In Remembrance of Things Past

THE COMPAKATIST IN REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST Henry Sussman 1.My most recent project, which I have entitled The Aesthetic Contract , aims toward an articulation both of the circumstances and conditions under which the Artist has emerged, over the broader Modernity, as an agent and icon of transcendence over conditions of fragmentation, moral insufficiency, and a freedom as disorienting as it is delightful. As an alternative to the transcendental model of the Artist, formulated perhaps definitively by Kant, I also elaborate in this project an alternative dynamic ofcultural evolution and intellectual work, one characterized by a succession of "aesthetic contracts," under whose aegis artists and other intellectual workers in different areas cooperate and produce artifacts for a time, specifically, so long as a particular aesthetic experiment answers its community's questions regarding the nature of knowledge and experience better than others. This experiment of mine has resulted as much in a modus operandi as in a body of substantive readings ofparticular texts. In responding to Professor Barricelli's comments on the current critical scene, it enables me to treat his reactions as interventions into certain critical contracts (close correlatives to "aesthetic" ones) that have in fact been formative to my own strategies as a reader. Nothing is sacrosanct about the deconstructive and psychoanalytical critical contracts under which my own work has evolved. Yet it helps me enormously in framing my reactions to a critique such as that delivered by Professor Barricelli to think that he writes as an individual who has not subscribed to certain of the contractual tenets that have been definitive to my own projects, experiments, and "signature " as a member of a critical community. 2.If the reassessment of dominant Western attitudes and postures that began with Nietzsche and continued through twentieth-century phenomenology and deconstruction is in any way right—the present is the ongoing disclosure of the involuted subtexts of culture in a largely unpredicted and unanticipated manner. While we owe a compelling immediacy, a heightened sense of ourselves to presence, the moment unfolds in a sense of surprise, unwilling intrusion, arbitrariness and imposition. We do not in the least control the moment we seem most to inhabit, to haunt. We lose ourselves in this moment by compulsively scoring texts seeming to respond to its exigencies; we relocate ourselves by discovering texts by others of alarming shock and surprise, that somehow speak to our current positions. I am obviously moving toward a definition of Comparative Literature as the conceptual and performative inquiry into the field oftextuality. Like rage or sexual impulse, the present in a sense finds us. The fullest expression of its alterity is its Vol. 20 (1996): 21 IN REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST ability to twist us around in a way we never imagined. Trying to control the present is like taking a vow of celibacy; present-control may be in fact what such special-acts most legislate. You act out sexually what you perform because ofyour position in a historical constellation ofimpulses and compromises that becomes activated in the unknowns of the present . Surprising yourself, you may break out of the conventions of your current social identity because of present exigencies. You read what you read because you need to, not because it is good for you. Because some other has synthesized a textual composition answering to the exigencies ofthe present in a way salutary to your curiosity, your intellectual wellbeing , your emotional health, and so on. To attempt to constrain what people read in their response to the moment is like attempting to control the people who copulate under the boardwalk at Atlantic City. 3.The academically credentialed life of letters is as much an aberration as was its absence. The theoretical facility and breadth of knowledge demonstrated by the likes of Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and even Ezra Pound would have clearly qualified them as comparatists . And we could have all benefited from their hypothetical academic treatises: Pound's on Homer and Provence; Stein's on Word and Image; Proust's on synaesthesia; Joyce's on nationalism and colonial discourse; Proust's, Stein's, and Joyce's on sexuality and gender. You and I would devour these treatises...