One Sunday morning I had gone to Flemings in Oxford Street for a meal. This was a different kind of establishment from the new-fangled Flemings of today. It had retained quite a Victorian atmosphere, and so had most of the customers, whose appearance suggested that they were food-faddists or Plymouth Brethren or Jehovah Witnesses or something else a trifle odd.… On this particular occasion a burly young man with a massive, florid countenance came and sat down opposite me. At first glance I associated him with the open air and rural pursuits. Yes, probably a young gentlemanly farmer spending the weekend in town. He gave his order and then, to my astonishment, unfolded the Observer at the book review page. This hardly confirmed my surmise about him and I was left wondering who he could be.
Paul Selver, on first seeing T. E. Hulme, pp. 25-6
T. E. Hulme arrived in London in June 1906 and plunked himself down – quite literally – in the midst of the city’s most advanced artistic and intellectual circles. His striking figure – 6’2” and 14 stone – could be seen in the Oxford Street Flemings, the ABC in Chancery Lane, or the Café Royal in Piccadilly. It muscled its way into the Twenty One Group, the Poets’ Club, and the pages of the New Age, taking charge of the conversation and clearing room for the most radical voices of the day. By all accounts, this young man from Staffordshire made sure that he was a central player in the modernist primal scene, acting the role of café-swinging avant-gardiste with grand aplomb. Yet, as Selver’s statement suggests, Hulme arrived somewhat after the violent habits of modernism had already taken hold, and his self-fashioning was always vexingly contradictory. Hulme seems to have approached the modern scene once it had exposed its more regressive aspects and thus he always addressed it with a keen awareness of its paradoxes. His work, as it adopts one radical position after another, maintains a critical detachment from them all; his life, as it teeters uncomfortably between the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern, throws each of these moments into utter confusion as well as high relief. More pointedly, Hulme, as a self-fashioned public intellectual, seemed to resituate modernism in the complex, uneven trajectories of the public sphere. He certainly was not the first man to enjoy that particularly bourgeois pleasure of reading and eating at the same time, yet his writing wittily conflates reason and appetite, foregrounding the tensions between language and the body. His work, in fact, may be one of the first to theorize modernism as a unique social formation founded upon the constant production and consumption of discourse. This collection, then, focuses on Hulme as a figure who was always engaged in the act of digesting the cultural currents of his day. Similarly, it focuses on a moment of modernism that was always pointed elsewhere, to the structural homologies of Victorianism or the shocking discontinuities of postmodernism. This introduction serves to outline the significance of this Hulmean modernism first in relation to other modernist trajectories and then in relation to the history and recent directions of modernist scholarship.
Even in his own day, Hulme was known as a central turbine of modernity’s cultural swelter, addressing, adapting, and channeling the ideas and tendencies of the age. Socially, he was at the center of pre-war London’s most advanced intellectual circles. He was a member of the foundational Poets’ Club and then the Secession Club; he befriended and supported the newly expatriated Ezra Pound; he boxed with Wyndham Lewis in Soho Square; he debated with Rupert Brooke, Bertrand Russell, Jacob Epstein, Henri Bergson, Pierre Lasserre, Georges Sorel, and many others. Professionally, he published on a variety of topics in the most progressive journals of the day. He addressed a dizzyingly wide range of subjects – modern painting and sculpture, Byzantine design, parliamentary reform, colonial preference, pacifism – and he articulated and revised a number of theories – vitalism, impressionism, royalism, Liberalism, Toryism – for a new Anglo-American audience. A regular for the New Age, he also wrote for Poetry and Drama, Commentator, Cambridge Magazine, and Westminster Gazette. He translated popular versions of Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics and Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. Throughout, Hulme seems the fortunate victim of a particularly modernist wanderlust. His career – even though it was brief – shows a voracious mind, bouncing from one field to the next, from nation to nation, vexed by discontinuities, elated by homologies. Aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, politics, sculpture, religion – these supersede each other in his work with a vengeance, disclosing the consumerist ideology of the day, yet suggesting a painful quest to provide some other foundation for communal being.
Not surprisingly, Hulme’s versatility and his tendency towards overstatement have led to misinterpretations in all directions. While critics have always acknowledged his centrality, they tend either to reduce or to marginalize his ambivalent positions in relation to those of other, more easily categorized modernists such as Pound, Eliot, and even Lewis. But his real significance begins to emerge when we focus on him as one of the most important conduits for modern thought in the pre-1914 phase of a barely emergent British modernism, during which he functioned as a one man Vortex – ‘from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing’ (Pound, 1970, p. 92) – and when we see that his interventions are emblematic of modernism’s interleaved trajectories. His work, in fact, can be productively moved to the foreground of our discussion and celebrated precisely for its continual self-revisionism, its responsiveness to an uneven history, and its radical commitment to material discontinuities and restraints. Its restlessness provides a running critique of the many restrictive ideologies of the time and, in its seeming contradictoriness, demands a revision of the very categories through which we understand the past and its politics. Hulme’s interest in Bergson’s vitalism, for example, has been read by some critics as a contradictory lapse in an otherwise reactionary career. Hulme is thought to have been swept up in a faddish Bergsonisme before returning to the dogmatism of his later years. A closer look, however, shows that much of what Hulme admired in Bergson’s thought was already present in his own: the emptiness of rational thought, the impossibility of pure vision, the intensive structures of the material world; both thinkers condemned the ideological closure of a rational world and sought release in a more dynamic interplay of self and other. More importantly, perhaps, Hulme’s writings on Bergson actually draw out the phenomenological unity of the latter’s work and thus clarify its broad appeal to modernists of the left and the right; conversely, these writings expose Hulme’s early emphasis on relativism and discontinuity, features that also underpin his later, apparently more conservative, positions.
Similarly, Hulme’s interest in Sorel has been reduced to a collusion between uncompromising dogmatists. Hulme’s reading of Reflections on Violence, however, emphasizes the Sorelian critique of liberal ideology and recasts Sorelian ‘myth’ not as fascist demagoguery but working class self-consciousness. In other words, he finds in Sorel’s writing an alternative to modern liberalism that does not necessarily fall toward the fascism to which Sorel was eventually drawn. Discovering in Sorel’s work ‘a return of the classical spirit through the struggle of the classes’, Hulme goes on to claim: ‘It is this which differentiates Sorel’s from other attacks on the democratic ideology. Some of these are merely dilettante, having little sense of reality, while others are really vicious, in that they play with the idea of inequality. No theory that is not fully moved by the conception of justice asserting the equality of men, and which cannot offer something to all men, deserves or is likely to have any future’ (CW, p. 251). Much like Hulme himself, this footnote to Hulme’s essay on Sorel needs to be brought to the forefront of the discussion – not simply because it complicates the critical perception of Hulme as inseparable from a male-centered, reactionary modernism, but because it confounds the categories upon which that version of modernism and its postmodern critique have been founded.
It is precisely those aspects of Hulme’s work that made him so popular amongst his contemporaries that force us to reconsider how we study modernism. Hulme’s work proved attractive in its ability to expose the creative destruction of the period and test alternative modes of social organization. On the one hand, we here find Hulme at his most reactionary. His critique of modernity focuses on the reification of romantic ideology and traces its corrupt effects in all areas of thought: liberalism in politics, relativism in philosophy, positivism in science, dynamism in the arts. ‘What is at the bottom of this religious conviction?’ Hulme asks. ‘It is a perfectly simple thing. It is a belief in inevitable “Progress”, the belief that the forces of things are themselves making for good, and that good will come even when things are left to themselves’ (CW, p. 222). Hulme’s self-proclaimed classicism served to counter this naïve exaltation of perfectionism with its concomitant, an uncurbed productivism, and to find solid values upon which a more stable social order could be built. Checks and balances were called for in all areas: against emotion in poetry, against liberals in Parliament, against Germans at war. In Hulme’s famous justification: ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him’ (CW, p. 61).
Hulme’s classicism, however, was not simply a justification of personal and cultural restraint, but a critical method that worked to expose the inevitable restraints of all historical shifts and paradigms. It points again and again to the body in the public sphere, the grit in the machine, the earth that exceeds and confounds the apparent solution. Throughout, symbolic constructions are proven to be relative and thus subject to deconstruction and collapse. In fact, for Hulme, classicism, fascism, and all other nominal dogmatisms are each only an ‘attitude’, a creation of appetite that must change with that appetite: ‘These little theories of the world, which satisfy and are then thrown away, one after the other, develop not as successive approximations to the truth, but like successive thirsts, to be satisfied at the moment, and not evolving to one great Universal Thirst’ (CW, p. 14). In such statements, Hulme reveals affinities with some of the most thought-provoking and disruptive modernisms of the twentieth century, such as the post-Marxism of Adorno and Arendt, the phenomenology of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the deconstruction of de Man and Derrida. In other words, Hulme is already centrally involved in the inevitable and ceaseless overturning of modernisms that has passed into postmodernity and postmodern criticism. In his work, all history – political, literary, or otherwise – is a modality, a constant recreation of new forms out of the old. It is a difficult, destructive/constructive process, full of gaps and discontinuities, subject to opposition and thus revision.
Similarly, Hulme’s typically modernist desire for intellectual synthesis forced him to push beyond the drive for totalization that is so often attributed to modernism in all its variable modalities. His preferred method of choice was analogical, and he sought unusual homologies and collocations through which Europe, if not history itself, could be redeemed. Yet, unlike Eliot and Pound, whose passions tended to elide the particularities of their discoveries, Hulme found that his project consistently ran ashore of irreducible gaps and crags. Despite his best efforts (and they carried him far abroad and far into the past), modernity would not resolve into a coherent whole and history itself seemed to be an uneven, at times regressive process. Tellingly, Hulme defined his own career in terms of a similar unevenness, as an ever-changing modality running up against, and thus renewed by, its own limitations. As he explained, each of his self-adopted dogmas was nothing more than a provisional shell, and a ‘shell is a very suitable covering for the egg at a certain period of its career, but very unsuitable at a later age’ (CW, p. 56). The discontinuities in Hulme’s thought appear most starkly in the shifts he made from one field to the next. The most traumatic moment occurred when, after meeting with the anti-liberal Pierre Lasserre, he realized that his Bergsonian metaphysics could not easily be aligned with his Tory politics. Hulme, perhaps bravely, made the conflict public in the pages of the New Age, exposing before his peers the ideological faultlines of his own thought and its bourgeois biases (CW, p. 165).
Hulme’s attempt to theorize a historical dialectic and thus the emergence of the modern period exposed similar discontinuities. While a residual Hegelianism in his thought led him to posit an oscillation of romantic and classical periods, the materialist in him knew that history was an untidy affair, fractured in its development and diverse in its effects. He saw in modern art a new turn away from romanticism, but considered that in other fields, particularly philosophy and ethics, ‘the critical attitude of mind which demands romantic qualities … still survives’ (CW, p. 65). Even in its final, most dogmatic phase, Hulme’s method remained open to dissonant material factors (the demise of the Liberal party, the reality of trench warfare, Epstein’s sculpture) and thus continued to carry itself beyond itself. In contrast to Eliot or Pound, this classicist continually undermined his own potential absolutism by dramatizing the terms of its all too material construction and disclosing the awkward tensions that ensure change. He was led, even in his final demand for restraint, to proclaim ‘discontinuity’ as the most compelling basis of any epistemic or ethical order, an assertion that also vaunted his hostility to modernist strains in thrall to progressivist optimism:
One of the main achievements of the nineteenth-century was the elaboration and universal application of the principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, a pressing necessity of the present … When any fact seems to contradict this principle, we are inclined to deny that the fact really exists. 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. For an objective view of reality we must make use both of the categories of continuity and discontinuity. (CW, p. 423)
With this principle in mind, all of Hulme’s proclamations take on a new cast. As suggested below, Hulme’s work, at the very moment of modernism’s inception, was already opening up the field to ‘new’ and ‘other’ modernisms: his work provides an engaged model for all recent efforts to theorize the uneven terrain of modernity.
This collection of essays, then, asserts that Hulme’s work speaks for a modernism that should be seen as an internally fissured phenomenon. Hulme’s particular brand of modernism offers a unique glimpse into the wider movement’s fundamental contradictions, its productive excesses and complicated hopes. But in making this claim we are striving neither to restore Hulme to canonical status nor to reconstruct a scholarly canon around a unified reading of Hulme. If Hulme is in any way representative of modernism, it is only because his work foregrounds (so early in its formation) its inconsistencies and paradoxes. In this sense, he must be read primarily as expressive of a reconfigured modernist field, one that is self-consciously revisionist insofar as it is riven by its own anxieties, tensions, and indissoluble problems. We intend the following discussion – which spans the multiple topics Hulme addressed – to be characterized by the self-reflexive urgency of Hulme’s own writing. We embrace its many discontinuities and contradictions, recognize its sometimes totalizing impulses, and appreciate its at times chaotic relativism. In fact, if there is any overarching scheme to which the following analyses loosely conform, it is that modernist criticism, in its perhaps traumatic response to modernist history, has become too schematic as well as too fragmented. As some of the essays make clear, modernist scholarship has all too easily drawn up sides and neatly categorized its heroes and villains. Concurrently, celebrations of new alternative modernisms, especially those that seek to recover forgotten or ignored texts and writers, often neglect modernism’s uneven history. In contrast, we see Hulmean modernism as that which can at once expose the deeper complexities of the period as well as its sometimes maddening consistencies.
Perhaps Hulme’s earliest work, ‘Cinders’, provides the best model for the modernism we hope to describe and emulate.1 Here, in this seemingly random set of scribbled notes, the young philosopher leaps from one unsatisfactory solution to another. One by one, he deconstructs the attitudes of the age by foregrounding the irreducible contingencies – the particular desires and material restraints – that confound all cultural production. Yet, for Hulme, this critique contained the very hope of renewal. His emphasis on contingency becomes the point at which a potentially more conscious social reconstruction is made possible: ‘A landscape, with occasional oases. So now and then we are moved – at the theatre, action, a love. But mainly deserts of dirt, ash-pits of the cosmos, grass on ash-pits. No universal ego, but a few definite persons gradually built up’ (CW, pp. 11-12). Miriam Hansen offers the best description of this attitude and the modernist challenge it poses for us today. For her, Hulme’s work contains an unusual ‘dialectic of provocation and affirmation’ (Hansen, 1980, p. 371). It displays a typically avant-garde need to ‘explode the organic unity of a poem from within’, yet its emphasis on the ‘fragmentary’ and ‘non-organic’ links human experience with the creation of ‘absolute values’ (Hansen, 1980, pp. 370-1). For Hansen, Hulme’s work recalls Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory; both are informed by a melancholic sense of an ‘empty world’, but, in their unflinching materialism, maintain the possibility of reconstruction, a ‘“new sense of form,” a sense of “construction”’ (Hansen, 1980, p. 379). In this collection we attempt to offer a new sense of Hulme’s work, suggesting that it needs to be ‘constructed’ otherwise than heretofore. What needs to be addressed, then, is precisely how previous critical misunderstandings of Hulme came about, how recent developments in criticism might serve to correct this, and how this collection of essays proposes to help in this revisionary process.
Hulme’s thought took language as its theoretical foundation, and it is through this problematic that his modernism can best be defined. Hulme’s intellectual development proceeds from early interests in philosophical nominalism and the construction of poetic form, and it is only out of these original studies that he came to consider more pressing political issues, such as the Bergsonian revolution, the demise of liberalism, and the significance of trench warfare. Moreover, Hulme’s work – in form and content – was geared toward the various institutions of the modern public sphere. His ideas were developed in cafés, at salons, and on the pages of journals; his writings are saturated with the material sites of their production, emphasizing the mood of a lecture hall, the atmosphere of a restaurant, the tenor of a debate. At the same time, his work offers one of the most sustained theoretical accounts of modernist discourse. It expresses an early self-consciousness about the discursive shaping of mass opinion, deploying the concept of Weltanschauung as a subtle process by which linguistic constructions are naturalized (CW, p. 433). It is precisely these thoughts on language that established his reputation and influence among other modernists. His theories of the image and analogy provided the foundations for modern poetics; his discursive elaboration of ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Classicism’ played a major role in the best political writing of the period, and his accounts of national myths and propaganda initiated a long twentieth-century tradition in British letters that extends in different ways from Wyndham Lewis to Raymond Williams and late twentieth-century cultural studies in general. In its emphasis on language, Hulme’s work sheds much light on modernism not only as a specific literary formation, but also as a significant moment in the history of the public sphere.
In several key ways, Jürgen Habermas’s dream of a rational public sphere is already realized in Hulme’s work and social milieu. Certainly, by the late nineteenth century, the logic of capitalism had learned to manage this zone of critical engagement, yet the institutions that fostered debate persisted. In Hulme’s writings, one is struck by the persistence of a bourgeois faith in rational debate, a certain respect for amateur criticism, and a keen desire for intellectual synthesis across institutions. In fact, at its most refined, Hulme’s classicism harks back to the eighteenth-century golden age of genteel salons and genteel debates, and in this guise is a more robust, more modern, version of Ford Madox Ford’s nostalgic longing for a lost world: ‘I should like to see revived a state of things in which port wine and long leisure over the table, and donnish, maybe rather selfish manners and high gentlemanly traditions, possibly a little too heavy drinking, and classical topics for discussion – in which all these things were considered to be the really high standard of living’ (Hueffer, 1915, p. 300). Hulme’s conception (in this, like Ford’s) sought to preserve certain public spaces from the corruption of economics, and thus ensure that citizens could free their minds from passionate interests.
But for Hulme it was also from within these spaces that social redress could take place; adopting an anti-Arnoldian stance, Hulme insisted on the link between ideas and practices. Debate within the public sphere entailed the possibility of intervening in cultural life in order to bring about change. Astradur Eysteinsson’s view of modernism as ‘an attempt to interrupt the modernity that we live and understand it as a social, if not “normal” way of life’ (Eysteinsson, 1990, p. 6) exactly captures the nature of Hulme’s project – he not only intervened polemically in numerous debates of his day but also engaged in theoretical speculation so as to defend wider socio-political theses.2 Ultimately, Hulme, perhaps more than any other modernist, typifies Habermas’s account of the bourgeois subject as a self-defined amateur critic; he, too, knew of ‘no authority beside that of the better argument’ and felt himself ‘at one with all who were willing to let themselves be convinced by argument’ (Habermas, 2001, p. 41). Hulme, throughout his work, defended these principles and their related ideal of access and consensus: ‘The history of philosophers we know, but who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers? Who will tell us of the circulation of Descartes, who read the book and who understood it? Or do philosophers, like the mythical people on the island, take in each other’s washing? For I take it, a man who understands philosophy is inevitably irritated into writing it’ (CW, p. 7).
Hulme’s writing, while always belligerent, shows a remarkable commitment to an open-ended dialectical method. He is as likely to admit his uneasiness over a position as he is to state a viewpoint with dogmatic certainty. In much of his writing he reflects on past intellectual errors, explains why he made them, and then clarifies how he hopes his current thinking will enable him to overcome them. In fact, no matter what the issue, Hulme tends to present both views, and while at times the deck is stacked against one, sometimes he simply throws up his hands and calls upon ‘those people who have perhaps been prejudiced by ignorant and biased criticism to go and judge for themselves’ (CW, p. 262). Karen Csengeri notes that Herbert Read’s version of ‘A Notebook’ gave it a ‘polish’ that ‘obscures the “cindery” aspect of the work’ (CW, p. xxxv). This cinderiness is perhaps the most important feature of Hulme’s writing, which may be declarative in tone but always gives the impression of thought in process, of a vigorous mind worrying at problems even as it announces apparent solutions to them. It often belies the provisionality of the positions he takes up; he states a case in the strongest terms possible in order to invite the expected rebuttal or refutation and thus to promote debate. Several of Hulme’s essays, in fact, were notes written to himself (and not necessarily intended for publication) which goes some way to explaining their unfinished form. But other pieces were originally lectures or articles, and these formats point to Hulme’s passionate commitment to the role of public intellectual actively engaged in contributing to and maintaining the public sphere.
Apparently, Tuesday nights at Hulme’s 67 Frith Street Salon occasioned a similar kind of debate. The host was affable, encouraging; he invited thinkers who were diverse in perspective, profession, and nationality (Jacob Epstein, Ramiro de Maeztu, Florence Farr), and his selected topics straddled a myriad issues and debates (ballet, colonial preference, Darwin). According to one participant, Hulme’s character was ‘at once authoritative and genial’, and this ‘made him an ideal leader of such assemblies’; he had ‘a most dominating personality, by means of which, however, he used to draw out the opinions of his guests and stimulate debate rather than to impose his own views’ (Jones, 1960, pp. 92-3). Hulme’s chosen outlet for written work – the New Age – operated on similar terms. Under A. R. Orage’s editorship, the journal welcomed scholars of all sorts of professional affiliations; it encouraged a mingling of institutional discourses, and openly proclaimed its commitment to discussion as ‘the rational remedy for everything’. Although the journal was born out of Fabianism, and promoted radical doctrines such as Guild Socialism and Social Credit, it insisted upon political freedom and reasoned debate as the precursor to any progress. As one editorial claimed, ‘friend and enemy of Socialism alike will find the need more and more insistent of some neutral ground where intelligences may meet on equal terms… . We shall therefore continue to invite and welcome discussion even when, as sometimes happens, our own cherished convictions are first to be challenged’ (Martin, 1967, pp. 38-9).
Other aspects of Hulme’s work and his milieu, however, seriously challenged the logic of the bourgeois public sphere. Hulme, as mentioned, arrived on the scene precisely at that moment when the promises of capitalist order, particularly as they were couched in terms of a beneficent liberalism, began to grow stale. He and his small coterie were able to turn the audience-oriented subjectivity of the bourgeois against itself, directing critical awareness to the ideology of the bourgeoisie itself. In other words, Hulme’s work everywhere wrestles with the Enlightenment distinction of the public citizen and the private soul: it calls into question the ideological dynamic that all too easily universalizes the bourgeois subject and the values upon which the bourgeois world has been constructed. First and foremost, it exposes ‘reason’ itself as an historical formation, contorted by class and riddled with relativity. Any particular position, he argues, ‘may look like an intellectual decision, but it isn’t’ (CW, pp. 207-8). All belief, even Hulme’s own, is driven by ‘instinct’, ‘appetite’, and ‘desire’ (CW, p. 211). More damningly, Hulme exposes the collusion of the rational public sphere with the consumerist logic of the marketplace. Everywhere in his writing, thinking and eating overlap – new ideas, new arts, and new identities feed a market bent on complete reification. In considering whether Bergson is a true philosopher or merely a fad, he writes:
The answer to that I should put in this way: the opposing sides in this dispute, I supposed, represented by opposing factions in the market-place – always remembering, of course, that the market-place exists inside of you. These factions represent not only the various views it is possible to hold, but also the force with which these views press themselves on your mind. Beliefs are not only representations, they are also forces, and it is possible for one view to compel you to accept it in spite of your preference for another. (CW, p. 136)
Yet, beyond theory, it is Hulme’s own polemical style that most radically undermines the claims of the rational public sphere. The body – its appetites and desires – intrudes constantly in his prose, inflating, distorting, and contradicting its self-proclaimed sensibility. Interestingly, Hulme tended to exaggerate his North Staffordshire accent when speaking in public, and his arguments returned again and again to his rural background. Throughout his writings, too, he affects a certain rustic simplicity, partly macho and partly naïve. He presents himself as a low-minded dilettante, preoccupied with the most vulgar needs and desires. His metaphors are decisively sexual, his images graphically abject. Ideas are merely ‘food’ to be ‘devoured’; they should be judged ‘from the status of animals’ (CW, p. 14). More radically, the threat of physical exposure and violence always lurks within his prose. Famously, in the pages of the New Age, Hulme turned his polemical rage against Anthony Ludovici’s negative assessment of primitive sculpture; after some cursory remarks on Ludovici’s faulty scholarship, he declared that the ‘most appropriate means of dealing with him would be a little personal violence. By that method one removes a nuisance without drawing more attention to it than its insignificance deserves’ (CW, p. 260). Hulme’s style, at once affectedly naïve and spontaneously violent, tells us a good deal about modernity in relation to capital and the public sphere. It both upholds the progressivist ethos of the bourgeois world and undermines it; it advances a dialectic of interestedness and enlightenment, yet inverts its very terms.3
Hulme, in other words, appears caught between historical moments in the history of the public sphere. More succinctly, his fraught polemic exposes the modernist fantasy of immediacy as always already a construction and reveals the postmodern fantasy of complete mediation as a decisively material effect. One might argue, in fact, that Hulme’s peculiar position led him to develop one of the last century’s most progressive accounts of ideology and ideological critique. Yes, his work is notable for its flirtation with political propaganda, its defense of totalitarian mythmaking, and its ultimate celebration of religious dogma. From start to finish, Hulme asserts the inevitability of ideological manipulation and so demands only more effective forms of manipulation. Yet this same work remains keenly aware of ideology’s constructedness, and thus refuses to posit anything but the most pragmatic absolutes. While it systematically denies any essential truth, it recognizes the necessity as well as the possibility of a better truth, a view that accords with his insistence that the Hegelian conception of human progress is spurious metaphysics, and that progress should rather be seen as piecemeal change, as ‘accumulation rather than alteration in capacity’ (CW, p. 241). This position most clearly informs the paradoxical process that Hulme calls ‘conversion’. Since prejudice is unavoidable, he argues, the political thinker can only ask for a clarification of a given position’s ‘first principles’; the factors that determine belief cannot be destroyed, but it is possible to get at their ‘exact contours’ (CW, p. 240). Hulme is not convinced that we can end ideology simply by disclosing its modes of production. Instead, he asks for a self-consciousness or doubling of that ideology, one that removes the ‘veil which hides man’s own real position from himself’ (CW, p. 233). He proposes that ‘exhibiting the intimate connection between such conceptions … and certain economical conditions at the time of their invention in the eighteenth century, does more than anything else to loosen their hold over the mind’ (CW, pp. 248-9).
Hulme’s later writing develops this notion by focusing on its uncompromising materialism and flexible pragmatism. In ‘A Notebook’, he calls for a ‘critique of satisfaction’ by which it is proven that human attitudes are always purposive and thus not only ‘demonstrably false’ (CW, p. 436), but also ‘unsatisfactory’ (CW, p. 438). Clearly, Hulme presents this critique as the foundation of religious experience. It inspires a new ‘attitude of renunciation’ (CW, p. 433), a ‘feeling for certain absolutes, which are entirely independent of vital things’ (CW, p. 426). Yet Hulme also insists that the critical gesture must be continuous, forever shadowing cultural production; renunciation must be constant, inspired by the recognition of humanity’s ceaseless failure and thus by the possibility of better forms. With this apparent paradox, we enter a certain pragmatic modality in which ‘form’ – political or otherwise – ‘follows the need in each case’ (CW, p. 257). As Patricia Rae suggests, Hulme was productively caught between relativism and dogmatism, original sin and absolute ethics: ‘However definitive a theory may seem, however attached emotionally he may have become to it, he must be constantly vigilant to ensure that it is not betrayed by the ongoing performance. When it ceases to be corroborated by evidence, or to be of any practical utility, it must be rapidly dismantled, and another, more satisfactory one erected in its place’ (1989, p. 52). This pragmatism, in fact, plays a key part in all of Hulme’s thought. Preoccupied with the techniques of rhetoric and oratory, Hulme believed that the arts of persuasion depend not on truth-claims but on their power to rouse and sway the emotions. Concern with the falsifying nature of concepts, the ineradicably personal dimension to philosophical systems, the impossibility of gaining an over-arching view of life, and the limitations of abstract thought led to a pragmatist suspicion of language and to the desire for immersion in the real. His emphasis on the need for new vocabularies thus derived from a pragmatist belief that suasiveness depended on an appeal to existing beliefs and from a modernist conviction – which aligns his views on poetry with his views on politics – that linguistic renewal lay at the basis of any wider social renovation.
But it was Hulme’s writing and thinking about poetic language that had the greatest impact upon his contemporaries. Here, his work is founded upon the conviction that a transformative potential could inhere in a particular conception of modern art. His theory of the image became a cornerstone of modernist poetics as well as modernist politics in that it emphasized an anti-romantic return to objective language and thus functioned, particularly in the hands of Eliot and Pound, as a critique of a corrupt bourgeois tradition and the abstractions of the market place. For all these writers, the harsh austerity and anti-organic intensity that could overthrow a degraded humanism (all emotional excess and moral uplift) were contrasted to the diminuendo of arts that passed themselves off as new but were actually the pale effluence of aestheticism. But in Hulme we also find a keen materialism, an insistence upon difficulty and restraint that served to curb, at least in his own writings, political excesses. Hulme, for example, insists that the poet ‘turn all his words into visions, in realities we can see’ (CW, p. 24). The empty abstractions of conventional discourse, he writes, need to be replaced with ‘real solid vision or sound’ (CW, p. 24). Indeed, for Hulme, the visual image is only the starting point for an even more concrete theory of language. His writings on poetry quickly shift from the thing seen to a tangible objectification of the sign; the image is reconceived as a physical force, a ‘real solid’; poetry, he argues, must approach the condition of sculpture: ‘Each sentence should be a lump, a piece of clay … a wall touched with soft fingers’ (CW, p. 25).4 Hulme, then, may yearn for a union of signifier and signified, for a renewed logos, but the strength of this model is that it recognizes the incredibly difficult process of expression. His writings at times privilege a masculinist doctrine of expressive force, but the fantasy of the organic sign is always tempered by the inevitable tensions within language itself.5 For Hulme, language is no less resistant than stone or iron; the poet must shape a stubborn, everyday speech. Similar tensions also inform aesthetic reception: the ideal work of art exerts a tangible pressure upon its surroundings; the hard forms of sculpture and poetry remain in the imagination. Ultimately, the entire creative process, like history itself, is restrictive, bound to a stubborn materiality. The artist is ‘forced’ to use a language that the perceiver ‘feels’. Nothing is created or perceived ‘out of vacuo’ (CW, pp. 26-7). By foregrounding these tensions, Hulme advances a theory of representation that radically undermines the romantic distinction between experience and expression, between world and word. He hints at a more dynamic language and thus a more supple epistemology, one that is both perceptive and creative, conscious and vital.
In fact, Hulme’s work consistently proclaims the merits of aesthetic dissonance and formal imperfection. Much like Theodor Adorno’s, it suggests that it is only in the gaps and fissures of discourse that we find critical purchase: ‘philosophers no longer believe in absolute truth. We no longer believe in perfection, either in verse or in thought, we frankly acknowledge the relative. We shall no longer strive to attain the absolutely perfect form in poetry’ (CW, pp. 52-3). Relatedly, Hulme’s celebration of mechanical form in art suggests not simply a defensive male egotism, but a more complex interest in engineering and the difficulties of construction, both of which require conscious thought and an active participation in the creation of new structures and mechanisms. In his account of modern architecture, for example, Hulme assaults the passivity of contemporary artists and calls for an interventionism that is inseparable from the wider process of revisioning that his own aesthetic envisages:
At present the artist is merely receptive in regard to machinery. He passively admires, for example, the superb steel structures which form the skeletons of modern buildings, and whose gradual envelopment in a parasitic covering of stone is one of the daily tragedies to be witnessed in London streets. Will the artist always remain passive, or will he take a more active part? The working out of the relation between art and machinery can be observed at present in many curious ways. Besides the interest in machinery itself, you get the attempt to create in art, structures whose organization, such as it is, is very like that of machinery. (CW, pp. 282-3)
Here, Hulme inspires the more progressive work of his heirs, perhaps most notably the Wyndham Lewis of The Caliph’s Design (1919) in his utopian insistence that a ‘complete reform … of every notion or lack of notion on the significance of the appearance of the world should be instituted’ in order that a ‘gusto, a consciousness should imbue the placing and the shaping of every brick’ in the modern metropolis (1986, p. 28).6 More broadly, we can see that Hulme’s poetics, his emphasis on the phenomenology of language aligns his work with the discursive deconstruction later undertaken by figures such as Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida. Interestingly enough, a modernist who has been often derided as proto-fascist sows the seeds of a much more progressive project of integration, one that is articulated in relation at once to a theory of language and to a nascent radical politics. His work undermines the romantic dream of otherness – gendered, national, or otherwise – and exposes the ways in which all subject positions, whether dominant or dominated, are linguistically constructed through and against each other.
Any attempt to reconsider Hulme’s writings and to make a case for their continuing relevance to modernism entails reflection on the shifts that have in recent years taken place within the field of modernist studies. Up to a decade ago, the postmodernity/postmodernism doublet appeared to have colonized the terrain of late twentieth-century scholarship, the new critical paradigm displacing its progenitor from the centre of debate. Modernism suffered in a number of ways: it was seen as the forerunner of a postmodernism that either completed or broke with it, but that in any case definitively superseded it; dismissed for its elitist advocacy of ‘high’ culture and contempt for ‘mass’ culture; criticized for its positive evaluation of the aesthetic as a category and its subsequent quest for perfection of form and artistic autonomy; deplored for its indifference and/or hostility to alterity; and questioned the role it played in establishing a new literary canon and promoting a formalist critical practice. Modernism, ultimately, was compromised by its association on the one hand with an aestheticist strain that sought redemption in art and on the other hand with the failure of the avant-gardes to transform capitalist society and to resist its power to commodify their protest. The time of postmodernity – seen in periodizing terms as emerging after the Second World War – could then be read as marking the break with modernity and its problematic arts. Postmodernism was seen not only to write finis to a particular historical moment but to inaugurate an anti-foundationalist, anti-transcendentalist sensibility characterized by dissolution of high/low boundaries, respect for otherness, and a playful, ironic, half-serious conception of art and its objects.
Postmodernism had its critics from the outset, of course, and its reading of modernism was always contested, but for much of the 1970s and 1980s it set the terms of debate with reference to itself. Recent critics, bored perhaps by increasingly sterile polemics over the exact relations between modernism and postmodernism, have altered these terms of debate by returning to a detailed study of the former, addressing it through a number of questions that differ from previous lines of inquiry. The result has led the concept or category of modernism to be reconfigured. Indeed, it appears at times as though we never really knew it at all, a view articulated in T. J. Clark’s contention that ‘the modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp’, that modernism ‘is unintelligible now because it had truck with a modernity not yet fully in place’ (1999, p. 2 and p. 3). For Clark, this is not to be taken as meaning that we now inhabit a new postmodern age but rather that the modernity heralded by modernism has finally come to pass; postmodernism sets its face against what it thinks of as ‘the ruin of modernity itself’, failing to see that, by way of the ‘holocaust’ of modernization, ‘what we are living through is modernity’s triumph’ (1999, p. 3).7 An alternative view, principally associated with the work of Habermas, is equally sceptical about postmodernism’s hegemonic claims but suggests that a modernity traceable back to the Enlightenment remains an unfinished ‘project’ that needs to be criticized from within so that its emancipatory potential can finally be fulfilled.8 On this view, modernity has not triumphed but has been distorted from its original radical implications.
Clark and Habermas offer only two out of many possible analyses of modernity’s history, but their readings of this recent past are symptomatic in that they urge a return to the questions that must still be addressed to the modernity/modernism nexus. How valid are earlier views of modernism as a heroic aesthetic championing the auratic power of art and trying to withstand the pressures of a commodified culture? How was modernism marketed and sold, and what roles in this process were played by authors, literary agents, publishers, readers, libraries, and bookshops – in short, what were the institutional and professional contexts in which modernism emerged? Where should modernism be located geographically (which cities, which countries) and what urban spaces did it traverse (museums, arcades, streets, cafés, department stores)? What is modernism’s past, where are its origins and ends, what is its relation to avant-gardism? Should modernism and the avant-garde be seen as historical categories or as trans-historical ‘concepts’ of an ideal type? How does modernism look when considered from the perspectives of feminism, racial politics, or post-colonialism, which raise questions about its formation and self-understanding, focusing on its complicity with strategies of exclusion and appropriation?
Recent attempts to answer such questions have resulted in revisionist accounts that have transformed the field of modernist studies. It would be unwise in an introduction such as this to try to cover this ground comprehensively, but it is worth touching on those areas that are pertinent to this volume’s reconsideration of Hulme. In doing this, we propose to cut across what are well established lines of inquiry in order to stress the similarities between their underlying assumptions. Earlier scholarship, while always attuned to the broken shards and luminous details of most modernist writing, seemed inclined to subsume these fragments to a unity of some kind, a view articulated by Bradbury and MacFarlane in their influential book Modernism: ‘there is a preservative element in Modernism, and a sense of primary epistemological difficulty; the task of art is to redeem, essentially or existentially, the formless universe of contingency’ (1978, p. 50). Bradbury and MacFarlane were attentive to the complex interactions between modernism’s various strands, but their own revisionist account tended to emphasize form and ideas rather than material practices, to identify modernism with male figures, and to see these figures as somehow able to gain a vantage point outside the social processes they rejected, celebrated, or sought to transform. Conversely, what emerges from contemporary revisionist scholarship is an almost relentless focus on modernism’s multiplicity, plurality, open-endedness, and instability. Modernism is now conceived less in terms of particular movements or individual figures and more in terms of its characteristic tendency to cross boundaries, disturb classifications, and weave together multiple discourses. Critics who have concentrated on this interpenetration of trajectories have tended to invoke a plurality of modernisms.9 These accounts offer detailed empirical work on the relations between modernism’s various strands and rely on theoretical models that construe modernity as a reflexive and multi-dimensional space in which there is a complex interplay between a range of mutually imbricated practices. The emphasis on multiplicity in such accounts militates against totalizing readings of modernism and draws attention to the interested nature of particular critical interventions. New lines of inquiry open modernism out and, as it were, fragment it further still by asking questions that reveal hitherto concealed textual, cultural, and economic relations.10 Feminists and post-colonialists, for example, have reconfigured modernism by pulling previously ignored issues into its orbit. In the process of doing so they have not only uncovered the often undeclared assumptions underpinning previous versions of modernism, but also disclosed the ways in which critical discourses (including their own) construct their object of inquiry in relation to present-day concerns and theoretical paradigms.11
Relatedly, modernism has been opened up by a return to its economic and institutional contexts. For example, its analysis is given over to the complex relations binding readers, authors, markets, and wider social structures, which, in Lawrence Rainey’s formulation, shifts the grounds of inquiry: ‘To focus on those institutions, instead, is to view Modernism as more than a series of texts or a set of ideas that found expression in them. It becomes a social reality, a configuration of agents and practices that converge in the production, marketing, and publicization of an idiom, a shareable language within the family of twentieth-century tongues’ (1999, p. 34).12 Within this perspective, which concentrates on the various consequences entailed by the late nineteenth-century professionalization of writing, modernism ceases to be a heroic project resistant to the imperatives of commodity culture and becomes part of a network of relations firmly placed within the capitalist economy. This does not mean that writers should henceforth be seen as toadies to a system they often deplored, but rather that simplistic distinctions between ‘high’ culture and capitalist markets are wide of the mark; as Joyce Wexler has observed, publishers promoted work that attacked the bourgeois society to which they themselves manifestly belonged, and modernists, while extolling the virtues of obscurity, desired wide readerships (1997, p. xix).13
With one or two exceptions, Hulme criticism has paid little attention to the multi-dimensional aspects of his work and thought. Early accounts of Hulme’s writing concentrated principally on his involvement with the Imagist movement, his championing of British avant-garde art and sculpture, and his emphasis on the romantic/classical antithesis. Much of this criticism was bedevilled by the problems caused by the improper dating of Hulme’s essays and by editorial decisions made by Herbert Read when he collected some of Hulme’s writings for the publication of Speculations (1924). A lot of early criticism emphasized the incoherence and derivativeness of Hulme’s thought. Hulme was presented as little more than a mediator of ideas that others had had before him and that they had often explained with greater clarity than he himself could manage.14 Many critics were also preoccupied with the romantic/classical antithesis, which they took to be a central component of Hulme’s work, and some devoted much energy to demonstrating that Hulme was himself deeply indebted to the romantic tradition.15 Yet it is our contention that Hulme’s reversals, confusions, and contradictions speak clearly to the most progressive criticism conducted today. Hulme’s importance to the theorization of new and other ‘modernisms’ can scarcely be over-emphasized, in part because he was so influential to the development of what we now think of as early modernism, and in part because, drawing on so many disciplines in his writing, he transmitted to England many of the European traditions of thought that assisted in modernism’s complex birth. His work can also teach us a lot about our own efforts to shift emphases from auratic works to institutionally embedded practices, from artistic isolation to networks of professional relations, from aesthetic purism to the question of the public sphere.
The real critical breakthrough in Hulme scholarship came with Michael Levenson’s work in The Genealogy of Modernism (1982), which identified the dates at which Hulme wrote his essays and clarified the shifts in his thought. Levenson was concerned to establish the intelligibility of Hulme’s various positions and this could only be done, he claimed, if it was grasped that Hulme changed his mind on a number of issues.16 It is from this position that our collection roughly takes its cue. Because Hulme discussed so many of the aesthetic, cultural, and political issues that have loomed large in modernism’s subsequent trajectories, and because he altered his views as his thought developed or new problems hove into view, the work he performed provides valuable insights into modernism’s origins. But if we invoke the notion of origins here it is not to proclaim Hulme as a beneficent progenitor; we see him as a symptom, rather, of the expanded field of modernism with which we are now so familiar. Our depiction of Hulme as a figure of the Vortex aims to direct attention away from the individual as a solitary creative force and to refocus it on the discursive networks to which he belonged. Hulme acts as a template for the clash and play of modernism’s idiolects; his work testifies to its heterogeneity – its contested intellectual traditions, aesthetic tensions, and varied institutional attachments. Nor should our reference to origins be taken to imply a fixation on newness, that characteristically modernist fetish. As Stan Smith has observed of modernism’s negotiations with the past, to be ‘original is to reproduce, or re-produce, that which is there already’ (1994, p. 5). Hulme was in this precise sense an originator: he argued that ‘the first attempt to formulate a different attitude’ is ‘always a return to archaism’ (CW, p. 271), and may thus be seen as a translator and transliterator of the diverse traditions that he transformed. A good example of this approach may be found in his discussions of archaism in the work of painters and sculptors such as William Roberts, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Jacob Epstein, which he argues ‘legitimately finds a foothold in these archaic yet permanent formulae’ but, because it is ‘part of a real change of sensibility occurring now in the modern mind … develops from the original formula one which is for it, a purer and more accurate medium of expression’ (CW, p. 266). New artistic creativity arises out of an altered sensibility but is brought into being through a return to art-forms derived from alternative (in this case pre-modern) canons, which it transforms and then discards. For Hulme, this has nothing to do with nostalgia or exotism. It represents a conscious, intellectually motivated attempt to deploy aesthetics as a way of reintroducing a lost Weltanschauung into the cultural arena, thereby opposing progressivist conceptions of post-Renaissance modernity.
Throughout, then, we read Hulme’s thought and style as an expression of this dialogical view of perception and cognition: his fractured polemics proclaim what Hugh Kenner, writing on Pound, has described as an ‘aesthetic of glimpses’ (1971, p. 69). The tension between contingent, arbitrary materiality and rational philosophical system everywhere marks his elliptical prose. With feet planted firmly on the cindery ground, his eyes scan the speculative horizon. Thus, while the essays gathered here have been written with an eye to the continuity of Hulme’s thought, they foreground the always provisional, self-skeptical nature of his revelations. As a whole, the collection begins with his theories of language and unfolds chronologically, yet it everywhere exposes the multiple, interdisciplinary connections that any one of his insights may have generated. We will find that his early reflections on language offer a portal to other areas of human experience and endeavour, most obviously to issues raised by philosophy, politics, and psychology; conversely, his final dogmatism forces us to turn back and reconsider what we think about his psychology, politics, philosophy, and language. From ‘Cinders’ through to ‘A Notebook’ Hulme speculates about the nature of reality, the difficulties of knowing it with any degree of accuracy, and the problem of articulating knowledge in words. These concerns are also visible in his Bergsonian phase, which is preoccupied with overcoming the nightmare of mechanistic determinism; his interest in pragmatism, which is connected in turn with his linguistic skepticism and his rejection of unitary metaphysical systems; his articulation of an illiberal but radical ‘Toryism’, which draws on the politics of Action Française, the syndicalism of Sorel, and Proudhon’s anarchism; and his attempted refutation of pacifism on the grounds that the war had exacerbated a situation in which ‘every boundary in Europe, of political, social, intellectual and cultural importance’ (CW, p. 332) was in dispute and that in this situation democratic liberties needed to be defended. These essays, then, offer a contribution to critical study of Hulme’s thought and of the complex role it played in the formation of modernism, and they emphasize throughout that Hulme’s work is always to be located within the overlapping discourses of aesthetics, culture, politics, philosophy, psychology, and theology. The book as a whole focuses on the complex ramifications of Hulme’s thought, situates his work in relation to the public sphere in which he was such a vocal, contumacious, and stimulating presence, and notes his impact on modernist thought and culture.
More specifically, then, this collection of essays begins with Hulme’s earliest and best known work, as it registers an emergent modernism in the fields of poetry, poetics, and language. The first few essays explore different moments from Hulme’s early years in London and by using interdisciplinary methods track his intellectual peregrinations between cafés, philosophies, and even disciplines. A complex portrait emerges of a new age in which intellectuals and artists groped for appropriate expressive models only to grow preoccupied with the problems of language and expression themselves. In ‘The Imagery of Hulme’s Poems and Notebooks’, Paul Edwards discusses Hulme’s vigorous polemical style and his early poetic experimentation, seeing in both an attempt to reconcile an almost vulgar materialism with the need for abstract systematization. Hulme’s intellectual dependence on physical experience and imagery, particularly as it manifests itself in the rough-hewn edges of Imagist verse, proves the basis of a larger modernist ambivalence, shaping the course of subsequent debates about poetry and poetics. Edwards suggests that the tradition of poetry seen to have been inaugurated by Hulme (and continued by Pound, Williams, and Olson) is typically read as demanding a return to the ‘primal’ in an attempt to overcome the ‘disease’ of language, but he argues that this is an inadequate description of Hulme’s own poetic thought and questions whether any such primal dissolution can emancipate the subject or produce the best poetry. Andrew Thacker’s ‘A Language of Concrete Things: Hulme, Imagism, and Modernist Theories of Language’ refocuses the discussion of Imagism in terms of the phenomenological relations between language and community, concentrating especially on the modernists’ experience of the alienating, increasingly dehumanized structures of the modern city. Drawing upon post-Marxist theories of modernity and history, Thacker reconceives modernist poetics – and its variously politicized resonances – as a fraught effort to restore an originary unity of word and thing, and thus to resist the perceived commodification of the work of art within modernity. Rebecca Beasley’s ‘“A Definite Meaning”: The Art Criticism of T. E. Hulme’ locates Hulme in the fashionably contentious salons of pre-War London and reads his aesthetic theories in light of the heated and controversial debates that exercised his intellectual contemporaries. Her essay recreates the complex terrain of the pre-war art world in order not only to expose the conflicted ideologies behind early modernist aesthetics but also to insist on the overlappings and borrowings that characterized positions that were often presented as simply opposed to each other. Beasley reads Hulme’s work as emblematic of early modernism, its unresolved engagement with the arts disclosing a powerful drive to system and order even as it foregrounds the limitations of its own newly emergent discourse.
The next group of essays coalesces around Hulme’s work as it sheds light on modern theories of subjectivity. Hulme’s work proves essential here not only in its grappling with conflicting theories of the expressive subject (Freudian, Darwinian, Marxist, etc.), but also in its analysis of the social forces that shape those theories (technology, capitalism, nationalism, etc.). These essays consider Hulme’s developing interest in alternative models of subjectivity that stress lesser known areas of modernist inquiry, such as phenomenology and pragmatism; in this respect, Hulme is seen to be struggling with his own Victorian inheritance and bourgeois idealism as he pushes his work toward more radical discoveries. Alan Munton, in ‘Abstraction, Archaism and the Future: T. E. Hulme, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis’, addresses Hulme’s account of subjectivity in relation to his sometimes willful theories of history and historical transformation. Munton first explores Hulme’s prediction of the break-up of the humanist spirit and his claim to have found, with reference to Wilhelm Worringer, a new ‘tendency to abstraction’ that was primitive in form, but modern in spirit. Munton, however, insists on the need to distinguish varieties of modernist abstraction; he contends that insofar as Hulme downplayed the significance of the new mechanical environment, he was led to a reactionary, fatalistic position regarding human society; Wyndham Lewis, in contrast, saw how machinery and technology impinged on the mind of modern subjects and thus developed a more radical theory of ideology that preserved room for both control and progress. Helen Carr’s ‘T. E. Hulme and the “Spiritual Dread of Space”’ interprets Hulme’s thoughts on humanism in terms of both his lifelong anxiety regarding open spaces and his long-noted ‘hyper-masculine’ posturing. Carr mobilizes philosophy along with psychoanalysis and theories of gender in order to explore the experiences of incoherence and inadequacy that underlie Hulme’s ambivalent postures; she links Hulme’s anxious readings of Nietzsche’s skepticism and of non-western cultural forms to his personal concerns regarding masculine prowess, seeing in this collusion an emblematic moment of the modernist revolution. Jesse Matz’s ‘The New Psychologism’ turns the discussion of the human away from the phenomenology of space towards time, focusing on Hulme’s abandonment of Bergsonian intuitionism and his move towards the static forms of Classicism, anti-humanism, and abstraction. Matz argues that Hulme’s critique of modern psychologism was a category mistake, inappropriately applying philosophical arguments in favor of the attainability of objective knowledge to poetry; the result was an anti-psychological view of aesthetics from which intuition had been expunged and which led to the cessation of Hulme’s own career as a poet. Like Carr, Matz contends that Hulme’s change of mind was motivated by socio-cultural anxiety, principally over the incursion of women into the public sphere; Matz, however, is more critical of the effect this anxiety had on Hulme’s work and on modernity at large: he draws on recent work in cognitive psychology to conclude that Hulme’s defense of a purified ‘objective’ aesthetic diverted literature from its concern with human psychology.
The next three essays turn to Hulme’s constantly shifting political allegiances, foregrounding the categorical challenges they pose to modernist scholarship. By situating Hulme’s multi-layered discourses at the origins of early twentieth-century thought, they reconceive the period as well as its legacy, dismantling many of the myths concerning the left and the right still promoted today. Lee Garver’s ‘Hulme Among the Progressives’ looks at the complex political origins of A. R. Orage’s the New Age and Hulme’s early role in setting the paper’s committed polemical tone. Garver sees in Hulme’s writings an expression of the unresolved tensions within early modernist political debate; Hulme’s writings reveal how difficult it once was to separate radicals and reactionaries, elitists and populists, socialists and feminists, not simply because these categories were unsettled at the time, but also because figures such as Hulme (in this respect a typical New Age contributor) found themselves able to draw on diverse rhetorics. Emphasizing Hulme’s indebtedness to the radical socialist agitator Victor Grayson (who was briefly a coeditor of the New Age), Garver suggests not only that Hulme was in his early writings a more populist and progressive figure than he is given credit for being but also that his politics cannot be categorized according to hard-and-fast distinctions between left and right. Andrzej Gasiorek, in ‘Towards a “Right Theory of Society”?: Politics, Machine Aesthetics, and Religion’, moves beyond specific political programs in order to reconceive Hulme’s thought within the larger context of modernity’s ‘disenchantment of the world’. Towards the end of his life Hulme’s political allegiances, no matter how contradictory they may seem today, circled around the possibility of a non-liberal democratic theory that drew on Sorelian syndicalism and on Proudhonian anarchism. Gasiorek argues that industry and technology – two potent causes of modern malaise – gave rise to a modernist machine aesthetic that functioned as a template for Hulme’s late anti-humanism and its attendant theology. For Hulme, social renewal and political freedom (albeit in a strictly limited form) were inseparable from a religious conception of humanity’s relationship with the divine. This required an intellectual paradigm shift that not only demanded a break with the presuppositions of a secular modernity but also highlighted the incommensurability of rival ontological positions. In ‘“Above Life”: Hulme, Bloomsbury, and Two Trajectories of Ethical Anti-Humanism’, Todd Avery concentrates on the no less contentious realm of political ethics. His essay focuses on G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica and its formidable influence on both Hulme and his intellectual opponents in the Bloomsbury Group. Avery looks closely at how Moore’s ethical idealism was mobilized by both groups in a series of highly publicized debates both before and during the war; he questions how and why Moore’s idealist reaction could inspire radically opposed views on the issue of human moral capacity and the need for ethical restraint. With this analysis, Avery moves beyond the specificities of Hulme’s moment: he unsettles the modernist antithesis between humanism and anti-humanism and begins to clarify its continuing significance in the present day.
The last two essays focus on what may be described as the rhetoric of modernity. They address the ways in which the concept of modernity has been utilized and appropriated by both moderns themselves and their postmodern critics: the first essay discusses the mobilization of ‘modernity’ as a structural concept in debates about history and teleology, while the second essay concentrates on the affective dimension of modernist criticism and the ways in which emotion informs the impasses of traditional thinking about modernity. C. D. Blanton’s ‘The Politics of Epochality: Antinomies of Original Sin’ considers the role that Hulme plays in rhetorically charged accounts of the modern period. Hulme’s career, Blanton argues, often figures as a ghostly sign of a historical modernity that never quite materialized, as a representation of a gap in modern time that is itself – paradoxically – representative of the time as a whole. Hulme’s incomplete body of work serves as a kind of modernist shorthand for a compelling logic of temporal dissociation, as such is made manifest in the work of art that signals its own material impossibility, in the promise of historical redemption voiced from within a damning historical moment. Lastly, Edward P. Comentale’s ‘Hulme’s Feelings’ considers what is perhaps the most pervasive, but least discussed aspect of Hulme’s work: the intense emotionalism of his critical thought. Drawing upon phenomenology, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and postmodern systems theory, Comentale explores Hulme’s emphasis on critical appetite and the intense feelings of anger and sadness that inform his approach to analysis, seeing in both the basis of an animistic ‘adolescent modernism’ that was open to historical change and conceptual revision. Comentale thus argues that it is the emotional register of Hulme’s thought, particularly in its feeling for historical tragedy, that both defines and dismantles the major myths of the modern period, at once willing and denying the age’s potential, pushing us through and beyond the biases that continue to define scholarship today.
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Writing in 1917 Pound claimed: ‘The last few years have seen a gradual shaping of a party of intelligence, a party not bound by any central doctrine or theory’ (Read, 1967, p. 89). This assertion captures what we have been trying to suggest about Hulme’s importance to modernism. If, following Bourdieu, we conceive modernism as a field constituted by a multiplicity of interanimating practices and a variety of institutions through which they are articulated, mediated, and disseminated, then the public roles Hulme played and the discourses he deployed may be seen as paradigmatic of modernism’s interventions in the modernity it sought to transform. Seen as a site of contestation between competing and contradictory elements, modernism becomes an overdetermined phenomenon marked by often unexpected alignments and combinations. Traversed by the very disciplines with which Hulme was throughout his life preoccupied – aesthetics, philosophy, politics, psychology, theology – this modernism testifies to his significance, less as an innovator or an influence (though he was both) and more as a conduit: Hulme not only mediated some of the key ideas to which later writers would regularly revert, but also highlighted many of the still unresolved aesthetic/political dilemmas that would haunt modernism in the decades to come.
1 In addition to our remarks here, see Dennis Brown, pp. 96-102.
2 Hulme is clear on a number of occasions about his desire to connect his aesthetic reflections with wider social issues. See, for example, CW, pp. 60, 270.
3 Janet Lyon, in Manifestoes, similarly defines modernist polemics and their challenge to the public sphere, p. 34.
4 Unfortunately, Hulme’s sculptural turn has led critics to dismiss his ideas on language. Frank Kermode, in particular, deplores this aesthetic confusion and argues that the classicist lacks a central theory of language (1971, pp. 132-3). More recently, Ethan Lewis has claimed that ‘Hulme cannot have it both ways.’ For Lewis, this solidity can only fail to be representative as well as concrete; he agrees with Pound that the result will always be, quite simply, ‘mushy technique’ (p. 264).
5 Mark Antliff describes the avant-garde’s advocacy of a ‘sign-system that claims hegemony over others on the basis of its supposedly “transparent and radically ahistorical” nature. By asserting that intuition established an immediate relation between signifier and signified, Bergson and his followers proclaimed their ability to create natural signs, signs whose temporal properties – reflective of the personality – were anterior to and at the origin of all conventional sign-systems’ (p. 11).
6 Lewis’s disgust at artistic passivity in the face of urban change more than matches Hulme’s (1986, pp. 27-8), hence his claim that modern art must escape the studio and find a place in the life of the community: ‘You must get Painting, Sculpture, and Design out of the studio and into life somehow or other if you are not going to see this new vitality desiccated in a Pocket of inorganic experimentation’ (1986, p. 12).
7 For a less negative view of the triumph of modernity, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 1990.
8 See especially Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, 1981 and Richard J. Bernstein, Habermas and Modernity, 1985.
9 Most obviously, in Peter Nicholls, Modernisms, 1995. But it should be noted that Bradbury and MacFarlane also gesture at this multiplicity (p. 48).
10 For examples of such work, see David Kadlec, Mosaic Modernism, 2000; Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism, 1999; David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism, 2001; and David Weir, Anarchy and Culture, 1997.
11 For a sample of such work, see Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism, 1991; Alice Gambrell, Women Intellectuals, 1997; Bonnie Kime Scott, Refiguring Modernism, 2 vols., 1995; Rita Felski, Gender of Modernity, 1995. For post-colonial approaches, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 1996; Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby, Modernism and Empire, 2000; Catherine Hall, Cultures of Empire, 2000; Jed Esty, Shrinking Island, 2004.
12 See also Kevin Dettmar and Stephen Watt, Marketing Modernisms, 1997; Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 1998; and Joyce Piell Wexler, Who Paid for Modernism?, 1997.
13 For a good account of the difficulties early modernist writers faced in trying to negotiate these complicated relationships, see Peter Keating, The Haunted Study, 1991. For accounts that emphasize a split between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 1986 and John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses, 1992.
14 See, for example, Hansen, ‘T. E. Hulme’, 1980 and J. Kamerbeek, ‘T. E. Hulme and German Philosophy’, 1969.
15 See, for example, Alun Jones, Life and Opinions, pp. 64-5; Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, 1971; and Murray Krieger, ‘Ambiguous Anti-Romanticism’, 1953.
16 Levenson rightly insists that this dating process is of vital importance (and not just in the case of Hulme) because there is a ‘tendency to regard the period as a simultaneous critical moment’, whereas key ‘critical concepts were not generated simultaneously’ and ‘do not all belong together’. Thus: ‘If the ideas of 1915 are assimilated to those of 1912, or the ideas of 1912 to those of 1908, the intelligibility of each is lost’ (p. 37).