Politics of Biography

In Chapter One, we considered the merits and appropriateness of looking at Barthes's thought and writing in a backwards, and anti-teleological, fashion. This was part of a concern to present his work in an equalized if not non-hierarchical manner that tried to disallow any privileging of the later ideas in ways that downplayed the political Barthes in favour of the aesthete. In this final chapter, we pursue the de-hierarchization of the aesthetic over the political by considering the political import of inverting History through a consideration of what we might call Barthesian dialectics: or, the ‘undialectical’.

In his biography of himself (1994, 68–69), Barthes uses the figure of the spiral to account for the way in which he sees his thought returning in different forms and in different places along his career. Indeed, the spiral goes to the heart of the Barthesian conception of the dialectic, in all its guises:

How then does the spiral – alongside the doubles, circles, returns that we have identified in Barthes's work – fit with the ‘undialectical’?

Though Barthes's ‘undialectical’ appeared to be used in some sense negatively in relation to Sartre and Marx's inability to use language dialectically (and thereby get beyond paradox), this turns around in Camera Lucida. Following his mother's death, his own death suddenly appears to him ‘undialectical’; for, since he has no offspring, ‘the only biography is of an unproductive life’, that of a ‘being pour rien’ (1994, 5, 21). In line with the Hegelian dialectic, his own death to come will produce nothing (1984, 71–72). Except that Barthes reverses chronology in the light of this non-dialectical (or anti-dialectical) situation, by considering his recently deceased mother as his daughter, as a product of his own life, and then proceeding to immortalize her by inscribing her into his essay on photography.

The second volume of R. F. Foster's biography, W.B. Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (the first volume was the award-winning The Apprentice Mage) clearly completes a major achievement in literary biography every bit as masterful and illuminating as Richard Ellmann's life of James Joyce. Despite this obvious achievement, however, I come away from finishing my reading of it disturbed. What disturbs me is not the usual kind of complaint about literary biography, that the biographer has poured so many facts into his text the writer's work has been overwhelmed by the contexts of history and personal life.

Foster has already demonstrated brilliantly in the first volume, and he continues the demonstration here, that he can marshal all the facts and place the work in context and still do justice to its large formal structures and major themes. Although close textual analysis of a specialized kind is apparently not Foster's forte, for purposes of literary biography it is not really necessary, and in fact would just get in the way, stopping the onward dynamic thrust of the story he has to tell.

Basically, that story is how the 52-year-old W. B. Yeats (to whom Foster consistently refers as WBY, for short), on marrying the 24-year-old Georgie Hyde Lees in October 1917 finds not only an erotic and domestic partner, willing to bear him children and run his everyday life more efficiently and sympathetically than anyone else ever could. But he also finds, for the first decade of their marriage at least, an occult muse whose automatic writing, dream-visions and oracular medium-like trances give him, as the spiritual Instructors later claims, “metaphors for poetry,” not to mention the most sustained and successful sexual relationship in his life. Indeed, she gives him, as Foster shows, metaphors for the experience of poetic inspiration and visionary eroticism so powerful and original, whatever their traditional sources, that it could rightly be said that if any person (other than Yeats himself) remakes this once minor figure into the major poet to write English in the last century, it is certainly she.

But it is not, of course, Foster's magisterial rehearsal of this familiar story that disturbs me. Nor it is that Foster writes dismissively of Yeats's occult beliefs, for he does not.

Two images or scenes of reading in Yeats’ work haunt me. The first occurs at the conclusion of Ego Dominus Tuus, the poem that Yeats attached to the end of his meditation upon visionary creativity, Per Amica Silentia Luna (1918). Basically, for Yeats, visionary creativity happens to the poet, to him, when an occult experience arises, and he becomes the medium of a long-dead person or of a daimon or daemon—a sort of demi-god, located in ancient hierarchy of beings between the human and the fully divine. The torturous self-divisions of life produce a crisis, which the coming of the ghost or daemon (to simplify things), whose wisdom, if properly evoked by the poet will not so much finally resolve the divisions but instead create a bulwark, what Yeats terms the Mask, a symbolic representation of provisional, ritually evoked unity of being. At the end of this poem, we find the following:

Insofar as a student of Yeats, his scholar–critic–teacher, reads him, he or she fulfills this prayer/prophecy, for Yeats, as he sees it.

The other scene of reading, twenty years later, concludes the poem Lapis Lazuli (1938):

The question of identity is never a purely academic matter. As we see every day, in America's War Against Terrorism, civilizations clash over identity, with great violence. This is especially true in the modern world, in which technology has fostered the power to lay waste to combatants and civilians alike on a massive scale without precedent in human history. How identities are formed, what shapes they take, how they defend themselves once formed and how they change, if they really do, are all questions embedded within a larger philosophical question of identity, particularly with the global advent of modernity, which early in the last century struck the minds of leading Western intellectuals with considerable force. This larger question, traditionally phrased, is: “What is man?” By which, I mean here, what does it mean to say that a person, a culture, a world or a historical period, has an identity? The question of identity is really the question of possessing an essence.

However, that may be in general, W. B. Yeats and Sigmund Freud conceive of human identity as being substantially dependent, for its essence (whatever that may be), upon the operation of a comprehensive and coherent system of symbols whose cultural power they call, respectively, myth or illusion. Although Yeats thinks that all myth is true in some fundamental sense, and Freud thinks that all myths are illusory and so false if pandemic, both agree that the system of interlocking symbols constituting the cultural machinery of a society works by means of great coordinating mythologies, or the manifold illusion to produce and enforce identity. What is striking to both of them about modern society, especially after the First World War, is the absence of any master symbol to stitch together the symbolic strands or to forge, into a significant whole, the chain of elements now making up cultural identity. Not only God, but also every other candidate for the position of master symbol appears outmoded, disposable, if not already disposed. Despite their considerable differences, Yeats the occult intellectual and Freud the Enlightenment enthusiast view this unparalleled situation in human history—in which the totality of a culture's resources to create and sustain identity appears to function without any authoritative central symbol—as apocalyptically dire and potentially destructive of the entire species.

So far we have considered the dialectical interventionist, and especially earlier, Barthes, by looking at the twin inheritance from Michelet and Marx, whilst asserting the competing epistemologies of early Nietzsche. Across theatre (both ancient Greek and modern Brechtian epic), contemporary myth and the historiality of criticism, Barthes's use of a ‘double grasp’ has signalled the political nature of his writing as it confronts a responsibility of forms within a determined defence of left-wing critique. Now the analysis moves onto a more creative and mobile form of critical praxis.

Macé (2006, 232) locates both Empire of Signs and S/Z on the cusp ‘between a met-alinguistic and a fictional moment’. The ‘double grasp’, as we shall see, involves the pleasure of reading, but also then writing. However, the pleasure of the ‘double grasp’ is also in its very deconstruction. In what Barthes calls a ‘new dialectic’, the very notion and practice of the ‘double grasp’ will be shown to undergo a ‘mutation’; and it is in his 1970 essay Empire of Signs that we will trace its trajectory in Chapter Seven, before showing the limits of this ‘new dialectic’ in the diaries Barthes kept during his 1974 visit to China. Before this, we need to consider two major elements in the ‘mutation’ that takes place in Barthesian thought and critical praxis across the 1960s. In Chapter Six we will consider the critique of systems and classifications, but first we need, for the philosophy of politics we are aiming to define, to track what it means to start ‘losing ground’ (Brown 1992, 13–63). However, the metaphor of ‘drifter’ that Brown attributes to Barthes will be replaced by a much more active, even voluntarist, metaphor, that of perte.

Turning the Tables: Creative Criticism and the Loss of Self: From Historiality to Apersonalism

Weakly (and pessimistically) translated as ‘loss’ in English, Barthesian perte – as distinct from the version in Georges Bataille's thought – is the politicized corroding of the notion of self, a relentless but not aggressive critique of personal identity, of national, linguistic and cultural tropisms that underpin selfhood.

A One-Hour Survey: Getting a Glimpse of Financescapes in Crisis

In his seminal Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig (1995: 110–127) reveals the ubiquitous, if largely unnoticed, discursive “f lagging” of national identifications through what he terms an “illustrative day survey.” Sampling British national newspapers on the relatively “ordinary” day that was June 28, 1993, Billig demonstrates how inescapable the distinctly national framing of headline news, political commentaries, sports reporting, weather forecasts and readerships is across the press, and how such daily “homeland-making” is an integral part of the routine reproduction of the institutions of the nation-state and of most of its citizens’ widely unquestioned identification with them. Billig's argument continues to resonate in, and indeed depicts, some of the ideological conditions of possibility for features of glocalization such as nationalist counterreactions against global f lows and interdependencies. Billig's day survey also poses more general, methodological questions as to how, twenty-five years on, other workings of glocalization and globalization may be captured. For that, it stands to reason that we may need to look to some of today's media with distinctly transnational orientations, international reach, and with a particular focus. Put differently, where are some of the processes and f lows underpinning our glocalizing world encountered?

Reappropriating Billig's discursive-qualitative “survey” approach for different ends, we may, for example, wonder what satellite and cable channels exclusively dedicated to (global) financial markets, flows and investors depict and how. This is what I did, and recorded, in a shorter time-window, namely between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. (GMT) on April 20, 2020. During this hour, as European markets reflected a difficult morning and the stock exchange in New York was getting ready to start its day, Bloomberg ran the following information recorded by the present author:

The ‘subversive complicity’ (Brown 1992, 32) that we have seen in Mythologies, using a range of dialectical innovations, will become in this chapter an intervention by Barthes into theatre. If the theatre is a more performative genre than the essay, the ‘commentary par excellence’ can take on new actions and new possibilities. In this chapter, a consideration of the chorus, the collective commentary, will be the key figure under which Barthes performs a political voice.

In a 1951 article (2015b, 8–11), Barthes likens the ‘many dissident’ Marxists who reject Muscovite dogmatism to the ancient Greek chorus, trying ‘to retain, like the classical chorus, an awareness of misfortune, a sense of hope, and a will to understand’ (10); this is, in 1951, in sharp contrast, to his imagining in 1975 a fiction of ‘choosing’ one's ‘brand’ of Marxism like a clothing item (1994, 156). Two years later, in 1953, describing ancient Greek tragedy as ‘essentially the theatre of a political history that created itself’ – the King in Aeschylus's play The Suppliants meditating on war and peace is his example – Barthes likens this ‘pure human deliberation’ to the Greek chorus (2002, I, 266). Between the three levels on the stage – the people, the kings and the Gods – it is the ‘people chorus’ which holds the ultimate human power: language. However, this chorus is not, as is traditionally thought, a lyrical echo of the actions on stage; rather the chorus is the ‘all-powerful speech that explains and resolves the ambiguity of appearances, bringing the actors movements into a causality that can be understood’ (266–67). Indeed, as the ‘Commentary par excellence’, it is the chorus which supplies the tragic dimension of the play, whilst, as Véron notes (2019, 10), it makes sure that the hero is never alone. Barthes regrets that it is precisely this that is missing in modern and contemporary theatre (not to mention sport, daily life) which has promoted human psychology over political commentary, the actor's humanity over that of the spectator who is silent.

In Chapter One, we used a dog-leg structure in the analysis to suggest that Barthes's conception of love is remarkably consistent, from one end of his career to the other, in its use of dialectics. In this chapter, we concentrate on a shorter period of his career, 1954–57, to consider an ‘amorous dialectic’ that is politicised in a different way.

In an early ‘monthly mythology’ called ‘Phenomenon or myth?’ (2002, V, 1022–23), not included in Mythologies, Barthes sets out the only strategy that he can see for analysing contemporary myths. Remarkably candid, and neither ironic nor playful, Barthes, here in 1954 at least, describes the political mission of his monthly column. Whenever he sees a new myth (that of Martians or Marlon Brando's wedding) he feels the need to counter the attempts to maintain ‘Order’ that myth enacts by denouncing and explaining. But here, he concedes, was the dilemma of this political act. Denunciation could only ever be an explanation whose inadequacy and limits he recognizes. Given the nature of human alienation, his explanations of myth must have a dialectical but ‘loving’ relationship with these myths, the mythologist must be ‘engaged with [their] historical moment’ in ‘a truly amorous dialectic [véritable dialectique d’amour]’:

Though there is no mention of the ‘amorous dialectic’ in Mythologies three years later, there is, at the end of ‘Myth Today’, an echo:

The difference is that, by 1957, the ‘amorous dialectic’ has become the ‘order of sar-casm’, indicative of the mythologist's exclusion from those ‘having nothing’, of the intellectual such as Barthes living only a ‘theoretical sociality’ (2009, 185).

It seems perhaps odd, in the light of what has gone before in this book, to conclude, to close down the discussion. Perhaps then a contradiction is needed. Barthes, probably not a Barthesian (Stafford 2015a, 156–59), is very possibly a materialist moralist; that is, deeply conscious of the lived realities of alienated modern human society, which are then turned into writerly, literary essayism. Furthermore, there is no ‘double’ Barthes divided between aesthetics on the one hand, and the political on the other hand. Indeed, it is against the spirit of Barthesian theory and writing to divide them. Though there are clearly different Barthesian constituencies, the political and the aesthetic are not separate, merely nuances, accents and emphasis. Perhaps it is the ultimate essayistic feature – moralism – that keeps them tightly tied, at least in Barthes's world and spirit. It is necessary then finally to make some tentative suggestions as to the nature of the ethics and politics of Barthesian essayism. This will be carried out by way of a triangulation with, first, an intellectual figure whom we have regularly discussed in this book, Lucien Goldmann, and second, an essayist heavily influenced in his early career by Goldmann and Barthes, the Palestinian post-colonial critic Edward Said.

Barthes, Said, Goldmann

Barthesian ethics in the 1970s have clear echoes in Edward Said's anti-imperialism, what in Orientalism is called the ‘nonrepressive’ and ‘non-manipulative’. Both Said and Barthes wrote, to lesser and greater extents – and this will be the nub of this comparison – as consummate essayists, who, both playful and acerbic in their commentaries, were ever keen to negotiate the dichotomies of writing and reading, of modernity and classicism (in music as much as in literature), of self and other in relation to an alienated political world. However, Higgins (1981) sees Barthes escaping the Saidian dichotomy of either not speaking, or denying subjectivity, by ‘writing without representing’.

Modern poetic autobiography originated with the Romantics’ desire to overcome that growing fragmentation of human existence that had its most immediate sources in the revolutionary scientific and historical critiques that so indiscriminately leveled every traditional structure and value of the culture. Just as people in ages of faith once turned to the confessional genre to discover the specific providential plan secretly at work in the lives, so, during the nineteenth century especially, poets and prose writers such as Wordsworth, Mill and Carlyle, who increasingly found this option denied to them, resorted to the autobiographical mode to determine if perhaps some imaginative pattern of ultimate meaning—or of personal continuity at least, however baleful—could be discovered beneath the apparently random and contradictory details of their experiences.

In this context the figure of the autobiographer and the image of his work clearly become of central importance. The former emerges in the course of the figure of a man who, suffering from an identity crisis, can be seen as in desperate quest of his very self. His work as a result appears to be the place where he seeks not only to trace but hopefully to prefigure the entire journey, as the symbolic history of his own imaginative survival in a bad time: from the imagination's wondrous if hazardous birth, through its eccentric development and self-conscious passion, to its intermittent pangs of a spiritual rebirth.

Thus, the work's completed narrative form describes a dialectical “progress,” which paradoxically is also a spiraling back from the present beginnings in the identity crisis, through the return to the original sources or first principles of imaginative being, to the point where the figurative repetition of the life's wayward movement begins: with the onset of the identity crisis.

Photographing Social Change

My wife and I recently spent a difficult period of six months living in a previously semirural English location that had since become an infrastructural node in our national and international networks of travel, work, and commerce. Thus, living very near an airport that serves and connects the region in question to the world at large, I used to be woken up every night by heavy air traffic, by cargo planes taking off with ferocious frequency between one and four o’clock in the morning. We had ended up in this location by accident, needing accommodation at very short notice, in a place that would be geographically fairly convenient for both my and my wife's commutes to work. Given the urgency of this at the time, we had to disregard the fact that the area in question had also acquired a reputation for its high levels of Brexit support. Two (self-defining) Europeans moving there, at the height of the furor created by the UK's uneasily unfolding exit from the European Union, was—in hindsight—always going to be difficult. And so it was. However, our problems extended far beyond restless nights and our deep uneasiness with the political positions held by many of our neighbors at the time. What many residents in this particular location, and probably many others like it around the globe, share is a usually unarticulated but locally inescapable experience of being squeezed by changes to the area being imposed from the outside.

The intentions of this chapter are threefold and interrelated. First, I will sketch some of the methodological questions raised by our recent experiences in the locality in question, wishing to point toward some possible ways of capturing recent and ongoing social changes in places such as the one described above and in what follows. Second, this discussion will draw on several conceptual strands in recent sociological theorizing that can help us make sense of the social changes at stake here and of how they impact on local lives. Third, in combining the empirical with the methodological and the conceptual, this discussion shows that examples such as the one that lies at the heart of this chapter strengthen the more general case for a reinvigorated sociological imagination and for a public sociology (Burawoy 2005) today.

Description → Analysis (→ Criticism)

Core parts of this book are about how we may arrive at valid, sociological claims to knowing and understanding our present moment that is widely experienced as novel and qualitatively different from what preceded it. Skeptics may argue that assumptions about the uniqueness of one's times are nothing new, perhaps a historical constant in its own right, perhaps a sign of a recurring historical myopia. After all, have people not always considered their own epoch to be particular, and often particularly challenging? Leaving this question for historians to ponder, there are—as we have seen— compelling reasons to assume that there are indeed structural and cultural particularities that warrant depictions of the “here and now” as distinctive. The concept of glocalization provides, arguably, the most apt term for capturing the particularities in question.

In epistemological and methodological terms, previous chapters have gone some way toward developing central arguments offered in this book: namely that the flows, interconnectedness, interdependencies and counterreactions that define our age of glocalization demand novel or refined ways of generating data; this is particularly so for the tradition of empirical, qualitative sociology that Max Weber (1972 [1922]) famously defined through its focus on understanding (or more evocatively captured by the German term “verstehende Soziologie”). Previous chapters have conveyed some of the methodological richness of sociology's qualitative toolkit today. Admittedly, relatively few contributions to the discipline have met Weberian standards for illuminating the interplay of meanings, social action, and resulting social relationships and institutions. Yet, we have seen that there is no shortage of methodologically innovative work able to help sharpen social scientists’ senses for the many ways in which “the global” and “the local” intersect. In this chapter, I push the argument a step further: I again commence with empirical questions about where (else) to go looking for some of the manifestations of glocalization. Following the structure of previous chapters, the argument will then turn a more distinctly analytical corner to ask how some of the resulting observations may be read and interpreted. This also helps prepare the ground for the subsequent chapter, in which I will argue that updated ways of perceiving, recording and making sense of our lived realities sociologically must be accompanied not only by relevant analytical frames but also by a willingness to engage with the social world critically. I begin this chapter, once again, in a very specific locality.

One of the more remarked but less closely pondered aspects of American critical theory over the last four or so decades is the persistent centrality of Yeats to its development. I can think of no other modern literary figure, with the possible exceptions of Stevens or Joyce, whose work has been so seminally influential. The major critical movements from the 1940s to the 1970s—New Criticism, archetypal and phenomenological criticism, and a variety of post-structuralist discourses (revisionary psychoanalytic criticism, dialectical hermeneutics and deconstruction) all owe a considerable debt to Yeats. Whether as sublime master of the concrete universal, demonic adversary of genuine Romantic visionaries, or seductive forerunner of the vertiginous interplay of self-subverting tropes, Yeats has repeatedly appeared as a representative case in point.

Belated ironic modernist or last decadent romantic: the course of Yeats’ reputation has run between these extreme positions. But in the different quests to know their own Yeats for theoretical purposes, his American metacritics, insofar as they appear to have even partially succeeded in this endeavor, have suffered strange fates. Their imaginations, whether they are of the systematic kind or not, have been brought face to face with the poverty of their own inventiveness, in a manner that resembles nothing so much as the climactic expressions of those few more sensitive protagonists in Joyce's Dubliners. As they finally confront the deadly if curiously alluring work of the spiritual paralysis then afflicting Irish culture, they become affecting instances of what they dread to behold all around them—transparent figures of paralysis fixed fast in a profound and permanent attitude of imaginative defeat, caught within the prison of the very discourses their author has devised for their epiphanic educations in the (admittedly bitter) self-knowledge of internal exile. For, in attempting to comprehend and use Yeats, his American theoretical heirs conceive designs that paralyze their imaginative developments, even as they disseminate and so perpetuate the error of proposing such undertakings as exemplary. Rather than authoring Yeats, then, their chosen poet has authored and—paradoxically if not perversely—authorized them.

Logging the Digital Revolution in Everyday Life

Although “globalized technologies” constitute only one aspect of globalization, they are arguably the dimension that brings global flows “closest to home” (Lemert 2015: 14). How, then, might one capture, self-reflexively and hence critically, one's own everyday reliance on our era's information and communication technologies? One possible starting point for such an undertaking is a simple recording exercise: in a randomly chosen week, how many hours do we spend doing particular things, communicating digitally, consuming information and entertainment via channels and through means that simply did not exist until not very long ago? Here is my own, in many ways atypical “technology and communication log” compiled during a week in early September 2020 (Table 7.1).

This is idiosyncratic. Timing and immediate context must be borne in mind: early September constitutes an unusual point in the annual cycle of academic work, when “we” still get to spend proportionally more of our time doing research, writing publications, and preparing our teaching rather than engaged in administrative matters and the delivery of teaching. What is more, the point in time captured here was still profoundly shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic: with more of our lives spent at home, our reliance on digital means of communication was clearly pronounced. Concurrently, especially for those of us with families in different countries, and whatever our general attitude toward our technological age, the personal importance of video calls across long geographical distances cannot be overstated. At the same time, my nonexistent use of social media (neither as an active contributor nor as a consumer thereof) arguably shows me to be old-fashioned and anachronistic. Other people's categories of activity will undoubtedly be far more numerous and, in light of their “fuller” digital lives, considerably more nuanced and multifaceted. Yet, this tentative table says something profound, particularly as it captures one week's activities in the life of a digital skeptic.

The picture becomes even more revealing when Table 7.1 is read alongside Table 7.2, which summarizes my non-digitally-mediated activities in the same week in question.

Further explanation is needed at this point. The proportion of digitally mediated to non-digital activities is noteworthy: the sum total of the first log amounts to ninety-one hours across seven days, compared to a sum total of ninety-nine hours of non-digital activities (including six hours of sleep per night, which for non-Fitbit-wearers are by definition non-digitalized).