A melancholy spirit, the mind like a great desert lifeless, and the sound of march music in the street, passes like a wave over the desert, unifies it, but then goes.
T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 23
This may be the saddest essay ever written about modernism. Sadness washes over all I have to say, dissolving each truth I hope to claim. Sadness exceeds all sense of personal tragedy – it cannot be contained by Hulme’s demise, by the professional failure and young death of a great thinker. Sadness exceeds all social tragedy and nostalgia – it flows past and then over the once proud monuments of modernism. Yes, this sadness pours forward, silting the appraisable, pushing itself beyond its original cause and towards a different future. This sadness is a productive force, one of the most transportive aspects of modernist writing. It is what at first drives and then routs the modernist polemic, what pushes modern thought and vision beyond the glacial impasse of modernity.
Granted, it has taken me some time to recognize this sadness for what it is. I first read Hulme as an adolescent, and as can be expected, I was attracted to anything but his sadness. Almost immediately, my teenage angst found a perfect fit in his weightier modernist angst. Young rage found shape, reason, a goal in his angry prose – the vague lines of selfhood were firmed up by his all-too-male voice. For years, I remained committed to this angry Hulme. I found myself trying out all of his intellectual poses – the more extreme, the better. These allowed me to throw down the gauntlet, again and again, to extend juvenile revolt into an education and then a profession. His emphasis on classical stasis provided a certain resistance to the fast-paced kitsch of modern production. His reactionary politics were a last defense against the liberal marketplace, a necessary check on the violence of consumption and production. His ethics provided the foundation for a most unethical revolt, as one last slap in the face of all that is preached as correct in academia today. Yes, this anger was comforting; I carried it around with me like armor. I had buddied up to a modernist who inspired fear in all other moderns: this bully was my muse.
In some ways, I still think this response is an appropriate one. For me, modernism is not simply adolescent, but adolescence itself. In its anger, its moodiness, its beautiful idealism, modernism embodies the dynamics of troubled youth and so remains at once alluring, captivating, and absolutely frightening. But sadness is also a part of this emotional mix – its base, so to speak. Peel away the spectacular rage, and you find a wild fear of change and resignation. Peel away this too, and there you see the most profound sense of loss; you find the last glorious vestiges of naiveté withering before the reality of war, trade, exploitation. But beyond personal tragedy or even psychopathology, modernist sadness serves as a way of relating to the world. It is at base a phenomenology, a dynamic that reveals selfhood in relation to its environment and thus establishes a basis for judgment. Hulme’s sadness works like a motor – it hums, it purrs; it carries him through the world and it gets things done. It is a primary production, sensual as well as ethical – it feels its way into matter, towards others, and toward value. Indeed, it was only my own anxious experience of sadness that allowed me to feel Hulme’s. I can pinpoint the moment exactly: I was at a bustling café with a book in my face – Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. I could not have appeared more ridiculously modern, more ridiculously Hulmean, as I realized nothing of the irony of reading this particular book amidst a buzzing, vital crowd. And then, in the middle of Freud’s long equivocation on the superego and guilt, I glanced up at the coffee line to see the face of a colleague. He had been ailing for some time and now his body stood feebly over a white plastic cane. His hair had turned gray and kinky – his face cold and drawn, mouth a jagged sore. Without blinking, I looked down and scrawled ‘I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE’ at the top of the page. I quickly packed up my belongings and scuttled out the back door.
Hulme is an embarrassment in many ways, but never so much as when he shows his feelings. Despite his politics (never mind his religion), he seems to irritate us most when he gets emotional. And this is insistent: Hulme consistently writes through feeling, and he only stops when feeling has dried up. Anger, sadness, panic, lust – his work seethes with emotion; each argument, each proof, and every last metaphor begins and ends with a bleeding heart. Bluntly, then, Hulme’s work forces us to consider why emotion in criticism has become so repellent. Indeed, his work can be used to confront head-on the tendency of popular postmodern theories, particularly those that stress the death of the subject, to obscure or at least critique the varied richness of emotional life. Again and again, in his emotional aggression, he proves that all is not discourse, structure, system and that we must not eschew emotion as the last sanctuary of bourgeois sentiment and liberal humanism. After my coffee shop experience, in fact, it became painfully apparent to me that I had no idea what it meant to be sad. Anger was clearly not an appropriate response to the situation, and sympathy seemed so maudlin and self-serving, but I knew nothing of being sad. I began to rethink my interest in modernism and to explore modern literature as it stands by its emotions. I turned to modernism as a last defense of emotionalism and its critical variedness, as a more engaged way of understanding our relation to the world and its potential values. This may seem odd, given that the high modernist tradition itself contains a scathing critique of humanism and common sentiment. Eliot’s theory of depersonalization, Lewis’s cold method of satire, Barnes’s scathing laugh – these artists and their work blasted away at the pillars of bourgeois humanism and pushed for a seemingly postmodern attentiveness to physics, discourse, system. They extended the most aggressive tendencies of modern history itself – technologization, taylorization, commodification, mass spectacle – chipping away at the private spaces of the ego, outsourcing vast reservoirs of libido into the sprawling marketplace.1 However, as I soon realized, the modernist demise of the subject does not necessarily presuppose a demise of modernist feeling. Eliot famously described poetry as the ‘expression of significant emotion’ (Eliot, 1975, p. 44) and Pound defined the ‘image’ as an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’ (Pound, 1935, p. 4). Their modernism could just as easily be read in terms of its preoccupation with primary feeling. Similarly, the taylorized workplace remains a scene of hostility or pride, the city occasions both intense fear and intense hope; feeling persists throughout these structures, if even in a dehumanized, impersonal form. Ultimately, despite our desubjectivized smugness, feeling remains to condition and contain the cultural networks that supposedly signaled its demise. In fact, one might even argue that desubjectivization itself allows feeling, which is always somewhat more than subjective, to enter the socius in a more active away. Ironically, modernity killed off the subject only to free up feeling and its critical potential. We may no longer be subjects, but our emotions still haunt the landscape, at once shaming and shaping its future.2
Two distinctions, then. First, we need to examine the way in which the work of feeling has been absorbed and obscured by modernist psychoanalytic discourse. As I hope to show, feeling is qualitatively different from desire; its physis, its spontaneity, and its plentitude everywhere distinguish it from libido and free it from ego pathology. Feeling may qualify the experience of libidinal cathexis; its various modes seem either to increase or diminish the strictures of pathology. But feeling remains distinct both as an inassimilable quantum of physiognomic energy and as an extra-subjective revelation of value. Feeling, in other words, exceeds desire on two fronts: it is both more spontaneous and more formal than desire, at once overflowing with affect and committed to value. Indeed, as I hope to show, feeling complicates not only our sense of desire, but psychoanalytic discourse itself. Its excesses continually complicate the experience of neurosis and thus drive psychoanalytic theory itself into a certain obsessional tailspin. Second, we must distinguish feeling from more recent accounts of affect. Undoubtedly, feeling is bound to a certain phenomenological affect, but it also consists of an evaluative dimension by which affect can be actualized, qualified, and evaluated. Brian Massumi, for example, draws upon cognitive science and classical phenomenology in order to define parallel, but correlated systems of cognition. Every image-event, he claims, is received on two levels, the discursive and the affective. On the one hand, discourse fixes the quality of the image-event; it qualifies the event in terms of socially inscribed ideals or norms. On the other, affect is experienced in terms of strength and duration; it registers the force of the image-event, its sensual impact. For Massumi, the relationship between these two levels – of qualification and intensity – consists of resonation and interference, amplification and dampening. Cognition occurs on a sliding scale between these extremes: at one end, we experience pure discourse, rational analysis; at the other, pure autonomous affect, phenomenological openness; in between, we find a conscious-autonomic mix, a measure of their participation in one another. Indeed, in between, we find emotion, emotion as ‘qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning’ (Massumi, 1995, pp. 86-8). Massumi’s typology is adequate, but his emphasis is not. As a postmodernist, as a Deleuzian, Massumi pins his hopes on affect. Affect is intensity, and intensity is inassimilable. Affect is the virtual, an infinite potential, waiting to be actualized – it is the foundation of an ethical openness to the world. For moderns, though, affect is only the base of experience, an unconscious potential in need of some structure or formal judgment. Hence, they tend to validate emotion – the midpoint of discourse and affect – as the socio-linguistic fixing, or qualification, of an experience. Following the moderns’ lead, I would like to assert the autonomy of emotion as a mode that productively conjoins affect with judgment. Hulme’s feelings move us away from psychology towards phenomenology, but also beyond a simple phenomenology toward ethics. Through feeling, being is reopened to a meaningful network, affectively linked to the construction and reconstruction of social value.3
To begin, then, we should recognize that Hulme’s most intense emotions arise precisely in response to a confusion about the role of emotion in thought. If anger seems to strike a dominant note in his work, its first cause – somewhat tautologically – seems to be his inability to distinguish anger from true thought. Indeed, Hulme tends to write through rage – rage against romantics, against liberals, against pacifists, against women. And, honestly, he is most captivating when hateful, most thrilling in his violence, whether it is directed at Bertrand Russell’s rationalist ethics or the threat of German expansionism (CW, pp. 153, 330ff.). One must marvel at a man who claims he is about to perform a ‘war dance’ on philosophical determinism or who plans to direct ‘a little personal violence’ against a rival art critic (CW, pp. 146, 260). On one level, Hulme’s conflation of thought and feeling is self-serving. He wants to play it both ways; when reason fails, he turns to violence, and when violence is impossible or uncouth, he turns to reason; similarly, he can easily accuse his enemies of being either too rational or too irrational, failing to see the truth of his reason or his passion. Always, for Hulme, anger remains compelling as it comes closest to the oppositional stance of true critique. Anger serves to reinforce an otherwise anxious boundary between intellect and world, shoring up an impossible distinction between the cultural critic and his culture. Indeed, even at his most cantankerous, he finds room to confess that extremism alone makes his thought appear tangible and concrete; he remarks that the most powerful thinker is one who can tangibly mark himself off from others, that all intellectual work must start with a set of people who are prepared to fight for their position (CW, pp. 131, 60). At base, though, Hulme is deeply troubled by this epistemological muddle. If anything, his loud wrath serves to purify his responses, to drown out the realization that his most rigorous ideas are simply ideological, or that what he thinks is ideology in others has a respectable intellectual basis (CW, p. 145). His greatest frustration arises in response to the recognition that, among moderns, any kind of debate has become impossible. It corresponds to his recognition that the hybridity of thought both reinforces and denies the possibility of conclusiveness, at once erects and erases its own rhetoric. Ultimately, relativistic tensions, which once seemed to suggest the possibility of epistemological clearness, now only lead to a hopeless stalemate. In these instances, Hulme’s ‘annoyance demands physical expression’; in his impotent rage, he wants ‘to do something dramatic with the printed page’ (CW, p. 153).
Importantly, then, Hulme’s anger is always an aftereffect, a defensive pose in response to a fearful state of epistemological turmoil. Anger is the default mode for something much less stable, much less assured or comforting; it is an adolescent lashing out at a change or confusion that is otherwise beyond his control. In contrast, the less spectacular, but no less definitive tone of Hulme’s work is sadness, if not outright grief. For Hulme, sadness is experienced prior to any kind of anger: it is his first and most basic response to the relativity of thought and the existential ash-heap of modernity. As he describes it, sadness is no aftereffect, but an absolute condition. It is as primary as ‘the breaking up into cinders’, as immediate as the ‘essentially imperfect, chaotic, and cinder-like’ de-composition of the modern world (CW, p. 9). For Hulme, there are only two moods in life: one heroic and the other tragic. He is either ‘flying along in the wind’, ‘constructing a new theory’, or ‘Ill in bed, toothache, W.C. in the Atlantic’. The first is thrilling, stable, and impersonal, the latter is debilitating, uncontrollable, and entangled: ‘The sick disgusting moments are part of the fundamental cinders – primeval chaos – the dream of impossible chaos’. Granted, both of these moods are personal, subjective, but they entail two different kinds of phenomenology, and, in Hulme’s more honest moments, only the latter bears witness to the abject truth of his situation: ‘Ennui and disgust, the sick moments – not an occasional lapse or disease, but the fundamental ennui and chaos out of which the world has been built’ (CW, p. 13). Most importantly, Hulme’s sadness seems to shut down, or short-circuit, any current line of argument. At the moment of sadness, production ceases; modernism, and particularly its critical anger, is put on hold. Yet, at the same time, these impasses are only temporary. Hulme’s sadness tends to propel his arguments beyond themselves in an entirely different register. After the last line quoted above, Hulme breaks off his paragraph and then offers a radically different definition of the subject as a kind of sorting machine ceaselessly rearranging the objects of his world (CW, p. 13). For me, this sadness – as it is defined by a dynamic of stasis and change – is central to modern emotional life. It is the fulcrum by which the most forward-thinking modernist texts move (Ford’s The Good Soldier, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Pound’s Pisan Cantos, to name a few) and the basis by which modernism begins to deconstruct itself and the humanist tradition out of which it arose.
This dynamic is most clearly on display in Hulme’s fraught account of his response to the work of philosopher Henri Bergson and the thoroughly modernist phenomenon of popular Bergsonisme. Hulme, as always, begins with a personal confession, describing the ‘great excitement’, ‘the physical delight of freedom’ that he felt when he first encountered Bergson’s work. He describes his initially overwhelming fascination with both the content and shape of Bergson’s thought – the ‘physical sensation’ of expansion he felt during his first reading, as if the turmoil of his own cramped mind found a new spacious abode and comfort in Bergson’s semi-abstract system. As Hulme confesses, this ‘release’ – at once ‘satisfying’ and ‘comforting’ – could hardly be described as intellectual (CW, pp. 126-8). In fact, he repeatedly apologizes for his enthusiasm, which he says springs from ‘mental debility’ (CW, p. 128), and he insists, again and again, that he will soon provide a more sober account. He also asserts his desire to distance himself from other followers of the Bergson craze, who have no true understanding of philosophy and are simply ‘driven on the beliefs of this kind by a certain appetite, a certain craving, which must be satisfied’ (CW, p. 129). As he explains, this craving is decisively modernist, since it fetishizes the ‘new’ and ‘different’: ‘It is an unconscious process; it most generally takes the form of a belief that the future holds possibilities of the perfect which have been denied to the present and the past. This type of debility of mind finds sanity in the belief that it is on the verge of great happenings’ (CW, p. 130). But with these apologies Hulme places himself in a very difficult bind. He has invalidated both his own intuitive response as well as the possibility of any rational vantage point. He traps himself between the mass of sentiment and the falseness of intellectual detachment, mired in his own binary as well as unable to reconcile its terms. The utterly modernist dimension of this position becomes apparent when Hulme next attends one of Bergson’s lectures. After some difficulty attaining a pass, he arrives at the hall to discover a crowd of women ‘with their heads lifted up in a kind of “Eager Heart” attitude, which resembles nothing so much as the attitude of my kitten when gently waking up from a nap’ (CW, p. 154). Apparently, with this single vision, Hulme’s ‘fixed and solid’ belief in Bergson is immediately tossed into doubt. The spectacle of sentimental consumption at once obliterates his defensive intellectual armor: ‘My mind began at once, almost unconsciously, to feel that what these people thought about Bergson was entirely wrong. More than that, I passed on to the further belief that Bergson himself was wrong. The whole structure of beliefs so carefully constructed fell down like a house of cards… . What these people agreed upon could not be right. It is not in the nature of truth to be grasped so easily or so enthusiastically’ (CW, p. 156). The crisis of modernist epistemology is apparent here in the confusion of emotion and vision as well as in the fraught relation between individual and mass. Yet what also interests us is that, for Hulme, anger no longer appears as a viable response, or, at the very least, an appropriate one. The feminine image here inspires a reaction that is still in part ‘disgust’, but is mostly ‘depression’. Hulme feels as if he had been ‘struck down by a most profound fit of depression’, ‘a most remarkable fit of the profoundest and blackest scepticism’. He mounts a halfhearted campaign to reassert the boundary between himself and the mass, between intellect and affect, but he has lost the will to do so: the spectacle was ‘profoundly depressing, not so much because it destroyed a particular set of fixed beliefs, but because it destroyed, so it seemed to me, the possibility of any “fixed” belief whatever’ (CW, p.156).
Importantly, though, while this scene marks the waning of Hulme’s interest in Bergson, it also signals the beginning of his most sustained effort to define the relationship between thought and feeling. His work soon reveals a new vigor, a new eagerness, as if the unrelieved potential of his affective experience gropes around frantically looking for new forms – a new discourse – through which to express itself. Certainly, even in Hulme’s early notebooks, we find inchoate expressions of a budding emotional phenomenology. Again and again, he rejects a stoic ‘armchair philosophy’ and ventures forth into the busy street, the crowded bus, and the bustling café. He experiments with his emotions, allowing each in turn to be occasioned by the phenomena of the urban landscape: repugnance rises towards this painting, disgust with that baby; sadness comes from that crowd over there. Apparently harmless objects – a museum dome, a gate railing, for instance – depress him. Even certain textures give rise to sentiment: ‘Smoothness. Hate it’ (CW, p. 22). Importantly, though, Hulme’s emotional life is decisively depersonalized and the objects that spark emotion are never metaphorized. He resolutely attempts to feel beyond, or maybe before, ego psychology and the structures of desire: the cinder must be felt in ‘a religious way’ and thus become ‘a criterion for nearly all judgment, philosophic and aesthetic’ (CW, p. 21). Hulme, in fact, desires a ‘space consciousness’, a sort of heightened experience of phenomenal space. He wants to ground being in its environment, splay it out into the phenomenal world and its impersonal order: ‘The idealists analyse space into a mode of arranging sensations. But this gives us an unimaginable world existing all at a point. Why not try to reverse the process and put all ideas (purely mental states) into terms of space (cf. landscape thinking)?’ (CW, p. 19).
After his Bergson experience, however, Hulme more explicitly seeks to clarify the merging of reason, psychology, emotion, and affect. Indeed, this intentional muddle is precisely what makes his later work so interesting: his multidimensional phenomenology opens up the binaries of classical modernism (subject/object; thought/feeling) as well as the categories by which we perpetuate those binaries (hot/cold; fascist/democratic). Truth here is neither immediately discovered nor spontaneously created; it exists only in an affective tension, in the networked energy of the past, the personal, the objective, and the intellectual. Take, for example, Hulme’s emphasis on touch. He turns repeatedly to touching as it blurs the boundary not only between subject and object, but also between thought, emotion, and physical sensation. Tangibility entails both the comfort of subjective coherence as well as the anxious revelation of difference; it allows the possible recognition of stable values and the sensation of a certain inassimilable affect. His earliest collection of notes, ‘Cinders’, was originally conceived as a modern parable. The fictional Aphra served as a poet-hero whose power lay solely in his ability to touch. As Hulme explains, ‘There are moments when the tip of one’s finger seems raw. In the contact of it and the world there seems a strange difference. The spirit lives on that tip and is thrown on the rough cinders of the world. All philosophy depends on that – the state of the tip of the finger… . When Aphra had touched, even lightly, the rough wood, this wood seemed to cling to his finger, to draw itself backward and forward along it. The spirit returned again and again, as though fascinated, to the luxurious torture of the finger’ (CW, p. 18). Here, subject and object are inextricably conjoined at the point of contact. Spirit and matter coexist at the fingertip, in a state of ‘luxurious torture’. Hulme, like Aphra, returns to the point of contact because there he finds both unity and difference, power as well as release. With each touch, he finds his body open to the world, subject to manifold sensations and potentialities, and he finds that world subject to his own meanings and demands, submissive to human decision.4 Certainly, we can explain this phenomenon through psychoanalysis and turn Aphra into Oedipus. As we will find, though, Freud’s terms fails to contain either the affective dimension or the ethical dimension of this phenomenon. Hulme does not work through the phallus, or even the ego; rather, he mediates desire in an anti-symbolic, experiential way and thus suggests the possibility of a life that is at once more open and more ethical.
Hulme’s most gratifying defense of this phenomenological method and its ethical dimension appears in his war writings, where he wrestles with the opposed attitudes of pacifists, warmongers, nationalists, rebels, suffragettes, Germans, Brits, and the Irish. His ‘A Notebook’, for example, was written directly in response to the hot moral and political confusion that arose over the war. Tellingly, he presents his essay as an attempt to clear up the maddening conflation of subjective biases and absolute truths, between relative, accidental positions (of, say, the pacifists) and objective arguments (of, say, his own essays). Indeed, the entire ‘Notebook’, its strength and weakness alike, rests upon a willful dissociation and re-correlation of attitudes, beliefs, truths, and values. Hulme argues that the apparently logical arguments of his opponents are entirely sentimental, and he insists that his own sentiment, while personal and subjective, is objectively ‘correct’ and ‘true’. He begins, then, by describing the emotions he experienced while sitting in a museum and reading through the back numbers of a philosophical review. With each issue, he finds himself increasingly overwhelmed by how quickly seemingly important ideas are overturned: ‘When the last ounce of solidity seemed thus to melt away in the universal deliquescence, the thing become a horror, and I had to rescue myself. I drew up a list of antitheses, of perpetual subjects of dispute, on each of which I had convictions, based on a brutal act of assertion, which no argument could touch’ (CW, p. 421). This emotionalism persists throughout the piece, haunting all his efforts to distinguish the absolute and the fallen, the animal and the human, the religious and the material. Seemingly without irony, he admits that while most philosophy seems impersonal and exact, it is often only an apparently logical description of an utterly personal attitude. Implicating his own writing, he argues that philosophy is not ‘a pure but a mixed subject. It results from a confusion between two subjects which stand in essential relation to each other, though they may be combined together for a certain practical reason’ (CW, p. 428). With this, though, Hulme is forced to call his own bluff. He admits that his own spiritual absolutism is nothing more than an attitude. His ethics are simply the result of a certain appetite – an historical accident, really – contained to just himself and a few of his radical modern peers. However, he insists that, as opposed to the humanist or relativist attitude, the religious attitude is a ‘right attitude’. As he claims, ‘I am so far from such scepticism about the matter, that I regard difference between the two attitudes as simply the difference between true and false’ (CW, p. 448). Hulme’s effort to resolve this paradox is founded upon his affective phenomenology. His proof is based on certain sensations of satisfaction and dissatisfaction – anger, remorse, love – and its success depends upon an ability to translate intuitive, affective responses into appropriate dogma. In all intellectual matters, he argues, it is the satisfactoriness of conclusions that need to be tested. The true is the satisfying and the satisfying is true – the reality of any value is at once felt, asserted, and recognized in the emotional register: ‘It should be noticed’, he argues, ‘that these canons of satisfaction are quite unconscious’ (CW, p. 429).
We will soon consider Hulme’s sense of tragic sadness as essential to this late method. First, however, we need to look closely at the work of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, who served Hulme as a model for this kind of emotional investigation.5 For Scheler, feeling lies at the origins of all non-formal ethics as the means by which the world and its values are made apparent. Feeling reveals essences and values immediately, in feeling itself, as they exist apart from psychology as well as philosophy. Whether the attraction of love or the repulsion of hate, feeling does not precede, but enact all doing, choosing, and willing; feeling is how human being takes part, and through which alone human being can take part. Love and hate are the original moments by which all value and its possible fulfillment are made apparent: ‘every kind of intellectual comprehension of whatness of an object presupposes an emotional experience of value related to this object. The proposition holds true for the simplest perception as well as for remembering, expecting, and finally, also for all types of thinking.’6 This language might be difficult for us to swallow today, but Scheler’s genius is his ability to feel his way outside of the categories that condition contemporary thinking. For Scheler, feeling is both more than the subject and more than his world; it everywhere exceeds the structures of the psyche and sees beyond the practical demands of a specific environment. Feeling is an apprehension that immediately takes the self out of the self as it comprehends an autonomous realm of values. It is a fundamental and spontaneous act that cannot be reduced to any local phenomenon. In fact, precisely because it is a spontaneous act it attains the quality of the absolute, at once recognizes and establishes the absolute. ‘The fact that one value is “higher” than another is apprehended in a special act of value cognition: the act of preferring … the height of the value is “given”, by virtue of its essence, only in the act of preferring. Whenever this is denied, one falsely equates the preferring with “choosing” in general, i.e. an act of conation. Without doubt, choosing must be grounded in the cognition of a higher value, for we choose that purpose among others which has its foundation in a higher value. But “preferring” occurs in the absence of all conation, choosing, and willing. For instance, we can say, “I prefer roses to carnations”, without thinking of a choice. All choice takes place between the deeds’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 221).
Thus, Scheler presents ethics as radically personal and yet radically idealistic. Man’s own heart can either confirm or deny a supreme order of values – he knows it as he is ready to make it real. Indeed, for Scheler, love reveals values as they exist apart from any subject or any object. It is directed solely at the value of which any object might be a bearer and thus persists despite any changes in the object. Hate, conversely, is a rejection of higher value, a refusal to acknowledge or an incapacity to recognize that value. It is ‘in the strictest sense destructive, since it does in fact destroy the higher values (within these spheres) and has the additional effect of blunting and blinding our feeling for such values and power of discriminating them’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 75). Ultimately, Hulme and Scheler describe an ethical system that is neither simply contractual nor stupidly fortuitous, but, rather, both more relative and more absolute. In a single emotive act, feeling and value coalesce, realizing each other through each other; at the same time, in the same act, an absolute discontinuity is generated, a radical division between the world of subjective passions and a world of essential values. In other words, the emotional act asserts radical hybridity as well as absolute difference, and thus – as I hope to show – enacts what Bruno Latour has defined as a ‘productive network’. Emotion’s power and critical import lies primarily in its refusal to reduce or divide phenomena into purely material or purely spiritual truth, into simple bodily necessity or abstract human freedom; instead, it confronts material history as it both defines and discovers competing values; it effects a quasi-cybernetic conjunction between the objects of natural science, cultural science, and ethics itself.
But let us leave this caring, feeling modernism alone for a moment. Let us consider modernism without sadness, in its anger and hostility, in its paranoid work of projection and introjection. As I have already noted, Hulme’s work can easily be defined as a kind of adolescence. At his best and most creative, his writing displays a boyish playfulness, a charming sense of discovery, and a sincere quest for intellectual exchange. A reader easily imagines Hulme toying with one of his many stray kittens, debating political ideologies with strangers in Hyde Park, or walking along Oxford Street for miles to prove that it really leads to Oxford. At its worst, though, Hulme’s adolescent bent takes form as sullen rage, angry idealism, and complete horror of the human body. His immaturity is apparent in his self-conscious and self-damning ambivalence, a violent hatred of authority that is matched only by an equally violent disgust with disorder. Hulme, indeed, adopts one father after another, at first championing and then mimicking and finally betraying each one in turn (Nietzsche, Bergson, Worringer, Lasserre, etc.). His avowed disgust with the body cannot be divorced from his absolute fear of all things feminine: women appear in his writing in mocking and often freakish poses, dancing in the mud, hiding behind bushes, tittering in the street (CW, pp. 12-13, 32). Certainly, Hulme’s intellectual turmoil is psychosexual, and we would learn much by reading his work through a psychosexual lens. His main intellectual dilemmas revolve around the nature of (male) selfhood as it remains caught between conscience and desire, between an impossible law and a precarious instinct. His mind spins madly around his own body, seeking solace in either its finitude or its freedom, but never able to settle for either closure or exposure. Here we perhaps find the root of his anger and paranoia; rage serves to construct and control the anxious borders between self and self-as-other. Indeed, the angry adolescent can imagine order and chaos, essence and artifice, nature and nurture, but he cannot fathom anything in between; he cannot, in other words, imagine the human – for Hulme, the self is nothing more than a ‘sticky ore’ torn apart by warring instincts, a grotesque homunculus that must be groomed and disciplined into something decent: ‘The future condition of man, then, will always be one of struggle and limitation. The best results can only be got out of man as the result of a certain discipline which introduces order into this internal anarchy’ (CW, p. 235).7
All of the above easily leads to the common psychoanalytical critique of masculine modernism and its attendant cult of heroic values, discursive armoring, and rigid oppositional logic. But, as I hope to show, this critical formulation – which has become so common in modernist studies – only begs the issue, for it remains caught within the same dualistic logic it seeks to oppose. Indeed, the very method for analyzing this problem is also part of the problem, if not its central cause; psychology as we know it is always modern bourgeois psychology, and thus – with its faith in self expression, constitutive experience, and social evolution – remains unable to confront the more dubious aspects of its own political and economic legacy. Thus, just briefly, I would like to take psychoanalysis in terms of its own negation, in its failure to contain modernity in its apparently universal dialectics. Freud must be read in terms of his failure to take account of nonsubjective feeling and thus in terms of how his work throws that feeling into stark relief. For instance, Freud’s touchstones on psychology and ethics, such as Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, can be read as attempts to patch over the increasingly obvious faultlines of his own theory of the ego. Despite his best efforts to re-inter conscience (by way of Oedipus), he repeatedly runs up against a much more complex formulation of the emotional self and its relationship to the social. He replays Hulme’s phenomenological confusion (of thought, emotion, and affect) and thus confronts a definition of the ego as an obsessional entity ceaselessly managing the intensive phenomena of its environment. In fact, by pairing Hulme and Freud, we are able to see the extent to which the latter’s work confronts a specifically modern psychology given over to experiences marked by an excess of affect. Like Hulme’s, Freud’s analysis is wracked with fear concerning the modern world and its increasingly errant forms of affect, and it seems to register these changes in an increasingly anxious way. It awkwardly reframes nonsubjective emotion within the logic of Oedipus and all too quickly effaces those dimensions of modern life that have become less ‘moral’ and more ‘taboo’. Indeed, the most awkward dimensions of this work on the ego – its ceaseless revisioning, its obsession with tangibility, its refusal to countenance the significance of brothers, its mocking descriptions of taboo culture – suggest that psychoanalytic theory serves not to diagnose, but to manage the changing terms of the modern socius.
In Totem and Taboo, in fact, Freud begins his defense of humanist psychology and its attendant ethics with a rather mocking description of primitive animism. Everywhere, the internalized guilt of the modern subject is held up against animism as a quasi-psychological system caught dubiously between romantic omnipotence and materialist contingency. For Freud, primitive animism entails faulty acts of projection, a non-scientific confusion of what one wants to be true and what is available to sustain that truth. Belief is at once established and reinforced by mostly false associations between fantasy and its objects; it mistakes – in theory and in practice – the realm of desire for the tangible order of things. As sorcery, for example, animism treats the entire world as if it were composed of other psychic forces, and it tries to control those forces by affective means (appeasement, propitiation, intimidation, etc.). As magic, it depends on certain ritualized procedures, such as making an effigy or engaging in mimetic performance (Freud, 1950, p. 104). But in Freud’s characterization, animism also begins to appear as an affective, embedded practice, a system of thought that is healthily restricted by the local. It begins with the advance of libido, a spontaneous projection of the possible, that just as immediately finds either expression or denial in the objects of its environment. The animistic subject reads his needs into the overdetermined structures of his environment; he projects his feelings out into a world that he simultaneously transforms (Freud, 1950, pp. 81, 120-1). Thus, despite Freud’s smugness, animism in general figures as an affective way of reading that is attuned to the network as a whole: its psychic dimensions and its material restraints, its human requirements and worldly demands. In other words, animism is exemplified by Hulme’s own method, which is best characterized not simply as a neurotic condition, but as a productive disorder. Freud fears, but Hulme ultimately accepts, that modern society is totemic society in its all too rigorous conflation of the symbolic with the productive. Indeed, its signifying practices are its productive practices (Freud, 1950, pp. 39-40).
Freud’s formulation of animism, in fact, directly recalls Hulme’s own emphasis on touch and the phenomenological confusion that surrounds touching. In Totem and Taboo, touching figures among primitive cultures as an almost spontaneous creation and negotiation of value – affect, desire, and social proscription conjoin in a moment that at once short-circuits and reconstitutes the network as a whole (Freud, 1950, p. 35). However, Freud quickly shuts down his discovery of this conscious-autonomic mix and its relation to the socius at large. Indeed, psychoanalysis, with its attendant ideological pressures, emerges in Totem and Taboo as a way of repressing, or at least managing, the messy contingency of the social network. For Freud, taboo culture is simply a primitive form of guilt culture: it represents a pre-humanist, quasi-psychological system of thought and ethics that inevitably (and thankfully) gave way to the more secure (because less tangible) regime of the internalized superego. Thus, for Freud, touching phobias, like any other obsessive-compulsive disorder, suggest that a prohibition has been internalized alongside an original desire (Freud, 1950, p. 39). The desire to touch figures as the first step towards instinctual mastery or appropriation, but it has been effectively barred from its object by the superego. Importantly, Freud argues that taboos of any kind are prohibitions that have been pressed upon one generation by the previous one. The prohibition against touching is simply one of many proscriptions handed down from patriarch to son, at once exposing as it attempts to deflect the real issue at hand: the potential for Oedipal revolt. Indeed, it is upon the apparently simple fear of social touching that Freud builds his theory of the primal horde and the intergenerational sacrifice necessary to all culture. The ritual killing is a gesture that allows one to express conflicting desires, both to kill and to be the father. More precisely, it allows one to be the father in his dual aspect, in his license and in his restraint; it is at once a release from all authority and a restriction by way of authority, a transgression and a restoration.
As I have suggested, Freud’s mythic narrative responds to an utterly modern phenomenon. His theory provides a symbolic check on a decisively anti-discursive tendency – he is calling on ancient patriarchy in order to contain the incredibly anti-psychological terms of modern fraternalism. His careful delineation between sexual instincts and social instincts, between pleasure principle and reality principle does little to obscure the fact that he confronts a world teeming with obsessive-compulsives, men and women engaged in the ‘luxurious torture’ of fondling each other and the objects of their environment. Ultimately, it seems as if Freud’s writing here confronts the obsessional neuroses only because they themselves seem to arise, dangerously, in response to an uncontrollable upsurge of affect. Indeed, his writing at this time itself figures as a kind of obsessional neurosis, an apparently endless effort to manage the affective surcharges of the modern psyche and thus the gaps in his own theory. The irresolvable dimensions of phenomenological exchange are at once channeled into appropriate forms of transgression (Oedipal rage, incest, etc.) and given a stable place within the theory as a whole (id, death drive, etc.). Ultimately, the energized relations of the spatial network are cast into the linear dimensions of intergenerational time, where they become at once impossible and inconceivable. Conscience is locked into family drama, where it can be nothing but a private mechanism of repression and a familiar reenactment of the law. We might say, of course, that Freud invents Oedipus for an age in which Oedipus no longer functions. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have argued, his work exemplifies a much larger ideological effort to lock modernity back into the family trinity, to stymie the phenomenological schizophrenia of a post-capitalist socius.8 His temporal allegory of fathers and sons carefully delimits what is rather a fascinating spatial dynamic between brothers – the formal perfection of his theory serves to channel the potentially rebellious feelings amongst radical equals. Ultimately, Freud remains caught between a dying bourgeois ideal of a seemingly bounded subjectivity and a sense of self that is at once more affectively open and attuned to an evolving socius. His work tries to contain a modern ego that has already undergone a process of deterioration and thus remains only partially open to alternative configurations of feeling and experience. Indeed, it is precisely because this formulation remains incomplete, inadequate, and neurotic that it suggests we need to pay attention to the power of feeling.
This last point brings us to the most significant dimension of feeling in criticism, namely, the different ways in which feeling can be used to shape, increase, and extend the forces of production. In other words, in addition to understanding feeling as an epistemological mode, as it occasions a revelation of value, it is also essential to consider feeling insofar as it serves to realize value, to create as it considers a more or less ethical world. I have defined Hulme’s feelings as radically hybrid as well as utterly discontinuous. If anything, it is not his thought or even his rhetoric, but his feelings that underlie his ability to enact all sorts of phenomenal breaks and linkages. On one level, Hulme’s feelings serve to create temporal and spatial breaks, sustaining essentialized differences between, say, the divine and the worldly, the human and the non-human, the romantic and the classical. Indeed, his disgust turns discontinuity into a first article of intellectual and spiritual faith, opposed to the romantic slither of the modern world: ‘We constantly tend to think that the discontinuities in nature are only apparent, and that a fuller investigation would reveal the underlying continuity. This shrinking from a gap or jump in nature has developed to a degree which paralyses any objective perception, and prejudices our seeing things as they really are’ (CW, p. 423). And yet, on another level altogether, Hulme’s emotionalism consistently blurs the distinctions between these realms. His is a particularly modernist tendency toward categorical confusion. It turns science into a religion, it makes judgments in art tantamount to judgments in politics, it confuses a brute primitivism with a mechano-modernism. ‘Mind and Matter’, he exclaims, ‘To take one or the other as absolute is to perpetrate the same old counter fallacy; both are mixed up in a cindery way and we extract them as counters’ (CW, p. 17). Beliefs are founded upon ‘appetite’, but they are also only manipulative ‘representations’, and yet their efficacy and inevitability could be determined by the laws of science (CW, pp. 136, 230). These statements are not simply contradictory or even dialectical. Hulme’s essays continually feel their way into and out of abstraction – the thrust of emotion itself at once raises and confounds the possibility of purity. Despite his claims, he feels chaos as a constant and relativity as an absolute. He celebrates the fallen perspective of man with a sensation akin to the divine. As he ultimately remarks: ‘For an objective view of reality we must make use both of the categories of continuity and discontinuity’ (CW, p. 423). Our perspective must encompass the absolutes of science and divinity as well as the ‘muddy mixed zone’ of the human that lies between the two (CW, p. 425).
Bruno Latour’s work on the ‘Modern Constitution’ provides the most compelling account of this double perspective and its productive effects. Latour defines modernity as a correlation of two practices that must remain distinct in order to be effective: the conceptual purification of humans and nonhumans and the phenomenological hybridization of nature and culture. His work depicts a closed system whereby the oppositional stance of modernity, with its assured divisions and persistent binaries, serves only to mask its true work of translation, its production of hybrid networks and quasi-objects. Moderns, he argues, insist on absolute distinctions in order to justify and mobilize more subtle and productive hybrids. They depend upon willfully absolute categories in order to extend formations that exist somewhere between culture and biology, or, say, between religion and science. These purities at once provide the pleasing terms whereby any kind of production becomes acceptable (‘it’s only natural!’ or ‘it’s only human!’), while they also obscure that utterly hybrid production and its often questionable aims (‘this is purely natural!’ or ‘this is utterly human!’):
Because it believes in the total separation of humans and nonhumans, and because it simultaneously cancels out this separation, the [Modern] Constitution has made the moderns invincible. If you criticize them that Nature is a world constructed by human hands, they will show you that it is transcendent, that science is a mere intermediary allowing access to Nature, and that they keep their hands off. If you tell them that we are free and that our destiny is in our own hands, they will tell you that society is transcendent and its laws infinitely surpass us… . If you believe them and direct your attention elsewhere, they will take advantage of this to transfer thousands of objects from nature into the social body while procuring for this body the solidity of natural things… . Everything happens in the middle, everything passes between the two, everything happens by way of mediation, translation, and networks, but this space does not exist, it has no place. (Latour, 1993, p. 37)
Latour’s work, though, interests us here for its critical perspective as well as for its sense of a solution. While it exposes the self-sustaining discourses of productive modernity, it seeks resolution in the correlation of formal and affective practices. Latour makes clear that the violence of modernity depends on its refusal to conceive of anything beyond its own rhetoric of purity. First and foremost, then, he asks us to consider the two practices of purification and hybridization together; we must at once expose these two processes as one, slow them down so that they can be evaluated, and then ‘reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters’ (Latour, 1993, p. 12). Latour, in fact, argues that every society is always already engaged in both of these processes. Quite simply, primitive cultures, by more carefully devoting themselves to the conception of hybrids, are able to manage their proliferation. Conversely, the moderns’ obscene insistence on purification allows its productive capacity to grow at an exorbitant rate, without conscience or even consideration. Between them, non-moderns must maintain and coordinate both practices – they must continue the work of purification as it drives all great production, but they must also cultivate responsible relations to the hybrids that define the network as a whole (Latour, 1993, pp. 134, 140). Most importantly, Latour insists that this appropriately double vision requires two different registers. While he calls for representation and solid critical work, he also alludes to a certain affective engagement by which we must feel our way through the local network. Society, he insists, needs to temper its absolutes with a more ethical recognition of the collective mediator, the network of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. It needs to redirect its attention away from pure forms, from satisfying abstractions, and reconsider the ‘original event’, the hybrid process that ‘creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role’ (Latour, 1993, p. 78). In other words, Latour asks us to go down where the monsters live, where the mixtures are made, to re-experience the experience whereby human and non-human are both created at once. He asks us to give up righteous indignation for a more active and generous process that follows the ‘countless meanderings of situations and networks’ (Latour, 1993, p. 45). Justice, here, exists only in hybrid things, in the utterly anthropological creations that co-organize God, will, love, hatred, and matter. Justice exists in the collective, the continual push and pull of communal affect in relation to the objects of its environment, in the slow accumulation and evolution of the subject–object continuum. Justice is the emotional network, the local configuration of spirit and matter that must be reconstituted at every site and at every moment in order to exist at all. Everything must be reconceived as it exists in its emotional delegation, in its passing, as it is delegated and as it passes.
Latour comes closest to defining the value of the emotional terrain that I have been stumbling towards. Indeed, his theory of the affective network pushes us far beyond Hulme’s particular emotionalism toward the full panoply of productive feeling that defines the best modernist experimentation: the affective streams of consciousness in Woolf and Joyce, the precise energistic configurations of the Imagist poem or the affective repetitions of Stein’s Cubist verse, the excesses of sentiment that we see negotiated in the late modernism of West, Barnes, and Lewis. In these last few pages, though, I want to defend sadness specifically as the first principle and cause of all such experimentation, as the most radical way by which modernism may move beyond itself. I would like to defend sadness as the primary emotion capable of pushing us beyond the polemics of purity, as a kind of feeling that is at once critical as well as immanent, capable of judgment as well as generosity, if not simple compassion. For this, we can turn to Hulme’s formulation of Original Sin as it provides the most concise definition of sadness and its productive potential. Original Sin, in fact, lies behind all of Hulme’s work. It readily served him, as it did many pre-war moderns, as a kind of rhetorical shorthand for his radical anti-humanist pessimism, for his belief in the fallibility and instinctual corruption of the subject and society.9 Hulme’s earliest set of notes, for example, describes a fallen, imperfect landscape, out of which certain useful forms and illusions may emerge, but only to sink back into chaos. ‘The eyes, the beauty of the world, have been organized out of the faeces. Man returns to dust. So does the face of the world to primeval cinders… . The girl’s ball-dress and shoes are symbolic of the world organized (in counters) from the mud. Separate from contact’ (CW, p. 12). We also find this theory at the base of Hulme’s aesthetics. He celebrates the classical poet for remaining aware of this limit and the ultimate fallibility of man: for the classicist, ‘even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas’ (CW, p 62). And, of course, this pessimism also inspires Hulme’s Tory politics and his defense of religious dogma: ‘In the light of these absolute values, man himself is judged to be essentially limited and imperfect. He is endowed with Original Sin. While he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he can never himself be perfect… . As man is essentially bad, he can only accomplish anything of value by discipline – ethical and political’ (CW, p. 444).
Each of these formulations is founded upon a severe sense of tragedy – the dominant note throughout is a morose sadness. All of Hulme’s intellectual work is riddled with this deep melancholy, a dejection that is at once personal, social, and historical. The concept of Original Sin, however, can also be understood as the most productive aspect of his writing. Indeed, Original Sin is the initial thrust behind his late existential turn and his famous defense of a ‘justice’ that asserts the ‘equality of men’ (CW, p. 251). It can be read between the lines of his sympathetic account of Scheler’s treatise on German militarism and of his attempt to understand the causes behind the larger German war effort (CW, pp. 335-6). Most importantly, it reinforces his heroic efforts to save Epstein and his work from a brutal war machine; he claimed to be ‘fearfully revolted’ by Epstein’s potential death – ‘the thing is really tragic’ (Ferguson, 2002, pp. 260-1). In other words, in Hulme’s best work, what Latour might describe as his ‘non-modern’ work, Original Sin functions as a viable critical stance. It represents the critical betweenness of mankind after the fall, caught between a recognizable paradise and an unbearable necessity. It signals a tragic-heroic condition, a persistent recognition of higher values, but also an inevitable failure to attain them. Indeed, as a conceptual category, Original Sin is defined primarily by negations – the human is not divine, but neither is the human purely animal. It locates the thinker both above and below the body, as well as decisively within the body. It allows us to posit an absolute discontinuity between the ideal and the worldly as well as to confirm the utter conflation of the two. It grants us, in Hulme’s words, access to the three regions of reality: ‘Imagine these three regions’, he claims, ‘as the three zones marked out on a flat surface by two concentric circles. The outer zone is the world of physics, the inner that of religion and ethics, the intermediate one that of life’ (CW, p. 424). The intermediate region of life is’, he explains, ‘essentially relative’, so a ‘muddy mixed zone then lies between the two absolutes’ (CW, pp. 424-5).10 Hulme’s writings thus give a critical shape to sadness, an affective structure upon which an entirely new Weltanschauung might be based. He turns sadness into a firm epistemological basis, before reason and beyond psychology, neither a posited formalism nor a blind process of identification. Indeed, once the hot confusion of the ego lifts, Hulme’s emotional sphere attains a certain autonomy and a clear critical basis. Through sadness, a familiar dynamic of opposition and identification gives way to a hybrid sensation of distinction and empathy. Disgust and shame dissolve into a single state that is at once aware and affective, both knowing and invested – a stance, we might say, that is at one and the same time less guilty and more accepting.11
Again, a certain spiritual detachment mingles with a worldly selflessness, with an open affective potential – the ideal ego wrestles with a phenomenal intensity. The sad subject is not a subject at all, but something somewhere between consciousness, emotion, and affect, somewhere between itself and the given world. The sad subject occupies the position of the tragic itself, attuned to higher value, yet mixed up with its own corrupt pastness and futurity. It is committed to a kind of purity, yet invested in the fallen world it also creates. Once again, Scheler’s work helps us to understand the shape of Hulme’s emotion and its progressive aspects. In an essay on the tragic, he emphasizes the form’s emotional dimension, its play of hope and impossibility, striving and failure. In his formulation, tragic emotion at once acknowledges the possibility of a higher value, initiates the struggle for its attainment, and then admits the reasons for its impossibility. Indeed, the most significant tragic experience at once enacts and denies its own values – the greatest tragedies depict how the struggle for value confounds itself, the ways in which the necessary pursuit of higher value sometimes necessitates the expression of lower, less ideal values. More importantly, Scheler argues that while it is true that all tragic events are sad, they are sad in a particular sense. First and foremost, tragic sadness entails both a hopeful recognition of greater value as well as a calm acceptance of the failure to attain it. It remains aware of the permanence of values, beyond any worldly experience and humbly accepts their present impossibility. Relatedly, tragic sadness, while generated in the self, remains utterly detached from any specific object. Tragic sadness, he explains, is not psychological, but phenomenological – its investment begins with the worldly and ends with the absolute. It bemoans neither the loss of self nor the loss of an other, nor even the loss of history, but rather the terms of spiritual potential. Accordingly, ‘the specific sadness of the tragic is really an objective character of the event itself. It is independent of the individual circumstances of the beholder. It is free from the feeling provoked by excitement, indignation, blame, and the like. It is not accompanied by physical feelings or by what can be called real pain. It has a definite resignation, contentment, and a species of reconciliation with the existence which it chances to have’ (Scheler, 1954, pp. 181, 183).
Hence, the tragic sadness of modernity. The same force does away with the values it hopes to bring into being – the same traits bring to catastrophe what could have been brought to fulfillment. A commitment to love leads to chauvinism, the call for brotherliness leads to corporate exploitation, the desire for community leads to international warfare. Yet Scheler’s formulation asks us to see beyond anger, beyond ego-investment. Anger at once appears as capitulation to the modern logic of opposition and an adoption of the guilt they accrued. We experience hate towards the moderns, and thus remain hateful – disgusted, therefore full of disgust. Conversely, sadness becomes the possibility of a simultaneous distinction and acceptance. We are not the moderns, and we do not blame them – I am not my father, and he is not an evil god. As Hulme and Scheler both knew, sadness lies at the origin of true fellow feeling. Through sadness, idealism is tempered and resentment overcome; through sadness, other minds are brought to us as having ‘a reality equal to our own’, and this acceptance is the beginning of benevolence, ‘love of someone simply because he is human and has the semblance of the man’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 69). For these thinkers, sadness is a spiritually significant mode by which alienation and egotism are overcome; it prepares the way for charity, by which one can increase the range of objects accessible to charity, by which value is sustained and opened up beyond itself to greater value (Scheler, 1992, pp. 70, 72).12 Tragic sadness looks beyond ego, beyond patrilineage, beyond guilt. It eschews the question of guilt. It gives up the comfort of good and bad moderns. Everyone did his part, history went according to its plan, value was recognized and then destroyed – we have been given this knowledge: ‘Out of this pardonable search for a subject upon whom to pin this ‘guilt’ … only out of this appears that specific tragic grief and tragic sympathy of which we have been speaking, along with its unique peace and reconciliation of the emotions. Now too the shifting of that which is to be feared to the cosmos itself appears as the essence of the reconciliation of the individual men and wills with the culminating deeds and events in which they have been taking part’ (Scheler, 1992, p. 188).
Sadness may be the foundation of all emotional being. Sadness is the primary feeling – the first postlapsarian feeling – at once mired in purity and reborn in the muck, caught between an artificial ideal and the unlimited potential of the natural world. The most progressive moderns make a virtue of this interface, seeing within it the possibility of judgment as well as renewal, a necessary ideal and a necessary release from all idealism. Their sadness at once recognizes value as well as its defeat: it remains static, holding paradise in view, as it moves one into the world, amongst equals. This sadness is conscious and committed, yet it hums with life, it hums with the continuity of affect, with the perception of one’s own vitality and one’s place in the vital world (Massumi, 1995, p. 97). As I have been trying to argue, a tragic modernism might move us beyond the guilt of history, beyond the law of talion and continual expiation. Tragic modernism uncovers a way outside of ego, beyond psychoanalysis, and towards the local network, to the physiognomy of the local. It pushes us past the father, past the damning ambivalence of Oedipus; it welcomes us to the horde, the animistic clan, whose way of knowing is also a way of living. The most valuable scholarship may just be that which can feel its way through the field – a critical method that at once evaluates as it invests the landscape of our common history. Undoubtedly, Hulme’s own intellectual and personal failures occasioned this turn, but these failures continue to plague modernity at large. Indeed, his tragedy is ours. It begins in the public sphere, it culminates in the trenches of war; it is exacerbated by mass consumption, the fall of leaders, and the death of comrades. His great melancholy spirit is also our own. We can once again drown it out with march music or let it sing.
1 See Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body; Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents; Peter Nicholls, ‘Apes and Familiars’; Hal Foster, ‘Prosthetic Gods’; and Jessica Burstein, ‘Waspish Segments’.
2 According to Rei Terada, poststructuralist theory shows how theories of emotion have always been disruptive, if not outright antagonistic, to theories of subjectivity. For Terada, radical post-modern thought – as exemplified by de Man and Derrida – embraces emotion as ‘non-subjective experience in the form of self-difference within cognition’ and thus as the foundation of a radical post-humanist critique: ‘Poststructuralist thought about emotion is hidden in plain sight; poststructuralist theory deploys implicit and explicit logics of emotion and, as its very critics point out, willingly dramatizes particular emotions. It has reason to stress emotive experience, for far from controverting the “death of the subject”, emotion entails this death’ (p. 3).
3 I recognize that several other theorists have recently devised competing definitions and rubrics for organizing the terms of affective experience; however, I believe that Massumi’s schema best allows me to pinpoint the significance of the moderns’ turn to affect and emotion. Given the space, I would have tried to align my approach with that developed by Charles Altieri in his excellent book The Particulars of Rapture. Altieri goes far towards defining the terms of affective experience as it occurs apart from the demands of either transcendental belief systems or unconscious desires and fantasies. Indeed, his work is most valuable insofar as it pinpoints the values of affective experience in itself, as they are realized in the immediate and dynamic cultivation of affective stances. He also shows precisely why and how these values became attractive to modernists who thus pushed their work into new realms of expression and engagement. That said, I ultimately think that Altieri’s commitment to the particulars of affective being tends to obscure other values that, while concomitant to affective experience, were equally important to the modernists.
4 For a more extensive discussion of Hulme’s emphasis on touch, see Edward Comentale, Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-garde, pp. 120ff.
5 For Hulme on Scheler, see Hulme, Collected Writings, pp. 422 and 443. For Scheler’s biography, see Manfred Frings, Max Scheler and Harold J. Bershady, ‘Introduction’, in Max Scheler, On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing, pp. 1-46.
6 Quoted in Manfred Frings, Max Scheler, p. 94.
7 Adam Phillips is perhaps the best theorist of the modes and malfunctions of modernist psychology, and his work remains astutely aware of how this particular set of neurotic traits took shape as the theory of psychoanalysis. Not surprisingly, he recently turned his attention to Hulme’s biography and the question of modernist paranoia in a review titled ‘Hauteur’, in London Review of Books, (22 May 2003), pp. 10-12.
8 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
9 For Hulme and others on Original Sin, see Wallace Martin, The New Age under Orage; Dominic Baker-Smith, ‘Original Sin’; Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, pp. 101ff.
10 Such statements run counter to Raymond Williams’s critique of Hulme as a shameless absolutist opposed to human experience. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 190-5.
11 Freud, too, addresses the cultural persistence of the concept of Original Sin. In his work, though, its affective potential is recast in terms of paternal envy – Original Sin at once signals and manages a profound ambivalence towards the father (Totem, pp. 190ff.). Yet, later in this century, Freud’s German heirs will begin to look beyond the proscribed condition – the rigid relay of Oedipus – and recognize a certain sadness that is at once conscious, mobile, and transportive. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, in particular, explore melancholic loss as the foundation of a flexible critique. Adorno, in fact, explicitly defines the cultural critic as a complex bourgeois thinker perpetually caught within a state of Original Sin, at once removed from and embedded in the networks he hopes to analyze. See Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, pp. 155-200, 253-64; Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, pp. 17-34.
12 Here, again, our discussion of emotion finds itself both in and out of synch with psychological theory at large. The work of Melanie Klein, for example, charts a similar course from an early emphasis on anger and resentment towards a realization of the developmental necessity of sadness. Her theory is significant both for its depiction of paranoia and melancholy as related but competing attempts to protect the newly-emergent infantile ego and for its emphasis on the need to confront the former mode, particularly in its angry obsession with purity and degradation, with the latter’s caring incorporation and potential recognition of others. Klein’s work, however, seems problematic precisely because of its insistence on the need for healthy introjections and projections; as in Freud’s analysis, all is dependent on the developmental transition from part to whole objects and thus locked into the logic of subjective identification. See ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ and ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921-1945, pp. 262-89, 344-69.