Reformist Reading Reparative Critique, c.1900

The legacies of the turn of the century are still very much with us but they sometimes manifest in unexpected ways. As I want to suggest here, the work of imagining a long turn of the century, which CUSP encourages us to undertake, need not remain limited to reconstructive or historicist projects that unearth hitherto buried lines of influence—as important and valuable as such work may be. Instead, making the turn of the century longer should also involve a sustained effort to turn this period into the reference point for a capacious remapping of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary, cultural, and theoretical production. To put this another way: while the category of the long turn of the century prompts us to excavate hitherto neglected discursive formations and to reconstruct lost traditions, it is my wager that this newly expansive period category also makes possible a broader reframing of some of the methodologies and hermeneutic protocols that structure the ways in which literary and cultural scholars approach their objects of study.

In a recent special issue on "Theories of the Nineteenth Century," Zachary Samalin points out that "at the most general level, we do not yet have a robust account of the precise sense in which a theory (let alone theory writ large) can be said to belong to or derive from a particular historical moment, process or scene."¹ The nineteenth century in particular, he observes, "is a horizon for theory, inasmuch as the past can be a horizon, a set of limits or boundaries no less than a site of expectation."² Samalin asks us to recognize "just how many different strains of contemporary theory and how many critical concepts have been produced through confrontation with and re-description of the nineteenth century".³ Samalin's rich and open-ended list of examples (ranging from Walter Benjamin and C. L. R. James to Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) indicates that critical theory's encounters with the nineteenth century have been tremendously generative. Indeed, as much recent work in literary theory (notably work conducted under the label of postcritique) has pointed out, the afterlives of the nineteenth century centrally include the hermeneutic procedures of "symptomatic" and "suspicious reading"—that is, styles of critical analysis which attempt to demystify the surface structure of texts by drawing attention to the aesthetic's alleged role in hiding some historical-political raw material that must not be allowed direct expression in the literary work itself. By contrast, champions of postcritique have called for greater scholarly attunement to the complex surface structures of artworks as well as to the layered phenomenologies of the act of reading, including the various affective attachments that get readers "hooked" on a particular text.⁴

In recent debates about the limits of critique, it is often taken as axiomatic that the protocols of suspicious reading were principally put in place by Sigmund Freud and the later Karl Marx—two thinkers who have a justifiable claim to belong to the long turn of the century. As Sedgwick, Paul Ricoeur, and Rita Felski have explained, psychoanalysis and Marxism evolved similar procedures of critique: while Freud instructs us to look beyond the surface appearances of everyday behavior, linguistic praxis, and dream-work, the later Marx teaches a distrust of the institutional forms of capitalist society and the bourgeois state.⁵ According to Ricoeur and Felski, these two types of suspicion—notably the politically charged forms of Marxist analysis—gained dominance in literary studies from the 1970s onwards: as the space for revolutionary action dramatically diminished in the West with the rise of neoliberalism, radical energies from the political realm were increasingly cathected to particular styles of critical inquiry.⁶ On this account, practices of ideology critique are implicitly or explicitly modeled on the determined negativity of a revolutionary praxis that breaks through the surface of the empirically given in a dramatic gesture of ideological unmasking.

In what follows, I want to put some pressure on such attempts to affiliate hegemonic disciplinary practices of critique with a Marxian vision of revolutionary praxis. To our political detriment, established historical genealogies of critique are marked by a conspicuous failure to take inspiration from the rich reformist idioms that emerged around 1900. It is surprising that this should be the case, partly because the long turn of the century gave rise to political languages—and accompanying practices of social inquiry and critique—whose conceptual richness is not simply reducible to the parsimonious duo of "revolution" and (anti-revolutionary) "reform." As the British guild socialist and Fabian G. D. H. Cole pointed out in his magisterial History of Socialist Thought (1953–60), "up to 1914 the line between revolutionists and reformists could not be clearly drawn."⁷ Looking back to the days of his early political involvement in the Fabian Society, Cole recalls that during the late Victorian and Edwardian years, the meanings of the two terms revolution and reform were so closely interwoven that "even a strict Reformist could be at the same time a Revolutionist; for if Socialism is Revolution, every Socialist is entitled to be so called. … They could have meant … that the establishment of Socialism would be a Revolution, irrespective of the means by which it was won."⁸ While much contemporary radical theory tends to see reforms as the reactionary shoring-up of the status quo, or as the rearguard defense of the state and its institutions, Cole notes the political latitude of both terms—revolution and reform; moreover, by lowering the bar for what counts as "revolutionary" change, Cole also asks us to see the state "not, as Marx had asserted it to be, of its very nature a class institution," but as a pragmatic "instrument ready to be used by any class or group or collection of human beings who could get control of it."⁹

Cole's comments blur the line between revolution and reform, and by pointing out the historical malleability of the concept of revolution they also usefully denaturalize the particular valorization of this term in current critical practice. The political idioms of the long turn of the century bring into sharp focus what Samalin calls the past as "a set of limits" and as a "site of expectation" and future possibilities: while established genealogies of current disciplinary practices tend to subject critique to the impossibly high standard of a fully revolutionary praxis, training our focus on idioms of reform around 1900 makes it possible to reframe modes of theoretical production in terms of alternative and more expansive critical paradigms. To rethink critique as a broadly reformist practice entails asking how such a practice might contribute to the project of social reparation rather than revolutionary overthrowing: to adapt a phrase from Sedgwick, reformist types of critique have "explicit recourse to reparative motives," and they are therefore "frankly ameliorative ('merely reformist')" rather than incipiently revolutionary.¹⁰ The act of foregrounding critique's family resemblance with projects of reform has a number of potentially salutary effects. Most importantly, as Anna Kornbluh notes, shifting attention away from our disciplinary commitment to (or elective affinity with) the revolutionary negativity of critique helps to counteract the accelerating evisceration of our constructive political capacities—it makes it possible for literary and cultural critics to think of what they do as the searching out of shared political ground and as the building of new solidarities.¹¹

Recentering scholarly attention around reformist projects helpfully defamiliarizes key assumptions about the nature of social change that are embedded in the work of key representatives of critique such as Foucault, whose writings have been foundational to much literary and cultural scholarship since the 1970s. For example, while Foucault's early writings presented the state as an omnipresent agent of panoptic surveillance and objectifying coercion, his 1978–79 Collège de France lectures (first published in English under the title The Birth of Biopolitics) depict the state as an unfixed entity, as "the mobile shape of a perpetual statification [étatisation] or statifications" that governs through indirect means such as incentivization. The conceptual fruitfulness of Foucault's paradigms notwithstanding, his reductive accounts of the state—as an apparatus of social domination or as the "mobile effect of a regime of multiple governmentalities"—entail a "theoretical and analytical antistatism" that is simultaneously effect and contributory cause of the impoverishment of constructive political idioms on the left.¹² By contrast, a methodological commitment to reformist theoretical frameworks reminds us that the state is not just something to be torn down (i.e., the state is not, in Cole's Marxian paraphrase, "of its very nature a class institution"), but that it also provides basic infrastructural conditions for individual and collective flourishing. Reformist frameworks enjoin us to imagine alternatives to critical theory's resolute negation of existing social forms as well as to critique's widespread disdain of political projects that are aimed at a slow, progressive transformation of the state and its institutions.

By turning to reformist political idioms of the "long cusp" around 1900, we can also make visible other—frequently unexamined or insufficiently probed—assumptions that continue to underpin our scholarly practice. For example, literary critics usually default to the assumption that literature excels at exploring key aspects of our social being—e.g., interpersonal relationships, or the inextricably social nature even of our most intimate thoughts and desires—but that literary texts are not equally suited to an engagement with the abstract externality of political structures and institutions. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the reformist imaginary of the long turn of the century requires us to recalibrate such assumptions: the central achievement of the period's reformist mode, I suggest, lies in a form of thinking that made it possible to envision the state not merely as an ensemble of institutional structures that are external to social life, but as intimately connected to the sphere of the social itself.¹³ This idiom pervades literary, philosophical, political, and social writing of the period, and it insists that we need to think about the state as a speculative figure—as a social form of life in its own right—rather than as a set of detached (Foucauldian) administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes.

As new work in political philosophy and the history of economic thought has shown, the reformist imaginary of the period 1870–1920 can be productively explicated by turning to the influential works of the idealist political philosopher T. H. Green and his students (including D. G. Ritchie, Bernard Bosanquet, and J. H. Muirhead).¹⁴ Wary of the social atomism that was implicit in the liberal concept of citizenship as a set of legal rights, Green began to reimagine citizenship under the labels of positive liberty and active citizenship. These concepts were intended to signal the socially embedded quality of liberty and citizenship: as Green, Ritchie, Bosanquet, and other "Greenians" contended, the state and its institutions were not simply guarantors of legal entitlements and negative rights but rather involved a lived and embodied orientation toward the common good. In providing their rich rearticulation of liberty and citizenship, the British idealists also offered an important counter to what the Marxist political theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood has called the systematic "devaluation of citizenship entailed by capitalist social relations": as Wood explains, our contemporary understanding of individual liberty and citizenship is "inexcusably one-sided" because it positions the social entirely "outside the state, [as] a space of autonomy, voluntary association and plurality or even conflict."¹⁵ The Greenian language of reform belongs to a mode of progressive liberalism whose aspirational dimensions—notably its ambitious attempts to remediate individual and collective, rights and obligations, social forms of life and institutional structures—have become nearly illegible to us.

In the decades around 1900, literature took on the task of imagining the kinds of life that would be possible under the auspices of the emerging welfare state, and this involved an anticipatory vision of new kinds of active citizenship as well as a speculative elaboration of statecentered institutions as forms of life. In works written in the reformist literary mode, key political projects of the period—including ones as technically complex (and, at first glance, artistically inauspicious) as land nationalization, taxation reform, and the introduction of unemployment insurance—are imagined in terms of the democratic and egalitarian forms of life which they are expected to nurture and support. These literary works by politically diverse authors such as Mary Ward, George Gissing, Edward Carpenter, H. G. Wells, and E. M. Forster lend the abstract concepts of active citizenship and positive liberty a degree of experiential concreteness unattainable to philosophical thought alone. This specific kind of literary-political work—the speculative concretization of abstract philosophical concepts—is best understood as the poetic figuration of a politics that works through existing social forms instead of rejecting them in favor of a revolutionary vision of total utopian difference. Unlike the kinds of symptomatic reading that have been scrutinized by recent postcritiquers, the reformist mode around 1900 engages in a type of ("reformist") social diagnosis that does not too quickly abandon the level of social forms in favor of a ("revolutionary") search for more rooted truths or hidden economic causes. As a consequence, and contrary to our own hardwired literary-critical habits, we do not need to read literary texts against the grain in order to make visible the impress of this particular reformist idiom: works written in the reformist literary mode do not require us to marshal an interpretive hermeneutic that aims at demystifying—in a quasi-revolutionary gesture of unmasking—particular formal or generic choices by pointing to the latent political content hidden in them; instead, what these texts require is a hermeneutic that is capable of restoring to these very formal and generic choices their immanent political force.

The idealist reformist language of the long cusp can help to bolster our political imaginations at a time when the welfare state is under unprecedented pressure and when many thinkers on the left believe that reformist politics have been comprehensively discredited. What we need in the current conjuncture are precisely more expansive ways of imagining and improving the institutions that support personal and collective flourishing and that enable the construction of a sustaining social world. By enriching our political, cultural, and literary vocabularies, the reformist language of the British idealists makes it possible to push beyond the narrow economism which so often paralyzes current debates about the welfare state: under neoliberalism, as the political theorist Bonnie Honig has observed, "efficiency is no longer one value among others. It has become rationality itself, and it is the standard by which everything is assessed."¹⁶ The reformism of the decades 1870–1920 affords us an understanding of state institutions that is no longer readily available under the historical conditions of late capitalism, which reduce questions of collectivity, democratic participation, and solidarity to the brutal economistic calculus of efficiency and profitability. Considered from the perspective of our own present, the reformism of the turn of the century highlights a keenly felt (if insufficiently conceptualized) absence: it points to a more substantive vision of the common good that we lack.