It may not be amiss, as illustrating the contemporary situation of philosophic thought in the British desert, and the recognition of one serious mind by another, to recall an incident of fifteen years past. When the late T. E. Hulme was trying to be a philosopher in that milieu, and fussing about Sorel and Bergson and getting them translated into English, I spoke to him one day of the difference between Guido’s precise interpretive metaphor, and the Petrarchan fustian and ornament, pointing out that Guido thought in accurate terms; that the phrases correspond to definite sensations undergone; in fact very much what I had said in my early preface to the Sonnets and Ballate.
Hulme took some time over it in silence, and then finally said: ‘That is very interesting’; and after a pause: ‘That is more interesting than anything any one ever said to me. It is more interesting than anything I ever read in a book.’
Ezra Pound, ‘Donna Mi Prega’, p. 8
Beauty is the marking-time, the stationary vibration, the feigned ecstasy of an arrested impulse unable to reach its natural end.
T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 3
Pound’s anecdote, inserted in 1928 into a commentary on Guido Cavalcanti, seems perfectly representative of a certain modernist enigma. Offered in a context apparently having little to do with the late T. E. Hulme, the story renders that mysterious figure of modernism’s most elusive architect by not rendering him at all. At best, Pound’s Hulme provides an echo, an authorizing bit of testimony designed to validate a distinctively Poundian opinion regarding poetic figuration. At worst, he provides nothing at all, like one of those imagist lyrics associated with his earliest critical forays. In Pound’s recounting, Hulme captures the disappearance and loss of a moment of insight, one consigned to forgetting precisely because no one ever wrote it down. The effect is hardly accidental. From Pound’s inclusion of his ‘Complete Poetical Works’ as an appendix to Ripostes in 1912 to Herbert Read’s selection of his prose as Speculations in 1924, Hulme would constitute the ghostly sign of something that never quite happened – or was never reliably put in a book. Even before his death in 1917, Hulme seems to have offered a supplementary signature to works only ambiguously his: a post-script added to Pound’s introduction of his poems, ‘Mr. Pound has grossly exaggerated my age’ (Pound, 1990, p. 266); a slightly cranky conduit into English for Sorel, Bergson, or the reactionary polemics of Action Française; the source of dubious anecdotes misremembered or long lost. Even Hulme’s ambiguous addition to the minor canon of war poets (as the author of ‘Trenches: St. Eloi’) is contradictory, depending on the problematic attribution of the poem originally published under Pound’s name in Catholic Anthology, 1914-15 as ‘T.E.H. Poem: Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr. T.E.H’: either the most remarkably experimental lyric penned by a combatant or the most remarkable bit of poetic ventriloquism undertaken by a civilian. As Hulme (or Pound, if one prefers) concludes there, ‘Nothing suggests itself.’ Or at the very least, nothing suggests itself definitively. For Pound, as for so many who shared his moment, Hulme remains a shifting figure, the index of so many unexplored or abortive modernisms, more interesting perhaps than anything that found its way into a book, but quite a bit less clear.
Even the precise shape of the figurative logic called Hulme remains difficult to calibrate. For his editors, critics, and apologists, his usefulness has lain precisely in such open questions. Herbert Read accordingly follows Jacob Epstein’s sense that Hulme’s ‘work lay entirely in the future’ (Epstein, 1960, p. vii). Sam Hynes implicitly accepts the estimate of Michael Roberts, that Hulme ‘was not an original thinker, he solved no problems and made no startling observations or distinctions’ (Roberts, 1938, p. 12), and credits his importance not to the actual invention of an intellectual ‘countercurrent’ but rather to the distinction of having been ‘the first to assert it vigorously in England’ (Hynes, 1962, p. xxxi). As an emblem of either promise or opposition, Hulme plays the elliptical role of the cipher, the name of a constellation significant primarily for what it merely suggests when assembled in retrospect. In 1951, for example, Hugh Kenner recounted Pound’s anecdote to remark that ‘Hulme’s accredited status as the philosopher of the 1914 avant-garde should gain the implications of this dialogue serious attention’ – but failed to mention the conversation again (1985, p. 100). The questions of whether Hulme actually matters, of what he actually implies, of whether modern art or its philosophy would look any different without him, remain. Characteristically, it was T. S. Eliot who summed up the effect most neatly and most ambivalently, with an oft-quoted counterfactual: ‘he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own’ (1924, p. 231).
More an image than a book, Hulme has played such a role often enough. Indeed the formal conventions of this figurative Hulme are marked above all else by its function as a retrospective bridge: ‘fifteen years past’, Pound recalls in 1928. His next (less temperate) recourse to Hulme, launched in 1939, would operate in much the same way: ‘I have no doubt that the bleak and smeary “Twenties” wretchedly needed his guidance, and the pity is that he wasn’t there in person to keep down vermin. God knows Messrs. Lewis and Eliot must have had a lonely time in your city [London] during that fifteen years’ interval’ (1939, p. 15). Somewhat oddly, Pound’s second recollection, following the first by a decade, names the same span, almost as if Hulme himself signified a precise increment of fifteen years, just long enough for things to have gone wrong in the interim. But the implications of Pound’s two fulminations are starkly different. In the first case, an increment of roughly fifteen years recalls a particular moment, somewhere around 1912, that marks a decisive transition in both Pound’s career and Hulme’s: the hardening of a poetic style in one case and the hardening of a philosophical position in the other. In the second case, Pound implicitly commemorates a rather different event: Hulme’s posthumous ‘broadside’ as redacted by Read, the very event that would consolidate the image and render Hulme as a book for the first time, recuperating a touchstone of the bleak and smeary decade (or at least that part of it carried on in the pages of The Criterion). In the first case, Hulme reacts affirmatively to a piece of aesthetic doctrine, some joint that implicitly ties his modernism to Pound’s and to the ‘accurate terms’ of a subsequent artistic practice. In the later passage, he is invoked to perform a different sort of work, keeping down vermin by the judicious application of a hard-edged but abstract aesthetic, intervening to defend the small handful of London artists left behind by Pound’s own retreat to the Continent. In this instance at least, Hulme represents (to use one of his own cherished terms) a dogma, a set of calcified positions that provide oppositional tacking points in the larger strategic fray of a culture war. As a recent reviewer summarizes it: ‘people are bad; poems don’t need to rhyme; and art is not imitation’ (Sansom, 2003, p. 14).
But for all the bluff and insistence, it remains difficult to say what Hulme is, what he is for rather than against. Beyond the ready slogans of Original Sin (‘people are bad’), free verse (‘poems don’t need to rhyme’), and abstraction (‘art is not imitation’), beyond keeping down vermin, he seems to offer little that does not arrive qualified in the negative. Even Eliot would be forced onto similarly antinomic terms to situate Hulme as ‘the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century’ (1924, p. 231). But Eliot’s assessment also concretizes Pound’s suggestion: Hulme marks time, but marks it against the age at large, as a series of formative antinomies. When Michael Levenson takes the task of ‘dating Hulme’ as the necessary prolegomenon to that of ‘parsing modernism’, casting him as ‘the name of an intellectual site, a place where intellectual currents converged’, he cuts to the core of such a contradiction (1984, pp. 36, 38). While critics have regularly invoked ‘the paradox of Hulme’ to account for a more general ‘paradox of modern poetry and modern poetics’ (Krieger, 1950, p. 301) or complained that ‘[w]henever Hulme generalises about historical periods he goes wrong’ (Kermode, 1957, p. 125), fewer have noted the cumulative force of Hulme’s contradictions, between romanticism and classicism, humanism and anti-humanism, modernity and the set of alien historical logics that Hulme arrays against it. In each case, the materials on which Hulme fastens are designed to produce a rupture in the historical moment, to spawn a sudden contradiction or counter-association of the present. And while each lurch in Hulme’s opinions opens a new and inconsistent set of theoretical axes, each also verges closer to a realization of Hulme’s ultimate importance as a chronological wedge, a convenient name for modernism’s ongoing attempt to formulate something like a negation of the present. Part of the problem lies in the simultaneous impossibility and inevitability of reading Hulme teleologically, of reading him (for better or worse) in the way that the century would subsequently read Pound or Eliot. But as Levenson rightly suggests, dating Hulme is crucial for just that reason, and nowhere more crucial than where the task of dating is most confused, from about the time in 1912 or so when Pound and Hulme thought over Cavalcanti’s metaphors in silence. It is this last phase of Hulme’s thought, what Levenson rightly labels Hulme’s ‘last shift’ (1984, p. 98), that is both most important and least formed, most fragmentary and paradoxically most fully developed as something like a modernist metaphysic. It is in this last phase that Hulme not only generates antinomies but also begins to refine the practice of contradiction as an historical practice, grounded materially in the work of art.
Together, such contradictions constitute, for Hulme, utopian placeholders that stand in for a still unexperienced epoch, opening the space of some non-modernity temporarily conceivable only in the terms of what it is not. In order to maintain such an impossible position, however, Hulme must not only stake out a set of tentative observations but also devise the conceptual matrix through which they can be preserved as antinomies. If each of Hulme’s critics has felt compelled to apologize for an ultimate lack of originality or polish, each has strained to name the particular quality that makes him indispensable nonetheless. That quality amounts to a method, a set of dialectical maneuvers that I wish to explore here, terms that conceal theoretical gambits in the attempt to articulate nothing less grandiose finally than the contrarian position of art, caught in an historical moment that has no particular use for it. In other words, I will suggest, the power of Hulme’s antinomies – what Lewis terms his ‘dialectical truculence’ (1937, p. 106) – activates the aesthetic as the evidence of historical alterity, as something which reproaches the historical present with its own untimeliness. What Hulme offers to his contemporaries is an idea of counter-historical form, a project obsessed with the possibility of locating modernity’s exterior. Another of Pound’s anecdotes, loosely attributed but offered during Hulme’s lifetime, may offer the most concise description of his effect: ‘So far as I am concerned, Jacob Epstein was the first person who came talking about “form, not the form of anything.” It may have been Mr. T. E. Hulme, quoting Epstein. I don’t know that it matters much who said it first’ (1916, pp. 115-16). The notion of form that Hulme propounds (original or not) is abstract but never transcendent. His antinomies attempt to escape convention and resist reification without retreating into the rhetorical folds of timelessness, abrogating what Donald Davie terms ‘the logical articulations of syntax’ (1966, p. 12) in order to break the syntax of history itself. Hulme’s conception of form therefore exerts itself most powerfully precisely where temporality is concerned. If Hulme’s work, for all of its fragmentation and contradiction, offers the ground for a reconsideration of art, it does so precisely by separating the question from that of art narrowly, in order to reintroduce a vision of the aesthetic won through the reorientation of historical time. The final suggestion of Hulme’s work, I argue, lies precisely in this antinomy: that art remains viable only insofar as it disowns the theoretical isolation of the aesthetic to occupy form and time differently, as a politics of historical shapes and configurations that generate the aesthetic as a social by-product.
In fact, Hulme never fully articulated his ultimate view of art. As Lewis claims, the question is unmistakably central to all of his thought, from early distillations of Bergson to later assessments of Epstein, but there is much to suggest that, from 1912 on, he had reconsidered many, perhaps most, of his earlier pronouncements. His last completed writings gesture toward an aesthetic theory that is never fully unveiled. The last installment of his New Age notebooks ends by anticipating a return to the effects of his theological or medieval turn on literature, but that exposition is curtailed (CW, p. 456). In what follows, I want to suggest that it is possible to sketch the contours of what Hulme never quite managed to say (but which became a modernist preoccupation nonetheless). Moreover, I wish to explore the implications of the two tropes, related if not functionally identical, that dominate Hulme’s later thought: medievalism and Original Sin. Between and upon them, Hulme did in fact construct a distinctive and dialectically coherent theory of modernist aesthetic production, one to which his ersatz theology and truculent historicism form indispensable predicates. Put another way, the claim is quite simple: what interested Hulme and what is so interesting about him is precisely the integration of theology and history as the most rudimentary elements of a modernist aesthetic and of the effect of modernism at large. The implication of that claim, however, though equally simple in one respect, is perhaps more surprising, revealing as it does the impossible antinomy that determines the condition of modernist aesthetic production and thought at large. Hulme regrounds and salvages the aesthetic by preparing the ground for a destruction of the category. Ultimately, art reasserts its importance by ceasing to be art, by refusing the philosophical reification of the category altogether. Hulme’s distinctiveness and his importance accordingly lie in the insistence that art work differently, metaphysically, as the evidence of an epochal politics. Already in the striking epigraph to ‘Mana Aboda’ Hulme had invoked a series of paradoxes to redefine beauty as an immanent power of form, as ‘the marking-time’: a stationary vibration, a feigned ecstasy, an arrested impulse. It was that notion that Pound would recall in The Pisan Cantos as the ‘word not blacked out’ by intervening years (1998, p. 499). Indeed the project that developed over those years would expand Hulme’s premise, displacing the category of beauty and straining to replace it with a notion of art that marks time by enduring. Indeed it is that art, in all its form and deformity, Hulme seems to suggest, that ultimately writes the history of epochs.
In late 1915 and early 1916, Hulme published a series of seven pieces in the New Age, later excerpted by Read as ‘Humanism and the Religious Attitude’. Included as the lead essay in Speculations and echoed in its sub-title, Hulme’s notebooks circulate around a problem first broached in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ several years earlier (CW, p. 59): the need to conjure up the specter of a new epoch to succeed the current one, a modern age perpetually (in Hulme’s view) in the process of breaking up. They also mark a departure. Once that need had produced the opposition between romanticism and classicism, but by 1915 Hulme had begun to abandon those terms in order to articulate an emergent ‘medievalism’ opposed to the ‘complete anthropomorphisation of the world’ (CW, p. 447) and predicated on ‘the radical imperfection of man’ (CW, p. 446). Folding classicism and romanticism together as ‘two stages inside the modern period’ (CW, p. 451), the later Hulme seeks to solidify ‘these abstract things at the centre, these doctrines felt as facts, which are the source of all the other material characteristics of a period’ (CW, p. 446). Mingling economic with scholastic speculation, the argument casts medievalism not only as something that precedes the modern age, but also as the force that dispels and eventually follows it. Understood most simply, medievalism is simply everything that modernity is not, from anti-humanism to geometric art, a set of tendencies assembled to refute and defamiliarize those facts felt since the Renaissance, from the assumption of progress to the importance of personality. For Hulme, the two periods relate to each other agonistically, oscillating unevenly across history:
Now it should be noted that the coherent attitude and art of these two periods have occurred many times before in history. The renaissance period corresponds very nearly both in its conception of man and in its art to the classical. The Byzantine art corresponds to many other geometric arts in the past, to Egyptian and Indian, for example, both, also, civilisations with a similar religious, non-humanistic conception of man. In the same way, then, it may be possible that the humanist period we live in may also come to an end, to be followed by a revival of the anti-humanist attitude. In saying this I do not in the least wish to imply any mechanical view of history as an inevitable alteration of such periods; I am so far from such scepticism about the matter, that I regard the difference between the two attitudes as simply the difference between true and false. (CW, p. 448)
As Hulme recognizes, the idea of a new medievalism is contradictory. The effect of the phrase depends on the assumption that the medieval represents a limit point on the spectrum of archaic forms, the ground programmatically effaced in the ongoing movement of modernization. The prospect of the new, by such a calculus, encounters the idea of the medieval by circling back on itself, searching out fresh origins at a moment when the very memory of something premodern has lapsed. More modestly, the suggestion harks back to the older medievalisms of the previous century, projections of a reflexive anti-capitalism spawned by the social uncertainties of industrial development and refitted to the demands of what Miriam Hansen terms ‘a new regime of neoclassicist orthodoxy’ (1980, p. 359) centered on A. R. Orage’s New Age. But Hulme means the paradox seriously, recasting the idea as a utopian thought-experiment designed to excavate and deny every presupposition or ‘pseudo-category’ of modern thought. In Hulme’s usage, medievalism entails no affirmative relation to the social, theological, or political structures of the Middle Ages. Instead, it conjures up a set of simple but totalizing historical differences, largely devoid of particular content precisely because they stand in less for the past than for the future. Hulme accordingly guards against misunderstanding: ‘I do not in the least imagine that humanism is breaking up merely to make place for a new mediævalism. The only thing the new period will have in common with mediævalism will be the subordination of man to certain absolute values’ (CW, p. 449). Medievalism is thus historical and ahistorical at once, conjoining a particular set of historical circumstances with a set of abstract forms that cut across history, occasionally determining social relations, occasionally withdrawing altogether. ‘It is only our categories that change … Men of different sorts exist in constant proportion in different generations. But different circumstances, different prevailing ideologies, bring different types to the top. Exactly the same type existed in the Middle Ages as now. This constancy of man thus provides perhaps the greatest hope of the possibility of a radical transformation of society’ (CW, p. 449). Paradoxically, the hope for what Hulme elsewhere terms ‘a certain sort of progress’ – ‘rather one of accumulation than of alteration in capacity’ (CW, p. 241) – reposes on the assumption that man remains incapable of alteration and thus vulnerable to circumstantial forces beyond human control. If man is constant, then historical periods themselves become radically variable, threatening to begin or end, lapse or recur, as necessary. Each epoch lingers as a suppressed alternative to every other age, and as importantly, retains the power to introduce a breakage into any other.
Writing in the same pages only a few months earlier, Pound had deployed the same idea of a new medievalism to justify the programs of the London avant-garde, declaring that ‘we have begun deliberately to try to free ourselves from the Renaissance shackles, as the Renaissance freed itself from the Middle Ages’ (1915, p. 410). Adopting what would become Hulme’s language, he suggests that the practitioners of ‘a new, and to many a most obnoxious, art’ (p. 410) recall the vanguard figures of an earlier humanism even while inverting and demolishing the various forms of classicist ‘propaganda’ (p. 409) that they produced. The modernist avant-garde, under such an account, reclaims the idea of the medieval as an aesthetic instrument, a mechanism engineered primarily to leverage new forms into place. In 1915, Pound would not name Hulme among his artistic revolutionaries. Returning to the question again in 1928, however, attempting to unravel Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi Prega’, he enlisted Hulme to provide a laconic nod of critical approval for his ‘historic method’ (1928a, p. 235). Cavalcanti’s poem would provoke Pound for decades, sparking repeated attempts at translation (and even an opera) before providing the core of Canto XXXVI in 1934 – and with that one of the enduring buttresses of The Cantos themselves. That urgency derives, for Pound at least, from the simple difficulty of reading the canzone adequately, of producing a set of critical terms appropriate to a figure suspended between hermeneutic worlds, equally alien to Dante’s rich but arid scholasticism and to the later figurative practices of Petrarch or Ficino: ‘What we need now is not so much a commentator as a lexicon. It is the precise sense of certain terms as understood at that particular epoch that one would like to have set before one’ (1928b, pp. 8-9). The result of Pound’s textual reconstruction is an elaborately revisionist effort to induce those terms, one that locates Cavalcanti in an intermittently dissenting intellectual tradition, poised against the orthodoxies of high medieval Thomism and open to the syncretic strains of several mystical traditions at once.
More mysterious than Pound’s attempt at philology, however, is the sudden appearance of Hulme as an unpredicated detail within the dense explication of an elusive canzone. Indeed the anecdotal Hulme seems to provide a kind of theoretical shorthand, casting Cavalcanti and his poetic moment into historical relief. First conjoined in 1912, when Pound appointed himself editor for each, Hulme and Cavalcanti seem to incorporate parallel medievalisms, opening the term to a dual reference: ‘Mediaevalism and Mediaevalism’, to follow Pound’s title. Invoked as a mute touchstone, Hulme suggests a series of buried arguments or associations: concerning the possibility of ‘precise interpretive metaphor’ or the critical difficulty posed in the attempt to decipher it. In context, he seems to name the lingering gap between brazenly fresh poetic descriptions and the reified forms of language that slowly accrete around and obscure them, maintaining an insistence on the absolute discontinuity between words and corporeal realities. But if Hulme illuminates (or conspicuously fails to illuminate) Cavalcanti, then Cavalcanti and his medievalism perform the same function for Hulme. After all, Hulme too would provide one of Pound’s most important recurrent references, not only in the later Pisan meditations but also in the hellish turn of the early war cantos. There, in fact, he occupies a place first filled (in the drafts of 1917) by Cavalcanti himself, inaugurating the turn into ‘the new world about us:/ Barred lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis’ (Pound, 1990, pp. 233-4). The Cavalcanti of 1928 would remain an index to ‘new form’, but he would also provide evidence of something else: ‘traces of a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, but that may have appeared about as soothing to the florentine of A.D. 1290 as conversation about Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin and Bucharin would be to-day in a methodist Bankers’ board meeting in Memphis, Tenn.’ (1928a, p. 231). Above all, Pound argues, Cavalcanti’s medievalism is revolutionary. But to the degree it concretizes ‘the new world about us’ into something more radical than the metaphorical revolutions of the avant-garde, so is Hulme’s, triggering a set of associations that (in Canto XVI) would culminate with the eruption of revolution in Russia. Beneath Pound’s anecdote lies a rather peculiar assertion, a detour that not only affiliates the lexicon of Cavalcanti’s medievalism with that of his own modernism but locates in each a latent revolutionary principle, loosely associating the end of one epoch with the end of another.
The passing reference, it turns out, is less an allusion than a sort of historical ideogram, a hybrid character forged to designate a rising series of discontinuities. Between them, Cavalcanti and Hulme first signify a disruption of linguistic forms, the interruption of a referential order built on the governing ideological homologies of their respective moments. Having decomposed the functions of language, each next connotes the possibility of a new poetics, Pound’s ‘accurate terms’ or what Hulme calls ‘the advance guard in language’ (CW, p. 27). It is that ‘tone of thought’ which Pound deems dangerous, seditiously corrosive in either 1290 or 1912. And it is that link which completes Pound’s historical ideogram, fusing Hulme and Cavalcanti into a single gesture both poetic and political. If Cavalcanti demands both a new critical lexicon and an anachronistic field of reference, Hulme implicitly presents the same problem again, of ‘Modernism and Modernism’ now, two tendencies straining against each other at the point of an epochal break. In a second moment, Pound’s acknowledgment of Hulme thus reveals a source, an encrypted reference not merely to a poetic practice but also to the critical and historical vocabulary enmeshed within it. In fact, Pound’s excursus on Cavalcanti undertakes a prolonged double reading, turning Cavalcanti into a figure that would haunt his own poetry, only to return also to the second figure that haunts his thought more quietly. Hulme is summoned forth to comment on Cavalcanti because he plays a functionally equivalent role in Pound’s reconstruction, but also because Cavalcanti explains Hulme, replicating the antinomies of modernism in an alien critical vocabulary that also approximates Hulme’s own.
What all of this suggests, of course, is that the complex sign of Cavalcanti/Hulme, medievalism/medievalism, retains an unexpected relevance, producing one last radical transformation. That last turn, both the formal sequel to medievalism and the historical term that displaces it, gathers the allusive elements of Pound’s Hulme and effectively reorders them. Mediated through Cavalcanti and Hulme at once, medievalism begins to function as a detached historical form, intermittently renewable as a set of revolutionary effects. As such, it offers the unexpected formal core of ‘the new world about us’, remapping the Florence of 1290 onto a world of revolution, trench warfare, and avant-garde experiment. At that moment, however, medievalism (either Cavalcanti’s or Hulme’s) becomes a modernist effect as well, the rough centerpiece of Pound’s and Hulme’s collective work. Under Pound’s idiosyncratic logic, the conversation with Hulme marks the core of that exchange: Hulme’s moment of medievalism, of becoming silent, spurs a movement in two directions. In effect, the confluence of medievalisms opens a conceptual gap in the present:
When Pound issues his call for a new lexicon, for the precise sense of terms as understood at that epoch, he thus asserts two contradictory imperatives. The first calls for a philological reconstruction of the medievalism of Cavalcanti. The task of reconstructing that lexicon, however, requires the supplementary lexicon of Hulme, some philosophical apparatus that doubles and estranges its own moment, devising a mechanism to evade the intermediation of centuries. If the reading of Cavalcanti provides the missing lexicon required to chart the medieval, Hulme provides the lexicon to read Cavalcanti, closing the circuit of reference between medieval and modern. The missing term in that account is therefore not medieval at all, is not in fact named at all, except in the odd recurring gesture that transforms Cavalcanti into Paine, Marx, Lenin, Bucharin, and finally Hulme, that makes a revolutionary practice of art. If Cavalcanti doubles the trope of medievalism, dividing the period against his poetic practice and recuperating poetics as politics, then the other side of Pound’s hybrid sign performs the same work.
Methodologically, Hulme provides both the surrogate and the precondition for Pound’s reading, a transit point for the work of historical translation, carrying Cavalcanti over from medieval to modern but also interpolating Hulme as an operative set of historical terms. The invocation of Hulme as a lexicon in his own right not only recalls the idea of a new medievalism, but also engages the deeper core of his critical practice. In the most literal sense, of course, the central detail of Pound’s story is the fact that Hulme adds nothing to it, conspicuously contributing nothing but a pause. But in another sense, it is precisely that pause which represents Hulme’s most decisive intervention. Within the delicate complex of associations swirling through Cavalcanti’s canzone and Pound’s meditation on it, Hulme offers the only fixed point of reference against which other terms can be measured. And it is just this function that Pound requires: a lexicon that illuminates its epoch. Etymologically, the idea of the epoch is defined in that very hesitation: a stoppage or fixed point against which time becomes measurable [OED, n.s.]. When Pound adduces Hulme to insist on the need for a critical reconstruction of Cavalcanti’s revolutionary moment, he returns to the same term, to the much larger pause produced in the oscillation of modernisms and medievalisms and in the tension of epochs. In effect, Pound’s reading performs a series of variations on a single term, moving outward from Hulme’s caesura or interruptive gap to the broader sequence of concepts that it anchors, temporal stops culminating in the idea of the temporal stop itself, of the epoch/epoché that marks the momentary cessation of temporal mediation. The recovery of the lexicon of an epoch depends, above all else, on the invention of a lexicon of the concept of the epoch, and for that concept Hulme offers a distinctive referential marker, performing and signifying it at once.
Pound’s moment of recollection (whether it actually occurred or not) accordingly isolates a distinct turn in Hulme’s thought, underscoring the problem of historical discontinuity from which Hulme seeks to construct a metaphysical system. To a large degree, Hulme’s medievalism is simply the product of a compulsion to reconceive history in discontinuous terms, according to the rhythms of an intermittent epochality. It is from that conjuncture that Hulme begins to articulate the shape of his own moment, in a conceptual movement that folds back anachronically to distant epochs in order to forswear the nearer past: ‘One of the main achievements of the nineteenth century was the elaboration and universal application of this principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, a pressing necessity of the present’ (CW, p. 423). In Hulme’s view, the overhasty philosophical assumption of historical continuity represents a secular ideological faith, an unsupported assurance underlying even the most trivial social presuppositions of political modernity and coalescing into a functional metaphysic. Continuity thus constitutes the axiom on which all other thoughts depend: ‘Our principal concern then at the present moment should be the re-establishment of the temper or disposition of mind which can look at a gap or chasm without shuddering’ (CW, p. 423). In 1915, Hulme offers such a goal as the first principle of his method and new Weltanschauung, but (as Pound’s anecdote suggests) some rough version of the idea had already emerged as a critical trademark as early as 1912. The trope of medievalism simply marks the limit point and refinement of an argument crudely formulated in the antinomy between romanticism and classicism. Far from encapsulating a contradiction in Hulme’s thought, the movement from anti-romanticism to anti-humanism reinscribes the thesis of discontinuity, extrapolating from the isolated case of a singular historical thesis to suggest a more fundamental metaphysical tendency. What the attacks on romanticism and humanism share is not an object, a simple disdain incrementally projected further back in time, but a deeper thesis.
In each case, Hulme sets out not to argue the failure of an aesthetic practice but to isolate the unacknowledged metaphysical implication of a regime of artistic production. In 1912, he thus assails romanticism as little more than the symptom of an ‘identification of our being in absolute spirit’ (CW, p. 68), the product of a ‘metaphysic which in defining beauty or the nature of art always drags in the infinite’. With its tendency to drift tiresomely ‘away into the circumambient gas’ (CW, p. 62) and its constant ‘moaning or whining about something or other’ (CW, p. 66), Hulme’s romanticism reifies the logic of infinitude as a style, unmooring the idea of art from any determinate context. Excluding the better historical share of artistic production, such an aesthetic claims only the narrower subjective ground of what he later calls ‘the arts with which we are familiar’ (CW, p. 272), deluding itself into transcendence through the indulgence of ‘a bad metaphysic of art’ (CW, p. 67). In a ‘tedious piece of dialectic’ designed ‘to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things’, Hulme thus insists that classicism is distinguished by ‘the conception of a limit’, a refusal to concede the question of art to the eternities of idealist aesthetics: ‘there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man’ (CW, p. 62). But Hulme would come to see even that critique as insufficient, a ‘partial measure’ that runs the risk of lapsing surreptitiously back into the very thing it despises. In 1914, he would therefore attempt to formulate the link between art and its metaphysic more directly, seeking in ‘Modern Art and Its Philosophy’ to ‘deal, not so much with the art itself, as with the language in which the artist or critic attempts to explain that art’ (CW, p. 268). Abandoning the language of classicism, he reframes the conundrum of art and the problem of criticism in more aggressively negative terms:
The critic in explaining a new direction often falsifies it by his use of a vocabulary derived from the old position. The thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from. While an artist may have emancipated himself from his own period as far as his art is concerned, while a spectator may have emancipated himself by looking at the art of other periods in museums, yet the mental, or more accurately speaking, the linguistic emancipations of the two, may not have gone forward parallel with the artistic one. (CW, p. 268)
The construction of a critical lexicon, as Hulme demands and Pound recalls it, proceeds from a moment of hesitation, of uncertainty or inadequacy induced by art itself. A genuine metaphysic of art appears only in the instant when an accustomed vocabulary (romanticism or classicism in this case) is forced into suspension and thrown beyond its familiar oppositions, compelled to reassemble previously antithetical terms on one side of some still emergent critical equation, over and against a set of terms lingering momentarily in negation. Art becomes the instrument of historical defamiliarization, claiming an almost prophetic privilege by virtue of its ability to render terms slightly inappropriate, to open a gap between the aesthetic apparatus of the subject and the actual terms under which the work operates. That gap, it turns out, is always implicitly historical, a temporal lag in which the work lurches as if by accident: ‘So thoroughly are we soaked in the spirit of the period we live in, so strong is its influence over us, that we can only escape from it in an unexpected way, as it were, a side direction like art’ (CW, pp. 269-70). It is this lateral or peripheral view of art as ‘a kind of side activity’ (CW, p. 276) that begins to link reactionary and revolutionary elements, fusing past and future against the present as ‘a certain archaism’ (CW, p. 280). The distant past, that is, begins to hold the place of a still unnamed and unnamable future, exactly as art opens a gap ‘when one’s mind is focussed on thought itself’ (CW, p. 276). The critical task is to look at it without shuddering.
When Pound confronts Cavalcanti’s canzone, he is forced onto the problem of a work of art that remains unresponsive to the categories of modern aesthetics. But he is also forced onto a set of methodological tacks that bear Hulme’s imprint. The lexicon that Hulme provides is felt as the suspension of an explanatory mechanism and the corollary need for a new set of references, for a critical language that offers only a provisional point of reference. Less dogmas than placeholders, Hulme’s terms work dialectically, constructing a practice that sets itself outside and against the dominant field of cultural logic as an unnamed negation, in order to create the very standpoint they will ultimately come to occupy. Unlike the studied classicism or intensive manifolds of an earlier phase, Hulme’s medievalism retains its negative function, resisting the reification of a doctrine by refusing to articulate an affirmative metaphysic. So conceived, it presents a limit case to modernity in general, even as it produces an ideological corollary in the idea of modernism, moving beyond simple genealogies in order to generate more totalizing conceptions of historical form. What Hulme ultimately labels a Weltanschauung is, at its core, an incipient dialectical totality, an inner cultural logic buried so deep within the field of sociological presuppositions that it functions as an ideological horizon: ‘It is these categories, these abstract conceptions, which all the individuals of a period have in common, which really serve best to characterize the period. For most of the characteristics of such a period, not only in thought, but in ethics, and through ethics in economics, really depend on these central abstract attitudes. But while people will readily acknowledge that this is true of the Greeks, or of Brazilian Indians, they have considerable difficulty in realising that it is also true of the modern humanist period from the Renascence to now’ (CW, p. 454). What has often seemed contradictory in Hulme is actually a process of historiographical revision, moving toward an extreme formulation ultimately represented by the concept of medievalism. In a sense, the operation is entirely metaphorical, seizing on the readiest trope for everything not modern, for an alien historical logic as such. More importantly, however, the medieval guarantees Hulme’s critique of ideology by maintaining a space of historical difference, by underscoring the power of the gap or chasm even at modernity’s own boundaries: ‘the difference between the mentality of one great period of history and another really depends on the different pseudo-categories of this kind, which were imposed on every individual of the period, and in terms of which his thinking was consequently done’ (CW, p. 453).
But above all else the provision of a lexicon at the gap depends on the prior fact of art, on a material object with which thought never fully coincides. The fact that a critical language trails behind the object itself requires two acknowledgments. First, art encapsulates a space of non-correspondence, a differentiated set of temporal zones conjoining the terms in which thinking is done with foreign matter that demands to be thought in other ways. Art maintains significance precisely because ‘the thought or vocabulary of one’s period is an extraordinarily difficult thing to break away from’, precisely to the degree that it forces such a breakage from the other direction. The consequence of that acknowledgment, however, is potentially more extreme. For art, under Hulme’s hypothesis, effectively ceases to function as art at all, as a system of representation or value. Instead, art marks time, engraving history as a system of suspended vocabularies. For Hulme, that is, art functions as epochal sediment, the historical thing left over when the words are gone.
Of all the idiosyncratic elements in Hulme’s private vocabulary, none has proven so durably perplexing and rebarbative as the idea of Original Sin. The ‘highly disobliging doctrine in question’ (Lewis, 1937, p. 110), as Lewis calls it, pointedly resurrects a tone of thought no longer considered dangerous, bearing the hint of a modernist fundamentalism designed to annoy polite cultural opinion with a studied pose of asceticism. In ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, the idea appears only briefly as a ‘sane classical dogma’ (CW, p. 61). Reformulated as the first premise of ‘A Tory Philosophy’ a few months later (CW, p. 232), it begins to bind the strands of an eccentric conservatism to Hulme’s aesthetic polemics. But it is on the contradictory knot of Original Sin that Hulme predicates the series of antinomies that anchor the successive twists of his emergent Weltanschauung. In 1912, Original Sin thus marks the relatively simple disparity between liberal and conservative political positions. By 1915, with Hulme’s translation of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, it has begun to do more, concocting an odd mixture of anarchism and Marx, Proudhon and Maurras, to divide the austere pessimism of a Tory radicalism from the bourgeois center (CW, pp. 251-2). With each turn, Hulme expands the orbit of his oppositions, first absorbing romanticism and classicism as surrogate political terminologies, stylistic registers of liberalism or conservatism respectively, only to recast those political positions again in the antinomy between humanism and its opposite. Through it all, however, Original Sin remains the axis and dividing line of Hulme’s later thought, the one constant around which other terms array themselves. At its simplest, Original Sin is merely an abbreviation, a phrase standing against all that Hulme opposes. As he puts it in his preface to Sorel, ‘We may define Romantics, then, as all who do not believe in the Fall of Man. It is this opposition which in reality lies at the root of most of the other divisions in social and political thought’ (CW, p. 250). More importantly, however, it is the notion that Hulme names Original Sin that guarantees a vocabulary of historical discontinuity by decomposing time. If the idea originates as a political slogan, it assumes a broader usage with the last fragmentary meditations on humanism, marking the limit of a modern imagination in general, defined now by the fact that it ‘exhibits the same complete inability to realise the meaning of the dogma’ (CW, p. 446). If the idea first draws a subjective distinction, that is, between political orientations and then between artistic styles, it is progressively rendered more objective and more absolute, recoded first as a contradictory set of social determinations (affiliated most obviously with religion and class) and then as an absolute historical difference, the truth of a looming gulf between modernity and the lost attitude of that epoch which preceded it.
Hulme’s turn after 1912 is simply the dilemma of Original Sin, the record of an attempt to decide not what it is but rather where it can be deployed most comprehensively. Boisterously provocative, Hulme’s private trademark – ‘such an original thing to have taken notice of’, as Lewis mocks (1937, p. 108) – has little to do with theology or theodicy: indeed God and religion as such play no particular part in it. The originality of the notion lies entirely in its obdurate refusal not merely of progressive models of social evolution, but also of the anthropological conceit of an ennobled humanity (opposed, for example, to Chesterton’s more benign liberal recuperation of ‘an obviously unattractive idea’ a few years earlier (1908, p. 292)). What Hulme struggles to name with Original Sin is rather a particular form of interrupted historicity, an idea of finitude entrenched against any idea of metaphysical continuity. The ease with which it functions as a mere slogan, either a stubborn bit of petulance or an easily recognizable piece of doctrinal orthodoxy (as in Eliot’s later recuperation) has largely obscured the extent to which the idea remains the most oddly concrete part of Hulme’s lexicon, both his most paradoxically original contribution and his closest approach to the articulation of a contrary or negative metaphysic. For Hulme, Original Sin offers a programmatic refutation of the assumption that continuity represents ‘an inevitable constituent of reality itself’. Grounded in what Pascal terms ‘the natural unhappiness of our feeble mortal condition, so wretched that nothing can console us’ (1995, p. 38), it forms a categorical wedge between the life-worlds of biology, psychology, and history on one side and the impersonal absolute logics of reason and ethics on the other, between inductive and deductive conceptual structures. In Hulme’s version, those two realms remain incommensurably askew, encountering each other only in the homological fallacy of something like a Kantian transcendental deduction. Original Sin thus constitutes a phenomenological given, a simple stipulation of finitude that inflects the possibility of every subsequent philosophical statement. To the degree that it implies an elusive absolute, Original Sin paradoxically ensures that every attempt at its articulation remains tentative, aware of its own chasms. Metaphorically then, Original Sin is the name of a negation, the sign of a travelling gap between the limited reference of language and the scale of all that exceeds naming. More pragmatically, it reproaches the claims of the philosophical subject, insisting on the historical inadequacy of humanism’s more affirmative self-delusions.
Even in the process of excoriating humanism, however, Hulme freely plunders its most useful points of contradiction. In a stricter sense, Original Sin also represents a tactical rejoinder to the achievement of the nineteenth century. Despite its ancient anti-pelagian resonances, the trope more aggressively redeploys the logic of idealism against itself, turning the very emblem of humanist progress into the conceit of its negation. Hulme takes notice of Original Sin, that is, not because it is original but precisely because it is not, because its restoration introduces a lacuna into the very structure of modern time. The most powerful modern reappropriation of Original Sin is offered by Hegel, for whom the myth presents ‘a profound truth’ regarding ‘this state of inward breach’ to which ‘the whole finite action of thought and will belongs’ (1975, p. 44). In essence, Original Sin allegorizes the development of philosophical logic itself, tracing the process of abstraction through which division is reconstituted as unity and encoding the world as a set of historical determinations to be overcome. In its Hegelian version, the myth reflects the entire course of historical development, charting the process through which labor imposes order on an ‘immediate and mentally undeveloped’ state of natural existence and man emerges as ‘a free substance which is in the position of not allowing itself to be determined by natural impulse’ (Hegel, 1967, p. 231). But if Original Sin provides the ground of the subject’s claim to individual freedom, it also enforces a more general collective necessity, an order of determination set in dialectical motion by the very labor required to overcome it. Inevitably and continuously, sin is reincorporated as the negative predicate of an ultimate philosophical redemption, a mythological spur to the operation of reason in time: freedom from a state of innocence comes at the price of logical necessity.
In answer to Hegel’s reappropriation, Kierkegaard strains to reclaim Original Sin as the site of a logical breakage, a point of interruption within the history of reason. Rather than allowing the fall ‘to drift into logical movement as does Hegel’ (1980, p. 30), Kierkegaard insists on sin’s dual function as a point of historical origin and a recurrent moment of existential decision, renewed and retraced again with the life of each individual. In the repetition of the fall, sin reinaugurates historical time (as Kierkegaard puts it) ‘with the first, with the leap, with the suddenness of the enigmatic’. Only with the repetition of Original Sin in a moment ‘in which time and eternity touch each other’, Kierkegaard argues, ‘does history begin’, and within such a radically discontinuous moment ‘the concept of temporality is posited’ (p. 89). But a history and a concept of temporality so inaugurated, with all the suddenness of the enigmatic, begin perpetually, stuttering unevenly into grinding motion. With none of Hegel’s smooth assurance, Kierkegaard’s reinscription revokes the illusion of historical continuity, suspending any historical grammar that might ensure a logically unbroken flow of time and insisting instead upon the radical limitation of a normalizing historical logic. With Kierkegaard’s turn, no single moment of origin exercises a determinate influence on another. Instead, the formal semblance of multiple leaps opens history endlessly to rearticulation and redirection, to moments when logic falters at the theological prospect of decision. Stripped of its more orthodox commitments, that revision provides the ground for a range of later philosophical departures, accounts that secularize and revisit the trope in an altered form through the provisional concept of temporality that it produces. Echoed in Freud’s return of the repressed and still more pervasively in Heidegger’s attempt to presuppose ‘a more primordial temporality’ (1962, p. 497) than everyday or ordinary time, such a concept of temporality progressively reduces the subject to a more paltry size and interposes a categorical obstacle to the rhetoric of infinitude. When Hulme turns to Original Sin, then, he returns to the problem of finitude in more general terms, searching for a concept of temporal difference, for a mechanism to guarantee historical gaps and limit the ideological claim of the present to an indefinite extension across time. More pointedly perhaps, he returns also to the theoretical crux of the critique of what Carl Schmitt would identify a few years later as political romanticism, predicated precisely on ‘the denial of original sin’ (1986, p. 3). In effect, Hulme’s embrace of Original Sin transforms the rhetoric of anti-romanticism into a revolutionary politics of its own, redeploying the concept of temporality to insist on the radical contingency of historical moments and on the availability of the present to a sudden dislocation.
In the end, the antinomies of Original Sin devolve on the deeper forms of temporality itself, on the question of whether history remains open to an unforeseen seizure by something quintessentially alien. Already in 1825, one of Hulme’s most familiar targets had formulated the case for a romantic theology in just such terms, constructing the association between temporality and Original Sin to which Hulme so frequently returns in contrary fashion. Searching for ‘the precise import of the scriptural doctrine of Original Sin’, Coleridge had located its consequence in the supposition ‘that the subject stands in no relation whatever to Time, can neither be called in time nor out of time; but that all relations of Time are as alien and heterogeneous in this question, as the relations and attributes of Space … are to our Affections and Moral Feeling’ (p. 287). For Coleridge, the fall of man specifies ‘the ground and condition of the attribute which constitutes him Man’ (p. 285), a freedom of will that lifts the subject out of its temporal entanglements and orientates its action toward eternity instead. For such a subject, the myth retains its historical resonance only insofar as it regulates what Paul de Man terms romanticism’s ‘constitutive temporal element’, its reliance on the ‘pure anteriority’ of a previous allegorical sign ‘with which it can never coincide’ (1983, p. 207). The subject’s need to retain ‘a distance in relation to its own origin’, in other words, requires that Original Sin be banished to an irrecoverable past, conceivable only through the mediated significations of an allegorical structure designed precisely to maintain the non-identity of present and past. Abandoning the identitarian logic of the symbol, romantic allegory thus ‘prevents the self from an illusory identification with the non-self, which is now fully, though painfully, recognized as a non-self’. Recoiling into ‘the void of this temporal difference,’ allegory thus offers as its compensation a recognition that the past remains definitively past, the negated precondition of the subject’s resistance to temporal incursion, pragmatically effacing the very void from which it springs.
To insist again on the lingering historical power of Original Sin, on the fact of the unfilled chasm, forecloses the melancholic consolations of allegory, relocating the concept of temporality from pure anteriority to a still undescribed future. For Hulme, that is, the promise of Original Sin lies in the simple possibility that it might prove original once again. Hulme’s notion therefore alters the rhetoric of temporality in one fundamental way. The reinscription of Original Sin as properly historical, as the moment when history begins (and potentially begins again), detaches the past from its distance, importing it into the present as the possibility of a new origin. For Hulme, Original Sin operates not in a dim memory but rather in an iterable present, one palpably linked to the past through a sudden rupture in time. Taken seriously, that is, Original Sin presumes an identification not with a self cut off from an anterior moment, but rather the embrace of a non-self that might return at any time. If indeed ‘the antinomies of his poetics’ qualify Hulme as a ‘modern allegorist’ (as Hansen suggests), they therefore do so in a uniquely fractured fashion (1980, pp. 376, 377). What Hulme in fact propounds, from the early doctrine of the image to the dogma of Original Sin, is a figurative third term beyond symbol and allegory altogether, a broken allegory predicated on the capacity of the past to reoriginate, to emerge as a radically finite answer to the infinite claims of the subject. Original Sin thus stands in as the historical rejoinder to romantic subjectivity, holding the place of history itself in an anticipation of the repetition of epochs and the return of historical difference. To that degree, medievalism and Original Sin relate to each other as content and form, dialectically linked facets of the concept of temporality, fused into a politics of epochality. Having abandoned the stable intermediation of the subject, however, such a politics requires an objective point of contact between one historical moment and another, a complex that straddles the concept of temporality itself. For Hulme, the end of humanism demands the fabrication of an apparatus that records time in longer spans and intervals than those of any individual, some surface upon which history inscribes itself more deliberately, something that lasts. It is accordingly that the ‘side activity’ of art asserts itself at last.
In July 1917, two months before Hulme’s death, The Monist printed an unsigned review of the English edition of Reflections on Violence. Authored by T. S. Eliot, the piece fastens on ‘that violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time’ in order to explore ‘the scepticism of the present … a torturing vacuity which has developed the craving for belief’ (1917, p. 478; attributed by Csengeri, CW, pp. xxvii-xxviii; see also Schuchard, 1916). Unsurprisingly perhaps, Eliot betrays an ambivalence regarding Sorel’s program, choosing to subordinate its ‘political propaganda’ to a deeper set of social tendencies that motivate contempt for the cultural forms of bourgeois democracy in general. The resulting figure is predictably Eliotic: ‘He hates the middle classes, he hates middle-class democracy and middle-class socialism; but he does not hates [sic] these things as a champion of the rights of the people, he hates them as a middle-class intellectual hates’. What Eliot finds valuable in Sorel, it seems, is precisely the lack of an affirmative politics. Violence, expressed most programmatically for Sorel in the myth of the general strike, amounts to little more than a useful reflexive disruption of romantic or bourgeois culture. Indeed those terms are effectively synonymous under such an account, sufficiently intertwined at least to leave each vulnerable to the same active response, to ‘very devious ways’ that tactically equate royalism and revolutionary upheaval, reaction and revolt. Like his Hulme a few years later, Eliot’s Sorel emerges as a contradictory and unfulfilled figure: ‘He is representative of the present generation, sick with its own knowledge of history, with the dissolving outlines of liberal thought, with humanitarianism. He longs for a narrow, intolerant, creative society with sharp divisions. He longs for the pessimistic, classical view. And this longing is healthy’ (1917, p. 479).
In 1917, Eliot’s formulation is softly mediated by the specter of Hulme, whose preface receives only a brief concluding notice: ‘Mr. Hulme is also a contemporary. The footnotes to his introduction should be read’. In 1924, however, Eliot’s commentary in The Criterion would revive the early characterization of Sorel to explain Hulme himself, formulating the political paradox at his core once again: ‘Classicism is in a sense reactionary, but it must be in a profounder sense revolutionary. A new classical age will be reached when the dogma, or ideology, of the critics is so modified by contact with creative writing, and when the creative writers are so permeated by the new dogma, that a state of equilibrium is reached’ (1924, p. 232). Of course, Hulme himself had slowly recloaked the idea of classicism in the language of Original Sin and replaced the vision of a new classical age with that of a new medievalism, but Eliot’s comment settles on the pragmatic center of Hulme’s vocabulary nonetheless, juxtaposing the two languages of critical dogma and creative production, reaction and revolution, as Pound had with Cavalcanti, as Hulme had with Sorel and Original Sin. In fact, Eliot’s review is guided less by Sorel than by Hulme’s footnotes. In ironically Eliotic fashion, Hulme uses those notes to unveil what would become the argumentative fulcrum of his late work, suggesting that the thought of Original Sin emerges most powerfully from the sidelong work done by art.
When Hulme first published his preface separately in the New Age in 1915, he glossed the notion of Original Sin – ‘the most fundamental division that can possibly be made in the region of thinking about society’ (1915, p. 570) – with an extended reference to the history of modern philosophy, suggesting that with Renaissance humanism the idea had already been abrogated, planting ‘the germ of the disease, that was destined to come out finally in romanticism’. More importantly, he claims, the denial of Original Sin gathers the whole of modern philosophy into a single register, collapsing modernity into the elaboration of a single thought. But Hulme quickly transfers that observation from philosophy to art, arguing ‘that what has passed as the science of aesthetics is only a psychology of classical and Renaissance art. This art forms a unity exactly, as thought since the Renaissance does, and differs from the intense Byzantine art in exactly the same way’. In passing, Hulme thus suggests two arguments of very different scale. The first is predictable enough, echoing Pound’s sense of an epochal threshold and reinforcing the premise that art since the Renaissance symptomatically reflects or replicates a set of unfolding philosophical presuppositions, all clustered around the newly central human form. But the second argument is potentially far more provocative. Having suggested a general parallel between the discourses of philosophy and art, Hulme revokes the presumed equivalence, taking ‘the science of aesthetics’ itself as the anachronistic derivative of a later innovation, a psychological accommodation shaped in retrospect to fit the classical or neoclassical demands of the cultural regime. The very category of art, in other words, opens a tautology. The Byzantine ‘art’ adduced as a counter-example functions as art only when removed from its own enabling presuppositions and resubmitted to the alien logic of aesthetic autonomy, when translated into a logic contradictory to its own. Art, Hulme suggests, effectively names little more than a certain historical interlude defined by the ideological presuppositions that attend individual psychology and the cult of beauty, belated romantic expressions in each case of a mutation several centuries old. While such presuppositions may appropriate other cultural forms, casting beyond their circumstances to other historical instances and interludes, they risk the illusion of unity in the process. Tactically, Hulme thus offers two mutually exclusive instances, comparing one aesthetic form to another only to destroy the first equation, ultimately contrasting an aesthetic form to something quite radically different. In order to accommodate the particular forms of a different art, one must systematically unravel the set of assumptions that have created the idea of an aesthetic in the first place. As other forms are recognized as art, art itself becomes less recognizable.
When Hulme revised his preface a few months later, he exploited the crack opened by Byzantine art more dramatically to dilate on Original Sin again, reaching out to include other traditions as well:
The change of sensibility which has enabled us to appreciate Egyptian, Indian, Byzantine, Polynesian, and Negro work as art and not as archaeology or ethnology, has a double effect. While it demonstrates that what were taken for the necessary principles of æsthetics are merely a psychology of Classical and modern European art, it at the same time suddenly forces us to see the essential unity of this art. In spite of its apparent variety, European art in reality forms a coherent body of work resting on certain presuppositions, of which we become conscious for the first time when we see them denied by other periods of art (cf. the work of Riegl on Byzantine art). One might say that in the same way, an understanding of the religious philosophy which subordinates man (regarded as a part of nature) to certain absolute values – in other words, a realisation of the sense of this dogma – forces us to see that there is a much greater family resemblance between all philosophy since the Renaissance than is ever recognised. The philosophy rests, in reality, on the same presuppositions as the art, and forms a coherent system with it… . Humanism thus really contains the germs of the disease that was bound to come to its full evil development in Romanticism. (CW, p. 250)
In this second version, tautology is pushed into full contradiction. The awareness of other traditions (itself a modern effect, produced by imperial expansion and the rise of social sciences) expands the category of art only to decompose it, reincorporating ‘European art’ and ‘philosophy since the Renaissance’ as discrete traditions resting on arguable and potentially obsolete presuppositions. Among the presuppositions and ‘necessary principles of æsthetics’ denied is the autonomy of art itself, the very idea that art might remain transhistorically ungrounded and somehow free of time. Hulme’s usage of art moves on two fronts, shadowing the movement of philosophy at a distance, but also intercutting that movement at the point where philosophy and art intersect, in the modern science of aesthetics. The denial of art’s autonomy offers a mere prelude to the denial of the autonomy of the philosophy of art and all that it metaphysically implies. Pragmatically, Hulme’s footnote remains an anomaly, at best a digression from the substance of Sorel’s text and the political concerns that dominate it. Methodologically, however, it distills Hulme’s aesthetic logic to its distinctive core. The concept of art, stripped of any intrinsic theoretical weight, returns as a blockage within other conceptual narratives, as an interruption of philosophy or politics, one of those sharp divisions cherished by Eliot or pauses recalled by Pound. Insistently posed twice over, first as art in some conventional sense and then as something quite different, as the prior vestige of an alien tradition that casts normalized habits of perception into question, the work of art lingers as a philosophical irritant, the foreign speck around which philosophical discourses must be woven to achieve an illusion of social coherence. The ultimate failure to maintain that illusion of coherence provides a retrospective confirmation (‘slight indications’, Hulme claims, ‘of the break-up of this period in art’) of the inadequacy of a system that has just been grasped as an epochal totality for the first time. Implicitly, one last tautology lurks in Hulme’s claim: the very ability to recognize modernity in some totalizing fashion bespeaks the end of the concept and the corollary rise of some new set of blindnesses and limitations yet to be recognized.
Hulme’s other significant revision concerns the idea of classicism, now attached not only to modern neoclassical revivals but rather to ancient Greek and Roman forms. In the process of that revision, the antinomic structure that first pitted the Renaissance against the medieval period expands to accommodate a much longer set of forces. Ironically, Hulme accepts the presumed connection or continuity between classical and Renaissance forms, the myth of a long humanist arc or common ‘psychology of Classical and modern European art’ stretching almost indifferently over millennia, in order to make his point. But it is precisely by positing that ideological continuity (a ‘coherent body of work’) that Hulme finds the vehicle to suit his theory of historical interruption. Effectively, Hulme posits the medial status of the Middle Ages – a long pause between classical humanisms – only to question it, to reverse his terms suddenly and suggest that the intervening suspension of classical aesthetic principles constitutes a positive set of presuppositions in its own right. By his own account, it was an encounter with Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna that first spurred Hulme’s attempt to construct a proper metaphysic of art, reinforced by the writings of Paul Ernst, Alois Riegl, and Wilhelm Worringer (CW, p. 271). And it is in the series of footnotes on Original Sin that he begins to reckon the power of that alien tradition, as the negation of classicism and romanticism together. Perhaps more importantly, however, it is in that sequence of marginalia that Hulme finally sheds the language of classicism for that of anti-humanism, for the first time gathering artistic, philosophical, and theological elements into a coherent set of attitudes. The passage that first appeared as an afterthought to Sorel and an attempt to explain Original Sin would, within a few more months, move to the center of Hulme’s last writings, again altered only slightly:
In a previous note, I made this assertion: ‘In spite of its extreme diversity, all philosophy since the Renascence is at bottom the same philosophy. The family resemblance is much greater than is generally supposed. The obvious diversity is only that of the various species of the same genus.’ It is very difficult to see this when one is inside this philosophy; but if one looks at it from the standpoint of another philosophy it at once becomes obvious. A parallel may make this clearer. The change of sensibility which has enabled us to regard Egyptian, Polynesian, and Negro work, as art and not as archaeology has had a double effect. It has made us realise that what we took to be the necessary principles of æsthetic, constitute in reality only a psychology of Renascence and Classical Art. At the same time, it has made us realise the essential unity of these latter arts. For we see that they both rest on certain common pre-suppositions, of which we only become conscious when we see them denied by other arts. (Cf. the work of Riegl on Byzantine art.) In the same way an understanding of the religious philosophy which preceded the Renascence makes the essential unity of all philosophy since seem at once obvious. It all rests on the same conception of the nature of man, and exhibits the same inability to realise the meaning of the dogma of Original Sin. (CW, pp. 427-8)
With petulant italics, Hulme underscores not only the sort of art needed to demonstrate his thesis, but also the totalizing identity of art with metaphysics (‘the same philosophy’), the narrow character of modern thought (‘essential unity’), the perspective from which that thought becomes estranged (‘when one is inside this philosophy’), and the process of negation that such an art unleashes against such a thought’s most unreflectively held instincts (‘when we see them denied’). More importantly, Hulme begins to formulate the paradox at the core of his aesthetic theory, based on the premise that art occupies time and space differently than other cultural forms, organizing history in durations much longer than those furnished by the subject and its attendant philosophy. What is most important about Byzantine art (or any of Hulme’s other examples, each a functional medievalism/modernism of another sort) is simply the fact that it remains visible even when all of its informing categories and assumptions have lapsed into abeyance. Deprived of its systemic context, the work of art performs a dual function. As art, it entails an alien aesthetic or even metaphysic of art that has gone silent. As something other than art, it persists as a reproach to and refutation of the ideal of continuity, insisting on the radical non-correspondence of historical moments.
In this case, the logic of Original Sin has reached its natural end. Having set out to explain the dogma in a footnote, Hulme ends in the same place and with the same figure. Each iteration of the argument rearranges the pieces of the constellation, offering or withdrawing some significant element, but making its way back in the end to the same problem of ‘the meaning of the dogma of Original Sin’. In its simplest version, that problem has to do with the coexistence of incompatible historical logics, woven together under the newly hybridized notions of philosophy and art. But philosophy and art operate differently. If thought is always bound reflexively, perhaps even unconsciously, to its moments and modes of production, art is not. To the contrary, art extends out of its time almost by definition, as an object shorn of its own enabling conditions, a text deprived of its lexicon or the terms of its legibility. In this respect, Hulme’s comparison of art to archaeology is overdetermined: the art that he envisions is a sort of archaeological shard already, an attempt to extrapolate from the available evidence to sketch an epoch whole. The selection of Byzantine art as a favored example thus resituates Hulme’s discourse of medievalism in a distinctive way. Most obviously, it disrupts the progressive structure of a narrative culminating teleologically in modernity, rhetorically unhinging the Middle Ages from their medial status. More importantly, however, the introduction of Byzantine art reverses the relationship between medieval and modern, using a distant model of geometric form to induce the shape of a larger system of production. Suggested already in Riegl’s work on the late Roman art industry, with its discovery of a discrete structure of aesthetic intentionality that varies according to historical epoch [Kunstwollen], Hulme’s move sharply distinguishes between a medieval art conceived on its own premises and one filtered through the logic of modernity: ‘beside its negative role of demolition in order to make room for the new, late Roman art always had positive aims, which have to date remained unrecognized, because they appear so different from our accustomed ideas of the aims of modern art’ (Riegl, 1985, p. 12). Within the canons of modern aesthetics, such an art remains frankly ugly, coldly repellent or illegibly dissonant in its refusal of classical conceits of relation and its ignorance of modern habits of arrangement. But according to Riegl’s scheme, Byzantine art dissolves the atomism of classical logic, placing individual objects not in relation to each other but rather in the context of extensive space and ‘mass composition’ (1985, p. 224)
In other words, Byzantine figuration dispenses with the individual form, seeking instead to integrate larger impersonal spaces and conceptual matrices within which the subject itself is reduced to negligible significance. Hulme’s idea of the Byzantine thus provides an exemplary rejoinder to the Kantian reduction of art to the subjective and the non-conceptual, and to the postulation through the subject of a universal power of judgment (Kant, 2000, pp. 75-8). Incorporating Worringer’s distinction between empathetic (subjective) and abstract (objective) systems of judgment, it constructs an artistic sphere that not only emphatically refuses the Kantian language of pleasure, but also elides the privileged psychology of the observer (Worringer, 1953). In a strict sense, such an art remains purely objective, both anonymous and impervious to the interpretive demands that the subject imposes. In a far more radical sense, however, such an art outstrips the logic of subject and object together. For Hulme, the association of Byzantine forms with more ancient figurative modes on one side (Egyptian or Indian) and with alternative modernisms on the other (Polynesian or African in origin) also underscores a more ambitious inversion. For in such a scheme, it is precisely the classical or humanist ideal that marks the historical interruption, that constitutes a finite interlude between epochs. It is the Renaissance ideal, that is to say, that comprises the actual dark age, long centuries distinguished by their forgetting of geometric forms and banished only with the rekindling of lost arts. Lurking in Hulme’s turn is an emerging final thesis, an inversion that ultimately postulates the medievality not of the Middle Ages but rather of modernity, of the very epoch in the process of breaking up piece by newly fragmentary piece. Within the almost ridiculous exaggeration of that polemic, however, Hulme conceals a very real and even measured point, one that perhaps ties the otherwise outlandish rhetorics of medievalism and Original Sin together. If works of art constitute the fragmentary evidence of eclipsed historical totalities, if they inhabit time differently by the very fact of their survival into alien epochs removed from their own conditions of production, then art specifies also the material aspect of Original Sin itself, finite and objective ground on which a concept of temporality and a politics of epochality may be constructed with all the suddenness of the enigmatic.