of the idea. First, the narrator of Le temps retrouvé says, we reach for the beauty of images that are situated behind things. Only when we have done so and the images’ beauty has ceased to enthrall us, do we reach for the beauty of the idea which is placed not behind but in front of things. We 5

world picture 3 understand the idea in its beauty, that which is in a certain sense closer, when we have moved away from what is more distant, the image. 19 The sight of a group of trees in the vicinity of Balbec makes such an impression on the narrator of the Recherche that, in La prisonnière, it is interpreted as a clue to the “construction d’une vie véritable” [construction of a true and real life]. 20 According to Adorno, the ephemeral character of natural beauty provides the model for Proust’s intuition of transience. 21 It is thus not surprising to come upon the writer’s name at the beginning of the section on natural beauty in Aesthetic Theory. 22 Yet does this section not also supply a privileged example of a productive appropriation of the motif of a second life, all the more so as the revision to which the philosopher submits the dialectical critique of natural beauty does not simply revoke the role Hegel assigns to artistic beauty? Adorno tries to rescue natural beauty by inscribing it in a historical context: the context of art. He believes that the experience of art cannot be dissociated from an experience of natural beauty and that, conversely, the experience of natural beauty itself requires an experience of art. Nature is perceived as beautiful when, appearing in a fugitive moment, it turns into an image. Its appearance is a “free favour,” to use Kant’s notion. But this image into which nature turns when it ceases to be instrumentalized is not the image of some object. If Adorno warns against artists who relate to nature through a gesture of imitation, whereby art would be given over to the form of a crude realism or naturalism, it is precisely because nature, prior to any intervention on the part of the artist, is already an image; already it opens onto the domain of a second life in which the line of demarcation between art and nature is blurred. The literal reproduction of appearing nature amounts to a tautological doubling that erases the appearance with which this life here rests. It is a piece of kitsch, an empty and sentimental simulation. What is instead meant by the use Adorno makes of the concept of an image is that nature becomes expressive without expressing anything specific. Adorno contradicts the view Hegel presents in his lectures on the philosophy of art. Nature is not indifferent. On the contrary, it addresses its beholder, and it is only in this address that I become the one who beholds. I feel touched. Hence nature does not express a meaning or convey a content in an image. Rather, one could say that it entirely consists in its touching the one who looks upon it. And when touched, the beholder feels a particular kind of pleasure. He feels the relief that comes from the open into which he enters. The viewer to whom nature fleetingly appears is drawn into the openness for which nature in this case stands. And if art, too, is endowed with the capacity of touching, then paradoxically the works of art that turn away from nature prove to be those which show it the greatest fidelity. Nature can be seen only blindly, in a second life of blindness. Its enigmatic character, the fact that it is a pure image or a pure expression, is reflected in the hermetic character of art, in that ultimately art must forbid all usage. Art and nature communicate when they are no longer of any interest. Is this the reason why, in the end, the Recherche is fundamentally a novel of abstraction, an abstraction that cannot be opposed to concretion as if theory were a label which the writer had forgotten to remove? The idea of a second life is the idea of an abstraction ensuing from the concretion of the singular—of the name. Alexander García Düttmann teaches Philosophy at Goldsmiths (University of London). Recent publications in English include: Philosophy of Exaggeration (London and New

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world picture 3 York: Continuum 2007) and Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood (Stanford University Press: Stanford 2008).

Notes 1

Theodor W. Adorno, “Meine stärksten Eindrücke 1953” [My Strongest Impressions in 1953], Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 20.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 734. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Short Commentaries on Proust,” Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. S. Weber-Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 3 While on a summer holiday in southern Germany in 1926, Adorno mentions Proust on the back of a postcard addressed to Siegfried Kracauer: “I read French kitsch, as usual, Marcel Proust and Franz Brentano.” (Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, Correspondence [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008], 123) 4 Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, 180. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 373. 6 Ibid., 373 f. (translation modified). 7 Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de La Pléiade], 1987), 380; Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s, trans. Lydia Davis, In Search of Lost Time, ed. C. Prendergast (London: The Penguin Press, 2002), 391. 8 Marcel Proust, La prisonnière, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de La Pléiade], 1988), 649; Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. C. Clark, In Search of Lost Time, 128. 9 Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de La Pléiade], 1989), 457; Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, trans. I. Paterson, In Search of Lost Time, 187. 10 Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29 (translation modified). 11 Marcel Proust, La fugitive, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 4, 78; Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, trans. P. Collier, In Search of Lost Time, 463. 12 Proust, La prisonnière, 704; Proust, The Prisoner, 180. 13 Ibid., 705 (French); ibid., 182 (English). 14 Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses Upon Art and Religion Today,” Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. S. Weber-Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 298. 15 Florence Colombani, Proust—Visconti. Histoire d’une affinité élective (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2006), 18 f. 16 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 392. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” Prisms, trans. S. Weber and S. Weber-Nicholsen (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1983), 182 (translation modified). 18 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Proust: II. Within a Budding Grove,” Notes to Literature, vol. 2, 315. 19 Proust, Le temps retrouvé, 510; Proust, Finding Time Again, 240. 20 Proust, La prisonnière, 765; Proust, The Prisoner, 239 (translation modified). 21 Adorno, “Valéry Proust Museum,” 182. 7

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Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kantor (London: Continuum, 2004), 63.

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The Work of Art and the Promise of Happiness in Adorno James Gordon Finlayson I. One of the most striking and intriguing theses of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is that art is the promise of happiness. Stendhal's dictum about the promesse du bonheur says that art thanks existence by accentuating what in existence prefigures utopia. This is a diminishing resource, since existence increasingly mirrors only itself. Consequently art is ever less able to mirror existence. Because any happiness that one might take from or find in what exists is false, a mere substitute, art has to break its promise in order to keep it. 1 Nothing about this dictum is self-evident, not least its attribution to Stendhal, who wrote not that art is the promise of happiness, but that “beauty is but the promise of happiness” (la beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur). 2 Stendhal’s saying about beauty occurs in a footnote to a passage in De l'Amour in which he states that it is possible to love the ugly. He illustrates the point with an anecdote about a man who, in the presence of two women, one beautiful and the other thin, ugly and scarred with smallpox, falls for the latter, who quite by chance reminds him of a former love. The moral of the story is that beauty has little or nothing to do with physical perfection. 3 Stendhal’s definition of beauty, and his thought that the idea of beauty lies far from nature and from the physical form of the object of desire, impressed Baudelaire. 4 He comments in Le Peintre de La Vie Moderne that, although it “submits the beautiful too much to the infinitely variable ideal of happiness and divests the beautiful too quickly of its aristocratic character,” Stendhal’s idea nonetheless has the considerable merit of “breaking decisively with the mistakes of the academicians.” 5 The mistakes to which Baudelaire refers are presumably those of taking nature as the ideal of beauty, and of having a misguided moral conception of nature. Baudelaire, under Stendhal’s influence, works up a theory of the beautiful, a theory reminiscent of Platonism. 6 The beautiful is made of an eternal, immutable element the quantity of which is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative and circumstantial element which will be in turn or at once, the era, the fashion, morality or passion. Without this second element...the first element would be indigestible, inappreciable, maladapted and inappropriate to human nature...Consider, if you please, the eternally substantial element as the soul, and the variable element as its body. 7 The main lesson Baudelaire takes from Stendhal is that the beautiful is an idea that can and must take on a myriad of historical guises, just as the lure of happiness can entice the flâneur into a thousand different alleys and arcades. Adorno’s dictum that art is a promesse du bonheur, then, though it draws on Stendhal and Baudelaire, is in an important sense his own. The dictum is a recurrent motif in Adorno, suggesting not just that he was fond of it, but that it is also a central thought, or at least that we can regard it as central, provided that we disregard Adorno's programmatic claim that in philosophical texts all propositions should stand equally close to the centre. 8 We can put aside that startling prescription, I believe, since it does not apply even to his own work: some propositions stand much closer to its center than others. The thesis that art is a promise of happiness is one of them and it radiates out in different directions. To understand it properly, is to understand

world picture 3 something important not just about Adorno’s philosophy of art, but also about his wider social and political theory, and finally about the close and fraught interrelation between these, an interrelation which is thematized in a significant passage from the opening of Aesthetic Theory. Art is not only the plenipotentiary of a better praxis than that which has to date predominated, but is equally the critique of praxis as the rule of brutal selfpreservation at the heart of the status quo and in its service. It gives the lie to production for production's sake and opts for a form of praxis beyond the spell of labour. Art's promesse du bonheur means not only that hitherto praxis has blocked happiness, but that happiness is beyond praxis. The force of negativity in the artwork gives the measure of the chasm separating praxis from happiness. 9 Here Adorno unambiguously sets out the social and critical role of art: the happiness it promises serves both as a foil for criticising existing society, and as an ideal for constructing a better one. Yet the passage raises a whole cluster of questions. What notion of happiness is in play? How exactly can art promise happiness? And what, according to Adorno, does the fact that art promises happiness tell us about art and its relation to society? Before we move on to these questions, we need to make two cautionary remarks about what Adorno means by “art” and by “promise” respectively, in order to prevent certain misunderstandings from arising. The first is that when Adorno talks about art, he is only talking about European literature and music, from about 1750 to 1950, roughly, that is, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Samuel Beckett. 10 The second is that Adorno is not talking about promising in the sense of making a verbal commitment to a person that one will do something in the future. To promise in the sense in question is to exhibit a potential for something good or better, as when one says that it promises to be a fine day, or that young Carlota is a promising artist: to promise is to give hope or raise expectations. The French verb “promettre” and the German “versprechen” share this sense with English. II. Now let us zero in on the notion of happiness. The claim that happiness can serve as an appropriate ideal and measure of a society has more prima facie plausibility, and much deeper roots in the philosophical tradition than the idea that art can: the latter dates from German idealism and German Romanticism; the former dates back to the ancients. Adorno knows this. In the beginning of Minima Moralia, Adorno remarks that the ancients took it for granted that happiness, the question of the good life, to be “the true field of philosophy”. 11 In classical philosophy happiness is the purpose and the point of the individual life and the common social life of human beings, and the measure of their success or failure. To take a striking example, consider Socrates reply to Adeimantus's objection in the Republic that the austere diet of philosophy and gymnastics imposed on the guardians—no family, no private property etc.—would prevent them from being happy. Socrates replies as follows: Our first task then, is not to form the happiness of a few, by isolating a few and ensuring their happiness, but of the whole polis....It is as if we were painting a statue and someone should approach us and censure us for not applying the most beautiful colours to the most beautiful parts of the body, because the eyes, which possess the highest beauty, were not painted in purple but in black. I think we should make a reasonable reply to him by saying, My good sir, do not imagine that we must make the eyes so beautiful that they would not appear to be eyes, or that we should do the like to the other parts; but observe whether by giving to the 2

world picture 3 several parts what rightly belongs to them we make the whole beautiful. Therefore do not now compel us to bestow upon our guardians happiness of such a kind as shall make them anything but guardians. 12 In this passage Plato is not talking about happiness as individual enjoyment, but as a structural property of the polis as a whole. This is perfectly normal for Plato, though not for us, since we are used to thinking of happiness as enjoyment or delight in one’s own existence, a good feeling about and positive attitude toward one’s own life. The structural property of the polis at the open end of Plato’s analogy consists in the harmony of the three classes, guardians, auxiliaries and workers, the good government of the guardians, and the functional principle of one person one job that cements society together. The ideal of beauty as aesthetic harmony at the fixed end of the analogy is also a structural property of the relation of part to whole, where everything is in its proper place. Plato considers the latter more familiar and less controversial than the idea of social happiness, which it elucidates. Socrates’ answer totally misses the point of Adeimantus's objection, which is that the individual lives of the guardians might not go well from their perspective, since they might remain unhappy even if the ideal of social harmony is realized in the polis as a whole. Aristotle presses the same objection in the Politics. Plato deprives the guardians even of happiness and says that the legislator ought to make the whole polis happy. But the whole polis cannot be happy unless the most or all, or some of its parts enjoy happiness. In this respect happiness is not like evenness in numbers, which may exist in the whole but not in the parts... 13 One has to take care here. It would be wrong to think that Aristotle is objecting to Plato’s view of happiness as a structural property of social whole. He is not. It is just that he has a different structural property in mind, namely one in which each citizen individually participates in and personally partakes of the happiness of the polis. To judge the happiness of the polis, on Aristotle’s account, is also to judge the happiness of its individual members. This distributive ideal of happiness is at work also in Aristotle’s criterion of a correct or good constitution, which is that, however political power be structured and administered—as monarchy (rule by one), as aristocracy (rule by the few), or as republic (rule by all), it is wielded in the common interest of all the citizens—that is to say all the inhabitants—of the polis, and not in the private interest of the rulers. 14 Again, just like Plato, Aristotle denies that a happy life is merely a life of pleasure or enjoyment. 15 Happiness, or eudaimonia, according to Aristotle's definition in the Nichomachean Ethics, is an “activity of the soul in conformity with virtue”. 16 That said, virtue need not be had at the expense of individual enjoyment, for if people have been correctly trained to love virtue for its own sake, then the life of virtuous action will be satisfying, provided first, that their major needs and deepest desires, which are themselves the product of good upbringing and education—and thus appropriate in content and degree—are satisfied, and provided second, that they have not suffered great ill-fortune. Thus qualified, Aristotle claims that the happiness of the individual and the happiness of the polis are the one and the same, without this implying that the individual cares only for the whole city-state and not for himself. 17 Aristotle’s point is a far reaching one. Political happiness here refers to the flourishing of the city, and the collective virtue of the citizenry, and there is an internal connection between these and the virtue of individuals. The soul of the happy person is one in which reason has the better part, and regulates the appetites, desires and emotions. The statesman, insofar as he is virtuous, in making laws in the common interest and exercising his practical wisdom, is expressing the rational part of his soul. 18 The laws and policies 3

world picture 3 that result from the statesman's activity are expressions of his reason. At the same time, the good practices and laws he brings into being foster the virtuous actions of the citizens, and help build their excellence of character and give rational form to their soul, which finds expression again when they, as citizens, are elevated to office and take turns at ruling. Looked at in this way, when all goes well, the collective happiness of the polis the individual happiness of citizens, coalesce in a metabolic harmony. Plato and Aristotle, then, conceive happiness as a predicate both of the lives of individuals, and of society as a whole. As the highest good, namely that for the sake of which everything else is sought, and which itself is not pursued for the sake of anything else, as the most final end of the individual and collective life of man, happiness serves as a foil for the critical evaluation of human life and human, which is to say political, association. A society that is not happy is not a good society. And, at least for Aristotle a society most or all of whose inhabitants are not happy, is not a good society. III. To see how all this relates to Adorno it will help to travel back to the origins of Frankfurt School critical theory. 19 In Max Horkheimer’s essays of the 1930s, the seminal period where avant la lettre he developed what later came to be called “critical theory,” he puts forward a theory of happiness very similar to the classical one we have just looked at, where it is a standard for the evaluation of society. The point of Horkheimer’s doing this was both to position critical theory on the side of Aristotle and Plato, and to take aim against Kant, who was one of Horkheimer’s chief bêtes noires. (It is easy to forget that in the early half of the 20th Century neo-Kantianism of one variety or another was the dominant intellectual force in Europe, and that consequently Kant's shadow was everywhere.) Horkheimer followed Marx and Lukács, in levelling his criticism of Kant as the epitome of bourgeois thought. Kant’s moral theory takes the form of a radical repudiation of eudaemonism. He gives various reasons why morality (and moral theory) cannot be based on the principle of happiness. First, happiness, unlike the good will, is not unconditionally valuable. Hence, second, it is incapable of being the ground of moral worth of actions. Third, the content of happiness is contingent, variable and indeterminate. Fourth, psychologically speaking, happiness and virtue, when not accompanied by a good will, produce over-confidence. The principle of one's own happiness...is the most objectionable, not merely because it is false and experience contradicts the pretence that happiness always proportions itself to good conduct, not yet merely because it contributes nothing at all to the establishment of morality, since making someone happy is quite different from making someone good...; it is the most objectionable because it bases morality on sensible motives which undermine it and destroy all its sublimity... 20 For Kant, the aim of morality as the expression of pure practical reason is not for moral agents to achieve happiness, but for them to become worthy of happiness. Similar arguments against the principle of happiness can be found, mutatis mutandis, in Kant’s theory of right, and in his conception of political association. 21 In these early essays Horkheimer attempts to rescue the concept of happiness as a tool for critical theory, while subjecting Kantian deontology to a materialist critique. He claims that Kant’s deontological insistence that the moral worth of an action depends exclusively on the conviction [Gesinnung] of the agent, no matter the consequences of the action, is a “regressive tendency,” and the idea that the good will is the sole source of moral value, an “idealistic delusion.” 22 The worth of an action according to Horkheimer is determined consequentially by whether or not it 4

world picture 3 actually conduces to the transformation of bourgeois capitalist society into a rationally organised society, to the elimination of human suffering and oppression, and to what he calls the “happiness [Glück] of life as a whole.” 23 Horkheimer rejects Kant’s central claim that one can explain the peculiar obligatoriness and overidingness of the moral “ought,” by showing that they are the manifestation of pure practical reason to a human nature that is both rational and sensible, i.e. not merely rational. That is why, according to Kant moral laws appear as imperatives. However there are alternative explanations. Both Hegel and Schopenhauer argue that the command like nature of morality is a relic of Mosaic law within the Judeo Christian tradition. Nietzsche traces the severity of moral commands back to rather gruesome origins of contract law, whilst Freud puts it down to the internalisation of fear of the father figure. Horkheimer sides with the dissenters. He attributes these features of Kantian morality to their religious origins. 24 He also portrays them as an internalization of social compulsion and as a psychic consequence of the suppression of the instincts. 25 Horkheimer’s rejection of both the rationalism and the universalism of Kant’s moral theory is related to this point. As these early essays make clear, he has a historical understanding of morality. He claims that in the bourgeois era the human psyche is stamped with the imprint of possessive individualism. However, motives of individual self-interest are not sufficient to cement society together. Hence, once religious traditions and hierarchies have ebbed away, other mechanisms are needed to provide a repository of altruistic or non-prudential motives that will do this. Morality comes to fill the void, by trying to shore up an historically contingent set of behavioural norms and values with the illusory metaphysical backing of a “transcendent order of reality.” 26 Horkheimer argues that the Kant's whole attempt to ground moral prescriptions as requirements of pure practical reason, together with the widespread idea that moral actions stand in need of rational justification, is an illusion. 27 Moreover, this illusion is “ideological” insofar as it misrepresents what are in fact the contingent needs, interests and aspirations of a particular class as “universally binding postulates, anchored in transcendent authorities, as principles that correspond to the eternal essence of the world and of humanity.” 28 Consequently, Horkheimer rejects what he sees as a “metaphysically grounded morality” in favor of a rich conception of humanity, which foregrounds the moral feelings of love, compassion and solidarity, and the anthropological fact that humans desire happiness. These moral feelings, and the associated “claim to happiness” [Glück], Horkheimer claims, do not stand in need of any “justification or grounding.” 29 Horkheimer, then, holds that happiness, not morality, is the appropriate basis for social criticism and the evaluation of social life. And like Plato and Aristotle before him, he holds that happiness is a property of social harmony belonging to life as a whole: happiness is the ideal of a rationally organised social totality in which the individual interest harmonises with the common interest, and where the individual citizen is at one with society. Horkheimer gives his concept of happiness an Hegelian-Marxist twist, in claiming that labour is the vehicle of individual self-realization through which the individual’s self-conscious activity become integrated within the social whole. 30 In the future society towards which the moral consciousness aspires, the life of the whole and of individuals alike is produced a not merely as a natural effect but as the consequence of rational designs that take account of the happiness of individuals…In place of the blind mechanism of economic struggles, which presently condition happiness and—for the greater part of humanity— unhappiness, the purposive application of the immeasurable wealth of human and 5

world picture 3 material powers of production emerges. 31 The harmonious social whole in which happiness will eventually be realized is a rationally organized totality, consisting partly in a planned economy. 32 In the absence of such a rational, selfconscious organization of society, morality functions as a socially integrative mechanism only by suppressing individuals’ demands for a happiness the existing order denies them anyway. It would be wrong to pass over the point that Kant means something very different by happiness to Aristotle. Aristotle, for his part, conceives happiness as an expression of human reason, as the ultimate good, and as the most final end of human life. For Kant, by contrast, happiness consists in the satisfaction (or possibly the co-satisfaction) of a plurality of sensible desires, which are part of man’s empirical make up, are only conditionally good, and are separate from and not automatically in harmony with the aims of human reason. It can thus be claimed with some justification that Kant has a hedonistic conception of happiness and that this hedonism motivates his rejection of eudaemonism, i.e. his denial that happiness can form the supreme principle of morality and the ultimate ground of right. 33 In a way, then, it is misleading to play Aristotle off against Kant, as Horkheimer does, since both Aristotle and Kant reject the life of mere pleasure as one unworthy of human beings, and both recommend that life be lived according to the demands of reason. The difference, then, is this. For Kant, the ideal of happiness, as he understands it, cannot serve as an apt standard for the evaluation of human life or political association. That citizens or moral agents are happy or unhappy is a side issue. That they heed the demands of morality and conform to just laws is of overriding importance. Horkheimer sides with Aristotle and Plato, not only in his conception of what happiness is, but also in the claim that it is the appropriate measure of a good life and a good society, and thus an apt tool of social criticism. IV. This is not the place to tell the long and by now well known story about the development of Frankfurt School critical theory, but it is important to note that, although Adorno passes different judgements on Kant’s ethics at different times and to different audiences, he shares Horkheimer’s general discontent with Kant’s rationalism and formalism, and that Adorno’s preoccupation with happiness is also both a refurbishment of a central topic of ancient philosophy, and a selfconscious act of critical resistance against contemporary philosophy. In the opening remarks of Minima Moralia Adorno claims that the teaching of the good life, or rather what he calls the doctrine of right living (“die Lehre vom richtigen Leben”), was once “the true field of philosophy,” but has fallen into neglect since philosophy converted to method. 34 Adorno’s concern with happiness in Minima Moralia is, however, far more fraught and problematic than Horkheimer’s in the 1930s. For one thing, the young Horkheimer did not doubt that happiness was an expression of human reason. By the time of Dialectic of Enlightenment this faith in reason had vanished. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s thesis in that work is that, in the process of social modernisation, human cognition and practical reason atrophy to the rational calculation of the most efficient means to given ends, and become the driving force in man’s domination of internal and external nature. Thus understood, human reason can no longer offer an unblemished ideal of human happiness. In Dialectic of Enlightenment this aspect of the Aristotelian conception of happiness as a “rational activity expressing virtue” is sacrificed on the altar of the critique of instrumental reason, which initiates a sea change in critical theory. Adorno abandons the Marxist idea, still present in Horkheimer’s ‘Traditional and Critical Theory,” that the idea of social happiness is “immanent in human labour.” 35 Labor is no longer the 6

world picture 3 healthy expression of man’s species–being but the cancerous outgrowth of man’s instrumental rationality and his domination of internal and external nature. This is why the promise of happiness is always the promise of a form of praxis “beyond the spell of labor.” Moreover, happiness can no longer be construed as the virtuous character arising from participation in the traditions and practices that make up the ethical life of the political community. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazism, War, Auschwitz, in short, in a context where an entire culture—its morality and its art—dismally failed, a neo-Aristotelian or Hegelian account of the social, cultural and institutional bases of happiness qua virtue is no longer possible. 36 In this context the question pressing on Adorno was whether “culture, and what this so called culture has become, leaves anything that even resembles right living [richtiges Leben], or whether it is a context of institutions, which to an increasing degree actually hinders such a thing as the right life.” 37 In the lectures post-humously published as Problems of Moral Philosophy Adorno suggests that, under current conditions, Sittlichkeit, or the morality of custom, rather than Moralität, the morality of principle, presents the immediate danger. 38 The former, with its pressure towards group adaptation and conformity, is far less likely to be a source of possible resistance and criticism and more likely to harden into totalitarianism than the latter. The peculiar difficulty Adorno now faces, given his diagnosis of social conditions, is to reliably locate and make available to critical theory something like happiness or the good life. This is the problem that lies behind one of his most memorable and most difficult aphorisms: “Es gibt keinen richten Leben im falschen.” What makes this sentence is so difficult to interpret, also makes it difficult to translate. Literally it means that there is no right living in the false life. 39 A good, idiomatic translation of this crucial sentence into English would be something like: “The false life cannot be rightly lived.” Jephcott’s translation—“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly”—captures some of the oddness of Adorno’s sentence but has disadvantages. For one thing, where Adorno stresses the absence of “rightness,” Jephcott’s translation indicates the presence of “wrongness.” Where Adorno uses the adjective “richtig” and “falsch,” Jephcott uses “right” and “wrong”, which have a more moral timbre. Finally, it fails to pick up the resonance with the reference in the opening line of the book to the ancient “doctrine of right living, which Jephcott renders (not unreasonably) as “the teaching of the good life.” This remarkably pithy sentence suggests two very different ideas about happiness. The first idea is that happiness can be found only in fragments of reality that bear no significant relation to the structure of social reality. This is a line of thought Adorno develops in ‘The Essay as Form” and is most prevalent in his earlier work. After writing that the essay, by self-consciously embracing and manifesting its artificiality “honours nature by confirming that she no longer exists for human beings,” he goes on to say that the essay’s “Alexandrinism responds to the fact that by their very existence, lilacs and nightingales—where the universal net has permitted them to survive—make us believe that life is still alive.” 40 Here, then, Adorno rejects the straightforward idea that art should imitate nature, and advances instead the view that art honours nature in not imitating it, but in celebrating its own artifice. Yet Adorno concedes that the idea of happiness—or at least the closely related idea of life that still lives—is immanent in the perfection of some of nature’s “creations,” like lilacs and nightingales, which remain outside the “universal net.” Our perception of the perfection of these natural beings, which makes them stand out against the background of social imperfection, helps us to form an idea of happiness. This incomplete negativism, as I call it, is compatible with Adorno’s habit of occasionally breaking his self-imposed prohibition on images, and saying what happiness would consist in. For example, he claims that once it has broken free of the spell of labor, of production and planning, enjoyment would itself be transformed: Rien faire comme une bête, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, “being, 7

world picture 3 nothing else without further determination or fulfilment” might take the place of process, act, satisfaction, and so truly keep the promise of dialectical logic that it would culminate in its origin. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of perpetual peace. 41 The second idea, suggested by the famous aphorism, is that there is literally no happiness in the world, and that nothing within the world can help us to picture happiness, or even so much as to form an idea of it. I call this second idea austere negativism. Austere negativism is consistent with Adorno’s thought in Negative Dialectics that philosophy’s true interest lies in what is nonconceptual and non-identical to thinking. 42 The thought is roughly that one cannot but think by means of concepts, which by Adorno’s lights means to think representationally. This is what one might call the rationalist moment in Adorno’s thought. Consequently, in philosophy one has to think what necessarily escapes conceptual (and representational) thought. Adorno has no truck with forms of Romanticism or mysticism which arrogate to the subject some kind of nonconceptual access to what is non-identical to thought: for Adorno, no kind of intimation or feeling can show us happiness, utopia, non-identity or whatever. And because what nevertheless has to be grasped is something that necessarily resists conceptual thought one’s only option is to use concepts against themselves, or as he says, to go beyond concepts by means of them. 43 Only by such a means, by pushing thought against its limits, and as it were cracking open its surface, is the good, or the right life, to be glimpsed. [I]t is only in that absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism secularises it by not permitting utopia to be positively pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. 44 There can be no doubt that Adorno endorses now one, now the other of these discrepant conceptions of negativism—incomplete and austere negativism. There can be no doubt also that Adorno does not much mind about discrepancy, or—which comes to the same thing—care much for consistency, the preoccupation with which he believes to be a major fault of contemporary forms of philosophy. He far is more concerned with the depth of insight his thought affords. Indeed he sometimes claims that if thought is too preoccupied with aiming for consistency it will not achieve depth of insight. Adorno’s work is much less like a theory—in the traditional sense— and more like a thicket of different ideas in tension with one another. When offering a philosophical interpretation of his work, though, it is quite proper to treat him as if he had a settled view. After all there is no obligation on the interpreter to accept Adorno’s qualms about philosophy. I tend to treat him as an austere negativist, because I think that this view is more in line with the fundamental tenets of his work. One implication of this reading of Adorno as an austere negativist is that the thesis that art is a promesse du bonheur cannot be understood as a subjective genitive, which says that the happiness occasioned by art promises a better world. Rather, it has to be read as an objective genetive, which says that art promises happiness to those who engage properly with it, yet does not itself embody or impart happiness. This I believe is the most natural way to interpret it anyway. V. We can now return with renewed focus to Adorno’s dictum. Richard Wolin gives a concise expression of what I take to be a fairly standard view of it, and of the whole relation between Adorno’s aesthetics and social theory. 8

world picture 3 Adorno seeks to redeem the vaunted promesse de bonheur (sic) that art counterposes to an antagonistic social totality. Art comes to represent a world of happiness and fulfilment that is denied in the workaday world of bourgeois material life. 45 The standard view makes good sense of Adorno’s claim that art provides a foil against which the social world can be criticized, and an ideal worthy of imitation. Bear in mind that Adorno does indeed make statements such as that “the doctrine of imitation should be reversed” and that “reality ought to imitate artworks, not the other way round.” 46 However, the standard view thus expressed is in need of qualification and revision. For one thing, it is by no means clear how it is to be squared with Adorno’s austere negativism: given the implications of the Bilderverbot as Adorno conceives it, it cannot be right to say that art represents happiness, for happiness—along with “utopia,” “reconciliation,” “right living,” and a whole cluster of related ideas such as “nonidentity,” “otherness”—defies representation. Adorno is not claiming either that happiness consists in the contemplation of works of art, or that art works transmit ideas of happiness to those who pay them due attention. 47 Yet he does hold that art works promise happiness, and thus somehow vouchsafe the ideal of a better society that provides a foil for the criticism of the existing world and the construction of a better one. To understand Adorno’s view properly, we must ask the question: by virtue of what features or qualities do art works show this promise? The standard view, which was our point of departure, suggests that the property in question is something like a harmony of part and whole, an organic unity of the work. And we have already seen how this might offer a vision of happiness in something like the sense Horkheimer used it in his early essays. The view resembles Georg Lukács’s theory that what makes the European realist novels of Balzac or Stendhal so successful is an organic unity of general and particular based in the “type.” 48 Great art is characterized by organic unity. This is, claims Lukács, why Marxists are “jealous guardians of our classical heritage,” a heritage that consists in “the great arts which depict man as a whole in the whole of society.” 49 Now what Lukács calls the type is better understood as a feature of the content of the work, than of its form, though it embraces both. Adorno’s view, by contrast, is that art works promise happiness in virtue of their form alone, or, as he sometimes says, their style, not in virtue of their content or message. 50 This is the substance of his criticism of the politically engaged art of Brecht and Sartre. And this is also why, contra Lukács’s preference for the realism of Balzac and Stendhal, Adorno defends the modernism of Beckett, Kafka, and Proust: “What these works say, is not what their words say.” 51 Of course, the standard view can accommodate this: art promises happiness in virtue of its form. To quote Wolin again: “utopian content is conveyed indirectly through the moment of form.” 52 But what formal feature of art conveys its utopian content and how exactly? The first answer that suggests itself is that it promises happiness through its organic totality. The view is that the reciprocal relation between the part and the whole calls forth an ideal of social harmony to which the world—the actually existing relations between individual and society—fails to live up. Adorno sometimes espouses this view, albeit tentatively and in passing. 53 Still, a lot more needs to be said if we are to explain why this formal feature can supply an ideal that is relevant for a criticism of this (Adorno’s) society. Three points in particular, each of which is linked to Adorno’s interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, are relevant to this explanation. First, Kant famously links judgements of beauty with the perception of what he calls “finality without an end,” or to use the more literal but less idiomatic phrase “purposiveness without purpose.” In other words, objects of beauty look as if they are for something, and yet are not for anything. Paradigmatically, for Kant, natural objects display this formal feature of finality without an end. Thus, for Kant, organic nature provides the 9

world picture 3 paradigm of beauty. So the form of finality without end provides a connection between nature, organic form, and beauty. Adorno, follows Kant in claiming that art works manifest through their form that they are without a purpose, and hence useless. Art does not fit in with, it is rather at odds with, the universally fungible world, and thus has the ability to convey happiness as an “awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose”. 54 Adorno sees this as an aspect of art’s autonomy which he gives a historical and social theoretical interpretation very unlike Kant’s. Second, art’s not being for anything, has another implication for Kant, that Adorno lights upon, namely that its meaning is not available for interpretation in existing categories. Art is not paraphrasable; it is essentially inscrutable and enigmatic. 55 In Adorno’s eyes, this is what lends art its peculiar affinity with the non-identical, and the non-existent. For Adorno, these two interlinked features, art’s uselessness and its non-paraphrasability, mark it out as being as it were in this world, but not of it. In bourgeois society, now fully organized and driven to subsume everything as totality, the spiritual potential of another society is to be found only in what does not resemble it. 56 Third, there is Kant’s view that beautiful art pleases without any interest. 57 The beauty of art pleases in a way that is fundamentally different from the way in which agreeable objects please. It does not gratify, in that it does not merely satisfy our present desires. Art pleases, on Kant’s view, only in the sense that its formal property of finality without end occasions a harmonious free play of the cognitive faculties, as they try and fail to bring the sensible intuitions presented by the art work under a concept. For Adorno too, art pleases, but does not gratify: it does not give people what they immediately want. One reason that it does not gratify is that it is enigmatic, not immediately intelligible as a this or a that: it is not for anything. Adorno recognises that artworks are not alone among the things in the world with these features, things that are purposeless, useless, enigmatic; things that please but do not satisfy. Fireworks, pranks, circus acts, among other things also do. They also bear the stamp of non-identity and have the same ability to promise happiness. 58 These features, which in art are linked with organic form, and with the harmony of part and whole, make art works peculiarly able to convey the idea of happiness in just the sense which that idea had for the critical theory of the 1930s. VI. There are two notable difficulties standing in the way of the view we have been developing, even with all these modifications. For one thing, Adorno’s aesthetics thus construed, is in flagrant violation of the Bilderverbot, and is incompatible with his austere negativism. There is nothing particularly negative about art so conceived. The promise of happiness, as a standard for criticising a society does not flow from what in the significant passage from Aesthetic Theory cited above Adorno calls “the force of negativity in the artwork.” Secondly and more worryingly, the view cannot be Adorno’s, for it makes art’s ability to promise happiness depend on a kind of aesthetic classicism and organicism. Recall that as we have told the story so far, works of art promise happiness because they actually embody a certain organic harmony between part and whole, which suggests a certain relation between individual and society that is denied to individuals in the present social world and provides a vivid point of contrast to it. Artworks thus transcend the existing world, with its principle of functionalization, and its economic and administrative domination, just as they transcend the whole associated cognitive and ideological apparatus that according to Adorno serves and perpetuates those institutions. By virtue of the harmony realized in their aesthetic form, artworks bring to light the absence of harmony in the 10

world picture 3 social world. But Adorno flatly denies this. Works of art are not internally structured like organisms: the greatest creations are refractory to their organic aspect as to what is illusory and affirmative. 59 Whilst he agrees that classical artworks indeed strive toward an harmony of part and whole, the reconciliation of the one and the many, he also denies that what is transcendent and utopian in art is their successful realization of this ideal. 60 That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. 61 So it is not their success in realizing this ideal harmony of aesthetic form, but, on the contrary, their failure to do so, which enables art works to promise happiness—to manifest the possibility that society could be different and better. Adorno is notorious for his critique of mass culture adn light music, and is often erroneously caricatured as a mandarin intellectual and partisan of high culture. So it is worth emphasizing that he subjects classicism to an equally thoroughgoing criticism. In eighteenth century Germany classical art had been elevated to a universal aesthetic ideal by Johannes Joachim Winckelmann, who famously wrote in his essay “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works” that in its “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” Greek sculpture manifested a Platonic idea of beauty that transcended all of nature. This ideal, Winckelmann asserted, marked a cultural highpoint that was to serve henceforth as model for all art, and even for all literature and philosophy. 62 Adorno’s view, contra Winckelmann, is that the successful realization of the classical ideal is always bought at the price of an “oppressive tension, which itself is brought to bear against the ruling spirit that is subdued by the work.” 63 He brings the same criticism to bear on Greek sculpture. The unity of the universal and the particular contrived by classicism was already beyond the reach of Attic art, let alone later centuries. This is why classical sculptures stare with those empty eyes that alarm – archaically – instead of radiating that noble simplicity and quiet grandeur projected onto them by eighteenth-century sentimentalism. 64 In Adorno’s eyes, to propose an ahistorical ideal of how art should be, as Winckelmann did, is to sanction its petrification, and to kill off what was once living and important in classical art, and erect in its stead “the pernicious universality of myth as a norm of creation.” 65 This tells us something very important about Adorno’s conception of successful art. Even if the promise of happiness of some classical artworks is due the organic wholeness and harmony of their form, it is a serious mistake to think of this as a formal property that can serve as a “norm of creation”, as a recipe or formula for great art. (The latin word for norm—norma—meant for the Romans a try square that carpenters or masons used to check right-angles. It is in this sense that Adorno is using the word.) Adorno’s critique of the classical view that art can and should aim to realize formally an ideal of aesthetic harmony and organic wholeness, then, requires us to give our interpretation of his dictum another twist on its axis. Art works should not aim to realize aesthetic harmony and organic wholeness; rather, through their form they should strive to resist this ideal, even while 11

world picture 3 they are inherently attracted to it. Moreover this negative desideratum of successful art through its form to resist succumbing to the demands of aesthetic harmony must not understood as an ahistorical requirement for all works of art at all times. Adorno is not in the business of replacing classicism with an inverted, but equally ahistorical, ideal. Rather, his view is that under different historical conditions, the very truth content of art—its immanent ideals and aspiration,and hence its meaning and social significance—shifts. On the story he tells, in the early bourgeois period of the eighteenth century artworks such as J. S. Bach’s fugues could naively embody the ideal of harmony. Similarly, through their synthetic efforts the great works of Beethoven’s middle period, the Eroica symphony and the Appassionata and Waldstein sonatas, still could and did convey their utopian vision through the aesthetic harmony and organic totality of their form: “In Beethoven the category of totality still preserves a picture of the right society…” 66 A work such as Beethoven’s Third Symphony naively embodies an aesthetic harmony and organic totality, which offers a picture of the right life. This is a promise of happiness in the sense that what it pictures is not actual, but only beautiful appearance or illusion, a semblance. 67 After a certain historical point, however, such naïvety is no longer available and what is required of artworks is a self-conscious elaboration of the impossibility of aesthetic harmony. As the nineteenth century developed, music (and art in general) became ever more preoccupied with subjective expression and its own form. Unlike Lukács, Adorno did not see this as a disease or degeneration of modernism. In his late works, Adorno claims, Beethoven himself intuitively begins to move away from this ideal. In the Missa Solemnis he “rejects the illusory appearance of subjective and objective, a concept practically at one with the classicist idea.” 68 In his late string quartets he unconsciously discovered the “compulsion toward disintegration” as he pushed the idea of integration to an extreme. 69 Later still, in the early twentieth century, modernist art breaks more decisively as well as more explicitly and self-consciously with the classical ideals. 70 As an example Adorno adduces the first movement of Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet, which—by means of the twelve-tone technique—replaces the free play of traditional classical music “which produces a whole out of a movement from sound to sound…by the juxtaposition of mutually alienated sounds.” 71 Instead of the “anarchic attraction between the sounds” within an organic whole, the sounds display only their “monadic lack of relationship and at every point administrative domination over the whole.” 72 In tonal music, which is written in a key, some notes are assigned greater significance than others. Tonal music is thus marked by a hierarchy of vertical relations between notes. The tone row of twelve notes, all of which must be sounded, allows the music to avoid being in a key, to avoid this vertical hierarchy, and accords equal importance to each note. However, Schoenberg’s real success, Adorno suggests, is to incorporate tonal moments within twelve-tone compositions, such as chords in which the notes have broken free from harmony. On the one hand, dissonant sounds are heard as dissonant in relation to the suppressed consonance. On the other hand, each note is differentiated and distinct from every other, and the dissonances and discordance are heard in themselves and not in relation to the suppressed consonances. Something like an Hegelian Aufhebung transpires (which it often does not in Adorno): “The dissonances arose as the expressions of tension, contradiction and pain…They become characters of objective protest. It is the enigmatic happiness of these sounds that, precisely as a result of their transformation into material, dominates the suffering they once announced, and does so by holding it fast. Their negativity remains loyal to utopia.” 73 Somehow, the consonance that is suppressed is kept alive, but takes refuge in the individual sounds where it remains concealed. Happiness here is a name only for the foil that throws the unhappiness and pain of the sounds into relief and makes them simultaneously dissonant and yet more than merely dissonant. In this way an imageless image of 12

world picture 3 happiness is conveyed through the transfiguration of tonal elements in atonality. This is one concrete example of how the “force of negativity in the artwork” can give rise to the promise of happiness. VII. Adorno’s view, fully expounded, is dialectically complex, historically supple and also aesthetically vague. There is no single formal property that all successful art works have that allow them to promise happiness. There are, rather, various different ways in which, and degrees to which, artworks through their form, according to the historical circumstances, promise happiness. At a certain point in the development of musical form, which is not to be separated from a certain point in historical and social development, art works can only promise happiness by their formal strategies of resistance to and repulsion of the attraction of aesthetic harmony and organic wholeness. This point was reached long before the cultural catastrophe that Adorno calls synecdochically by the name of Auschwitz. Yet, after Auschwitz Adorno thinks it is barbaric and unpardonable to attempt renew the classical ideal. Art must pay the price of a culture’s having entirely failed. It can no longer enjoy any illusions, or give rise to any naive semblances of happiness à la Bach and Beethoven. Art’s promise of happiness depends henceforth not on its successfully realizing an aesthetic harmony and organic unity through their form, i.e. on its “immanent success,” but on its immanent failure to realize such an idea, on the formal strategies it puts in play to eschew and resist the intrinsic pull of this ideal. Art works of the highest rank are distinguished from the others not through their success—for in what have they succeeded?—but through the manner of their failure.” 74 There is a reason for this. Any art, which through the aesthetic harmony of its form in the context of a totally administered and hence radically evil social world, would be guilty, as Raymond Geuss puts it, of “at least a quasi-moral failing.” 75 Artworks must from now on remain failures. They are damaged, fragmentary, and bear the scars of their resistance to the social world. This is why Adorno always couches his description of contemporary art in language of failure. Successful art works “shatter,” they “go under,” they “self-destruct,” they “fail,” and thus they resist absorption and assimilation into the culture that entirely failed: the administered society. Adorno likes to counterpose works which self-consciously fail, because in their very form they run up against their limits and transcend these limits, and thus succeed, to what he considers to be truly failed works of art, such as the music of Stravinsky’s neo-classical period. Adorno is notoriously uncharitable in his interpretation of Stravinsky, whose work he considers to betray happiness, by aiming to convey it directly through the “restoration” of the classical ideal, after its secret complicity with the totally administered world has been uncovered. 76 By contrast, the immanent failure of works of modernist art—failure of this special aesthetic kind—is in fact a “measure of their success.” 77 Only thus can they succeed in not betraying the very idea they fail to live up to. Through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled. 78 Only thus can they still promise happiness. VIII. This final twist brings Adorno’s dictum into a more or less stable and intelligible relation with his 13

world picture 3 aesthetic modernism, with the austere negativism of the Bilderverbot, and finally with the historical and sociological aspects of his theory. Still, the question arises whether these loosely conjoined doctrines do not push him malgré lui towards a kind of aesthetic asceticism—the joyless intellectual appreciation of the technical accomplishment of certain difficult and astringent works of avant-garde art, which in turn undermines the idea that art is a promise of happiness. For Adorno, successful (failed) art works must withhold sensible gratification, such as the pleasure of recognizing a familiar tune or subsuming a configuration of sensible particulars under a concept. Successful failed works of music, for example, thwart the expectations conditioned by traditional listening patterns, whereas light music, or even classical music that truly fails, occasions a “culinary” pleasure, by matching up with these patterns, and gratifying the untutored demand for familiarity. Thus successful artworks make people aware of their own unhappiness, and of the gulf between the potential for happiness contained in the technological and economic wherewithal of modern societies and the catastrophic state of the actual world. How, then, can Adorno claim that art promises happiness, while maintaining that, in its negativity, it withholds pleasure, thwarts expectations, and increases actual unhappiness? Adorno emphatically denies that he is advocating an unremitting asceticism about art. Unlike Kant’s aestheticism, which, he claims, offers a “castrated hedonism, desire without desire,” his aesthetic theory offers a true hedonism, albeit at a higher order of reflection. 79 One takes true pleasure in reflecting on the fact that works of art must, and sometimes successfully do, withhold gratification. And their thus prescinding from enjoyment, which ultimately yields true pleasure, is the reverse side of their self-conscious failure to realize aesthetic harmony and organic totality. In the false world all ήδονή is false. For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art. 80 Now it would be very wrong to interpret this as a version of the ancient view that one should refrain from the life of pleasure for the sake of happiness. Plato’s critique of hedonism in the Gorgias, the Philebus, and also the Republic, and Aristotle’s repudiation of the life of pleasure in the Nichomachean Ethics have a very different motivation. 81 Adorno’s worries are closer to the attitude of modern German philosophers, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, who, generalizing slightly, saw the satisfaction of untutored sensible inclinations as a threat to free human activity. But there is a very important difference. Adorno holds that mere gratification is suspect, because under conditions where needs are manufactured by advertising, and desires and expectations manipulated by the culture industry to fit in with the administrative and economic demands of capitalist society, to succumb to immediate satisfaction is to volunteer for the false life, and the false life is no real life at all. 82 There is here a strong Rousseauian strand in Adorno, and in critical theory in general—one also finds it in the work of Herbert Marcuse, Eric Fromm. 83 One aspect of this Rousseauianism is the assumption that the false life has been disfigured by the civilizing process itself. So the “given” desires and sensible inclinations that we find ourselves with are to be overcome not because they are raw and untutored, but because they have been falsified and disfigured. 84 I am more interested here, though, in how this strand of hedonism bears on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Adorno claims that not just happiness, but also true pleasure has taken refuge in art, and although there is no going back to immediate, untutored “true” desire, there is a way of going forward to it, by wresting it from the experience of art through reflection. In withholding pleasure at the first level, artworks repay due attention by offering pleasure at a second level and at a heightened degree of intensity. There is more joy in dissonance than in consonance. 85 14

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Pleasure and pain, Adorno recognizes, are as intimately related as dissonance and harmony. Dissonance, he claims, is the truth about harmony, which is unattainable “according to its own concept.” Dissonance is not imposed as an idea, but arrived at because of a “friction in harmony itself ”; similarly with artworks that initially do not afford pleasure, but pain. 86 Once one has through reflection on their form, on the social and historical situation of the artwork, and on the effect of the latter on the former, gained an understanding of why these artworks must appear painful and difficult, they afford a kind of deferred and transposed gratification.We should be clear here. Adorno is not talking about a highly refined, sublimated and ultimately cognitive pleasure, like the pleasure, according to Aristotle, that we take in acting virtuously, or in philosophizing. He is talking about visceral enjoyment, bliss, sensuous, somatic satisfaction, indeed a sexual pleasure: less happiness as organicism; more happiness as orgasm: “If anywhere, it is here, [in its processual character–GF] that aesthetic experience resembles sexual experience. The way the beloved image is transformed in this experience...effectively makes it the bodily prototype of aesthetic experience.” 87 Adorno’s hedonism is not confined to Aesthetic Theory; it is present also throughout Minima Moralia, where he claims that truth demands that utopia be “determined in blind somatic pleasure” [in der blinden somatischen Lust]. 88 Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic. For its idea, sexual union, is the opposite of slackness [Gelöstheit—relaxed satiety], a blessed straining, just as that of all subjected labour is cursed. 89 The lesson that sexual love (or heterosexual union) is the prototype of aesthetic experience is one that Adorno might have drawn from Stendhal and Baudelaire, who in agreeing that beauty is the promise of happiness, do not try to hide that it is also the promise of sexual pleasure, had he looked more closely at the context of the dictum. However, it seems that quite different considerations move Adorno to embrace hedonism: the mutuality of sexual intimacy, the fact that sexual intercourse is a kind of pleasure without function, and finally that orgasm involves on the one hand strenuous effort and on the other receptivity and self-abandonment. Anyway by endorsing a hedonistic conception of happiness, Adorno sets himself against Aristotle, Plato, and Kant, all of whom repudiate the life of pleasure as a life unworthy of human beings. That said, his hedonistic conception of happiness is far closer to the one that Kant rejects as an account of moral value, and as a criterion of political right, than it is to the one that is— broadly speaking—endorsed by Plato, Aristotle, and the young Horkheimer. As ever, Adorno’s philosophical allegiances are mercurial. The difficulty is that, while Adorno’s hedonism emphatically answers the question of whether his modernist aesthetic pushes him towards an intellectualist asceticism, it sits ill with the other elements of his theory. Not only is it a very different notion of happiness to the one we have been expounding, it is less amenable to the aims of critical theory. It is difficult, for example, to see heterosexual union as symbol of the good society, in as much as sexual intimacy usually tends to be a private and exclusive affair, rather than a collective, cooperative group activity. 90 It also is difficult to square with Adorno’s rationalist moment, which in his aesthetics manifests itself in the view that art requires philosophical criticism and reflection to bring its truth to light. 91 Adorno’s eudaemonism and Adorno’s hedonism look like different and incompatible notions of happiness, or as he might prefer to say, two halves of a theory of happiness that do not add up to a whole. 15

world picture 3 IX. I have tried to show how Adorno’s dictum that art is the promise of happiness radiates in different directions and connects with various significant themes in his philosophy. In this interpretation of the dictum five interrelated themes in Adorno have come to prominence.First, Adorno’s eudaemonism: i.e. the notion that that philosophy must return to the teaching of the good life, even under adverse conditions, and the associated doctrine that the idea of happiness can serve as a foil for the criticism of existing society and at the limit as an ideal to which existing society should live up. Second, there is Adorno’s austere negativism: the view that there is no right living in a false world and that currently we cannot so much as reliably form a positive conception of a good life or a good society. Thirdly, I touched upon Adorno’s rationalist moment, which is contained in the thesis that philosophy’s task is to think what is non-identical to concepts, by means of concepts, and that true happiness, as well as what he calls non-identity or the utopia of cognition, is a form of transcendence that is only to be gained by breaking through conceptual thought by means of reflection. Fourth, we examined Adorno’s modernism, namely the view that, after a certain historical point, art succeeds to the extent that it prescinds from being merely enjoyable and that it eschews the idea of aesthetic harmony and organic unity to which it is nonetheless inherently attracted. Fifthly and finally, there is Adorno’s hedonism, namely the view that the pleasure of sexual intercourse is the Urbild—the original image—of aesthetic experience, and thus the epitome of the idea of happiness. So far as I can see, these five themes cannot be arranged comfortably into a single coherent theory. The first four themes, however, can be so arranged that they form, if not a single coherent theory, then at least a stable and intelligible overall view that makes sense of the idea that art is a promesse du bonheur. However, the last theme—Adorno’s hedonism—disrupts the picture I have been painting. Whether one thinks this a problem will depend on one’s view of the requirements of interpretation. One task of interpretation, certainly, is to take into account all the significant textual evidence. This being so, we cannot drop any of these five themes, at least not without bowdlerizing Adorno’s writings for the sake of attributing to him a more coherent view. On the other hand, philosophical interpretations of Adorno will not rest content with analyzing and separating out these different ideas, but will aim to unite them into a coherent overall view. Adorno would no doubt be pleased with the fact that his work does not yield readily to the aim of philosophical interpretation. He is deeply suspicious of and opposed to philosophy’s attempt to fit phenomena of whatever kind a single unified view. He believes that philosophical theory, like any body of beliefs, is inherently affected by the social and historical conditions under which it is formed. To that extent he believes modern philosophy, and its drive for completeness and coherence, is complicit with the culture that entirely failed, i.e. that gave rise to the Final Solution, nuclear holocaust, and other appalling human wrongs of the twentieth century. Secondly, he holds that reason and rationality are themselves forms of domination, as well as the only available answer to domination. Our difficulty in uniting these five themes into one theory has brought to light one of the animating concerns of Adorno’s philosophy in general and of Aesthetic Theory in particular. Aesthetic Theory is so named not just because it is about art, but because it is arranged, as most of Adorno’s written works are, aesthetically, according to principles drawn from musical composition, an arrangement which deliberately frustrates the demands of theory. In this respect Aesthetic Theory is an aesthetic theory in that it enacts the same “success” achieved by successful works of art, on Adorno’s account of art: it resists assimilation into a single, unified whole, and thus deliberately fails as a theory. This is why interpreting Adorno can be such a frustrating and exhausting experience for a reader who wants to make philosophical sense of his work, and why contrary to Adorno’s views about the appreciation of art, that experience is not an ultimately 16

world picture 3 satisfying one. Adorno is alive to this. “This inadequacy,” he claims, with which his theory is convicted by philosophers, “resembles that of life, which describes a wavering, deviating line, disappointing by comparison with its premises, and yet which only in this actual course, always less than it should be, is able, under given conditions of existence, to represent an unregimented one.” 92 For Adorno, only an unregimented life would be a happy one. 93 James Gordon Finlayson teaches European Philosophy at the University of Sussex where he is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Social and Political Thought . He is also chair of the UK Society for European Philosophy. He has published numerous articles on German Philosophy and Frankfurt School Critical Theory in journals such as Telos, European Journal of Philosophy, and Journal of the History of Philosophy, and in collections such as The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2008). His most recent article ‘‘‘Bare Life’ and Politics: Agamben’s Idiotic Reading of Aristotle” is soon to appear in The Review of Politics. He is the author of Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2005) and is working on a monograph on Adorno. Notes 1 Hullot-Kentor’s translation is a little inaccurate. He translates the passage thus: “Stendhal's dictum of [art as] the promesse du bonheur implies that art does its part for existence by accentuating what it prefigures in utopia. But this utopic element is constantly decreasing, while existence increasingly becomes merely self-equivalent. For this reason art is ever less able to make itself like existence. Because all happiness found in the status quo is ersatz and false, art must break its promise in order to stay true to it.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1999), 311; Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 461. Hereafter abbreviated as Aesthetic Theory and GS 7 respectively. 2 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 82/GS 7, 128. In the passages I have cited, it is implied that the promise is given by art. Hence Hullot-Kentor’s translation is not erroneous. Besides in Aesthetic Theory, 136/GS 7, 205 Adorno states that, “Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.” He does the same at several other places, e.g. Aesthetic Theory 135-6/GS 7, 204-5; GS 10.1, 192; and GS 14, 19. Note that Tom Huhn claims that Adorno “often repeats Stendhal’s dictum that beauty ‘is the promesse de (sic) bonheur’” unconsciously correcting the saying that Adorno, quoting from memory, usually gets wrong. Huhn, “Kant , Adorno, and the Social Opacity of the Aesthetic,” The Semblance of Subjectivity. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart eds. (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 239. 3 De L’Amour XVII (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 58–59. 4 In “The Genealogy of Morality”, Nietzsche also compares Stendhal’s saying about beauty with Kant’s definition that the beautiful pleases without interest. Nietzsche is more interested in attacking Kant’s view. Friedrich Nietzsche: Sämtliche Werke, 5 ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Münich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Berlag, de Gruyter. 1999), 347. 5 'Le Peintre de La Vie Moderne' in Charles Baudelaire: Variétés Critiques vol. II (Paris: Editions G. Crès & C-IE, 1924), 39ff. [The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1995)]. 6 "Tout ce qui est naturel, toutes les actions et les désirs du pur homme naturel, vous ne trouverez rien que d’affreux. Tout ce qui est beau et noble est le résultat de la raison et du calcul." Ibid., 73. 7 Ibid., 39-40. “Le beau est fait d'un élément éternel, invariable, dont la quantité est excessivement difficile a déterminer, et d'un élément relatif, circonstanciel qui sera, si l'on veut, tour à tour ou tout ensemble, l'époque, la mode, la morale, la passion. Sans ce second élément, qui est comme l'enveloppe amusante, 17

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titillante, apéritive, du divin gâteau, le premier élément serait indigestible, inappréciable, non adapté et non approprié à la nature humaine...Considérez, si cela vous plâit la partie éternellement subsistante comme l'âme, et l'élément variable comme son corps.” 8 On philosophical style, see Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1974), 70-4, 80-5/ GS 4, 78-82, 90-1; and “The Essay as Form” in Notes on Literature I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 3-24; GS 11, 9-34. 9 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 12. See also ibid,, 227: “Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit and the false needs of a degraded humanity.” 10 This is a point that Raymond Geuss makes well in “Art and Criticism in Adorno’s Aesthetics,” Outside Ethics, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 11 Simon Jarvis is right to claim that “Adorno's thought, unlike Habermas's, thematizes happiness, including bodily delight and an end to material suffering, as strongly as it does free and rational intersubjectivity.” Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 220. That said, Adorno’s thematization of happiness is highly problematic (see IV and V below.) I find the comparison with Habermas unhelpful, though. 12 Plato, Republic, 419a, 420c-e. 13 Aristotle, Politics, 1264b15ff. 14 Aristotle, Politics, 1279a16-30. 15 In a well-known passage at Nichomachean Ethics, 1095b19, Aristotle characterises the life of gratification and pleasure as “slavish” and “a life for grazing animals” [boskēmatōn bion]. 16 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1098a16; Politics, 1332a10. 17 Aristotle, Politics, 1324a5-6. 18 Because the practical life is a rational life, some commentators claim that it is an analogue of philosophical contemplation, albeit a secondary and lower form. See Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1991). 19 I am assuming here that the lineaments of what has come to be known as first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory, in particular the critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer, germinated in their workof the 1930s, when Horkheimer had the intellectual lead. 20 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 48. 21 “[T]he principle of happiness (which is not in fact a definite principle at all) has ill effects in political right just as in morality...” “On The Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, but it does not Apply in Practice’,” Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 83. 22 Max Horkheimer, “Materialism and Metaphysics” in Between Philosophy and Social Science (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 24. Max Horkheimer. Kritische Theorie: eine Dokumentation, ed. A. Schmidt, vol.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1968), 8 [in two volumes, hereinafter KT 1, & 2]. 23 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science 30/KT 1, 88. 24 ‘The fear which moral prescriptions…still carry from their origins in religious authority is foreign to materialism.” “Materialism and Morality,” Between Philosophy and Social Science 32/KT 1 91 (translation amended). See also “Materialism and Metaphysics” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, M. O'Connell ed. (New York: Continuum Press, 1999), 18/ KT, 1 39. 25 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 33/KT 1 92. 26 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 14-22/KT1 71-6. See also Critical Theory: Selected Essays12/KT , 33. 27 Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, 23/KT 1, 44. 28 Ibid., 22/KT 1, 42-3 translation amended. 29 Ibid.,, 44/KT 1, 64. See also Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science 34-5/KT 1 94. 18

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This way of arguing had an enduring effect on Adorno. Think of the “new categorical imperative” he claims that Hitler has imposed on people, namely “to order their thought and actions such that Auschwitz never reoccur, nothing similar ever happen.” He claims that it would be a “sin” to try to justify the new categorical imperative. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Verso, 1993), 358; GS 6, 365. Compare also his earlier remark: “One ought not to torture: there ought to be no concentration camps . . . These sentences are only true as impulses, when it is reported that somewhere torture is taking place. They should not be rationalised. As abstract principles they lapse into the bad infinity of their derivation and validity” Negative Dialectics, 281/GS 6 285. See also Adorno: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. and ed. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 202. 30 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 20, 37/KT 1, 77, 98. 31 Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, 29/KT 1, 88. 32 In this, Horkheimer is influenced by the work of the economist at the institute, Friedrich Pollock: ‘Die Gegenwärtige Lage des Kapitalismus und die Aussichten einer planwirtschaftliche Neuordnung’ in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932). 33 It is true, as Timo Juetten pointed out to me, that this does not mean that Kant has a general animus against happiness, even on his hedonistic account of it. 34 Adorno writes of “a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy...which since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy, and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life”. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1991), 15/ GS 4, 13. Presumably Adorno thinks this applies to positivism in Austria, neo-Kantianism and Husserl in Germany, and analytic philosophy in England and the United States. 35 Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Critical Theory: Selected Essays 213/KT 2, 162. 36 Adorno, GS 6, 128; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 122. See also Adorno, Minima Moralia, 44; GS 4, 49. 37Adorno, Probleme der Moralphilosophie. Theodor W. Adorno: Nachgelassene Schriften IV, vol. 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 28. 38Indeed Adorno praises Kant’s moral law for its infinity and sublimity, which (in his eyes) make it incompatible with any existing form of totalitarianism. Adorno, Probleme der Moralphilosophie , 214. 39In a previous article (Finlayson, “Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable,” European Journal of Philosophy (2005), 10: 1, 1) I misread the sentence as saying that there is no right living “im Falschen” i.e. in the False, where the False is a noun which I took to be an inversion of what Hegel means by “das Wahre” – the True – in his dictum: “Das Wahre is das Ganze” which Adorno ironically inverts in Minima Moralia: “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre/The whole is the Untrue.” Adorno, Minima Moralia, 50/GS 4, 55. Although the allusion to Hegel still holds, in the sentence of Minima Moralia 18, strictly speaking the word “false” in the phrase “the false” is used as an adjective qualifying the noun “life”, which is suppressed. I have benefitted greatly from discussing the meaning of this sentence on different occasions with Christian Skirke and Fabian Freyenhagen. 40 “The Essay as Form,” Notes to Literature vol. 1., trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 11/GS 11, 19. 41 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 157/GS 4, 179. Another place where he revealingly trangresses his own prohibition is in Probleme der Moralphilosophie, 249. "The only thing that can perhaps be said is, that the good life [das richtige Leben] today would consist in the shape of resistance against the forms of a false life [eines falschen Lebens], which has been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. 42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 8-9. 19

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43 Adorno, Negative Dialetics, 21 and passim. 44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 207/ GS 6, 207. 45 Richard Wolin, “Art and Politics in Aesthetic Theory,” Theodor W. Adorno. Sage Masters in Modern Social Thought, ed. G. Delanty, Vol. II (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi, 2004), 40. 46 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 199/ GS 7, 199. 47 See, however, section VI below. 48 “The central character of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations.” Lukács, Studies in European Realism, tr. E. Bone (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 6. For Adorno’s critique see Aesthetic Theory, 184-5. 49 Lukács, Studies in European Realism, 5. 50 Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 130/ GS 3, 152 51 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 184/GS 7, 274. See also Adorno’s essay “Engagement” in Noten zur Literatur, GS 11, 411-30. 52 Wolin, “The De-aestheticization of Art,” Theodor W. Adorno. Sage Masters in Modern Social Thought, ed. G Delanty, Vol II. (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: 2004), 22. 53 “Every undistorted relation, even perhaps the reconciliation (das Versöhnende) in organic life itself, is a gift.” Adorno, Minima Moralia, 43/GS 4, 47. 54 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 41/GS 4, 45. 55 This is a main point of difference with Hegel. Things of nature for Hegel are essentially cryptic and inscrutable, unlike artefacts or products of spirit which are essentially intelligible,albeit, he claims, that their spiritual content is embodied in a form that is not adequate to it, namely that of sensible particularity. 56 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 23/GS 12, 32. 57 Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. W. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 45-47; Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. Königliche Preuβliche Akademie der Wissenschaften vol. 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co. and Predecessors, 1902- [vol 5, 1908], 204-6. 58 “At the highest level of form, the deserted circus act is reenacted: the manifest absurdity of the circus – Why all the effort? – is in nuce the aesthetic enigma.” This sentence kept coming to mind when I watched James Marsh’s documentary, Man on Wire, about Phillippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. 59 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 89/GS 7, 138. 60 “Ultimately to call a work classical refers to its immanent success, the uncoerced yet ever fragile reconciliation of the one and the multiplicitous.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 162/GS 7, 242. 61Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1999 [1972]), 131/GS 3, 152. 62 Johann Joachim Winkelmann, “Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst“ (1755/6). Note that, unlike Plato, Winckelmann, says nothing about brightly painted statues, and one assumes that he believed their weathered whiteness to be part of their noble simplicity. After all, the fact that he could read his idea of serenity and simplicity into Laakoon, a statue representing a man and his sons trying to escape the clutches of two huge sea snakes, is an indication that Winckelmann, like many others or his era, was determined to find his preferred ideals in Greek art whatever the evidence. 63 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 160/240. 64 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 161/241. It seems churlish to point out that they would not have stared blankly, had they been painted, as they originally were, which we now know. Our passage from Plato’s Republic confirms this. 65 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 163/243. 66 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 20

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1976), 63/GS 14, 245. See also ibid., 130 and 243. 67 How does this view of the music of Bach and the early Beethoven fit in with Adorno’s doctrine view of the Bilderverbot? One thought here is that no music transgresses the prohibition on images since music is essentially imageless, and what Adorno calls imageless images are permitted. Another thought is that it is a contravention of the Bilderverbot, but that in art this prohibition did not apply at all times, and is itself to be understood historically. 68 Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” Essays on Music, trans. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 581/GS 17, 159. 69 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 45/GS 7, 73-4. 70 “Its [art’s] highest products are condemned to a fragmentariness that is their confession that even they do not possess what is claimed by the immanence of their form.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 90/GS 7, 139. See also ibid., 185/GS 7, 276. 71 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 67/GS 12 84-5. 72 Ibid. 73 Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 68/GS 12 85. See also Adorno, Probleme Der Moralphilosophie, 260ff. Note that Adorno allows a relation of resemblance to obtain between the dissonant sounds of the quartet and the unhappiness of actually existing society and the alienated individuals who comprise it. The Bilderverbot pertains to happiness, to the right life, reconciliation and Utopia, not to actually existing society. 74 Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 99. 75 Geuss, “Art and Criticism in Adorno,” Outside Ethics (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), 165. 76 Philosophy of New Music, 103-159/GS 12, 127-197. Adorno sees in Stravinsky an example of the not so secret complicity between totalitarianism and neo-classicism, of the kind that one might think is more obviously present in the music of Aram Khachaturian, Stalin’s favourite composer, and the buildings and plans of Albert Speer, Hitler’s beloved architect. 77 Adorno, Essays on Music, 581/GS 17, 159. 78 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 33/GS 7, 55. 79 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 11/GS 7, 25. 80 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 13/ GD 7, 26. 81 For Aristotle, it is true that pleasure of a certain highly sublimated sort is a legitimate accompaniment to the life of virtue, and that furthermore a eudaimon life would contain its own proper amount of sensual and sexual pleasure – neither too much, nor too little. Still he agrees with Plato that to succumb to the demands of immediate enjoyment of food or sex (or music) is slavish and bestial, and unworthy of human activity. 82Adorno’s notion of right living also means ‘genuine’ or ‘real’ living.’ See Raymond Geuss, Morality Culture, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 103. 83 See Marcuse’s important article “On Hedonism” in Negations (London: Penguin, 1968), 159200, first published in the Zeitschrift der Sozialforschung VII as “Zur Kritik des Hedonismus” (note the change of title). See also Eric Fromm’s Man for Himself: an Enquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (London: Routlege, & Kegan Paul, 1982 [1947]), 172-95. 84 To go into this in any detail would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say that it is at least a bold and optimistic assumption to think that there are no untutored desires that are anarchic, violent, selfish and anti-social, and that have to be channelled in more appropriate directions, or managed, and at the limit suppressed. And if there are at least some such desires, then responsibility for the present dismal state of society cannot be lain entirely at the door of civilising and socialising processes, and there can be no expectation that, should those processes can be removed, human desires in their raw state will prove to be self-regulating and as it were, humanly acceptable. 21

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85 “Radically darkened art…which the aesthetic hedonism that survived the catastrophes defamed for the perversity of expecting that the dark should give something like pleasure, is in essence nothing but the postulate that art and a true consciousness of it today can find happiness only in the capacity of standing firm. This happiness illuminates the artwork’s sensuous appearance from within. Just as in internally consistent artworks spirit is communicated even into the most recalcitrant phenomenon, effectively rescuing it sensuously, ever since Baudelaire the dark has also offered sensuous enticement as the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture’s façade. There is more joy in dissonance than in consonance: this metes out justice, eye for eye, to hedonism.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 40/GS 7, 66-7. 86 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 110/GS 7. 168. 87 Sabine Wilke and Heidi Schlipphacke’s translation of this passage—“Orgasm is a bodily prototype of aesthetic experience” biologizes Adorno’s language, and also omits the qualification with which it begins. “Construction of a Gendered Subject: A Feminist Reading of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” The Semblance of Subjectivity. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 302. Hullot-Kentor’s translation is much better and closer to the original. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 176/GS7 263. 88 Adorno, Minima Moralia , 61/GS 4, 68. 89 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 217/GS 4, 248. The German phrase “geschlechtliche Vereinigung” means heterosexual union, although this might just be Adorno’s default phrase for sexual union. 90 There is a distant resemblance here between this strain of Adorno’s thinking about the subject’s relation to the wholly Other, and certain variants of what the Germans call Brautmystik, where religious worship and often extreme asceticism and hardship culminates in an immediate, sometimes visionary experience of the presence of God or Christ. Oliver Davies, God Within: The Mystical Tradition of Northern Europe (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988). Denys Turner has persuasively argued that the apophatic tradition of negative theology, has little to do with this kind of mysticism, which is in fact not negative at all but rather a kind of religious positivism, of which apophatic negative theology offers a sustained critique. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God. Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 259 & 268. 91 This may be why J. M. Bernstein, in his interesting and imaginative discussion of Adorno’s dictum omits to mention these passages. Bernstein gives a Kantian interpretation of Adorno’s dictum, according to which art promises happiness, in the sense that it offers a ‘possible experience’ of it, and happiness means something like what Kant called the summum bonum, namely the proportionate unity of subjective happiness – in Kant’s sense of sensible satisfaction – and virtue, also in Kant’s sense of the practical expression of pure reason. Bernstein, “Why Rescue Semblance?” The Semblance of Subjectivity. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 198. I take a different view, partly because of Adorno’s hedonism, and partly because, as I argue in II above, happiness originally occurs in Horkheimer’s influential early work as a tool of evaluation for critical social theory and as an explicit move against Kant and Kantianism, and it continues to have this critical animus in much of Adorno’s later work. 92 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 81/GS 4, 91. 93 I am grateful Suchita Paul, Keston Sutherland, and to all the member of the Minima Moralia reading group at the University of Sussex, 2009: Arthur Willemse, Simon Mussell, Chris O’Kane, Chris Allsobrook, Laura Finch, Becky Hancox, Doug Haynes and Danny Hayward. Special thanks are due to Timo Juetten, John David Rhodes, and to Danny Hayward for bringing my attention to two passages.

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Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China Jason McGrath Within the first third of Xie Jin’s 1961 revolutionary classic Red Detachment of Women (Hongse niangzi jun; later adapted as both a model ballet and a model Peking opera during the Cultural Revolution), a definite pattern in the lighting scheme emerges. Every sequence set in the area of Hainan Island controlled by the Nationalist or Guomindang (KMT) government is dark and gloomy, with glowering, underlit villains and deep architectural shadows appropriate to the landlord Nan Batian’s dungeons, in which proletarian slaves like the film’s heroine, Wu Qionghua, are tortured (fig. 1). In contrast, the areas of Hainan controlled by the insurgent Communists (the year is 1930), including the Red women’s detachment that Qionghua joins after an undercover Communist agent facilitates her escape, seem always to be bathed in bright sunlight (fig. 2).

Fig. 1 Red Detachment (Nan Batian at center)

Fig. 2 Red Detachment (Wu Qionghua on left)

In keeping with the lighting scheme and even more striking is the radical lack of anything resembling joy in depictions of the KMT-held areas on the one hand, and the abundance of everyday happiness represented in the Communist strongholds on the other. The people and soldiers of the liberated areas laugh, dance, and playfully splash water on each other, while those suffering under the old society live in darkness, misery, and mutual estrangement. It is not just that the ordinary people are happier under communism; even Nan Batian himself, the richest and most powerful landlord in the region, can never seem to muster more than a lingering smirk or at best a false smile. This is just one example of a central message of mass cinema of the Mao era: Communists have more fun! In fact, Mao-era cinema itself was much more fun than its reputation as mere propaganda would have us believe. Not only does a film like Red Detachment of Women stand up well against the slickest and most emotionally involving classical Hollywood films of heroism on the battlefield, but there was a diversity of filmmaking in China during the “seventeen years” (as mainland Chinese refer to the period from the establishment of the People’s Republic of

world picture 3 China [PRC] in 1949 to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966) that is forgotten by most except for a smattering of film scholars and an older generation of Chinese. Popular genres of the period included traditional opera films, comedies, ethnic minority romances, children’s films, and spy thrillers in addition to the more well-known revolutionary bildungsromane and patriotic war epics (depicting resistance to the Japanese during the occupation and to the Americans during the Korean War as well as the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists). Nevertheless, it is fair to state as a generalization that the idea of happiness conveyed by all of these genres revolved around the cultivation of an ever more public self, a forward-looking subject whose libidinal organization and object choices were intimately linked to the total project of revolution. Whether this type of fulfillment is conceived in terms of the sublimation of private desires or in terms of a “new human” (xin renlei) with entirely different psychological wiring, the extreme of this mode of cinema and of the accompanying social experiment no doubt came during the Cultural Revolution, when every detail of daily life was supposed to be imbued with the type of revolutionary heroism embodied by the main protagonists of the “model drama” (yangbanxi) films such as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Zhiqu Weihushan, 1970) and The Red Lantern (Hongdengji, 1970) in addition to the later film versions of Red Detachment of Women itself (ballet, 1971; opera, 1972). If the pursuit of happiness is a modern right bequeathed to the world, however unintentionally, through the universalist agenda of Western colonialism, it is interesting to reflect on the model of personal fulfillment offered by the alternative modernity of Maoism—not just as an exercise in cultural history, but more importantly as a backdrop to what often appears as an almost diametrical reversal in post-revolutionary China. Whereas the Maoist subject was not to divorce the personal from the political, for the postsocialist subject (in keeping with the global trend since 1968), the political itself becomes impossible, and happiness can be pursued only along the most private trajectories of desire. In either case, a certain pathology emerges that effectively makes some form of self-destruction a condition of personal fulfillment. What is interesting in the case of cinema is that, in both instances, the repressed returns in the form of residual generic conventions—silent visual reminders of what has been sacrificed. Love and Revolution Long dismissed by Western Sinologists as mere propaganda and mostly ignored by film historians and theorists, the cinema of Mao-era China has recently begun to attract new interest. It is true that the 1950s saw a rise in Soviet influence and the loss of the particularly productive narrative and stylistic heterogeneity of the “golden age” of Shanghai cinema in the 1930s and late 1940s. The new ideological formula for cultural production was variously called proletarian realism (in Chinese Communist writings during the civil war), socialist realism (for a few years in the 1950s before the Sino-Soviet split), and finally a combination of revolutionary realism plus revolutionary romanticism (the formula promulgated by Mao beginning in 1958). In practice the films mostly followed the rules of Eastern bloc socialist realism—that is, classical Hollywood narration, but with occasional rhetorical flourishes reminiscent of early Soviet montage, all in support of a didactic revolutionary message. A key difference from classical Hollywood, however, is the suppression of romantic love as a central plot element in most revolutionary films. Indeed, the replacement of private libidinal desire with the appeal of a 2

world picture 3 revolutionary sublime Other, to which Communist protagonists directed their longing, has led to a conception of revolutionary narration as a process of sublimation. The sublimation thesis was first advanced by Chris Berry in his study of the Republican-era classic Big Road (Da lu; dir. Sun Yu, 1934), which, in Berry’s reading, “attempts to arouse revolutionary ardor by the arousal of libidinal drives and their redirection towards the object of revolution.” 1 Later, in one of the finest attempts in Anglophone scholarship to reach a deeper understanding of films of the Mao era, Ban Wang developed the sublimation thesis with a view to explaining how revolutionary films provided pleasure for spectators: Far from repressing the individual’s psychic and emotional energy in a puritanical fashion, Communism is quite inclined to display it—with a political sleight of hand. It recycles the energy, as if it were waste products or superfluous material lying outside the purposive march of history by rechanneling it into transforming the old and making the new individual. This method launches individuals on the way to a more passionate and often ecstatic state of mind and experience. 2 Consequently, argues Wang, “an intense emotional exuberance marks Communist culture,” and instead of seeing the sublimation process as “the dreaded ‘collectivization of the self’” of Cold War caricature, we should acknowledge that in revolutionary films of the Mao era (as was likely the case for many in the revolution itself), it is precisely through collective action that the individual finds the greatest meaning and fulfillment. 3 One example given by Wang is the blockbuster film Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge; dir. Cui Wei and Chen Huai’ai, 1959), in which the heroine, Lin Daojing, begins the film as an utterly alone and suicidal young woman who has run away from an arranged marriage (fig. 3), and ends it as a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member fully and exuberantly engaged in the mass opposition to Japanese imperialism (fig. 4). 4 In the film’s finale Daojing helps to lead an anti-Japanese protest march in 1935, bravely persevering in the face of police swords and water hoses. The exciting sequence conveys not just the revolutionary potential of the masses but, just as importantly, the deep personal fulfillment that Daojing has gained by joining the collective struggle; communism has brought her happiness as well as purpose.

Fig. 3 Suicidal Daojing prepares to throw herself into the ocean in the first scene

Fig. 4 Happy Daojing helps to lead a protest march in the film’s final shot 3

world picture 3 The libidinal sublimation that, according to Wang, facilitates both aesthetic pleasure and ideological interpellation in these films often plays out by way of an implied romance between the protagonist and an attractive Communist who acts as mentor. Both Red Detachment of Women and Song of Youth follow this pattern: in the former, the slave-girl-turned-revolutionary Qionghua is romantically linked, albeit only implicitly, with the handsome young cadre who saves her and later teaches her about Communism; in the latter, Daojing develops emotional attachments to a series of Communist Party members, two of whom become martyrs in the course of the film. The shift in the object of cathexis suggested by the sublimation thesis—from another person as sexual/romantic object to the Party as sublime Other—is facilitated by the depiction of Party members as robustly attractive, physically and socially, and the eroticization of the Party by means of these characters is often surprisingly direct. An example of this dynamic in Song of Youth comes when Daojing’s husband mistakenly accuses her of adultery. The husband, Yu Yongze, depicted as a student of the reform-minded scholar Hu Shi (who would be villanized under Communism), had seduced her with his liberal, romantic outlook after saving her from a suicide attempt in the film’s opening sequence. However, during their marriage in Beijing, she becomes increasingly disenchanted by his lack of revolutionary consciousness while meanwhile being drawn to Lu Jiachuan, the handsome cadre who first teaches her about Marxism-Leninism. One night Daojing daringly stays out all night posting Communist agitprop fliers while disguised as a bourgeois “new woman” of the jazz age out for a night on the town—dressed in a fashionable cheongsam and accessorized with jewelry and high heels. When she returns home in the morning thus attired—and with an unmistakable glow about her as well (fig. 5)—her husband flies into a jealous rage and accuses her of having an affair. On the denotative level, of course, his accusation is false and only serves to increase the distance between them and accentuate his own lack of understanding of the revolutionary cause to which she has committed herself. The real problem with his accusation, however, is of course not that it is false, but rather that it is absolutely true at a deeper level: Daojing has been swept away by the Party, which, by way of its attractive representative Jiachuan, has completely replaced Yongze as the object of Daojing’s desire.

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Fig. 5 Daojing as spied upon by her husband after being out all night Films such as these—in which the message Communists have more fun! is just as central as that of any blatant ideological indoctrination—helped to form a distinctive discourse of happiness in the Mao era. The official dogma on happiness became especially self-conscious as the revolution reached the age at which the transmission of its legacy to the young became an issue. During the “Socialist Education of the People” campaign of 1963-1964, the newspaper Chinese Youth ran a series of articles that discussed the correct understanding of “happiness,” emphasizing that happiness in fact comes from the elevation of the collective over the self, the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, asceticism over hedonism, and revolutionary zeal over material satisfaction. The main idea of the campaign, argues Xiaobing Tang, was that “You are actually happy.” For example, the paper advised, “Young comrades, we live in a happy country. We must not live in happiness without knowing what it is.” 5 As Tang shows, a play first performed in 1963 and adapted into a 1965 film, The Young Generation (Nianqing de yidai; dir. Zhao Ming) explicitly addressed the problem of how youth should realize happiness, and in particular the need for them to understand the profound debt owed to the revolutionary elders who made possible their current happiness (however unconscious the callous young may have been of the latter). Needless to say, here we see a creeping anxiety on the part of the Party that self-fulfillment by means of identification with the revolutionary collective might not be enough to convince the people of their own happiness indefinitely—an anxiety that the post-Mao reform era launched by Deng Xiaoping would more than justify. Reverse Sublimation If revolutionary films of the Mao era often enacted the sublimation of sexual love to politics, a striking feature of the current “reform-era” stage of development of the People’s Republic (a condition officially called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” but known more widely as “capitalism”) is the extent to which the dynamic has been nearly reversed. Indeed, beginning 5

world picture 3 around the turn of the twenty-first century, a number of films from China depicted heteronormative romantic love as the singular true value in life, sometimes even represented as explicitly trumping any sort of political commitment. 6 Whereas Mao-era cinema enacted the sublimation of love and sexuality to politics, in these recent films the political becomes at best an ornament for tales of sexual passion, at worst a completely repressed aspect of social life. From the perspective of Western liberalism, this shift represents the newfound freedom of the individual in China to pursue personal desires during the reform era. In fact, such films actively propagate a neoliberal model of an entirely apolitical existence and the type of subjectivity most suited to global capitalism: the desiring individual “as a bundle of needs waiting to be met,” for example. 7 As such, their significance goes beyond China as they are of a piece with the global trend of post-1968 depoliticization. One example of the new relation of love to politics in Chinese cinema is Lou Ye’s 2006 film Summer Palace. The film never received distribution in China, and in fact was banned, its director forbidden from making films for five years, ostensibly for illegally entering the film in international festival competitions without obtaining the necessary permission in advance. Despite this bureaucratic rationale, the ban was widely interpreted as the result of the film’s controversial content. Summer Palace featured a number of explicit sex scenes, but it also contained potentially explosive political content, being the first mainland Chinese feature film to directly depict the student protests of 1989 that led to the violence in Tiananmen Square on June Fourth. However, the most revealing aspect of the film may be neither the sexual content nor the representation of political dissent but rather the odd manner in which the two subjects were articulated together in the filmic text—or, more precisely, the way the political failed to find any meaningful expression beyond the personalized libidinal narrative. Summer Palace is narrated from the point of view of Yu Hong, who enters college at the fictional Beiqing University (an obvious stand-in for Beijing University) in the fall of 1988. Just before leaving for college, she loses her virginity to her high school boyfriend, and upon arriving in Beijing she joins a student scene of bohemian pleasures: drinking and dancing in bars frequented by foreigners, listening to rock music, engaging in casual sex with classmates, and the like. Soon Yu Hong meets the love of her life, Zhou Wei, with whom she has a torrid, tumultuous love affair during her freshman year. At the end of that year, in spring 1989, the Tiananmen protests erupt, and Yu Hong, Zhou Wei, and their various friends are swept up in the student activism of the time. In an extended sequence, we see Yu Hong, Zhou Wei, and other students boarding trucks in droves to go to central Beijing, all the while laughing, chanting, singing, and screaming in excitement. In the end, of course, the protests are crushed, and the students’ screams of joy turn to cries of agony as they throw rocks at a burning truck, run from police, and lose track of each other. Eventually Yu Hong and Zhou Wei part ways, and the film quickly skips ahead through the years, depicting Yu Hong having a series of sordid sexual relations (an affair with a married man, sex with another man in a squalid public bathroom, and so on) as she moves first back to her hometown, then to Shenzhen, then Wuhan, and then Chongqing. Meanwhile, Zhou Wei and several of her other friends move to Germany, with one eventually committing suicide. Throughout Summer Palace the point of view is closely tied to Yu Hong, in part through a confessional voiceover narration in the form of her diary entries. Despite her occasional attendance at college classes and her involvement in the student protests, her consciousness and the very structure of her subjectivity seem to be tied entirely to her turbulent romantic life, 6

world picture 3 and in particular her obsessive and often self-destructive love for Zhou Wei. The film features ten scenes of sex or post-coital partial nudity, taking up a full nineteen minutes of the film’s running time. The sex scenes quickly become almost relentlessly monotonous—featuring passionate kissing, panting missionary-style intercourse, partial to full nudity, male (but never female) orgasm, and post-coital kissing, crying, and cigarette smoking. Most of these scenes involve Yu Hong and Zhou Wei, but some depict Zhou Wei and a later girlfriend or Yu Hong and her later lovers. In the latter case, Yu Hong’s voiceover narration makes clear that her predilection for casual sex is a way of working out her lingering obsession with Zhou Wei. As the camera shows explicit views of Yu Hong having sex with her married lover in Wuhan, for instance, her voiceover relates the following: Looking through my photo album, I came across a picture of Zhou Wei. My heart raced wildly. One look, and the joy and pain flooded back. Staring at his image, I asked myself how it was that on this serene face—open, frank, and resolute—I saw no trace, no shadow that could make me doubt? Why could nothing he’d said to me or done to me prevent my heart from going out to him? . . . The memories brought tears, and the resolve to endure. The later scene of sex with another man in a public bathroom has this accompanying diary entry: Zhou Wei, why am I always so anxious to make love with the men in my life? Because it’s only when we make love that you understand that I’m good. I’ve tried countless ways. In the end, I’ve chosen this very special, very direct path. Thus Yu Hong appears to indulge in a pleasurable suffering centered on self-destructive obsession with a love object. The sex scenes, which were clearly deemed excessive by the Chinese authorities, dramatize both the intensity of the lead female character’s passion as well as the masochistic nature of her love (Yu Hong is repeatedly slapped, at her own request, by Zhou Wei in one scene, for example). Since the Chinese authorities gave just a bureaucratic explanation for the banning of Summer Palace, we can only speculate as to whether it caused greater offense with its explicit sex scenes or its political content. To my mind, however, the great irony of the film is that, in one sense at least, it in fact fully supports the official government narrative of the 1989 protests, and indeed if the Communist Party cultural mandarins had had any sense of subtlety they might have promoted the film as an instructional illustration of their version of history, sex scenes notwithstanding. The reason for this is the bizarrely complete disconnection between the political events of 1989 depicted in the film on the one hand and its overall mode of narration and characterization on the other. In not a single scene do we see Yu Hong, Zhou Wei, or any other student utter so much as a solitary sentence providing social context or political motivation for the Tiananmen Square protests. On the contrary, the students are depicted as entirely narcissistic and hedonistic, and their joining in the protests appears to be no more profoundly motivated than their decisions to go to rock-and-roll bars or to have sex with each other. In short, if the Chinese government account of the students in Tiananmen Square is that they were impulsive, unreasonable, lacking in understanding of their own goals, and spiritually polluted by Western influences, then it could hardly find a better illustration than in this film. As a result, while the film depicts the political through its unprecedented use even of documentary images from the 7

world picture 3 actual Tiananmen protests (a point I will return to later), the political is nonetheless never meaningfully integrated with the characterizations and the narrative as a whole, which instead hews closely to Yu Hong’s private, self-indulgent libidinal trajectory. Thus, while Mao-era classics such as Red Detachment of Women and Song of Youth encourage an actual libidinized politics, Summer Palace reveals a symptomatic underlying rupture between the political and the libidinal in the post-Mao era, its ostensible social message of solidarity with the 1989 student protesters in Tiananmen Square undermined by its myopic tale of an individual’s psychosexual cul-de-sac. In fact, this film is merely the most politically sensitive instance of the thoroughgoing depoliticization of the public sphere and redirection of subjectivity into the realm of individual desire rather than social commitment in the postsocialist age. 8 A more typical and noncontroversial example of this trend is Xu Jinglei’s 2004 film Letter from an Unknown Woman (Yige mosheng nüren de laixin), a remake of the 1948 Max Ophüls film of the same English title, which was in turn an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s Austrian novella of 1922. By the time she directed and starred in Letter from an Unknown Woman, Xu Jinglei was already a cultural phenomenon in her own right. She had studied acting at the Beijing Film Academy, starred in several films by hip young directors, begun directing her own films, and launched what became the most popular blog in China by 2006. For the lead male role in her adaptation of Letter from an Unknown Woman, Xu recruited Jiang Wen, one of China’s top actors and a director himself, to play a man who comes home one night to find a letter from a woman whose name he does not recognize. Just as in the precedents by Zweig and Ophüls, the letter reveals that the writer has always been in love with the recipient, having obsessed about him since they were neighbors during her childhood, and that they have in fact had sexual liaisons and even conceived a child together, all without his explicitly recognizing her as anything more than a fleeting romantic conquest whom he soon forgot. Xu’s adaptation begins in China in the 1930s and continues to 1948, when the woman makes a final sacrifice of her life and writes the letter explaining all that has transpired. The film thus encompasses the period of the War of Resistance against Japan, but for the most part it only deals with the tumultuous political events of the time obliquely, keeping the focus almost entirely on the obsessive, romantic love of the “unknown” woman for the man. When asked why the war itself is never shown in the film, Xu Jinglei answered as follows: What I wanted to say in this movie was about love. I made a period movie and described the love story. I wanted to portray a simple love affair between two persons, to focus on the emotional relationship between the man and the woman and what happened between them. Everything else is just background. 9 The one moment when the divorce of personal relations from wider politics breaks down is when, in the period leading up to all-out war with Japan, the young woman, in keeping with the spirit of the age, is marching in an anti-Japanese protest rally with a large group of other students. She suddenly sees Mr. Xu, the neighbor with whom she had fallen hopelessly in love while still a pubescent girl, taking photos of the crowd. When the protesters are violently dispersed, Xu pulls the woman into a doorway and keeps her safe from the public struggle by taking her up some stairs and quietly hiding with her inside a building (fig. 6). Any investment 8

world picture 3 she had in the political demonstration is soon forgotten amidst the pleasure of the chance encounter with the man she loves (fig. 7), and indeed she quickly realizes her longtime dream by belonging to him for a night.

Fig. 7 They turn happily to each other after catching their breath

Fig. 6 Xu pulls the “unknown woman” out of the politicized space of the street

In an analysis of the Ophüls film version of Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gaylyn Studlar notes the extent to which it fits the “repetition of scenarios of masochism” characteristic of the “women’s film,” in which “apparent capitulation to ‘romantic love’ demands to be read as a masquerade for a perverse sexual scenario that freezes ‘love’ into a single, compulsively repeated pattern unconsciously replaying a past object relationship.” 10 The “unknown woman” in this remake thus anticipates the masochistic performance of Yu Hong in Summer Palace, in that she seems to be locked in a perpetual repetition of a primordial scene of self-negation with regard to a primary love object, on whom she has willfully set her libidinal coordinates for the rest of her life. When she began adapting the script for Letter from an Unkown Woman, Xu Jinglei originally planned to set the film in the contemporary era, from the late 1970s to the 1990s. It was precisely politics—or rather the desire to completely avoid politics—that caused her to change the setting to the Republican era during the writing of the script: When I was one-third through, it became difficult to continue because I discovered the script encroached on issues like unmarried mothers and high-class prostitution. If I were to portray these in this period, it would involve social issues and this I didn’t want. I did not want to discuss social issues. I felt they would detract from my original intention and the Chinese censors would intervene. So I decided on the 1930s and 40s. 11 In other words, Letter from an Unknown Woman not only depicts, particularly in the antiJapanese protest scene and its aftermath, the rejection of any political significance in favor of obsessive romantic love, but it also was itself calculated to avoid any semblance of political relevance. Pathologies of Fulfillment and Generic Residua Obviously the version of romantic love presented in films such as Summer Palace and Letter from an Unknown Woman is a fundamentally pathological one. Such depictions of obsessive sexual attachment suggest that when the individual is so completely cathected in a single, highly 9

world picture 3 private object that it becomes the only conceivable source of happiness, happiness paradoxically becomes impossible. The relative lack of any broader symbolic social order anchoring personal identity in favor of an exclusive imaginary relation with a singular love object inexorably leads, in the case of both films, to self-destruction, or at least the self-inflicted perpetual misery of amour fou. The complete identification of the self with an individual other at the expense of any wider social Other makes the self impossible to sustain, and the self-negating excesses of such a masochistic object relation are on full display in the films themselves. Of course, the sublimation of the self to the sublime Other of revolution carries with it its own potential pathology, which in China the excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) made abundantly clear. This pathology has perhaps been most clearly delineated by Slavoj Žižek in his discussion of “the fetish of the Party.” The fundamental ideological dynamic of totalitarian parties, argues Žižek, is to replace the private object of desire with the “social phantasm,” so that for ultimate personal fulfillment subjects look not to private objects but rather to the “social body,” or “society as a body.” 12 The problem with this structure, according to Žižek’s take on Lacan, is that usually the phantasm of desire is intrinsically nonuniversalizable—its object basically personal—as opposed to the “big” Other of symbolic Law, which is “universal in its very nature.” 13 This paradoxical dynamic, however, is the defining trait of the “‘totalitarian’ social link,” which Žižek says “is precisely the loss of distance between the phantasm that gives the indicators of the enjoyment of the subject and the formal-universal Law that rules the social exchange”: “The phantasm is ‘socialized’ in an immediate manner as the social law coincides with the injunction ‘Enjoy!’ It starts to function as a superego imperative.” 14 Indeed, despite the obvious mechanisms of sublimation of libidinal desires found in revolutionary films—such as the implied romances with Communist cadres that are not consummated but instead redirected into cathexis in the Party/state itself—we could even say that the ideal of Maoist revolutionary aesthetics would be something like that of Deleuze and Guattari, which refuses the necessity of repression or sublimation altogether. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari insist “that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is desire and the social, and nothing else.” Consequently, “fantasy is never individual: it is group fantasy.” 15 By the early 1960s, as we have seen, the CCP was becoming increasingly explicit in the superego injunction “Enjoy!” as it launched coordinated campaigns to convince youth in particular that they were already happy. Such a message was only an extension of the dictum Communists have more fun! that I have identified as a central tenet of revolutionary films throughout the Mao era. By the Cultural Revolution, represented most memorably by the films of the yangbanxi or model plays, an extreme was reached in which every phrase, gesture, and act of everyday life was supposed to be directly imbued with the libidinal fervor of revolutionary commitment. The result, however, seems to confirm Žižek’s assertion that a political order built on the social phantasm is “necessarily self-destructive; it cannot be stabilized; it cannot arrive at a minimum of homeostasis that would allow it to reproduce in a circuit of equilibrium. It is constantly shaken by convulsions.” 16 During the Cultural Revolution, the impossible ideal of direct, unmediated libidinal investment in the social field of revolution arguably led to, on the one 10

world picture 3 hand, gang fights among Red Guards and a witch-hunt mentality of seeking out and exposing imagined enemies of the revolution and, on the other, quite possibly a crippling cynicism when the quotidian routines of daily survival failed to live up to the impossibly heroic ideals espoused in official discourse. If such a direct and intense libidinal investment in the political proves to be both pathological and ultimately impossible, the extreme privatization of desire seen in many post-Mao films of the PRC raises, as we have seen, a different but equally troubling set of issues. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, Summer Palace, and countless other films of millennial China, we have to trace a new model of the relationship between love and politics, the private object of desire and the realm of collective ideology, the imaginary and the symbolic, the objet petit a and the “Big Other.” These films might of course be read in terms of a desublimation that happens in the postsocialist period, in which the private realm reasserts itself and is represented as outstripping the public and the political in the construction of human subjectivity and desire. But we could also read the films as on the contrary a sublimation of politics itself, in that the political somehow becomes inarticulable as any kind of coherent, sustained collective commitment, and any urges in that direction are rechanneled into purely personal obsessions. Whether sex is sublimated by politics or politics by sex, an interesting question that arises is how the repressed might return. 17 In both cases in the history of PRC cinema, it appears to return in the form of narrative conventions or genre citations that ultimately are subverted or belied by the overall narrative system of the film. At issue in this kind of sublimation is not necessarily or primarily the sublimation of drives or desires within the libidinal economy of the films’ fictional protagonists, nor the sublimation of similar desires in the viewing audience, for whom the film functions as dream work or as fantasy to structure desire through a narrative vector. Instead, what is more interesting in the present context is a process of trans-narrational sublimation, in which narrative elements from previous modes of filmmaking—elements that formerly had served as textual dominants—appear in the new context only to be overwhelmed or suppressed within a new narrative system. In the case of revolutionary films of the Mao era, the conventions in question are those of classical Hollywood romance. Both of the main examples we have considered from that era— Song of Youth and Red Detachment of Women—have clear instances in the form of scenes that— in the script—seem to be all about the growing bond between the female protagonist and the Communist cause, but in the visual elements of the mise-en-scène and editing pattern unmistakably deploy the genre conventions of classical Hollywood heteronormative romance. Thus, in Red Detachment, when Qionghua reunites with Changqing, the handsome cadre who had saved her, after a period of separation while she recovered from a gunshot wound, the scene may read verbally as the growing comradeship between an aspiring Communist Party member and her mentor, but the use of shot/reverse-shot editing, close-ups, and non-verbal performance cues (figs. 8-11) all lead us to a much more personal conclusion: this is a woman in love (and a man inclined to reciprocate).

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Fig. 8 Encounter on the road

Fig. 9 Camera tracks in to close-up of Qionghua

Fig. 10 Reverse-shot close-up of Changqing

Fig. 11 A woman in love

Even more such examples can be found in Song of Youth. Most notable is a scene late in the film in which Daojing, the protagonist, meets with Jiang Hua, the last in the series of Party members/mentors in her story and someone who appears to be a potential romantic partner (and in fact is in the popular novel on which the film is based). They row in a boat on Beijing’s famous Beihai Lake in a quintessentially romantic setting (whether the precedent is Hollywood or traditional Chinese drama and fiction). Again the editing pattern (shot/reverse shot), framing (ever closer as the scene progresses), and performances closely follow the conventions of Hollywood romance. In fact, reading the scene only visually, one might guess that the gentle yet confident man is proposing to the shy yet overjoyed woman, the scene ending with a closeup of her happy smile and a tear of pleasure in her eye (figs. 12-15).

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Fig. 12 Romantic setting on Beihai Lake

Fig. 13 Intimate conversation

Fig. 14 Reverse shot of Jiang Hua

Fig. 15 Words she’s been longing to hear

The impression would seem to be borne out by the cut to the following scene, in which Daojing stands with Jiang Hua raising her hand in a solemn ceremony. Of course, this visual reading is belied by the actual film script: what really has played out on the lake was that Jiang Hua informed her that she was at long last being admitted to the Communist Party, the following scene being her induction ceremony. Similarly, the potential romance of the scene in Red Detachment described above is quickly followed by a discussion of military strategy between Qionghua and Changqing, who in fact goes on to lecture her about the need to sublimate her personal desires to the collective struggle of the masses throughout China. In both cases, then, the genre conventions of Hollywood romance are deployed in a way that would seem to facilitate sublimation. The spectatorial desire to see the potential romance consummated is redirected to the didactic function of a cinema explicitly aimed at serving the Communist revolution. That is, given the fact that the implied romances never actually occur in these films, the conventions of classical Hollywood romance appear here as generic residua— leftovers from an earlier mode of narration that survive because Chinese cinematic “revolutionary realism plus revolutionary romanticism,” like the broader category of transnational socialist realism of which it is a variety, is in fact highly dependent on classical Hollywood narration in its stylistic details. At the same time, it is precisely through these generic residua, though apparently now deprived of their original signifieds (those of heteronormative romantic love) that sublimation is carried out on the textual level, with the residual generic signifiers now given the new signifieds of the Communist cause (thus 13

world picture 3 constituting a specific example of the “political sleight of hand” described by Ban Wang in the passage quoted earlier). Spectators cued to invest their desire in romantic love through identification with characters have their cathexis gingerly shifted from the sexual bond to the political, in theory losing little of its libidinal intensity. Yet, if this is how the sublimation process plays out through the details of film narrative technique, we may speculate whether contemporary audiences necessarily experienced the films this way. We have anecdotal accounts, for example, of men who vividly recall being sexually aroused by the Cultural Revolution ballet version of Red Detachment of Women. 18 In the case of the scenes described above, we can also question whether the political meanings inscribed in the film scripts necessarily trumped in the end the romantic signifieds of the Hollywood visual conventions deployed. Might audiences not have consciously and fully enjoyed the alternative narrative provided by the visual text, without necessarily having that pleasure rechanneled into the political cathexis? In fact, it is just such an over-privileging of the written over the visual text that would create an opening for filmmakers of the early reform era—particularly “Fifth Generation” innovators such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou in films like Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1985) and The Big Parade (Da yuebing, 1986)—to surreptitiously subvert revolutionary film conventions just by virtue of tweaking the imagery in various subtle ways while using scripts that were relatively uncontroversial. 19 In the case of the revolutionary films examined here, we can and should analyze the textual practices through which the sublimation process was mapped out, but we also should recognize the possibility that audiences may have enjoyed (mis)reading the visual cues of Hollywood romance according to their “original,” unsublimated meanings and taken pleasure in the implied love stories featuring attractive actors whether or not the political meanings had much effect on their consciousness. Indeed, in the form of visual conventions and genre cues, the “repressed” libidinal content turns out not so much to return as to have remained there on the surface all along. Can we find a similarly ambiguous process of repression, sublimation, and yet ongoing presence in the form of generic residua in the post-Mao era, when the sexual and the political seem to have switched dialectical positions? In Letter from an Unknown Woman, as we have seen, the tale of obsessive romantic longing is at one point ruptured by a throwback to the genre of Mao-era revolutionary cinema. To an audience familiar with precedents such as Song of Youth, the shots of the protagonist marching in protest against Japanese aggression would be an immediately identifiable convention from the earlier genre of the revolutionary bildungsroman. (See figs. 16 & 17.) Just when this generic residuum threatens to sweep the lead young woman into a social movement and a political praxis, her fetishized private love object almost magically appears to pull her out of the public space of the street into a private space where her attention can be refocused on his apparently irresistible attraction.

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Fig. 16 Street demonstration against Japan in Song of Youth

Fig. 17 Street demonstration against Japan in Letter from an Unknown Woman

If there is any kind of trans-narrational sublimation happening here, it would indeed have to be a reverse sublimation in which the public and political passions of the prior narrative mode are quickly channeled into the private, masochistic libidinal trajectory of the “unknown woman” in the post-revolutionary film. However, just as was the case with the Mao-era films’ use of classical Hollywood conventions for romance, we may well ask whether the substitution in question—here the replacement of a political cathexis with a romantic, sexual one—is likely to be so seamless. Alternatively, we may view the surprising, solitary irruption of the revolution into the tale of obsessive love as a generic residuum that in fact calls into question everything else in the text. Here the repressed returns as a potentially damning judgment: why, in an era of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolution, is this heroine consuming herself with love for a Westernized intellectual/artist rather than casting her lot with the Chinese masses? (In earlier segments we have seen that Xu is a musician who plays Western classical music, dresses in Western leisure outfits, and adorns his home with Western-style furniture and decorations.) The generic residuum quickly passes and is integrated, if not sublimated, into the narrative of privatized narcissistic desire, but the potential for critique by means of its suggestion of revolution and public action remains. In Summer Palace, the mismatch between the libidinal and the political plays out in the extreme rupture the filmic text displays between the overall narrative of love and sex on the one hand and the irruption of the Tiananmen political protests into the narration midway through the film on the other. Here the documentary images taken from Western news coverage of the actual protests in 1989—inserted into the fictional scenes shot more than fifteen years later— stand out from the rest of the film as an undisguised shard of history within a fictional fantasy. The grainy televised images contrast with the 35 millimeter high resolution of the rest of the film, while the physical appearance—hairstyles, dress, and so on—of the people in the actual 1989 protests cannot help but call attention to how much the fictional students in the film look suspiciously like they are from 2006 rather than 1989 in terms of their sense of fashion. (In one sex scene Yu Hong and Zhou Wei even share earbud-style headphones, which would hardly have been widespread in Beijing in 1989.) In short, the generic residuum interrupting the fictional narrative in this film, the moment at which the repressed political returns, is precisely the documentary footage awkwardly inserted into the stylishly shot fiction film. 15

world picture 3 Here again, we may question whether the political signifieds of the documentary images, and the fictional students’ participation in the protests, are really suppressed by the text as a whole or not. As I have noted already, the script itself gives absolutely no context or rationale for the students’ political convictions, and indeed the film may be read as supporting the official government account of the Tiananmen events insofar as the protests seem consistent with an overall lifestyle of hedonism, irrationality, and irresponsibility on the part of the students. At the same time, however, the visual documentary images themselves are quite powerful, and spectators could well have been spurred to provide their own context and rationale for the protests despite the lack of representation of them in the film. Thus while the film as a whole appears to suggest obsessive romantic love as the ultimate fulfillment available in life, the outof-place documentary footage potentially remains a fundamentally unassimilated textual remainder, a splinter of social reality that disrupts audience absorption in the private fantasy. Impossibilities of Happiness In these four select but in some ways representative films of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary eras of the PRC, we have a reversed pair of images of the aporias of happiness under extremes of communism and capitalism. The former presents a model of fulfillment in which the individual subject ideally achieves something like direct libidinal investment in the revolutionary collective so as to merge with the sublime subject of History, with all secondary libidinal attachments (of heroines to handsome Party cadres, for example, or of spectators to the attractive heroines themselves) serving ultimately as mere means to this end. The latter suggests on the contrary a model of subjectivity in which the social/political becomes bracketed entirely, while the individual seeks fulfillment purely by means of private(ized) libidinal obsessions. In both cases, as we have seen, the dynamic appears to lead to some form of self-negation. Insofar as the revolutionary subject loses all capacity for the private fantasy and invests desire completely into the public sphere of revolutionary action, the public sphere itself becomes a dangerous space of “fanatics” who end up obsessively seeking and persecuting the corrupting counterrevolutionary “other” in their midst. In the postsocialist case, in contrast, the privatization of desire to the point that no fulfillment at all can be found in collective political identity or social action leads to an ironically self-negating narcissism—a subject so consumed with a private object of desire that the ultimate impossibility of merging with or being consumed by it results in compulsive self-destruction. Of course, both of these are fantasized, fictional outcomes that may only occasionally find approximations in real people’s lives. More often, the revolutionary subject will continually fail to reach the ideal of complete identification with the social phantasm, while the postsocialist/capitalist subject will be haunted by at least the possibility of social(ist) values and action on behalf of the collective rather than just individual obsessions. The implication here is thus not that the Chinese (or anyone else) ought to find a golden mean between the two, but rather that, while the medium of cinema is likely to express through its narratives whatever ideals of fulfillment hold current dominance in the culture, it may well also find means, such as countervailing generic residua, to represent what is necessarily repressed by those very ideals.

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world picture 3 Jason McGrath is Associate Professor of Chinese film and literature at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is the author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford UP, 2008), and his essays on Chinese film have appeared in journals such as Modern Chinese Literature and Culture as well anthologies including Chinese Films in Focus II, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, and China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century. His current projects include an anthology of Chinese critical writings on film and a book entitled Inscribing the Real. Notes Chris Berry, “The Sublimative Text: Sex and Revolution in Big Road (The Highway)” EastWest Film Journal 2:2 (June 1988): 79. 2 Ban Wang, “Desire and Pleasure in Revolutionary Cinema,” in The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 123. 3 Ibid., 124, 127. 4 The contrast between Daojing’s desolate individualism at the beginning of the film and her fulfillment through collective belonging at the end was first analyzed by Dai Jinhua and discussed further by Ban Wang. See Dai Jinhua, Dianying lilun yu piping shouce (A manual of film theory and criticism) (Beijing: Kexue jishu chubanshe, 1993), 175-76; and Wang, 136. 5 Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 175. 6 I first discussed this phenomenon in Jason McGrath, “The New Formalism: Mainland Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Century,” in China’s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century, edited by Jie Lu (London: Routledge, 2008), 217. Other films in this category include Spring Subway (Kaiwang chuntian de ditie; dir. Zhang Yibai, 2002), Dazzling (Huayan; dir. Li Xin, 2002), Where Have All the Flowers Gone (Na shi hua kai; dir. Gao Xiaosong, 2002), Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Xiao caifeng; dir. Dai Sijie, 2002), and Baober in Love (Lian’aizhong de Baobei; dir. Li Shaohong, 2004), just to name a few. 7 Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Vintage, 2003), 71. In this book-length essay, Kipnis relates the ideology of romantic love to capitalism, finding that “in commodity culture [love] conforms to the role of a cheap commodity, spit out at the end of the assembly line in cookie-cutter forms, marketed to bored and alienated producer-consumers as an allpurpose salve to emptiness.” Ibid., 195. 8 For an extensive discussion of the ideological and cultural implications of the postsocialist condition in China, see my Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 9 “Xu Jinglei: In Front of and Behind the Camera” (interview), Kinema (spring 2006), http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/jingl061.htm. 10 Gaylyn Studlar, “Masochistic Performance and Female Subjectivity in Letter from an Unknown Woman, Cinema Journal 33, no. 3 (spring 1994): 38, 40. 11 “Xu Jinglei: In Front of and Behind the Camera.” 12 Slavoj Žižek, “The Fetish of the Party,” in Willy Apollon and Richard Feldstein, eds., Lacan, Politics, Aesthetics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 25. 13 Ibid., 26. 1

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Ibid., 27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 29, 30. Emphases in original. 16 Žižek, 28. 17 Though the terms have important distinctions in psychoanalytic theory, generally speaking from Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, sublimation is closely linked to repression, which would be the dynamic that occurs before the libido is rechanneled into social labor of some kind. Here, of course, we are using psychoanalytic terms not in any clinical sense but as metaphors for textual operations in the field of culture and thus ideology. 18 In the documentary Yang Ban Xi: the 8 Model Works (dir. Yan Ting Yuen, 2005), a 39-yearold artist recalls that his first sexual feelings were aroused by the revolutionary ballet Red Detachment of Women because the dancing women wore relatively revealing military uniforms: “At last we’d discovered something real in the Revolution.” Similarly, actor/director Jiang Wen (who plays Xu in Letter from an Unknown Woman) has claimed that a viewing of Red Detachment of Women “was the first time I ever experienced sexual feelings.” Quoted in Jerome Silbergeld, Body in Question: Image and Illusion in Two Chinese Films by Director Jiang Wen (Princeton, N.J.: P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art, 2008), 33. 19 See, for example, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald’s perceptive analysis of the way Yellow Earth subverts the “socialist realist gaze,” in her Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 57-83. 14 15

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On Compromises Brian Price I. When discourses of film theory and political philosophy converge, it is often in a mutual state of unhappiness—one that can only be remedied by appeals, it seems, to notions of autonomy. For instance, where John Stuart Mill saw happiness in the key of compromise, as the tension between Liberty and Authority—which is just one way of describing happiness as the ground of affable and productive social relations in which gross social inequities are more closely tended to than are private satisfactions—radical film and political theorists have regularly viewed compromise as something forced. Freedom is understood strictly in terms of what can only be found outside of any social unity. 1 Compromise is what happens to us—hence our unhappiness—and not something we choose to do for the sake of being happy together inasmuch and as often as possible. This is, for example, the general drift of Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni’s influential essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in which they understand film as: …ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself. Once we realize that it is the nature of the system to turn the cinema into an instrument of ideology, we can see that the filmmaker’s first task is to show up the cinema’s so called “depiction of reality.” If he can do so there is a chance that we will be able to disrupt or possibly even sever the connection between the cinema and its ideological function. 2 If the filmmaker can recognize what is understood here as a direct and causal relation between representation and the social, one in which representation nevertheless organizes the social on a strictly illusory and always involuntary basis, then what will be disrupted is the false sense of need and illusory sense of unity that mass art provokes: Certainly there is such a thing as public demand, but “what the public wants” means “what the dominant ideology wants.” The notion of a public and its tastes was created by the ideology to justify and perpetuate itself. And this public can only express itself via the thought-patterns of the ideology. The whole thing is a closed circuit, endlessly repeating the same illusion. 3 What Comolli and Narboni go on to do here is to enumerate a list of types of films, privileging those that “throw up obstacles” to ideology by adopting more a reflexive strategy over those that give it free pass, as if the construction of a taxonomy of progressive and regressive styles were itself unburdened by ontological suppositions. But most importantly, what we see here is a distinction between the popular and the avant-garde that is meant to effect a sense of autonomy, which, once achieved, will collapse any sense we may have of the popular, or more simply, what can be united under the pretense of false consciousness. And this division in the social body can only

world picture 3 take place, one supposes, if we are forced by the filmmaker to give up what might otherwise be said to bring us pleasure, or the happiness we might experience by virtue of what we share, even if all that we share is our delusions about the social. If the enlightened filmmaker denies us the familiar conventions of popular cinema, then we may not find happiness, but we will be in the service of truth. However, this presumes that once we rid ourselves of one illusion no others will present themselves, and, more importantly, that truth is there to be had if we can just learn content ourselves with a less social conception of what it means to be happy. The decision, in either case, does not belong to us and there can be no compromise between categories. In terms of political theory, we might consider the example of Trotsky’s Terror and Communism, written in 1920, at the height of the Russian Civil War. After suggesting that there is nothing logical about revolutionary terrorism—indeed that it would be better understood as a necessary response to tsarist violence—Trotsky nevertheless suggests that it is also above reasonable moral reproach: The state terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned “morally” only by a man who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence whatsoever—consequently, every war and every rising. For this, one has to be merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker. 4 By Trotsky’s logic, the existence of any violence whatsoever, even a use of violence that we may oppose, cancels out the possibility of opposing revolutionary violence wherever it may occur. The possibility of compromise—an appeal made in words—is ruled out in advance as hypocrisy. And if something is ruled out on the grounds of hypocrisy, it is because of a perceived lack of moral consistency, a mendacity that only violence can correct because violence is conceived of as the truth beyond or beneath representation. The assumption of an originary violence—of a truth in violence—makes impossible any discrimination between what might otherwise and more productively be understood as historical contingencies. What the truth of violence covers over is the decision of the one over the many, even if in the name of the many; a certainty that brooks no disputation and regards that certainty as secondary to what has been proven inevitable simply because it has happened before. Violence is not logical, Trotsky says, just necessary and true. What binds these two works—one, an instance of film theory, the other a famous work of political theory—has to do with a general mistrust of representation, whether as images or words. Truth is rendered in both as that which is guaranteed only in suffering, in the displeasure that we will never choose for ourselves. And in both cases, displeasure leads to autonomy, which is understood as liberty, even though it is hard to know in what sense. For Trotsky, violence was necessary to the final overthrow of tsarism and the realization of the Bolshevik state, but the appeal to violence as a truth beyond disputation leaves no theoretical (and thus practical) basis upon which any dispute within the newly formed bloc might be resolved. That is, violence might produce a new unity, but what it does more enduringly and consistently is to dissolve them. For Comolli and Narboni, a truly resistant, autonomous work must conform to certain aesthetic prerequisites, and thus earn for itself a sense of belonging to a category of image production predicated on autonomy, precisely because anything that might 2

world picture 3 cause pleasure can only be understood in terms of ideological mystification. Every unity is understood as a false unity. For this reason, so much of radical film theory demanded a kind of violence to the image (albeit a very different kind of violence than what Trotsky was defending), and thus the spectator. Nevertheless, I do not wish to suggest that we abandon radical political film theory, nor radical politics more generally. Just the opposite. What I would suggest instead is that we might take more seriously the dead-end that radical theory takes in its insistence only on displeasure, which is, as I am suggesting here, always predicated on a claim that truth is an unhappy event. For one, if we abandon the idea that the work of the political is the excavation of truth—and it is tempting not to do so precisely because we are so accustomed to denying the status of truth to any image that offends us—we might be in a better position to see the work that images can do in and for the social, especially as we come to understand the social as something that cannot be, and should not be thought to be, beyond representation. Likewise, if we understand the movement of the social as a process of representation, then we are in a better place to understand just how important it remains to think images politically, but to do so on the promise of pleasure instead of violence, happiness instead of deception. We might begin, then, by thinking about the terms of compromise and recognition rather than identification and interpellation. To proceed in this way is to bring moving image theory even closer to political philosophy, and allow us to both understand and effect change in the social along more peaceable and productive lines.

II. My title is borrowed from an essay written by Lenin on September 1, 1917. The plural of compromise should be noted, even if it is less pleasurable to pronounce—significantly less tidy on the page and far too wobbly off the tongue. To speak of compromise in the singular, as we have seen in the case of Trotsky, is to offer nothing of the sort—a demonstration only of the relative and dangerous inflexibility of belief and certainty. This is the one thing I can do, and I will do nothing more. The singular is aggressive, stubborn, and entirely unhappy. The compromises that Lenin was entertaining when he wrote this essay were, by contrast, multiple and related to his ongoing cooperation with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries in the Provisional government to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat by peaceful means. The compromise could be struck only because the Mensheviks and the S.R. agreed that a government could not be formed with the Kadets. Most importantly, this moment was one in which a distinction needed to be made between a forced compromise and a voluntary one. The former was represented by the Bolshevik’s participation in the Third and Fourth Dumas. The voluntary compromise, by contrast, was what could be struck with the S.R./Menshevik block, which Lenin imagined as a true democracy: The medley of voices in the “bloc” is great and inevitable, for a host of shades is represented among the petty-bourgeois democrats—from that 3

world picture 3 of the completely ministerial bourgeois down to the semi pauper who is not yet capable of taking up the proletarian position. Nobody knows what will be the result of this medley of voices at any given moment. 5 Lenin did have an idea, or at least a worry, a lingering skepticism about how well the compromise would work—which is a normal effect of any compromise, so long as that worry remains de-emphasized. Lenin expressed this worry in a long footnote, which I quote here in its entirety: The above lines were written on Friday, September 1, but due to unforeseen circumstances (under Kerensky, as history will tell, not all Bolsheviks were free to choose their domicile) they did not reach the editorial office that day. After reading Saturday’s and today’s papers, I say to myself: perhaps it is already too late to offer a compromise. Perhaps the few days in which a peaceful development was still possible have passed too. Yes, to all appearances, they have already passed. In one way or another, Kerensky will abandon both the S.R. Party and the S.R.s themselves, and will consolidate his position with the aid of the bourgeoisie without the S.R.s, and thanks to their inaction…Yes, to all appearances, the days when by chance the path of peaceful development became possible have already passed. All that remains is to send these notes to the editor with the request to have them entitled: “Belated Thoughts.” Perhaps even belated thoughts are sometimes not without interest. 6 What Lenin’s worried note makes clear is the temporal dimension of any compromise. It can come too late. Made at the wrong time, it can also fail—becoming less an instance of compromise than a trace of deceit. Compromise, in the moment of a failed mutuality, has to be understood instead as strategic failure. But if something can be described as strategy then it is no longer a compromise. Not, in any case, for the deceived. To compromise, I would suggest, is to decide without agency in the moment of a mutual suspension of instrumentality, and for the sake of the greater good for all parties within a bloc. This is why Lenin concludes that “On Compromises” might be better understood as “Belated Thoughts.” Belated, he says, but not without interest. Not without interest because any voluntary compromise—we can only infer—retains the promise of revolution without violence, change without bloodshed. A belated thought is not without interest because it can also become timely; peace should always be on time, and yet it seems to be the one thing that always comes too late, as Derrida so often reminded us. One feels this tardiness very strongly in the history of revolutionary political theory—for instance, in Fanon’s pained realization in The Wretched of the Earth that decolonization would not be the result of a “friendly understanding,” especially as the colonial subject—in most instances—grew up with a gun at his nose and barbed wire around his block. To be, for the colonized, was already to be compromised; it was to live in a permanent state of risk and disenfranchisement that was always someone else’s decision. One cannot compromise when one has nothing more to surrender.

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world picture 3 We might also consider, and by sharp contrast, Žižek’s analysis of the 2005 riots in the Paris suburbs as an instance of superfluous violence, one that nevertheless occurs and occurs as unnecessary: If the much repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense, it is here. There were no particular demands made by the protesters in the Paris suburbs. There was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, unarticulated ressentiment. Most of those interviewed talked about how unacceptable it was that the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, had called them “scum.” In a weird referential short circuit, they were protesting against the very reaction to their protests. “Populist reason” here encounters its irrational limit: what we have is a zero level protest, a violent protest act which demands nothing. 7 Žižek’s description of the riots as a short circuit, in which the protestors only protest the way that the protest itself was described, is entirely ungenerous. It presupposes, for one, that North African immigrants in the suburbs were unaware of the discriminatory character of French modernity and the development of the suburbs in the first place, not to mention the sense of disenfranchisement that immigrant populations live with daily. Recognition is the demand; its lack, the source of ressentiment. The gap between lived experience and the way in which that experience remains absent as both news and as popular culture produces antagonism. Moreover, with the increasing popularity of rap in France at the time—especially as the nation began to embrace popular representations of suburban immigrant life around figures like Diam’s and Kery James—one can imagine how easy it would be to contemplate one’s abjection and to revolt. Resentment emerges when one realizes that things could be otherwise. This is why and when violence becomes thinkable as possible, but not—I would submit—thinkable as necessary. To decide that it is necessary is to be certain, in turn, that the violence of 2005 in the suburbs of Paris is contextually identical to the violence of the F.L.N. in the years of decolonization. The moments are related, but not identical. The difference is where the prospect for a peaceful revolution resides. The protestors of 2005 are the inheritors of a revolution whose violence was entirely just and for the reasons described by Fanon. Moreover, we are speaking here about a generation of North African immigrants now living in low-income housing produced during the Algerian War in an effort to return France to the French, Paris to Parisians, as the racist logic of colonial France goes. For this reason alone it would be difficult to imagine how the residue of French colonial policy would not be felt in the suburbs, the lack of representation and equality felt today as a result of deeply sedimented values in French culture. These are the values that made possible Sarkozy’s call, following the riots, to rid France of the sans papiers in the first place. The call, for many, was effective because it was recognizable—it no doubt felt right, and felt so as historically familiar and objectively true. To speak here of sedimentation is to invoke the relation between sedimentation and reactivation that Ernesto Laclau expropriates from Husserl in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time in an effort to understand the ways in which “the sedimented forms of ‘objectivity’ make up the field of what we call the social.” 8 Reactivation, by 5

world picture 3 contrast, is the means by which the constitutive activity of thinking is restored to what has become sedimented. Or as Laclau puts it: The moment of original institution of the social is the point at which its contingency is revealed, since that institution, as we have seen, is only possible through the repression of options that were equally open. To reveal the original meaning of an act, then, is to reveal the moment of its radical contingency—in other words, to reinsert it in the system of real historic options that were discarded—in accordance with our analysis above: by showing the terrain of original violence, of the power relations through which that instituting act took place. This is where Husserl’s distinction can be introduced, with certain modifications. Insofar as an act of institution has been successful, a “forgetting of the origins” tends to occur; the system of possible alternatives tends to vanish and the traces of the original contingency to fade. 9 Reactivation, then, is the disruptive work of the political, as Laclau has defined it. The political produces the social and is also what can remain buried. As an imaginative act— as the articulation of an absence in the social that must be rectified—the political is what, as Laclau says, prevents the social from “merely reproducing itself through repetitive practices.” 10 We might say, then, that the 2005 riots exposed the radical contingency long concealed beneath the repetition of social forms that were instituted in the 1950s; it was a moment of recognition, the reawakening of historic options long repressed that will now need to be acknowledged and modified. As an opening for the political, recognition—which produces reactivation—is also what would allow for change without bloodshed, which is largely what the 2005 riots involved. The violence done was largely to private property—to cars and public buildings, which do not obtain the status of being in any instance. Moreover, private property, in this instance, bears an important relation to Žižek’s supposed short-circuit, and the rioters outrage about the manner in which their own protest is being represented back to them by the then Interior Minister of France. We can only assume that Žižek understands representation here as merely epiphenomenal, ancillary—at best—to what is, to the cause of what appears unmediated beneath and as truth. If the protestors are absurd for being angry about being represented as scum, then the real problem can only be said to reside outside of discourse, outside of the realm of the political. We can only presume that what is, in this instance, is the absence of a stable ground upon which the validity of any given claim can be measured. Sarkozy could only agree. To refer to the protestors as “scum” is to produce at the level of political discourse the very terms of social objectivity. It could only reactivate what had appeared as objective, and did so by way of an eidetic reduction that can only ever succeed on the basis of a willed consistency within representation itself. What appeared as the essence of North Africans—“scum”—could only appear so because the political is the ground of the social. It is what makes the appearance of certain cars and certain buildings in certain neighborhoods seem natural and inevitable. Car burning and window breaking is a rupture in representation, an effort to reactivate the discourses that appear to us not as discourse but as what is. Here is where these cars belong in and as nature. If these acts provoked Sarkozy to refer to the protestors as scum, it was only in 6

world picture 3 an effort to justify force by reference to the truth of the social—the horrible essence of the North African and the poor—and to silence the re-awakening of an awareness of the contingent character of social relations. It is not that the protestors demanded nothing; rather, they proceeded from it, were energized by the nothing and nowhere that gives ground, but gives it only because ground is both contingent and necessarily unstable. If the ground of the social is the political, what is can only ever be organized by representation. And that’s a good thing, provided that representation is understood as both political and contingent; social objectivity more properly understood to be a dream of the metaphysician. An appeal for recognition, then, is not a demand for authenticity—for an authenticity gone absent but still capable of being recovered nevertheless. Recognition is better understood as a question of representation. It is not a matter of finding in an image or a discourse an essential self—this image of me that has been waiting for me to arrive, where I shall find myself as it—but of seeing in an image or a discourse pure possibility; options for how things may be different. As Alexander García Düttmann has very convincingly shown, the one who seeks recognition and the one from whom recognition is sought can never be One, just as any single representation will never constitute my entire being. Thus, recognition is, in Düttmann’s terms, a relation of non-identity, even though what one goes in search of when one seeks recognition is, in fact, identity. As Düttmann puts it: If one wished to define recognition as a pure relationship of otherness, then one would not be in a position to explain how it is possible to relate to the other without a moment of sameness; if, conversely, one wished to define recognition as a pure relationship of sameness, then one would not be in a position to explain how it is possible to relate to the same without a moment of otherness. Finally, if one wished to define the relationship between sameness and otherness as a purely dialectical one, recognition becoming the conceptual epitome of a positive dialectic, then one would not be in a position to answer the question of what it is that distinguishes a recognition resulting from the sublation of otherness from a recognition, from that knowing-oneself-in-the-other that sub-lates difference in the non-identical in the unity of an identity, and that, rather than requiring or needing recognition, already comprises it within itself. 11 Recognition thus presumes a multiplicity in being, difference-within-itself, even while felt as whole. Because being is multiple, and each being differently multiple, marked by consistencies and inconsistencies at once—though never in a state of incommunicable alterity—there is a spacing that makes recognition possible; room enough to perceive an other in some aspect. I perceive the same in the other precisely because the other is only same in some ways, other in other ways; always at once, but not in any stable proportion or relation. Thus, as Düttmann has shown, recognition cannot be conceived of in terms of a pure dialectic between same and other; a dialectic, presumably, that leads to a becoming-one, which is conceivable only in metaphysical terms, and as a statement of pure essence. Recognition should instead be understood as a function of reactivation, which I would like to understand here as the beginning of the work of the political. It is an impossible origin of representation—a process in which I imagine myself to belong to a community that I nevertheless constitute in an imaginative 7

world picture 3 process that proceeds from a lack I perceive myself to be experiencing. The plenitude I seek initially appears to reside in, and be conferred by, a being or beings in some partial way that will produce a sense of unity by way of a sublation of otherness that I require if the ground of the social is to be reactivated and exposed as contingent. This way of understanding recognition poses an intriguing relation between recognition and compromise. If there is a multiplicity in being, then recognition itself can be understood as an act of voluntary compromise. If there will be a unity between the one that seeks recognition and the one or the many in whom, or by way of whom, recognition is sought, then what I am agreeing to in the act of recognition is the failure of any relation of identity, and I make this agreement for the sake of a solidarity provoked by an imagining, by any instance of representation. A representation can seem like me—must seem like me in some way, like the me I think I am but am nevertheless yet to become—but can only ever partially be so, lest the potential for recognition disappear beneath an all consuming otherness, or an all consuming sameness, to return to Düttmann’s terms. If the sublation of otherness is fundamental to recognition, then what is other in the other remains present as other and thus productive of some other possible unity in which what was other once can also appear as same at some point and for some time. If being is open and multiple, then the act of recognition itself becomes context-dependent. Or as Düttmann suggests: “The fact that the recognizing relationship is one of inconstancy and tension, both homogeneous and heterogeneous, symmetrical and asymmetrical, reciprocal and interrupted by a caesura, indicates its dependency on determinate contexts.” 12 Context, however, is not a fixed totality, an unbroken frame in which the recognizing relationship settles into an order that could have been predicted. Another way of understanding the problem of context can be found if we think not of recognition, but of crisis. In “Criticism and Crisis,” for instance, Paul de Man recounts the story of Mallarmé’s 1894 lecture at Oxford, La Musique et les letters, where he passionately proclaimed a crisis in poetry brought about by a younger generation of French poets— influenced by Mallarmé himself, of course—who were defying the rules of verse. His audience, as de Man tells it, was clearly nonplussed; they failed to see what all the fuss was about since “English prosody had not waited for some rather disreputable foreigners to start tampering with free verse; free and blank verse were nothing very new in the country of Shakespeare and Milton, and English literary people thought of the alexandrine as the base supporting the column of the Spenserian stanza rather than as a way of life.” 13 The point, for de Man, is that the trouble of identifying any crisis— that is, of locating a stable and indisputable referent—has to do with the lack of a transcendental observer: Historical “changes” are not like changes in nature, and the vocabulary of change and movement as it applies to historical process is a mere metaphor, not devoid of meaning, but without an objective correlative that can unambiguously be pointed to in empirical reality, as when we speak of a change in the weather or a change in a biological organism. 14 For the sake of our discussion here, then, we should understand context as a question of crisis. For de Man, context is untranslatable, untransferable, and—worst of all, from the 8

world picture 3 point of view of one who might prefer to believe in a transcendent observer—most apparent at the moment in which a crisis is named. Context, especially as it is summoned in the naming of a crisis, is antagonistic and productively imprecise. Any crisis, once named, becomes catachrestic; it becomes the point around which a series of figures, forms, and events can be collected, or contextualized. It is catachrestic—a slight misnomer that nevertheless becomes productive of meaning—because there can only be disagreement about the terms of the crisis. De Man, for instance, notes that Mallarmé makes a stunning and odd omission from his list of young poets who are effecting this crisis: namely, Rimbaud. Historical context is always under the angular sign of catachresis; productive and always inaccurate, insofar as inaccuracy summons rival formations that it cannot ignore since historical change can only be articulated metaphorically. But in this way “crisis” is also constitutive. Mallarmé’s “crisis” is an instance of the political. It sets forth the terms of representation by which this community will come to exist—supposing, of course, that others might agree. It is a demand for recognition. And because it is an instance of the political, the call itself—as de Man’s characterization of an unimpressed audience of Oxford intellectuals makes clear—will reactivate a series of related “crises” in the history of Western prosody. Context, then, is that which brings a relation into focus as contingent and necessarily unstable. It sets the terms by which something or someone can be recognized in a particular way, but only by way of a misnomer. And as a misnomer, the sign can never be identical to that which it refers. For instance, when George W. Bush declared of his antagonists in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2000, “They misunderestimated me,” two meanings came to the fore in the same moment: misunderstand and underestimated— neither of which he was capable of articulating. “Misunderestimate” refers, in the logic of the misnomer as we make sense of it, to misunderstanding. Thus, the misnomer proceeds by a relation of non-identity. It refers to a meaning not related in the conventions of standard usage to that word (misunderstand), while producing sense on a different register—i.e., we understand all too well that we could, and should, lower our estimation of him even further. The misnomer re-routes the signifier away from what we would normally be inclined to think of as its proper referent, and in so doing, reveals the contingency of language that renders the notion of a mistake impossible by way of the impossible relation between sign and referent that it most comically announces. If we get the joke—and it cannot be overemphasized that Bush probably did not intend it as such—we do so by way of a context that we share imperfectly. The misnomer finds sense in our frustration with the repeated acts of brutality authorized by this man who seems not to grasp the most basic elements of language and is (was) charged with the highest degrees of responsibility and agency in the U.S. The context is shared imperfectly because our understanding does not depend on our experience and memory of the same exact instances in a specified, closed quantity. It does not matter whether I’ve seen five press conferences, in which this unsettling mixture of brutality and stupidity are present, and that you’ve seen twenty-five. Recognition of the joke’s meaning—supposing that a joke’s meaning can be unintended and still be a joke— merely requires some overlap and will appear at some historically contingent moment. Some may even get the joke later (the ones, I can only suppose, who need a little more convincing). If we require a more determinate temporality and a requisite quantity of instances, then we no longer have a context, but a system. Moreover, we fail to 9

world picture 3 understand the representational basis of the misnomer that makes context possible and productive, but only ever as one possibility among others. Seen as such, recognition presents an opening to compromise. It is bound up with compromise precisely because the historical context in which I find myself preparing to respond to what appears before me is a vast field of historical contingencies, whether recovered in reactivation (Laclau) or merely in what appears to us now as yet another series altogether. In voluntary compromise, I remain open to what is possible, knowing that once possibility disappears—when the social appears objective—any compromise will be forced. A forced compromise can only ever lead to violence since it involves only subtraction without decision—a subtraction that nevertheless fails to appear as subtraction, owing to a totalizing sameness or a totalizing otherness, which follows from the sedimentation of the political within the social. No risk, then: what is given up is what has already been demanded of me. When I go to the airport and disrobe with strangers in a hurried fashion I am engaged in a forced compromise. It is something I have to do. This, as we know, fuels resentment—a resentment that is gradually disappearing beneath the weight of so much sedimentation. This is simply how things are now. I can no longer remember what used to be allowable. If I can no longer remember how it used to be, my forgetting might become the ground of a new utilitarianism in which I participate by dint of my own forgetfulness. It is an agreement that I cannot help or be helped to make, and that implicitly occurs for the assured safety of all who pass. And we all know what happens when we let our resentment in the airport emerge—how much longer it takes us to go on with everyday life. III. The idea of voluntary compromise in the service of peaceful change that I have in mind has to do with our relation to popular culture as an instance of the political, as the imagining of a better way. We could say that the revolt of 2005 was internal to the logic of the suburbs themselves, but I can’t help but think that it had more to do with its constitutive outside: the representation of something better than what is already present, even if it is not exactly what we all want—precisely because no representation can ever be exactly what we all want. A voluntary compromise, in which I imagine a unity of fellow sufferers, may also come about in more negative representational terms, in an image of me (“scum,” for instance) that demands resistance, lest what offends me in that image be hypostasized as the true essence of me, and the “they” to which I will be said to belong. Popular culture can be the very thing that cues recognition, insofar as it reveals a lack, which in turn amplifies resentment and triggers reactivation. But as an instance of voluntary compromise, reactivation will occur in a more peaceful form, even if the moment of recognition was expressed, initially, as violence. If we carry this understanding of recognition and voluntary compromise back to film theory, some unexpected possibilities present themselves. The form of popular culture that I have in mind is classical narrative cinema—the recurrently bad object of radical film theory. 15 The form itself is universal—the name bequeathed to us by Aristotle— and has been under protest in Marxist and psychoanalytic film theory for decades for precisely this reason. As a universal form, classical narratives are most often understood as a three-fold operation: in the first act, an antagonism is stated; in the second, the antagonism is expanded; in the third act, resolution is found and order restored. 16 In 10

world picture 3 Aristotelian terms, the spectator undergoes an experience of catharsis in which his or her unhealthy emotions—which find temporary expression on screen—are purged. Pleasure is also said to be what secures us as peaceful—or one might say pacified— citizens of the state. In this way, the experience of catharsis is also the work of mediation, the establishment on screen of a sense of moderation that follows the onscreen expansion of crisis, conflict, and disorder. Most classical narratives depict crisis as a way of establishing context: a group of people, a closed set of places, and a finite temporality (finite, that is, in the context that the crisis names and then collects). Classical narratives, we are told, make us moderate, and our moderation, in turn, perpetuates the social in its more sedimented form. Or as Siegfried Kracauer once put it: A producer…will never allow himself to be driven to present material that in any way attacks the foundations of society, for to do so would be to destroy his own existence as capitalist entrepreneur. Indeed, the films made for the lower classes are more bourgeois than those aimed at finer audiences, precisely because they hint at subversive views without exploring them. Instead, they smuggle in respectable ways of thinking. 17 For now, Kracauer’s description will have to stand in for the Marxist and psychoanalytic critique of classical narration as it was developed in increasingly specified terms throughout the last fifty years. It is, suffice to say, the kind of film that Comolli and Narboni had in mind when they wrote “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” What Kracauer points to is a Marxist logic of base and superstructure, one that assumes the image—this respectable way of thinking—to be causally related to the economic base that it protects in turn. In other words, the image masks the source of structural inequality. For this reason, film theorists on the left—with whom I feel a deep sense of belonging—have called over the years for the development of a counter cinema. It is what underlies every claim for the autonomy of the avant-garde—namely, that the autonomy of the subject can only follow from the autonomy of the aesthetic. However, it might just be that the aesthetic autonomy demanded by political film theory may very well be beholden to a logic of causality. To insist on it might very well be to occupy a category of forced compromise—a site of relative autonomy in which the political becomes less likely to reactivate the social. For one, the development of counter cinema practices—no matter how important they are, and how much I admire them—have not had the revolutionary effect so long hoped for in Marxist and radical psychoanalytical film theory. If we accept the category of the avant-garde as that which is to be distinguished from the popular—if we content ourselves with notions of aesthetic autonomy or advanced art—we merely reinforce our minoritarian position in oppositional terms, which any dominant class will only ever respect by referring to us as elitist, incommunicable, or merely arty. 18 Moreover, the superstructural images of moderation described by Kracauer and others have obviously not imploded. For them to do so, capital—as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have shown us—would have to contain within it the seeds of its own undoing, a scenario which assumes in turn that capitalism is causally motivated and that antagonism itself resides within capital— indeed, that capital has an inside. 19 What I would suggest, instead, is that classical narratives are merely fables of causality; their universal character—their structural repetition through time—is what produces 11

world picture 3 sedimentation. If crisis becomes the point around which a context is formed, then the repetition of crisis in each instance, in each new film, takes on the appearance of an essence. Crisis is what always recurs, and does so as context; it gathers together beings in a place in order to solve a crisis that nevertheless brings the world we are watching together in a particular way, again and again. The pleasure of classical narratives—the happiness they seem to afford us—should thus be understood as the pleasure of sedimentation, which is another way of describing apperception. Classical narratives are fables of causality precisely because the lack they work to fill is contingency itself. Crisis is thus constitutive of narrative, and in turn the repetition of narrative in its classical dimensions effects a sense of essence that it cannot support since crisis, as I have argued, is catachrestic. And if crisis is catachrestic it is also a misnomer. Crisis always leads to a gathering, but what is gathered in every instance is something altogether different, even if the movement through three acts persists as a cultural form. A classical narrative presents us with images of a world ordered by causality, but it does so on the basis of a misnomer, according only to a sign that can only gain its clarity by what it gathers and not by that to which it can actually be said to enduringly and causally refer. In this sense, we could say that every classical narrative is an affront to both metaphysics and the religious conception of origin—no matter what stories they tell, and even when they tell religious stories. That is, if we agree that classical narration is a political form, then we can only mean that it works to foment collectivity around something that has gone missing—namely, causality itself. And until we can irrefutably prove that the universe is not contingent, classical narratives are likely to remain with us—but they will only do so as representations of something that does not exist and that will likely go on not existing. This, of course, is also the danger of classical narration. The same sedimented field of objectivity that allowed for Sarkozy’s racist calls for the removal of the sans papiers to be heard—and felt as right—is the work that classical narrative can do. Because what recurs beneath the content of any particular instance is a fable of causality: a structure without any particular content. It can also move us in a direction that I will not agree with, depending on the moment in which I experience it. And yet, if we agree that classical narrative, as a universal form, is always concerned with producing a sense of moderation in the spectator, and that it reproduces images of causality in every instance and through time—and what is more, that they do so because of a lack that will likely never disappear, since the lack in this case is causality itself—then we would also have to admit its possibility as a progressive political form. To understand the work of mediation that classical narrative does in terms of the production of moderation is thus to recognize, in turn, that what these films continually present to us is the appearance of voluntary compromise. Of course, not every voluntary compromise will work out, as the lesson of Lenin attests. The effectiveness of any compromise is always itself historically contingent. But in this way, we can also say that once recognition occurs in a particular moment, a demand can be made, and the political emerges as an imagined alternative— an alternative without any particular content. Consider, for instance—and as just one possible context—the last few months of the Bush administration; the months, that is, leading up to what would become the election of Barack Obama. Many of us in the U.S. had at that point lived for eight years in a state of forced compromise, living, as we all did, under the state of exception and the Bush 12

world picture 3 administration’s willful indifference to the physical and socio-economic well-being of its constituents. However, as became quite clear in these final months, especially as Republican candidates began to distance themselves from Bush in an effort to secure their party’s nomination and eventually the presidency itself, there was a demand—on the left and the right—to put an end to what had been occurring. Our collective dissatisfaction—the lack of moderation, reason, and justice that so many of us felt (and feel)—became, as such, a contingent ground of the political. It united us—eventually and for some time—in what Laclau has called a chain of equivalence. Equivalence, as Laclau makes clear in “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” is not the same thing as identity. In a chain of equivalence, unification is achieved on the basis of shared partiality—on the de-emphasization of difference for the sake of unification. What unites any group is what that group collectively lacks—i.e., lawfulness, reason, moderation. Or as Laclau has argued, “It is not…something positive that all of them share which establishes their unity, but something negative: their opposition to a common enemy.” 20 The differences that pertain between members of a given unicity, however, remain present. The presence of difference within a chain of equivalence is also what prevents a hegemonic formation from taking on a totalitarian character, precisely because it cannot emerge on the basis of identity. The chain of equivalence can be undone by difference just as easily as it can be formed. What this means for us is that to be a part of any unicity is also to make a voluntary compromise, such that the demand articulated at the level of the political—the desire of justice that is currently absent, let’s say—can be most forcefully heard and effect change in peaceful terms. To change in peaceful terms means that we have to find a point of agreement across traditional party lines, compromises that make the chain of equivalence possible; a bloc dense enough assure the delivery of a new government. Hence, the arrival of the so-called purple state. During this moment of political upheaval, when both the left and the right seem united by what each collectively lacks, even if we cannot agree entirely on what we all need, the repetitive insistence on compromise in classical narratives—the ritual appearance of moderation and mutual assurance—plays an interesting, and progressive role in the movement of the social. Indeed, this insistence can—and may very well have helped to—unite groups that would otherwise remain opposed, and precisely because the particular content of any given compromise in a universal form is unimportant. It is the operation of compromise that matters, not what is being depicted in any given instance. Consider, for instance, The House Bunny (d. Fred Wolf), released in the summer of 2008—in the months, that is, just prior to the election. The film tells the story of Shelly Darlington (Anna Faris), a Playboy bunny who, through the machinations of a rival playmate is forced to leave the Playboy mansion and re-enter everyday life, penniless and without shelter. Shelly wanders into sorority row and the signs of her former life appear to her: groups of women living together in large homes suggest to her a sense of belonging. She becomes hopeful; she seeks recognition. Shelly happens on a particular sorority, Zeta Alpha Zeta, which is on the brink of ruin. Owing to a lack of popularity— which stems, according the logic of the film, from its members’ status as bookish, tacky, and unattractive nerds—the sorority has failed to recruit enough young women and thus faces the possibility of losing its charter and house. Needing a place to live, Shelly brokers a compromise with the young women: in exchange for being named house mother, and thus providing her with a place to live, she’ll help the young women to recruit the rest of the women they need to retain their house. What the film goes on to 13

world picture 3 enact, however, is a larger compromise. Shelly encourages the women to become less bookish and more beautiful, while the sorority sisters encourage Shelly to become less shallow and more bookish, all in an effort to secure a relationship with a “normal” guy. As a result, the sorority becomes more popular with men, and thus attracts enough new female recruits, and Shelly gets her man. These are, for better or worse, fairly familiar terms in the vernacular of classical narrative. Indeed, they comprise the kind of arrangement and on-screen compromise that has worried feminist film theorists for a long time. There is nothing particularly progressive about the terms of compromise offered in The House Bunny, and the dance sequence that accompanies the closing credits is enough to make any reasonable person—or, at least, anyone over the age of sixteen—feel embarrassed. Probably, if you haven’t seen the film, or even if you have, the compromise on offer—and the terms of the crisis itself—seem entirely retrograde. Obviously, I don’t believe that women become more attractive as they become less smart. If I’m being honest, though, I would admit that the smarter a woman is, the more attractive she would appear. But I also do not see any reason to generalize my own preferences. Even if I detest the retrograde gender politics of the film and the specificity of the compromise it enacts—i.e., that social mobility depends on decreased intelligence and improved bust lines (which is to say, diminished)—I may take pleasure in the operation of compromise itself, burdened as I had been by the voice of a lawless, hostile, and ideological administration. I can forsake my differences knowing that the member of the religious right sitting next to me in the theater is also getting comfortable with compromise, taking pleasure in the idea that something has to change rather than insisting on what must remain the same, at all costs. What matters in this unicity is not what we share but what we all in this moment lack. I may prefer the compromise that sees Shelly become more worldly and more self-conscious about her own sexual objectification, whereas the man next to me might prefer the compromise he sees these sorority girls enacting for the sake of popularity and solvency. What matters at this moment is, to borrow Laclau’s terms, not what we share, but what we lack. To be clear, I am not suggesting that The House Bunny is responsible for the election of Obama, or that its rhetoric of compromise was what finalized the appeal across party lines for cooperation—in much the way that Triumph of the Will (albeit in distinctly opposite terms) is so often said to have cemented the Nazi masses. Films don’t organize the political all by themselves. People do. I am simply suggesting that the context brought to bear by crisis in the film—Shelly’s loss of community and her traditional sense of herself, of how and where she belongs—appeared at a moment in which Barack Obama’s call for unity and cooperation across party lines was gaining traction. Many other films did the same thing. They always do. At the same time, Obama represented the terms of voluntary compromise in the broadest and most consistent fashion and his discourse aligned itself with the universal logic of classical narration. And if we understand classical narratives as fables of causality, as ceaseless representations of what is missing in the world—i.e. causality itself—then the movement of the political can be understood as the alignment of discourses about voluntary compromise that are themselves united on a larger basis: on the understanding, however implicit, that the social can be re-organized because there is no determinate and metaphysical ground of the social. Our being is subject to change, individually and socially, because our 14

world picture 3 identities do not exist ahead of us and as a determining essence—which is what these films suggest on the basis of their repetition through time. One cannot compromise something that cannot actually be changed. And as I have already suggested, the trouble with this position—and it is a trouble with no remedy—is that the discourse of voluntary compromise that every classical narrative enacts on the basis of a crisis could easily serve discourses that I entirely disapprove of. Nevertheless, those discourses can only be articulated as truth; they cannot actually be grounded in it. As such they cannot give direct passage to a determining essence. No one, I submit, would be compelled to make or see classical film narratives if a determining essence were not what goes missing in each instance, again and again. One can represent causality, but one cannot produce it—not, that is, in any metaphysical sense. To be sure, discourses of causality also find their sedimentation in classical narratives. But those narratives can also provide a basis for recognition—the voluntary compromise that we will all have to make in order to form a community that does not yet exist—that produces the reactivation of the social, and does so precisely because the political, or representation itself, is the ground of the social. And representation begins when something has gone missing, or has only ever been missing. Otherwise, we would only ever speak of the thing itself. Perhaps, then, the pleasure I experience with classical narratives is not pathological; nor is it a sign of my interpellation in the system of Capital. Rather, the pleasure that the endless cycle of such films brings me, even when such films require a temporary deemphasis of difference, is the renewed awareness of the absence of causality. It is, thankfully, an experience we have been having again and again, and for centuries. It is also what allows us to make a change in being, individually and socially; to find new ways of being happy together, even if that happiness can only every be partial because it is shared and defined on the basis of a lack—the lack in whose name happiness so often announces itself. But without sharing, there would be no social—something we must recognize even if it means adopting something like a utilitarian conception of happiness. How, in other words, would autonomy and solitude be a solution to the problems of the social? What we say of cinema, we shall also say of the social. Brian Price is an editor of World Picture. Notes 1

Consider, for instance, Simon Critchley’s recent call in Infinitely Demanding for a brand of anarchism that does not mirror the totality of the state that it has just undone. What he calls for instead is the model of the artistic avant-garde: “It seems to me that the great virtue of contemporary anarchist practice is its spectacular, creative and imaginative disturbance of the state. Contemporary anarchists have created a new language of civil disobedience that combines street-theatre, festival, performance art and what might be described as forms of non-violent warfare.” Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 123.

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Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Film Theory and Criticism, 6th edition, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 815. 3 Ibid. 4 Leon Trotsky, Terror and Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2007), 58. 5 V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 205. 6 Ibid., 206. The emphasis and ellipses are Lenin’s. 7 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 74-75. The emphasis is Žižek’s. 8 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York and London: Verso, 1990), 35. 9 Ibid., 34. The emphasis is Laclau’s. 10 Ibid., 35. 11 Alexander García Düttmann, Between Cultures: Tension in the Struggle for Recognition, trans. Kenneth B. Woodgate (New York and London: Verso, 2000), 62. 12 Ibid., 48. 13 Paul de Man, “Criticism and Crisis,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 5. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Much of what I am saying here is, I believe, equally true for television. Ultimately, I am not all concerned with questions of medium specificity. Television, however, presents an interesting complication, owing to the open-ended temporality of the narrative it constructs; open-ended insofar as most television shows, I can only suppose, begin without a definite end in mind, temporally-speaking. So, for the sake of simplicity, I will just be speaking here of the standard feature length narrative film—but in very bad faith, where television is concerned. 16 The most influential account of the principles of classical narration in film is no doubt David Bordwell’s “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Theory, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 17-34. Many other examples could be cited. The proof of its universality (its sedimentation) are the legions of introductory film texts that rehearse the same distinction that I have offered above—too many, in fact, to warrant quotes around my own account. The character and nature of its universality, however, awaits better definition than one finds in these standard accounts. 17 Sigfried Kracauer, “The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 291. 18 In many respects, I owe this idea to Phil Solomon. Speaking at Oklahoma State University on September 11, 2008, Solomon began by expressing his dissatisfaction with the term avant-garde, reminding us all that it is a military term for the front line. And as Solomon pointed out, we all know what happens to those who go to battle in the front line. Solomon suggests that we might think of avant-garde cinema, instead, as poetic filmmaking. I’m inclined to suggest that we cease making any generic or class distinction between types of film and filmmaking practices. If it were up to me, we would be able to see a film like Psalm II: “Walking Distance” (1999) in the same theater, and with the same regularity, as any more “mainstream” work. 16

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See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, 2001). 20 Ernesto Laclau, “Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?” in Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 40-41.

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Happiness in Writing for Simon Jarvis Keston Sutherland to speak of happiness one hesitates those awful syllables first asparagus burst abscess —Beckett At the beginning of part two of Minima Moralia, Adorno sets out a series of “precautions for writers.” The most formidable among the “precautions” is the following complete paragraph. Should the finished text [Arbeit: “work”], no matter of what length, arouse even the slightest misgivings, these should be taken inordinately seriously, to a degree out of all proportion to their apparent importance [Relevanz]. Affective involvement in the text [Die affektive Besetzung des Textes: “Besetzung” is the technical term in Freud, known to Adorno, which Strachey translates as “cathexis”], and vanity, tend to diminish all scruples. What is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole. 1 Readers of Adorno will know to expect impossible demands. The most confounding of all is saved for the last paragraph of Minima Moralia, where Adorno, at his most superlatively emphatical, in high prose lyric, denies that any philosophy can be “responsibly practised” except that which demands from philosophers “the utterly impossible,” namely, that they should think from a “standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence.” 2 By the standard of this annihilatingly beatific ultimatum, to which the most clamorous reecho of thought is by prescription infinitely mute, the demand sounded in the precaution to writers that “what is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole” seems almost humanly gentle. I know what I have to do. I should not let even a minute doubt pass, since the whole value of my work may depend upon my insight into the content of a minute doubt. But what makes this demand so formidable is that it is not an impossibilistic “demand placed on thought” by dialectic, but a practical psychological demand whose impossibility I may endlessly protest but will never predicate. 3 How, practically, should I meet this demand? Or practically meet it? The demand is more impractical even than it seems on first reflection, since the experience of doubt, and perhaps of minute doubts in particular, may itself be doubted. Is this truly a doubt that I feel about the sentence I wrote, or am I giving the name doubt to my feeling because I can more easily delay the end of writing through sheer procrastination if I can claim a mental motive not yet to believe that I have done what I had to do, whatever that was? Am I doubting dubiously? How do I know that what I call a doubt is not really a fear of having nothing more to do? And in any case, or in that case, how do I know if I am a good enough doubter, even at my best? The demand not to let pass a minute doubt is formidable because it threatens to diminish the conversations I have with myself and the whole work of anxiety into the ersatz of phenomenological method. The minuteness of

world picture 3   the doubt punitively incurs the diminution of free anxiety to borrowed thought. I ought to accept in writing nothing but what I cannot doubt; objectivity itself depends on the success of this reduction. I stare at my doubtful sentence, and under the pressure of my solicitude for its objectivity my real, living thoughts are reduced to masquerading as the mimic thoughts in some Cartesian meditation. Something not right there. This is an essay in close reading doubt. It is also, incidentally, a criticism of the status of doubt in phenomenology. The major claim of the criticism is that phenomenology adopts a calculus of doubt in preference to an interpretation of doubt, whereas in reality doubt is not calculable and must be interpreted. Descartes and Husserl, and more recently, Michel Henry, all have a dubious preconception of indubitability: not the absence of doubt, simply, but the absence of doubt as what is left after all doubts have been subtracted. For Husserl, “the essence of the reduced lived experience of perception”, that is, of the experience of perception that remains after the “phenomenological epoché” has been performed, “is incompatible with disbelief and doubt…disbelief and doubt are precluded.” 4 Their preconception of indubitability is an essentially quantitative absence. But the absence of doubt is not essentially quantitative in experience. This dubious preconception of indubitability is conditioned by the prior misconception of doubt as something calculable, which is a misconception not only of doubt but of calculability. 5 But this essay is not just a formal criticism of the status of doubt; it is an essay in close reading it. What does doubt look like on paper? Can it be read? It may look like this: seeking knowledge at that time

Have pleas’d me in those times; I sought not then Knowledge, but craved for power, & power I found Far less than craving power

In the reading text of the thirteen-book Prelude established by Mark L. Reed for the Cornell edition, those lines by Wordsworth, no longer with lines drawn through them by Wordsworth, have become these: With strong sensations teeming as it did Of past and present, such a place must needs Have pleas’d me in those times; I sought not then Knowledge, but craved for power, and power I found In all things; nothing had a circumscribed And narrow influence; but all objects, being Themselves capacious, also found in me Capaciousness and amplitude of mind: Such is the strength and glory of our Youth. 6 Wordsworth’s manuscript revisions, adopted at VIII. 599-600 of the fourteen-book Prelude edited by W.J.B. Owen, may not seem to make any important change to the   2   

world picture 3   sense of the lines. Where he first wrote “I sought not then | Knowledge, but craved for power”, Wordsworth on later reflection wrote “seeking knowledge at that time | Far less than craving power.” 7 Where must of course be understood literally: the later lines of verse are written back where the earlier lines of verse already were. The earlier lines of verse are in that moment rewritten, and not simply cancelled, by the superaddition of the correcting line, the strikethrough, that deletes them without yet expunging them. For later readers they will be expunged, but for their recurrently first reader, Wordsworth, the diacritical promise of their expunction reads less dubiously than a fresh blank would. The correcting line or strikethrough reads: not yet expunged, but will be expunged in the end. Verse and correction are not on verso and recto, but in the same physical place on the page in writing, a place proved newly capacious by the amplitude of mind exercised in poetic revision. The page is, literally, an “object” which, “being [itself] capacious, also found in [Wordsworth] Capaciousness and amplitude of mind.” The discovery of an amplitude of mind is a practical, psychological moment: in this case the act of revision. In the real moment in writing when they are revised, the lines are that amplitude. Revision is not a jump from one category or judgment into another—from wrong words into right words, say. What happens to the lines from the point of view of their author is that they reemerge back into originality, not simply by being new or right, but by emerging from under the shadow of an overfamiliar or exhausted doubtfulness into the illumination of a new doubtfulness full of potential happiness. In their revision, which is not just written on the newly capacious object of the page but also spoken with new amplitude inwardly, is heard the promise that for a while at least they can be owned more passionately than disowned. No longer “I sought not then | Knowledge, but craved for power”, but, more assuredly, “I sought not then | Knowledge, but craved for power”. The new amplitude of revision is a special intimacy of object and mind. It needs looking at closely, because the ideal of intimacy is that every detail should matter, because in every detail there is the potential for happiness. Does every minute detail in this transcription from the thirteen-book Prelude really matter, or do I at least minutely doubt that some details ought not to matter or need not? Is it significant that the end of l.754, “I sought not then”, is, unlike its continuation in l.755, left unchanged in writing, that it is not deleted by any correcting line, even though its replacement by “seeking knowledge at that time” assigns it to the set of verse fragments that will be expunged in the end? However demandingly doubtful it may have been earlier in writing, was “I sought not then” not in the moment of revision a significantly doubtful enough fragment to compel Wordsworth to promise its expunction with a strikethrough? In any case, the inconsistency is not essentially quantitative: “I sought not then | Knowledge, but craved for power” is not dubious writing subject to a method of reduction whose diacritical logic requires one more deletion, a line drawn through its first four words, but dubious writing whose inconsistency is an essential interpretandum irreducible to anything like a paralogism or oversight. Or so at least I must prefer to think, if I don’t want to diminish the potential happiness in the new amplitude of the revision. But other doubts occur. Should this minute detail in the bewildering immensity of the transcriptions of the thirteen-book Prelude be conceived as a choice Wordsworth made in   3   

world picture 3   writing? As evidence, however minute or dubious, of his Besetzung of the objective place in writing whose capacity for “Truth that cherishes our daily life” may be enlarged by revision? 8 From the point of view of a verbal criticism narrowly interested in the ambiguity of technique and propositions in language, these questions may seem preliminary or even circumlocutory, and not yet a description of what would conventionally be called the “change in sense” that Wordsworth made with his revision. But these questions are close reading, not just speculations about what sort of reading is legitimate. A conventional reading would point out that Wordsworth’s revision suggests discomfort with the statement in the earlier lines that he did not seek knowledge but only craved for power, as though seeking and craving were entirely distinct, or knowledge and power are. It might add that the later lines are metrically less unwieldy or ambiguous, since the four stresses of “seeking knowledge at that time” are more easily kept from multiplying in utterance than the two stresses that are meant to be in “I sought not then” (shouldn’t there be three stresses, and couldn’t there be four?); but that the enjambment in the later lines is more shocking, since “seeking knowledge at that time” does not yet describe any lethargy or reluctance in Wordsworth, but suggests rather the opposite, and it’s only when the verse turns back into its next beginning and we read “Far less than craving power” that we understand that the lines are a criticism of his former ardency. We might then say that the metrical shock in the later lines is intended as a slight moral shock, too, and speculate on that example about the increasing moralization of verse technique in the later texts of Wordsworth’s poem. From there the conventional reading might ramble off distantly in pursuit of an ideological connection between Wordsworth’s lines and De Quincey’s theory of the two literatures of knowledge and of power, most fully developed in his 1848 essay “The Poetry of Pope”; 9 or more distantly yet, into Foucault, a place in writing where criticism may now metacritically decide that it should find the contemporary test of its professional relevance and accountability. This conventional reading is close reading too, and is importantly close, but how close is it? Free from the threat of diminishing into the ersatz of phenomenological method, conventional close reading is also free from the fundamental obligation to interpret doubt. But as Wordsworth powerfully knew, it is in the interpretation of doubt that close reading comes closest to potential happiness. I want to turn to another moment of doubt in the thirteen-book Prelude that from the perspective of the most literal calculation is still more minute. They who had fed their childhood upon dreams, The Play-fellows of Fancy, who had made All powers of swiftness, subtlety, and strength Their ministers, used to stir in lordly wise Among the grandest objects of the sense And deal with whatsoever they found there As if they had within some lurking right To wield it:—they too, who, of gentle mood,   4   

world picture 3   Had watch’d all gentle motions, and to these Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild, And in the region of their peaceful selves— Did now find helpers to their heart’s desire, And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish, Were call’d upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields, Or some secreted Island Heaven knows where; But in the very world which is the world Of all of us, the place on which in the end We find our happiness, or not at all. 10 This famous passage about the great and beautiful optimism felt by Wordsworth and by his contemporaries who lived and fought through the French Revolution ends, in the manuscript transcriptions, like this: And in the region of their peaceful selves Did now find helpers to their heart’s desire, And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish, Were call’d upon to exercise their skill, Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields, Or some secreted Island, Heaven knows where; But in the very world which is the world where

Of all of us, the place on which, in the end reap [? know]

We find our happiness, or not at all. 11 The line written through “on which” in l.726 and the superaddition of “where” are a metrical correction. The hypermetricality of the earlier line—its surplus of syllables—is deleted in revision: by striking a line through on which, Wordsworth promises the expunction of the surplus syllables in the end. Along with the deletion of hypermetricality comes the deletion of an emphatic literalism about the standpoint of possible redemption. We will literally, the line in its first form insists, be standing on the world when we find our happiness or do not at all find it; and our happiness itself will be found, if at all, on the world. We who were “call’d upon to exercise [our] skill…in the very world” will in the end, possibly by virtue of that exercise, or through fidelity to the knowledge that we were “call’d” to it, find our happiness on the place which that very world is. These are—as is too often unthinkingly said in professional criticism—my italics, my own emphatical recomposition of a distinction in meaning. By owning the italics I admit to a minute doubt over the possibility that the distinction is not originally Wordsworth’s and that my italics have travestied it. In that minute doubt, however, resounds the interpretandum of Wordsworth’s revision and its promise of meaning, an interpretandum that I begin more than minutely to lose at the moment   5   

world picture 3   when I find in the concept of ambiguity a set of ready protocols for its interpretation. If I treat this minute doubt as something subtractable from interpretation, either by dismissal of it or by submitting it too exclusively to the protocols for interpretation that already belong to the concept of ambiguity, I cease on that instant to interpret the doubt itself. In fact, I cease properly to understand it as doubt at all, and half-consciously begin to treat it as an obstacle to be admitted or cleared away by an ersatz of phenomenological method. What I want to interpret is not the ambiguity in two alternatives, but the doubt in one composition. My text is not the three items “Of all of us, the place on which, in the end”, “Of all of us, the place where, in the end” and their imaginary hypostasis in the concept of ambiguity, but the single real text: where

Of all of us, the place on which, in the end The adverb where depends on the verb find in l.727 and hangs above it, doubly suspended in its higher priority in utterance and in its termination of a clause that could not possibly terminate any correct sentence. It is higher in manuscript position too than its emphatically literal ancestor, the conjunction on which, which Wordsworth has decided is the culprit of hypermetricality. I say that he has decided this, rather than that he simply noticed it, because on which is not the only candidate for culpability; in fact, up to and including the moment at which on which appears, the line is not yet bound or even likely to turn out hypermetrical, but still flows with the rhythm of a blank verse line. “Of all of us, the place on which,—.” Wordsworth need only have completed the line with any two monosyllabic words, or any one disyllabic word, in which he could accept without too much doubt that there was a single stress. “Of all of us, the place on which, at last” would have done it; or, if he had a stronger metrical doubt and wanted to interpret it with just a flicker of hypermetricality, not by the sharply pronounced hypermetricality of the line as it first stood, then “Of all of us, the place on which, finally” might do: the deletion of hypermetricality through the compression of finally into fin’lly might even be desirable for its anxious mimetic suggestion that the end will come, when it does, a little too fast for us not to stumble just a little into it. But I think Wordsworth had a compelling instinct not to do away with the hypermetricality of his line by accepting “Of all of us, the place on which—” and writing on from there. Why he should have, not an acceptable because illuminating doubt about the potential in the line as it stood at this point, but an overfamiliar or exhausted doubt about it that he couldn’t let pass, is however unclear until the line in its earliest form is given and read complete. The most important part of the line was yet to come. “Of all of us, the place on which, in the end”—I feel immediately that the most important part of the line is its end. If I try to doubt something about this judgment, all I can find to doubt about it is how unusually confident I am in believing it; and that throwback of interpretation into reflexivity I think is part of what the line must mean. Its last three words are its most emphatically suspenseful, held at the end of the line that cannot possibly be the end of the thought. “Of all of us, the place on which, in the end”—. Wordsworth must have doubted whether he could keep these last three words just as   6   

world picture 3   they were without abandoning the line to its original hypermetricality, and may have rejoiced in finding for on which a not too disparate alternative, one that would delete the surplus of syllables and, if not too nicely doubted, might even be taken for an equivalent of his original choice: where. In fact, not only is where emphatically not the equivalent of on which, as I have argued in saying that the revision deletes an emphatic literalism, but, more significantly and I think disastrously for the line, in the end is nothing like the same utterance in the revised line that it is in the first line. Exculpated of its hypermetricality the phrase diminishes from emphatic suspensefulness into a mere semantic and grammatical indicator of suspense. It diminishes from suspense in feeling to suspense in “sense”. The new in the end is the bathos of the old in the end. The words are of course identical, but exactly that merely verbal identity in the revised line is the glaring consummation of its bathos. What is at stake in this effort of Wordsworth’s to correct a line of verse in writing, and, earlier on, in the effort of the line first written, which was the effort to make a line whose hypermetricality, however dubious, outweighs in “affective involvement” or Besitzung the potential alternative benefit of correctness, is not just a calculable mastery of technique, but happiness itself. where

Of all of us, the place on which, in the end reap [? know]

We find our happiness, or not at all. I wrote earlier that I would turn to a moment of doubt that, from the perspective of the most literal calculation, is still more minute than the moment in book VIII I discussed earlier on. I meant Wordsworth’s doubt over the verb in l.727. Each one of the three verbs that the line includes in the transcription is doubted differently. The earliest, find, is the only one actually deleted, which is to say marked out for future expunction but not yet expunged. The substitute nearest to it in writing, know, is not yet unambiguously rejected, but is triply marked out as doubtful by its confinement in brackets, by the question mark that precedes it as an indeterminate protocol for its interpretation, and by its submission beneath a third possibility, reap. That last word, however, which is free of any diacritical mark and is also the highest on what just now begins to resemble a list in writing, does not seem much less dubious for those reasons, but is colored by doubt rising as though collaterally from the fact that the brackets and question mark of know seem unequal to an outright deletion. If the doubt in know is decisively out of proportion with the doubt in reap, why is know not simply marked out for expunction in the end? Far from denying that there is a trivial aspect to this line of questioning, I want to argue that the trivial aspect is important. Its trivial aspect is what protects the interpretation of doubt against sinking into a particular aesthetic ideology. I mean the aesthetic ideology which insists that what makes a “poem” a “poem” is the fact that no   7   

world picture 3   detail in it could be altered without the “poem” disappearing completely. This bathydialectical idea not only turns “the poem” into an abstract category that the great majority of poets would not recognize; it also travesties the idea in Minima Moralia that I began with, the genuinely difficult idea that “what is let pass as a minute doubt may indicate the objective worthlessness of the whole.” The difficulty of that idea in Minima Moralia is irreducibly a psychological difficulty. It imposes on the writer a demand that promises to make writing an incessant trial. The idea of the poem that it conjures is of an intense and enduring forcefield of doubtful and potentially doubtful moments in language, any one of which may yet prove to be either the catastrophic undoing of the whole work or the artifice of its redemption. The aesthetic-ideological alternative which may superficially resemble Adorno’s thought is, by contrast, psychologically impotent. It imposes no trial on a writer to know that the alteration of a single detail in her work must cause it to be excluded from the category “poem.” Neither is there any happiness to be won or strained after in the transcendent security of belonging to a category so dignified that membership of it means ontological unalterability. Happiness in writing is found in the trial of enduring, intense and ineliminable doubt or not at all. Beckett knew that for longer even than Wordsworth knew it. What may strike modern readers most forcefully about Wordsworth’s l.727, “We find our happiness, or not at all”, is the idea that the happiness we hope to find “in the end” is our happiness. It is normal in contemporary English to find happiness, but not to find our happiness. The locution has fallen out of everyday use and recognition. In Wordsworth’s lifetime it was not an uncommon locution. Examples are abundant. I will give here just a few, to help conjure the amplitude of the expression as it was then understood. From Night the Seventh of Edward Young’s long poem Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, 1744: And he that would be barr’d Capacity Of Pain, courts Incapacity of Bliss. Heav’n wills our Happiness, allows our Doom; Invites us ardently, but not compells; Heav’n but persuades, almighty Man decrees. 12 From the fifth volume of Hugh Blair’s Sermons,1801: Placed as we are, in the midst of so much ignorance with respect to the means of happiness, and at the same time under the government of a wise and gracious Being, who alone is able to effect our happiness, acquiescence in his disposal of our lot, is the only disposition that becomes us as rational creatures. 13 From Johnson’s Rambler, 1750:   8   

world picture 3   It is therefore the business of wisdom and virtue, to select among numberless objects striving for our notice, such as may enable us to exalt our reason, extend our views, and secure our happiness. 14 These three examples are all like Wordsworth’s line in treating our happiness as the object of a transitive verb. Young’s will, Blair’s effect and Johnson’s secure, though in many ways differently suggestive from Wordsworth’s find, all share with that usage a basically cognate grammar of figuration. Our happiness must be gained by an effortful activity. But whether the specific activity is a human one, as in the example from Johnson, or a divine, as Young and Blair would have it, what separates all three examples from Wordsworth’s find is that our happiness is for them unambiguously an object only in the grammatical sense, whereas the thought that we might find our happiness irresistibly connotes the possibility that our happiness is somewhere in the way that places, people and real, physical objects are. That would seem to most eighteenth century writers of sermons like a pretty, but hardly a heretical thought, provided that somewhere meant heaven, or that the connotation that our happiness is an object in a place was unambiguously figurative, as for example in a sentence like this one by William Gilpin in 1798: “The love of God consists in keeping his commandments: and if we keep the commandments of God, of course we shall love our neighbour; and shall find our happiness in our obedience.” 15 In this sentence the preposition in is safely neither literal nor inexchangeable: through might do just as well. There is little or nothing to doubt in this expression, whatever we may doubt in the thought it expresses. The Wordsworthian trial of doubt, however, begins when expression must justify its emphatic literalism. That God has given us abilities to provide for our preservation, support, convenience, and happiness, we may readily allow; and we shall probably think it our duty to employ them to those ends. The first error we are apt to commit, is to forget that others are constituted and employed in the same manner with ourselves; and that it is not only a cool determination of reason, they should have room given them to exert their abilities, and to make themselves happy, as we do; but that this conduct is necessary to the existence of society, where alone we can find our happiness. This passage is from the first pages of David Williams’s Lectures on the universal principles and duties of religion and morality, 1779. 16 The end of the last sentence quoted here may, I think, be the nearest thing to Wordsworth’s thought and expression in the original l.727 of the thirteen-book Prelude anywhere in eighteenth century prose. Williams writes society, not the very world, but the thought is very nearly kindred. Like Wordsworth, Williams permits his sentence to connote the possibility that our happiness is literally somewhere and that we will literally find it in the way that we find physical objects: a connotation so astonishing that it virtually overwhelms the more obvious figurative sense of find as used in the expression find that. Like Wordsworth, Williams seems emphatically to rule out that somewhere could be heaven, unless heaven   9   

world picture 3   is society or the very world of all of us. But most kindred of all is the emphatical word alone, a word that risks lyricizing an already exceptionally doubtful thought, a word to which the last words in the thirteen-book Prelude X. 709-727 make equally emphatical reply, in lyric solidarity of thought and insistence. Whether this passage was a source for Wordsworth is an intensely interesting question, because the meaning of his own famous lines will be quite different if they intend lyric solidarity with this passage than they will if their solidarity is coincidental. It would tell us something about what solidarity meant to Wordsworth if we could confirm that at this very moment in writing he desired to express it. I at first keep to find rather than to know or reap, knowing that my discussion is exclusive, because I find more potential happiness in that word than in the others. The doubtfulness of find in the single composition reap [? know]

We find our happiness, or not at all. seems to me a less exhausted and less overfamiliar doubtfulness, a more tense and illuminating doubtfulness than that of [? know] or reap. Find suggests, surely at least a little inappropriately, that our happiness is already there, lying in wait to be discovered like an object or a prospect. Find also hints at a different verb, found, and found would be a good choice—we found our happiness on the world—except that it must have created some superficial but irritating ambiguity as to whether Wordsworth had forgotten what tense he was in and committed a solecism by using the past tense of find in a future tense construction. Exposure to a diminutive quibble like that would risk distraction from the real doubtfulness of the line, a sinking from the interpretation of doubt into the calculation of grammatical correctness. But perhaps neither find nor found could seem illuminatingly doubtful enough because both would make an internal half-rhyme with end, which would raise in ll.726-7 the shadow of a musical chiasmus: all—end | find—all. That might seem too neatly almost epigrammatic; it might also threaten to misinterpret, if only minutely, the difficult asymmetry of the human effort of looking and the human object to be found. But know seems plainly ineffective by comparison, since from the sentence with that verb it wouldn’t be clear that our happiness must be inordinately known rather than merely known in the way that anything may be known through reflection without a change of place or object. Lyric gives way to noise in the expression know our, where the potential elision of the two words in utterance would conjure a phantom nonsense word, knowour, whose second syllable might be wour, an ugly noise not least because of the difficulty of restricting it to one stress and keeping it from sounding like the infantilistic wawa. Lyric is too much at stake in this passage to be trifled with by a noise like that. Perhaps too Wordsworth thought that know our happiness was doubtless too near to a sexual pun. But know our happiness is overfamiliarly doubtful for another reason, namely that it is liable to invoke as a philosophical problem the question whether happiness can be known or if happiness in any way exceeds knowledge, opening promptly on to a vista of disquisitions on the reciprocal   10   

world picture 3   exceptionality of happiness and knowledge, pleasure and faith, etc. Know could also be used to mean experience, as when we say that we know what something is like because we have done it ourselves, but in that case it must be a pun: it couldn’t mean only that, it would have to mean understand or comprehend too; and Wordsworth doesn’t want a pun here for nearly the same reason that he doesn’t want a trivial noise. The line must be unambiguous in its emphatic doubtfulness, or at least it must have a very minimum of ambiguity to it, or else it will set up discord against the whole lyric of veritability. Reap our would give a sonic pun on power, not much of a pun but too much by far, and in any case a definitely inappropriate meaning. The double e sound in we reap may also have seemed unattractive; Wordsworth may even, at a stretch, have disliked the distant half rhyme with belief, also a double e. But reap is surely altogether overfamiliarly doubtful because it suggests, first, the figure of death who, once summoned and fitted into the image, is obliged by grammar to be ourselves (after Freud we might say, the figure of Thanatos); and second, a reward or payment of dues on the model of exact remuneration, you reap but what you sow, which is exactly the calculating objection leveled against Wordsworth’s more complex understanding of natural reciprocity by the embittered Coleridge, first in his brilliant, manipulative and morbid “Letter to Sara Hutchinson” and then in its yet more false and corrupt public recension, “Dejection: an Ode.” 17 Reap may also have been unacceptable because Wordsworth wrote often about real farming and real peasants, even about real reapers, and he may not have wanted to use the image of agricultural labor in so strictly metaphorical a sense, particularly at such an emphatic moment of his lyric of veritability. The line would imply, very egregiously, that the real language of men’s and women’s work that had been so much his enduring concern could in the end be sublimed into metaphor when the really serious poetic business of uttering truths about our happiness was attempted. The strikethrough in l.720, “Did now find helpers to their heart’s desire”, may have sprung from the same impulse: helpers are not metaphorical, Wordsworth may have thought, and least of all should they be metaphorical in a passage on the great hope roused by the French revolution. This is the line I love: We find our happiness, or not at all. But I love it best of all by reading this: reap [? know]

We find our happiness, or not at all. What I am closely reading in this composition is doubt. Not, of course, doubt exclusively, but doubt more prominently and more preoccupyingly than sense or even yet meaning. I find potential happiness by close reading and interpreting doubt. I find both my own potential happiness, the love for this line that grows and flourishes in me, as I learn to respect it in intimacy, a happiness and love found on the literal object of   11   

world picture 3   this page in Wordsworth’s transcriptions, his great gift to the posthumous world; and, though I must doubt that I am right, I find what I think must be Wordsworth’s happiness too, his idea of happiness but more importantly still his activity of straining after it in writing through the passionate trial of enduring and ineliminable doubt. Belief in reality, like belief in happiness, cannot be found on a preconception of indubitability as the quantitative absence of doubt. If any experience not only proves this but renews the proof of it endlessly until death, it is writing (it is loving). Whatever may be true of the discursive construction of identity and its politics in theory, in writing happiness is not ontological promiscuity but ontological fidelity; but fidelity in writing is not the opposite of promiscuity, but its sublime. Fidelity is also more powerfully doubtful than promiscuity, as Wordsworth knew for longer even than Beckett. Fidelity is the element in which doubt is hardest struck by passion. What is most real to me is what I most passionately doubt. Kein Glück ohne Fetischismus. Keston Sutherland is the author of Stress Position, Hot White Andy, Neocosis and other books of poetry. He is the editor of the poetics journal Quid and co-editor of Barque Press (www.barquepress.com). He is currently editing the collected prose of J.H. Prynne. His essay on Marx can be read in the first issue of World Picture. He teaches English at the University of Sussex. Notes                                                   Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2002) [1st in English, 1974; in German 1951], 85; Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 95. 2 Minima Moralia, 247; Gesammelte Schriften, 283. 3 Minima Moralia, 247; Gesammelte Schriften, 283. 4 Edmund Husserl, Collected Works: Things and Space. Lectures of 1907, vol. VII, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 19-20. On the “phenomenological epoché”, Husserl’s Cartesian method of “excluding” and “parenthesizing”, see Collected Works: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol. II, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 62ff. My disagreement with Husserl could be summarized as follows. First, that every possibility of insight or “originary seizing upon…objectivities” (Vol.II: 66) which Husserl claims is a special achievement of the “phenomenological attitude” in fact already belongs radically and inalienably to the so-called “natural attitude”; and second, that the “phenomenological epoché” is not a reduction, as Husserl specifically conceived it, but an increment: the “parenthesizing” of experience is essentially the superaddition of parentheses to experience. Neither of these mistakes, as I think of them, would seem tenable except for 1

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world picture 3     the prior misconception of doubt as something that may be “precluded” by a fundamentally calculistic “reduction.” 5 The corresponding minor claim is that apodicticity is the bathos of speculation. 6 William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, vol. I, ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 229 (VIII. 752-760); for the ms. transcription, vol. II, 773 (VIII. 754-755). 7 William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W.J.B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 176. 8 “I yearn towards some philosophic Song | Of Truth that cherishes our daily life.” Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, vol. I, 112 (I.231-2). On philosophic song, see Simon Jarvis’s brilliant Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), whose discussion of these lines begins on the objective place page 1. 9 De Quincey as Critic, ed. John E. Jordan (London: Routledge, 1973), 269ff. 10 The Thirteen-Book Prelude, vol. I, 286-7 (X. 709-727). 11 The Thirteen-Book Prelude, vol. II, 883. 12 Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 212 (Night VII, ll.1299-1303). 13 Hugh Blair, Sermons, vol. V (Edinburgh, 1777 – 1801), 167. 14 The Rambler, by Doctor Johnson, and Persian letters, by Lord Lyttleton (London, 1800), 174 (No. LXXVIII, Dec 15th 1750). 15 William Gilpin, An exposition of the New Testament; intended as an introduction to the study of the scriptures, vol. 2, 3rd edition (London, 1798), 409. 16 David Williams, Lectures on the universal principles and duties of religion and morality (London, 1779), 15. 17 “O Lady! we receive but what we give, | And in our life alone does Nature live.” “Dejection: an Ode,” ll.47-48.

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