Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era

• Preface
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. vii-xvii
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PREFACE

In recent years, the fate of theory has given rise to much concern. To see why, it’s only necessary to take a quick look at the current scene: since 1990, roughly, no new forms of theory, and, instead, a lot of restatements, with some variation, of earlier viewpoints. Perhaps the most noticeable trend, in fact, has been a tendency to combine some of these. The new eclecticism, you might call it. Yet even the combination of different approaches hasn’t quite managed to produce an entirely satisfactory result. Hence our present critical impasse.

A number of possible explanations come to mind. Maybe our present forms of theory simply don’t answer the questions we really want to ask. Or maybe the conversation has just turned away from theory. In any case, what no one can deny is a definite shift. Before, it seemed a common belief that all the larger questions could be answered only by theory. And now that belief is no longer there. Yet it isn’t as if we’ve come to feel we no longer need theory because it’s already fulfilled its purpose, given us what we want. On the contrary: the reason theory now faces an uncertain future might well be its failure to satisfy a need we still feel. Simply put, what we want from theory is a higher level of conceptual awareness. So if we no longer turn so hopefully to theory as we once did, our reluctance might well imply doubt as to whether theory has that sort of awareness to give.

To understand how we’ve arrived at the point where we now are, it seems useful to go back to the springtime of hope for theory: the last moment, in recent memory, when theory seemed as if about to answer all our questions. Specifically, I want to revisit Paris structuralism, and most of all (despite his vehement efforts to dissociate himself from that movement) the work of Michel Foucault. The Order of Things marks perhaps the last attempt, in recent years, at universal theory. Its ambition was to integrate a history of the human sciences with a theory of those sciences. By his refusal to adopt a teleological perspective, Foucault believed he could produce a better account of the history of the human sciences. At the same time, his account of their history was also supposed to yield a theoretical framework. But the historical account never quite managed to coalesce with the theory, largely because Foucault couldn’t find a way to conceptualize the developmental aspect of nineteenth-century theory. So his project broke down after the end of what he termed the era of representation. His failure, of course, has had consequences. One of these is that we now find in more recent work a widespread resistance to universal theory.

The way Foucault proposed to integrate the history of the human sciences with a theory of those sciences was by means of what he called the Classical episteme. For Foucault, the episteme is what makes knowledge possible. It’s the discovery that things have the capacity to be ordered. And because such a capacity was universal, we would then have the possibility of universal theory. At the same time, Foucault didn’t want development. As a result, he found himself forced to adopt a spatial framework, where all relationships exist simultaneously. Specifically, Foucault chose to highlight the seventeenth-/eighteenth-century belief in a relationship between representations and a relationship between things, both of which pointed to resemblances. These resemblances led Foucault to suggest a “continuum” between being and representation, based on their correspondence. Implied was the notion that representation could encompass existence in its entirety because of a similar structure of internal resemblances within each field. The problem with belief in a correspondence between ontology and representation, however, was that it assumed exactly what you had to prove: that the world out there looks the way you represent it to be. Because of his own commitment to the Classical episteme, moreover, Foucault could only talk about the nineteenth-century shift away from it historically. In the process, he converted nineteenth-century temporal terminology into spatial concepts like analogy and succession. What he left out was any trace of development. But that meant he couldn’t talk about the kind of change by which we become what we are.

If the failure of The Order of Things and other structuralist attempts at universal theory simply led people to write off the possibility of any such project, the present tendency to combine viewpoints nonetheless hints at a wish to go beyond a field-specific level of theory. It points, I would argue, to a hope that theory might offer more: a means to elucidate what we can’t otherwise understand, by recourse to a higher vantage point that can relate our particular inquiry to a matrix of all the other relevant knowledge we have. It suggests, in other words, that what theory is at the present time isn’t necessarily all it wants to be.

To get beyond the present theory impasse, I felt we had to retrace the way we got here: to go back to the source or sources of all modern theory. Specifically, it meant we had to look for the moment when theory first began to display the tendency toward self-reflexivity that we identify as the hallmark of the modern. And that meant a need to go back to theory in the Romantic period. But if reflexivity first emerged in the Romantic era, our present theory impasse ought to be traceable to the same source. Nor was it difficult, once I began to think about the inward turn of Romantic theory, to see how it might have happened. As a result of its self-reflexive gaze, Romantic theory had become aware of its power to conceptualize any and all material circumstances. From there, it was bound to arrive at the inevitable corollary: that we can achieve ascendancy over anything material via theory. Hence the dream of universal theory, which would allow us to talk about any field we wanted at a higher level of generality than what was possible to the field itself. Given the circumstances, it can hardly come as a surprise that Romantic theory tried to make its dream a reality. Or that at a later moment Foucault would do the same. From his failure, in turn, we come to our present theory impasse as one of the consequences.

At the same time, it seemed to me that if Romantic theory lay at the source of our present impasse, it might also point to a way out of it. After all, we’d gotten to where we were because of the Romantic dream of universal theory, which was based on an awareness of its own power to conceptualize. But if Romantic theory did in fact possess a virtually limitless capacity to conceptualize, perhaps that same capacity might prove relevant to our impasse. If we could recover the way it conceptualized its own theory scene, perhaps we could see by the same token how its perspective might be applied to our present circumstances. To some extent, the failure of contemporary theory had come about because of its attempt to pursue a goal defined by the Romantic period. Perhaps, then, we had to try to see that goal in terms of the conceptual framework from which it arose. Hence Romantic theory came to seem not only the source of our trouble but equally a source of possibility.

Nonetheless, I also knew that any attempt to see it as a way out of our present theory impasse would at some point have to confront the New Historicist critique of Romantic theory. From a New Historicist perspective, the move toward reflexivity, which led theory in the Romantic era to stress its own formal aspect, was only a form of blindness, perhaps deliberate, by which it tried to deny the hegemony of material circumstances. But if the material base did in fact determine what consciousness in a given period might perceive or feel, any such move away from the material circumstances out of which theory had emerged could only lead to a sort of false consciousness, rather than to any insight relevant to our present scene.

Yet if this was what the New Historicist perspective implied, I couldn’t help but feel that some of its own most exemplary instances gave hints of a distinctly different tendency. Yes, Jerome McGann in The Romantic Ideology had initially tried to make the hegemony of material circumstances essential to any Romantic New Historicist programme. But in Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems Marjorie Levinson put a significant spin on that programme in the way she read “Tintern Abbey”: the poem is all about what it doesn’t say rather than what it says, yet the negative twist by which its silence becomes its message is itself expressive of agency. To me, it seemed that Alan Liu took the same process even further. Wordsworth: The Sense of History considers how the Romantic mind or consciousness internalizes its experiences, where the result, as in the “imagery” of The Ruined Cottage or the effort to repress Napoleon, can even be creative. Finally, a decade later, James Chandler’s England in 1819 explicitly attempts to theorize history. So instead of theory reduced to the material circumstances out of which it arose, we seemed to have material circumstances that gave rise to theory.

At an even deeper level, there was what Marx himself had discovered as he worked out the foundations of his critique of political economy in the Grundrisse. Initially, he had tried to describe, as simply as possible, what he took to be the most basic economic process: the production/consumption cycle. Once he got into it, however, he quickly found how difficult it was to avoid Hegelian self-development: not only production/consumption but also the commodity/money cycle seemed to involve a movement into otherness so as to return into oneself. He tried to resist it, by a more general description of the movement from abstract concepts to a complex real. Yet here, too, he found his path blocked by money. Money was odd: its autonomy, as well as its tendency to absorb everything into itself, suggested a movement from the real to the conceptual or abstract. At this point, I suspect, Marx saw he would need to talk about the entire process of economic development, in order to get around the problem posed by money. But once he had embarked on a general analysis of economic development, he couldn’t help but feel the way that it, too, seemed to move from the real to the abstract. From the perspective of capital, the goal of economic development was to create a higher exchange value. In order to create that higher exchange value, capital was ready to sacrifice its labor force and its material. But the concept of a higher exchange value was clearly abstract. Nor could Marx deny that capital was the motive force behind economic development, the force that made it happen. As a result, he could only stake his hope on the historical development of economy. Capital, he argued, would eventually result in a universal development of all the productive forces. Yet even this development, if embraced as a goal or end, clearly constituted an ideal. At every level, then, the Grundrisse itself seemed to testify to movement from a concrete real to the abstract or conceptual.

Finally, there is the testimony of history. More than any other event, the French Revolution loomed large over the entire Romantic era. Here, then, if anywhere, we ought to be able to discern the hegemony of material circumstances. Yet French Revolutionary scholarship in recent years has had a very different story to tell. It began with Alfred Cobban, who in The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution questioned the definability of social classes and their Revolutionary role. But the decisive shift came from the work of François Furet. Penser la Revolution française marked a direct attack on the Marxist account of the Revolution as economically or socially transformative. Instead, Furet argued, its primary consequence was a new ideology: democratic political culture. In effect, Furet went back to Tocqueville, who claimed that for the Revolution the political had been cause, rather than effect, of the economic/social. Furet, moreover, saw the Terror not as excess but as an integral part of Revolutionary ideology. An ideology, however, is purely conceptual. Nonetheless, its pull on Revolutionary events has been amply documented by Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt, and others. Through their studies, we can now see the force of Revolutionary rhetoric and imagery, and how these took on a life of their own. Lastly, there was the work of Richard Cobb. More than anyone else, he brought the Revolution to life through his portrayal of the acts and beliefs of the menu peuple: the shopkeepers and artisans of Paris, who peopled the Revolutionary armies, enforced the decrees, made the Revolution happen. What Cobb showed, above all, was that they didn’t do it purely for personal gain, that their commitment often meant significant personal losses. As a result, what we get is a sense of the force of the Revolutionary ideal, its power over material circumstances.

But if the story of Romantic theory isn’t about the hegemony of material circumstances, there was a reason why the road from material circumstances to theory still seemed necessary to my story. Simply put, as soon as we try to talk about Romantic theory, we invariably get into the genesis of theory. And the reason we do that is because of the way it talked about itself. Asked to say what theory consists of, Romantic theory would describe how it came to be. If Romantic theory is all about the genesis of theory, however, the particular circumstances of its own actual genesis must have possessed some significance for it. Hence an account of how Romantic theory grew out of those circumstances might likewise be meaningful. Increasingly, then, I began to see the way Romantic theory grew out of particular material circumstances as crucial to its story. Specifically, I wanted to focus on the process by which that came about. To me, it seemed we might even see the move from material circumstances to theory as a way to define the Romantic period itself. Faced with the chaos of Revolutionary circumstances, what the Romantic era did was to assimilate these to theory. For me, the question was how to describe the process by which it got from circumstances to theory. Clearly, any attempt to answer that question would have to take a close look at the relevant factors. Only then could we try to trace the process or sequence by which circumstances had led, subtly and almost imperceptibly, to theory.

Yet even beyond the story of how it came to be, what drew me to Romantic theory was its vision of theory, as more than just knowledge or explanation. In that respect, Romantic theory was never just a heuristic framework for a given field. To be only that would be to say, in effect, that we’re no better than our epistemological or cognitive sources. And from the outset, Romantic theory had never professed to be only a means to organize its source material. Instead, what I began to see, as I worked my way into different Romantic theory texts, was how, beyond a given point, they no longer looked to all the factual minutiae for the answers. Not that they became careless or indifferent in their treatment of their sources. But they seemed to have arrived at an unspoken belief that the answers, if discoverable at all, would have to be found elsewhere. At some deeper level, they seemed to say, the reasons we do theory the way we do it come less from our knowledge of a given field than from what we intuitively feel about theory itself. And that, in turn, could point to the possibility of a new kind of autonomy for theory.

Apart from its effort to be more than just explanatory, Romantic theory wanted to go beyond the rational. To a large extent, even at the present time, we still appeal to rational criteria. We believe in a need for consistency. And we respect assertions based on logical inferences. We respect these because we know how hard it is to satisfy the requirements involved. In addition, we’ve seen instances of what a world without those requirements might be. It wasn’t that Romantic theory didn’t respect such requirements, or the kind of thought moves that give theory its rational quality. But it believed, at the same time, in other ways to justify our thought moves. And if these went beyond the rational, that wasn’t because they somehow lacked rationality but because they tried to get at what gave the rational its necessary quality or aspect. From a Romantic perspective, in other words, the necessary quality of the rational grew out of a more basic level at which thought moved. It was as if you were to feel the essential rightness of some passage from a musical work, and only later to learn of the harmonic principle on which it had all been based. For the Romantic period, then, theory grew out of a deeper necessity than any described by our efforts to specify what was rational. The role of theory was to find out what the sources of that necessity were.

Finally, from a Romantic standpoint, there was the question of what we could say on a more general level about the form and content of any given theory. For years I had been haunted by a remark of Évariste Galois: his hope that mathematical equations would one day become solvable by their form, rather than their content. If theory was in fact governed by a kind of internal necessity, we ought to be able to describe the overall shape of a theory independently of the field to which it pertained. And that in turn suggested we might even be in a position to say what a theory for any given field ought to entail, without a knowledge of that field. But if we could specify the form of a theory independently of its field, we would then presumably gain some insight into the essential nature of all forms of theory. Insight of this kind, I think, was what Galois had dreamed of. For his project was always more than simply a theory of equations, or even just of algebra. In his preface to a planned collection of his papers, he spoke of a knowledge that would apply to all the sciences. But knowledge on that level amounts to metatheory. By its self-reflexivity, then, theory could hope to know more about theory for any given field, which would in turn yield insight into the very nature of theory itself. For thought or theory to come to an awareness of what it is, however, could only mean a greater awareness of its own capacity.

I begin chapter 1 with an image: the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the Isle of Poplars at Ermenonville. A favorite site for the late eighteenth-century Rousseau cult, it typically moved viewers to tears. From the pleasure of emotion at Rousseau’s tomb I shift to La Nouvelle Héloise and its treatment of what it means to give oneself emotionally, then to Rousseau as tutelary figure for Shelley in “The Triumph of Life.” As an alternative to the pleasure of passion, Shelley, I argue, hints at the need for reflexivity, or a perspective characterized by an awareness of itself. Which is to say: theory. Confronted by allegory in the form of a triumphal pageant of Life, the narrator comes to see that the only way we can hope to understand it is by an awareness of our own conceptual framework or perspective. So the ultimate conceptual frame would be the ultimate theory. Significantly, it isn’t as if Shelley knows what exactly that theory would entail. But his figuration of it, as the “shape all light,” points to the future of theory in the Romantic era and beyond, by the abstract way it represents its object. Likewise, it looks forward proleptically to my subsequent treatment, in the rest of the book, of theory.

If my first chapter is introductory, my second is about the move from history to theory within Romantic theory. I start with Hadrian’s villa, which shows how the nostalgia for Greek antiquity can be traced back to antiquity itself. From there I turn to Friedrich Wolf, whose Prolegomena to Homer revolutionized classical studies in 1795. Whereas Hadrian yearned for an antique Greek subjectivity he believed Antinoüs embodied, Wolf hoped at best for Greek antiquity at one remove: the Homeric text as it existed for a cultured, critical late antique subjectivity. Yet even that, for Friedrich Schlegel, can no longer be recovered. As he saw it, the fate of classical scholarship was precisely to yearn for what it knows it can’t recover. Instead, he felt, the quest for Greek subjectivity forced classical scholarship to reflect on its own tendency toward nostalgia. As it did that, it became aware of how the antique subjectivity it yearned for was a creation of scholarship. Elevated to the level of an ideal, it had ceased to be history and become, rather, a construct of theory.

I conclude the first section of my book with what might well be the biggest challenge for Romantic theory: how to develop itself out of purely material circumstances. Perhaps the most massive, intractable circumstances are those of war. Here, if anywhere, we ought to find external necessity. And yet, even here, it would be possible for Napoleon at Jena to lift material circumstances to the level of theory. His battle plan displays a constant flow of development, from beginning, to middle, to end. At the same time, it also displays an awareness of its own tendency toward development: hence the manoeuvre sur les derrières, a surprise flank or rear attack that actually defers victory but also makes possible what I call the moment of return, the final assault by a reserve force Napoleon termed the masse de rupture. And that same tendency toward development and the movement of return would continue upward, to an even more abstract level in the mind of an observer who saw Napoleon at Jena. So I shift to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit Preface, with its movement from Substance to otherness, followed by a return to itself as Subject. With Hegel, we get our first look at what will become the dominant topoi of high Romantic theory: the spatial treatment of concepts, the primacy of development over concepts, and, finally, the creation of metatheory.

From Hegel I turn to the sciences, and, first of all, the French physiologist Xavier Bichat. His vital theory would exert great influence on a later generation of British physicians: Abernethy, William Lawrence, and others. Through them, in turn, it would have further, wider consequences for the British Romantic scene. But my interest is in the genesis of that theory, as it emerged out of post-Revolutionary Paris hospital circumstances. It was, after all, the experience of death in the Hôtel-Dieu and other Paris hospitals that gave rise to a sense of what life might consist of. And that, in turn, would help to shape vital theory. For Bichat, it began as resistance to a single vital principle: to him, it made more sense to talk about vital properties. Each vital property, however, could be explained by the way different vital functions interact. And each vital function, in turn, could be traced to a single tissue. Yet the quest for vitality doesn’t end here, because tissue properties outlast death. So finally Bichat was led to think of vitality as a process, by which the non-vital gets converted to the vital. Hence theory comes to take on the form of a process.

If Bichat is about the need for theory to engage process or development, the work of British chemist Humphry Davy points to the origin of metatheory in the Romantic sciences. From the phlogiston debate, he arrived at the need for theoretical economy, universal explanation, and, ultimately, the creation of objectivity by theory. His own work in the isolation of chemical elements had shown him how few chemical substances there really were, hence how few theoretical constructs were necessary. Theoretical economy led in turn to a desire for universal explanation, a theory that might do explanatory work for all the sciences. Hence his efforts to prove chemical and electrical affinity were identical. The fact that chemical explanation appeared to be based on theoretical preferences, moreover, would finally force him to become aware of how so-called objectivity was actually shaped by theory. Theory engaged factual material via analogy and experiment, but it returned at the end to theory. And his insight into the process by which all that happened places Davy at the origin of metatheory.

The culmination of Romantic metatheory in the sciences comes, for me, in the work of Évariste Galois. If Hegel marks the high point of the first section of my book, Galois represents that of the second. His celebrated memoir on the solvability of equations by radicals had shown it was possible to determine whether any equation (up to degree 5) was solvable without actually solving it. In my account, I give the basic schema of his proof: an equivalence between subfields of an extension K (a splitting field that contains the roots of a polynomial, defined over a field F) and subgroups of the group G(K,F), which consists of all automorphisms of K to itself that leave every element of F fixed. Although what I do with Galois theory may seem more technical than the rest of my book, I felt it was necessary to explore the material in some detail. In effect, it looks forward to much of what appears in the epilogue to my work. Specifically, the notion of a spatial perspective on concepts, the power or capacity of abstraction, and the emergence of metatheory all occur here, but with a specificity that my epilogue couldn’t hope to equal because of its greater scope. And, to the extent that it’s possible, even a discussion of theory at this level ought to be grounded on specific instances.

The third section of my book, which begins with Coleridge, is about reactions to Romantic theory. Unlike other Romantic theorists, Coleridge didn’t try to develop theory for a particular field. Instead, his ambition was to relate different forms of theory to each other. His belief was that virtually all forms of theory lacked perspective. For him, in other words, theory didn’t translate into metatheory. On the contrary: if you did theory, your effort to conceptualize data would probably preclude an awareness of your own thought processes, or metatheory. Hence his attempt to provide that awareness, by means of a Reason/Understanding distinction. As Coleridge saw it, philosophy shows what the difference between Reason and Understanding is, the natural sciences subordinate the first to the second, religion strives to do the opposite, and psychology attempts to explain the conflict. For Coleridge, however, theory isn’t just about knowledge or explanation. What fascinated him was, rather, its nature as thought or activity. In that respect, you might say, he looked beyond some of the immediate aims of Romantic theory, to a more “natural” perspective that saw it as part of a larger quest to make our experiences meaningful.

To some extent, Mary Shelley reacts to theory in an even more radical way. The dream she describes in her 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein largely mirrors that of her protagonist. Both are about the effort we make to impose our own subjectivity on external objectivity. That same process occurs in the novel, when Victor, as creator, tries to impose his subjectivity on his creature, whose desperate efforts to get Victor to recognize his own subjectivity only provoke his creator to more elaborate forms of denial. Once his request for a female companion is dismissed, the only option left to the creature is to assimilate his subjectivity to Victor’s, which has destructive consequences. The point of all this, I take it, isn’t just a critique of science: the tyranny of subjectivity in the novel is much more pervasive. Nor is it just to recapitulate subjectivity/objectivity. Instead, it seems to me, Shelley sees the impulse to conceptualize the external (i.e., to do theory) as natural: we get into it out of a fear of external forces. At the same time, she seems to feel our only hope is to abandon theory for a completely different kind of relationship to the external: intersubjectivity, or sympathy.

It remains for Friedrich Hölderlin, finally, to reflect on the limits of theory. Rather than look at any of his theoretical texts, however, I focus on a late poem: “Patmos.” Here the nearness of the God, combined with its otherness, is precisely what makes it unrepresentable. So Hölderlin discovers the limit of theory: it can’t conceptualize anything too close to itself. The difficulty is briefly overcome at an epiphanic moment of the Passion narrative, which sees relationships from a spatial rather than rational viewpoint. But this viewpoint can’t be sustained in the aftertime, which can at best only hope to symbolize what it can’t conceive. For Hölderlin, that sort of process was what lay beyond the capacity of theory to represent. Yet if we’re somehow aware of it, our awareness might hint at a way to go beyond theory. In his awareness of that possibility, Hölderlin might be said to sum up what Romantic theory was all about. Deeply immersed in the rational, it nonetheless embraced what couldn’t be encompassed within a purely rational framework: the spatial, and development. Above all, Hölderlin displays the capacity of Romantic theory to look beyond itself.